Some thoughts on Mearsheimer and international relations

I've been following Vaush's arguments against several of John Mearsheimer's videos on Ukraine and Russia with interest, as I've previously studied Mearsheimer during my undergraduate degree in politics and international relations and have some thoughts that may be of interest.

Firstly, about half of my degree was focused on international relations and IR theory. During every single module I took at university, Mearsheimer was discussed. This is the first point I want to make: Mearsheimer isn't some random professor of Realist IR - he's the figure head for this school of thought. I'm not trying to suggest that Vaush should be intimidated by this, but by expressing his desire to debate Mearsheimer, Vaush ought to recognise that Mearsheimer is the leading academic on realist IR theory and therefore might be difficult to get him to agree to debate.

Vaush has debated professors previously, in fact quite recently he talked with one on IR. However, if Vaush debates Mearsheimer, I think he should establish a firm grasp on IR theory and understand Mearsheimer's critics from multiple perspectives. I'm not unique in this respect, most people with a degree in political science can probably help, but I happened to dedicate a lot of time to IR during my undergrad.

With this in mind, I have some thoughts on Vaush's perspective on IR too:

I think that Vaush's view on IR can be confused. Before Ukraine, Vaush labelled himself a realist and yet coming face-to-face with the leader of IR realism, rejects his ideas outright. I also remember some people on this subreddit, long ago, suggested that Vaush should re-think his commitment to realism - something that I agree with. I think that realism can have some reactionary elements to it, for example, it rejects ethics in war outright and advocates for extremely brutal warfare when it happens. It is also not anti-war, it is anti-bad-wars. These, I would suspect, are views that progressive socialists reject.

Although simplified, at its core, realism can be defined as balance of power politics, which isn't always useful. Why, for example, is Europe not afraid of the overwhelming nuclear arsenal of the United States? Because they're pals. And why, is Japan afraid of the nuclear capabilities or North Korea? Because they're not pals. Realists like to suggest that all international relations is just power games between states, but it's also true that many states have deep cultural and social similarities that bind them together beyond merely material reality.

More broadly, and before regurgitating my undergraduate essays, the other of the two major schools of thought for IR theory is liberalism - which isn't 100% associated with liberalism as a political theory, but isn't wholly different either. Liberalism is another materialistic IR theory which argues that there are other variables that determine whether or not war happens. Notably, these include democratic peace theory, capitalist peace theory and international institutions.

Democratic peace theory argues that democratic states very rarely declare war upon one another (another reason why Europe isn't afraid of American nukes).

Capitalist peace theory is a similar idea which Vaush has discussed previously, that states that are intertwined with each other's trading blocks or are useful to facilitating that trade, will be remiss to declare war or take military action against that state. There are problems with this one, but I think you could look at Ukraine here too, specifically, how Nord Stream II ensured that gas no longer flowed through Ukraine and therefore made it expendable.

Lastly, and I know for some, including Vaush, controversial, international institutions can help facilitate peace, by providing a means by which ideas and plans can be discussed and a consensus arrived at. The UN and EU are the best examples of it. Having graduated several years ago, I couldn't argue one way or the other about this, but it's an element of liberal IR theory none-the-less.

Realists reject internal state politics as having any explanatory power for the behaviour of states on the world stage, but I can think of several examples where liberalism triumphs over realism: Look at the Falklands war in 1982, where the Argentine government invaded the Falklands because of faltering domestic support for a dictatorial regime, and Thatcher defended those islands for the exact same reason, winning an election in 1983 in a landslide because of it. Look at 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, which practically forced the US into an offensive footing on the world stage. The more you look, the more domestic politics matters a great deal for states behaviours.

Another lesser known theory of IR is social constructivism, which is kind of an adjunct IR theory and is idealistic as opposed to materialistic :(. Still, I think this one is useful. This one states that what governs the behaviour of states is the norms and ideas floating around the state itself and the policy elites within international institutions. This one has no predictive power, unlike the others, but can sometimes be added to them. For example, why did Europe go to war in 1939, even after WWI? Partly because the ideas of Mussolini and Hitler pushed their respective states into a position that glorified war and conflict, whereas France and the UK were more turned off war and largely viewed WWI as a tragedy. These two sets of ideas are explicitly idealistic and not materialistic, which might put Marxists off. However, I'm not one to fetishize materialism at the expense of idealism, I think the latter has some use.

The trouble with socialists discussing international relations is that there exists no explicitly socialist school of thought for IR. So socialists, like all others, must choose between the two leading theories of international relations, realism and liberalism, as well as the possibility of social constructivism also.

Lastly, I think the idea of looking at this from the perspective of Lenin's Imperialism, as some socialists have done is misguided and would get you laughed out of an IR classroom as being woefully outdated and irrelevant, as the conflict is between two capitalist states, with each side being supported by their capitalist pals to differing degrees (US, Europe and China).

This has gone on for too long and I'm happy to discuss further, but I wanted to offer this sub and Vaush some useful starting places for discussing Mearsheimer and his perspective, which isn't that simple, but appears like deceptively simple stuff without an understanding of where Mearsheimer is coming from.

tl;dr - Mearsheimer bad, but he's a big big deal in IR circles. Look into liberalism IR theory and maybe social constructivism too.