Mearsheimer, who is not modest, believes it is a reliance on theory that invigorates his thinking. Returning to his principal passion, China, he tells me: “I have people all the time telling me that they’ve just returned from China and met with all these Chinese who want a peaceful relationship. I tell them that these Chinese will not be in power in twenty or thirty years, when circumstances may be very different. Because we cannot know the future, all we have to rely upon is theory. If a theory can explain the past in many instances, as my theory of offensive realism can, it might be able to say something useful about the future.” And it is likely to be China’s future, rather than Israel’s, that will ultimately determine Mearsheimer’s reputation. If China implodes from a socioeconomic crisis, or evolves in some other way that eliminates its potential as a threat, Mearsheimer’s theory will be in serious trouble because of its dismissal of domestic politics. But if China goes on to become a great military power, reshaping the balance of forces in Asia, then Mearsheimer’s Tragedy will live on as a classic.
President-elect Donald Trump is being called a “realist” in foreign policy. Don’t believe it. He may have some crude realist instincts, but that only makes him a terrible messenger for realism. Realists like myself should be very nervous about his election.
Realism is a sensibility, not a specific guide to what to do in each crisis. And it is a sensibility rooted in a mature sense of the tragic—of all the things that can go wrong in foreign policy, so that caution and a knowledge of history are embedded in the realist mindset. Realism has been with us at least since Thucydides wrote The Peloponnesian War in the fifth century B.C., in which he defined human nature as driven by fear (phobos), self-interest (kerdos), and honor (doxa). Because the realist knows that he must work with such elemental forces rather than against them, he also knows, for example, that order comes before freedom and interests come before values. After all, without order there is no freedom for anybody, and without interests a state has no incentive to project its values.
Trump has given no indication that he has thought about any of this. He appears to have no sense of history and therefore no mature sense of the tragic. A sense of history comes mainly from reading. That’s how we know in the first place about such things as our obligations to allies and our role as the defender of the West. All previous presidents in modern times, without being intellectuals, have been readers to some extent. But Trump seems post-literate, a man who has made an end run around books directly to the digital age, where nothing is vetted, context is absent, and lies proliferate.
Realists worship truth—for the ultimate lesson of history is that the truth of situations is often unpleasant. But Trump’s statements throughout the campaign have repeatedly revealed a basic disregard of facts.
Realists know that while the balance of power is not a panacea, maintaining an advantageous balance of power with rivals is generally in a nation’s interest. Russian president Vladimir Putin has upset the balance of power from Central Europe to the Middle East, something that we need urgently to rectify, at the very least for the sake of a stronger negotiating position with Russia. Trump appears to have no understanding of this. Indeed, rather than being realistic, his benign statements about Putin are dangerously naïve.
Realists know that because values follow interests and not the other way around, a free-trading regime in Asia gives us a greater stake in the region so that we have more incentive to project our values there. A free-trading regime among our allies also counters China’s overbearing influence, which Trump claims he wants to curtail but—because he is not a realist—has no responsible idea about how to do it.
Realism is about moderation. It sees the value in the status quo while idealists only see the drawbacks in it. It is, therefore, wary of change. Trump, by contrast, wants an upheaval in the international system: from sparking trade wars, to increasing tensions with Mexico, to undermining NATO. Admitting the Baltic states into NATO may not have been altogether prudent from a realist point of view. But now that they are in the alliance, the credibility of NATO (and of the West) depends on defending them. Trump and his supporters clearly do not grasp this.
Realism, again, because it is a sensibility, and not a strategy, must be merged with a historically accurate vision of America’s place in the world. That place is no better defined than by the location of the Holocaust Memorial Museum adjacent to the Mall, showing that the Holocaust, which happened to Jews in Europe, has been by consensus granted entry into our national consciousness. This does not mean that the United States must intervene every time there is a major human rights violation somewhere—for that would be unrealistic. But it does mean that it must always take notice and, when practical, participate in a response, because America’s duty emerging out of the crucible of World War II and the Cold War has been to try—wherever possible—to expand the boundaries of civil society worldwide. Idealists are obsessed with this; realists are not. Realists know that national interest comes before any global interest. But realists, too, at least the respectable kind, harbor an internationalist vision.
History moves on. World War II and the Cold War recede. But the United States is the most well-endowed and advantageously located major state on Earth. That good fortune comes with responsibilities that extend beyond our own borders. Just look at the size of our three-hundred-warship Navy and the location of our aircraft carriers on any given week. Realism is about utilizing such power to protect allies without precipitating conflict. It is not about abandoning them and precipitating conflict as a consequence. Hopefully, Trump will become a realist, but he has a long way to go.
In 1935, the anti-Nazi writer and Austrian-Jewish intellectual Joseph Roth published a story, “The Bust of the Emperor,” about an elderly count at the chaotic fringe of the former Habsburg Empire, who refused to think of himself as a Pole or an Italian, even though his ancestry encompassed both. In his mind, the only mark of “true nobility” was to be “a man above nationality,” in the Habsburg tradition. “My old home, the Monarchy, alone,” the count says, “was a great mansion with many doors and many chambers, for every condition of men.” Indeed, the horrors of twentieth-century Europe, Roth wrote presciently, had as their backdrop the collapse of empires and the rise of uni-ethnic states, with fascist and communist leaders replacing the power of traditional monarchs.
Empire clearly had its evils, but one cannot deny its historical function—to provide stability and order to vast tracts of land occupied by different peoples. If not empire, what then? In fact, though very few will admit it, a rules-based international system and the raft of supranational and multinational groupings such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, European Union, International Monetary Fund, International Court of Justice, World Economic Forum, and so on are all attempts to replace—to greater and lesser extents—the function of empire. Silently undergirding this process since World War II has been the undeniable fact of American power—military, diplomatic, and economic—protecting the sea-lanes, the maritime choke points, and access to hydrocarbons, and in general providing some measure of security to the world. These tasks are amoral to the extent that they do not involve lofty principles, but without them there is no possibility for moral action anywhere. This is not traditional imperialism, which is no longer an option, but it is the best available replacement for it.
However, while the United States still remains the single strongest power on the globe, it is less and less an overwhelming one. The diffusion of central authority in new democracies everywhere, the spread of chaos in the Middle East and North Africa, and the rise of Russia, China, and Iran as regional hegemons all work to constrain the projection of American power. This is part of a process that has been going on for a century. At the end of World War I, formal multi-ethnic empires in Europe—those of the Habsburgs and Ottomans—crumbled. At the end of World War II, the overseas empires of the British and French began to do the same. The end of
the Cold War heralded the collapse of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe and parts of Eurasia. The early twenty-first century witnessed the collapse or erosion of post-imperial strongmen in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere: men who ruled absolutely within artificial borders erected by European imperialists. The American empire-of-sorts—that is, the last power standing whose troops and diplomats have found themselves in an imperial-like situation—is now giving way, too.
This partial retreat of American power has international and domestic causes. On the international front, vast urbanization, absolute rises in population, and natural-resource scarcities—as well as the rise of individual consciousness thanks to the communications revolution—have subtly eroded the power of central authority everywhere. The United States just cannot influence the decisions of individual countries the way it used to. Meanwhile, the maturation of both violent millennial movements and regional hegemons are direct threats to U.S. power projection. On the domestic front, the Obama administration, wishing to transform American society, has deliberately avoided major entanglements overseas and has sought to ameliorate relations with adversaries, principally Iran. This is a sign of imperial fatigue—a good thing, arguably, but something that nevertheless works to constrain U.S. power rather than to project it. The United States is signaling that it will less and less be providing world order, in other words. Rather than exclusively the philosophical work of one president, I suspect that this development is the beginning of a new phase in American foreign policy, following the hyperactivity of World War II and the Cold War—and their long aftershocks in the Balkans and the Middle East. Driving this relative retrenchment in Washington are social and economic turmoil at home and intractable complexity and upheaval abroad. Again, I am not saying that this is a wise course for the United States, but I am saying that it is real—and it is happening.
Because it is happening, and because of the economic, environmental, and social disruptions I have alluded to above, world disorder will only grow. The weakening and dissolution of small and medium-size states in Africa and the Middle East will advance to quasi-anarchy in larger states on which the geographic organization of Eurasia hinges: namely Russia and China. For the external aggression of these new regional hegemons is, in part, motivated by internal weakness, as they employ nationalism to assuage unraveling domestic economies upon which the stability of their societies rests. Then there is the European Union, which, if not crumbling, is surely weakening. Rather than a unified and coherent superstate, Europe will increasingly be a less than coherent confection of states and regions, as it dissolves internally—and also externally into the fluid geography of Eurasia, the Levant, and North Africa: demonstrated by Russian revanchism and the demographic assault of Muslim refugees. Of course, on a longer time horizon there is technology itself. As the strategist T. X. Hammes points out, the convergence of cheap drones, cyberwarfare, 3-D printing, and so on will encourage the diffusion of power among many states and stateless groups, rather than the concentration of it into a few imperial-like hands.
We are entering an age of what I call comparative anarchy, that is, a much higher level of anarchy compared to that of the Cold War and Post Cold War periods.
After all, globalization and the communications revolution have reinforced, rather than negated, geopolitics. The world map is now smaller and more claustrophobic, so that territory is more ferociously contested, and every regional conflict interacts with every other as never before. A war in Syria is inextricable from a terrorist outrage in France, even as Russia’s intervention in Syria affects Europe’s and America’s policies toward Ukraine. This happens at a moment when, as I’ve said, multinational empires are gone, as are most totalitarian regimes in artificially drawn states where official borders do not configure with ethnic and sectarian ones. The upshot is a maelstrom of national and subnational groups in violent competition. And so, geopolitics—the battle for space and power—now occurs within states as well as between them. Cultural and religious differences are particularly exacerbated: for as group differences melt down in the crucible of globalization, they have to be artificially reinvented in more blunt and ideological form by, as it turns out, the communications revolution. It isn’t the clash of civilizations so much as the clash of artificially reconstructed civilizations that is taking place. Witness the Islamic State, which does not represent Islam per se, but Islam igniting with the tyrannical conformity and mass hysteria inspired by the Internet and social media. The postmodern reinvention of identities only hardens geopolitical divides.
In the course of all this, technology is not erasing geography—it is sharpening it. Just look at China and India. For most of history, with exceptions like the spread of Buddhism in antiquity and the nineteenth-century Opium Wars, China and India had relatively little to do with each other, emerging as two civilizations separated by the Himalayas. But technological advances have collapsed distance. Indian intercontinental ballistic missiles can reach Chinese cities and Chinese fighter jets can include the Indian subcontinent in their arc of operations, even as Indian warships have visited the South China Sea and Chinese warships have sailed throughout the Indian Ocean. A new strategic geography of rivalry now exists between China and India. Geopolitics, rather than a vestige of previous centuries, is a more tightly woven feature of the globe than ever, as India seeks new allies in Vietnam and Japan, and China seeks closer links with Russia and Iran.
In fact, there are no purely regional problems anymore, since local hegemons like Russia, China, and Iran have been over the decades engaged in cyberattacks and terrorism worldwide. Thus crises are both regional and global at the same time. And as wars and state collapses persist, the fear we should harbor should be less that of appeasement and more that of hard landings for the troubled regimes in question. We know that soft landings for totalitarian regimes in Iraq and Syria have been impossible to achieve: The United States invaded Iraq yet stood aside in Syria, the result being virtually the same, with hundreds of thousands of people killed in each country and a radical, millenarian group like ISIS filling the void.
Another thing: Remember that globalization is not necessarily associated with growth or stability, but only with vast economic and cultural linkages, which can amplify geopolitical disorder in the event of an economic slowdown—which is what we are seeing now. Take Africa, which has had years of steady economic growth thanks less to the development of a manufacturing sector and more to a rise in commodity prices. Commodity prices are now falling, along with Chinese infrastructure investment in Africa, as China itself experiences a dramatic decrease in GDP growth. Thus African stability, to the degree that it exists, is imperiled because of economic changes in Asia. Then there are the various radical Islamic movements rampaging across Sahelian Africa. This is actually the latest phase of African anarchy—in which the communications revolution brings millenarian Islam to weak and failed states. Obviously, the United States has little power over any of this.
In sum, everything is interlinked as never before, even as there is less and less of a Night Watchman to keep the peace worldwide and hierarchies everywhere break down. Just look at the presidential primaries in the United States, which demonstrate an upheaval from below for which the political establishment has no answer. Meanwhile, like “the brassiness of marches” and “the heavy stomp of peasant dances” that composer Gustav Mahler employed, as he invaded “the well-ordered house of classical music” in the waning decades of the Habsburg Empire (to quote the late Princeton professor Carl E. Schorske), the twenty-first century will be defined by vulgar, populist anarchy that elites at places like Aspen and Davos will have less and less influence upon, and will less and less be able to comprehend. Imperialism, then, will be viewed as much with nostalgia as with disdain.
The sleep of any president, prime minister, or statesman is haunted by what-ifs.
What if I had only fired that defense secretary sooner, or replaced that general in Iraq wi
th the other one before it was too late? What if I had not wholly believed the air force when they told me that the war in southern Lebanon could be won from the skies? What if I had more troops on the ground in Iraq from the start? What if I had called off those fruitless negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians a few months—or even a few weeks—earlier than I did? What if I had asked more questions at that meeting, and listened sooner to the pleas of my assistant secretary or whoever it was that said something could be done about Rwanda? The whole world, and my reputation, would be different.
Counterfactuals haunt us all in the policy community. We all want to be right, and to assign failure to someone else. We all want to deny fate, even as we recognize that it exists. For example, we know that despite Isaiah Berlin’s admonition against the very idea of vast impersonal forces, such as geography and culture, these forces really do matter, and they affect the tasks ahead: Whatever the intervention strategy, Iraqis will never behave like Swedes, and Afghans or Libyans will never behave like Canadians. And sometimes it is that simple. While individuals are more real and concrete than the national groups to which they belong, group characteristics actually do exist and must play a role in the foresight of any analyst. For group characteristics are merely the sum total of a people’s experience on a given landscape throughout hundreds or thousands of years of history.
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