When theory becomes an instrument of power again
John Mearsheimer starts from a truth often forgotten: no foreign policy is born in a vacuum. Even governments that claim to be pragmatic, even leaders who despise intellectuals, even chancelleries that praise the primacy of facts, always act within a vision of the world. Whether they call it doctrine, instinct, national interest or common sense, it remains a theory. And a wrong theory almost always produces a wrong policy.
This is where Mearsheimer places the strategic failure of the West after the Cold War. The United States believed that market expansion, the enlargement of liberal institutions and the spread of democracy would tame competition among great powers. It believed that China, by becoming richer, would become a responsible actor; that Russia would accept NATO’s expansion; that Europe could live on prosperity without seriously dealing with its own security; that the Middle East could be reshaped through wars, pressure and regime change. The result is before our eyes: history did not end. It returned.
Realism against the liberal religion
Mearsheimer’s realism is harsh because it begins with an elementary fact: the international system has no government above states. There is no final court capable of guaranteeing the survival of nations. Every state knows that others possess offensive capabilities, that intentions can change, that promises last only as long as it is convenient to respect them. This is why security comes first.
Liberal internationalism, by contrast, built its illusions on three pillars: economic interdependence, democratic peace and multilateral institutions. All are useful tools, but none is decisive when power, territory, survival and spheres of influence are at stake. Trade does not erase fear. Institutions do not abolish international anarchy. Democracy does not prevent states from pursuing power interests.
America’s mistake with China was born from this blindness. Washington encouraged Beijing’s integration into the world economy, thinking it would transform China. In reality, it helped strengthen it. Chinese wealth became industry, technology, navy, missiles, artificial intelligence, space capabilities and control over supply chains. It could hardly have gone otherwise: every great power turns prosperity into strength.
China and America’s great strategic mistake
For Mearsheimer, the United States made a historic strategic error: it helped its future main rival become powerful enough to challenge it. Not because China was communist, but because every great power, once it reaches a certain critical mass, seeks to dominate its own region and reduce the presence of outside powers.
Beijing cannot indefinitely accept American bases, fleets, alliances and military systems along its coasts. From China’s perspective, East Asia is what the Western Hemisphere is for the United States: the vital space of national security. China wants to be secure in the South China Sea, in the Taiwan Strait, and in its relations with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Australia. To achieve that, it must limit American power in the region.
This is where the memory of the “century of humiliation” returns. A weak China was penetrated, divided and subordinated by foreign powers. A strong China no longer wants to live in that condition. Taiwan is therefore not only a national symbol. It is a strategic question. As long as the island remains outside Beijing’s control and inside the American containment architecture, China will continue to see a vital vulnerability in its security system.
Ukraine and NATO: the Monroe Doctrine seen from Moscow
The same logic applies to Russia. Mearsheimer does not absolve Moscow and does not offer a moral justification, but he proposes a strategic explanation. If the United States would not accept Russian or Chinese troops in Mexico, Cuba or Canada, why should Russia have accepted NATO’s expansion all the way to Ukraine?
George Kennan and other realists had foreseen it: NATO enlargement would sooner or later produce a serious crisis with Russia. Ukraine, for Moscow, is not just any country. It is strategic depth, historical frontier, military space, imperial memory and geopolitical hinge between Russia and Europe. Bringing it into the Western orbit meant altering Russia’s security balance.
Realism reasons in this way: when a great power perceives a threat in its vital space, it reacts. It does not matter whether the language used is legal, moral or ideological. Beneath the surface remain the classical categories of power: borders, depth, alliances, bases, missiles and military balance.
Security against prosperity
The decisive contrast between liberalism and realism lies here. Liberals believe that shared prosperity reduces the incentive for war. Realists answer that when prosperity and security come into conflict, security almost always wins.
1914 remains the most instructive example. Europe was deeply interdependent, yet it plunged into war. Why? Because Germany feared that time was working against it. When a state believes the future will be hostile, it may decide to act before the balance of power worsens. This is the tragic logic of preventive war, which Mearsheimer also applies to the Ukrainian crisis.
This is an uncomfortable lesson for contemporary Europe, raised in the belief that markets, law and institutions were enough to neutralize conflict. But geoeconomics has now absorbed economics itself. Semiconductors, energy, data, digital networks, artificial intelligence, raw materials, underwater cables, ports and military technologies have all returned inside strategic competition.
Geoeconomics as battlefield
After 1991, the West lived through the unipolar moment as if it were a suspension of history. Globalization seemed a technical, almost natural process. Value chains were built according to efficiency, cost and profit. But once the system became multipolar again, with the United States, China and Russia engaged in open competition, the economy ceased to be neutral.
Today, a semiconductor factory is a strategic infrastructure. A gas pipeline is a political weapon. A digital platform is an instrument of influence. A battery, a port, a telecommunications network, a satellite or a rare earth deposit becomes part of national security.
Economists look at growth. Realists look at survival. In today’s world these two logics no longer coincide. And when they diverge, states choose security even at the cost of sacrificing efficiency, trade and profit.
Europe under the American umbrella
One of Mearsheimer’s sharpest arguments concerns Europe. He recalls that postwar European peace was not born only from European integration. It was born first of all from the American presence. The United States froze the rivalries among Germany, France and the United Kingdom, guaranteed the continent’s security and allowed Western Europe to focus on prosperity without fully confronting the question of power.
The European Union prospered because someone else guaranteed the military order. First NATO, then the common market. First survival, then economics. This dependence, tolerable during the Cold War and comfortable during the unipolar moment, has now become a strategic problem. If Washington concentrates its energies on China, Europe discovers that it has neither a true common defense nor a complete strategic sovereignty.
Drones, artificial intelligence and the permanence of power
On technology, Mearsheimer avoids easy enthusiasm. Drones, artificial intelligence, digital networks and new weapons change the way wars are fought, but they do not change the deep structure of international politics. Small powers can resist better, strike farther and make aggression more costly. But the hierarchy of the system remains dominated by great powers.
Since the nineteenth century, the only technology that has truly transformed relations among great states has been nuclear weapons. Nuclear power imposed caution, limited direct confrontation and made total war between superpowers unthinkable. Everything else changes tactics, timing, costs and instruments, but not the fundamental fact: states seek power because they fear for their security.
Trump, America and strategic dispersion
His judgment on recent American policy is also revealing. Some strategic documents from the Trump administration appeared close to realist logic: priority to China, centrality of the Western Hemisphere, use of Asian allies, selective containment. But Mearsheimer distinguishes between writing a strategy and actually applying it.
The United States, even when it identifies the main rival, tends to disperse energy in secondary wars, regime changes, ideological campaigns and useless interventions. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela: the catalogue of errors is long. For a realist, a great power should concentrate its resources on the decisive adversary and not exhaust itself in strategic peripheries.
The tragic return of the real world
The conclusion is bitter but clear. The world has not entered a post-geopolitical age. It only lived through a brief parenthesis in which the West confused its own supremacy with a universal law. Now competition among great powers is once again at the center: the United States against China, Russia against NATO, Europe searching for a security it does not possess, the Middle East crossed by regional rivalries and external powers.
Realism offers no consolation. It does not promise perpetual peace, it does not believe in redemption through markets, it does not imagine that international law can replace the balance of power. But precisely for this reason it remains indispensable. Not because it makes the world better, but because it helps us avoid misunderstanding it.
Mearsheimer in Athens does not invite us to love power politics. He invites us to recognize it. China challenges the United States because an emerging great power does not accept regional subordination. Russia reacts to NATO enlargement because it sees Ukraine as a decisive point of its own security. Europe still depends on America because it built prosperity without building power. Globalization becomes economic warfare because, when security enters the scene, the market ceases to be a neutral place and becomes a battlefield.
History, in short, had not ended. It had merely been repressed. And realism, with its severe language, now returns to remind us that nations do not live on declared intentions, but on power, fear, interests and capabilities.
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