John Mearsheimer discusses US grand strategy, offensive realism, and the shifting global balance of power
Glenn Diesen interviews political scientist John Mearsheimer on grand strategy, the rise of China, the Ukraine war, and US military overextension.
Summary
Glenn Diesen interviews John Mearsheimer, professor at the University of Chicago, on the theory and practice of grand strategy, with particular focus on how the United States should navigate a rapidly shifting international order. Mearsheimer defines grand strategy as the alignment of a state's vital interests with the military means available to protect them, and argues that for most of American history Europe was the primary area of concern outside the Western Hemisphere — a ranking now reversed by the rise of China. He contends that the United States made a catastrophic error by pursuing NATO expansion after the Cold War, a policy that was never genuinely aimed at containing Russia but that inevitably drove Russia toward China, Iran, and North Korea. Mearsheimer argues that US military involvement in the Persian Gulf against Iran has significantly weakened American conventional deterrence in East Asia, potentially to China's short-term advantage, while warning that defeats in both Iran and Ukraine will not reduce America's raw power but will severely damage its ability to project that power and win allies. He closes by warning that Japan now faces simultaneous deteriorating relations with Russia, China, and North Korea at precisely the moment the United States has pivoted away from the region, raising the prospect of nuclear proliferation and broader instability across multiple theaters simultaneously.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Defining Grand Strategy
Glenn Diesen: Everyone now seems to recognize that we live in somewhat historical times. The international distribution of power has shifted from the West to the East very fast, which is quite remarkable for having occurred during peacetime. The unipolar moment is over, and on a greater time frame one can argue that a period of five hundred years has come to an end — since the European maritime powers reconnected the world in the early sixteenth century and, to different degrees, organized the world under their administration ever since.
The response in the West, and especially in Europe, to these massive ongoing shifts in the international distribution of power tends to be very narrow, knee-jerk reactions. They don't really reflect much upon how the world has changed, how our position in the world is changing, and they don't really take a step back and assess what our options are and what our objectives should be to maximize security and prosperity. In short, there's an absence of strategic thinking at a time when we need it more than ever before.
What I really want to discuss with you today is, if we take a few steps back and begin with grand strategy — what is grand strategy, and what do you see as the main challenges in terms of aligning potentially unlimited aspirations with limited means?
John Mearsheimer: Let me define what I mean by grand strategy, because as you know well, Glenn, you can define grand strategy in different ways and there's no such thing as a correct definition. Definitions are just definitions and you can define grand strategy any way you want. My view is that the best definitions are those that are most useful for helping you make sense of the world. You could define the term "great power" to include Iran, and the question you have to ask yourself is whether you think that makes sense — and I don't think it does. That's not to underestimate the power that Iran has, but it's not a great power. So I would want a definition of great power that included countries like the United States, China, and Russia but excluded countries like Iran. The basic point I want to make clear to viewers is that there's no such thing as an approved solution as to what the definition of grand strategy is.
When the Vietnam War ended in 1975 — which is when I was entering graduate school — there was all of a sudden a huge interest in the subject of grand strategy. It had not been a subject talked about much in academia up until the mid-1970s, and then a whole cottage industry grew around that subject. So in a very important way I was present at the creation, and we came up with what I thought was a quite useful definition of what grand strategy was at the time, and I still think it's a quite useful definition, especially if you think about how great powers act.
What I'll do is quickly lay out my definition of grand strategy, and to make it as clear as possible I'll contrast it with how I would define foreign policy — because I distinguish between grand strategy and foreign policy.
My definition of grand strategy is that it's all about balancing a state's most important foreign policy goals — to put that in slightly different terms, its vital interests — with the military means it has available to achieve those goals. So you have to first define what the most important foreign policy goals, the vital interests, are, and then you have to think about what military means you have to protect those goals. Foreign policy, for me, doesn't discriminate among your goals. You can have lots of different foreign policy goals. What I'm saying is that grand strategy is all about looking at a state's vital interests.
What exactly do I mean by that? The question is: what areas of the world are worth fighting and dying for? Where are you willing to expend blood and iron? Those are the vital interests. And to get way ahead of myself — in the case of the United States, the vital interests outside of the Western Hemisphere have historically been Europe, East Asia, and the Persian Gulf. Those were the three areas where almost everybody agreed we should be willing to expend blood and iron, that we should treat as vital interests. But foreign policy deals with interests all over the world.
With regard to the military means, you have to make all sorts of choices about what kind of means you want when protecting those vital interests. Diplomacy is another means, sanctions is another means. But what people of my persuasion argued back in the day — and most of us still do — is that you want to look at the kind of military forces that you would build to protect your vital interests. You have to choose between land power, air power, and sea power. And then you have to think about how much you're going to rely on nuclear weapons versus conventional weapons — or to put it in slightly different terms, how much you're going to rely on nuclear deterrence versus conventional deterrence.
So for me, grand strategy is all about figuring out what a state's vital interests are, what the most important areas of the world are — those areas where you're willing to fight and die — and then what kind of military forces you build to defend your interests in those areas.
There's one question I've left out of this analysis which I'll turn to now. I said you have to identify those areas of the world that are of great importance. The question I left out is: what are the threats to those areas, or threats to those interests? Because the particular nature of the threat determines what kinds of military forces you build. So when you boil this all down, there are three big questions you ask if you're doing grand strategy. What are your vital interests? What are the threats to those vital interests? And then what kind of forces do you build to protect your interests around the world?
That's the basic framework that a number of people I hung around with starting in the mid-1970s employed as a definition of grand strategy. It's not an approved solution, but I think it's a very useful definition for thinking about the subject. And as I tried to make clear, it's different from asking what a state's foreign policy is — because if you're talking about a state's foreign policy, you're talking about all of its goals, all of its interests, not just its vital interests. And you're talking about all of the instruments it has available, not just the military instrument, which is what I'm focusing on when I talk about grand strategy.
America's Vital Interests and Strategic Priorities
Glenn Diesen: That was actually my next question, because the United States has to start making more priorities, especially as the distribution of power shifts. It has to focus on and prioritize some things above others. To use your words — what are the priorities for the United States in terms of what it's willing to fight and die for? Is it security, or is it its position and power in the world? At the moment the US does face challenges to its power — from China, from Russia, and of course the Middle East is also seemingly being reorganized. How do you see the challenge for the United States in terms of prioritizing what to focus on? There will always be tradeoffs given limited resources, and the need is to prioritize since we can't do everything. Not necessarily what the US should do, but what are the dilemmas it's facing?
John Mearsheimer: Let me tell you what I think the four areas of the world are that the United States really cared about and had to think about, and then we can talk a little bit about the threats to those areas.
There is no question that the most important area of the world for any great power is its backyard, its neighborhood, the surrounding area. In the American case, the Western Hemisphere is the most important area of the world — there's just no question about that. It is our backyard. Nevertheless, because the United States is a regional hegemon in the Western Hemisphere, it's usually taken for granted, so people don't talk much about that. What people do talk about are the areas outside of the Western Hemisphere that the United States should care about because that's where its vital interests are located.
Historically, the two most important areas have been Europe and East Asia. The reason is that's where the other great powers are. The United States has always cared about those areas where there are other great powers, because smaller powers really can't challenge the United States in any meaningful way. If you look at Europe, that's where you saw countries like Napoleonic France, Imperial Germany, Nazi Germany — it's where the heart of the Soviet threat was located, in Eastern Europe. And then East Asia mattered greatly because of Japan mainly, and today it matters greatly because of China.
It's very important to understand that for the United States, over the course of its history going back to when it got its independence in 1783 and ramping forward to about 2017, Europe was the number one area outside of the Western Hemisphere and East Asia was always number two. The reason is that the great powers in Europe were more powerful than the great power in East Asia, which was Japan. You remember that even though the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, we had a Europe-first policy — because Nazi Germany was a greater threat to the United States than Imperial Japan, because Nazi Germany was much more powerful.
After 2017, for the first time in our history, the most important area for the United States outside of the Western Hemisphere is East Asia, because China is by far the most powerful great power on the planet besides the United States. The Russians, the Chinese, the Americans — those are the three great powers. But the Russians are the weakest of the three. China is really a peer competitor of the United States in almost every sense of that term. So for the first time in American history, East Asia has become the most important area and Europe is of secondary importance.
The third area I haven't talked about is the Persian Gulf. This is not the whole Middle East, just the Persian Gulf. The Persian Gulf has been a very important area for the United States for most of the twentieth century and up till today because that's where the oil is, and oil is such an important resource for making the international economy work. So the United States has always cared greatly about who controls the oil in the Persian Gulf.
So when we talk about grand strategy, there are four areas of the world that matter. First, the Western Hemisphere. Second, Europe. Third, East Asia. And then the Persian Gulf.
Now, the big debate that has always taken place in the realm of grand strategy is how do you think about the developing world or the rest of the world? Does Africa matter to the United States in terms of its basic vital interests? The answer that someone like me would give is no. What about Southwest Asia — India, Pakistan, that region — during the Cold War? Was that an area worth fighting for? The answer was no, and I would argue the answer is still no today. It's hard for me to imagine the United States expending blood and iron in Southwest Asia.
The best example to illustrate this is the Vietnam War, and to compare how Americans thought during the Vietnam War from a grand strategic point of view with how they think today about Southeast Asia. During the Vietnam War, basically all the realists argued that it was remarkably foolish for the United States to fight in Vietnam. It made no strategic sense at all. Virtually all of the realists of the day — including people like Ken Waltz, Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan, just to name a few — were adamantly opposed to the Vietnam War because it was in Southeast Asia and the Soviet Union was not physically located in Southeast Asia. In fact, the Soviet Union was located in Northeast Asia. So when the United States fought the Korean War in Northeast Asia, which is right next door to the Soviet Union, everybody understood that Korea was a strategically important area and it made strategic sense for the United States to contain the Soviet Union there. But that logic did not apply in Southeast Asia.
However, if you look at Southeast Asia today, because of the rise of China and the fact that China is the state the United States cares most about in East Asia, you now have a situation where the United States considers all of East Asia a vital interest and considers Chinese hegemony in East Asia a threat to American national interest. So you can see that you have to think long and hard about what areas of the world you consider to be vital interests, then think about what the threats are to those interests, and then think about what kind of military forces to build to deal with those threats.
The Challenge of Forming Grand Strategy Amid Political Fragmentation
Glenn Diesen: It seems that historically, if you want a successful grand strategy, you need strong political consensus at home, because everyone has to kind of agree so it's consistent. But often this requires slow developments in the world so politicians can adjust, and of course political cohesion as well. We see the opposite happening now — the world is spinning very fast and political cohesion at home is fragmenting, not just in the US but in Europe as well. As a result, how can the US form a clear, successful grand strategy? Should the US prioritize Europe? For some, that's what we've traditionally done and it can still be a force amplifier. Others are saying no, they're holding us back, costing a lot of resources, and it comes with the further cost of pushing the Russians toward the Chinese. These different options haven't really been settled because the world is changing fast and political polarization isn't helping either. What seems to be grand strategy could shift in an election. So to what extent is this a challenge, or do you see the distribution of power eventually imposing grand strategy on the politicians?
John Mearsheimer: A couple of points. One is there are a variety of grand strategies that you can choose among, which we've not talked about, and there's no such thing as a final agreement on what American grand strategy should be.
To illustrate this — one of the four grand strategies that the United States can choose among is isolationism. Isolationism says that there is no area of the world outside of the United States where it's worth fighting and dying. It's very important to understand that. In the run-up to World War II, the United States was a thoroughly isolationist country. Franklin D. Roosevelt could not move the United States away from isolationism in any meaningful way until Pearl Harbor happened on December 7th, 1941. All sorts of Americans thought that what happens in Europe is of no strategic importance to the United States. I want to contrast this with foreign policy — this is not to say that isolationists believed the United States didn't have interests in Europe or in East Asia where Imperial Japan was on a rampage. It did have interests, but those interests were not vital interests, and therefore most Americans believed it was not worth expending blood and iron to fight against Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan.
Just think about that. The United States is separated from the rest of the world by two giant moats. It's very hard for any country in Europe or East Asia to get at the United States. Launching an amphibious operation across the Pacific Ocean or across the Atlantic Ocean is not in the cards. And when you marry that to the fact that the United States has nuclear weapons today, you can make a very powerful case for isolationism.
This has great relevance for the rise of China, because the question from a grand strategic point of view is how do you think about the possibility that China will dominate East Asia the way the United States dominates the Western Hemisphere? There are many of our friends who believe that the United States should not contest China in East Asia, should not try to contain China. If China becomes a regional hegemon, that's no big deal. How you think about the China threat is all about grand strategy — it's all about the question of whether you think China dominating East Asia is a threat to America's vital interests. Those people who argue that it's not basically reflect the isolationist view of grand strategy.
Now there's another whole group of people — and I'm included in that camp — who believe it's important that the United States not allow China to dominate East Asia the way the United States dominates the Western Hemisphere. The United States, in my story, does not want a rival regional hegemon. But that's not a settled issue, and it's very important to understand that.
All this is to say that what is the proper grand strategy is really never settled once and for all. Let me give you one more example to highlight this point that will be dear to your heart as a European. When the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union pulled out of Eastern Europe, the Warsaw Pact dissolved and then the Soviet Union itself broke apart. The question that immediately came to the fore is: what should the United States do with NATO? What should happen to the American military presence in Europe?
There were really two schools of thought — put isolationism aside, that was not an issue at the time. One school of thought is commonly called offshore balancing, and it's a view that I share. The offshore balancing grand strategy says that the United States should only keep troops in Europe if there is a country that threatens to dominate all of Europe — to become a regional hegemon — that the local great powers cannot contain. In other words, the United States had to stay in Europe after World War II because the Soviet Union was a threat to dominate all of Europe, and there were no Western European countries in the late 1940s and early 1950s who could come together to contain the Soviet Union. So the United States had to come onshore and balance or contain the Soviet Union. But then the Soviet Union went away. So my view was the United States should pull out of Europe. There's no threat to our vital interests in my story.
Now most of my fellow students of grand strategy argued differently. Their strategy was called selective engagement. They believe Europe is important, just like I do, but they believe that the United States should remain in Europe to serve as a pacifier. The argument among the selective engagers is that it's in America's vital interest to keep the peace in Europe. And of course this was an argument that resonated with the European elites — and by the way, it resonated with the Soviet Union and later on with Russian leaders, because they understood that the Americans did serve as a pacifier.
I was not in favor of the selective engagement grand strategy. I was interested in pulling the Americans out of Europe, bringing them back home, spending less money on defense, and spending more money on the American public. So you can see how different selective engagement and offshore balancing are when it comes to dealing with Europe. And this all gets back to the question of what you think America's vital interests are and what you think the threats to those vital interests are. The selective engagement people believe peace in Europe is a vital interest. The offshore balancers like me — I'm not saying I'm interested in seeing war break out in Europe, but peace in Europe is not a vital interest to the United States in my opinion. What's of vital interest to the United States in my opinion is to make sure that no country — be it the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Imperial Germany, or Napoleonic France — dominates all of Europe the way we dominate the Western Hemisphere.
So you get a feel for the different ways that people think about grand strategy. And my final point — I apologize for being long-winded here — is that we've talked about isolationism, offshore balancing, and selective engagement. The fourth grand strategy is global hegemony. That's a grand strategy that says every area of the world matters to the United States. Just think about the term global hegemony — every area of the world matters to the United States. We don't prioritize. We see threats everywhere and we build military forces to deal with every potential threat that might be out there. And of course that's the polar opposite of isolationism. It's a strategy that I have long argued is deeply flawed, and that's why I favor offshore balancing. But since the Cold War ended, the selective engagers have provided by and large the most popular grand strategy among the people in my crowd.
The Costs of Hegemony and the Unipolar Moment
Glenn Diesen: I take your point that with grand strategy you have to prioritize and recognize dilemmas. It's fine and well to be a pacifier in Europe, but if one chooses to do this, it comes at the expense of fewer resources at home to rebuild or strengthen the US, and the pivot to Asia will be less feasible. But let me ask about something you mentioned — you do think that the US should contest China's attempt to be a regional hegemon in East Asia, and indeed this is also built into your theory of offensive realism, arguing that states are power maximizers, so if they can achieve hegemony for security they will go for it.
But I was wondering whether it could be in the benefit of the United States to have some kind of Chinese hegemony in the East. Some would argue that the fall of the Soviet Union — that hegemony — had a huge cost for the United States. Your colleague and friend Stephen Walt was making the point, I forget which book it was, that the main problem for the US was that after the Cold War it was essentially like a five-hundred-pound gorilla with no constraints on itself. The problem being it would punch in every direction, exhaust its resources, and make a lot of enemies.
I'm thinking there is some point to this — that without a balance, to be a hegemon can also be a curse. If the US can do anything, it means it can be everywhere. It doesn't have to prioritize, it doesn't have to engage in much strategic thinking, it can make a lot of mistakes and absorb the cost. It has an incentive to embrace ideologies of being a benign hegemon — one that has to intervene anywhere to save other peoples. It's easy to have ideologies of civilizing missions or humanitarian interventionism. The military option will always be available to transform the world, which gives rise to a class of hawks who argue for war as the solution to everything. If the whole periphery has to be managed, you would see the core being drained, diplomacy beginning to falter, lack of fiscal discipline, the moral compass falling apart. Overall it would exhaust resources and incentivize collective balancing by other powers. Wouldn't it be an argument that hegemony itself has not been great for the United States? That if states do not constrain themselves, wouldn't it be in the US interest to be constrained — to not be the only great power superpower in the world?
John Mearsheimer: I know exactly what you're saying, but let's be clear here. The Soviet Union was not a hegemon. The United States stayed in Europe after World War II ended for the purposes of containing the Soviet Union. And of course the Soviet Union was contained — it never dominated all of Europe, it was not a regional hegemon. My argument is you don't want China to be a regional hegemon. My argument is the best situation for the United States is to be the only regional hegemon on the planet.
Now I think the issue that Steve Walt raised, and that you're raising, is a somewhat different issue. That is that the United States needed some rival great powers — not a rival regional hegemon, but rival great powers like the Soviet Union, or like China and Russia today — to prevent it from spinning out of control. The key point here is that once the Soviet Union breaks apart, the Cold War ends, and you have this badly weakened Russian state replacing the Soviet Union. That Russian state cannot be considered a great power. We're in the unipolar moment, and there's no one — or hardly anyone — to check the United States. The United States doesn't have to prioritize. This is why you can make a very good case that the grand strategy the United States adopts once it hits the unipole is global hegemony, or what people like us sometimes call liberal hegemony. We felt there were hardly any checks and balances on us.
And you want to remember that in the early 1990s, China was nowhere near as powerful as it is today. Nobody considered China a great power in 1992, and the Soviet Union was gone by December 1991. So the United States was Godzilla. I often think of Lord Acton's very famous phrase — power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We had absolute power and we were not in a position where we thought we had to prioritize. We thought we could run the globe and got into all sorts of trouble. So I don't disagree with the basic point that Steve and even you were making.
Russia's Strategic Options After the Cold War
Glenn Diesen: If we take off our American shoes and jump into the Russian ones — how would you assess their strategic options? Because I always thought that after the Cold War the best approach for them would be to integrate with the Western countries for economic security. But of course that was not forthcoming. They weakened, and then they saw all these strategies and plans for a pan-European security architecture go out the window as the West said, well, we're going to go with collective hegemony instead — essentially cementing the unipolar moment. That manifested itself in NATO expansion. They started to see this essentially restarting the logic of the Cold War, everything becoming zero-sum bloc politics. And of course, as CIA Director William Burns wrote, Ukraine was the reddest of red lines. In 2014 a huge shift happened — they decided this is the time to stand their ground, take back Crimea, and they also began arguing that they can't connect their economy anymore with the West, so let's reorient it to the East with China and others. This is the only path to a multipolar world. But now of course they're in a war. What are the strategic options for Russia now? What is it that they can do, and how do you read their grand strategy altogether?
John Mearsheimer: When the Cold War ended, what the Russians wanted to do was create some sort of security architecture in Europe that they were firmly integrated into and that would produce a stable order on the continent. I don't think the Russians saw the United States as an adversary. The Russians — and the Soviets before them — were interested in keeping the United States in Europe and keeping NATO intact. The Russians understood that the Americans served as a pacifier in Europe, and that was especially important vis-à-vis the German problem, because when the Cold War ends Germany is reunited, and the Russians care about that — but it's much less of a problem if the Americans are there.
And in the 1990s — it's hard to believe this today — the Americans didn't view Russia as a meaningful threat. It wasn't a meaningful threat. As I often say, NATO expansion in the 1990s was not aimed at containing Russia. This was the era of global hegemony, the era of liberal hegemony. The United States was interested in spreading NATO, the European Union, and other institutions eastward. We were interested in promoting democracy through the color revolutions in Eastern Europe. I don't think it was directed at Russia. I think it was mainly us trying to spread the order that existed in Western Europe during the Cold War into Eastern Europe. We foolishly didn't want to bring the Russians into that order. And I think the reason we didn't want to bring the Russians in is that we understood that Russia, although it was no longer a great power, was still a quite powerful country and would stand up to us if we tried to push it around inside those institutions that we dominated.
For example, there was no way the United States was ever going to let Russia into NATO — not because they were worried about the Russian threat, but because Russia was a reasonably powerful country that would not be easily pushed around by the United States. The United States likes to run institutions in which it can push other countries around. That's what we always liked about the Europeans — the Germans, the Norwegians, not the French so much, but the British. They did what we told them to do for the most part. That wouldn't be the case with the Russians. So we didn't want the Russians in NATO.
But anyway, it all blew up in our face. Now we're in a situation where the United States and Russia are basically mortal enemies, and the Russians and the Europeans are basically mortal enemies. So the question is, what do the Russians do at this point in time?
It's quite simple. They go to great lengths to have good relations with China, and they go to great lengths to have good relations with North Korea and with Iran. Those are the four countries that are at the top of the American hit list — China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. And unsurprisingly, the Russians are working with all three of those other countries. We see all sorts of evidence that there are North Korean troops in Russia today that may be involved in an offensive in the northern part of Ukraine — who knows for sure — but who have fought in Ukraine on the Russian side before. There's also all sorts of evidence that the Russians and the Chinese are helping the Iranians.
So at this point in time, from a Russian point of view, countering the United States is of enormous importance. Furthermore, what they have to do — and are trying to do — is cause trouble inside Europe itself. The Russians view the Europeans as an enemy and want to do everything they can to sow dissension in Europe and cause trouble there moving forward, so that Europe can't cause them trouble. And finally, I think they will go to great lengths to turn Ukraine into a dysfunctional rump state that can't threaten them. Those are the principal goals — not the only goals, but the principal goals that Russia has.
NATO Expansion, the 2014 Turning Point, and European Strategic Paralysis
Glenn Diesen: About consensus — there was in the 1990s some discussion around NATO and Russia joining NATO. I remember the American ambassador to NATO made the point that NATO was about a consensus culture, that the Europeans were falling in line, and it would be difficult to get Russia into this. The size and more independent policy of Russia as its own central power kind of prevented this.
But for the Russians — in the 1990s they were hoping that the OSCE would be this inclusive security architecture, all built on the Charter of Paris for a New Europe. When that was essentially hollowed out by NATO expansion, first Yeltsin and then Putin suggested they could join NATO. That didn't work. After 9/11, Putin wanted to be the first one to call Bush and say let's find a way of cooperating, essentially putting us in the same camp. It didn't prevent another round of NATO expansion. In 2008, they proposed under Medvedev a new European security architecture — it was kind of brushed away. In 2010, they wanted a EU-Russia Union, and the Europeans threw cold water on it. And by 2014 it was kind of the breaking point. By pulling in Ukraine, that signaled very clearly that all the people in Russia who still had some dreams of gradual integration with the West realized that this was the ultimate test — the West deciding that Russia should be a frontline state, not a bridge, by essentially putting a new dividing line there.
Given that the Russians are now in this position — where they see it's not possible to make peace with the West anymore, they're effectively fighting a war, it's in their interest to cause disruption in Europe and more or less destroy Ukraine as you pointed out — what can the Europeans do with this? Because I don't understand quite what they're doing. If there's no off-ramp for the Russians except winning this war, why escalate? I don't understand what they're going for.
John Mearsheimer: I think at this point they're just locked in and flailing around. It's just hard for them to see what alternative strategy they have. The sunk costs here are just enormous.
If you go back to the early 1990s, when the Clinton administration first started NATO expansion, at that point in time the Clinton administration and the Europeans had a deep-seated interest in having good relations with the Russians. It's just very important to understand that as NATO expansion proceeded throughout the 1990s — and remember the first tranche of expansion is 1999 — at the same time, the Clinton administration was pushing NATO expansion, it was going to great lengths to tell Yeltsin it was not a threat to Russia and that it wanted friendly relations with Russia for the foreseeable future.
But what the Clinton people didn't understand — though many people did understand at the time — is that once you set the train in motion for NATO expansion and effectively opened the door to endless expansion right up to Russia's border, you had created a situation that at some point was going to blow up in your face. People like Kennan said this loudly and clearly, but the Clinton administration and subsequent administrations, as well as the Europeans, did not believe this logic. They thought that you could have your cake and eat it too — that you could continue to expand NATO on and on and still have good relations with the Russians.
Of course, as you point out, it really blew up in their face in 2014. But they were so committed to this belief that NATO expansion was a wonderful thing, that countries like Ukraine had a right to become a member of the alliance, and that there was nothing that could get in the way of that — and therefore they had to soldier on. So after 2014 happens, there's no backing off. The Europeans and the Americans continue to push forward.
Then comes late 2021, a couple of months before the war breaks out on February 24th, 2022. The Russians are desperately trying to work out some sort of diplomatic solution so that Ukraine doesn't become part of NATO and there's no war. But the Europeans and the Americans simply won't listen. They don't try to accommodate the Russians. It's actually quite amazing — just go back and watch the footage from the Munich Security Conference in February of 2022, the year the war broke out. It's very clear from watching the American and European leaders that they're not worried about a war breaking out.
So what you see here is that the Europeans are so deeply committed to NATO expansion and so deeply opposed to the idea that Russia could prevent that from happening, that they're at a point where they almost can't turn around. They just have to keep pushing forward. The sunk costs are just so great. And that's the reason you see virtually no evidence today — even though the war is going badly for the Ukrainians, and even though the Americans are reducing their commitment to Europe and to the Ukraine war — that there seems to be no ability for the Europeans to sit back and say things have not gone well, we're in deep trouble, it's time to reflect on this and come up with a new policy. You see none of that. It's just more of the same.
The point I'm making is that if you go back to when the decision was made to expand NATO in the early to mid-1990s, it's just been this inexorable march towards more and more expansion — a profound commitment to this basic precept that we have to have an open-door policy and Ukraine has to be a member. Period. End of story.
The Rise of China, the Iran War, and the Weakening of US Deterrence
Glenn Diesen: No, the point of being locked in seems about right, because they made not just a commitment but an ideological commitment as well, so it's very hard to break away from this. But I think also in the 1990s some people even recognized that this would alienate Russia. If you listen to people like Madeleine Albright, they did recognize this is going to cause problems with Russia. But if that problem comes in the future, at least we'll have NATO there. That was the main point. So in other words, NATO expands, the Russians will become more unhappy and more concerned, however as NATO expands the power distribution shifts as well, and this would essentially force the Russians to adjust to new realities — essentially the hegemonic peace. Well, if you're not happy, tough luck, but this is the way it's going to have to be.
But I guess one thing that went wrong with it is that yes, if the European continent would be isolated in the world, but at the periphery you have the rise of other powers — primarily China — which suddenly gives the Russians an offering in the East. Why not just lean towards the Chinese or the Indians or any country in the East?
But that takes me to my last question. Given that we now see the US not just challenging China, but the US effectively having been defeated in Iran — at least that's what it looks like today — what does this mean for countries like Russia and China? Does it work to their advantage?
John Mearsheimer: This is a huge question, not simple to answer. One could argue that after the United States is driven out of the Persian Gulf completely — or almost completely — the last thing the United States will want to do is think about fighting another war in the Persian Gulf, and that we will focus laser-like on East Asia, and that this could be bad news for the Chinese.
It's very important to understand that China's position in East Asia and Russia's position in the Ukraine war has improved because of the war against Iran. What's happened is that we've pulled all sorts of military assets out of East Asia to fight in the Middle East. And if you look at our navy, which is really only capable at this point — given the limited number of ships we have — of fighting in one theater at a time, and you look at the wear and tear on the US Navy taking place in this war in the Persian Gulf, it's quite clear that that is to China's advantage. US military forces in East Asia have been greatly weakened.
And by the way, this is why the United States is now talking about putting more emphasis on tactical nuclear weapons. The United States is talking about shifting its doctrine. I think the last time we emphasized tactical nuclear weapons was in the 1950s when the Eisenhower administration was in control. But here we are talking about emphasizing tactical nuclear weapons because we've so badly damaged our conventional deterrence in places like East Asia.
So I think in the short term this has worked to China's advantage for those reasons. But I think over the long term it may be the case that after this debacle in the Persian Gulf comes to an end — and it will end — the United States will end up focusing much more on East Asia than we have certainly in recent months.
One key point you want to keep in mind here is that the United States is an incredibly powerful country, and what's happening in the Gulf and what's happening in Ukraine is not going to weaken the United States in terms of its actual power. We're going to remain as powerful as ever in terms of our capabilities. Where we're in deep trouble is more in terms of our ability to use that power — our ability to project power, our ability to win friends and allies around the world. All of that has been badly damaged as a result of this fiasco in Iran and as a result of the Ukraine fiasco as well. There's no question about that.
But you don't want to underestimate the fact that the United States remains a remarkably powerful country and will remain a remarkably powerful country moving forward. This is analogous to what happened in Vietnam. The United States lost in Vietnam — it was a decisive defeat. But fourteen years later, we won the Cold War and we emerged as a unipole, as the most powerful state on the planet. All of this just illustrates that even though we're going to lose — if we haven't already lost the war in Iran — and I believe the Ukrainians and therefore the Europeans and the Americans are going to lose against the Russians in Europe, these pair of defeats will not weaken the United States in the sense that our raw power will be reduced. But we will be weakened in terms of our ability to project power and to influence countries diplomatically.
Nuclear Proliferation Risks and the Danger of Escalation
Glenn Diesen: I guess that's a problem when security is defined in completely zero-sum terms and also when it's defined as defeating adversaries. Because if the US is now facing defeat in Iran as you said, then they would have to lean more into tactical nuclear weapons. You see the same in Europe — when they started to acknowledge that they will likely be defeated in Ukraine and the US is pulling back from the continent, suddenly you hear the Germans and the Poles beginning to flirt about nuclear weapons. The same in Asia — if China gets its will and the US pulls out of Japan, for example, the Japanese might lean into nuclear weapons instead.
You should be careful what you wish for. Of course the same applies for Russia. The whole idea that you push Russia into a corner, escalate, and assume they only have the option of capitulating — I think not. I think they will only go up that escalation ladder. And that's what we're seeing now. Do you have any final thoughts before we wrap up?
John Mearsheimer: I would just say we live in very dangerous times — no question about that. Your point about Japan reminds me that Vladimir Putin recently visited the southern Kuril Islands, which the Japanese say belong to them. This of course angered the Japanese greatly, and it just tells you that relations between Japan and Russia are terrible these days. This is in large part because the Japanese have sided with the Ukrainians against the Russians. Also, the North Koreans recently launched a missile that landed in the waters just to the west of Japan. Furthermore, Japan and China have terrible relations today because of some comments the Japanese prime minister made that enraged the Chinese.
So here you have Japan that has significant problems with Russia, North Korea, and China — and at the same time, the United States, which is supposed to provide a security umbrella and certainly have its nuclear umbrella over Japan's head, has pulled forces out of Japan and South Korea and has pivoted away from Asia in recent months because of the war against Iran. The question you have to ask yourself is: what is the lesson that the Japanese are going to learn from that? And then this gets to the whole question of possible nuclear proliferation in Japan and the whole issue of where that leads.
You can just tell all sorts of stories today about how things are getting worse and worse rather than better and better — not just in the Gulf and in Ukraine, but also in East Asia now. So we are in a lot of trouble in a lot of different places where the potential for disaster is very great.
Glenn Diesen: Also, Putin made the point that from now on they will start to seize ships of the Europeans, given that the Europeans have engaged in piracy. As you said, it's all spiraling out of control. Usually you would see that with huge shifts in the distribution of power, a new order would only be established after a great war — that is, when everyone's been bled out, when we can sit around the table and accept to reset the board and come to some compromises. You would hope that there would be some great power diplomacy where all our leaders would meet and try to work something out before we all bring out our guns. Unfortunately, there's not much historical precedent for this. As always, thank you so much. I appreciate your perspectives and your views on grand strategy and especially offensive realism.
John Mearsheimer: You're welcome, Glenn. Thank you for having me.