The security dilemma plays a central role in Walt and Mearsheimer’s reading of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But what if they get the security dilemma wrong?
What Walt and Mearsheimer Get Wrong About the Security Dilemma
read more
Mearsheimer
A tale of two realisms
It's been a rough week for John Mearsheimer. He has come under a barrage of criticism for his claim that Russia's aggression towards Ukraine is the West's fault. His theoretical tradition, realism,...
Why John J. Mearsheimer is Wrong on Ukraine
When I arrived as an incoming graduate student at Ohio State University, I was labeled a realist since I studied extensively under John J. Mearsheimer at the University of Chicago. And despite the...
Crimea is not a Realist story
[Note: This is a guest post by Jarrod Hayes, assistant professor of international relations at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His first book,...
More Mearsheimer Posts
Iraq 10 Years Later (1): How Culpable is Academic International Relations?
I’ve been thinking a lot about the war this month. I’ll be teaching it in the next few weeks at school because of the decade anniversary (March 20). My quick sense is that any defensible theory behind the war was simply buried by an execution so awful, disorganized, mismanaged, and incompetent that it invalidated the whole premise. The whole episode became just shameful, and regularly teaching and conferencing with non-Americans these last few years has made this so painfully clear. My students particularly are just bewildered to the point of incredulity. Again and again, the basic...
In Defence of Flawed Giants
OK, its confession time. I don't really agree with them much, but I loved reading the post-Cold War 'blockbusters' of Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama and John Mearsheimer, (all beautifully surveyed a little while ago by Richard Betts).I was psyched to read Fukuyama's prophecy that with the American-led era of market democracy, humankind had overcome the historical dialectic struggle of ideologies and had hit upon an ultimate way of being that would satisfy its fundamental longings, both material and psychological.Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations was also audacious, in its...
Hamiltonian Failure?
Yesterday, my class on U.S. Foreign Policy considered Walter Russell Mead's Hamiltonian School -- ostensibly an American realism grounded in the aligned interests of the state and business. The Hamiltonians have their roots in Alexander Hamilton. They have always believed that the American national strategy should be modeled on the British system: use your trade to make money through commerce; government should support large business; your trade policy should be an instrument of your economic development, however that benefits you most; and then, the revenues from your international trade...
Which New Year’s Eve would you rather celebrate?
Dan Drezner and Bill have both flagged Randy Schweller’s new piece in National Interest. I’ve just finished reading the piece and I agree with them – it’s really a depressing read. But, it’s the type of piece that we see periodically – it tries to take stock of the state of the global politics and IR scholars’ understanding of it. In many way, it reads a lot like Mearsheimer’s “Why We Will Miss the Cold War” or Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations?” It aims high and tries to explain large systemic events by using a lot of broad generalizations to develop the core argument that we live in a...
Who said it?
Can you tell the difference between the views expressed by a human rights activist who worries mostly about humanitarian emergencies in Asia and those stated by a prominent neorealist American academic? 1: Realist thinking versus liberal talk:A. "...oil and strategic interests are what dictate Western policies, not their professed liberal values. All the talk of humanism or humanitarianism is just for public relations." B. "...public discourse about foreign policy in the United States is usually couched in the language of liberalism. Hence the pronouncements of the policy elites are heavily...
The Comedy of Great Power Politics
Next Wednesday in Chicago -- that's February 28, at 8:30 am -- at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, I'll be presenting a paper called "The Comedy of Great Power Politics in the 21st Century." Warning: that's a pdf, which I posted on my rarely used University homepage.On the same panel, my friend Nayef Samhat is presenting "The 'Comedic Turn' and Critical International Relations Theory." If those titles sound strange to you, read my paper (and Nayef's once it is available) and pass along your comments. Better yet, come to the panel. If you are an IR theorist, you...
Film class — week 3
Film #3 "Saving Private Ryan" (1998). We viewed it Tuesday.Reading for Thursday: Daniel Warner, "Two Realist Readings of the Tragic in International Relations," 20 International Relations 2006, pp. 225-230.Warner reviews the recent books by John J. Mearsheimer (The Tragedy of Great Power Politics) and Richard Ned Lebow (The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders).While both Mearsheimer and Lebow discuss the tragic dimensions of international politics, they have a fundamentally different take. Mearsheimer focuses on the structural aspects of international politics, which he...