Why I’m Not a Realist (right now)
A reply to John Mearsheimer
John Mearsheimer, that sole celebrity of international-relations theory, has penned a short post entitled “Why I Am a Realist.”
Mearsheimer, for those who don’t know, is probably the most famous living realist. He’s an offensive realist, which, of all the various realist traditions, assumes the worst about nation-states and humanity. But before he became a viral controversy, he spent a career doing solid scholarship; he earned his standing in the field whether you agree with him or not.
As it happens, I do not agree with him on much.
He was a vocal opponent of the Iraq War (on this we agree). And he courageously critiqued the Israel lobby in the US at a time when that was simply not done.
But I think of him as a broken clock that’s right twice a day. Mearsheimer has made a litany of bad predictions, including that Western Europe would consume itself with old-school intra-continental rivalries after the Cold War. He’s been Mr. Self-Fulfilling Prophecy on China, advocating for containment of the Middle Kingdom long before it was fashionable, on the belief that a Sino-US war was all but inevitable. And even in instances where he’s right, it’s often for reasons that do not resemble his reasoning.
These days, his notoriety owes primarily to people considering him an apologist for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine since 2022 (I’m not sure it’s fair to call him that, so I won’t, but it’s a widespread charge against him). At first, it wasn’t Mearsheimer’s fault; the Kremlin was simply leveraging his name and talking points to advance their own cause. Scholars don’t have much ability to police who uses their ideas. But as the war in Ukraine proceeded, the line separating Mearsheimer’s views from Russia’s preferences has gotten blurry.
Whatever. I’m not trying to adjudicate all that. And I want to separate his scholarship—which I disagree with but which is of a high enough standard—from his analysis of the real world, which is mostly just bizarre.
What I want to do here is contrast his reasoning for identifying as a realist with my reasoning for not identifying as a realist right now, or in the ways that he conveys.
I very much believe in both analyzing and moving in the world as it actually is. And that’s why I have to say I’m not a realist “right now.” But I’m also unlikely to ever be a realist in the way that Mearsheimer is because I don’t think he has a very realistic view of…reality.