The Tragedy of "Tragedy of Great Power Politics" Politics

John Mearsheimer is a poor representative of IR theory.

Yesterday I argued that if a political science theory gets too popular outside the academy, we should think it probably sucks. The theories that do well among academics usually answer interesting technical questions about niche topics and institutions, while the theories that do well among the lay public usually try to explain everything that’s worth knowing about the world with just one or two variables. When we have a theory that tries to explain so much without meaningful complexity, we can’t delve into multifaceted real-world events in any great detail. That wouldn’t be a problem if academics were commentating simply to broaden everyone’s understanding of the world. But most people only think about politics in terms of discrete events and what to do about them, and most academics want their scholarship to have some influence over policy.

Today, I want to apply the “Tragedy of Political Science” theory to my sub-field, international relations. If most people know only a single IR theorist, it’s probably John Mearsheimer. Mearsheimer, despite working almost exclusively on grand theory, broke into the mainstream following the publication of his book, The Israel Lobby, with Stephen Walt in 2007, and his provocative article, “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,” in Foreign Affairs in 2014.

Mearsheimer is, as Van Jackson has recently put it, the “sole celebrity of international-relations theory.” His lecture on the 2014 Ukraine crisis has almost 30 million views on YouTube. He is a darling of every flank of the Quincy coalition: that “ostensibly odd alliance of domestic libertarians, balance-of-power realists and the anti-imperialist liberal left” which unites in promoting a U.S. foreign policy that forsakes global hegemony. He is admired by a sizable minority of establishmentarian foreign policy practitioners and the lot of right-wingers who fetishize “national greatness” and obsess over BAP-esque aesthetics—Greek statues, portraits of kings and queens, etc. (The front page of his website features a painting of himself dressed as Machiavelli.)

There is a confluence of reasons why Mearsheimer is so popular: his scholarship is genuinely impressive; he has over 50,000 citations on Google Scholar; he is extraordinarily patient with students and junior faculty (a friend of mine emails him incessantly and he replies with Chomsky-like diligence); his writing style is accessible; he has an electric stage presence; his theory is broad yet simple; he makes interesting and provocative claims; he does a great deal of self-promotion.

But Mearsheimer is not popular as a foreign policy commentator because he’s qualified to talk about foreign policy. Quite the contrary: The nature of Mearsheimer’s theory makes him far less qualified than most of his peers to talk about foreign policy issues; he’s increasingly seen as an anachronism within the discipline; and his real-world analysis hardly seems to have anything to do with his scholarly work.¹

To understand why, we have to get back to the basics of IR theory. What is “international relations,” anyway?

Politics Is Not Political Science

Most people think that IR is the same thing as foreign policy. Not so, however. Kenneth Waltz—the godfather of much modern IR theory—took pains to distinguish between the two in his aptly titled Theory of International Politics (we in the biz call it TIP):

A theory about foreign policy is a theory at the national level. It leads to expectations about the responses that dissimilar polities will make to external pressures. A theory of international politics bears on the foreign policies of nations while claiming to explain only certain aspects of them. It can tell us what international conditions national policies have to cope with. To think that a theory of international politics can in itself say how the coping is likely to be done is the opposite of the reductionist error.

Foreign policy is how a state conducts itself. IR refers to the broad patterns of how states relate to each other within the confines of the international system. If you want to know what Zimbabwe will do if South Africa invades tomorrow, you ask a foreign policy analyst who specializes in Zimbabwean politics. If you want to know what a small state like Zimbabwe typically does when it’s invaded by a larger and more powerful neighbor, you ask an IR theorist. IR theorists sometimes train analysts how to think, but they rarely have the case-specific knowledge that would make them qualified to answer highly technical foreign policy questions.

Waltz was very clear about this.

[A]ny theory of international politics can at best limp along, able to explain some matters of foreign policy while having to leave much of foreign policy aside. The scope of a theory is a measure of its power, but the fact that my Theory of International Politics does answer some questions about foreign policy with more or less precision—usually less—does not turn it into a dual theory.

[…]

The theory explains why states similarly placed behave similarly despite their internal differences. The explanation of states’ behavior is found at the international, and not at the national, level. That is why the theory is called a theory of international politics. In contrast, a theory of foreign policy would explain why states similarly placed in a system behave in different ways. Differences in behavior arise from differences of internal composition. Foreign policies are governmental products. A theory has to take the performance of governments as its object of explanation in order to be called a theory of foreign policy.

Waltz’s hard-and-fast distinction between IR and foreign policy isn’t taken as gospel within the discipline. New perspectives and research agendas have come along since Waltz was doing his work in the 1970s, and some IR theorists now work in specific enough domains that it’s possible for them to gain the type of subject matter expertise you need to speak authoritatively about particular foreign policy cases and issues. But for the type of grand theorizing done by Waltz—which is the tradition that Mearsheimer follows—IR is a very poor tool for analyzing foreign policy.

A Dying Breed

We can call the type of theory that Mearsheimer does “grand theory” or “paradigmatic theory.” This type of theory aims to explain the broad patterns of what happens in the international system, with particular attention to relations between the most powerful states. It doesn’t sweat the small stuff, and it can’t explain, for example, the behavior of non-state actors and international institutions. Following Waltz, Mearsheimer’s theory takes the structure of the international system and the distribution of power within it as the salient factors affecting international political outcomes, while less important factors like domestic politics and international norms and institutions can be ignored to keep the theory parsimonious. Mearsheimer places a high premium on parsimony: A good theory makes as few assumptions as necessary. For Mearsheimer, the magic number is five.²

1. The international system is anarchic. (There is no overarching authority to regulate relations between states.)

2. All great powers possess some offensive military capability.

3. States can never be certain about other states’ intentions.

4. Survival is the primary goal of great powers, where survival refers to territorial integrity and domestic political autonomy.

5. Great powers are rational actors. (“They are aware of their external environment and they think strategically about how to survive in it.”)

If you take all these assumptions together, the international system starts to look like a very dangerous place. All states must be concerned about their survival at all times, and all states seek to maximize their power because they can’t know what other states might want to do to them. If states can’t know each other’s intentions, and they don’t have any way to “call 911,” as Mearsheimer puts it, then the best way for a state to maximize its chances of survival is to aim to become a regional hegemon, or the domineering force in its region. The only reason states don’t aim for global hegemony, Mearsheimer reasons, is because it’s difficult to project military force across large bodies of water.

This way of theorizing used to be representative of a lot of the field, and it’s easy to see why. Mearsheimer’s theory tells us a lot based on just a few facts about the world: The international system is anarchic. There is no one to help you but yourself. States always want more. You can look at his later work, or the work of his graduate students, for some of the non-obvious conclusions these assumptions might lead us to: leaders usually don’t lie to other leaders, because there’s just not much trust in international politics anyway; regime change usually doesn’t work, because states have core interests that aren’t affected by what government is in charge; states sometimes continue to trade even when they go to war with each other, because there are conditions under which trading with the enemy bolsters their chances of survival; states still want nuclear weapons even when they have alliance guarantees, because they can’t trust their allies.

For a while, it was trendy in IR to come up with your own proprietary grand theory, train your graduate students to think the same way, and then fight viciously with other academics about whose theory is better.

But by the late 1990s and 2000s, the “paradigm wars” had become obsolete. Grand theories were no longer identities but simply tools that one could use to help answer relevant questions. Academics also started doing more technical and policy-relevant work in specific sub-sub- and sub-sub-sub-disciplines. We broadened our understanding of international relations without treating it like a sports match.

A few decades after the cessation of the paradigm wars, Mearsheimer is a rare grand theorist in a world of technicians. That’s great for his career as a pop political scientist—one must be able to commentate on a wide variety of issues to make it in the mass media—but he’s increasingly alone in the academy because that’s just not how we do theory anymore. We’ve picked all the low-hanging fruit. History is over. Now we’re just squabbling over the details.

Making It All Up

The problem with using Mearsheimer’s grand theory as a guide for foreign policy analysis is that it can’t take into account all the relevant details in any particular case. Domestic politics? Norms? Institutions? Ideology? Economics? Individual psychology? Even if Mearsheimer is correct that these things don’t have an appreciable impact on the broad pattern of outcomes in international affairs, that doesn’t mean they aren’t important for data point X or Y. If someone trusts you as an expert on X or Y, then a grand theory isn’t going to cut it.

You might get things right a lot of the time. Mearsheimer likes to say that good theories get it right about 75 percent of the time. But one in four wrong predictions is a lot, especially when you could be listening to the area studies specialists and subject matter experts instead.

Mearsheimer would probably be able to up his batting average if he deigned to consider some of the factors at play other than the distribution of power and the anarchic nature of the international system. But most of the time, for most issues, he just gives us a big, overconfident answer to a complicated empirical question.

Take the Ukraine war, which launched Mearsheimer into celebrity status in the first place. He says it was provoked by U.S.-led designs to admit Ukraine into NATO. But no serious analyst can possibly believe Ukraine was on the verge of joining NATO in 2022! If Putin was only concerned about NATO expansion, he could have simply kept supporting proxies in the Donbas, since it’s not feasible for NATO countries to promise to defend the borders of a country whose borders are under dispute or don’t exist.

You may think this is splitting hairs, but if someone can’t admit that the war in Ukraine is really, really complicated, then their opinion on Ukraine probably isn’t worth listening to. Most credible experts—the people who speak the languages, have been on the ground, and have dedicated their lives to studying the region—say it involves longstanding historical claims; Soviet-era grudges; security dilemmas and, yes, genuine fears about U.S. expansionism; Russian revanchism; complicated domestic politics in the NATO countries, Ukraine, and Russia; and Vladimir Putin’s idiosyncrasies. It’s not the type of thing that a grand theory can explain with one variable!

In other cases, Mearsheimer’s theory might offer us several plausible predictions for what we should expect to happen in a particular policy domain, and you just have to choose one of many reasonable-sounding options or make something up.

For instance: What should Mearsheimer have thought would happen in Europe after the Cold War? He wrote at the time that the United States would likely withdraw as long as no other state posed a threat of becoming a regional hegemon; several European states would emerge as major powers and acquire nuclear weapons; and Germany was “likely to reject the continued maintenance of NATO as we know it.” This was because, according to Mearsheimer, the “stopping power of water” prevents the United States from projecting force across the Atlantic Ocean and keeping the European states from getting into internecine security competitions. But, as Christopher Layne objected, why would a state as powerful as the United States not be perfectly capable of projecting force across water?

Or consider: Why shouldn’t the United States have expanded NATO, given Mearsheimer’s theory? You can easily imagine that the United States, hungry for power as Mearsheimer says all states are, would have wanted to dominate Europe and keep “the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” In fact, that’s what U.S. policymakers were saying at the time. As Mearsheimer’s colleague Paul Poast wrote on Twitter, Mearsheimer’s theory seems to offer a much better explanation for contemporary European security affairs than whatever Mearsheimer seems to think is going on.

Putting It All Together

This all doesn’t mean Mearsheimer’s analysis or policy prescriptions are wrong per se. As it happens, a lot of very smart people agree with him on a lot of different issues, including that NATO expansion was the permissive, although not immediate, cause of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Joshua Shifrinson, for one, has found good evidence that the United States promised Soviet leadership that NATO wouldn’t expand past East Germany after the Cold War.

But the point is: Shifrinson actually did the research! He approached an empirical question with empirical methods, rummaged through the archives, and dug up the documents! Mearsheimer doesn’t do that. When Mearsheimer’s analysis is correct, it’s often because he has good instincts or listens to the right people, not because he’s applying an appropriate theoretical framework to the case and using it to guide him as he weighs the evidence.

Now, I like John Mearsheimer. He’s probably had a greater impact on my intellectual trajectory than all but half a dozen people. He’s the second kindest and most humble celebrity I’ve ever met.³ When I spoke to him a few years ago and asked about his predictions for Europe after the Cold War, the first words out of his mouth were “I was wrong.”

But—as I recall another academic saying not long ago—it’s best to take Mearsheimer as a brilliant scholar and a cautionary tale about overreliance on theory. Oh, and leave foreign policy to the foreign policy analysts.

1. As it happens, I disagree with Mearsheimer’s theory and agree with much of his analysis and policy conclusions, although I think his scholarly work is much more intellectually valuable.

2. John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001), 30—31.

3. I met Dennis Kucinich and his wife a few months ago, and they jointly occupy slot number one.