Chartbook #95: Is "Ukraine the West's fault"? On great powers and realism - 0 views
adamtooze.substack.com/...rtbook-95-is-ukraine-the-wests
realism foreign policy offensive ukraine great power politics
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Mearsheimer’s analysis also falls short at the level of explanation. Famously “free choices” resist causal explanation. But we cannot simply waive our hands. Indeed, if we merely waive our hands, or assume an automaticity from structural conditions to action, as Mearsheimer seems to do, we void the domain in which the responsibility of statecraft is actually enacted. We void too the domain in which a sophisticated understanding of realism would have to prove its worth.
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Actual realism is not a simple thing. It is not some schema, no more in international relations than in any other dimension of life. It is a challenge.
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what I do in the New Statesman essay is to locate Mearsheimer in relation to the history of realism. And my prompt here is Matthew Specter’s excellent new history, The Atlantic Realists.
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What matters for Mearsheimer is not so much the imperialist competition of the 1890s and 1900s, but the great train-wreck that resulted, in 1914. What concerns him above all is how great power rivalry leads to war.
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what Specter’s book allows us to do is to squarely locate Mearsheimer’s brand of “offensive” or “great power realism” within a history that goes back to the moment of high imperialism in the 1890s.
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Specter focuses on the tradition of imperialist geopolitics that goes back to geographers like Friedrich Ratzel and naval theorists like Alfred Mahan, and descends from them to Karl Haushofer and Carl Schmitt in the 1930s and 1940s
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It is important to emphasize, I think, that Mearsheimer is less a theorist or apologist for great power policy as such, than an analyst of why great power clashes lead to wars.
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What Mearsheimer sees himself as doing, as far as I can tell, is to speak truth to power and to the public with a view to dialing back excessive ambition and avoiding ruinous competition.
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I take issue with him in the New Statesman. Not principally on moral or ethical grounds, though I do find the naturalization of war abhorrent, but above all because I think Mearsheimer’s reified view of international politics effectively evacuates any subtle understanding of what statecraft actually consists of.
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The theory we need here is not the logic of great power self-assertion, so much as the logic of great power self-destruction.
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abstraction is a risky business and you have to get your abstraction “right”, otherwise you risk missing what is essential and engaging in a kind of callous and at times ludicrous reductionism.
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Taking Mearsheimer’s account of great power politics for the real thing is, to my mind, a bit like confusing the anatomy of sex ed, with actual eroticism, or romance. It isn’t exactly wrong, but it entirely misses the point
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the alarming thing is not so much the possibility that Mearsheimer offers justifications for what Putin has done, but, rather, the degree to which, in his reification of power relations, Mearsheimer’s thought seems to mirror Putin’s actions.
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To call that kind of description an explanation begs the question. It is more like an analogue model. And that ought to be deeply alarming.
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If for Putin as for Mearsheimer war really is just the extension of policy by other means, and if he was capable of taking this first step, where does this end?