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. While this isn't the only factor that determines the outcome of a war, it is the only one that we can purposefully augment.
  • Strategy can fail, weather isn't under our control, latent power (i.e. socieconomic assets that can be fed into a military economy) isn't quickly realized into military power.
  • Specific mention of "resolve". This surely refers to the willingness of an army to fight. But this is an asset that is purposefully augmented in reality (i.e. propoganda, reducation/indoctrination, censorship, revisionism, etc). Should these be treated the same as an arms race?
• It seems like Mearsheimer started with the idea of using land army size as an independent variable and found a justification to fit that model.
• Similarly, the use of GNP to measure latent power (after 1960) is dubious.
  • Bombs are only Pareto efficient to manufacture when fighting for survival.
  • Public investment on the scale of great power arms races certainly crowds out private investment.
  • The military industrial complex has never been an open and competitive market, even outside of command economies.
  • No one would argue that the Cold War arms race was a wise investment of resources.
  • Furthermore, not all production can easily be converted for a military economy. Manufacturing certainly can, but office jobs and luxury services cannot.
  • The pre-1960 measure (iron and steel production) is both more grounded in reality and better substantiated by actual negotiated treaties and actual imposed sanctions.

Nuclear exceptionalism.

• The insistence on land armies taking primacy over navies makes sense to a degree. I think a more nuanced model would explore the relationship between a nation, its percieved or actual rivals, and the geographic features between the two. But models can begin simply.
• The insistence on land armies taking primacy over air forces (and space forces?) seems a product of currency bias.But nuclear weapons are treated as an exceptional category.
• Great powers must have nuclear weapons.
  • If a nuclear dominance emerged, that power would certainly be the global hegemon.
  • A distinction between first strike capacity, which can qualitatively differ so as to give an advantage to one power, and second strike capacity, which is a simple state.
    • Is any of that true? Are nuclear weapons truly incomparable to conventional military assets?

Western exceptionalism.

• A great power does not need to have capacity to defeat the strongest power, just enough capacity to weaken it.
  • But all great powers were European until the U.S. (1895).
    • How can this be so?
    • Mearsheimer repeatedly explores the existence of regional hegemons. So it need not be that a non-Western great power had to influence the Western great powers.
    • Mearsheimer tries to explain this away as being an effect of insurmountable geographic barriers until technology enabled Europeans to colonize. But what existed in the world prior to that?
    • Mearsheimer necessarily is saying that the world existed in a constant power vacuum until global colonization.

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.

• But Fearon was mostly concerned with land wars, perhaps its just that Fearon and Mearsheimer are interested in different kinds of war?
• Mearsheimer does not significantly explore causes of war, just posits that you cannot increase the probability of peaceful cooperation by increasing transparency. This is only important to emphasize the fear of anthropomorphized nations.

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