As someone who works with questions of power, major power status, and international conflict, I want to address the use of John Mearsheimer’s views on Ukraine by the Russian MFA for propaganda purposes.  I had the opportunity to listen to Mearsheimer’s talk on Ukraine for the first time in years today since hearing it in 2015 and reading the corresponding Foreign Affairs article, presenting it to my students to get their reactions in the context of our upper-level international relations theory class.  As usual, their thoughts were brilliant and provoked some of these reactions.

 First, what follows is not an indictment of John Mearsheimer personally.  My limited interactions have always been completely positive and delightful.  He is a master orator who is also generous and kind with his time and attention.  He has been gracious in the past to not only engage colleagues, but even my undergraduate students at conferences where they’ve attended.  Once upon a time when I was an undergraduate, he was kind of enough to sit and chat with me.  His work is, partly, the origin of my own interest in international politics, and I am indebted to him for that.

 Furthermore, I am completely confident that he is in no way pro-Russian or supportive of the attack on Ukraine.  Instead, I think what is unfolding now with the relationship between his work and the invasion in Ukraine is an important lesson for all of us working in political science about engaging in thoughtful, empirical analysis and being very cautious and measured about our truth claims, lest they be used against us.  While most of us tend to think our audience is only other academics or our students, and usually it is, our work can at times be heard by those we study.  It may affect their behavior, certainly, though that is unlikely the case in this instance.  Russian irredentism long precedes any talks by Mearsheimer on the subject.  But, it can also be used in propaganda and messaging, as the Russian MFA recently did.  Thusly, we should be very careful.  As we’ve seen in more than just this case, it can be too easy for governments to exploit even the most rigorous research, as the Bush administration did in part with the democratic peace literature.  Nonempirical conjecture riddled with bombastic language, as is the case with Mearsheimer’s Ukraine piece, is even more prone to manipulation.  Unfortunately, as of this writing, an interview in the New Yorker suggests he is continuing to double down on a theory absent evidence.

 So, while I appreciate him as a person, his theory, however, is nonempirical and problematic on multiple levels which I will enumerate here.  Further, I want to emphasize that this is not a post opposed to neorealism (that’s a separate issue, which I address in Tad and I’s book Power, Space, and Time in a way geared to an undergraduate audience).  Indeed, I would argue that Mearsheimer is not a neorealist – certainly not in any form that would be recognizable to Kenneth Waltz.  As his Ukraine talk illustrates, he bounces wildly across first, second, and third images of international politics, depending upon what suits the narrative, and tries to craft an approach that can explain individual foreign policy acts (and weaves into a prediction).  All together, these are remarkable departures from the neorealist core.

READ MORE