The Return of Marco Polo's World

by Robert D. Kaplan

  The “stopping power of water” is where Tragedy, in an analytical sense, builds toward its powerful conclusion. “Large bodies of water are formidable obstacles that cause significant power-projection problems,” Mearsheimer writes. Great navies and air forces can be built, and soldiers transported to beachheads and airstrips, but conquering great land powers across the seas is difficult. This is why the United States and the United Kingdom have rarely been invaded by other great powers. It is also why the United States has almost never tried to permanently conquer territory in Europe or Asia, and why the United Kingdom has never tried to dominate continental Europe. Therefore, the “central aim of American foreign policy” is “to be the hegemon in the Western Hemisphere” only, and to prevent the rise of a similar hegemon in the Eastern Hemisphere. In turn, the proper role for the United States is as an “offshore balancer,” balancing against the rise of a Eurasian hegemon and going to war only as a last resort to thwart it. But better to try buck-passing first, Mearsheimer advises, and come into a war only at the last moment, when absolutely necessary.

  Mearsheimer tells me that the United States was right to enter World War II very late; that way it paid a smaller “blood price” than the Soviet Union. “Before D-Day, ninety-three percent of all German casualties had occurred on the eastern front,” he says, adding that the devastation of the Soviet Union helped the United States in the Cold War to follow.

  “How is offshore balancing different from neo-isolationism?” I ask him. “Isolationists,” he responds, “believe that there is no place outside of the Western Hemisphere to which it is worth deploying our troops. But offshore balancers believe there are three critical areas that no other hegemon should be allowed to dominate: Europe, the Persian Gulf, and Northeast Asia. Thus,” he goes on, “it was important to fight Nazi Germany and Japan in World War II. American history suits us to be offshore balancers—not isolationists, not the world’s sheriff.” Later, when I ask Mearsheimer about the Obama administration’s slightly standoffish policies toward Libya and whether they are a good example of buck-passing, he says the problem with leading from behind in this case was that America’s European allies lacked the military capacity to do the job efficiently. “If mass murder was truly in the offing, as it was in Rwanda,” he tells me, “then I would have been willing to intervene in Libya. But it is unclear that was the case.”

  Such thinking is prologue to Mearsheimer’s admonition that a struggle with China awaits us. “The Chinese are good offensive realists, so they will seek hegemony in Asia,” he tells me, paraphrasing the conclusion to Tragedy. China is not a status quo power. It will seek to dominate the South China Sea as the United States has dominated the Greater Caribbean Basin. He continues: “An increasingly powerful China is likely to try to push the U.S. out of Asia, much the way the U.S. pushed European powers out of the Western Hemisphere. Why should we expect China to act any differently than the United States did? Are they more principled than we are? More ethical? Less nationalistic?” On the penultimate page of Tragedy, he warns:

  Neither Wilhelmine Germany, nor imperial Japan, nor Nazi Germany, nor the Soviet Union had nearly as much latent power as the United States had during their confrontations….But if China were to become a giant Hong Kong, it would probably have somewhere on the order of four times as much latent power as the United States does, allowing China to gain a decisive military advantage over the United States.

  Ten years after those lines were written, China’s economy has passed Japan’s as the world’s second largest. Its total defense spending in 2009 was $150 billion, compared with only $17 billion in 2001. But even more revealing is the pattern of China’s military modernization. “Force planning—the product of long-term commitments and resource allocation decisions—is the heart of strategy,” the military expert Thomas Donnelly, of the American Enterprise Institute, wrote last year. And for more than a decade now, China’s military

  has shifted its focus from repelling a Soviet invasion and controlling domestic unrest to the sole problem of defeating U.S. forces in East Asia. This has been a strategic surprise to which no American administration has appropriately responded.

  China is increasing its submarine fleet from 62 to 77 and has tested a stealth fighter jet as part of a buildup also featuring surface warships, missiles, and cyberwarfare. Andrew F. Krepinevich, the president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, believes that nations of the Western Pacific are slowly being “Finlandized” by China: They will maintain nominal independence but in the end may abide by foreign policy rules set by Beijing. And the more the United States is distracted by the Middle East, the more it hastens this impending reality in East Asia, which is the geographical heart of the global economy and of the world’s navies and air forces.

  Mearsheimer’s critics say that offensive realism ignores ideology and domestic politics altogether. They argue that he takes no account of China’s society and economy and where they might be headed. Indeed, simple theories like offensive realism are inherently superficial, and wrong in instances. Mearsheimer, for example, is still waiting for NATO to collapse, as he predicted it would in a 1990 Atlantic article. The fact that it hasn’t owes as much to the domestic politics of Western states as it does to the objective security situation. And the stopping power of water did not prevent Japan from acquiring a great maritime empire in the early and middle part of the twentieth century; nor did it prevent the Allied invasion of Normandy. More generally, Mearsheimer’s very cold, mathematical, states-as-billiard-balls approach ignores messy details—like the personalities of Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Slobodan Milošević—that have had a monumental impact in deciding how wars and crises turn out. International relations is as much about understanding Shakespeare—and the human passions and intrigues that Shakespeare exposes—as it is about understanding political science theories. It matters greatly that Deng Xiaoping was both utterly ruthless and historically perceptive, so that he could set China in motion to become such an economic and military juggernaut in the first place. Manifest Destiny owes as much to the canniness of President James K. Polk as it does to Mearsheimer’s laws of historical determinism.

  But given the limits of social science theories, even as we rely on them to help us make some sense of the Bruegelesque jumble of history, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics is a signal triumph. As Huntington once told his protégé Fareed Zakaria: “If you tell people the world is complicated, you’re not doing your job as a social scientist. They already know it’s complicated. Your job is to distill it, simplify it, and give them a sense of what is the single [cause], or what are the couple of powerful causes that explain this powerful phenomenon.”

  Truly, Mearsheimer’s theory of international relations allowed him to get both Gulf wars exactly right—and he’s one of the few people to do so. As a good offshore balancer, Mearsheimer supported the First Gulf War against Saddam Hussein, in 1991. By occupying Kuwait, Iraq had positioned itself as a potential hegemon in the Persian Gulf, justifying U.S. military action. Moreover, as Mearsheimer asserted in several newspaper columns, the United States could easily defeat the Iraqi military. This assertion made him something of a lone wolf in academic circles, where many were predicting a military quagmire or calamity. The Democratic Party, to which most scholars subscribed, overwhelmingly opposed the war. Mearsheimer’s confidence that fighting Saddam would be a “cakewalk” was based in part on his trips to Israel in the 1970s and ’80s, when he was studying conventional military deterrence. The Israelis had told him that the Iraqi army, mired as it was in Soviet doctrine, was one of the Arab world’s worst militaries.

  But Mearsheimer’s finest hour was the run-up to the Second Gulf War against Saddam, in 2003. This time, offshore balancing did not justify a war. Iraq was already contained and was not on the brink of becoming the hegemon of the Persian Gulf. And Mearsheimer felt strongly that a new war was a bad idea. He
joined with Harvard’s Stephen Walt and the University of Maryland’s Shibley Telhami to lead a group of thirty-three scholars, many of them card-carrying academic realists, to sign a declaration opposing the war. On September 26, 2002, they published an advertisement on the New York Times op-ed page that cost $38,000, and they paid for it themselves. The top of the ad ran, WAR WITH IRAQ IS NOT IN AMERICA’S NATIONAL INTEREST. Among the bullet points was this: “Even if we win easily, we have no plausible exit strategy. Iraq is a deeply divided society that the United States would have to occupy and police for many years to create a viable state.”

  Mearsheimer opposed not only the Iraq War, but also the neoconservative vision of regional transformation, which, as he tells me, was the “polar opposite” of offshore balancing. He was not against democratization in the Arab world per se, but felt that it should not be attempted—and could not be accomplished—by an extended deployment of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. And as he explains to me, he now sees an attack on Iran as yet another distraction from dealing with the challenge of China in East Asia. A war with Iran, he adds, would drive Iran further into the arms of Beijing.

  During the buildup to the Iraq War, Mearsheimer and Walt began work on what would become a London Review of Books article and later The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. (The Atlantic had originally commissioned the piece, only to reject it owing to a profound disagreement between the editors and the authors over its objectivity.) In some respects, The Israel Lobby reads as an appendix to The Tragedy of Great Power Politics—almost a case study of how great powers should not act. Many of those loosely associated with the lobby supported the Iraq War, which Mearsheimer saw as a diversion from the contest with China. The so-called special relationship between the United States and Israel, by further entangling the United States in the problems of the Middle East, contradicted the tenets of offshore balancing. And proponents of the special relationship have routinely justified it by citing Israel’s status as a stable democracy in the midst of unstable authoritarian states—but that internal attribute, in Mearsheimer’s view, is largely irrelevant.

  Mearsheimer denies that he cowrote the book to explain away the contradictions that the U.S.-Israel relationship poses to his larger theory. He wrote it, he says, because the special relationship is a major feature of U.S. foreign policy in its own right. He might also have said that the Israel lobby is an example of how domestic politics do intrude in foreign policy; thus his theory of offensive realism is less an explanation of events than an aspiration for how states should behave. He has said elsewhere that the lobby is an “anomaly” in American history. An anomaly is certainly what his book about it is.

  Whereas Tragedy is a theory, The Israel Lobby is a polemic, a tightly organized marshaling of fact and argument that does not necessarily delegitimize Israel, but does delegitimize the American-Israeli special relationship. Lobby lacks the commanding, albeit cruel, objectivity that Mearsheimer evinces in Tragedy. It negatively distorts key episodes in Israel’s history—beginning with its founding—and in effect denies Israel the license that Mearsheimer grants other countries, including China, to act as good offensive realists. He and Walt equate U.S. support for Israel with Soviet support for Cuba, thereby equating a pulsating democracy with a semi-failed authoritarian state. And while Tragedy is rich in explication, Lobby is merely tedious, pummeling the reader with lists of names of people and organizations whom the authors group together as advancing the American-Israeli special relationship and the Iraq War, but who in fact often have had profound disagreements among themselves. Meanwhile, the motivations of America’s political leaders at the time—the putative targets of the lobby’s pressure, and thus the ones best able to assess the lobby’s strength—go largely unexplored. This failure to establish a link between the lobby and White House decision making undermines the book. As the Middle East expert Dennis Ross has suggested, had Al Gore been elected president in 2000, he probably would not have invaded Iraq, even though he had much closer ties to prominent Jews and others in the lobby than did Bush.

  Nevertheless, The Israel Lobby contains a fundamental analytic truth that is undeniable: The United States and Israel, like most states, have some different interests that inevitably push up against any enduring special relationship, especially because their security situations are so vastly different. To start with, the United States is a continent-size country protected by oceans, while Israel is a small country half a world away, surrounded by enemy states. Because the geographical situations of the United States and Israel are so dissimilar, their geopolitical interests can never completely overlap in the way that Israel’s most fervent supporters contend. (Iran’s nuclear program is a far more acute threat to Israel than it is to the United States.) “The fact that Israel is a democracy is important,” Mearsheimer tells me. “But it is not sufficient to justify the terms of the special relationship. We should treat Israel as a normal country, like we treat Britain or Japan.”

  What particularly exasperates Mearsheimer and Walt is the lack of conditionality in the special relationship. They admit that making American support for Israel “more conditional would not remove all sources of friction” between Arab countries and the United States; nor do they deny “the presence of genuine anti-Semitism in various Arab countries.” But they cannot condone a situation in which the United States has, over the decades, given Israel more than $180 billion in economic and military assistance, “the bulk of it comprising direct grants rather than loans,” and yet can barely achieve modest negotiating goals such as getting Israel to stop expanding West Bank settlements for ninety days, let alone dismantle them, even though the Palestinians have been willing at times to make major concessions. (And the United States has been willing to throw in major sweeteners in the form of advanced military hardware.) Mearsheimer and Walt repeatedly say in their book that they believe the United States should militarily defend Israel if it is in mortal danger, but that the Israelis must be much more cooperative in light of all the aid they get. But, as they also argue, the reason the Israelis are not more cooperative is that in the final analysis, they don’t have to be—which, in turn, is because of the pro-Israel lobby. Thus, in the spirit of Huntington, the authors distill a complicated situation down to a single, powerful cause.

  I see nothing wrong or illegitimate about this core argument. And no amount of nitpicking by their critics of The Israel Lobby’s hundred pages of endnotes can detract from it. I say this as someone who is a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces and who supported the Iraq War (a position I have come to deeply regret). Say what you will about The Israel Lobby, but as Justine Rosenthal—who is a former editor of The National Interest, a leading foreign policy journal, and is now with Newsweek—told me, “It changed the debate on Israel, even if it did not change the policy.” She added: “John is one of the clearest logical thinkers I know, who hammers his points home well.” Indeed, if you put Lobby together with Tragedy, you have the beginnings of a prudent grand strategy for America: Invest less in one part of the world and more in another, events permitting. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently proposed that the United States should attempt to pivot away from the Middle East toward the Asia-Pacific region, a realization that Mearsheimer came to years ago.

  On several occasions, Mearsheimer and Walt approvingly bring up the Middle East policy of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, which was more evenhanded vis-à-vis Israel and the Arab states: Without being hostile, it lacked the effusive warmth that more-recent American presidents have demonstrated toward the Jewish state. When I say to Mearsheimer, “That’s the kind of American policy you and Walt really want in the Middle East, isn’t it?” he responds: “That’s exactly right. Eisenhower came down like a ton of bricks on Britain, France, and Israel—U.S. allies, all three—to force them to withdraw from Sinai in 1956. Imagine,” he goes on, “if we had Eisenhower in the post-’67 period, or now.” Mearsheimer’s argument is that Eisenhower would have
quickly forced Israel out of the occupied territories, and all parties concerned—Israel especially—would have benefited over the long run. No doubt decades of occupation have fueled hatred of Israel among Egyptians, Jordanians, and others. Given that Israel’s electoral system helps assure weak governments—which are beholden in varying degrees to small right-wing parties opposed to substantial territorial withdrawal—perhaps the only chance Israel has of not becoming an apartheid society is if an American president finds the gumption to adopt an Eisenhower-esque approach and force Israel to withdraw from significant portions of the West Bank, wrangling Palestinian concessions in the process. “You don’t have to trust me, Steve Walt, or Jimmy Carter, just listen to former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert,” whose November 28, 2007, statement Mearsheimer quotes to me:

  If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African–style struggle for equal voting rights…then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished.

  Moreover, the revolt against calcified central authority in the Middle East, while in the long run beneficial to the emergence of more-liberal regimes, may in the short and middle term yield more-chaotic and more-populist ones, which will create more rather than fewer security problems for Israel. The cost to Israel of its unwillingness to make territorial concessions will grow rather than diminish.

  Even as Mearsheimer is attacked, whenever he publishes something—a recent book on why diplomats are forced to lie, or a recent essay decrying both liberal and neoconservative imperialism—he breaks new ground. A collection of his critics’ academic essays published in 2010, History and Neorealism, takes aim at Mearsheimer’s theories in Tragedy. Some of the criticism is scathing, proving that Mearsheimer is the political science world’s enfant terrible much more because of Tragedy than because of The Israel Lobby. (The essayists attack his theory for its lack of historical subtlety, but here, too, like Huntington, Mearsheimer is setting the terms of the debate.) Despite the media controversy that surrounded The Israel Lobby, his latest book, Why Leaders Lie (2011), attracted generous jacket blurbs from academic eminences such as the Princeton professor Robert O. Keohane and former editors of both Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy. Within media ranks, The Israel Lobby has delegitimized Mearsheimer. Inside the service academy where I taught for two years, in the think tank world where I work, and in various government circles with which I am acquainted, Mearsheimer is quietly held in higher regard because of familiarity with his other books, but the controversy (and its echoes last fall) has surely hurt him.