Mearsheimer America

Mearsheimer-america

One interesting takeaway is the response to the question of why the US was so hostile to Russia ever since the fall of the Soviet Union. As they point out, If the US foreign policy planners maintained a consistent realist logic they would have stopped the constant antagonising of Russia and worked to build closer co-operation with them to challenge China.

Mearsheimer's answer is the US took the disastrous approach it did because of their disgust at Putin's homophobia and latent Russophobia of the American elite. But why would the American elite be Russophobic? Of course, someone like Mearsheimer can't answer this, but when you realise that elite is dominated by Jews with roots in Eastern Europe it makes more sense. The conclusion is the Judeo-American elite have pursued an irrational foreign policy contrary to American interests to satisfy their own ethnic emnity and opposition to Nationalism and social conservatism.

This is a good example of why analysis of politics based on how people should behave have to be tempered with an observation of who elites are and what motivates them. Without understanding that the financial elites governing America care more about their ethnic and financial interests than they do for the preservation of the state they occupy, someone doing a Realist analysis of American foreign policy would be at a loss for how to explain America's policy toward Russia, as they would be to explain the Iraq war, the level of hostility to Iran, or the level of support for Israel.

It is this kind of thinking that also provides bad analysis like the Iraq war being for oil (American oil companies opposed that war), or, as is also discussed here, the simplistic analysis popular in our own sphere that China must be controlled by the same interests as the West because of their massive investments there. As Mearsheimer and Walt point out, Western financiers did indeed believe that investing in China would bring about liberal democracy, but this was ultimately a miscalculation resulting from their liberal hubris and countered by the Chinese elites actual loyalty to the Chinese nation. Structural paradigms are useful for analysing state behaviour, but ultimately states are governed by people and groups that have their own interests, loyalties and ideology. Someone whose analysis discards these all too human motives and biases will never make sense of the past or the present. The guy who just assumes American foreign policy is dictated by whatever benefits the Zionists will have had far better predictive power over the last few decades than an IR scholar rigidly applying Realist logic to make sense of motives.