The death of ideology | John Mearsheimer [Full Interview]

we should be focusing laser like on China we should not be focusing on the war in Ukraine and the war in the Middle East but it was through our foolish policies in the past uh that we failed to prevent these two Wars from breaking out and got ourselves deeply involved in both of them to the detriment of American foreign [Music] policy welcome to this II opening interview um I'm Alexis papazoglu I'm a senior editor for the online magazine of The Institute of Art and ideas and I'm delighted to have as our guest today John mimer he is the r Wendell Harrison distinguished service professor of political science at the University of Chicago and is considered to be one of the most influential international relations theorists of his generation he is the author among other books of how States think the rationality of foreign policy and the great delusion liberal dreams and international realities so without further Ado John Mir shimer Welcome to The Institute of Art and ideas thank you glad to be here so you are one of the key proponents of what is known as the realist School of international relations which is this kind of framework that tries to explain the behavior of States as rational actors aiming to maximize things like power and security can you tell us just brief why is this the best framework for explaining how States behave in your view well it's very simple it's the best explanation because that is how the world Works uh but also because there is a compelling logic that underpins uh the realist story and it goes like this we live in a world where there is no higher authority that can protect States if they get into trouble and at the same time we live in a world where it's very difficult to tell what the intentions of other states are today and certainly what they will be in the future so there may be some powerful State out there that has malign intentions towards your state and if it comes after you there is no higher authority to protect you and in a world like that it makes eminently good sense to be really powerful because if you're really powerful it's highly unlikely that another state will attack you all states of course understand this basic logic and the end result is that all states compete for power among themselves so you get security competition among the great Powers all the time and of course sometimes that security competition leads to war So speaking of War you have very famously argued that this realist this realist framework explains essentially why Russia was going to attack Ukraine and why it has attacked Ukraine and the idea is that it was trying to prevent it from becoming a security risk uh given its Ambitions and plans to join NATO and NATO's open door policy um a criticism of of this position of this explanation have pointed out that this realist framework doesn't quite explain why Russia had to invade Ukraine by land rather than simply say Bomb It by air and to them this looks more like uh an attempt to conquer Ukraine an attempt to absorb it into Russia not merely to neutralize it or um uh prevent it from becoming a security threat so how do you how do you understand that criticism well there's no question that uh the conventional wisdom in the west uh has long been that Putin was an imperialist he was bent on creating a greater Russia and that's the reason he invaded in February 2022 my argument is that there's no no evidence to support this uh and there is an abundance of evidence to make the case that Putin feared Ukraine becoming a Western bwar on Russia's border and most importantly he feared Ukraine becoming a member of NATO and he and the other Russian Elites uh were dedicated to making sure that didn't happen and they couldn't do it diplomatically they tried they tried to reach a deal with the United States stes to get the United States in the west to call off NATO expansion into Ukraine but they failed and he felt that he had no alternative uh but to invade uh Ukraine uh I think using air power is your question referred to would have made no sense at all he was not going to get much leverage from bombing Ukraine and it made much more sense to launch a limited Invasion which is what he did but you still don't think the the aim of Russia was to essentially uh or is at the moment to conquer Ukraine to trying to absorb it into Russia's orbit no I think that since the war has started uh there's no question that Russia's territorial Ambitions have escalated and they have already annexed four oblas in Ukraine and I would expect them to Annex a few more oblas I don't think they're going to try to conquer all of Ukraine I think Ukraine uh will remain as sovereign state but there's no question that it'll be a dysfunctional State and that's Putin's goal to turn Ukraine into a dysfunctional State a dysfunctional rum State as I like to say so that it's no threat to Russia I mean another criticism of this approach and one that tries to point to some evidence that maybe Putin was interested in in conquering uh Ukraine is this famous essay that Vladimir Putin published in July of 2021 uh called on the historical Unity of Russians and ukrainians and some analysts have seen this sort of underlying motivation for why Putin invaded Ukraine uh and a telling sign that this was indeed intended as a war of Conquest not just a sort of Hit and Run job as it were so why does um why do you think the realist framework sort of underplays dramatic Declarations of ideology by political leaders like this when when trying trying to explain their behavior and how they act I think that July 12 2021 article that Putin wrote uh says exactly the opposite of what you said uh it represents uh it doesn't make an argument in there that Putin sees Ukraine as part of Russia and that he is bent on conquering Ukraine in fact if you read that piece carefully it makes it clear that Putin wck recognizes Ukrainian nationalism he recognizes the settlement of December 1991 when the Soviet Union fell apart uh and that he believes Ukraine's future is up to Ukraine uh what he also makes clear uh in that essay and in all sorts of other places is that Ukraine cannot become part of NATO because that is an existential threat to Russia and that's the basic story I tell but I don't know why proponents of the argument that Putin was an imperialist and was bent on conquering Ukraine point to that July 12 2021 essay because it says the exact opposite of what they claim it says okay that's an interesting disagreement I guess but what about the wider Point putting this particular essay aside that the realist framework is too focused on sort of structural issues and ignores potentially ideological reasons that might be mo motivating the actions of world leaders State leaders and so on so looking more at a kind of objective picture and less at kind of the ideas that might be behind um the actions of people like Putin well I think there's no question that ideology matters somewhat uh in the decision making of almost all leaders the question is how much does it matter and my argument is that in the vast majority of cases ideology does not matter much at all that what really matters are balance of power considerations states are primarily concerned about their survival and if you're primarily concerned about your survival then you worry about the balance of power more than anything else and if you look at Putin's thinking before uh the war in Ukraine it's very clear that he was thinking about Ukraine as an existential threat Ukraine in NATO as an exist po ential threat and he was interested in preventing that from happening this was not a case of ideology at play and in fact Putin doesn't have much of an ideology this is not the Soviet Union with a communist ideology and despite the fact that lots of people like to portray Putin uh as the second coming of Adolf Hitler this is not a case of fascism or Nazism at play it's good oldfashioned balance of power politics and people in the west should have had the good sense to understand that expanding NATO into Ukraine was going to lead to the destruction of Ukraine and that is exactly what's happening now to mention another famous work that you you are known for which is the Israel Lobby and the US foreign policy in which you document this kind of remarkable level of support both material and diplomatic by the United States to the state of Israel something that of course we're witnessing again today and you have argued that this support cannot be fully explained on on merely strategic grounds and it has more to do with the political influence of um you know certain individuals and organizations that act uh to shape US foreign policy in a in a pro-israel Direction so is this not a kind of falsification of your own realist thesis in the sense that this is proof that states don't always behave merely in accordance with their power and security interests but they can be uh influenced by IDE ologies or particular people that capture power yes there's no question about it this is a case that uh violates my basic realist theory of international politics and indeed Steve Walt who is my co-author on that book uh is a realist as well and has he has a different realist theory of international politics than I do but Steve would readily admit that the case uh violates his theory as well it's very important to understand that theories are simplifications of reality the fact is we live in an enormously complicated world and to make sense of that world we need simple theories but because there's simplifications of a complex reality those theories are sometimes going to be wrong and I argue this is an intuition on my part that the best theories in international politics get it right about 75% of the time which means that you're wrong 25% of the time and I think the case the Israel Lobby where domestic politics overwhelm strategic considerations is a case that contradicts my theory interesting that yeah you don't think that counter example is a sort of definitive um falsification of of the theory um do you make any adjustments based on based on that uh paper and and then book that you wrote do you think that the realist framework should adjust in some ways to make to make sense of these counter examples and allow for a greater role of ideologies and ideas and influence by other means that have less to do with security and power to to play a role no because then it wouldn't be a realist Theory and furthermore it wouldn't be simple a simple explanation of how the world Works which is what a theory is uh you're just complexifying the theory and once you complexify a theory by adding more and more factors uh into the story it Seas to be a meaningful Theory I think you just have to accept the fact which many people find it hard to do that theories don't always work that sometimes they're falsified and this is a case so to move on to um a little bit about what's happening in the Middle East as well you're you're a big proponent of the so-called us pivot to China and this is a policy that was adopted already by the Obama Administration and you're critical of the United States for sort of getting bogged down in Russia now getting involved again in the Middle East rather than focusing on its main adversary who you see in I think the United States sees as being China there are those who argue sort of the opposite that the outbreak of these two conflicts are in fact the consequence of the US dropping the ball as it were in the Middle East and Eastern Europe and that focusing only on China is a thing that have led the world going up in Flames as we see it so what do you what do you make of that is it credible critique of US foreign policy as we're seeing it well first of all as I've tried to make clear I believe the United States is principally responsible for the Ukraine War uh I believe the United States was the principal driving force behind NATO expansion and that's what led to this War uh and with regard to the Middle East I think if the United States had put significant pressure on Israel uh which it was trying to do since at least the Carter Administration to uh achieve a two-state solution uh where you had a Palestinian State living next door to a Jewish State you would not have the conflict between Hamas and Israel today so I think the United States failed on that front as well although there I think it was mainly because of the Israel Lobby I think that American policy makers uh going back to Carter and moving forward understood the importance of a two-state solution but they just couldn't get it uh and they couldn't get it because of pressure from the lobby but anyway the end result of all this is that we're bogged down uh in Ukraine we're bogged down now in the Middle East there's no hope of us getting out of either one of those conflicts anytime soon and this is preventing us from fully pivoting to Asia to deal with a threat that really matters there's no question that China is the principal threat to the United States today it is a peer competitor and we should be focusing laser like on China we should not be focusing on uh the war in Ukraine and the war in the Middle East but it was through our foolish policies in the past uh that we failed to prevent these two Wars from breaking out and got ourselves deeply involved in both of them to the detriment of American foreign policy so you mentioned the two-state solution there about um sort of Israel Palestine why do you think this solution hasn't happened given that as you as you see it in some others see it it would be the best guarantor of the security of Israel and so again if we follow the realist framework a rational State should be pursuing it and instead Israel has been sabotaging it for you know decades so why do you think this is how do you end up explaining it through again your kind of ir framework well I think in the case of uh the two-state solution uh there are certainly some Palestinians who were not interested in that uh outcome for sure and to begin with Arafat yaser Arafat was in that category but he eventually uh changed his thinking on the matter and became committed to a two-state solution and mmud abas who is his successor uh and now basically runs the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank is committed to a two-state solution so there are Palestinians and there have been a long for a long time Palestinian leaders who are committed to the two-state solution it's been very difficult to get the Israelis to agree to a two-state solution I think there was only one time where that happened and that was with ahood Barack uh and that surrounded the very famous Camp David meeting in 2000 but I think even there in that one case the Israelis were not willing to go to all not willing to go all the way and give the Palestinian Ians a meaningful state of their own and since 2000 uh there has been little interest in a two-state solution in Israel and the government now has uh a great interest if anything in trying to prevent a two-state solution so even if the United States pushes hard uh it's going to run into a tremendous amount of resistance but the United States can't push hard because of the lobby so do you see this resistance on the part of Israel as as rational like would it would it be perhaps more of a security threat if it did have another state on its borders potentially hostile with more infrastructure and so on potentially a military than the situation we have now or and if and if that isn't the case what's preventing it at the moment from from seeing that as a possible solution is it is it ideology again getting in the way well I think you know in the past you could make the case it was largely ideology that Israelis wanted a greater Israel they wanted an Israel that included the West Bank and Gaza uh I think now uh the real problem is the security problem that you describe it's hard to imagine given the war that's taking place and given what happened on October 7th that the Israelis would be willing to countenance creating a Palestinian state on their border Israel after all is a very small country and uh putting a Palestinian state right on its border uh when that Palestinian State might have aggressive intentions uh is really not in the card so I I think we have a situation here where the possibility of a two-state solution which I think was very real in the past is no longer a realistic outcome I just wanted to ask you about um what I see sometimes as a tension in your approach um so sometimes you you use the realist framework to sort of describe what is going on the ground why states are behaving in certain ways and then other times like when you criticize the United States for you know not directing its full attention to China and instead having its involvement with Russia and now in the Middle East you seem to use the the realist framework not as a tool to explain what's going on but as a tool about for saying as a guide for saying what should be happening so as a normative tool um to to say the US should be doing this should be doing that it should be pursuing its security interest in this way so how do you negotiate this kind of tension is is the realist framework good for describing things or is it good for prescribing how States should behave that's a great question the answer is it's good for both as I said before uh no Theory gets it right all of the time and that means that states sometimes do not act according to basic realist logic or at least according to John's realist logic and I of course think that's a mistake that it would make good sense for states to always operate according to realist logic uh but the fact that they don't always do that remember I said before I thought that and this is an intuition on my part that roughly 20 5% of the time states don't act uh according to realist logic I think therefore it makes sense uh to uh argue that states should do this or should do that if they're not acting according to realist logic so it is both an explanatory Theory and a normative Theory someone might say that that's a bit like cheating though because on the one hand you know if as a social scientist you're trying to describe reality and then you have a theory you put it forward and sometimes it doesn't behave reality doesn't behave like you predict then you just turn around and say well that's reality's fault reality should be behaving according to my theory what do you say to that I no I think that's just the way the world works I mean that that's the way social science Works you're saying that somebody should come up with a theory that explains every case you're saying in effect that a theory uh should be a perfect explanation of how the world works there's no social thought science theory whether you're talking about economics or political science or sociology that's going to fit that description remember the world is an incredibly complicated place and theories are simplifications of reality you leave out certain factors when you craft a theory and sometimes those factors that you leave out really matter and your theory in those cases is FAL fals ifed but that's just the way social science works there's no way that anyone can come up with a theory that explains every case before you were talking about adding more factors like domestic politics and ideology and so forth and so on to my theory but as I said then as I'll say again you no longer have a theory once you do that because theories are simple descriptions of reality and when they become complicated explanations they don't become explanations they're just descriptions well John Mir shimer thank you very [Music] much

Channel: The Institute of Art and Ideas

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Keywords: learning, education, debate, lecture, IAItv, institute of art and ideas, IAI, philosophy, international relations, ukraine conflict, china is the new global power, will china overtake the US, the US and the ukraine conflict, john mearsheimer, john mershmeyer, john mersmeier, john mearshimer, political debate, israel palestine conflict, global power, political ideologies, ideology, politics, interview

Id: ClitqYW8HVk

Length: 22min 39sec (1359 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 25 2024