A Critique Of Mearsheimer's Realism

Here at MiH we’ve cited Prof. John Mearsheimer frequently for his views, initially, on the American war on Russia. Prof. Mearsheimer has long been a critic of US policy toward Russia as well as the Middle East. In that second respect, more recently we have cited Prof. Mearsheimer on the Palestine issue, to which he has devoted an enormous amount of energy (including his well known book, with Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby). His views are refreshingly outside the mainstream of Deep State thinking on geopolitics. Nevertheless, I always exercise care in evaluating Mearsheimer’s views because I have reservations regarding his favored theory for explaining geopolitics, known as “Realism”. Basically, I find that this theory is a simplification, a one-size-fits-all approach that doesn’t do full justice to the complexities of different societies and nations. I believe this is particularly the case with regard to nations like China and India. Mearsheimer’s Realism causes him to be, in my view, to prone to regard nations that are regionally influential and powerful as threats. The author, below, argues that a country like China is motivated in its geopolitics by quite different motivations than those that have characterized—and still do characterize—the West.

Today, MoA features a book review that critiques the Realist school of geopolitical thinking. The review is written by Arnaud Bertrand, and the book—“Sub-Imperial Power”—is written by Clinton Fernandes, a former Australian intelligence officer and now professor of international and political studies at the University of New South Wales. I should say that I find Fernandes’ self serving idea that countries like Australia are “sub-imperial” powers rather than vassals of the United States to be less than convincing, but that’s not our main interest here. I’ve excerpted the most relevant parts, from my POV:

On 'Sub-Imperial Power' (by Arnaud Bertrand

One of the most interesting aspects of the book is how it departs from the theories of realism, championed by the likes of John Mearsheimer or Stephen Walt, who assert that all states - regardless of culture, religion, social hierarchy or political system - will act in the same way because they all prioritize survival and security above all else. They assert that given that maximizing power is the best way to survive in the international system, if they had the opportunity all states would seek to become hegemons like the US is today, or imperial Britain was yesterday.

Fernandes makes a very different case, which I actually think is a far better explanation of how the world actually works, and of the historical behavior of various states. His point is that there’s something unique about US geopolitics, and that of Western colonial states before it, in that they have these extremely aggressive characteristics - the impulse to subjugate and pillage others - that actually often harm their security rather than safeguard it. And he explains this with the undue power the moneyed class has over the state in those systems of government. Which is hard to deny if one looks at things historically: …

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In other words, Fernandes’ point is that the key characteristic of the “rules-based international order” relates to the actual structure of the American (or British, French, Australian, etc) social and economic system, which seeks to enforce an order where the whole world is open to the penetration and control of their respective national moneyed classes. Which is why the order is about hegemony, and not about security, and why the former so often comes at the expense of the latter.

It’s interestingly something that John Mearsheimer often laments about if you listen to him: “why would the U.S. act in such foolish ways that go against what my realist theories recommend?”. He was adamantly opposed to the war in Iraq, warned for many years about the risk of a clash with Russia in Ukraine if we expanded NATO, and keeps speaking out against the U.S.’s unequivocal support of Israel. And by doing so Mearsheimer actually admits that realism doesn’t quite explain the behavior of states and that his theories are therefore not quite right. Fernandes here offers an explanation that better predicts the actual behavior of the US and its “sub-imperial powers”: you cannot understand states’ behavior if you limit yourself to a state-centric view, you also need to look at the unique characteristics of their political, social and economic system.

A last interesting point is that, given the fact he argues that states’ political and economic systems play a key role in defining their geopolitics, Fernandes’s book implies a prediction that as China’s power rises, it will behave in vastly different ways than the U.S. and its imperial henchmen. Given the Chinese system, it will undoubtedly seek to maximize its power but this time it will actually be for its own security and survival, and not to serve the interests of its moneyed class, and as such will behave in much less aggressive ways than the US. Again, interestingly Mearsheimer kind of admits this too because he repeatedly says “when I am in China, I’m amongst my people”: as in they follow his realist theories much more faithfully than the US. We can already see the contours of this: it’s absolutely obvious that the Chinese state isn’t at the mercy of its moneyed class, quite the contrary, China is not exactly a country where billionaires have an easy life 😂 Same thing with respect to hegemony: China just doesn’t do military alliances (it doesn’t have any), foreign interference or coups d’états. In fact they haven’t as much as fired a single bullet abroad in over 4 decades. On the contrary, it seeks to create an order with indivisible security and mutual respect embedded in the system, where it’d ideally be the most powerful state - sure - but not for the purpose of pillaging or subjugating others but because this guarantees its security and stability. Which is exactly how it behaved for 1,800 years when it was the most powerful state on the planet before the industrial revolution: it never went around trying to colonize and pillage the world as it believed this would eventually come at the expense of its own security, much like it comes at the expense of American security and interests today. Instead it sought relationships of trade and mutual respect that maximize security and stability over the long term.

Obviously this only scratches the surface, but it seems a good start. One could say, perhaps, that the imperial Western powers have tended to view geopolitics as a zero sum game—a war of all against all. Nations—or, perhaps better—civilizations such as China, India, and Russia tend instead to expand to borders that provide security, but then focus on maintaining internal cohesion and stability. An historical overview of these civilizational fields will demonstrate that each has been subjected to periodic, devastating invasions, but that over the long term they have been more concerned with taming their own centrifugal tendencies once their security is assured.