The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (ISBN: 9780393349276) was written by John J. Mearsheimer in 2001, with an updated 2nd edition published in 2014.

Mearsheimer posits that international conflict is best described as being driven by structural incentives based on a fundamental fear of other nations and a desire to survive as a nation at all costs. Nations are used as an anthropomorphized unit that itself feels these incentives and anxieties. Because this is how the world is best described, and because (as the model states) we fear other nations behaving that way, all nations ought to behave this way too.

Fundamentally comes down to relative balance of power. Balance of power is largely balance of military assets. Specifically land armies.

Great powers must have nuclear weapons.

A great power does not need to have capacity to defeat the strongest power, just enough capacity to weaken it.

The ultimate aggressive strategies for survival are:

The ultimate defensive strategies for survival are:

The predicted strategy for China is:

Mearsheimer emphasizes the parallels between his offensive realism and Waltz's defensive realism. He agrees with the core structuralism (i.e. zero sum game given anarchy in which goal is survival). Mearsheimer takes issue with idea of status quo powers (i.e. either ons great power or a cartel of great powers that benefit from the current balance of power, so they flex offensive and defensive power to maintain it). He believes that great powers always stand to gain from instability, so always aim to destabilize the status quo.

Mearsheimer disagrees with rationalist explanations for war. Tsarist Russia was not stronger than Napoleonic France; Viet Nam was not stronger than the United States.


My thoughts

The simplification of balance of power down to land army size is highly suspect.

Similarly, the use of GNP to measure latent power (after 1960) is dubious.

How can Mearsheimer claim that all great powers were European until the U.S. and Japanese rise in the 1890s?

Mearsheimer's disagreements with rationalist explanations for war are interesting. But Fearon was mostly concerned with land wars, while Mearsheimer seems mostly concerned with wars of conquest (genocide?). Perhaps its just that Fearon and Mearsheimer are interested in different kinds of war?


See also

Epistemic superimposition: the war in Ukraine and the poverty of expertise in international relations theory


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TheTragedyOfGreatPowerPolitics (last edited 2024-01-02 15:41:49 by DominicRicottone)