On Mon, 24 Mar 2003, Ian Murray cited
> http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/foreign/mearsh.htm
> August 1990
> The Atlantic Monthly Sidebar
>
> The conditions that have made for decades of peace in the West are
> fast disappearing, as Europe prepares to return to the multi-polar
> system that, between 1648 and 1945, bred one destructive conflict
> after another
>
> by John J. Mearsheimer
Mearsheimer is fundamentally wrong here. For all his merits, he's still deeply, deeply stuck in the past like almost all realists.
The post-cold war world is not multipolar. It's unipolar in an unprecendented way. And secondly, the 21st century does not have Great Powers in the same sense that 19th century had: countries that were continuously devoted to territorial expansion for its own sake, and whose citizenry and soldiery accepted that being sacrificed to such aims was a glorious accomplishment.
Remove those two elements from his parallel and it's kind of like the old German saying, "Wenn meine Grossmuetter raeder haette, waere sie Autobus" -- if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bus. Those elements gave rise to a particular international logic. What we have today is an entirely different one. If if they both produce wars.
The strategic environment changed enormously with the end of the cold war. But boy have realists not grasped the essentials. And Mearsheimer is a genius compared to that raison brain Wolfowitz. (I hear he's good at math. But he wouldn't be the first one who erroneously thought that gave him the keys to the social world.)
Michael