John Mearsheimer: a Liberal Advocate for Mindless Barbarism (pardon the redundancy)

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Billy Bob
THE WORLD THROUGH AN INDEPENDENT LEFT LENS
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Mearsheimer

Mearsheimer cheerfully holding forth on his realpolitik before a congenial audience.

Let’s begin with some necessary context.  Most readers are going to be familiar with John Mearsheimer.  He is a widely celebrated critic of Western diplomacy.  His interviews and lectures are among the most popular on social media and he travels regularly, across the globe, sharing his framework on international relations with large audiences who typically hold him in extremely high regard even when they don’t agree with him.  As a critic who has been somewhat marginalized by the establishment press, he still manages to get invited to many mainstream platforms including powerful think tanks, prestigious universities, the biggest podcasts, and other respected international venues.  Ultimately, Mearsheimer asserts that his theory of “great power politics” is the most authoritative way to understand “how the world works.”

Mearsheimer is famous for his theory on international relations known as “Realism”.  Here he is, in his own words describing his theory:

“Realism is a theory of international politics that privileges power.  It says power is the currency of international relations and states are mainly concerned, not exclusively but mainly concerned, about the balance of power and they want to maximize the amount of power they have.  The best situation is to be a hegemon in the system, now why is that the case?  The argument that I make is that if a state operates in a world where there's no higher authority that can rescue it if it gets in trouble and one can never know what the intentions of another state are today and certainly cannot know what their intentions will be in the future and that rival state may be very powerful in that world, you want to make sure you are much more powerful than all of your Rivals because again if it turns out that the intentions of another state are malign and that state is really powerful and you get into  trouble there's no higher authority you can turn to so in a world like that it makes eminently good sense to be as powerful as possible, indeed to be the hegemon in the system.  But of course, all states understand that basic logic and the end result is that you get a competition for power I call that security competition and sometimes that security competition results in war so that's the basic argument that I lay out.”

Here's more Liberalising from Mearsheimer:

“Every human being has a moral compass and at the same time they have a set of interests.  Sometimes that set of interests and the moral compass are lined up and you can pursue a policy or take action that is morally correct and maximizes your chances of satisfying your political or economic goals.  But then there are those cases where your moral compass points in one direction and your interest compass points in the other direction and then the question is what do you do.  And there are going to be cases where people do what their moral compass says they should do but as we both know from studying history there are lots of cases where people put aside what is morally correct according to their own compass and instead pursue policies that are morally incorrect but satisfy their own political or economic interests.”

Well, who can argue with conventional wisdom like this?  I mean ok, I guess in a very abstract and useless way, such observations are truish, but if one is actually trying to explain reality in order to improve it, such “insights” are of no value whatsoever.  On the other hand, Mearsheimer’s theoretical framework of international relations has resulted in a scathing criticism--an indictment really--of Western foreign policy especially as it pertains to Israel and Russia.  It is Mearsheimer fierce and effective criticism of the West’s truly abysmal policies towards these two countries, that has resulted in his marginalization by the establishment press and has made him such a highly revered superstar in the alternative media.

I enjoy listening to Mearsheimer because he is a self-defined “realist”, who still maintains a lot of credibility within the Western establishment (notwithstanding his marginalization by their press) and he states truth that is typically verboten to say, especially to large mainstream audiences.  For instance, Mearsheimer, with a matter-of-fact gravitas that is extremely effective, declares that Israel is an apartheid state.  He will denounce the powerful Israel lobby as not good for the United States and not good for Israel.  With regards to Russia, Mearsheimer denigrates the Western policy of unnecessary agitation and provocation, and according to his framework, Western policy towards Russia is self-defeating and counterproductive.

The French capture of Constantine, the capital of Constantine province in Northeastern Algeria in the early 1830s, eliminated most of the forces seeking to reinstate the Regency of Algiers, a tributary kingdom of the Ottoman Empire. This allowed the French to concentrate on their battle with the stronger nationalist forces under Abd Al-Qādir in the West and Center. France's extremely brutal conquest of Algeria (1830—1903) is a typical example of Western colonialism in action. According to several historians, the methods used by the French to establish control over Algeria reached genocidal proportions, with war, famine and disease leading to the deaths of between 500,000 and 1 million Algerians within the first three decades of the conquest out of an estimated population of 3 million.[11][12][70] French losses from 1830 until 1862, were 480,000 total dead (civilians and soldiers).[10](Painting by Horace Vernet).

These are all correct takes and again, these truths are delivered with such eminent gravitas that it is truly refreshing and a joy to hear him make, especially in establishment venues where one really gets the feeling that he is speaking indisputable truth to power. (Mearsheimer's "loyal criticism" of today's imperialist adventures reminds us of many "pragmatic" critics of the protracted Vietnam War, people who concentrated their fire on the "wrong-headedness" and "ineptitude" of the methods and policies being implemented by the American hegemon to achieve its objectives, but never on the obvious injustice and moral criminality of the whole enterprise.)

Mearsheimer’s barbarous liberalism demands perpetual confrontation, conflict, and war and I worry that too many people are buying into this BS and believe that great power politics, might makes right, and the subordination of morality to political and economic interests are natural, inevitable, and something we need to resign ourselves to.

But despite Mearsheimer’s eminent reputation, the tremendous respect which he commands, and his accurate and scathing indictment of Western foreign policy, his framework is surprisingly shallow and lacking in even a basic grasp of “how the world actually works”.  Why do I say this and what do I mean?  For starters, Mearsheimer is a dyed-in-the-wool liberal who seemingly has never even heard of the concept of class.  There are innumerable instances throughout history of seemingly inexplicable behavior that the lens of liberalism is incapable of explaining.  Only when one adopts the lens of oppositional class interests and class struggle does history even begin to make any sense.  The same is true regarding contemporary reality.  Trying to understand, much less explain reality without acknowledging the prime influence of oppositional class interests, is like trying to explain a tidal wave to someone that doesn’t even know what water is (hat tip to Jeff J Brown for this simile).

The same is true regarding contemporary reality.  Mearsheimer seems oblivious to the fact that the West is run by an establishment of wealthy elites, who see the masses of workers as a threat to their wealth, power, and privilege--masses who must be constantly attacked by propaganda that is designed to indoctrinate and render them ignorant, confused, divided, and ultimately disenfranchised from the political process.

So, even though Mearsheimer’s theory results in many good takes and accurate criticisms regarding the policies of Western imperialism, it is severely lacking and limiting in its ability to explain motives or predict future behavior.  Without doubt Mearsheimer is trapped in the limiting liberal orthodoxy of the nation state paradigm and terms like imperialism, and class struggle are entirely missing from his framework.

This fact limits his ability to explain otherwise inexplicable actions, but worse than this, his facile and superficial framework which purports to authoritatively explain “how the world works” really does nothing other than project mindless and hypocritical liberalism on to other societies and other governments that long ago, had the common sense to abandon such useless ideologies to the trash heap of history.  Liberalism is nothing but the self-serving ideology of the wealthy elite, and its purpose is to allow the elites to maintain their wealth, power, and privilege against the oppositional interests of the working-class masses who desire actual representation instead of the pseudo democratic façade, offered by liberalism, which only exists to conceal the mask of capitalist class dictatorship.

China knows all too well the evils of Western liberalism as they suffered under it for over a century before they finally liberated themselves.  Yet Mearsheimer, trapped in his “great power politics” “nation state” paradigm simply can’t conceive of advocating for anything other than an all-out effort by the US, to “contain China”.  Why?  Because his liberal mind can’t conceive of China as being any less evil than the United States.  Mearsheimer doesn’t oppose the West’s proxy war against Russia on moral grounds.  Quite the contrary, as we have seen, morality does not enter the realist equation.  No, Mearsheimer attacks the proxy war against Russia on “realist” grounds.  Why is it bad from the perspective of the “realist” approach to initiate a proxy war against the Russia?  Not because nearly a million Ukrainians will die, not because the US ought to learn how to live and cooperate with other countries through an enlightened system of good neighborliness and peace through mutual prosperity and development.  No, these things have no place in liberalism or in Mearsheimer’s realist foreign policy.  The US was wrong to initiate a proxy war with Russia *because it drove Russia and China closer together thereby making it more difficult to destroy our “peer competitor” China*.

In the liberal world inhabited by John Mearsheimer, the powerful must always wage war against the weak, lest the weak rise up to take their place.  This is the barbaric approach of liberalism which Mearsheimer works overtime trying to convince everyone is natural and inevitable.  Mearsheimer’s barbarous liberalism demands perpetual confrontation, conflict, and war and I worry that too many people are buying into this BS and believe that great power politics, might makes right, and the subordination of morality to political and economic interests are natural, inevitable, and something we need to resign ourselves to.  I reject this with every fiber of my being as does the 100 million-strong communist party of China.  Socialism is the ideology of enlightenment that says we can do better as a species than the perpetual war and exploitation the West has offered the world for most of the past 200 years.  It’s dinosaurs like Mearsheimer that need to be refuted before they infect the younger generation with their mindless barbarity.  Socialism is the answer.  But socialism must be worked for, struggled for, developed, and nurtured.  It is never easy to overcome the dictatorship of capital but it is possible and absolutely necessary as the alternative is to leave things in the hands of the barbarians.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE
Editor-at-large Billy Bob is a dedicated anti-imperialist activist and blogger. He hosts the Blowback roundatable.  You can reach him at his Facebook page HERE.

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