Luke Ford

I’m enjoying this long profile of John J. Mearsheimer:

Tragedy begins with a forceful denial of perpetual peace in favor of perpetual struggle, with great powers primed for offense, because they can never be sure how much military capacity they will need in order to survive over the long run. Because every state is forever insecure, Mearsheimer counsels, the internal nature of a state is less important as a factor in its international behavior than we think. “Great powers are like billiard balls that vary only in size,” he intones. In other words, Mearsheimer is not one to be especially impressed by a state simply because it is a democracy. As he asserts early on, “Whether China is democratic and deeply enmeshed in the global economy or autocratic and autarkic will have little effect on its behavior, because democracies care about security as much as non-democracies do.” Indeed, a democratic China could be more technologically innovative and economically robust, with consequently more talent and money to lavish on its military. (A democratic Egypt, for that matter, could create greater security challenges for the United States than an autocratic Egypt. Mearsheimer is not making moral judgments. He is merely describing how states interact in an anarchic world.)

…States take up human rights only if doing so does not contradict the pursuit of power.

…“To argue that expansion is inherently misguided,” Mearsheimer writes, “implies that all great powers over the past 350 years have failed to comprehend how the international system works. This is an implausible argument on its face.” The problem with the “moderation is good” thesis is that “it mistakenly equates [so-called] irrational expansion with military defeat.” But hegemony has succeeded many times. The Roman Empire in Europe, the Mughal Dynasty in the Indian subcontinent, and the Qing Dynasty in China are some of his examples, even as he mentions how Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Adolf Hitler all came close to success. “Thus, the pursuit of regional hegemony is not a quixotic ambition,” though no state has yet achieved regional hegemony in the Eastern Hemisphere the way the United States achieved it in the Western Hemisphere.

The edgiest parts of Tragedy are when Mearsheimer presents full-bore rationales for the aggression of Wilhelmine Germany, Nazi Germany, and imperial Japan.

“The German decision to push for war in 1914 was not a case of wacky strategic ideas pushing a state to start a war it was sure to lose. It was … a calculated risk motivated in large part by Germany’s desire to break its encirclement by the Triple Entente, prevent the growth of Russian power, and become Europe’s hegemon.”

As for Hitler, he “did indeed learn from World War I.” Hitler learned that Germany could not fight on two fronts at the same time, and he would have to win quick, successive victories, which, in fact, he achieved early in World War II. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor was a calculated risk to avoid abandoning the Japanese empire in China and Southeast Asia in the face of a U.S. embargo on imported energy and machine tools.

…Mearsheimer is no warmonger or militarist. His job as a political scientist is not to improve the world, but to say what he thinks is going on in it. And he thinks that while states rightly yearn for a values-based foreign policy, the reality of the anarchic international system forces them to behave according to their own interests.

…Mearsheimer tells me that the U.S. was right to enter World War II very late; that way it paid a smaller “blood price” than the Soviet Union. “Before D-Day, 93 percent of all German casualties had occurred on the eastern front,” he says, adding that the devastation of the Soviet Union helped the U.S. in the Cold War to follow…

Truly, Mearsheimer’s theory of international relations allowed him to get both Gulf wars exactly right—and he’s one of the few people to do so. As a good offshore balancer, Mearsheimer supported the First Gulf War against Saddam Hussein, in 1991. By occupying Kuwait, Iraq had positioned itself as a potential hegemon in the Persian Gulf, justifying U.S. military action. Moreover, as Mearsheimer asserted in several newspaper columns, the United States could easily defeat the Iraqi military. This assertion made him something of a lone wolf in academic circles, where many were predicting a military quagmire or calamity. The Democratic Party, to which most scholars subscribed, overwhelmingly opposed the war. Mearsheimer’s confidence that fighting Saddam would be a “cakewalk” was based in part on his trips to Israel in the 1970s and ’80s, when he was studying conventional military deterrence. The Israelis had told him that the Iraqi army, mired as it was in Soviet doctrine, was one of the Arab world’s worst militaries.

But Mearsheimer’s finest hour was the run-up to the Second Gulf War against Saddam, in 2003. This time, offshore balancing did not justify a war. Iraq was already contained and was not on the brink of becoming the hegemon of the Persian Gulf. And Mearsheimer felt strongly that a new war was a bad idea. He joined with Harvard’s Stephen Walt and the University of Maryland’s Shibley Telhami to lead a group of 33 scholars, many of them card-carrying academic realists, to sign a declaration opposing the war. On September 26, 2002, they published an advertisement on the New York Times op-ed page that cost $38,000, and they paid for it themselves. The top of the ad ran, WAR WITH IRAQ IS NOT IN AMERICA’S NATIONAL INTEREST. Among the bullet points was this: “Even if we win easily, we have no plausible exit strategy. Iraq is a deeply divided society that the United States would have to occupy and police for many years to create a viable state.”

Mearsheimer opposed not only the Iraq War, but also the neoconservative vision of regional transformation, which, as he tells me, was the “polar opposite” of offshore balancing…

During the buildup to the Iraq War, Mearsheimer and Walt began work on what would become a London Review of Books article and later The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. (The Atlantic had originally commissioned the piece, only to reject it owing to a profound disagreement between the editors and the authors over its objectivity.) In some respects, The Israel Lobby reads as an appendix to The Tragedy of Great Power Politics—almost a case study of how great powers should not act. Many of those loosely associated with the lobby supported the Iraq War, which Mearsheimer saw as a diversion from the contest with China. The so-called special relationship between the United States and Israel, by further entangling the United States in the problems of the Middle East, contradicted the tenets of offshore balancing. And proponents of the special relationship have routinely justified it by citing Israel’s status as a stable democracy in the midst of unstable authoritarian states—but that internal attribute, in Mearsheimer’s view, is largely irrelevant…

Nevertheless, The Israel Lobby contains a fundamental analytic truth that is undeniable: the United States and Israel, like most states, have some different interests that inevitably push up against any enduring special relationship, especially because their security situations are so vastly different. To start with, the United States is a continent-size country protected by oceans, while Israel is a small country half a world away, surrounded by enemy states. Because the geographical situations of the U.S. and Israel are so dissimilar, their geopolitical interests can never completely overlap in the way that Israel’s most fervent supporters contend. (Iran’s nuclear program is a far more acute threat to Israel than it is to the United States.) “The fact that Israel is a democracy is important,” Mearsheimer tells me. “But it is not sufficient to justify the terms of the special relationship. We should treat Israel as a normal country, like we treat Britain or Japan.”

What particularly exasperates Mearsheimer and Walt is the lack of conditionality in the special relationship. They admit that making American support for Israel “more conditional would not remove all sources of friction” between Arab countries and the United States; nor do they deny “the presence of genuine anti-Semitism in various Arab countries.” But they cannot condone a situation in which the U.S. has, over the decades, given Israel more than $180 billion in economic and military assistance, “the bulk of it comprising direct grants rather than loans,” and yet can barely achieve modest negotiating goals such as getting Israel to stop expanding West Bank settlements for 90 days, let alone dismantle them, even though the Palestinians have been willing at times to make major concessions. (And the U.S. has been willing to throw in major sweeteners in the form of advanced military hardware.) Mearsheimer and Walt repeatedly say in their book that they believe the U.S. should militarily defend Israel if it is in mortal danger, but that the Israelis must be much more cooperative in light of all the aid they get. But, as they also argue, the reason the Israelis are not more cooperative is that in the final analysis, they don’t have to be—which, in turn, is because of the pro-Israel lobby.

… Within media ranks, The Israel Lobby has delegitimized Mearsheimer. Inside the service academy where I taught for two years, in the think-tank world where I work, and in various government circles with which I am acquainted, Mearsheimer is quietly held in higher regard because of familiarity with his other books, but the controversy (and its echoes last fall) has surely hurt him.