Prof John Mearsheimer 250 Years Of American Foreign Policy

TITLE: Prof. John Mearsheimer: 250 years of American Foreign Policy CHANNEL: The University of Chicago Graham School DATE: 2026-03-05 ---TRANSCRIPT--- Thank you everyone for joining us tonight. It’s a huge joy to see so many familiar faces. Also to have this opportunity to make new friends, bring new friends into our community. And thank you most of all, John, for your time and insights this evening tonight, especially at a time when you are in high demand. So we are truly grateful. Thank you. So we’ve come together tonight to in in celebration really of our 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. So we are trying we aim to take sort of have a historical program. widen the lens as Seth said. So, let’s dive right in and start with the declaration.

So, the Declaration, it’s heralded as an idealist liberal democratic document. How do you see it? Is Jefferson’s glowing prose about all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with unalienable rights? Is that just cover for self-interest?

Before I answer Jennifer’s question, let me just thank Seth for the kind introduction and for inviting me here. And I’m thrilled to be here with my good friend Jennifer and fellow IR theorist. And I thank all of you for coming out to hear us go back and forth. I actually love doing these things. And I look forward to the Q&A as much as I look forward to talking with Jennifer.

So the question has to do with the Declaration of Independence. The way I look at the Declaration of Independence is that there are two broad themes in it that are somewhat at odds with each other. One is the liberal theme, the universalistic theme that Jennifer referred to. This is the whole idea that all men are created equal and that we all have inalienable or natural rights. And if you talk about inalienable or natural rights, that means that everybody on the planet has those same rights. So you can see the universalism built into that. And that’s actually the liberal strand of the declaration. But there’s another strand which I think actually gets more attention than the liberal strand and that’s the nationalist strand. This is very much a nationalist document. It’s all about the creation of the American nation state. And nationalism is a particularistic ideology. Liberalism is a universalistic ideology. And basically what nationalism is all about is saying sort of we people, we Americans have had it with this sovereign state called Britain and we’re breaking away and we’re creating our own sovereign state. In other words, what we’re doing is we’re creating our own nation state. Nation state is the embodiment of nationalism. And that’s a particularistic ideology. And actually, if you read the literature on the origins of nationalism, it’s usually a tossup as to where nationalism first gets started on the planet, whether it’s in France in association with the French Revolution or whether it’s in the United States. So, what you see in that document is both of these isms, liberalism and nationalism. The final point I would make to you is I once had a three-hour one-on-one conversation with Victor Orban who as you all know is the prime minister of Hungary and a very controversial figure and a very very smart guy. But for a good chunk of that conversation, what we argued about was whether nationalism and liberalism can go together. And Orban hates liberalism. He views it as acid that tears apart the roots of the foundation of the Hungarian nation state. So he doesn’t believe they can go together. And I as an American said I did not believe that was the case although I fully understand that there are two ideologies that are at odds because one is universalistic as I said and the other is particularistic. But anyway, we went back and forth for much of the three hours talking about that. I’m not going to say I won because I certainly didn’t convince him.

Well, we could certainly talk about those great isms all night long. Anyone interested in more of sort of disentangling these great isms, John’s book, 2018 book, The Great Delusion, looks at how realism, liberalism, and nationalism are all sort of wrapped up together. But we’re not here to talk about that book. My next question moving on sort of chronologically in our 250 years. What was the vision of our founders for relations beyond our borders? Relations for this fragile republic of 13 colonies strung out along the Atlantic seaboard.

Very important to understand that even before the United States was created 1776, the colonists had an expansionist impulse. They wanted to move westward from the get-go. And in fact, there was a huge disagreement between the colonists and the British government back in London on this very issue because if you expand westward, you end up fighting wars against Native Americans and fighting wars against the French. And fighting wars cost money. And the British government had a limited amount of money and didn’t want to spend all of that money or a big chunk of that money on fighting wars as the colonists moved westward. And this was one of the main causes of the revolution. The colonists were irate at the idea that the British government was trying to check that expansionist impulse. And of course, once the United States is created, we get our independence in 1783. We’re free to roam across the continent. And this is what manifest destiny is all about. We march all the way to the Pacific Ocean. You all know we invade Canada in 1812. And the principal reason is we wanted to conquer Canada and make it part of the United States. The reason that Ottawa is the capital of Canada and Toronto is not is because the Canadians/British expected us to pay a return visit. You understand that the Caribbean, the entire Caribbean would all be part of the United States today except for the fact that slavery as an issue got in the way. There were huge numbers of slaves in the Caribbean because that’s where sugar cane was and sugar is an especially labor intensive crop. And as a result, northerners, people from the northern states understood that if you brought those Caribbean islands into the United States, you’d be bringing more slaveholding states into the United States. So that was prevented. But what I’m saying to you is manifest destiny was not simply an east to west phenomenon. It was also a north to south phenomenon. And by the way, bringing Canada back into the story, it was a south to north phenomenon. And really, the only thing that stopped us was the Pacific Ocean. If the Pacific Ocean had been land, we would have just kept going. And we eventually did, by the way, add Alaska. And we did eventually add Hawaii. And if you listen to Donald Trump talk, we’re eventually gonna make Canada the 51st state and we’re gonna take Greenland to boot.

Well, that’s a lot to think about there. It kind of heads us towards Frederick Jackson Turner and, you know, once we took the continent, the world was ours to take. Well, you often talk about how by the turn of the 20th century, the US had become a regional hegemon for the first time in modern history. What is a regional hegemon? How did that happen? And why did that happen?

Yeah, my argument is just to start that you have to distinguish between a global hegemon and a regional hegemon. And there’s no country in the world ever that could be a global hegemon. The planet’s just too big, number one. And number two, there’s just too much water. And projecting power across water is very difficult. So the ideal situation for any country is to be a regional hegemon and there’s only one regional hegemon in recorded history and that’s the United States of America and our principal goal for much of our history was to achieve regional hegemony and then to make sure that we kept it and to make sure that there is no other regional hegemon on the planet. There were four potential regional hegemons in the 20th century. Imperial Germany, Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. We put all four of them on the scrap heap of history. And now there’s one on the horizon. It’s called China. And we have our gun sights on China. The Chinese wisely from their point of view want to be a regional hegemon in East Asia. From our point of view, that’s unacceptable. We’re not going to let that happen. We’re going to contain China and that’s going to be the principal source of conflict across the planet for the rest of this century.

Now Jennifer asked me what exactly is a regional hegemon? A regional hegemon is a country then in its region of the world. That region could be Europe, it could be East Asia, could be the Persian Gulf. You are the most powerful state in the region. First of all, you’re the only great power, and as you all know, just talking about the United States, we’re the only great power in the Western Hemisphere. And furthermore, you’re in a situation where the difference between how much power you have and every other power in the region is so great that you can basically dictate what the other states’ foreign policy is. And there are no other great powers in the Western Hemisphere. And there is no country in the Western Hemisphere that would violate the Monroe Doctrine. And that’s a way of saying they understand full well that their limits on what their foreign policy can be. And if they violate those limits, we will crush them. As you all know, the United States is an incredibly ruthless great power. We don’t teach that in school, but that’s the way the world works. We gussy it up with all this liberal ideology about how noble we are and so forth. So you know better than to believe that.

So in the western hemisphere we have the Monroe Doctrine. And the Monroe Doctrine says that no country in this hemisphere is allowed to form a military alliance with a distant great power. Nor is any country in this hemisphere allowed to invite a distant great power to put military forces in the Western Hemisphere. And many of us in the audience are old enough to remember the Cuban missile crisis. The Soviets put missiles in Cuba and JFK told them that was categorically unacceptable. Those missiles had to be taken out. We do not tolerate that. That’s the Monroe Doctrine.

So a hegemon is by far the most powerful state in its region of the world. And the problem that a country like Imperial Germany has which I told you before was a potential hegemon is that in its region it had other great powers like France, Britain, Russia and so forth and so on. We have a very different situation here. Now you ask me why do you want to be a regional hegemon? It’s very simple. There is no better way to maximize your security, to enhance your chances of survival than to be a regional hegemon. How many of you go to bed at night worrying about anybody in this hemisphere attacking us? The answer is nobody does. Who you worry about? Mexico, Guatemala, Canada. Are they going to attack us? No. And then on our eastern border and our western border, we have fish. Does it get any better than this? No, it doesn’t get any better than this.

You want to be a regional hegemon? This is my point to the Chinese. As I often say, if I were Xi Jinping’s national security adviser, I’d tell him that we want to dominate East Asia. We want to drive the Americans out. We have a Monroe doctrine. Why shouldn’t they have a Monroe doctrine? What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. They should want to push the Americans out beyond the first island chain, then the second island chain. They should want to dominate East Asia, but we don’t want them to do that. Of course, we want to be the only regional hegemon on the planet.

And just very quickly, after we got our independence in 1783, we achieved regional hegemony with two policies. One is manifest destiny, which I explained to you before. It had a real strategic logic to it. We marched across the continent. We created this super powerful state. And then we imported all these people from Europe. All these hyphenated Europeans who came in. I’m a descendant of some of them who came in the middle of the 19th century. Huge numbers of people came to fill up the country. Then the industrial revolution hits. And we bring in more people because we need workers to make the industrial revolution go. And that makes us not only a big country in terms of population, makes us a very wealthy country. And we dominate the hemisphere. So that’s my basic wrap on regional hegemony.

Well, your basic rap is very interesting and very compelling. But aren’t you forgetting I guess I think of a couple of things. Number two, the Civil War. Where does that fit into our story? But number one, backing up, whenever I think of manifest destiny, I always think of something that comes before. Tell me why I’m wrong. But I think of before manifest destiny I think of the belief, the myth, or as Reinhold Niebuhr would say the sin of American exceptionalism, model for Christian charity from 1630. Where does American exceptionalism fit into this before manifest destiny? And second where does the civil war fit into this story and us becoming a regional hegemon?

Okay, I’ll answer them in reverse order. Just on the civil war, civil war is very fascinating because what is really going on there is that you finally have this nation state coming together to form one whole. If you go back to when this all started in 1776 or 1783, pick your date, the United States was a series of colonies and then it became a group of loosely allied states. This is reflected in the Articles of Confederation. And they went from the articles of confederation to the constitution because they wanted to create a more powerful central state. They wanted to do more to mold this country into a unified nation state. But they failed and it was mainly because of the slavery issue and it wasn’t until the civil war where that issue was in large part settled and the north won.

So I think that when you go back to the theme of nationalism that you see reflected in the declaration of independence and the fact that we were interested in creating a nation state, what happened in the civil war was of enormous importance. When I often talk about what made the Americans great in the 19th century, I talked about manifest destiny, I talked about industrialization. I talked about the Monroe Doctrine. But as Jennifer correctly pointed out, I left out the Civil War. And the Civil War is of enormous importance because it plays a central role, as horrible as that conflict was, in bringing the North and South together.

You all understand just on the point of regional hegemony that had the south won the war, had Lincoln conceded, we would have had two great powers in the western hemisphere and we would not have had regional hegemony. And you will not be surprised to hear that the British actually wanted the south to win because the British did not want a regional hegemon. But as Jennifer and I have often talked about in private conversation, this was a fundamental mistake on the part of the British because we pulled their chestnuts out of the fire in World War I and then again in World War II. So in the final analysis, the British were actually lucky that the North won the civil war, that we became a regional hegemon, that we became remarkably powerful, and were in a position to rescue Britain. And by the way, I don’t have time to make this argument, but if we hadn’t come in at the end of World War I, the Germans would have won World War I. We tipped it at the last moment. So, it really mattered what happened in the Civil War.

And as Reinhold Niebuhr brings up this concept of American exceptionalism, is it this dangerous defect in our Puritan heritage that Niebuhr argues or how do you see it? American exceptionalism.

Well, you can define American exceptionalism in a lot of different ways. And the way most people, most Americans define it is that America is a noble country. It’s the city on the hill, and so forth and so on. And for somebody who studies foreign policy and does realism, it’s hard to see the United States in those terms. As I said to you before, I think that we are an incredibly ruthless country. The amount of murder and mayhem that we’ve created around the world is just unbelievable. I was looking at a study the other day put out by Lancet, which is a scientific journal. And they did a study, this was put out in November of 2025. And what the article did was it looked at sanctions, American sanctions from 1971 to 2021. And it asked what were the consequences of those sanctions? And we murdered 38 million people. 38 million people. The amount of havoc we have brought on the Middle East in recent years is just stunning. You think about the consequences of the Iraq war, what we do in places like Venezuela, Cuba, Iran. We’re using this tremendous economic leverage we have to basically starve people, to make them suffer, to inflict great punishment on them so that they’ll rise up against their government. This is what we were doing in Venezuela. This is what we’re doing in Iran. We’re inflicting massive punishment on these people.

Given all that, I find it very difficult to talk about the United States as a noble country. I just don’t think that we are exceptionally virtuous when it comes to foreign policy. The one thing I will say and I often say this, this is what I said to Victor Orban. I thank my lucky stars I was born in liberal America. I love liberalism. I love the fact that I live in a liberal democracy and that’s a wonderful thing. But I don’t think that necessarily makes us exceptional.

Got it. Well let’s move to the 20th century. So moving on to the 20th century with World Wars one and two. The US tried to stay on the sidelines of both those wars. Wilson was reelected on a promise to stay out of the war which by then in 1916 was raging into its third year. What, after World War I isolationism was the US was a thoroughly isolationist country. Why did the US want to stay on the sidelines of both World Wars and why did it fail to do so?

Just quickly on the dates here, World War I breaks out, August 1st, 1914, and we declare war in April 1917. So, we’re on the sidelines for probably three years. World War II in Europe and really in general breaks out September 1st, 1939. That’s when the Wehrmacht invades Poland, September 1st, 1939. It’s the fall of France in 1940 that really spooks us. And then a year later, June 22nd, 1941 is when the Wehrmacht invades Soviet Union, which really spooks us. And we don’t get in until December of 41 with Pearl Harbor. We’re attacked on December 7th, 1941. And then Hitler does us an enormous favor and declares war against us on December 11th, 1941. But as Jennifer was saying, we stayed out a long time before World War I. We joined World War I and we stayed out for quite a while before we joined World War II. And in both cases, very important to emphasize, we did hardly anything before those wars broke out to prevent those wars.

Now, the reason that you stay out if you’re the United States is that you want other countries to do the heavy lifting when it comes to defeating the single power that threatens to dominate all of Europe. It’s Imperial Germany in World War I and it’s Nazi Germany in World War II. Let’s just talk about World War II because I think it illustrates the point very well. To defeat Imperial Germany in World War I was a herculean task. The French, the British, and the Russians suffered enormously. So, when World War I is over with, the question is when Nazi Germany comes to the fore, who’s going to pay the blood price to defeat Nazi Germany? This is the calculation. Everybody understands once Hitler begins to rearm, creates the Wehrmacht, here we go again. And the Germans, as you know, are really good at fighting wars.

And there are many of them. And to defeat them, somebody’s going to have to pay a huge blood price. And by the way, you know who does pay that blood price? It’s the Soviet Union. 27 million people, that’s the number that’s officially used these days. 27 million people die. Soviet people die. They paid the blood price. We paid much less of a blood price. We don’t land at Normandy until June 6th, 1944. The war is over with May 8th, 1945. So 11 months before the war is over, we land at Normandy. Stalin had been screaming bloody murder saying when are you going to engage the Wehrmacht on the European continent? We were in Italy, but that was not enough to satisfy Stalin. He wanted us to land at the beaches in France. When we land on the beaches in France, June 6th, 1944, 11 months before the war ends, at that point, 93% of German casualties are on the Eastern Front. The Soviets are principally responsible for winning World War II.

Well, if you’re an American leader, that’s an ideal situation because you don’t want 27 million of your people to die fighting against the Wehrmacht. You’d rather the Soviets do that. It’s not that we were glad the Soviets were paying that blood price. We just didn’t want to pay that blood price. One more dimension to this that’s worth thinking about. One of the reasons that Hitler is almost impossible to stop until he invades the Soviet Union is the British and the French are trying to get the Soviets to do the dirty work. The Soviets are trying to get the British and the French to do the dirty work. And the British are staying on the sidelines and trying to get the French because they’re physically located on the European continent to do the dirty work. So everybody’s buck passing and we’re staying on the sidelines. And this is what allows Hitler to pick off his adversaries one at a time. He takes Poland with the help of the Soviet Union, mind you, in 1939. He gets a free shot at France in 1940 because the Soviets are allied with him. And then he finishes off the French and the British and he turns against the Soviet Union. He gets a one-on-one shot at the Soviet Union. This is all the end result of people not wanting to pay the blood price of defeating the Third Reich.

And this basic logic applies to the United States. And we have the luxury of having a giant ocean between us and Europe. So we can sit back and we can tell the British, “Oh, you do it. We’ll give you lend lease and so forth and so on. We’ll give the Russians some help or the Soviets some help here and there.” So they do the heavy lifting. But what happens in both of those wars is it looks like the bad guys are going to win. When France falls in 1940, you cannot underestimate the extent to which FDR is spooked. And then when the Germans invade the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, Stalin has purged the Red Army at the top. He decapitates the Red Army. The Red Army had performed very poorly in Finland. And of course the Wehrmacht looked like it was unstoppable. Roosevelt thought that the Soviet army, the Red Army, was going to be defeated and Germany was going to end up dominating all of Europe and he did everything he could to get us in the war. That’s another whole story. And the same thing happened with Wilson.

As I said to you before, I could tell you a story how we won that war in the sense that we tipped the balance at the very end. But you all remember the Germans took on the French, the British, and the Russians all at once. And they knocked the Russians out of the war in 1917. This is the October Revolution. This is when the Soviet Union is created. It’s in the middle of the war. French army mutinies in May 1917. It’s going down the tubes and the British are beginning to get cold feet. Lloyd George is saying maybe I don’t want to send more troops over there and the German army once the Russians drop out have a huge number of forces against the French and the British and then we come in and we make the difference at the very end. But anyway, this is a long-winded way of just saying our basic policy when you’re dealing with a rival great power is to let the locals, the neighbors defeat that great power. And if we do have to come in, come in at the last moment and win the victory.

Mission accomplished. Thank you. So after two, moving ahead in our 250 years of US foreign policy, immediately or really before World War II was over, there’s a new war called the Cold War. Was the Cold War a security conflict or an ideological conflict?

Yeah, great question. I think the cold war was both an ideological conflict and a security competition. By the way, World War I, there was no ideological conflict. It was pure security. World War II, it’s ideological plus security. It’s fascism, i.e. Nazism versus communism, i.e. the Soviets. And the ideological dimension in World War II between the Germans and the Soviets, not to be underestimated, and even with regard to the British and the French and the Americans where you had liberalism, and these two liberal countries had to jump in bed with a communist country to defeat this fascist country. So I think World War II and then the Cold War, as you point out, Jennifer, is heavily laden with an ideological competition.

As a realist, I believe that security competition always trumps ideological competition because security competition is all about survival and survival has to be your number one goal and therefore if you look at any of these competitions, this is even true with regard to Hitler. He was driven mainly by security concerns. He was a murderer of the first order driven by this completely heinous ideology. No question about that. And that ideology infused his thinking but he was ultimately driven by strategic concerns. And I think that was certainly true of Stalin as well. There are all sorts of articles and books on Stalin as the realist. It’s very easy to make the case that Stalin was not driven that much by ideology, was driven more by security.

Okay, that leads right into what I was going to ask next when you mentioned realism always trumping idealism or liberalism. Switching gears a little bit from historical view here. You are an international relations theorist. What does that mean? What are international relations theories and how, if at all, do they inform policy?

I believe that we are all theoretical human beings, that we need theories to navigate the world. I refer to us all as homo theoreticus. You know in the business school and in the economics department they talk about homo economicus and in the psychology department they talk about homo heuristicus. They’re second-class citizens compared to homo theoreticus. I’m just joking. But my view is that the world is incredibly complicated and to make sense of the world and to navigate through that world, you need theories in your head. You need simple theories to make sense of that world. And if you do international relations like I do, you have to have theories to help you think about the world.

And there are a body of liberal theories. I’ll tell you about one of them. And then there are a body of realist theories and of course I fit in that tribe. But the liberals, these liberal IR theorists, believe in one particular theory called democratic peace theory. And the argument is not that democracies are more peaceful than non-democracies. That’s not the argument. The argument is that democracies do not fight other democracies. So if you can create a world that’s filled with all democracies, it’ll be a peaceful world because those democracies won’t fight other democracies. But it’s a very simple and elegant theory. And you need a simple and elegant theory like that to sort of make sense of the world.

And you know, if President Trump calls you up and he says, I’m thinking about invading Iran, and he asks you what you think, you have to have a theory or two in your head that predicts what’s going to happen when he invades Iran or doesn’t invade Iran so that you can advise him. And that theory has to have an underlying logic to it. What I call causal logic. And it has to be an empirically sound theory. And what does that mean? That means that there has to be a good deal of evidence in the historical record that your theory has explanatory power.

He can’t be making an argument or laying out a theory that’s never worked before and has failed in a whole slew of cases. But again, there’s just no way you can advise President Trump without a theory. There’s no way you could navigate your way through life. Forget IR, without theories in your head. As I often like to say to students, when it comes to raising children, you have to have theories in your head about how to deal with children. For example, when they misbehave, do you spank them? Do you give them a timeout? Do you ignore them? And you have theories in your head about how to deal with your children. And you’re constantly running those theories up against the evidence. If you’re giving your kids timeouts and that’s failing and they’re misbehaving more and more, you’ll adopt another strategy. If somebody tells you it works, that other strategy works better for them. So again, I think we’re theoretical human beings. And I just happened to be an IR theorist because for some reason I fell in love with IR way back when.

Way back when. Well, child rearing is certainly something we can all relate to. Those change, right? You put a toddler in timeout and that might work. And you put a teenager, you tell them they’re in a timeout, they have to go spend some time in their room. That’s a gift to that teenager. So those theories change, right, as life changes. My theory never changes. [laughter]

That’s why I have a problem with AI. I have a huge problem with AI fakes. I can’t tell you how big the problem is. And David Sacks, who’s a good friend of mine who’s actually Trump’s czar for AI and crypto, he says to me that I’m the ideal person for AI fakes because I say the same thing over and over to so many audiences that it’s very easy for these AI models to pick up my views on particular subjects. In fact, one of my graduate students says that I’m going to die and in 10 years after I die, there’s going to be a big cataclysmic event in the world and AI videos of me commenting on that event are going to appear. And I’m frightened to say I think that’s probably true.

I saw some, it was obviously a fake of you the other day because you were speaking Spanish. Yeah, not to get carried away here, but some woman journalist in Spain sent me a very nice email and she says she’s a journalist at this newspaper, but she’s also the newspaper’s fact-checker. And she was fact-checking something on me and she discovered there were like 15 platforms, each of which had over a hundred videos of me speaking Spanish. Now, I want to tell you, I speak about four words of Spanish. When I was in high school, when I went to West Point, I was a total failure with foreign languages. It’s embarrassing how bad I am. And you can hear me speaking Spanish. And if you see the videos, I look like I’m fluent. And by the way, I have the same problem in China, where there are all these videos of me speaking Chinese. And there I don’t even speak one word.

Although you’re among your people in China, you often say, “Yeah, the Chinese sure are realists. I’m actually a real rock star in China. It’s quite amazing.” But I always, I start my talks, not always, but usually when I go to China by saying it’s good to be back among my people, even though culturally I’m a complete fish out of water.

Well, I really only have one more question for you because we’d like to get to all of your questions and have a good Q&A. But actually I want to mention one more thing that came to mind as you were talking just now. I was in Washington DC recently. I love Washington DC. I feel very much at home there where I went to school and lived and worked at Foggy Bottom. And I was in Georgetown. I was near campus and I walked by a townhouse. It looked like they’re not official student housing but townhouses where students live. And in the window in front, right on O or P Street, there was a poster size enlarged photo of you. I’d say it was about 20 years ago, a younger photo, but it was the size of a poster. Someone clearly had found, I guess it’s a meme of you online and printed it into a poster and above your head it said “I studied Mearsheimer since before it WAS COOL.” [laughter]

So, I guess a little throwing in an extra question before I get to my final question. These last few years, it does seem like your argument, your presence, your views, how you’re received both here in the US and globally, is it taking kind of a different turn these last few years to the point that, you know, since before it was cool, people studied you?

Well, during the unipolar moment, when I made certain arguments, people would say, “John’s very interesting. He’s very entertaining, but he’s basically crazy.” Because when China was rising in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I made the argument that China could not rise peacefully, that we would be in the situation we’re now in today. And I was dismissed out of hand and it was really quite remarkable and it’s because in the unipolar moment, the United States was just so powerful, there was no real great power politics. And in terms of the business world, people in the business world had no interest in what I had to say because geopolitics didn’t matter for business people all around the world.

But around 2017 China becomes a great power and Putin brings Russia back from the dead and it becomes a great power. So roughly around 2017 up to the present, we move from unipolarity into multipolarity and that means great power politics is back on the table. And you have the Ukraine war, you have the US-China competition in East Asia and of course you have what’s going on in the Middle East now. And what this means for me is that people are deeply interested in what I have to say and some of my predictions turn out to be right, regrettably. China did not rise peacefully and everybody now understands that we got to work hard to make sure we don’t have a shooting war because we’re definitely going to have a cold war.

But people are more interested in what I have to say because we’re in a multipolar world. And then one other thing that’s very different: during the cold war when I came of age, the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union was almost purely strategic and it did not have an economic dimension to it. The world that we’re now in involving China and the United States, United States and Russia, Russia and China, it has an economic and military dimension to it. So people in the financial world, people who run hedge funds want to talk to me because they don’t know geopolitics. They don’t know what to make of X, Y, and Z. And it’s not that I’m a genius and am right about everything, but they just want to hear what my take is on particular issues so they can figure out for themselves where they should invest their money. So I actually find these days there are lots of people in the financial world who were very interested in talking to me, which was certainly not the case in unipolarity and because there was not much economic intercourse with the Soviet Union, was not the case during the cold war. So it’s a very different world that we’re in today.

Just one other point on this: the cold war was very simple. You had two gorillas. They were eyeball to eyeball at places like Central Europe and places like East Asia. It’s a very simple system and countries around the world were basically either aligned with the Soviet Union or aligned with the United States. We knew what it looked like. The world today is really hard to figure out because there are three gorillas in the system. And then you have a lot of countries like India that are hard to pinpoint and are free floaters of a sort. So it’s just a much more complicated world and I find myself spending much more time just trying to keep up with the news every day than was the case during the cold war when it was just a much simpler world.

Well, last question for me because we definitely want to get to all of your questions as well. Actually this kind of leads right to my last question. As you know a few years ago I taught a course we called it Three Visions of International Politics. We looked at three seminal works that were published in the immediate aftermath of the cold war. Francis Fukuyama’s End of History, Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, and your Why We Will Soon Miss the Cold War or Tragedy of Great Power Politics. So what were these three, just briefly, what were these three visions and who was right in your unbiased opinion? [laughter]

Yeah. Very interesting. Frank Fukuyama wrote what I think is the most famous article that’s ever been written on American foreign policy. George Kennan’s X article from Foreign Affairs in 1947 comes close. But Frank’s article is an incredibly important article and it was actually a talk he gave in Social Science 122. I sat in the front row when Frank delivered that talk. February 1989. Yes, right before the Cold War ended and it’s called The End of History as I’m sure many of you know. And Frank’s argument was that we had defeated fascism in the first half of the 20th century. We had defeated communism in the second half of the 20th century and the wave of the future was liberalism. Every state was going to become a liberal democracy. We had the wind at our back and it has a lot of democratic peace theory in it. It was wild-eyed optimism. And Frank, by the way, said given that democracies were going to spread all over the planet, Frank said literally at the end of the piece that the biggest problem we’re going to face moving forward is boredom. Now, let me just very quickly say Frank’s article had real cache throughout the 1990s. It was the heyday of the unipolar moment. We were so enthusiastic about the direction we were headed in. So everybody thought that Frank had found the magic formula. That’s Frank. Obviously, once you get deep into the 2000s and today, Frank doesn’t look good. You wouldn’t want to have to defend his article today.

And Huntington. He looked good then. Sam Huntington, Clash of Civilizations. Now you remember I told you about nationalism in nation states. Sam has a very different argument. He says the world is based on civilizations, not nation states. Civilizations are the highest political or social entity that people are profoundly attached to. I knew him well. I loved him dearly. I told him this was nonsense. Nationalism is the most powerful political ideology on the planet. This talk about civilizations is not a very powerful argument. However, the civilizations that he focused on were Islam and China on one side and us on the other side. And after 9/11, a lot of people thought this is a case of Islam versus the West. They hate us because of who we are. We hate them because of who they are. And therefore, Sam looked like he was in the driver’s seat after 9/11. So you get Frank from 1989 up to 9/11 and then Sam for a few years after that, I’d say up to about 2017.

Then you go to multipolarity and you’re back in balance of power politics. In a balance of power politics world, John looks like he’s right from 2017 up to the present. But I think you can make a case that all three of those theories held real cache at different periods since the Cold War ended.

I’ll be teaching your book, Tragedy of Great Power Politics, this coming autumn. We’ll see. Well, maybe we’ll take a vote at the end of the class and see. Well, I think I win now. I wanted to be fair to my fellow political scientists.

[Q&A section follows with audience questions on China containment, Sunni-Shia dynamics in the Middle East, middle powers and multilateralism, Ukraine, NATO expansion, Russia’s strategic intentions, and US overstretch across multiple theaters.]