April 5, 2024by Graham E. Fuller
April 2024
Graham Fuller is a longtime CIA operations officer, who subsequently headed up CIA’s National Intelligence Council for Long Range Strategic Forecasting, later served as an analyst in International Relations over a decade at the RAND Corporation. He speaks numerous languages of the the region including Russian, Turkish and Arabic.
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I pen this “attack” on John Mearsheimer, Chicago’s dean of Political Science, as a long time admirer of his. My critique is not based on his superb and insightful situational analyses of Ukraine and Gaza but rather on his potentially dangerous self-described”Realist” school of foreign policy analysis and its future implications.
John’s brilliant and imaginative work over the years offers us a profound contradiction. Perhaps the unkindest remark one might make about that work is that he has been remarkably right on major critical events – but for the wrong reasons. John’s spot-on foreign policy analysis is so good precisely because it stems not from his theories on international relations but rather from his innate personal feel for key global events.
John’s penetrating and accurate commentaries on Ukraine and Gaza mark him out as one of a small handful of courageous, perceptive and outspoken analysts examining the deep flaws in American strategic thinking in the realities of Russian, Ukrainian and Israeli geopolitical actions. He is joined by small group of other fine observers who include Alastair Crooke, Scott Ritter, Anatol Lieven, Douglas MacGregor, Moon over Alabama, John Mercouris, and other analysts who, for their sins of accurate analysis, have been systematically stricken from the the mainstream media. Their views clearly represent an affront to Washington’s dismayingly effective efforts to shape and dominate the West’s entire narrative about Ukraine. (I should add that I too have closely associated myself with their views over the last decade.)
John and others have been spot on in their critique of the foolish enterprise of America’s fervid ideologically-driven drive to expand NATO right up to the very gates of Russia in a grand effort to bring Russia to its knees. That drive has now patently failed, although Washington itself is far from making any such admission–yet.
This is not the place for a complex discussion of diverse longtime schools of international relations. Yet there is one approach John nominally represents–the “Realist” school. Realists tend to write primarily from abstract and theoretical positions about power relationships. They seem in my view largely innocent of, or uncomfortable with, the role that political culture and history play in the world arena. This critique here is hardly new— but there are increasingly dangerous implications for these theories as we move towards deeper great power confrontation.
In perhaps an oversimplification of the basic theoretical views of Realism they appear highly “mechanistic” in their view of the international arena. Mearsheimer’s and other writings in the so-called “Realist” school seem to portray actors on the international scene as little more than random uneven billiard balls on a billiard table. Very little distinguishes them from each other except for perhaps size. There is little room for the messinesses of cultural analysis based on study of the cultural, historical and psychological character of the players and peoples involved.
Yet in my own thinking, good long term analysis of International affairs involves heavy emphasis on the nature of the political and cultural character of the players – in which historical experience, languages and cultures–even myth– are key analytical ingredients. Of course in any analysis of the political culture of other states, strong elements of the subjective inevitably creep in. After all, history can be read in many different ways and it can be bent to the particular geopolitical goals the writer seeks. But regardless of what body of school of thought analysts emerge from, the bottom line is some analysts are more deeply perceptive and accurate than others. The same can be said of Меаrsheimer himself – that it is not his theories but his deep skills of geopolitical perception that have proven him to be so correct on critical international issues – particularly in more recent times.
“Realism” in foreign policy analysis seems to demonstrate a kind of built-in determinism to it all – that, crudely put, states are inevitably bound to conflict with one another for power and self-preservation within an anarchic global political order. In this view it is basically a structural problem.
The hints of geopolitical determinism in the Realist school of thinking is further disturbing because it seems to discount key elements of human agency, chance, and choice in the decisions of statesman and states. In any number of wars and conflicts, war was not actually inevitable. John and others actually make precisely this point–that the Ukrainian war did not have to have been at all but rather consisted of (bad) choices made primarily by Washington. Wars indeed generally spring from deeply ill-considered choices. But there is no given that states must conflict simply because they are large players on the international scene with some sense of rivalry–even if they do make risky calculus of the potential gains and losses in possible conflict.
Indeed we have watched major reversals over centuries in “eternal struggles” between the British and the French over power on the continent, later followed up by an “eternal struggle” between Germany and France, or Germany and England. We see that in the modern era that these “eternal conflicts” between major European powers have largely now given away to a more productive coexistence. Russia and China went from decades of bitter hostility to now close allies. Nothing is forever.
We are by now quite familiar with the fact that Russian Premier Mikhail Gorbachev was eager to engage in a new relationship with the West after the fall of the Soviet Union – including the creation of a new “security architecture” between East and West that would take into account the security needs of all sides. Washington, fearing a threat to its own hegemony, would have none of Gorbachev’s thinking. Indeed Wahington proceeded to opportunistically take back all the marbles across post Soviet Eastern Europe through the incessant expansion of NATO as a hostile military force right up to the borders of Russia itself. Yet it does not take very much intelligence to understand how the US might react were Russia or China to seek to establish military bases in Mexico or Canada – and we already know what happened in the Cuban missile crisis.
As correct as Mearsheimer has been on these issues he has not been entirely alone, among the names I cited above. And not all of these people who got the geopolitics of Ukraine and Gaza right are necessarily adherents of John’s own theoretical “Realist” framework of the problem. Analysts can be right for different reasons; whatever the theory, what matters is to be right.
More disturbingly however, is what happens when one seeks to project these Realist theories of great power conflict now into the Asian Pacific region– where Mearsheimer seems almost mechanistically to accept that China is indeed an “inevitable threat” to the US that must be met. In his so-called “structural analysis” John here seems to lean on theory rather than on actual reality. But yet is there no agency, no range of options, between the US and China in their relations with each other? Is conflict unavoidable and inevitable? Does any concept of enlightened “Win-Win” exist in Realist theory? This seemingly theoretical question takes on immense importance in the face of potential nuclear confrontation looming in the Pacific region.
Indeed, one of the most plausible analytical approaches in this potential great power struggle emerges in the so-called theory of “Athens and Sparta” or “The Thucydides Trap”–which propounds that any rising power automatically threatens the existence and security of an existing great power and will inevitably lead to conflict. This theory seems to hold greater explanatory power than most other theories out there today. Indeed we can see how Washington is now trapped inside its own obsessive great-power fantasy bubble in which it is virtually inconceivable for it even to acknowledge the prospect of becoming a declining power, or a primus inter pares, much less a secondary power in face of the rise of China across so many categories.
Interestingly ,It would seem that both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have absorbed potential lessons from the “Thucydides Trap.” Both are treading shrewdly and carefully in the face of what is increasingly perceived now as a dangerously erratic and irrational Great Power in the US – a country that must be treated with exceptional caution lest it flail out dangerously and irrationally in a futile effort to preserve itself as unchallenged Number One.
Here again, we might press the Realists to acknowledge arguments of strategic choice and national agency. Relationships with both Russia and China do not inevitably lead us to conflict unless we concur in such a direction. Indeed if there is any “structural” element of confrontational impulses they exist more strongly within the United States itself. Are we inevitably driven by the imperatives of the military, security, industrial, corporate, congressional, intelligence complex?
A rational Europe might once have been a hope. But a basically geopolitically neutered Europe has so far gone along with the American game plan – blindly following the American Pied Piper into conflict with Russia. Washington indeed now seeks to entice Europe down that same path into”inevitable”conflict in East Asia–at great cost to Europe. As that cost rises we may see some timid stirrings of European independence of thought that might not accept continuing damaging confrontation with Russia or China as a given.
It is striking that while neither Russia nor China any longer operates on the basis of global ideology as it did in communist days, the US itself is now the one power deeply wedded to its own ideological mission designed to maintain its global hegemony in the name of “democracy and human rights.” Notably, while Washington routinely uses terms like “enemy” or “peer competitor,” our ostensible opponents of China and Russia do not employ such terms. But this matters–does not Washington’s very designation of these states as enemies or competitors already strongly set the tone to the nature of the relationships? Is the United States a prisoner of its own ideology and rhetoric? Does it accept a Realist view of inevitable confrontation with China— where even Mearsheimer himself might not agree? We conveniently line up our regular hierarchy of enemies: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela–such declarations help keep the pot stirred and the military budgets flowing. When one is a global hegemon there is nothing in the world that cannot be construed as a “strategic threat” to the US-made “rules-based order.”
The world owes much to the creative – and evolving – character of Mearsheimer’s contributions to international relations theory. John has been indisputably right on the critical issues of recent times on Ukraine and Gaza. Hopefully his thoughtful and important analyses will continue to take precedence over his vaguer and possibly more dangerous theories on the inevitability of great power conflict. A little deeper analysis of the nature of our competitors – based on cultural and yes, even empathetic insight into their own positions and fears might help spare us this kind of confrontation.