John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3

The following is a conversation with John Mearsheimer, a professor at University of Chicago and one of the most influential and controversial thinkers in the world. He teaches, speaks and writes about the nature of power and war on the global stage, in history and today. Please allow me to say, once again, my hope for this little journey I'm on. I will speak to everyone on all sides with compassion, with empathy, and with backbone. I'll speak with Vladimir Putin and with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with Russians and with Ukrainians, with Israelis and with Palestinians, with everyone. My goal is to do whatever small part I can to decrease the amount of suffering in the world by trying to reveal our common humanity. I believe that in the end, truth and love wins. I will get attacked for being naive, for being a shill, for being weak. I'm none of those things, but I do make mistakes and I will get better. I love you all.

Can you explain your view on power in international politics as outlined in your book, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics and in your writing since then? Yeah, I make two sets of points there. First of all, I believe that power is the currency of international relations, and by that I mean that states are deeply interested in the balance of power and they're interested in maximizing how much power they control. And the question is why do states care so much about power. In the international system, there's no higher authority, so if you get into trouble and you dial 911, there's nobody at the other end. In a system like that, you have no choice but to figure out for yourself how best to protect yourself. And the best way to protect yourself is to be powerful, to have as much power as you can possibly gain over all the other states in the system. Therefore, states care about power because it enhances or maximizes their prospects for survival.

Just to linger on the human nature perspective, how do you explain Hitler and Nazi Germany, just one of the more recent aggressive expansions through military might? How do you explain that in the framework of offensive realism? Well, I think that Nazi Germany was driven in large part by structural considerations. And I think if you look at Imperial Germany, which was largely responsible for starting World War I, and of course Nazi Germany's largely responsible for starting World War II, what that tells you is you didn't need Adolf Hitler to start World War I. And I believe that there is a good chance you would've had World War II in the absence of Hitler. I believe that Germany was very powerful, it was deeply worried about the balance of power in Europe, and it had strong incentives to behave aggressively in the late 1930s, early 1940s. So I believe that structure mattered.

To fast-forward in time, but not in space, let me ask you about the war in Ukraine. Why did Russia invade Ukraine on February 24th, 2022? What are some of the explanations given? And which do you find the most convincing? Well, clearly, the conventional wisdom is that Putin is principally responsible. Putin is an imperialist, he's an expansionist.

Well, I think the main reason was that you had this suffocating occupation. I think as long as the occupation persists, the Palestinians are going to resist. As you well know, this is not the first time there has been a Palestinian uprising. There was the first Intifada, there was the second Intifada, now there's October 7th, and there are uprisings besides those three, so this is not terribly surprising. A lot of people hypothesized that this attack was due to the fact that the Israelis, the Saudis and the Americans were working together to foster another Abraham Accord and that the Palestinians would in effect be sold down the river. I think given the fact that this was in the planning stages for probably about two years, and the Abraham Accords with regard to Saudi Arabia are relatively new phenomenon, I don't think that's the main driving force here. I think the main driving force is that the Palestinians feel oppressed as they should, and that this was a resistance move. They were resisting the Israeli occupation.

Do you think there will be a war with China in the 21st century? I don't know. My argument is there will be. There is right now a serious security competition and at the same time, there is a real possibility of war. Whether or not we avoid it is very hard to say. I mean, we did during the Cold War. We had a serious security competition from roughly 1947 to 1989 and we thankfully avoided war, probably came the closest in 1962 at the Cuban Missile Crisis. But we avoided it and I think we can avoid it here. Is it for sure? No.

What advice would you give to a young person today about how to have a career they can be proud of or a life they can be proud of? Well, I think it's very important to make sure that you do something in life that really interests you. My mother used to use this phrase, "Floats your boat." You want to do something that floats your boat or to use another one of my mother's phrases, " You want to get off. You want to do something where you get up out of bed in the morning with a bounce in your step." So I think that if your mother and father want you to be a lawyer and they're pushing you to be a lawyer and you don't want to be a lawyer, you want to be a policeman, be a policeman. Don't do what other people want you to do because it's very important to find a job, an occupation that you really love.