Conversations with History: John Mearsheimer

[Music] [Applause] welcome to a conversation with history I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies our guest today is John J Mearsheimer who is the our Wendell Harrison distinguished service professor at the University of Chicago he's the author of numerous books including conventional deterrence Liddell Hart and the weight of history and the tragedy of great power politics John welcome to Berkley glad to be here Harry where we want to raised I was born in Brooklyn New York in December 1947 just as the Cold War was getting started and I was raised in New York City until I was 8 years old at which point my parents moved to the suburbs they moved to Westchester County croton New York where I grew up and and looking back how do you think your parents shape your character that's a very interesting question my parents were actually not at all interested in politics so they had almost no influence on pushing me into political science in the study of international relations that all came much later in life I think what my parents taught me was to be very honest to be what they used to call a truth teller and also to work very hard my parents had very old-fashioned values and they believed that God put you on earth to work hard and they instilled the value of hard work and the value of truth-telling and their children and I think that's had a significant effect on me over the years were there any books that you read as a young person that really affected you I would say that there were a handful of books that I read when I was in my late teens and early 20s that had a significant impact on me one in particular was David Halberstam was the best and the brightest I grew up during the Vietnam years in fact I was in the American military from the years 1965 to 1975 which was coterminous with the Vietnam War and I often used to say to myself in those days how in God's name did we get into this horrible war it happen and I think reading David Halberstam book which I think provides a very powerful and coach and explanation had a very significant impact on my thinking now you did your undergraduate work at at West Point how did you wind up there I went into the American military in 1965 I went into the army and I was in for two years and at the end of that first year as an enlisted man I had two choices one is I could go to West Point or two I could go to Vietnam and what happened in those days was that they often looked at people who were in the army and those who were in the army enlisted men in the army who had talent they would offer appointments to West Point and that's what happened to me and I first decided I'd go to Vietnam I did not like the military at all although I spent ten years of my life in the military and I'm deeply appreciative of that experience I actually didn't like the military as an institution I don't like shaving I don't like sleeping in the woods I actually don't like guns I don't like uniforms I don't like Authority so there was nothing about the military that I found congenial to my basic personality but anyway my father greatly wanted me to go to West Point he was deeply convinced that I shouldn't do that and when he heard that I was thinking about not accepting the appointment to West Point and instead going to Vietnam as an infantryman he basically gave me compound fractures of both arms have to go to West Point so in what ways was the military a positive influence if any what what did you take out of that experience that proved useful later in life well I think I learned a lot of things in the military first of all I just learned a lot about the subject that I now study from having been in the American military if you do international relations and you focus on military strategy and the use of force there's no question that having been in the American military provided me with a lot of experiences and a lot of insights that I think helped me in my later work but on a more personal level I think that West Point prepared me to be scholar in two very important ways first of all West Point taught you to suffer it taught you to work hard to be able to deal with the adversity that comes with producing scholarship many people look at a book that a scholar writes or an article that a scholar writes and they think that this person just sort of sat down in in a few hours in the case of an article or in a few weeks in the case of a book produce this terrific piece of scholarship in fact as you well know it takes years of hard work to produce a first-rate piece of scholarship and it's often very painful in fact it's almost always very painful to write a really good book and it requires a lot of suffering and I think West Point taught you to get up every day and to wrestle with the bear and even when it looked like things were not going to work out nevertheless get up out of bed and go to work so that was one very important lesson that it taught me the importance of hard working and fighting through adversity and the other thing is that West Point taught me to tell the truth and to placed a very high emphasis on saying things that might go against the conventional wisdom that people might might not want to hear just because it was the truth so I think I learned there to sort of speak my mind even if people didn't like what I have to say and I think that's an important quality in an academic well how did it affect you being in the military and at the at the time of the Vietnam War when there was so much despair about that war and the military's role in it it was very tough to be at West Point when I was there I was there from 1966 to 1970 I graduated on June 3rd 1970 and if my memories correct Kent State took place on May 4th 1970 so those were definitely tumultuous times it was difficult to go home at Christmas or during summer vacation because we all had very short hair and virtually all the kids that I grew up with who were then in college had long hair many of them had been radicalized and very much opposed to the Vietnam War and so on me is somebody who was a symbol of the establishment and therefore the enemy probably some of my most searing experiences during those years were marching and Armed Forces Day parades in New York City every spring we would go to New York City and we've marched down Fifth Avenue on what was called Armed Forces Day and invariably in later years the let's say 68 69 and 70 there would be huge numbers of demonstrators on either side of us as we marched down Fifth Avenue oftentimes throwing bags of pig's blood plastic bags filled with pig's blood or urine at us spitting at us screaming at the top of their lungs and we oftentimes before we went had extensive drills on how to deal with the crowd should it charge us and try and get to the American flag which we carried in our midst so those were very difficult times for a young person to be at West Point what did you learn about the military as an instrument of political power that you got from that experience anything in particular well I think I learned a couple things first I learned that militaries tend to be rather conservative institutions many people think especially people who had no affiliation with the military that the military officers like war they like the gunfight in fact I think the exact opposite is the case and if you think about it it makes good sense it's those people who are going to get shot or killed if they get sent to war so the military generally speaking is quite reticent about fighting wars it's very rarely the case that military officers are clamoring to get a shooting war started that was one thing I learned the second thing I learned is that there's a great deal of corruption in the military as there is in any large institution whether it's the Catholic Church or the academic world the military had its share of corruption and I think this was especially true during the Vietnam War which I think had a corrupting influence on the military so those were the two principal things I think I learned about the American military from my experience now you in the end became a international relations theorist somebody who works on strategy and who can be put in the realist camp I'm curious as to what it takes to do this kind of work before we talk about what it is you do what exactly do you mean when you say what it takes well what sorts of skills other than the ones that you've already mentioned I mean is it is it is it what what what kind of thinking what kind of preparation for that thinking is is is something we should talk about well I've given a lot of thought to this question and it's a fascinating issue I think by and large theorists ir theorists are born not created yeah i think you either have an instinct for creating theories or you don't it's very hard to take people who don't have those proclivities and to turn them into a theorist and i think to be a theorist you have to be creative you have to be willing to invent new ideas number one - you have to be willing to make arguments that are likely to be controversial and therefore cause all sorts of people to come after you hammer and tong and number three i think you have to know a lot of history to be an ir a theorist of some consequence you have to have thought long and hard about how the world works because what you're doing is trying to come up with an explanation that can account for a large part of politics and if you haven't thought long and hard about how the world actually works it's hard to imagine how you could come up with a theory that could explain the world so I think these different characteristics are essential for someone who wants to be an IR theorist in the first two are I think not learned they're sort of born into you they're hardwired into you at birth third you can learn now you are a realist so help us understand what the essential features of a realist theory is and or are and then what your particular take on the the realist theory is realists are individuals who believe that the state is the principal actor in international politics and furthermore they believe that states are very concerned with the balance of power and pretty much everything that states do is connected to how the behavior that they're taking at any particular time will affect their position and the balance of power and when you talk about the balance of balance of power you're really talking about military power and the use of military force that's all bound up with this concept of the balance so realist tend to be people who pay a lot of attention to the use of force they focus on things like deterrence and war fighting and the impact of nuclear weapons on international politics and so forth and so on I think those are the key ingredients that all really share my view is that they're basically three kinds of realists human nature realists are realists who believe that States like individuals are hardwired at birth with a will to power in them and that States constantly compete for power because it's an innate phenomenon Hans Morgenthau is the most famous human nature realist who came from the University of she who was at the University of Chicago was at the University of where I am now right and then the second school of realist thought or what I call the defensive realist these are people who believe that states behave somewhat aggressively because the structure of the international system forces them to compete for power it's not that states are hardwired with this animus Bauman and I as Morgenthau calls it what drive States is the fact that the best way to survive in the system is to be very powerful and every state understands that and therefore they compete for power witness how the United States and the Soviet Union behave during the Cold War these defensive realists however tend to believe that states only want a limited amount of power because they understand that too much power is a bad thing Kenneth waltz who is probably the most famous living realist theorist and who was a famous professor here at Berkeley for many years I think is the archetypical defense of realist waltz believes that states do compete for power but it does not make sense to want too much power I agree with waltz that structure determines how states behave in other words it's the structure of the international system that's causes States to anarchical system that they have to operate in its anarchical system meaning that there's no higher authority that sits above States so you have a 911 if a state gets into trouble in the international system it can't dial nine-one-one because there's nobody on top to come to their rescue and it's this anarchy that pushes States to compete for power so waltz and I agree on that but the fundamental difference between the two of us is that I believe that States seek hegemony I believe that they're ultimately more aggressive than Waltz portrays them as being and the goal for States is to dominate the entire system to put it in colloquial terms the aim of States is to be the biggest and baddest dude on the block because if you're the biggest and baddest dude on the block then it is highly unlikely that any other state will challenge you simply because you're so powerful just take the Western Hemisphere for example where the United States is by far the most powerful state in the region no state Canada Guatemala Cuba Mexico we even think about going to war against the United States because we are so powerful this is the ideal situation to have to be just so powerful that nobody else can challenge you but waltz would argue that it's not a good idea to be so powerful because when you push in that direction other states balance against you they try and cut you down at the knees and you really believe that the key to understanding the u.s. role in the world today is that we are really the only state that has a hegemonic power in its own region my argument is Harry that it's impossible for any one state to be a global hegemon to dominate the entire globe the globe is just too big and there are huge power projection problems associated with the bodies of water that separate the various regions of the world and the lords for us to go on a rampage in Asia and conquer huge parts of Asia would involve projecting power across this giant moat called the Pacific Ocean and it's just not going to happen so I argue that what states can do is they can become the hegemon in their own region of the world I know that you can become a regional a regional hegemon not a global hegemon but then furthermore what states want to do is make sure that there are no other regional hegemon on the face of the earth in other words they don't want to have a peer competitor and the reason for that is what that they are concerned that another regional hegemon would inevitably try to interfere with their backyard yes that's right let's take the United States for example the United States is a regional hegemon in the Western Hemisphere the United States does not want a regional hegemon in Europe whether it's Imperial Germany Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union because it would fear that if that state had no compare in its region it was the dominant state it would be free to interfere and form alliances with states in the Western Hemisphere and possibly threaten the security of the United States so from the American point of view the best situation that you can have in Europe is for there to be two or more great powers that focus most of their attention on each other and are therefore much less concerned about what's going on in the Western Hemisphere so the United States over time I argue has gone to great lengths to make sure that there is no regional hegemon in either Europe or Northeast Asia the two areas of the globe where there are other great powers and ergo there may be a potential peer competitor now now the argument you're making is what you wanted namely controversial and before 9/11 it was even more controversial so let let's look at some of those arguments that the Soviet Union Falls the Berlin Wall comes down and before we knew who Osama bin Laden was because of events in New York City on 9/11 all right it looked like the world was going the other way we were looking at globalization we were looking at the movement of people and money and it looked like a global culture and society was emerging and in the States were really losing their power we were seeing the decline of the nation state or the state power which is critical to your theory what was your argument then and what is it now against that argument being made against your theory well there's two arguments here one is that the state was disappearing and the second is that cooperation was replacing conflict as the dominating feature of international politics and let's take them one at a time first of all I think that there's no evidence that during the 1990s and certainly now that the state is disappearing from the face of the earth the fact of the matter is that the most powerful political ideology in the world today and it's been the most powerful political ideology in the world two centuries is nationalism and nationalism glorifies the state and there are all sorts of people's out there fighting for a state of their own the Palestinians are just one example of that right so the state is here to stay for for the long term now with regard to the argument that cooperation was replacing conflict is the defining feature of international politics I think that there's no question that there was less conflict among the great powers during the 1990s than there was during the rest of the 20th century we had World War One World War two and the Cold War but the principal reason for that was the architecture of power that you had in Europe and Northeast Asia with the end of the Cold War when the Cold War ended in Europe and the Soviet Union collapsed you were left with this remnant State called Russia that was remarkably weak and in no position to cause any trouble the other potential great powers in Europe Britain France and especially Germany we're in no position to cause any trouble because the United States had a hundred thousand troops stationed in Europe and was sitting on top of those states throughout the 1990s through NATO the way it had sat on top of those states from 1945 to 1990 during the Cold War so it was the American pacifier in Europe and you have basically the same situation in Asia where you have the American pacifier there you have a hundred thousand troops in Asia as well most of them in Korea and most of them in Japan sitting on top of some of the most powerful states in both of those regions and preventing them from fighting with each other and China and Russia which are the two states that the United States are not is not sitting on top of are both so weak that they're in no position to cause any trouble but nevertheless I would remind you that we have fought three wars since the cold war ended we fought a war against Saddam Hussein in 1991 we fought a war against slobodan milosevic in Yugoslavia in 1999 and we fought a war in Afghanistan last year and in fact that war is still going on so despite the fact that there has been not much conflict between the great powers there has been a great deal of conflict in the world in the United States has been involved in at least three of those Wars now why is it so hard for the United States to buy in to a realist theory of the world and a realist explanation of its own behavior well realism has two real problems with it for most Americans first of all realism has a very pessimistic view of international politics it says there has always been conflict there is conflict today and there always will be conflict and there's not much you can do about it this is what I call the tragedy of great power politics which is the title of my book the second point that realists make that most Americans find repugnant is the idea that you can't discriminate between morally virtuous States and malign States in the international system for realists all states are basically black boxes that behave the same way if the United States has to be ruthless the United States will have to be ruthless that's the argument that realist make now Americans are fundamentally liberals at heart they believe in progress they're products of the Enlightenment they're people who believe that through hard thinking and skillful policies it's possible to solve the world's problems that somewhere out there in the future it's hard to say where we can create a more peaceful world that is in contrast to the pessimism of realists and American liberals in we talk about American liberals we're talking about the vast majority of Americans therefore disliked realism for that reason the other point that Americans believe in is the idea that our country the United States is a highly moral country we behave according to a different code of conduct than most other states and the war for example there were good guys and bad guys we were the good guys and the Soviets were the bad guys realists on the other hand don't discriminate between good States and bad States they're just States and a realist explanation of the Cold War would say that the United States and the Soviet Union were both equals and they behaved according to the same rules because the structure of the system left them with no choice that's perspective that most Americans recoil at now in addition to this dilemma for Americans to understand the way the world really works and the way that policymakers actually make policy that there is the added difficulty that we're doing this in a democracy right so it your theory and what you've just said suggests that our leaders are always not putting all their cards on the table as they get elected and debate the issues and and how does that problem affect the way we behave in the world well we behave in the world according to realistic pace on almost every occasion right what's affected by the point you're making is a rhetoric right notes we act according to the dictates of realpolitik but we justify our policies in terms of liberal ideologies right so what is going on here is that in many cases elites speak one language right and act according to a different logic and speak a different language behind closed doors now to unpack this a bit more there are some cases where the dictates of realpolitik and the dictates of the idealism that is so attractive to most Americans lined up perfectly for example in the fight against Nazi Germany and the fight against the Soviet Union the logic of realism pointed in exactly the same direction as the logic of idealism so it was not difficult for American elites to justify the war against both Nazi Germany and against the Soviet Union in terms of idealist rhetoric and it was completely consistent with what we were doing the really tricky cases are when the United States has to form an alliance with a repressive regime right or goto against the will go to war against the state that it thinks is quite progressive and then realist logic points in one direction and idealist logic points in another direction and in those cases what the United States does is it brings out the spin doctors and they tell a story to the American people that makes it look like what the United States is doing is completely consistent with its ideals a perfect case in point of this is how we dealt with the Soviet Union in the late 1930s in the late 1930s Stalin was viewed as a murderous thug and the Soviet Union was widely considered to be a totalitarian state but in December of 1941 when we went to war against Nazi Germany we ended up as a close ally of the Soviet Union so what we did was bring the spin-doctors out and Joseph Stalin became Uncle Joe and the Soviet Union was described as an emerging democracy and we made all the necessary rhetorical changes to make it look like we were aligning ourselves with a burgeoning democracy because Americans would find it very difficult to tolerate a situation where we in effect jumped into bed with a totalitarian state that was run by a murderous leader like Joe Stalin so we cleaned them up so what is the implications of this for the notion that we try to conduct our foreign policy in a democratic system because on the one hand I'm hearing you say that our politicians do not lay all their cards on the table but then on the other hand they are acting in ways that they cloak what really is governing their action in in liberal democratic terms I guess that's a long-winded way of saying how should people exam and they're leaders in an electoral process in a democracy when it comes to the conduct of foreign policy well I think that they should tend to be very skeptical to begin with I think it's very important for students of foreign policy to be skeptical about what their leaders say regardless of the country that you live in regardless of whether it's Bill Clinton or George Bush who's running American foreign policy we should all be very skeptical of what our leaders say because they have powerful incentives to mislead us on occasion not always as I said before there'll be cases where they're giving us the straight poop but there'll be cases where they have an incentive to mislead and we want to be aware of that second point is I would pay more attention to what states do rather than what they say and I think if you look at the behavior of states and mesh it with the rhetoric of the leaders you'll often find the real disjuncture there and those are the cases where you want to examine things much more closely what are the particular responsibilities of a strategist and an IR theorists as they get involved in the policy debate in their own country I know one of your your books was on the British strategist Liddell Hart and and what what did you learn from that study about the dilemmas that confront a strategist and keeping the debate honest as it relates to national security and foreign policy well what I learned from that case and that's not from a handful of other cases that I've studied and thought about over time is that in a democracy it's very important to have individuals who have the freedom to say whatever they want and if you look carefully at most people who speak out about American foreign policy or about German foreign policy or British foreign policy you can pick your country most of them are constrained in what they can say because they're beholden to certain institutions oftentimes it's the state as you know in German universities right your appointment as a professor was dependent on the state these were all state-run universities so you had to be very careful what you said when you were a German professor for fear you might run afoul of the government the beauty of the American system is that we have all these private institutions and even public institutions like Berkeley where with tenure system professors are free to say whatever they want and suffer hardly any consequences in terms of losing their job therefore I think we have a very important responsibility to talk about important issues and to challenge conventional wisdoms that other people might be unwilling to challenge we have a real social responsibility here one thing that bothers me greatly about most political scientists today is that they have hardly any sense of social responsibility they have hardly any sense that they're part of the body politic and that the ideas that they are developing should be articulated to the body politic for the purposes of influencing the public debate and particular policies in important ways they believe that they're doing science and science is this sort of abstract phenomenon that has little to do with politics in fact I think exactly the opposite should be the case we should study problems that are of great public importance and when we come to our conclusions regarding those problems we should go to considerable lengths to communicate our findings to the broader population so that we can help influence the debate in positive ways I'm not making an argument here by the way for coming up with particular answers to important questions in fact if different scholars come up with different answers fine but in a democracy like the United States you want to vary you want to have a very healthy public debate about the key issues of the day and I think that scholars can go a long way towards making that debate richer and healthier let's look at two problems and see if we can tie some of these problems together terrorism that is something that we were confronted starkly with after the blowing up of the the Twin Towers by the hijacked planes and the al-qaeda terrorists in control of the planes what sort of a problem is terrorism in in the eyes of somebody who is a realist who does international relations theory and and what do you have to say about the way the government is conducting the war against terrorism you know there are a lot of different questions yeah first of all it's very important to emphasize that terrorism was a significant problem before 9/11 as you know in 1993 al-qaeda tried to blow up the World Trade Center they just failed on that occasion and we the United States had been the victim of terrorist attacks by al Qaeda on more than a handful of occasions in the 1990s what made what happened on 9/11 so important was that they proved beyond doubt that they were not the gang that couldn't shoot straight which is what they we thought was the case before 9/11 right and when we realized just how competent and dangerous they were we then began to hypothesize what might happen if they got a hold of weapons of mass destruction in particular if they got a hold of nuclear weapons so the terrorism problem has been with us for a while and most IR theorists have spent some time thinking about it but what has changed over the past year is the magnitude of the threat we understand that we're up against a much more formidable and much more dangerous adversary than we thought was the case throughout the 1990s so that's point number one point number two is the question of what does a realist theory of international politics have to say about terrorism the answer is not a whole heck of a lot realism as I said before is really all about the relations among states especially among great powers in fact al-qaeda is not a state it's a non-state actor or what's sometimes called a transnational actor and my theory and virtually all realist theories don't have much to say about transnational actors however there is no question that terrorists and terrorism is a phenomenon that will play itself out in the context of the international system so it will be played out in the state arena and therefore all the realist logic about state behavior will have a significant effect on how the war on terrorism is fought so realism and terrorism are inextricably linked although I do think that realism does not have much to say about the causes of terrorism now the final issue that you raise is the question of what I think of how the Bush administration is waging the war on terrorism my basic view which may sound somewhat odd coming from a realist is that the Bush administration's policy is wrongheaded because it places too much emphasis on using military force to deal with the problem and not enough emphasis on diplomacy I think that if we hope to win the war on terrorism or to put it in more modest terms to ameliorate the problem what we have to do is we have to win hearts and minds in the Arab and Islamic world look there's no doubt that there are huge numbers of people in that world who hate the United States and a significant percent those people are willing to either sacrifice themselves as suicide bombers or support suicide bombing attacks against the United States what we have to do is we have to ameliorate that hatred and we have to go to great lengths to win hearts and minds and I don't believe that you can do that with military force I think some military force is justified if you could convince me that Osama bin Laden and his fellow leaders are located in the particular set of caves in Afghanistan at this point in time I would be perfectly willing to use massive military force to get at those targets and to kill all of the al-qaeda leadership but I think in general what the United States wants to do is not rely too heavily on military force in part because the target doesn't lend itself to military attacks but more importantly because using military force in the area of an Islamic world is just going to generate more resentment against us and cause the rise of more terrorists and give people cause to support these terrorists so I'd privilege diplomacy much more than military force in this war and I think the Bush administration would be wise if it moved more towards diplomacy and less towards force let's look at another problem and that is the future relations with the People's Republic of China this seems to be an area that that you've written about and it your theory suggests that it may have applicability there how should we look at China as it emerges as a potential hegemon in in the Asian theater well the most important question about China is whether or not it will continue to grow economically over the next 20 or 30 years the way it's grown over the past 20 years it's almost impossible to say whether or not China is going to look like a giant hunk from an economic perspective in the year 2030 or not just very hard to say my argument is that if China continues to grow economically it will translate that economic might into military might and it will become involved in an intense security competition with the United States similar to the security competition that existed between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War that intense security competition in my opinion is unavoidable now the question is why do I say that my argument is as I emphasized to you before that all states like to be regional hegeman's they like to dominate their backyard and make sure that no other state can interfere in their backyard this is the way the United States has long behaved in the Western Hemisphere it's what the Monroe Doctrine is all about well if China continues to grow economically and militarily why should we expect China not to imitate the United States why should we expect that China won't want to dominate its backyard the way we dominate our backyard why we should we expect that China won't have a Monroe Doctrine when we have a Monroe Doctrine now if China tries to dominate all of Asia which I expect it will do for good strategic reasons related to realpolitik the question you have to ask yourself is how will the United States react to that well again as I emphasized before the United States has long wanted to be the hegemon in its own region and to make sure that it has no peer competitors well if China becomes a hegemon in Asia it is a peer competitor by definition my argument is that the United States will go to great lengths to make sure China does not become a peer competitor it will go to great lengths to contain China and cut China off at the knees the way it cut Imperial Germany off at the knees in World War one the way it cut Nazi Germany off at the knees in World War two the way it cut Imperial Japan off at the knees in World War - and the way we cut the Soviet Union off at the knees during the Cold War the United States has a long and clear record of not tolerating peer competitors in either Asia or Europe and therefore I think there's no reason to believe that we would tolerate Chinese hegemony and Asia any more than we would tolerate Japanese hegemony now now what what does that mean what what do you think we will do or we should do to prevent that inevitability from coming about well there's two things I think that we'll do one is I think that we'll go to considerable lengths to slow down Chinese economic growth once it becomes apparent that they're headed towards the Hong Kong model I'm not exactly sure what policies will pursue and I tend to believe that it will be almost impossible I don't have a lot of hard evidence to support this but I think it will be almost impossible to slow down Chinese economic growth or will be impossible will be almost impossible yeah be very difficult yeah at the very least to slow down Chinese economic growth the second thing that we will do which I think will be more effective is that will put in place a containment policy similar to the containment policy that we had against the Soviet Union in the Cold War to prevent China from actually dominating Asia and the balancing coalition will look like this it will be Japan Vietnam Korea India Russia and the United States and you can already see the first stirrings of that balancing coalition the fact that the United States and India who were not rivals but basically soft adversaries during the Cold War the fact that those two countries have now moved much closer to each other and are much more friendly with each other is I believe due to the common threat of China and I think you'll see the same thing happening with Russia I don't think Russia American relations will be as bad over the next 20 years as they were during the 1990s in large part because of growing China will push us together now what what particular for or what particular action will these alliances take in other words is the worry here that that China will be on the move militarily and and these coalition's will stop it I mean what what what form will this balancing take will it be political will it be cultural or what it will be mainly political and military yeah just to give you a couple examples to highlight the potential problems that are out there there's a dispute between Russia and China as to exactly where the border is between them but more importantly there's been massive illegal Chinese immigration into Russia it is possible that a border dispute could break out between Russia and China at some point in the distant future the United States I think will go to great lengths to back up the Russians and to prevent that from happening because the United States would not want a situation we're China conquered any large portion of Russian territory to take another example Japan as you well know is an island state that's highly dependent on imports and exports that come across water therefore the Japanese are very concerned about the sea lanes of communication or the sea lines of communication that they're so dependent on the Chinese on the other hand trawl those same waters in the scenario we're describing they're sure to build a very large Navy and the Japanese and the American Navy on one hand and the Chinese Navy on the other hand are likely to move about in places like the China Sea and one can hypothesize all sorts of scenarios where they crash into each other another important issue which I won't talk about at any length because it's so obvious is Taiwan it's probably going to be the case that Taiwan is not incorporated into China in the next five or ten years it may happen but certainly not likely what happens if China becomes big and powerful and doesn't own Taiwan at some point they're probably going to use military force to take Taiwan and it may be the case that both you and in the United States say that is unacceptable and go to war on behalf of Taiwan so you can hypothesize all sorts of scenarios let's hope they don't come to fruition but you can hypothesize reasonable scenarios or powerful China runs heads long into a powerful United States the argument on the other side by the people who believed in the emergence of international institutions was in in some sense an idealistic and is in some sense an idealistic argument you know that that certain values whether it's human rights or whether it's entered the values of international commerce and capitalism will take hold and offer a brighter future than realists theories offer however compelling their logic the question I have for you is where if is there in realism a place for values and in the realization of those values in the world because at one level realism can sound very mechanistic you know that there's a logic here and it's very hard to deviate from that logic and there doesn't seem to be a place for normative structures for example the universalizing of human rights and so on any comments on that er well I am sad to say that I think that your description of realism is an apt one and that is to say that there is not much place for human rights and values in the realist story realists basically believe that states are interested in gaining power either because they're hardwired that way or because it's the best way to survive and they don't pay much attention at all to values there's a new book out by Samantha power everybody should read that deals with the question of how the united states reacted to all the principal genocides of the 20th century the most recent of which is the Rwanda crisis of 1994 and the central conclusion that she reaches is despite all the rhetoric in the United States over time about our willingness to fight on behalf of human rights our record is an abysmal one and if you read her chapter on how we behaved during the Rwanda crisis it will make you sick to your stomach here was an administration the Clinton administration that was filled with people who extolled the virtues of human right regimes and the importance of the international community intervening to prevent mass murder and so forth and so on in the event right when there was evidence pouring in that a genocide was taking place and Rwanda a real genocide they behaved in the most despicable fashion right and this is consistent with how we have behaved over time the fact of the matter is as I said to you earlier States talk a good game when it comes to values but they actually behave in a very realpolitik a rather cold and calculating manner when the money is on the table now what does this tell me this tells me that if you're interested in survival in the international system the best way to survive is to have your own state and to have lots of power and not to depend on the international community the Jews learned this lesson very clearly this is what Zionism is all about the Jews understood that as long as they didn't have their own state they were at the mercy of other states or of states that had a lot of power and could beat up on them and that when they dialed 9-1-1 or they thought about calling in the international community there would be nobody at the other end so they got their own state now the Jews are whopping up on the Palestinians the Palestinians are getting very little help from the international community right when they down 9-1-1 there's nobody there at the other end not surprisingly the Palestinians are desperate to get their own State so the basic lesson I take from studying international history over time is that it makes sense if you're interested in surviving if you're you as a people are interested in surviving to have your own state and to be as powerful as possible what advice would you give to students who might watch this tape as to how they should prepare for the future well my view is that students should read widely and they should look at all of the competing theories that are out there that attempt to explain how the world works as I've tried to make clear here there are a number of realist theories about how the world works Morgenthau is different than waltz and waltz is different than Mearsheimer right and I'm different than Morgan that these are three very distinct realist theory then you have a whole body of liberal theories and theories that have been devised by social constructivists that explain in very different ways than realism how the world works I think students should pay very careful attention to all of those theories and get them deeply embedded in their brain well at the same time looking carefully at how the world works looking at the historical record right looking at what happened in the 20th century world war one world war two the Cold War and they should constantly be running all of those different theories that they've studied up against the historical record to determine for themselves which theories they think best explain the world I always tell students my goal here is not to make you a realist I'm going to give you my view on how the world works hopefully many of you will think that my theory is a powerful theory but if you don't and you come to different conclusions so be it but the important point is you want to be open-minded about all the theories that are out there especially for young students right not old cadres like you and I who have already figured out what our theories are and are now attached to them for all sorts of different reasons these are young people who have an opportunity to play around with all sorts of theories and to run them up against the real world to to their own conclusions about how they think the world operates if students watching this what what suggestions do you have about the lesson they might learn from your intellectual Odyssey soldier theorists and and so on well there's two lessons I would take from it one is that it's almost impossible to figure out how you're going to end up wherever you end up somewhere down the road the world works in very funny ways and I never imagined when I was a young boy training myself to be a professional athlete or when I was a cadet at West Point that I would become an eye or a theorist someday if somebody had told me that in say 1964 or even 1970 when I graduated from West Point I would have said that that person should be taken away to the loony bin right I just did not think it was in the cards so one never knows where he or she is going to end up that's point number one point number two is one thing I've learned over time is that it's important to have lots of different life experiences and to expose oneself to all sorts of different situations and different theories and different kinds of people because it provides you with all sorts of insights about how the world works you don't want to be narrow in your learning experience you want to be wide-ranging you want to absorb tremendous amounts of information and you constantly want to be running it through your brain to see how well the theories that you have in your head about how the world work works how they mesh up with the real world the key point remember here is did all individuals have theories in their head we understand the world in terms of theories and what we have to constantly be doing is upgrading and improving our theories because the theories that we have when we're twenty years old many of them we jump by the time were 40 years old because the world doesn't work according to those theories and people want to be conscious of this interplay between the theories they have in their head and the real world and pay very careful attention to that phenomenon and then one final question what should students get out of an under graduate education that helps them along the path that you just described out of a graduated gender graduate out of an undergraduate education well again I think that if you're an undergraduate what you want to do is you want to take a lot of history courses and you want to familiarize yourself with let's call it the empirical database you just want to know a lot about history and a lot about the politics of the day in fact you want to read the New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or your local newspaper and you want to read widely and then the other point that I would make is that you want to take a good number of courses where they teach the prevailing theories in the various sub disciplines you want to take courses in American politics for example where you get the principal theories you want to go over to the sociology department and you want to take courses where the principal theories of the day are laid out and the same thing is true with international politics again I think there's no substitute for having a wide-ranging knowledge base and there's no substitute for being familiar with the theories of the day because that will help you refine your own thinking help you fine-tune those theories that you have in your head maybe even abandon certain theories that you have in your head and adopt new theories as you well know we all go through life and we reach certain junctures along the road when we junk theories that we once thought were tremendously powerful and that's because we can introduce to new ideas that give us a much better grasp on life and and we also sometimes run into evidence that contradicts the theories we have in our head so I would say to students that what you want to do is you want to make sure right did you expose yourself to lots of theories and to lots of history John on that positive note thank you thank you and thank you very much for joining us for this conversation with history [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 164,090

Keywords: realist, theory, international, relations, U.S., China, terrorist

Id: AKFamUu6dGw

Length: 58min 28sec (3508 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 07 2008

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[u/osaru-yo]

TRANSCRIPT

Interview with Professor John Mearsheimer from the Berkley Institute's Conversation with History series. In which he explains his background and his perspective on international relations from the perspective of an offensive realist.

[u/prizmaticanimals]

I guess Mearsheimer changed his views on liberalism since the recording of this video. In the lecture "Liberal Dreams and International Realities" he said that the universal nature of liberalism is what pushed the US towards liberal interventionism after securing global hegemony following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

[u/Johnny_Ruble]

I think that the greatest weakness of this analysis is its refusal to delve deeper into the question of what gives states legitimacy to rule over their own people. You cannot really separate states from the people they represent, even if these states are autocratic ones whose legitimacy is questionable. Rather, the scholar treats states as representative of powerful elites, who are obsessed with power for its own sake.

[u/MrIvysaur]

Mearsheimer’s The Tragedy of Great Power Politics is one of the best IR books I’ve ever read.