----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael McIntyre" <mmcintyr at depaul.edu>
> Ian Murray wrote: "Mearsheimer is smart, but his pessimism is a form of
> Right Wing revo. defeatism, bordering on fatalism; "the rest of the
> planet may become an ever cumulative dynamic of failed States, we have
> to step in and stop this new, potentially nefarious dominoes
> cascade................"
>
> That's not the Mearsheimer I know. The Atlantic Monthly piece and the
> related article in IS are occasional writings. To get what Mearsheimer
> is really about, you have to read "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics."
> There, it's clear that he's not a "pick up the white man's burden" kind
> of guy. For Mearsheimer, the whole business of "failed states" or
> "rogue states" is a piece of idiocy. He believes that unipolarity is a
> passing phenomenon, that the U.S. will have a new great power competitor
> in the 21st century - China - and that the task of American foreign
> policy is to prepare for that competition. Pissing around in Iraq is a
> costly distraction from that task. Moreover, he has no illusions about
> any supposed moral superiority on the part of the U.S., which is just
> another amoral great power in his book. So, not surprisingly,
> Mearsheimer has been a VERY vocal opponent of the war in Iraq.
===========================
I never stated that Mearsheimer held *that* particular view; just that his pessimism is of a piece with the various pessimisms of the Right. Nor is there a trace of the "white man's burden" in a lot of the Right's pessimism regarding foreign policy, although as Besty Hartmann has pointed out, there is plenty of racism in such views, especially in the enviro. security paradigm.
What's particularly bothersome is that JM's views on China are all too appropriable by those paranoid pessimists that have hijacked the USG and also hang out at the James Baker Institute as Rice Univ. To the extent that the future is not yet written his -and others- pessimism could exacerbate the desire to maintain unipolarity precisely by creating policies that attempt to create a context that would subvert what may not even happen with regards to China's trajectory. There's not a shred of evidence that it is inevitable that China's economic strength must turn into military strength and an increasingly belligerent stance towards its neighbors.
If the US acts as if it's "inevitable," and becomes more belligerent, well, then.....On the other hand, if China's economic might starts to unintentionally destabilize the financial-economic [there is no entry for finance, banks or banking in JM's book, btw, a glaring omission] health of Japan and Taiwan etc., whose side do you think the US would come down on? Clearly as the ball is in the current Hegemon's court, the current amoralism and pessimism that suffuses Realist thinking would seem to have reached a point of diminishing utility as a perspective for policy prescriptions/strategies. Something that, perhaps, the CEO's sinking $$ in China will have to be ever more forceful in pointing out if they don't want to see their returns go to waste.
As for Iraq, it is not a failed State, although the Warlords in the WH & Pentagon are trying to turn it into one. Yes JM is against the current imperial adventure/mishap, as are Waltz and the other doyens of Realism, but it's the very amoralism that they regard as descriptive that partly feeds the amoral/immoral policy prescriptions that have plagued power politics for a long time. The dimensions of the gender biases that accompany such problematizing are alone worth a serious rethink. The amorality of the current IPE is the problem.
Ian