Mearsheimer, to his credit, was able to anticipate the Russian invasion of Ukraine. If his prescriptions were heeded to sooner, perhaps this conflict could have narrowly been avoided.
You could just as easily argue that Mearsheimer’s opponents have done more to enable the Russians.
I’m not saying I agree with Mearsheimer or understand his views fully, but I’m grateful his school of thought exists and is being explored.
This is a tangent, but I think it’s important to consider predictors’ entire track records, and on the whole I don’t think Mearsheimer’s is very impressive. Here’s a long article on that.
Indeed. And there are other forecasting failures by Mearsheimer, including one in which he himself apparently admits (prior to resolution) that such a failure would constitute a serious blow to his theory. Here’s a relevant passage from a classic textbook on nuclear strategy:[1]
In an article that gained considerable attention, largely for its resolute refusal to share the general mood of optimism that surrounded the events of 1989, John Mearsheimer assumed that Germany would become a nuclear power. Then, as the Soviet Union collapsed, he explained why it might make sense for Ukraine to hold on to its nuclear bequest. In the event Germany made an explicit renunciation of the nuclear option at the time of the country’s unification in 1990, while Japan, the other defeated power of 1945, continued to insist that it had closed off this option. Nor in the end did Kiev agree that the nuclear component of Ukraine’s Soviet inheritance provided a natural and even commendable way of affirming a new-found statehood. Along with Belarus and Kazakhstan, Ukraine eased out of its nuclear status. As it gained its independence from the USSR, Ukraine adopted a non-nuclear policy. The idea that a state with nuclear weapons would choose to give them up, especially when its neighbour was a nuclear state with historic claims on its territory, was anathema to many realists. One of his critics claimed that when asked in 1992, ‘What would happen if Ukraine were to give up nuclear weapons?’ Mearsheimer responded, ‘That would be a tremendous blow to realist theory.’
It’s not a fair description of all IR realism, which I think is a useful theory for illuminating certain interests of state actors. But some proponents (and the article Stephen linked confirms that Mearsheimer is one of them) seem to elevate it to a universal theory, which I don’t think it is. Frankly, Realism is the intellectual home of Russia-apologism, and while I’ll admit that Mearshimer seems to come by this honestly (in that he honestly thinks Russia is likely to respond with nukes and isn’t just a Putin fanboy) I take a rather different view of how things are likely to turn out if we keep backing Ukraine.
Realism as a school of IR thought far predates Russia-Ukraine, Wikipedia lists ~1600s as the origin of IR realism in the West but in college I was taught that the intellectual foundation originated with at least Thucydides.
Is this really a fair description of IR Realism?
Mearsheimer, to his credit, was able to anticipate the Russian invasion of Ukraine. If his prescriptions were heeded to sooner, perhaps this conflict could have narrowly been avoided.
You could just as easily argue that Mearsheimer’s opponents have done more to enable the Russians.
I’m not saying I agree with Mearsheimer or understand his views fully, but I’m grateful his school of thought exists and is being explored.
This is a tangent, but I think it’s important to consider predictors’ entire track records, and on the whole I don’t think Mearsheimer’s is very impressive. Here’s a long article on that.
Indeed. And there are other forecasting failures by Mearsheimer, including one in which he himself apparently admits (prior to resolution) that such a failure would constitute a serious blow to his theory. Here’s a relevant passage from a classic textbook on nuclear strategy:[1]
Lawrence Freedman & Jeffrey Michaels, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 4th ed., London, 2019, pp. 579–580
It’s not a fair description of all IR realism, which I think is a useful theory for illuminating certain interests of state actors. But some proponents (and the article Stephen linked confirms that Mearsheimer is one of them) seem to elevate it to a universal theory, which I don’t think it is. Frankly, Realism is the intellectual home of Russia-apologism, and while I’ll admit that Mearshimer seems to come by this honestly (in that he honestly thinks Russia is likely to respond with nukes and isn’t just a Putin fanboy) I take a rather different view of how things are likely to turn out if we keep backing Ukraine.
Realism as a school of IR thought far predates Russia-Ukraine, Wikipedia lists ~1600s as the origin of IR realism in the West but in college I was taught that the intellectual foundation originated with at least Thucydides.