Offensive realists agree with Morgenthau against Waltz that little faith can be placed in arms control agreements as power is ultimately a zero-sum game. We will consider later in what way offensive realism also hinges on a theory of human nature and what that theory is.

The Question of Greatness

Realism distinguishes between great powers and non-great powers because it holds that the rivalrous relations between these powers shape the global configuration of forces within which all other states are compelled to operate. What is a great power? “To qualify as a great power, a state must have sufficient military assets to put up a serious fight in an all-out conventional war against the most powerful state in the world.” A quick scan of the roster of nations suggests that more states than what are usually assumed to be great powers might be able to put up such a fight—maybe India, for example—but perhaps not many more. This definition puts the emphasis on defensive capacity and so raises the question of whether the possession of nuclear weapons makes it possible for more states than those that might ordinarily be thought of as great powers to meet this criterion. 

In holding that all states have the capacity to employ offensive power against their neighbors, realism seems to accept the international legal fiction that all of today’s states are sovereign. But this raises the question of the reality of sovereignty given that political entities as different in power as the US and the Republic of San Marino nominally share this attribute. The era before decolonization arguably had a more realistic understanding of the term—a political community was held to be truly sovereign only if it possessed the recognized capacity to declare hostilities, conclude peace treaties or claim the rights of neutral powers in wars between states. The realist axiom of states as rational actors tacitly depends upon this older and more discriminating conception of sovereignty in presupposing the existence of polities with the power to decide on their friends and enemies and to settle their disputes with the latter by armed force. By this older criterion, of the 195 nominally sovereign members of the United Nations not many make the grade. 

It is obviously an empirical matter whether realism’s focus on the balance of power at the top—justifiable for the age of empire and during the subsequent Cold War—will continue to hold water in a world in which a more motley crew of non-great powers come to assert themselves as relatively autonomous geo-political actors. Relatedly, it might be wondered whether states at such different levels of international power as the United States and Russia can now be adequately subsumed under the rubric of “the great powers”—a term arguably presupposing a greater symmetry of might than once obtained between those nations that could claim this preeminence over the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. Mearsheimer simply brackets the ambiguities now surrounding the meaning of the terms “sovereignty” and “great power” on the assumption that bold generalizations that can explain things at the expense of sometimes being wrong are more useful than weak, qualified generalizations that explain nothing and so are neither right nor wrong.

Since we started from the assumption of sovereignty, and sovereignty is the power of final decision, logically we would want to know whether states can choose not to be a great power even if they possess the objective capacity to be one. Or do the fearsome compulsions of inter-state competition deprive potential great powers of this constitutive choice? Mearsheimer acknowledges that in certain, atypical contexts a potential great power can answer this question of whether to be or not to be with a negative, provided they can entrust their protection to an even greater power. For example, soon after their defeat Germany and Japan embraced their new status as semi-sovereign clients despite being the fourth and third largest economies in the world. 

Putting aside a few apparent exceptions to the rule, offensive realism treats the size of an economy (GDP per capita times population) as the main determination of great power status on the assumption that if states have the economic potential they will decide to manifest it as military power because being more of a threat to others is the best way to be more secure and security is the highest law of the state. One reason, then, for the instability of international relations is that the longer-term trajectory of economic growth and the offensive capacity it generates is so hard to predict. Since Mearsheimer assumes that economic size will tend to translate into geo-political power, he concludes that the ideal situation for any state is to experience sharp economic growth while its rivals’ economies grow slowly or hardly at all. It might seem that this generalization should be qualified by the distinction between one’s friends and enemies, but if all states are potentially enemies perhaps not. Even the closest allies of the United States might have reason, then, to fear their protector for no one can really say what the world will be like even ten years from now. The US once promoted the development of its Western European and East Asian clients as bulwarks against Communism but everyone can see that more hardball approaches are now in store for them. 

The future trajectory of relative power is moreover not entirely shrouded in mystery. The demographic dimension of economic growth is more predictable and currently points to imminent declines for the states against which America prevailed in its twentieth century wars, and a widening of the gap between them and the top two powers of the world. This is how the future looked a quarter of a century ago:

America’s three principal great-power rivals from the twentieth century—Germany, Japan, and Russia—are all depopulating and the United States is likely to become increasingly powerful relative to each of them over the next few decades.

This trendline remains in force. What are the distant consequences? Though we do not tend to think like this anymore, history tells us that whole political communities like individuals eventually decay and the means by which the declining ones are dispatched can be frightening. Survival is thus the highest law of states compelling them to plan for even seemingly remote contingencies in which enemies come to threaten their very existence. 

Though realism treats security as a hard fact, this existential imperative is intrinsically ambiguous. It will always be difficult to determine what exactly is at stake for a sovereign community in its relations with its potential enemies. Is it its relative status in the international hierarchy of power or its very existence as a state? Is it the preservation of the social order or collective way of life of a people that is in danger, or rather the physical safety of the individuals who make it up? Like with the ordinary language of security and threat, their theoretical sublimations remain vague, as if the meaning of such terms is a matter for states themselves to decide. We will return to this problem of what constitutes an existential threat—now one of the most overused terms of foreign policy jargon—when considering Mearsheimer’s more philosophical thoughts on the state of nature. 

In the realist view, the greater one’s offensive capacity, as determined by the size of one’s economy, the greater the relative threat one poses to all those in one’s neighborhood. At a certain level of even latent offensive power the sheer existence of a state becomes threatening to all other states close enough to be struck down by this power. Above this gradient, such a state is a great power and must act like one because it will be treated as one by other states through the counter-pressure exerted against it by the balance of power. From these premises Mearsheimer draws a set of conclusions that distinguishes his offensive realism from its predecessors.

Balancing Regions

He begins by situating the abstract logic of the balance of power on a concrete planet of land and sea on the assumption that the core terrestrial regions of geo-politics are separated by oceans across which the projection of military power is drastically impeded. It follows that “great powers separated by water are likely to fear each other less than great powers that can get at each other over land.” Accordingly, “the best outcome a great power can hope for is to be a regional hegemon and possibly control another region that is nearby and accessible over land.” In the strategic disputes between the branches of the US military, the West Point graduate upholds the primacy of boots on the ground. 

The claims of Douhet and Mahan notwithstanding, neither independent naval power nor strategic airpower has much utility for winning major wars. Neither of those coercive instruments can win a great-power war operating alone. Only land power has the potential to win a major war by itself. The main reason is that it is hard to destroy an enemy’s economy solely by blockading or bombing it.

The consequences of this primacy of land over air and sea is not limited to the planning of effective military operations for it shapes the deep structure of any possible international order. “The stopping power of water has important consequences for the concept of hegemony: the presence of oceans on much of the earth’s surface makes it impossible for any state to achieve global hegemony.” For Mearsheimer, the US has never exercised global hegemony even at the height of unipolarity, nor could it have. The best that any state can hope for is hegemony over its region while preventing a hegemon from emerging in any other region. 

Regional hegemons attempt to check aspiring hegemons in other regions because they fear that a rival great power that dominates its own region will be an especially powerful foe that is essentially free to cause trouble in the fearful great power’s backyard.

Though global hegemony is forever out of reach—despite the America’s post-Cold War ambition to achieve it—the struggle over regional hegemony generates four possible world systems of security competition, i.e., four worlds of anarchy. 

1. Balanced multipolarity
2. Unbalanced multipolarity 
3. Unbalanced bipolarity 
4. Balanced bipolarity

Each of the possible worlds he enumerates implicitly refers to a concrete case. Europe from 1815-1870 was governed by the strategic rules of 1, balanced multipolarity. Europe from the 1870s to 1945 was in condition 2, unbalanced multipolarity brought into being by Germany’s bids for regional hegemony over Europe, but the globe as a whole then came to be subsumed into this unbalanced multipolar pattern of international relations by Japan’s rise and its inter-war grab for the same in Asia. The Cold War began as 3—unbalanced bipolarity based on massive US nuclear superiority over the USSR—and then settled into 4—balanced bipolarity—with the attainment of the rough parity of mutually assured destruction.

How do these different distributions of power affect the prospects for war and peace?

Unbalanced multipolar systems feature the most dangerous distribution of power, mainly because potential hegemons are likely to get into wars with all of the other great powers in the system. These wars invariably turn out to be long and enormously costly. Balanced multipolar systems occupy a middle ground: great-power war is more likely than in bipolarity, but decidedly less likely than in unbalanced multipolarity. Bipolar systems are the most stable of the three systems because the two powers are likely to be evenly matched.

In this encapsulation, he equates bipolarity with balanced bipolarity, i.e., he leaves out number 3, “unbalanced bipolarity,” but it warrants separate consideration as one of the possible worlds that will follow unipolarity. The only precedent is the early Cold War—when the US possessed a credible nuclear first capacity against the Soviet Union. Though Mearsheimer sees multi-polarity as more prone to dangerous clashes, these few years of unbalanced bipolarity may go down as the most potentially catastrophic moment of human history even if by the luck of the draw a hot apocalyptic war was avoided. If Russia is defeated in the current war over the Ukraine, the world will be heading into unbalanced bipolarity.

Strangely, “unipolarity”—the geo-political situation of the world when the work was written—also goes unmentioned, perhaps because there is only one case and no other country aside from the US could conceivably occupy the lofty office of unipol. In such a world, great power war is obviously not a prospect but whether it was otherwise relatively more conducive to war or peace he does not say. 

Grand Strategy

Mearsheimer assumed when he wrote The Tragedy of Great Power Politics that a more rationally restrained US foreign policy under conditions of enduring unipolarity would have been the most peaceful of all possible worlds for however long it lasted. The problem is that even in a unipolar world there are bound to be dormant great powers who will continue to act as realists even when the unipol has ceased to, thereby exploiting the foreign policy debacles—in a word, “overreach”—that characterize unipolarity. It is unclear whether or to what degree under unipolarity as he conceived it all other states remain subject to the compulsions of lower level, regional balances of power. If the new restraints on US action imposed by global multi-polarity are not likely to lead to a decline in our resort to force, our power projection will become subject to realist constraints once again and therefore supposedly less likely to end in debacles.   

What strategies do states pursue to gain power, or to maintain it, when another great power threatens to upset the balance of power? 

1. Blackmail and war are the main strategies that states employ to acquire power. 
2. Balancing and buck-passing are the principal strategies that great powers use to maintain the distribution of power when facing a dangerous rival.
3. With balancing, the threatened state accepts the burden of deterring its adversary and commits substantial resources to achieving that goal. 
4. With buck-passing, the endangered great power tries to get another state to shoulder the burden of deterring or defeating the threatening state. 
5. Bait and bleed is a third strategy causing two rivals to engage in a protracted war, so that they bleed each other white, while the baiter remains on the sideline. 
6. Appeasement rests on the assumption that the adversary’s aggressive behavior is largely the result of an acute sense of strategic vulnerability. Therefore, any steps taken to reduce that insecurity will dampen, and possibly eliminate, the underlying motive for war. This violates the relative balance-of-power logic and increases the danger to the state that employs them.

Each of these strategies can be exemplified by episodes from the annals of twentieth century war and diplomacy. The meaning of blackmail and war is familiar enough but we can see buck-passing and balancing at play in America’s stances towards the faltering of the European balance of power in the lead up to its entry into WWI and then WWII. In both cases, the US began by passing the buck, hoping that the alliance of Britain, France and Russia (then the Soviets) would hold in check a potential German hegemon. When this strategy failed with the near defeat of France in 1917 and then again with the unexpectedly sudden fall of France in 1940, the US leapt into action to beat back a Germany still on the verge of victory in 1918 and more belatedly contributed to its destruction in 1945. When it became clear that far off European colonial powers and Nationalist China could not withstand the armed might of Imperial Japan, the US slapped crushing sanctions on the latter before swinging into military action to crush it after the defeat of the main enemy in Europe. 

Bait and bleed was in play when in the mid to late 1930s Britain and France refused to honor its security agreements with the Soviets, attempting to lure Nazi Germany into attacking the latter and in this way to weaken both. Stalin responded with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with the idea that the Germans would be bled by prolonged war with France and Britain, and as Khrushchev relates his nerves cracked when he heard about the fall of France. Before he became Vice President, Senator Harry Truman saw bait and bleed as a wise strategy for the US to pursue even after the German invasion of the USSR in 1941. 

In violating realist logic, appeasement is rare—despite its now frequent use as a heated accusation—and the closest thing there was to it in the twentieth century was the British and French recognition of Nazi Germany’s gains up through 1939 in the vain hope that it would be satiated and not go on to seek full blown European hegemony. To the extent that appeasement was strategically rational in this case it depended upon bait and bleed.   

Mearsheimer theoretically synthesizes the experiences of two world wars as follows. 

Offensive realism predicts that the United States will send its army across the Atlantic when there is a potential hegemon in Europe that the local great powers cannot contain by themselves. Otherwise, the United States will shy away from accepting a continental commitment.

Strange as it may seem, the theory of offensive realism has a normative dimension in the sense that it prescribes how states should behave and not just how they do. Why is it necessary to stipulate how they should act? After all, the imposing constraints of the system should leave great powers with little choice but to act as the theory predicts. States need theory to act rationally because the international order is less mechanistic than is assumed by defensive realists, who falsely presuppose the transparency of the motives and capacities of states and thus downplay the role of strategic choices on outcomes. 

These are the main elements of the theory of offensive realism. Running through this allegedly timeless theory is the singular emergence of the United States as a regional hegemon over the entire Western hemisphere, putting it in a position to counterbalance against potential hegemons in Europe and Asia. Other great powers fought wars to attain hegemony in their respective regions: imperial Japan in East Asia, Wilhelmine Germany and then Nazi Germany in Europe, then the Soviets in both Europe and East Asia. The US tossed them all into the dustbin of history. The overriding aim of American foreign policy has been to be the hegemon of its hemisphere and to face no rival hegemon in either Europe or Northeast Asia. If any of these contenders were ever to succeed in becoming hegemons, they would then come to thwart us in our core domain just as we do now in theirs and so we put them down before they can. 

Though it is laid out as a general theory its primary application is American grand strategy. One might ask, then, what is distinctive about America’s position in the global balance of power, what goals should US foreign policy pursue, and in what regions should it be willing to intervene militarily in pursuit of these goals? Firstly, how does the balance of power in Europe or Asia affect it? What distinguishes the US from all other great powers is that vast oceans seem to make it far less vulnerable to other great powers. The US far more than even Britain before it is an “off-shore balancer” with a different relation to the balance of power in continental Europe and Asia than the states of those regions. But while Mearsheimer embeds this difference in his theory, he nonetheless also has to end up minimizing it. For despite its remoteness from the main theaters of geopolitics, he holds that the world inter-state system in some way structurally incentivizes the US to smash potential regional hegemons in far off Europe and Asia. One might think that these oceanic moats confer upon the US the enviable option of isolationism. US nuclear superiority would moreover seem to make it impregnable to attack from outside powers. Unconvincingly, Mearsheimer interprets his own theory as ruling out isolationism. 

Despite Mearsheimer’s aspiration to offer an abstract social-science theory of timeless validity, offensive realism seems to depend upon a set of historically concrete presuppositions shaping the spatial arenas of geo-politics. By his account there are four regions of geo-political significance for the US: 1) the entire Western hemisphere, where it brooks no rival, 2) Europe, 3) East Asia (inclusive of the Taiwan Strait and the first and second Pacific Island chains), and 4) the Persian Gulf that has no native great powers but energy reserves of strategic interest to all of them. In these regions and no others, the US is justified in sacrificing treasure and blood to beat down any contender for regional hegemony for here its national security is supposedly at stake. His preferred grand strategy for the US is off-shore balancing to enable allies to check hostile potential hegemons in Europe and East Asia, but backed up by a willingness to intervene directly if these allies prove unable. This strategy is opposed to isolationism, on the one hand, and both liberal and neoconservative pan-interventionism on the other. 

Mearsheimer acknowledges that these regions lack a firm basis in geography. Why, for starters, is the Western hemisphere treated as a single geo-political area when Washington is closer to Paris than to Brasilia? Both capitals are only capable of being reached from the US by sea and air—unless one entertains the fanciful scenario of a movement of troops through the isthmus of Central America. It is history, not geography, that provides the answer. He divides the world on the pattern of the Monroe Doctrine that declares the entire Western hemisphere a single region under the oversight of the United States. At the time of its pronouncement in 1823 this brazen claim was more aspirational than an effective foreign policy precept, the young nation being still too weak to enforce it against the British, French and Spanish who still held colonies in what would only later become the Yankee backyard. But by 1900 with the conclusion of the Spanish-American War, the US had finally achieved this vision of regional hegemony and soon began to feel the need to knock out any comparable power in Europe and East Asia. 

By the 1930s Washington had stopped making reference to Monroe Doctrine but it arguably remains to this day an unofficial maxim of US foreign policy. On this basis, offensive realism would predict that if Brazil were ever to ally with an outside power the US would regard this development as a graver existential threat than hostile bids for hegemony by rival great powers in Europe or Asia and would pull out all the stops. This seems doubtful but perhaps the theory could be rescued if the region in question were redefined to consist of just North America. Clearly the US would respond forcefully to prevent Mexico or Canada from exercising such options. But then that would raise the troubling question of how it is that the entire continent of South America has remained such a relatively pacified inter-state region, especially given its history of military rule and civil wars? And why is Brazil not seeking anything close to regional hegemony over its neighbors when relative size would seem to give it cause to at least try?

Conversely, the division of Eurasia into two geopolitically significant regions raises another problem. Europe and East Asia were for most of their history separate worlds and even now remain relatively autonomous zones of the world inter-state system but Russia clearly links the two regions. Current events warrant a closer look at how the Russian state fits into the theory of offensive realism, its conception of regions, and of what states qualify as great powers.   

In neither his books nor his many lectures has Mearsheimer ever accorded much significance to the fact that Russia is an Asian as well as a European great power. In the early twentieth century, a rising Japan was supported by the US and Britain as a balance against Tsarist Russia’s attempts to encroach onto a disintegrating Chinese imperial realm. During the Cold War, the US placed forces in Japan and South Korea with the goal of balancing against the Soviet Union and saw Red China as a Soviet ally and not as itself an independent great power that had to be checked. Then, and now, the Russian state links the two regions geo-politically but in a manner that Mearsheimer has difficulty explaining. For much of the post-Cold War era, Russia has obviously been too weak to count as a great power. Mearsheimer has explained that it only became a great power again, if barely, somewhere around 2014 when it began to push back against further NATO expansion in the Ukraine. He argues that nearly simultaneously China entered the ranks of the great powers for the first time, having crossed a threshold in its economic ascent. The tell-tale sign of China’s new international stature was the belated American “pivot to Asia.” Russia’s reassumption of great power status was thus the result of its actions—moves from which it could retreat or that may be thwarted—whereas China’s greatness was thrust upon it by its economic ascent.

Offensive realism flatly rules out the possibility of long-lasting Russo-Chinese partnership as these powers share a long land border and must forever breath down each other’s necks. Mearsheimer insists that their current partnership of convenience cannot hold and that the US will eventually go so far as to ally with Russia against China, as hard as it might be to believe now. The only reason he thinks this has not happened yet is because a reluctant American establishment is still in the process of abandoning its delusional strategy of liberal hegemony and associates friendship with Russia with the unpredictable Trump whom they hate because he dared to cast doubt on this strategy. But liberal hegemony is on its way out with the shift to multipolarity. While it is now hard to see the US cutting and running from Europe to swing its full weight into East Asia, when war in the Ukraine stalemates and some understanding is reached he thinks it likely that now dormant Russian fears of Chinese encroachment into its Central Asian sphere of influence, as well as into its vast, nearly empty Siberian flank, will begin to stir again. 

The tradition of geo-political thought associated with Mackinder and Haushofer would argue that, on the contrary, the great land powers of Eurasia would benefit from an alliance that would be directed against the encirclement of the Anglo-Saxon naval powers whose weapons of preference are sanctions, blockades and embargoes. While this antagonism of Land und Meer is not recognized by offensive realism it is hard to discount the geo-political rationality of Russo-Chinese Eurasianism for as long as the US remains committed to keeping up its punishing sanctions and military threats against both. The US seems committed to containing both states at the same time, and it is an empirical matter whether it has the capacity to pull this off. As of now its leaders seem hell bent on a two-front escalation. 

The current international position of Russia brings us back to the problem of what constitutes a great power. Russia’s option for an alliance with China against the US-led West signifies that it has abandoned any idea of opposing China’s bid for East Asian hegemony. But the notion that it has done this to focus on attaining hegemony in Europe is dismissed by Mearsheimer as lacking any objective basis. The Russian economy is not much bigger than the Italian and cannot support such an ambition. Not being a potential hegemon in either Asia or Europe in what sense can it be regarded as a great power? As he puts it, China, but not Russia, is a “peer competitor.” A significant distinction between two different kinds of great powers is assumed but given no basis in the theory. Offensive realism has shown itself to have difficulty conceptually situating a) geo-politically autonomous major states that are not great powers, b) states which could be great powers but choose not to be, and c) great power states that cannot realistically strive to be hegemons. Realism’s abstract theoretical assumption that all states strive to be top dog—seems a very poor description of the goals of most states and even fails to convey a picture of the aims that second and third-rate great powers might realistically strive for. 

Is Russia’s current bid to prop up its great power status increasing the likelihood of open war or forestalling it? Its defeat would likely free up the US to pursue a far more aggressive stance towards China, and the latter scenario increases the likelihood of a hot war that would take us far beyond the currently cold one of intensifying “security competition” in East Asia—the first open military clash between great powers since 1945. China is unequivocally a great power—a peer competitor. What would China’s regional objectives be in this coming clash?

We should expect China to devise its own version of the Monroe Doctrine, as imperial Japan did in the 1930s. In fact, we are already seeing inklings of that policy. For example, Chinese leaders have made it clear they do not think the United States has a right to interfere in disputes over the maritime boundaries of the South China Sea, a strategically important body of water that Beijing effectively claims as its own.

Chinese leaders would like to develop the capability to push the US Navy beyond the first island chain sealing off the East China Sea, the South China Sea, and the Yellow Sea, thereby making it almost impossible for the US Navy to reach Korea in the event of war. Some Chinese strategists have begun to talk about eventually pushing the US Navy beyond the second island chain which runs from the eastern coast of Japan to Guam down to the Moluccan Islands. Japan and the Philippines would be cut off from American naval support. China would then have achieved regional hegemony. Of course, China sees its efforts in this direction as defensive. The Economist reported in 2009, “A retired Chinese admiral likened the American navy to a man with a criminal record ‘wandering just outside the gate of a family home.’”³

Offensive realism holds that the United States would opt to stay in the background and let China’s neighbors assume most of the burden of containing China if that were possible. But China’s neighbors will not be powerful enough to contain China by themselves. The offshore balancer must come onshore when the local powers cannot get the job done and this will bring the US to the very brink of open war with China. But not necessarily beyond the brink. Mearsheimer recognizes that the US-China strategic competition will unfold quite differently than did WWI or WWII, not only because nuclear weapons will continue to act as a powerful restraint on escalation like they did during the Cold War, but even more consequentially for his theory because this would be a war that cannot be decided by the clash of land forces giving the theater of conflict a historically unprecedented spatial configuration. 

Land is the basis of offensive realism’s strategic map of the world, and land war ultimately determines regional hegemonies, a reality that apparently not even intercontinental ballistic missiles can negate. In 1945 after three and a half years of naval war Imperial Japan was defeated by the US with atomic bombs (though at the time eighty percent of its army was tied up in occupying China). Assuming that Sino-American hostilities are not likely to culminate with the use of nuclear weapons, there is no historical precedent for the kind of great power conflict that is currently shaping up in East Asia. The Korean Peninsula is probably the only place where China and the United States might conceivably end up fighting a major conventional land war. While the odds of such a conflict are low, Mearsheimer nonetheless sees it as more likely than clashes between the Cold War superpowers in Europe once were. Of course, if Russia were to become an ally of the US in its bid to contain China, land battles might erupt along their 2600-mile shared border, but he seems to regard the prospect of that as so low that it goes unmentioned. By default, then, in a Sino-American military conflict the main battles would have to be fought by naval and air forces and “neither has much utility for winning major wars.” The passage from strategic competition to open war seems then to be greatly impeded by “the stopping power of oceans.” 

It was mentioned earlier that the existence of nuclear weapons might conceivably undermine the distinction between Great Powers and ordinary states. Nuclear weapons carried by intercontinental ballistic missiles cast doubt on the stopping power of oceans, and their possession seems to ambiguate the criteria of who counts as a great power. India’s GDP is now nearly twice that of Russia’s, but its nuclear arsenal is small. Is it only the size of Russia’s nuclear arsenal that puts it into the great power ring? Obviously, some states might only be able to seek to destroy whole cities in nearby countries (North Korea, soon Iran), others large swathes of whole nearby nations (Israel, India, Pakistan), and finally, for a few, the whole earth (America, Russia and possibly China). But even given considerable differences in nuclear capacities, the destructiveness involved at all levels seems so enormous that it might be thought to level the playing field. “Some argue that nuclear weapons effectively eliminate great-power security competition, because nuclear-armed states would not dare attack each other for fear of annihilation.” Mearsheimer notes that the existence of these ultimate weapons of mass destruction has certainly made nuclear states more cautious about using military force of any kind against other nuclear states. In any event, Mearsheimer foresees the Non-Proliferation Treaty breaking down given the unwillingness of the top nuclear powers to even contemplate their own disarmament though the Treaty obligates them to take trust-building steps in this direction. But in the final analysis there is really no sound strategic reason for great powers to scale back on nuclear arms racing because the extreme contingency of a crippling first strike can never be ruled out and warrants continually upgrading one’s own first-strike and retaliatory capacities. 

Mostly Right

This all seems to point to a very grim future. Can alternatives be conceived? After all, Mearsheimer has always admitted the limits to the predictive power of his theory.

I use the theory to make predictions about great-power politics in the twenty-first century. This effort may strike some readers as foolhardy, because the study of international relations, like the other social sciences, rests on a shakier theoretical foundation than that of the natural sciences.

Offensive realism is an excellent tool for navigating through this dark sea, for as its inventor modestly explains it gets things right about seventy-five percent of the time. What is the role of the remaining twenty-five percent in the conduct of international relations? “Great powers might pursue these non-security goals as long as the requisite behavior does not conflict with balance-of-power logic, which is often the case.” What does this twenty-five percent consist of?

There are essentially two forces that might occupy this remaining space: ideological passion and economic interest. Max Weber argued that the first was of decisive significance and placed the struggle for prestige and recognition at the heart of his conception of the great power system.⁴ This pathos of honor has arguably come to play a far less significant role in world politics. After the Second World War, nationalist ruling classes were transformed into housebroken successor formations single-mindedly committed to growth and stability and so willing to entrust their protection to American statecraft. The neutralization of more bellicose ruling classes opened the gate to the collapse of nationalist fervor in the broader populations of Western Europe and Japan after forty years of heavy casualty warfare, a pacifying trend that eventually reached the US during the high point of its Indochinese operations. The only military interventions now capable of soliciting domestic acclamation are those that demand no heavy sacrifices of the home front. Mearsheimer notes that the Chinese are increasingly receptive to ‘hyper-nationalism’ while Americans are always up for another crusade. But it is doubtful even the most patriotic Americans and Chinese of today would be willing to sacrifice life, limb or even much material comfort for raison d’état. Both nuclear weapons and pacifying cultural-ideological change impinge upon at least the form that great power rivalry will have to assume.  

Many would assume that this twenty-five percent would have to be economic interest, but Mearsheimer disagrees. Though there may be contexts in which promoting national economic development can come into conflict with prioritizing their security, in such cases he holds that security trumps wealth. In support of this view, he quotes none other than Adam Smith who wrote in The Wealth of Nations that “defense is of much more importance than opulence.” Though Mearsheimer acknowledges that “great powers sometimes—although not often—act in contradiction to the theory,” he holds that American strategists were simply heedless of the consequences of enabling the economic development of China long after this policy had lost its Cold War rationale. Under unipolarity, the US supposedly lost sight of what should have been manifestly obvious to rational actors operating on realist assumptions. 

A powerful state can pursue liberal hegemony only in a unipolar system in which it need not worry about threats from other great powers. When the world is bipolar or multipolar, on the other hand, great powers have little choice but to act according to realist dictates, because of the presence of rival great powers.

One might still think that even in unipolarity, the US would nonetheless have kept its eye on developments that would undermine unipolarity or at least not actively promote such developments. It is at least likely that the reason the foreign policy establishment promoted China’s rise was because it calculated that the economic benefit to the US and its most reliable allies outweighed the security risk, until it deemed that it no longer did. Looking only at the quantitative economic dimension of the balance of power, US strategists might have plausibly calculated that they were breaking even. But a qualitative factor intervened: the unexpected rapidity of China’s development of cutting-edge technologies with a host of military applications amounted to a strategic surprise. Mearsheimer could plausibly argue that the foreign policy establishment failed to anticipate this dialectical transformation of quantity into quality. 

Overall though, realism makes it hard to assess this kind of trade-off of relative inter-state power and economic growth and shifts the responsibility for any deviation from the security logic it specifies to the irrational goals promoted by anti-realist doctrines. It does not recognize the ways in which over the last two centuries a world capitalist dynamic of development has restructured the field of geo-political rivalry, complicating the order of determination between the wealth of nations and the balance of power.

While the old-fashioned obsession with prestige plays no role in his theory, he sees the twenty-five percent that falls out of the purview of the theory as abstract ideology. Realists tend to think of themselves as locked in an eternal battle with such chimerical ideals. For Mearsheimer, the primary role that ideals have played in the history of American foreign policy has been to divert strategic focus away from the core geopolitical regions and to mis-rank the hierarchy of strategic significance between them. During the Cold War, the number one priority for US strategists over the twentieth century was the European theater with North East Asia coming second and the Gulf a close third, but liberal hegemonism of the anticommunist variety inspired a disastrous diversion into Southeast Asia. The end of the Cold War shifted the strategic focus to fighting terrorism and rogue states in the name of spreading democracy, perilously raising the Middle East to the position of region number one while the easier task of pushing NATO further eastward against a weakened Russia demoted Europe to two. It may soon be difficult to recall that it was not long ago that globalization was thought to have reduced the position of East Asia to a merely tertiary geo-political concern. 

The pursuit of the ideal of liberal hegemony in this unipolar moment turned out to be an even greater folly than the crusade against Communism had been during the Cold War because in the latter era American planners, though diverted, at least got the strategic hierarchy right: first Europe, then Asia, then the Gulf. By contrast, in the post-Cold War era, the pursuit of liberal hegemony diverted the US into a round of regime change wars in the Middle East (beyond its core Gulf region), preventing the strategic community from grasping and promptly responding to a structural change in the global strategic hierarchy stemming from the transition from unipolarity to multipolarity. Washington’s destabilizing, costly adventures opened up a nearly fifteen year-long path for China’s rise to proceed more or less unopposed. The opportunity for prolonging a rational unipolarity—a period of respite before the wheel turned back to another era of great power war—was squandered. 

The final chapter of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics expressed the hope that the IR theory he advanced might shape the outlook of a realist counter-elite that could persuade a unipolar United States to renounce exporting liberalism on the grounds that the latter was strategically counterproductive and led to a misallocation of resources that could be better spent domestically. In recent interviews, he occasionally reflects on how America’s overseas commitments have led to an erosion of civil liberties, growing inequality and intractable domestic divisions and lets slip that he voted for Bernie Sanders in 2016 and again in 2020.

Ancients and Moderns

We can now turn to The Great Delusion. Reading it, one notes that the twenty-five percent taken up by ideology is made to consist of not just ideals but more specifically political theories with philosophical foundations—no doubt reflective of the view from the ivory tower, the high-minded University of Chicago. One might think that the influence such theories have on the systemic logic of inter-state relations would be minimal for, after all, necessity should be able to take care of itself and doesn’t depend upon the theory of realism to have its effects. Realist theory only aims then to liberate the operation of this necessity from the deluding influence of utopian, non-realist theories on actors who operate under conditions of uncertainty and are therefore in need of theoretical guidance. He holds that the roots of both these delusional utopias, as well as sound realist theories, are philosophical—political anthropologies. 

For Mearsheimer, the liberal theory underlying the post-Cold War US hegemony project came in two varieties: conservative liberalism and progressive liberalism. Conservative liberals conceive of rights as the freedom of individuals to act without fear of government intrusion and associate with one another in ways that express their preferences and even prejudices. Progressive liberals are committed to an equally individualistic conception of rights but think that the latter are best secured when governments actively promote individual flourishing through social engineering that breaks down traditional prejudices and the associations they lead to. In the West, and in the US most of all, progressive liberalism has prevailed domestically over the classical, conservative liberalism because of the growing need for administrative intervention relating to education, welfare and the optimal functioning of markets. But progressive liberalism is also open to the idea that other societies can be socially engineered to accept its values. For this reason, it is the main target of the book, being somewhat more prone to violate the objective dictates of realism than its laissez-faire counterpart. Mearsheimer’s critique of rights-based liberalism as a way of understanding inter-state relations is not, however, a critique of progressive liberalism in the name of conservative liberalism. He is quite aware that there is absolutely no difference between the two when it comes to foreign policy either in unipolarity or before or after. So the significance of the distinction he draws it is not entirely clear. Complicating the picture, neoconservatism is a variant of the progressive kind of liberalism in its belief that American values can be brought to the world by the barrel of a gun. 

In any event, Mearsheimer makes it clear that when it comes to his own country, he is an unwavering supporter of liberalism and the priority it accords to rights. This stance informs a trenchant opposition to the ominous spillover effects of the ‘forever wars’ on domestic civil liberties. 

A liberal democracy that is constantly preparing for and fighting wars, as well as extolling the benefits of using force, is likely to end up violating the individual rights and rule of law that are at the heart of a liberal society. In times of national emergency such as war, leaders may think they have good reasons to stifle criticism of their policies by curtailing freedom of speech and freedom of the press…When liberal democracies feel seriously threatened, they are likely to declare a state of emergency, allowing themselves to take on many of the features of an authoritarian state. 

It is not clear what he thinks will happen when the hostilities with China take off and whether he will regard the resulting state of emergency and lurch to greater authoritarianism as a more justified trade-off of liberty for security given that he sees opposition to China’s rise as structurally necessary in a way that regime change in the Middle East and NATO expansion to the doorstep of Russia was not. In order to unravel the inter-relationship of the domestic to the international spheres of politics, we turn to the political philosophy of offensive realism. 

In order to understand why liberalism aspires to override the objective dictates of realism it will be necessary to identify its intellectual core. The latter is a theory of inviolable individual human rights shared by both variants of liberalism and rooted in an asocial conception of human nature.

John Locke, one of liberalism’s founding fathers, put the point well: “To understand political power right…we must consider what state all men are naturally in.”

We need to answer two principal questions about human nature.

1. Are humans fundamentally social animals, or are they asocial individuals who can choose to form and dissolve social contracts at will?
2. Can we reach some rough moral consensus on what defines the good life, or are there irreconcilable value orientations that prevent this?

He holds that in responding to these two questions liberalism errs in downplaying the social nature of human beings by presupposing atomized, contracting individuals. The liberal assumption that one begins with rational individuals is not false, but it radically exaggerates the ability of these individuals to dis-embed themselves from such collectives. On the other hand, he strongly agrees with liberals that it is impossible to arrive at a universal agreement on what constitutes the good life.

After clarifying his relation to liberalism, he lays down his own anthropological axioms.

1. Human beings are profoundly social because the best way for an individual to survive is to be embedded in a society. 
2. Every society has its own distinctive culture with different customs and beliefs. 
3. This sharp cultural differentiation of societies is more or less permanent because of the historically accumulated consequences of geographical separation.
4. This differentiation is exacerbated by disagreements about what constitutes the good life.
5. The most important of these disputes over the good cannot be resolved by even the disinterested pursuit of truth.

But here one should distinguish three kinds of cultural difference. The first consists of customs that distinguish groups of people but not necessarily politically. Such cultural traits or at least some meaningful semblance of them can be preserved even when people leave one society and become members of another. Most cultural differences between groups are of this kind and do not come into consideration here. The second relates to cultural antagonisms between societies that subscribe to nearly identical conceptions of the good life—between Republican France and Imperial Germany, for example. The passions of nationalism mainly fall into this category. For Mearsheimer, nationalism is the primary modern expression of the social nature of man motivating individuals to band with those like them to protect themselves against outsiders. For all its culturalist trappings, the modern nationalist conception of the good life is simply the secure and prosperous one. This cultural dimension of nationalism often intensifies conflicts between such states and justifies the sacrifices involved but not because they uphold or embody different ideas of the good or the just but on the contrary because they strive for the same goal and fight over what they both want. In contrast to liberalism or Communism, nationalist ideology is thus highly compatible with realism according to which all states strive for the same goals—security first, as a condition of material prosperity. 

The third kind of difference involves intellectual-ideological contentions over the good—the just and unjust—wars of the spirit, so to speak. The US hot war with Nazi Germany followed by the cold one with the Soviets mixed pure power calculations with disputes over the nature of the best regime. Looking at the twentieth century, multi-polarity came in two forms: one pitting nationalist great power states of the same ideological mold against each other culminating in WWI, the other revising classical nationalism in the light of universal ideologies of the good—liberalism, communism and global racial hierarchy. Paradoxically, the most nationalist of the three regimes in contention for hegemony in WWII was also the most willing to depart from realism in pursuing ideological goals that arguably hastened its destruction. 

His comments on the foreign policy of the USSR are more interesting as they suggest an awareness of another, opposed conception of international relations that he respectfully considers.

When the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, they apparently believed that international politics would immediately undergo a fundamental transformation and that balance-of-power logic would be relegated to the boneyard of history. Specifically, they thought that with some help from the Soviet Union, communist revolutions would spread across Europe and the rest of the world, creating like-minded states that would live in peace before finally withering away altogether.

From an IR perspective this original enterprise of the Third International could not have been long for the world, and Mearsheimer notes that under Stalin promoting revolution and abandoning it when convenient was reduced to another instrument of hard ball realist calculation. Why did the original enterprise of world revolution fail? It was obviously not because the Bolsheviks were soft-hearted utopians—their conception of civil war and the dictatorship of the proletariat hinged on a very tough realism. Here one should look at what the Marxist theory of the state has in common with realism. Both see the state as ultimately grounded in the organized power of armed men directed outwards against states and, at the same time, directed inwards towards the preservation of a social order against domestic threats to it. While Marxism gave predominance to what the Germans call Innenpolitik, it nonetheless accorded a great, if subordinate, significance to Aussenpolitik while IR realism has tended to downplay the former even if logically it could not exclude it. 

Just as IR realism’s conception of the state in international relations requires extreme abstractions, the same method can be employed here to bring out the logic of domestic social division implied by the conception of the two-fold nature of the state that Marxism shared with it. It was, after all, no accident that the occasionally violent class struggles unleashed by the rise of the modern workers’ movement raged during a long era of inter-state multi-polarity from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. According to the Marxists, in the era of inter-imperialist war and revolution, the workers of the world had to be organized into an international army in preparation for civil wars against their own ruling classes. Under the leadership of revolutionary officers at least as realistic as these ruling classes, the universal class interests of wage-slaves and their allies would come to the fore overriding the particularistic national bonds that tied these subalterns to their masters in the wars that periodically broke out among the latter. 

The world revolution as the Bolsheviks had originally conceived it collapsed in the 1920s. But an older European world of great power war and diplomacy nonetheless underwent a structural transformation over the inter-war era as new ideological dynamics came to modify the equations of geo-politics. During WWII and the Cold War, ideology inspired the opposing sides to occasionally depart from the realist calculus. The preeminent geo-political contenders of this era—Stalinism, Nazism and democratic America—hoped to transcend the older conventions of statecraft and diplomacy. For all of them, pure raison d’état had to bend to new conditions of domestic legitimacy within an emergent global field of ideological conflict. In this respect, the European and then world civil war of the twentieth century came to resemble the religious civil wars of the seventeenth century: as subjects came under intense pressure to support the cause of the regime they lived under, realist war between states slid into ideological-religious civil wars within them and vice versa. Defeating the enemy state made it easier to defeat its domestic supporters who it was assumed would form subversive fifth columns while the right to neutrality shrunk both within and between states. 

By comparison, today’s ideological divisions are pretty superficial. Could they nonetheless impart some new impetus to international relations? We can speculate. The fiscal and ideological requirements of a prolonged conflict may force the Kremlin to break up the extractive oligarchy that subordinated post-Soviet Russia to “the international community.” An anti-Western, nationalist Kremlin will lend its support to the efforts of other states to push back against Washington though as a weak “great power” it will remain largely consigned to pursuing defensive goals. While Russia will likely not become an anti-systemic state challenging the core-periphery hierarchy like the USSR and Red China once did, nor a revisionist power seeking to reshape this system to its specifications like the Germany, Italy and Japan of the inter-war era, it is nonetheless powerful enough to hamper the US’s ability to intervene and shape outcomes with military force and sanctions. This disruption will likely create a new inter-state landscape in which anti-systemic forces have greater room for maneuver but on which the resort to nuclear threats will go up and the possibility of their use become more likely. The reemergence of the prospect of mass destruction may supercharge the small ideological divisions between different kinds of capitalist states at the top and begin to encourage new domestic political dynamics as populations confront the costs and consequences of the geo-political scramble for power. In this scenario, modest ideological disputes intensify an already existing realist logic and open up more points of resistance to the existing balance of power.  

In reflecting on the springs of human conflict Mearsheimer concedes that the terms of pure existential security conflict can be transformed by contentions over the good and the just, but he also tends to minimize the significance of this dimension of the struggle as its eruption would undermine the black box abstraction of realism. Offensive realism tells us, however, that it is unwise to rule out such seemingly unlikely events as they can unexpectedly recur. We must always be prepared for the extreme. A fully blown offensive realism might then open up a conception of the political that would conjoin the struggle for power between states to the one within them. Admittedly, the world implied by this dialectical development of offensive realism does not currently exist but it is a possible world and one that speaks to the vital human need for ends and conflicts over ends that liberal hegemony has long suppressed. The prolongation of this hegemony now threatens to cut off the possibility that some people, somewhere might construct new forms of collective existence. Here we must reconsider the role of the subjective, the thymotic drive and the ideas that might inspire it. If today’s so-called great power states can no longer rely upon the mobilizing power of nationalism to neutralize deepening social divides, what passions might the latter inspire, and how will they shape wars of the twenty-first century?

The Great Delusion begins by presupposing deep, irreconcilable divisions within societies and from there unfolds into another, more expansive equally troubling conception of the political.

1. “That centrifugal forces are at play in every society that occasionally lead to its unraveling tells us that culture alone is not enough to hold a society together.” 
2. “The most important way societies prevent disintegration is by building formidable political institutions, for which there is no substitute.”
3. “These institutions must control the means of violence both to enforce the rules within the society and to protect it from external threat.”
4. “With political institutions comes politics, which is crucial to daily life in any society. Politics is essentially about who gets to write the rules that govern the group.”
5. “The power to write rules, which matters so much inside a society, matters much less at the inter-group level.”
6. “This is because social groups have a propensity to expand or otherwise aggress because this enhances their prospects for survival.”
7. “There are several possible motives for enlargement, one of which is ideology. The leaders of a society may think they have discovered the true religion or the ideal political system and want to export it to other societies, because they think it would benefit humankind.”
8. “At its deepest level, political competition revolves around conflicting visions of how society should be organized—again ideology. This competition is usually intense and sometimes it involves chicanery, coercion, and violence.”

Unexpectedly, the work concludes by according primacy to ideology. Perhaps this should not be too surprising for the significance of realism must rise in proportion to the influence of ideologies that deny what realists purport to see more clearly. Realism at its height promises an impartial perspective on not just the raw struggle for existence but also on the war of ideas. While the latter often conceals, it sometimes also fundamentally modifies what is at stake, thereby opening up whole new dimensions of the struggle. Such detachment does not have very deep roots in human nature. Realism was a flower of one of those improbable historical moments when the political fundamentals became thinkable and inspired reflections that were conceived as being for all times to come. It is not to the early modern theorists of the state of nature and the social contract that we should look to when considering its underlying assumptions but rather to a foundational experience of the political that arose in a confrontation with the idealizing outlook of philosophy. In The Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche wrote:  

You have to turn Thucydides over, line for line, and read his ulterior motives as clearly as his words: there are few thinkers with so many ulterior motives. He represents the most perfect expression of the sophists’ culture, by which I mean the realists’ culture; this invaluable movement right in the middle of the hoax of morals and ideals that was being perpetrated on all sides by the Socratic schools. Greek philosophy as the decadence of Greek instinct; Thucydides as the great summation, the final manifestation of that strong, severe, hard objectivity that lay in the instincts of the more ancient Hellenes. In the end what divides natures like Thucydides from natures like Plato is courage in the face of reality.⁵

This passage conveys the grandeur of realism, but also what is missing in the spiritually truncated realisms of our times: the counterforce of idealisms in contention over the best order of human things, here tendentiously described as decadence. For without this agency of the spirit, fates worse than tragedy probably lie in store for us.  

1. John J. Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (New Haven:Yale UP, 2018). ↩︎
2. John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001). ↩︎
3. “Naked Aggression,” The Economist, March 12, 2009. ↩︎
4. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (1922). ↩︎
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 225-26. ↩︎