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Video Interview
Note: The opinions presented are not necessarily those of the Government of Canada.
(Video players are available here: QuickTime | Windows Media)
Transcript:
Introduction to Realism
My name is John Mearsheimer and I teach political science at the University of Chicago, where I’ve been since 1983.
Basically, I’m what is generally known as a realist, and that means that I think that states are the principal actors in the international system and that they operate in an anarchic environment. Anarchic means there is no higher authority above those states. Those states are like pool balls on a table.
Secondly, as a realist I believe that those states are principally concerned with the pursuit of power. Power is the currency of international politics for realists. And that includes both economic power and military power. The final point I’d make about realists is that they tend to think that the regime type of a state does not matter.
Many Americans, and certainly many Canadians as well, believe that whether a state is democratic or not has a great deal to say about that particular state’s foreign policy. Realists believe that states, whether they’re democratic or autocratic, behave basically the same way, because the imperatives of the system, the structure of the system, just does not leave them much choice. “Great Power” Politics
The argument I would make about great-power competition today is twofold. First of all, it is important to understand that we are at an unusual period in history, where there is one country, the United States of America, that is so powerful that no other great power in the system, be it China or Russia, is likely to antagonize the United States and pick a fight with it. So you don’t have much evidence of potential war involving the great powers, I think in large part because you have such an imbalance of power. The second point I would make is that if you look at the U.S.-Chinese relationship today, and certainly out into the future, there is good reason to think that great-power politics is alive and well. No one would deny that there is some reasonable chance that over the next decade, the United States and China will end up tangling with each other over Taiwan. Now I don’t think that’s likely to happen, but what I’m saying is that it’s a plausible scenario. All this is to say that great-power politics between the United States and China is alive and well when you focus alone on the Taiwan issue.
When you throw into the mix the Korea issue—the whole question of North Korea versus South Korea and the possibility a war could break out on the Korean peninsula that would drag both the United States and China in—you see another example of where great-power politics is alive. To come at this from a slightly different perspective, let’s throw the Japanese into the equation. It’s very clear from watching the Japanese today, what they’re saying and what they’re doing, that the Japanese are very nervous about the Chinese and that they are beginning to rebuild certain military capabilities just in case they need them. So with regard to Japanese-Chinese relations you see evidence of this.
And finally let’s look at India. The Indians are very nervous about the Chinese. The Indians and the Americans have moved much closer together since the Cold War ended in large part because of fear of China.
So there is all sorts of evidence in Asia, broadly defined, that great-power politics is alive and well. That’s not to say that you’re on the verge of World War III in Asia, because that’s certainly not the case. But those states, to include the United States, are competing with each other, and they have their eye on each other, and that’s what great-power politics is all about.
U.S. and China
When the Bush administration first came to power, in January 2001, they were focused almost exclusively on China, and they actually paid remarkably little attention to terrorism. We now know from the 9/11 Commission that the Clinton administration was much more concerned with the Osama bin Laden problem than was the Bush administration, at least in its early incarnation. And that’s because the Bush administration was focusing on China. But after September 11, the United States for obvious reasons became obsessed with its terrorism problem, which meant focusing almost exclusively on the Middle East. So America, in a sense, shifted its gunsights from China to the Middle East, broadly defined, and therefore the United States under President Bush has not put much emphasis on dealing with China. This is not to say we’ve ignored it completely, but it’s not been a high priority.
Now if 9/11 had not happened, I think there’s almost no question the Bush administration would have pursued a quite vigorous containment policy. The President himself made that clear in the 2000 campaign, and he’s surrounded by advisers who have talked about a vigorous containment policy vis-à-vis China. But once you get into the war on terror, and once you shift your focus to the Middle East, you really don’t want to have trouble with China.
In fact, you want to go to great lengths to have good relations with China, because you’re up to your ears in alligators in Iraq and other places in the Middle East, and the last thing you need is a crisis with China in Asia. So what’s happened here is that we have basically dampened our enthusiasm for containment and we have, by and large, engaged China under President Bush, which is not what one would have expected in January 2001. U.S. and Iraq
The realists, almost to a person, were opposed to the Iraq war. The only realist I know of who favoured the Iraq war—who by the way was the only realist I know of who favoured the Vietnam War—was Henry Kissinger. Otherwise, the realists, to include Brent Scowcroft and James Baker in Washington, D.C., and all the realists in the academic world, were adamantly opposed to the Iraq war from the beginning.
In fact, it was liberals and neo-conservatives who formed a coalition to drive the United States into that war. Realists thought from the beginning it was a misguided enterprise, and I think there were two reasons they thought it was a misguided enterprise.
First of all, they did not think that Iraq was that great a threat. Most realists believed that even if Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, it could not use those weapons because the United States had the ability to retaliate in kind, so the threat was not very great. Secondly, most realists believed that if the United States invaded Iraq we would end up occupying the place and we’d have a full-scale insurgency on our hands because of nationalism. And that of course is exactly what happened.
Many people seem to think that it will weaken American power. I don’t think that’s the case, because I think power is usually measured in terms of material capabilities, and our material capabilities will not be influenced much by this experience. The downside, the negative effects of Iraq, are that America’s standing around the world has been very badly damaged. And furthermore, it is going to be very difficult for the United States to countenance using military force in the future, even in cases where it might make good sense to use military force.
I think, for example, if you were to have a situation analogous to Rwanda, four or five years down the road, that most Americans would be very reticent to do something, even though they should do it, for moral reasons and for strategic reasons. There is no strategic argument against doing something. The moral imperative is clear. But I think many Americans will be reticent because we got burned so badly in Iraq. And again, if you go back to Rwanda in 1994, the reason we did not do it was in large part because of what had happened in Somalia in 1993.
So I think you can posit all sorts of plausible scenarios where our negative experience in Iraq will cause us problems down the road, because people, the United States public, will not be willing to use military force. So I think no good will come out of Iraq and much bad will come out of it.
The State
I think that in the 1990s it was fashionable to argue that the state was losing its cachet. It was no longer the powerful actor on the international stage that it had once been. I thought this was wrong-headed at the time, and I think with the passage of time it’s become very clear it’s a wrong-headed argument.
Just a couple of points on this. First of all, many people thought the European Union was the wave of the future and the European Union demonstrated that the state was withering away. The European Union has slowed down. I mean European integration is moving forward at a snail’s pace at best, and one could argue that if anything it’s stopped. But even if the European Union was not slowing down, if it was marching forward, you’d just get one big European state instead of a handful of states. It wouldn’t be like the state disappeared.
The next point I would make on this subject of the withering state is, if the state is disappearing, what is replacing it? People need a political system to govern their everyday life, and there is no replacement for the state. Does anybody seriously believe that the multinational corporation can replace the state? I don’t think so. And all these international institutions that are out there, like the United Nations, are useful. I don’t want to say that the United Nations is not useful; it is useful. But the United Nations is in no position to handle global governance in any meaningful way. So there is no replacement for the state.
My third and most important point is that the reason the state is not going to wither away is because nationalism is the most powerful political ideology on the face of the earth, and nationalism privileges the state. Nationalism basically says that the world can be divided up into nations or ethnic groups or tribes, call them what you want, and every one of those nations should have their own state.
Look at the Palestinians today: what the Palestinians want more than anything else is their own state. Look at the Kurds: what the Kurds want today more than anything else is their own state.
We could point to all sorts of other examples around the world where you have different ethnic groups that are clamouring for their own state. And then you have all sorts of countries that have finally freed themselves of the Soviet Union, like Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. These countries are in no rush to give up their sovereignty. So I think that the state is alive and well for the foreseeable future.
Institutions
With regard to institutions, I think there are basically three views. First there’s the liberal view, very popular in the United States and in Canada, which says that institutions have the independent power to push states around. Once you get states like the United States and Canada enmeshed in an institution, they have no choice but to obey those rules. And the end result of that is that states like the United States, when they’re thinking of misbehaving, will not misbehave because they know they have a responsibility to obey the rules of the institution. Now for liberals who have that world view, institutions are a very powerful force for peace in the international system.
Then there’s the neo-conservative view of institutions, and this has been the Bush administration’s view of institutions as well. They, like liberals, believe that institutions are very powerful. They believe that institutions can push great powers around. But they believe, contrary to the liberals, that institutions push great powers around and it has bad consequences. In other words, it’s where the Lilliputians tied down Gulliver. It’s all the small states in the system, like Canada, tying down the United States. So the neo-conservatives hate institutions, because they view them as very powerful entities that can do serious damage to America’s national interests.
The realist view is very different from those two views. Realists believe that institutions do not have the capability to push great powers around. If an institution tells the United States that it should do X, and the elites in the United States judge that doing X is not in the American national interest, the United States will either ignore the institution or rewrite the rules. But it will not do something that is not in its national interest. And that logic doesn’t just apply to the United States, it applies to other great powers as well.
So the point is, from a realist perspective, institutions can’t push a great power like the United States around. However, realists believe that if you’re going to run the world, or if you’re going to be a global superpower, you need institutions because the world is too big and too complicated to run unilaterally.
To talk about this in the context of the Cold War, NATO was an institution. It was a wonderful institution; it was a very useful tool for the United States. The World Trade Organization, the United Nations: these are all institutions that the United States had a key role in creating, and has employed for all sorts of good purposes over time. So a realist would say that it’s foolish to ignore institutions, to try to destroy institutions, and to not build institutions, because institutions are very useful devices, especially for the United States. |
Introduction to Realism