John Mearsheimer is a crackpot realist

The famous professor is merely a restrained neocon

In the last few years, Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago has become an alternative media celebrity for advocating contrarian views over Russian’s invasion of Ukraine and Israeli genocide in Palestine.

Professor Mearsheimer is a world-renowned political scientist and IR scholar. He has written many impactful books – The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, The Israel Lobby, and The Great Delusion – Liberal Dreams and International Realities.

He is famous for opposing NATO expansion and the US policy towards Russia. He accurately predicted the Russian invasion of Ukraine in a 2015 lecture with a deep analysis of the root causes and likely implications of the 2014 Crimea crisis.

Together with Harvard professor Stephen Walt, he wrote about the corrosive influence of the Israel lobby on US politics and foreign policy in 2007. His analysis helps to explain the US complicity in the recent Israeli genocidal rampages across the Middle East.

He also predicted and analysed the coming great power competition between the US and China in his book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.

Professor Mearsheimer advocates a rational and realism-based foreign policy for the US. He argues against NATO expansion into Russia’s near abroad; he advocates integrating Russia into the western security architecture. On the Middle East, he advocates reining in Israel and distinguishing US national interests from Israel’s. He is against going to war with Iran.

Regarding east Asia, Mearsheimer proposes the US to prioritize countering China. He believes China poses the main national security threat to the US as it possesses the capability to challenge US dominance in western Pacific.

In his view, the US must prevent China from becoming a regional hegemon like the US in the Americas. He suggests the US should be ready to go to war with China over Taiwan or the South China Sea.

Although his views are hardly radical, they do stray from the approved narrative. Therefore, he is ignored by policy makers and deplatformed by the corporate mainstream media.

Professor Mearsheimer is considered one of the more rational and courageous voices in the US on international politics, comparable with Columbia Professor Jeffrey Sachs and Ambassador Chaz Freeman.

However, I contend that despite his achievements and fame, Professor John Mearsheimer is fundamentally still an establishment scholar, and his brand of realism is what C Wright Mills, the famed American sociologist in the 1950 and 60s, called Crackpot Realism, a militaristic ideology based on US supremacy. His fundamental beliefs about US hegemony, though more restrained, is aligned with hard-core neocons.

Moreover, I contend Professor Mearsheimer is a naïve and poorly informed geo-strategist, not in the same league as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinki. His wishful thinking about peeling off Russia from China and leveraging US vassals to contain China demonstrates a poor understanding about the dynamics of major powers, respective strengths of the main players, and basic human psychology.

My arguments have three parts:

1. Professor Mearsheimer has a fundamentally flawed worldview how international relationship should be organized and how states interact with each other; conflict and aggression is the natural state of affairs in this worldview

2. His analysis of major power dynamics among the US, Russia and China is wishful thinking and has little basis in reality

3. His beliefs in fundamental US economic and military superiority, and hence its ability to dictate global events and contain China, are outdated (by about 2 decades) and detached from reality.

Regarding his analysis about US Israel relationship, I contend they are also superficial and fail to probe into the true depth of Israeli/Zionist Jewish control over US politics, foreign policy, economics, finance, media, academia, and religion.

His attribution of Israeli influence on US is so narrowly focused on the power of the Israeli lobby that one must wonder whether Professor Mearsheimer actually serves as controlled opposition to ringfence the debate over Jewish power in the US.

His conclusion that the lobby is the primary and ultimate reason for US complicity with Israel seems designed to distract and derail a real discussion about the role of Jews, Zionism, and Israel in American economic and political life. This is a topic I’ll explore in a future essay.

Today I’ll focus on his crackpot realism regarding US China Russia relationship.

Flawed worldview and IR theory

Professor Mearsheimer believes the international system is anarchic and pursuit of national security/survival makes every state an aggressive power maximizer. States do not cooperate, except for temporary alliances, but constantly seek to weaken their competitors’ power and enhance their own.

He argues the US must be the only hegemon in this hierarchical international system and must prevent other country from challenging its hegemon. Thus the US must pursue containment of China to prevent it from becoming such a contender in Asia.

His advocacy of rapprochement with Russia is based on his view that Russia is too weak to seriously threaten US global dominance hence the US should get Russia under its wings in the fight with China.

His argument implicitly endorses the most expansive definition of US national security interests, exactly as the neocons who pursue “full-spectrum dominance”.

His idea of Realism has nothing to do with achieving peace and co-existence among states, but rather how to achieve and maintain hegemony in a more realistic fashion. He is different from the hard-core neocons in that he is more rational about the limits of current US power.

Tellingly, in his vision of the global order, the US is fully entitled to exercise open hegemony in the western hemisphere through the Monroe Doctrine, while the same must be denied for China in east Asia, even if China has never espoused such a hegemonic aspiration.

For someone who often quotes his own mother, in his many interviews/lectures, as saying, “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander”, Professor Mearsheimer seems blind to his own double standard.

What would he feel if China adopts his worldview? What if China starts to conduct “freedom of navigation” patrols in the Gulf of Mexico, or put military bases and intermediate range missiles in Cuba and Venezuela, or advocate rolling back the “Monroe Doctrine”? Would Professor Mearsheimer still say “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander”?

Native understanding of major power dynamics

Professor Mearsheimer’s brilliant idea for the US to make up with Russia and peel it off from China is as delusional as Trump himself. I wrote an essay on that subject – A new American (wet) dream. https://huabinoliver.substack.com/p/a-new-american-wet-dream-ununite

Just to highlight a few common-sense points and refresh the good professor’s memory about history (he seems to suffer the same deficit in historical knowledge as so many of his fellow countrymen) –

- The Ukraine war is a US-provoked proxy war against Russia – even Rubio has just openly admitted. Russia is winning on the battlefield. The US is reaching out to save itself from another defeat. The US is not doing a favor to Russia. Russia is not so stupid as to not understand this basic fact.

- Russia will not trust the US. Russia won’t forget the US-led NATO expansion is a violation of its own promise to the Soviet Union and root cause for the current war. Russia will remember how the US has repeatedly failed to honor the treaties it signed with Russia – the INF treaty, ABM treaty, the Open Sky treaty, and more. Russia won’t forget how the US took advantage of the country with shock therapy and looting of its resources after the fall of USSR. Russia probably will not forget the US blew up Nord Stream, stole its money, and sanctioned its athletes and cats.

- I don’t speak for Russia, but I assume Russia has no interest to be a junior partner to the US. There is no doubt the US has no plan to treat Russia as an equal even if there is a détente. If the US doesn’t do that with a much stronger China, what are the chances Russia will be treated with respect?

- Russia has much stronger economic, trade, technological and military ties with China than the US. Russia China trade in 2024 was $240 billion and its trade with the US was less than $3 billion. Russian and China share the same strategic view about a multipolar world order.

- The much trumped-up “reverse Nixon” strategy was dreamed up by people totally ignorant about history. Nixon and Kissinger pursued rapprochement with China in 1972, at a time China and Russia already fell out and were engaged in border conflict. Today China and Russia are partners and both want to change the US-dominated global order. They are winning too. Only the stupid and delusional would think a “reverse Nixon” has any chance of success.

Professor Mearsheimer’s grasp of major power dynamics is befitting a grade school student, not a full professor, even if only at the University of Chicago. Or maybe he is perfect for Chicago. Read my article – How the University of Chicago ruined the US? https://huabinoliver.substack.com/p/has-the-university-of-chicago-ruined

Blind belief in US power

Professor Mearsheimer, as a reputed realist, doesn’t seem to have much of a realistic view about relative US power vis-à-vis China. Like other neocons, he seems to suffer the same delusion that if the US is not distracted by Europe or the Middle East, and as long as it can focus all its powers, it can contain and roll back China.

This blind belief conveniently ignores all the contrary empirical evidence how the US has failed to contain China with its trade war, tech war, and narrative war to date. It fits the clinical definition of insanity – the belief that a different outcome will result from repeating the same failed actions.

Professor Mearsheimer seems totally unaware that China has three times total industrial capacity than the US, has achieved technological parity and lead in most critical future technologies including AI and military tech, and is much better prepared for a kinetic war in the western Pacific near Chinese shores.

His knowledge about economics, technology, and military capabilities seems outdated by at least two decades. He may be a realist theorist but doesn’t have much grasp of the cold realities of comparative national strengths between the US and China.

Professor Mearsheimer suffers the same intellectual deficiency as the neocon hawks in the US establishment. They understand very little about China, its ambitions and its capabilities. They mistakenly think of China as another USSR, and they will pay dearly for that mistake.

Professor Mearsheimer’s brand of realism is what sociologist C Wright Mills termed “Crackpot realism” in his 1958 book The Causes of World War Three. According to Mills, a crackpot realist is an ideologue who believes might is right and thinks the world should be subject to Pax Americana.

Mills described crackpot realists as “serious people” who believe in the righteousness of their own cause, a maximalist definition of national interests, and a proclivity to the use of bombs to solve problems. He wrote: “…such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism, they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own.”

While Professor Mearsheimer is more subtle than the deranged neocons, his view of international relations is similarly zero-sum game, and his brand of realism is similarly militaristic and amoral. Most notably, as Mills called out, such realism is fundamentally delusional and divorced from reality.

A real “Realist” should be able to understand the US will never be at peace if it doesn’t give up its ambition to dominate the world. A hegemon is not only intolerant of peer competitors. It is intolerant of any independent and sovereign states with agency.

A Realist should understand the US is in no position to win a major power war with China or Russia, through its proxies or directly. Its vassals have no agency and thus no strength and even they will eventually refuse to be cannon fodders.

Henry Kissinger understood this. Zbigniew Brzezinski understood this. This is why Kissinger and Nixon pursued détente with China. Brzezinski famously advised not to drive China, Russia and Iran together out of a common grievance towards US aggression. Both were far wiser true realists compared with Mearsheimer.

You don’t have to be a fan of either but Kissinger and Brzezinki both realized the limits of US power and advocated a balanced approach to pursue US national interests.

Brzezinki defined the strategy of preserving US dominance as: “prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and keep the adversaries from coming together” (quote from The Grand Chessboard).

As a true realist, Brzezinki advocated a strategy to create new structures of world politics through dialogue and rapprochement with China and Russia. He may not be fully sincere when he wrote that “the ultimate objective of American policy should be benign and visionary: to shape a truly cooperative global community, in keeping with long-range trends and with the fundamental interests of humankind”. But at least, the rhetoric is laudable. While he was coming from an America First perspective, he was realistic that the world will be multipolar regardless of US wishes.

Similarly, Henry Kissinger pursued détente with China and Russia when he was advising Richard Nixon. In his writings in the last 40 years such as On China, he repeatedly cautioned the US not to underestimate the potential of China. He advocated a balanced approach to preserve US advantages without challenging China’s core interests like Taiwan.

In the final analysis, no doubt Professor Mearsheimer is intellectually superior and more honest than neocon players like Marco Rubio, John Bolten, Victoria Nuland, or Joe Biden. However, he holds the same world view as the neocons. He supports US unipolarity and believes in its supremacy. Worse yet, he seems to think it is achievable. This makes him a very poor “realist”.

After all, John Mearsheimer is just another University of Chicago product.