The Fundamental Flaw in John Mearsheimer’s Reasoning

My father was in the RAF at the end of WWII in Egypt and Crete especially. I remember asking him about the various troops. When I asked him what he thought about the US military, he said. “They are very innocent.” I was surprised. By that he meant missing a deeper dimension of guile compared to other nationalities. I think of it again and ask myself - is John Mearsheimer innocent in some way or is it just that his International Relations (IR) model is flawed or both?

You may ask me how I can dare to question such an IR celebrity? I have taught in IR departments and written and engaged much with EU and World Trade in my previous professional incarnation. Even then it is crystal clear that IR theorists presume to know what is done in the Capitol though it does not actually help us. People do agree with you because you are stating the obvious truth at times. You are honest and point to what is actually happening and should be commended for that.

But you can be right for the wrong reasons. Some knew Enron was in trouble but did not get the reasons correct for example. I agree with Professor Mearsheimer on a whole range of issues from Russia to China and Israel. However I would argue there is a fundamental flaw in his international realist position as he believes it. This arguably leads to conclusions that are suspect. In a globalising world of powerful networks, the world is not comprehensible by merely looking at ostensible national interests and relations between countries. I will just refer to your talk on 30 July 2025 with Tucker Carlson.

You may be described as innocent, they are not

The Distinguished Professor argues that the entire foreign policy cohort of the US made a mistake about China. They also made a mistake about Ukraine. They also made a mistake about Israel. Presumably if we go back to Afghanistan the mistakes continue and so on. We end up in an absurd position that Mearsheimer is arguing that they all just get it wrong. The professionals miscalculated or were naïve. When one examines what he claims, it appears disingenuous. The potential disingenuity of the argument should be challenged. Just take his argument on China’s rise to superpowerdom.

He said this about the obvious danger from a realist perspective of creating a strong China.

“…but the foreign policy establishment in the United States almost to a person including hawks like Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger said that China can grow economically. We can integrate it into institutions like the World Trade Organisation and so forth and so on and it will become a democracy and we will all live happily ever after. Right, so what we did is we helped fuel China’s phenomenal growth between 1990 and 2017 when it became a great power. You want to remember that when the Cold War ends and then the Soviet Union collapses in December of 1991 we enter the unipolar moment which by definition means there is one great power on the planet. That’s the United States of America. By 2017, there’s three great powers on the planet. And one of those great powers is a peer competitor. And we helped create that peer competitor on the foolish belief that if we turned China into a rich country it would become a liberal democracy and it would become a friend of the United States and it would allow us to run international politics the way we did during unipolarity. This is a remarkably catastrophic decision.”

To avoid an overly-long article, let me pass over the other many mistakes, errors and so on that he finds in US foreign policy. Instead of criticising his view which is based on incomprehension of a consistent policy I will put forward my hypothesis of a consistent explanation of consistent policy.

The two hawks he mentioned envisaged global governance by hi-tech networks including a range of Swiss nodal global legal systems and think-tanks like the WTO and WEF. Kissinger wrote about the AI future. Brzezinski wrote about the technetronic society. Both were globalists. Globalists are willing to sacrifice national interest for future global systems. Both supported China. Thus the International Realist theory became obsolete when allegiance is to a higher goal than the state whose interest you claim to represent. Many commentators have noted the lack of commitment of major players to their own people. That national interest is now an anachronistic assumption. Their support of China created a prototype technetronic society. Undermining US hegemony creates a stepping stone for transnational corporate, Deep State and international institutions to consolidate global governance systems. There was no belief in a future democracy in China in any way we recognise it. The policy arguably emerged from the translation of the British Empire through US power to constitute a New World Order as envisioned by H.G. Wells and instituted by Churchill and others. Such an approach also explains US focus on the crux of Israel, as the Empire had done, as well as Crimea and Afghanistan and so on. When you say that you could not understand how the West was exaggerating the power of the Soviet Union, maybe we should consider how the British Empire regarded containment of Russia as critical for global control. It is nothing to do with what Russians are doing or not or intending. Similarly, the mystery of the disappearing opposition to NATO expansion in the US that Mearsheimer notes is not a mystery. The expansion is part of a globalist agenda. When a supposedly North Atlantic organisation which was defensive expands thousands of miles from there, something is afoot. China in its tech-tyrannous way is unfolding the futurist dystopia the Bolsheviks would have enjoyed and the ‘English-speaking world’ facilitated.

If you look back to some of the early work by US globalists that preceded NATO, you will see mention of preparing global relations for the machine. The out-of-date reference to the Atlantic is more comprehensible in terms of the ambition that underlies The New Atlantis of Francis Bacon and the start of a movement towards global scientocracy.

Professor Mearsheimer, you cannot just believe that these men and women were dumb, doing strange things that made no sense and that you can say all the time that you don’t get what’s going on here. You cannot keep saying it should not be so. Maybe you don’t get what is going on. You say you were right about China. You were but missed the strategy and the lies. You were right and they were lying. But I would suggest that your characterisation of an entire-establishment-error-era is an error. They were perfectly consistent strategically but the International Relations scholars have largely ignored what was happening, perhaps because their paradigm is so outdated or the others get paid to look the other way. Or maybe they are just innocent as a dove.

There could of course be other policies such as that of Fabius Maximus that inspired the Fabians with their symbol of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. That nice Mr. Blair was a Fabian. What a shame for his legacy he made silly ‘mistakes’! You knew he was nice because he had a suit and smiled. You know he is sincere. Luckily enough he got the Brits out of Northern Ireland in time for the destructive international interventionism and adventurism. Loves the oul’ peace he does. Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Iraq interventions for the oul’ peace. North Atlantic, the geography books must have changed since my time. What a boon that those old Irish nationalists also are now globalists as well with a bit more US investment leaving behind all that traditional stuff generations fought for. Isn’t it great all these great minds knew how to send their people to die around the world to save good old Britain for their people? Wasn’t it a mystery how many neo-cons used be Trotskyists?

The weakening of IR realism

You are really an IR realist Professor, I am a real-world realist really and I suggest my view on this reality-assumption is more coherent, more comprehensible and more rational with more predictive power. You cannot have a theory which is only right so long as the conditions are right but leaves you scratching your head beyond the old context. When you keep saying ‘you would think’ I am thinking you would think that. With great respect your rightness is wrong. You keep being right for the wrong reasons. You were right about US responsibility for war in Ukraine but missed the strategic continuity that led there. You believe that the hawkish, forever-war establishment want what is best for the US and intends to spread liberal democracy when they make enemies, lose wars, cause instability, wreck democracy and make the US weak economically and strategically. You think the concatenation of policy-decisions is based on some broader ideal rather than concentration on attaining global strategic control for technocratic and managerial elites. You see it as an inexplicable, national tactical or strategic error not obtaining what you assume is its aim under your assumptions rather than being another global strategy which is successful according to its globalist objectives and which therefore is explicable. When you come to Israel you claim the US support of Israel and invasion of Iran has nothing to do with American interests. Do you not notice the pattern? Virtually no foreign policy, of the past generation or two, furthered American interests, by which I mean the interests of the people. It all did further transnational, global, corporate interests however. Similarly when you argue that even the Israel lobby is doing stuff not in the interests of Israel, the argument in favour of the lobby being the determining factor is weak.

Your theory of US national interests being relevant but being pursued by a persistent blundering posse of gung-ho do-gooders blinded by their own optimistic democratising desires is even contradicted by your own analysis of the Israeli position. It makes no sense to support China nor Israel in the way the US does as you say. It contradicts your own views and is not explained away by mere lobbying. Come to think of it ‘innocent’ means not guilty and after a certain point, your decades of involvement do not let you off the hook. Indeed, your righteousness against an imaginary mosaic of mistakes without a coherent explanation innocently suits perpetuation of a barely camouflaged global-coup process you have missed. When your theory fails to explain what is happening, what has happened and what will happen the answer is not to be found in presenting your astonishment at the failure of players to adhere thereto - especially when the real theory with explanatory power is being ignored. Your future is still realist, being about US and China with the former benefiting from mass immigration. You think there is an absence of world power whilst there is an incredibly expanding network of distributed decentralised power shifting from an ethical international law pretension to a non-ethical mere ‘rules-based system.’ You think the foolish use of power now will transmogrify into smart power. It will be smart power but through hi-tech networks planned in the mid-19^th century. National interest and its maximisation have long been abandoned by the men and women ‘without souls’ or allegiance. Your being right on the outcome without understanding the obvious explanation and without influencing the players or the play must make you ask why and examine your simplistic idea of consistent misapprehension motivated by naïve idealism.

My father used use an old motto which comes from the mid-19^th century when the modern world was made. Love many. Trust few. Always paddle your own canoe. Today the national canoe is sunk or controlled remotely. Just relying on what you said in this interview, especially about China leads one to wonder about a misrepresentation. In law one can have an innocent, negligent or fraudulent misrepresentation. Blair and Bush were in the latter category. Your representations are generally true as far as I can see but your identification of the foundations are innocent. Innocent representations based on outdated assumptions and filled in with large fillers of incomprehension are less than we deserve. All I would ask is that the old paradigm is re-examined.

Otherwise the people of the West (whose culture is being overthrown through the effects of illegal elite adventurism masquerading as necessity) will have to hear the same old stuff about it being a mistake, unwise or (God forbid) too idealistic. That you are telling them that what they are seeing on the news is wrong and ill-conceived and not in their interests is obviously true. That the people who are responsible do not know this is mistaken on your part. Everything is aimed at securing global government whilst reducing existing hegemons and trialling devastating new control-technology to be applied to the people of the world in the new state of the world.