Hi,
I love me some realpolitik and I hope you do too 🙂
Let’s walk through Mearsheimer’s The Tragedy of Great Power Politics:
1. Introduction
Indeed, there is much evidence that the promise of everlasting peace among the great powers was stillborn. Consider, for example, that even though the Soviet threat has disappeared, the United States still maintains about one hundred thousand troops in Europe and roughly the same number in Northeast Asia.
great powers fear each other and always compete with each other for power. The overriding goal of each state is to maximize its share of world power, which means gaining power at the expense of other states. But great powers do not merely strive to be the strongest of all the great powers, although that is a welcome outcome. Their ultimate aim is to be the hegemon—that is, the only great power in the system.
Since no state is likely to achieve global hegemony, however, the world is condemned to perpetual great-power competition.
Indeed, the best guarantee of survival is to be a hegemon,
Otto von Bismarck made during the early 1860s, when it appeared that Poland, which was not an independent state at the time, might regain its sovereignty. “Restoring the Kingdom of Poland in any shape or form is tantamount to creating an ally for any enemy that chooses to attack us,” he believed, and therefore he advocated that Prussia should “smash those Poles till, losing all hope, they lie down and die; I have every sympathy for their situation, but if we wish to survive we have no choice but to wipe them out.”
In other words, survival mandates aggressive behavior. …, they
have to seek more power if they want to maximize their odds of survival.
Americans dislike realpolitik,… Behind closed doors, however,
the elites who make national security policy speak mostly the language of power,
2. Anarchy and the Struggle for Power
The first assumption is that the international system is anarchic, … because there is no higher ruling body in the international system. There is no “government over governments.”
The second assumption is that great powers inherently possess some offensive military capability, which gives them the wherewithal to hurt and possibly destroy each other. States are potentially dangerous to each other,
The third assumption is that states can never be certain about other states’ intentions. … Uncertainty about intentions is unavoidable,
The fourth assumption is that survival is the primary goal of great powers…. Soviet leader Josef Stalin put the point well during a war
scare in 1927: “We can and must build socialism in the [Soviet Union]. But in order to do so we first of all have to exist.”
The fifth assumption is that great powers are rational actors. They are aware of their external environment and they think strategically about how to survive in it.
When the five assumptions are married together, they create
powerful incentives for great powers to think and act offensively with regard to each other. In particular, three general patterns of behavior result: fear, self-help, and power maximization.
Great powers fear each other… From the perspective of any one great power, all other great powers are potential enemies.
Add to this the “911” problem—the absence of a central authority to which a threatened state can turn for help—and states have even greater incentive to fear each other.
In international politics, God helps those who help themselves.
It pays to be selfish in a self-help world. This is true in the short term as well as in the long term, because if a state loses in the short run, it might not be around for the long haul.
the best way to ensure their survival is to be the most powerful state in the system.
The ideal situation is to be the hegemon in the system. As Immanuel Kant said, “It is the desire of every state, or of its ruler, to arrive at a condition of perpetual peace by conquering the whole world, if that were possible.” Survival would then be almost guaranteed.
they look for opportunities to alter the balance of power by acquiring additional increments of power at the expense of potential rivals. … states are disposed to think offensively toward other states, even though their ultimate motive is simply to survive.
The pursuit of power stops only when hegemony is achieved.
This inexorably leads to a world of constant security competition, where states are willing to lie, cheat, and use brute force if it helps them gain advantage over their rivals. Peace, if one defines that concept as a state of tranquility or mutual concord, is not likely to break out in this world.
A hegemon is a state that is so powerful that it dominates all the other states in the system. No other state has the military wherewithal to put up a serious fight against it.
Thus, one can distinguish between global hegemons, which dominate the world, and regional hegemons, which dominate distinct geographical areas.
It is virtually impossible for any state to achieve global hegemony. The principal impediment to world domination is the difficulty of projecting power across the world’s oceans onto the territory of a rival great power. The United States, for example, is the most powerful state on the planet today. But it does not dominate Europe and Northeast Asia the way it does the Western Hemisphere, and it has no intention of trying to conquer and control those distant regions, mainly because of the stopping power of water. Indeed, there is reason to think that the American military commitment to Europe and Northeast Asia might wither away over the next decade. In short, there has never been a global hegemon, and there is not likely to be one anytime soon.
The best outcome a great power can hope for is to be a regional hegemon…
States that achieve regional hegemony seek to prevent great powers in other regions from duplicating their feat. … Regional hegemons prefer that there be at least two great powers located together in other regions, because their proximity will force them to concentrate their attention on each other rather than on the distant hegemon.
What is power? It is important to distinguish between potential and actual power. A state’s potential power is based on the size of its population and the level of its wealth. These two assets are the main building blocks of military power. Wealthy rivals with large populations can usually build formidable military forces. A state’s actual power is embedded mainly in its army and the air and naval forces that directly support it. Armies are the central ingredient of military power, because they are the principal instrument for conquering and controlling territory—the paramount political objective in a world of territorial states. In short, the key component of military might, even in the
nuclear age, is land power.
Second, when great powers are separated by large bodies of water, they usually do not have much offensive capability against each other, regardless of the relative size of their armies. Large bodies of water are formidable obstacles that cause significant power-projection problems for attacking armies. For example, the stopping power of water explains in good part why the United Kingdom and the United States (since becoming a great power in 1898) have never been invaded by another great power. It also explains why the United States has never tried to conquer territory in Europe or Northeast Asia, and why the United Kingdom has never attempted to dominate the European continent. Great powers located on the same landmass are in a much better position to attack and conquer each other.
When a state surveys its environment to determine which states pose a threat to its survival, it focuses mainly on the offensive capabilities of potential rivals, not their intentions.
Furthermore, greater economic prosperity invariably means greater wealth, which has significant implications for security, because wealth is the foundation of military power. Wealthy states can afford powerful military forces, which enhance a state’s prospects for survival.
Security also trumps wealth when those two goals conflict, because “defence,” as Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations, “is of much more importance than opulence.” Smith provides a good illustration of how states behave when forced to choose between wealth and relative power. In 1651, England put into effect the famous Navigation Act, protectionist legislation designed to damage Holland’s commerce and ultimately cripple the Dutch economy. The legislation mandated that all goods imported into England be carried either in English ships or ships owned by the country that originally produced the goods. Since the Dutch produced few goods themselves, this measure would badly damage their shipping, the central ingredient in their economic success. Of course, the Navigation Act would hurt England’s economy as well, mainly because it would rob England of the benefits of free trade. “The act of navigation,” Smith wrote, “is not favorable to foreign commerce, or to the growth of that opulence that can arise from it.” Nevertheless, Smith considered the legislation “the wisest of all the commercial regulations of England” because it did more damage to the Dutch economy than to the English economy, and in the mid-seventeenth century Holland was “the only naval power which could endanger the security of England.
Great powers do not work together to promote world order for
its own sake. Instead, each seeks to maximize its own share of world power, which is likely to clash with the goal of creating and sustaining stable international orders.
Russia was deeply opposed to NATO expansion, which it viewed as a serious threat to Russian security. Recognizing that Russia’s weakness would preclude any retaliation, however, the United States ignored Russia’s concerns and pushed NATO to accept the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland as new members. Russia has also opposed U.S. policy in the Balkans over the past decade, especially NATO’s 1999 war against Yugoslavia. Again, the United States has paid little attention to Russia’s concerns and has taken the steps it deems necessary to bring peace to that volatile region. Finally, it is worth noting that although Russia is dead set against allowing the United States to deploy ballistic missile defenses, it is highly likely that Washington will deploy such a system il it is judged to be technologically feasible.
Great powers cannot commit themselves to the pursuit of a peaceful world order…
Genuine peace, or a world in which states do not compete for power, is not likely as long as the state system remains anarchic.
…
I’m going to leave it there. The rest of the book is filled with detailed historical examples on how all the great powers behave toward each other throughout the last 200 years.
There’s also an very interesting chapter on the rise of China that I think is required reading given the current political climate.
Thanks for reading,
Notes:
John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, W. W. Norton & Company; Updated edition (April 7, 2014)
Free PDF: https://samuelbhfaure.com//srv/htdocs/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/s2-mearsheimer-2001.pdf