John J. Mearsheimer says: “What is Zionism? It is Jewish nationalism. It is Jews in Europe moving to Palestine and getting a state of their own. Palestinians are interested in getting a state of their own.”
“In a world where nationalism is the most powerful ideology, the state is not going away… What you see today is a planet populated by states… The evolution of the political order since 1500 has been about the rise of the state.”
“What about states coming together? It’s not going to happen. Nationalism is a particularistic ideology. It privileges one’s own group. There’s little interest in a marriage with the other. In most cases, there’s an interest in divorce. Look at the former Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Soviet Union. We are going to live in an anarchic world dominated by states.”
Why would the US facilitate the rise of China?
“I have a number of liberal friends who want to get China hooked on global capitalism and help China get richer and richer… From a realist perspective, this horrifies me… Why would I help facilitate the creation of a very powerful state, a state capable of becoming much more powerful than the United States when I can’t be sure what its intentions will be? There’s no way anyone can assure me that China will have benevolent intentions.”
“If we had to rerun history, it was 1919, what do you do with Germany? Most of my liberal friends would say we should not impose a Carthaginian peace. We should treat the Germans more nicely. My view is that you should break Germany up into eight pieces because you can’t be sure what its intentions will be. My liberal friends say that if you treat Germany nicely, Hitler wouldn’t come to power. Well, you didn’t need Hitler to start WWI. That I would allow Germany after WWI to become powerful again, it’s not the way I operate. I think it is important to make sure that you are more powerful than all of your neighbors because you can’t be sure of their intentions.”
“Though realists accept that war is politics by other means, realists are very reluctant to use military force. They are much more reluctant than liberals and neo-conservatives. Virtually all realists in the US opposed the Iraq War [of 2003]. Almost every important realist in the US opposed the Vietnam War before it happened (Kenneth Waltz, Hans Morgenthau, Walter Lipman, George Kennan, etc).”
“If realists ran foreign policy, we would have a more peaceful world.”
