John Mearsheimer discusses Russia, Iran, and Western escalation with Glenn Diesen
Glenn Diesen interviews political scientist John Mearsheimer on the shift from unipolarity to multipolarity and its consequences for Western foreign policy.
Summary
Glenn Diesen interviews Professor John Mearsheimer on the escalating risks in Ukraine, Iran, and the broader international system. Mearsheimer argues that the current disorder stems directly from the transition from a unipolar to a multipolar world, and that Western foreign policy elites — educated during the unipolar moment — fundamentally lack the grounding in balance-of-power logic needed to navigate great-power competition. He contends that NATO expansion, the Iraq War, and deep US entanglement in the Middle East are all residual problems from decisions made during that unipolar era. On Iran, Mearsheimer dismisses the reported discussion of tactical nuclear weapons as strategically incoherent, arguing it would shatter the nuclear taboo, accelerate proliferation, and cause catastrophic regional damage without achieving US objectives. He draws on Cold War precedents — including the Carte Blanche exercises and the 1983 Proud Prophet exercise — to illustrate why tactical nuclear use tends to escalate uncontrollably and produce mass casualties. On Europe, he discusses three possible escalation scenarios: a Russian attack on the Baltic states (which he finds implausible, noting Baltic leaders themselves confirmed no elevated threat); the Karaganov scenario of Russian nuclear signaling (also implausible given Russian battlefield success); and the Storm Shadow/SCALP cruise missile strikes on Russian-controlled territory, which he regards as the most concerning near-term risk. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova warned of potential retaliation against British targets inside Ukraine and beyond. Mearsheimer expresses skepticism about the stated rationale for CIA Director Ratcliffe's visit to Moscow, finding no credible evidence that Russia was preparing to attack the Baltic states. He also recounts conversations with Chinese interlocutors who were themselves puzzled by America's willingness to help China grow into an economic superpower, attributing it to the dominance of liberal ideology over balance-of-power thinking in US foreign policy circles.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
The transition from unipolarity to multipolarity
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back everyone. We are joined today by Professor John Mearsheimer. Thank you very much for coming on the program. I've been looking forward to asking you about the unprecedented escalations we're seeing — the willingness, the effectiveness, and the consequences of these escalations — which in my opinion hasn't really been discussed enough.
Case in point: in the war against Iran, we now hear talks about the possibility of widening the options by also using tactical nuclear weapons against Iran and against Russia. We see remarkable openness about the strategy of several NATO countries to strike deep inside Russia and hit civilian targets, as the Finnish president said, so as to put pressure on the Kremlin. And of course you can look at Gaza, which just seems like there are no limits anymore to the willingness to escalate. One can also look at economics — the United States is now discussing whether it should legalize the seizure of Iranian oil tankers and essentially make them US property. And all of this happens at the same time as the Europeans are discussing whether or not they should seize all the Russian sovereign funds to pay for the war.
So there are no rules anymore it seems, the old international system is being dismantled, and before getting into effectiveness and consequences, I was wondering how you explain this era we're living in — the seemingly wholesale shedding of constraints, rules, and possibly common sense.
John Mearsheimer: Well, some of it just has to do with the fact that we have moved from a unipolar world to a multipolar world. I was born and came of age during the bipolar world. We had two great powers — the United States and the Soviet Union. It was a pretty simple world. You had the Soviets on one side with their order, and on the other side you had the United States with its bounded order. So you had these two superpowers facing each other eyeball to eyeball, each with its own order.
Then that bipolar world went away and you moved into a unipolar world where there was only one great power on the planet, and that one great power was the United States. It took its order that was left over from the Cold War — that Western order we had built during the Cold War — and tried to extend it all across the globe. This is the liberal international order. The liberal international order was basically the Western order from the Cold War extended across the globe.
But then, I argue, roughly around 2017, unipolarity came to an end and you moved into a multipolar world. You now have three great powers: China, Russia, and the United States. It's a fundamentally different world than existed during unipolarity, and it's also a fundamentally different world than existed during bipolarity.
What that means is that the order that existed during the unipolar moment is going to come to an end. That order, by almost all accounts, was a liberal international order. You could have a liberal international order when you had a liberal unipole — the only great power on the planet was the United States and it was a liberal state. But that world is gone. You now have three great powers, and the Chinese and the Russians have a fundamentally different view of what the order or orders should look like. Just think about BRICS. BRICS is part of a newly emerging order, designed to deal with the US-led order. Just think about the BRICS bank and what it would like to do compared to the IMF and the World Bank, which are dominated by the United States.
So what you see happening here is not all that surprising. You just have a new distribution of power in the system. You're in a multipolar world, and that existing order from the Cold War is gone. The Chinese and the Russians are interested in establishing a different order, and the Americans want their own order. It's a lot like the Cold War in that sense.
But then just put aside the order for a moment and focus on the three great powers in the system. What you have is a system that's just much more complicated than the bipolar world of the Cold War. When I got up every day during the Cold War and read the newspapers, it was much easier to keep track of what was going on than it is today, because you have three great powers instead of one — which you had during unipolarity — or even two, which you had during bipolarity. And those three great powers are interacting in all sorts of ways that make it difficult to keep track of what's going on.
And then when you factor in someone like Donald Trump, and also factor in the consequences of what the United States did during the unipolar moment, you've got a really complicated world.
Residual problems from the unipolar moment
NATO expansion started during the unipolar moment. It started when the United States was at the height of its power, in 1994. What we did — to get back to what I was saying — was take that Western order that existed in Western Europe during the Cold War, think of the European Union, think of NATO, and move that order eastward. This is NATO expansion. This is EU expansion. This is the unipole taking the Western order and trying to make it into a liberal international order. Although, as we well know, the United States did not want to bring Russia into NATO or into the EU, for reasons we could talk about later. But the point is that's when NATO expansion started. That's when the West began to think about making Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia's border. And we know how that ended up — a total disaster. That is the principal cause of the ongoing war in Ukraine. The Ukraine war is a remnant of the unipolar moment. Remember, the crisis broke out in Ukraine in 2014. That's when the really serious trouble started — 2014, during the unipolar moment — and it's just continued on into this new multipolar era.
Now let's talk about the Middle East. What happened during the unipolar moment in the Middle East? After 9/11, the United States decided it was going to adopt what was called the Bush doctrine. What we were going to do was go in and knock off regimes and democratize the entire region. We started with Iraq, but we planned to democratize Iran and Syria — the entire region. This was part of the whole liberal hegemony project. Of course, it didn't go very far because the invasion of Iraq was a disaster. But nevertheless, we remained committed to promoting democracy and regime change in the Middle East even after that defeat.
There's another dimension to this which cannot be underestimated. As the Cold War was coming to an end, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The war broke out — I think it was January 15th for the air war, and the ground war was February 24th to February 28th of 1991. We won a stunning victory against Iraq in that fight over Kuwait. But what the United States decided to do after that war — mainly as a result of pressure from the Israel lobby — was adopt a policy of dual containment, which meant keeping large numbers of forces in the Middle East for the purpose of containing both Iraq and Iran.
Just think about US Middle East policy during the unipolar moment. At the beginning of the unipolar moment, we fight the Iraq war and as a result we radically alter our foreign policy in the Middle East. We adopt dual containment. We say we are going to stay in the Middle East and contain both Iraq and Iran. Then after 9/11, we go beyond containment and say we're going to do social engineering — the Bush doctrine. And it's possible for the United States to think in these terms because there's no Soviet Union to balance us in the Middle East. We're Godzilla. Plus, we have the Israelis on our side, and the lobby is pushing us very hard to do exactly these things.
So what I'm trying to say is that we have a number of problems today that are basically a consequence of decisions made during the unipolar moment. When you go from unipolarity to multipolarity, you've now got three great powers, and the competition between them is going to be very complicated. The liberal international order that existed during the unipolar moment is kaput, in large part because orders are based on the balance of power, and when the distribution of power changes, the orders change. What's taking place now is the formation of new orders.
Then you add on top of that these residual problems from the unipolar moment. And then, at the risk of getting overly complicated, there's Donald Trump. Trump is in a class all by himself in many ways — a one-man wrecking ball. He's interested in doing all sorts of things in the international system that have made a lot of these problems worse than they have to be. To be fair to him, a lot of his basic instincts regarding this new distribution of power were correct. If you listen to him talk during the 2016 and 2024 campaigns, he said lots of things that made sense. But when it came to executing foreign policy after he moved back into the White House in January 2025, he has not behaved in a strategically wise way. In fact, he's behaved in a foolish way and made a lot of these problems worse than they have to be.
Why Western elites lost their grip on balance-of-power logic
Glenn Diesen: I get the desperation and the difficulty in shifting from a unipolar to a multipolar world. But if one takes a step back and looks at how Washington acted during the Cold War — when there were two centers of power in fierce competition with two incompatible ideologies — there was still a lot of constraint and a lot of common sense. Now the Cold War is over, there's no overwhelming Soviet threat anymore, and still there's a willingness to risk even nuclear war over ideas like NATO being allowed to expand anywhere it wants, or where the border should go in Donbas. Global communism was a real threat, a real problem. But I remember during the Olympics in Russia we had to sanction and boycott them because they didn't have sufficient gay rights. The challenges we had during the Cold War versus now — it looks like we're making up problems where they didn't have to exist.
John Mearsheimer: I think the problem today is that most of the Western elite just doesn't understand basic balance-of-power politics. That's another way of saying — and maybe this is a bit too extreme — that most people in foreign policy elites in the West don't understand great-power politics. They don't understand the essence of international relations.
If you go back to the Cold War, it's very important to understand that the elites who ran foreign policy came out of World War II. For some of the older people, they grew up in the 1920s and 1930s. Paul Nitze, if my memory is correct, was born in 1907. Someone like Paul Nitze knew the 1930s very well and understood what happened in World War II very well. Robert McNamara cut his teeth in World War II working for Curtis LeMay in the bombing campaign against Japan. In other words, the foreign policy elites during the Cold War were educated in a world where realism — basic balance-of-power politics — dominated thinking about how the world worked. And of course once you moved into the Cold War, your description of it was right on the money — it was a realist world par excellence. So those of us who studied international politics during the Cold War were deeply steeped in balance-of-power logic. You just thought about the world in those terms. You understood that great-power politics was highly competitive and very dangerous.
Then the Cold War ends — 1989, Soviet Union collapses in December 1991 — and you're into the unipolar moment. As a good realist, I can tell you that all sorts of people were telling me I was a dinosaur, that the world had fundamentally changed, that we had undergone a revolution in international politics and realist thinking was no more. And there was a certain element of truth in that, in the sense that the United States was the only great power on the planet and great-power competition could not take place by definition. So it was easy to say we don't have to pay attention to realist logic.
Where do you see this manifesting itself? You see it in NATO expansion. Realists — and I think George Kennan is the most prominent example — saw NATO expansion as a really dangerous idea. The idea that you could expand NATO up to Russia's borders and that Russia wouldn't take that as a threat was unthinkable to Kennan, because Kennan was a good realist. But for people like Bill Clinton and many of the people around him, who thought realism was outdated — a view only dinosaurs adopted — that argument was easy to dismiss. They thought we lived in a liberal world.
The best evidence of this is the tremendous power of Francis Fukuyama's very famous argument, "The End of History." Just go back and read that article. Frank was basically saying that realism is dead, liberalism is the wave of the future, and huge numbers of people bought that argument.
I'll give you another example. The United States played a key role in helping China grow into the remarkably powerful and economically impressive country it is today. Welcoming China into the World Trade Organization in 2001 really juiced its economic growth. I said at the time, as a good realist, that turning China into an economic powerhouse where it could translate economic might into military might made no sense at all from a realist point of view. I was one of maybe three or four people who made that argument in the West, and most people thought I was crazy. It's just not the way the world works anymore. "John, you are a dinosaur." So it was a debate in which I got zero traction — and I'm not exaggerating — nobody took it seriously in the West.
What you have, then, is a situation where from roughly 1989–1991 up until the present, people have had a really difficult time coming to terms with basic balance-of-power logic. It's a foreign way of thinking about the world for lots of people who were educated during the unipolar moment. Just look at the IR departments in European universities. How many realists, how many people who study balance-of-power politics, do you find in those universities? Hardly any. And I've discovered over the years going to Europe that most people who study IR there hate realism and think that people like me are not only outdated but dangerous. That mentality is a prescription for really big trouble in a multipolar world. You could think like that in the unipolar moment and get away with it because there was only one great power on the planet. But once you move into a multipolar world, you're in a fundamentally different world.
Nuclear deterrence and the lost education of the unipolar era
There's one other huge dimension to this. That's nuclear weapons — how to think about nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence. If you came of age in the Cold War like I did, you learned a tremendous amount about nuclear deterrence and nuclear strategy because the US-Soviet competition relied very heavily on nuclear deterrence. We had to constantly be thinking about how you might fight a nuclear war, what the balance was between nuclear deterrence and conventional deterrence, and so forth. It was just part of the warp and woof of daily life for anybody who was a strategist in the Cold War.
But in the unipolar moment, that all went away. So I find a lot of people's commentary on nuclear weapons today remarkably naive, and I don't find it surprising, because they were trained in the unipolar moment where you paid hardly any attention to this and where people therefore developed rather unsophisticated views about nuclear weapons.
During the Cold War, at first we didn't know what to make of nuclear weapons either. The first nuclear weapon was exploded in July of 1945. The two of them were used against Japan in August of 1945. Then World War II ended and the Cold War slowly began to develop. NATO was not created until 1949, and the Cold War was not militarized until 1950 — it was the Korean War that militarized the Cold War. At that point we really began to think long and hard about nuclear weapons, how nuclear deterrence works, how we would use nuclear weapons in a war, what the difference is between tactical and strategic nuclear weapons, and so forth.
But at first we were remarkably ignorant, and it took us a long time to figure out how to think in smart ways about nuclear weapons. Albert Wohlstetter wrote a very famous article in Foreign Affairs in 1959 called "The Delicate Balance of Terror," which if you look at it now — for people who understand nuclear deterrence — looks like a rather simplistic article, but it was a revolutionary article at the time. Wohlstetter introduced all sorts of concepts and different ways of thinking about nuclear weapons that nobody had really crystallized in their own mind. And therefore the 1959 Wohlstetter piece was enormously important when it came out. It just shows you that there was a real learning process that took place, a coming to grips with the different ways you could think about nuclear weapons, what the strong points and weak points were of each perspective.
But that all went away during the unipolar moment, because the idea of fighting a nuclear war was pretty much taken off the table. Then we move into the multipolar world we're in today, and that subject is back in spades — and people have just not thought long and hard about it because they didn't have to.
So if you look at the world today and how most people studying international politics think about it, there's very little evidence that they understand balance-of-power politics, and very little evidence that they understand nuclear deterrence theory.
The possibility of tactical nuclear weapons against Iran
Glenn Diesen: I think this whole idea that power politics went away is very convenient when you're the hegemon. The rest of the world did not see power politics going away. We replaced power politics with ideas of globalization, humanitarian values, universal values — but I always found it a bit strange, because when we said globalization, we meant an economy organized under Western leadership. When we said universal values, we meant managed by the West. When we said upholding humanitarian values, it was usually NATO. The universal values one spoke of in the 1990s and 2000s were actually fairly well linked to the hegemon, not divorced from power politics.
But you were on the topic of nuclear weapons, and that fits within what I wanted to ask about the seemingly unprecedented and reckless abandonment of constraint. The United States doesn't face any real threat from Iran — definitely not an existential threat — and yet we now hear the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons against Iran because the US is running out of options. These are at least the rumors being confirmed by many coming out of Washington. So I was wondering: how do you explain this? What would be the purpose of using tactical nuclear weapons, and what would the consequences be?
John Mearsheimer: Well, first of all, it's not clear that this issue is being seriously discussed. As best you can tell from what's in the public record, it's President Trump — who is desperate and has a tendency to bring up the use of nuclear weapons as a way to solve his problem — but all the reports say that his advisors are adamantly opposed to this, and that's especially true of General Caine. I don't know whether this is actually true because you're just depending on what you read in the media, but it makes sense to me that Trump would raise the possibility and that his advisors would have no interest in it.
Glenn Diesen: If you were advising Trump, what would be your view? To what extent do you think tactical nuclear weapons — which are very different from a strategic nuclear weapon that would wipe out cities, being more of a battlefield weapon — what would they do that conventional weapons wouldn't do?
John Mearsheimer: The argument that was made during the Cold War when we first started thinking about tactical nuclear weapons is that they are much more effective than using conventional weapons to destroy the other side's conventional forces. The scenario in which we thought long and hard about using tactical nuclear weapons in Europe involved a Soviet or Warsaw Pact attack into West Germany that was succeeding. You had a massive armored force overrunning NATO forces. The question was: how would you stop it using tactical nuclear weapons in the fight?
What you quickly discovered was that although nuclear weapons gave you what people said at the time was "more bang for the buck," you still had to use many nuclear weapons to stop the Soviet onslaught. It wasn't like you could just use one or two or three nuclear weapons in a warfighting capacity to stop the Warsaw Pact forces. What we quickly discovered is that we would end up killing well over a million people. I think the number we concluded after the famous Carte Blanche exercises was 1.7 million Germans would die if we used tactical nuclear weapons to try to stop the Soviet offensive, and you would end up effectively destroying West Germany.
And then there was the escalation problem. There was a very famous exercise in 1983 called Proud Prophet — you can read about it in the New York Times. Proud Prophet showed the escalation potential very clearly. The idea is that it would be hard to keep a tactical nuclear war at the tactical level — it would quickly escalate to the strategic nuclear level. In other words, you'd end up blowing up the world.
The Iran situation, though, is different because Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons. So we're not talking about a situation like the Cold War where both sides were armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. One of the reasons you so thoroughly destroy Germany and escalate to the general thermonuclear level during the Cold War is because both sides have nuclear weapons. We're not talking about using nuclear weapons against Iran and fearing that Iran will retaliate with nuclear weapons of its own.
The other big difference is you're not talking about fighting a conventional war on the ground. The scenario where we first thought about using tactical nuclear weapons involved central Europe and a ground war. There's no ground war in Iran. It's an air and naval war. All the talk since February 28th about inserting American ground forces in Iran — a land option, a ground invasion — has never happened. So there are no American forces fighting toe-to-toe against Iranian ground forces.
That raises the question: what are the targets you're going to go after? How are you going to use those nuclear weapons? It seems to me — and I haven't thought long and hard about this because I think it's a crazy idea and I think most of Trump's advisors think it's a crazy idea — that the target set would be around the Persian Gulf. Our principal goal here is to open the Strait of Hormuz. Are we going to use nuclear weapons to open the Strait of Hormuz? I do not think so. First of all, you'd probably have to use a lot of nuclear weapons. You can't use really small tactical nuclear weapons because they just don't do enough damage. You'd have to use reasonably large tactical nuclear weapons, and quite a few of them, to open up the Strait of Hormuz. And then there are all sorts of questions that come racing to the fore. What about all the radiation in the Strait of Hormuz? What's going to happen to countries like the UAE, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia that border the Persian Gulf in addition to Iran? So you can see that this is not really a viable option.
Then you might say, let's not use nuclear weapons against the Strait of Hormuz — let's strike targets deeper inside Iran. But then the question is: how does that work? How does striking targets with nuclear weapons inside Iran get the Iranians to surrender? Is just dropping one or two nuclear weapons in a rather remote area going to get the Iranians to surrender? I wouldn't bet a lot of money on that. And probably what you'd have to do is use lots of nuclear weapons. Will dropping a lot of nuclear weapons in the Iranian heartland get the Iranians to surrender? Not clear it would.
But more generally, what would be the consequences internationally? First of all, you would be breaking what some people call the nuclear taboo. You would be using nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear weapon state. What would that mean for proliferation? Wouldn't that send a message to the world that you'd better get your own nuclear weapons, when a nuclear powerhouse like the United States uses nuclear weapons against a state that doesn't have them and has signed the NPT? And furthermore, don't you legitimize the use of nuclear weapons? You say it's okay to use them. Is that a message you want to send to the Russians? To the Chinese? To the Israelis? I don't think so. From the perspective of proliferation and thinking about other countries actually using nuclear weapons, you don't want to use nuclear weapons at all. You want to stay far away.
So I don't see how you could use nuclear weapons against Iran to achieve your ends if you're President Trump. And at the same time, if you did use nuclear weapons, the consequences on a global level — and even inside the region, as I said, if you try to open the Strait of Hormuz with nuclear weapons — would be devastating for all the countries in that region. I don't think this is a viable option for one moment, and that's why I think President Trump's advisors are telling him he shouldn't do it.
I have not thought long and hard about this, Glenn, but it may be the case that there's a clever strategy out there for using nuclear weapons that I just don't see. But I certainly don't see how it works. And it certainly doesn't work when you're fighting a major conventional war against an adversary that has tactical nuclear weapons of its own.
Glenn Diesen: I don't see the logic either. There are no large Iranian brigades rolling forward, no concentration of Iranian armored vehicles. And even if the US-Iran conflict were somehow isolated — which it isn't — you have other countries around the world, nuclear powers who would be concerned about the US being the only country throwing these weapons around, and non-nuclear powers who would think they need more defensive capability. It does seem like it would open up a box of uncertainty without a clear purpose, unless it's meant to make Iran suddenly wave the white flag and surrender and allow their existence to be threatened. I'm not quite sure.
The security dilemma, containment, and rollback
But I did want to ask about deterrence — whether we're using the concept correctly. Typically during the Cold War, deterrence was simple: if the West or the East attacked the other, a response would come. We sought to preserve the status quo by having a clear punishment for the revisionist if they crossed a line. But a lot of what we're trying to deter today seems to involve us being the revisionist. You can argue that in Iran, given that it was the US and Israel that attacked. But also if you look at China — if the purpose is to deter China from invading Taiwan, but part of the deterrence means pumping Taiwan full of weapons, that would be revisionist in some way, because it would break the one-China principle and fuel secessionist sentiments, making the Taiwanese bolder. With all these weapons, if you try to deter the Chinese from invading Taiwan by arming the Taiwanese, you cross the red line of the Chinese and then they would have to invade Taiwan so it won't secede. So we're trying to deter different things — we don't want them to invade Taiwan, they don't want to see Taiwan's secession.
And then the last example would be Russia. During the Cold War, if the Soviets attacked us we attacked them — clear deterrence. But today the deterrence was: we expand NATO gradually and we're deterring Russia not to interrupt this revisionism by trying to hold on to the old status quo. And now you see the British sending drones and long-range missiles, and the Russians just warned that they now have the right to retaliate against Britain. And Finland's president went out and said the strategy should be to strike deep inside Russia, take out civilian targets which hurt the economy and the Russian people, so we bring the war to Russia and the public will put pressure on the Kremlin. If we want deterrence to mean Russia not attacking us, does it work if we are the revisionist going up the escalation ladder and deterring them from responding? It seems like we're using these concepts in a way they were never meant to be used.
John Mearsheimer: Let me build on what you said by coming at this from two different angles.
What is the security dilemma? The famous security dilemma in international politics says basically that anything one country does to defend itself is invariably interpreted by the other side as an offensive measure, not a defensive measure. To take an example: China begins to build up its ICBM force. It's very clear that the United States has a much larger and more sophisticated ICBM force than the Chinese do. So the Chinese feel they're at a disadvantage and want to catch up. From their point of view, it is defensive. So they build up their ICBM force. The end result will be that the United States interprets that as an offensive measure. Even though the Chinese see it as defensive.
To take the case of Taiwan: the United States is deeply interested in making sure that China does not conquer Taiwan. The United States wants Taiwan to remain quasi-independent and on the American side of the ledger. So what the United States is doing is giving armaments to Taiwan to help Taiwan defend itself. We see our assistance as defensive in nature, but that's not the way the Chinese see it. They think this is a case of the United States acting in an offensive way. This is a constant in international politics — the security dilemma at play. What one side does for defensive purposes is interpreted by the other side as offensive in nature, and that makes security competition extremely dangerous. We cannot distinguish in any meaningful way between defensive and offensive moves.
Another cut at this: when I first got into this business and we studied American grand strategy during the Cold War and American strategy toward the Soviet Union, the emphasis was on containment. I remember John Gaddis's very famous book, which everybody read many times over, called Strategies of Containment. Containment is a very defensively oriented word — the basic name of the game is just to contain or deter the Soviet Union. But as the Cold War wore on and we learned more about what was going on between the two sides, it became clear that the Americans were not simply interested in containment. They were also interested in rollback. And rollback meant rolling back Soviet power. This is pure, unadulterated offensive behavior designed to weaken the Soviet Union.
Now, if you think about the United States dealing with China today — and the Chinese are well aware of this — the United States is interested in containment, but actually more than containment. The United States would like to roll back Chinese power. And you see this very clearly in the case of the Russians. The United States, as you and I have talked about on numerous occasions, wants to knock the Russians from the ranks of the great powers. If you listen to the recent commentary inside Russia, they're complaining about Britain giving these sophisticated cruise missiles to the Ukrainians that can hit Russia. The Russians are referring back to rhetoric from earlier in this war where the United States and the Europeans were talking about greatly weakening Russia, knocking it out of the ranks of the great powers, inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia. Remember those words — "strategic defeat." This is rollback.
So the point I'm making is that anytime you have a security competition — whether it's the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the United States and Russia today, or the United States and China today — you're not going to get just plain containment. You're going to get containment plus rollback. That's what security competition is all about. It is a very nasty and dangerous business. And at the same time, even when you get a heavy emphasis on containment, even when you just focus on the containment dimension of the relationship, the security dilemma kicks in and what you're doing for defensive purposes looks offensive in nature from the other side.
This is what makes the situation we're now in so dangerous. And this is why, when you're in a situation like the one we're in now, you want cooler heads to prevail and really smart strategists in control — people who understand balance-of-power politics. This gets back to where we started our conversation. We have elites in the West who don't understand balance-of-power politics, who don't understand the security dilemma, who don't understand the difference between containment and rollback, who don't understand the essence of great-power competition. And when you don't understand the essence of great-power competition, you get cockamamie ideas like NATO expansion in your mind. You get the idea that you can go out and do social engineering all over the planet and get away with it. But that's not the way the world works.
Why the West refused to build a common security architecture with Russia
Glenn Diesen: How would you explain the post-Cold War era? When the Soviet Union came to an end, one could argue there was no real security dilemma. If you assessed the threats, the capabilities and intentions of the Russians — well, the capabilities were weak and getting weaker. If you assessed their intentions, it seemed like their only foreign policy was to integrate with the West. At the most in its entire history, it was the best time ever to create peaceful relations with the West. The Russians kept asking for something like Gorbachev's Common European Home. They kept asking for indivisible security when we initially walked away from a pan-European security architecture. Yeltsin said Russia could join NATO. Putin suggested Russia could join NATO. This continued through the 2000s — this idea of trying to find a common security architecture with the West. How can we explain essentially refusing to take yes for an answer?
John Mearsheimer: Let me make two points. One is that the opponents of NATO expansion in the 1990s — and as hard as it is to believe today, there were lots of opponents of NATO expansion — understood the security dilemma. They understood that the Russians would see NATO marching up to Russia's border as a mortal threat. If you talk to people like Mike McFaul, who was the American ambassador to Russia, he will tell you that he told Putin on numerous occasions that NATO was not an offensive alliance, it was not a threat to the Russians, and that Putin had nothing to worry about. This is evidence of my point that people like McFaul — and McFaul represented the majority — didn't understand basic realist logic. Of course Putin was going to see NATO expansion into Eastern Europe as a threat to Russia. Even Gorbachev saw it as a mortal threat. But people didn't think the security dilemma applied anymore. They really did believe that the United States was a benign hegemon.
It's not like people thought that the United States was this vicious great power that now dominated the world and had to come up with fancy rhetoric to disguise its behavior — and that liberal hegemony was the fancy rhetoric. That's not what happened. These people genuinely believed in what they were doing. They believed that realist logic was dead, that concepts like the security dilemma no longer mattered, and that the United States could move the EU and NATO eastward, promote the color revolutions, and do it in a way that did not alienate the Russians. I think it's quite amazing.
But if you go back and look at the 1990s when liberal hegemony came to the fore and was fully developed by the Clinton administration, the Clinton administration did not have an antagonistic relationship toward the Russians, toward Boris Yeltsin. They wanted to work with Yeltsin to make NATO expansion and EU expansion work. They did not want a hostile relationship with Russia. The fact is they thought they could have their cake and eat it too. What people like Kennan were saying is: you can't have your cake and eat it too. If you expand NATO, you're going to end up alienating the Russians. They did not believe that. But I think it was done in good faith. My good friend Steve Walt has written a book called The Hell of Good Intentions, and I think that does apply in this particular case. I don't think that people like McFaul had malevolent intentions.
Going back into the 1990s and early 2000s, we thought we had a magic formula for a new world. This gets to my second major point. We did believe that we could build a security architecture in Europe — in fact, a security architecture that encompassed the entire globe. It's called liberal hegemony. Just think about those words: liberal hegemony. The United States is the sole pole in the system, the sole great power, it is a thoroughly liberal state, and it is completely dedicated to spreading liberalism all over the planet. And Frank Fukuyama told us — and many people believed it — that liberalism is the future. Fascism was defeated in the first half of the 20th century. Communism was defeated in the second half of the 20th century. What we're going to have as the default ideology is liberalism. So all we have to do is start pushing. We've got the wind at our back. And what you're going to get is liberalism here, there, and everywhere. Then we'll globalize the international economy, build all these powerful institutions, integrate states into these institutions, they will become responsible stakeholders, and we will live happily ever after.
And Glenn, as you know better than I do, in the 1990s it looked like the Russians were moving toward liberal democracy — or at least lots of people could tell themselves a story that that's where Russia was headed, that its somewhat authoritarian past was behind it. So in the 1990s when this whole enterprise was set in motion, it looked like we didn't need the kind of security architecture you're talking about. It looked like the alternative — liberal hegemony — was the winning strategy for the United States. And people who argued against that really couldn't get to first base. They were just badly outnumbered.
And because it looked like it was working at first — the first tranche of NATO expansion is 1999, and we get away with it; the second tranche is 2004, and that even includes the Baltic states which are adjacent to Russia, and we get away with that as well — this is why in 2008 people think you can get away with NATO expansion into Ukraine. We think we are the hegemon, a liberal hegemon. Liberalism is the wave of the future and we can spread liberalism and international institutions and globalization all over the planet.
And just to come at this from another angle, as you know again better than I do, Glenn, Putin was interested in working with the West. That just gave us more cause early on in the 2000s to think that we could work with the Russians and the Chinese to make this happen. The Chinese were perfectly happy to go along with liberal hegemony. From China's point of view, this was a gift from heaven. We were helping the Chinese economy grow. I remember times when I went to China and occasionally Chinese interlocutors would say to me: why is the United States helping us to grow into such a powerful state? Because my Chinese interlocutors understood this was not exactly the smartest strategy from America's point of view.
So I would say to them: it's because America is run by liberals who don't understand balance-of-power politics, and they really do believe that when you get powerful, we're going to live happily ever after. And the Chinese would say to me: I don't believe that. The United States must have some sort of magic formula for thinking they can still dominate China over the long term. Because the Chinese understood that if we helped China grow into an economic behemoth, the United States would not be able to dominate China the way we had been able to during most of the unipolar moment. Once you lose that dominant position vis-à-vis China, you can't dominate the Chinese. So the Chinese were saying to me: why would you do this? And I just said: it's because the people running American foreign policy are basically fools. And they would say: no, no, can't be. These are clever people. They must have a strategy we just don't understand. So I used to say to them: well, when you figure out what that strategy is, let me know.
NATO escalation, the Baltic states, and the Ratcliffe visit to Moscow
Glenn Diesen: It's kind of been my thought that all these leaders who think they can transcend the balance-of-power logic — supported by the Fukuyama ideology and all that you've outlined — end up not transcending it but ignoring it at their own peril, and then you see the problems building up.
I'll just squeeze in a last short question. Now, in the 1990s you can argue there were benign intentions and people believed in these ideas. But now there's an actual war, NATO is deliberately escalating — you hear it in the rhetoric, you see it in their actions. And my main concern is that the Russians see themselves as being under great pressure, that they have to retaliate at some point, otherwise you can't deter the West if you don't actually push back. So they will have to set an example, and the Baltic states seem like an opportune target — not invasion, but perhaps a strike. I'm not saying that's the plan, I'm saying it must be on the board somewhere as a consideration. But the problem then would be that the NATO countries would likely do something to Kaliningrad, and at that point I think we would be very close to a nuclear exchange.
I say this because CIA Director Ratcliffe, as you know, just went into Moscow for a few hours — a very short trip. And according to Politico, the purpose was to convince Russia not to go after NATO, not to test NATO, not to retaliate — however one wants to frame it. My question is: how do you think this played out? Is he arguing for mutual de-escalation — we're not going to attack you anymore, you don't attack the Baltic states? Or does he go there to deter — meaning, we have the right to attack you, but don't you dare respond as we go up the escalation ladder? How do you see the logic playing out in Washington?
John Mearsheimer: It appears from reports — and I was reading about this in the Kyiv Independent, which had a number of stories I found very helpful — that Ratcliffe went to tell the Russians not to attack into the Baltic states. The Kyiv Independent also said that Ratcliffe delivered a message about Iran and told the Russians to cut off economic intercourse with Iran. I thought that would be part of the story, and according to the Kyiv Independent it is. But let's just focus on the Baltic states.
First of all, there's no evidence to me that the Russians are thinking about attacking into the Baltic states. The Kyiv Independent has a big story where the leaders of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — and especially Latvia, whose prime minister is speaking — have said that the threat level from Russia has not gone up. What they're talking about is the threat of invasion. The Estonians, the Latvians, the Lithuanians — and again especially the Latvians — are making it clear that they don't see an imminent threat from Russia in terms of an invasion. Yes, they're worried about cyber attacks. Yes, they're worried about Russia influencing public opinion in their countries. Yes, they're worried about an occasional drone coming over their territory. But there's no sense in the Baltic states that the Russians are going to invade. So I say to myself: what's Ratcliffe doing? Where's the threat here?
Are the Russians really likely to do that? Then I say to myself: well, maybe things are going terribly on the battlefield and the Sergey Karaganov logic is beginning to kick in — they understand they can't win on the battlefield, therefore they have to bomb some countries in Eastern Europe and they'll start with the Baltic states. But as you know, Glenn, the Russians are actually doing very well on the battlefield. Their air campaign is working very well. They've turned Ukraine into a landlocked country, which is having devastating economic consequences. So it's hard to see the Karaganov argument kicking in at this point in time and therefore motivating Ratcliffe to go to Moscow. I don't know what threat he sees.
Now I think the most dangerous situation at the moment is the case of Britain and the cruise missiles that Britain has given to Ukraine that Ukraine is using against Donetsk. In today's media reports there's been a big deal made over an attack that Ukraine made using British Storm Shadow missiles — or I guess the French version is the SCALP. The picture I saw in RT was of a SCALP, which is French, and the story involves Storm Shadows, but they're effectively the same missile. So let's just say Storm Shadow.
The Russians were enraged by this Ukrainian attack with a Storm Shadow on Donetsk. Maria Zakharova, who's the foreign policy spokeswoman, said explicitly that the Russians might very well attack British targets inside of Ukraine — and then she used the words "and beyond." Think about those words: "and beyond." That means maybe targeting British sites outside of Ukraine, maybe Britain itself, maybe a British ship at sea. I thought the Russians were sending a very clear message to the West, especially to Britain, that if they're going to continue to support attacks by these sophisticated cruise missiles on Russian territory, they should be prepared for a possible Russian retaliation not simply against British targets inside of Ukraine, but outside of Ukraine as well.
So what I'm saying is there are three ways of thinking about escalation to the nuclear level. One is what the Ratcliffe visit seemed to be all about — the Russians getting ready to attack into the Baltic states — and that doesn't seem plausible to me. Then there is the Karaganov scenario, and that doesn't seem plausible to me either. And with regard to these British and French cruise missiles, that was not raised in the Ratcliffe visit — as best I could tell, nobody is saying Ratcliffe was talking about these missiles. So I don't know exactly what's going on here. That's my bottom line. It just doesn't make a lot of sense. What's Ratcliffe talking about? Do you see any evidence that the Russians are getting ready to go into the Baltic states? Do you see any evidence that the Karaganov argument is kicking in?
Glenn Diesen: No. I think the Russians are getting very confident now that things are going very well on the front lines, and I think they see Ukraine crumbling a bit on the front lines — the political stability, the economy. So I think it's undoubtable that Russia is winning now. But as Ukraine begins to crumble, I think the prediction is that NATO will begin to panic and will escalate in some way, do something foolish, and the Russians would like to set a clear warning that they can back up with force — that if NATO steps over the line there will be retaliation. Not invade anything, but restore deterrence.
But no, I don't think an attack is pending on the Baltic states. So I'm not quite sure what Ratcliffe was there for. It could be that it was primarily about Iran — but again, why would Russia support Iran? They can't afford to see Iran fall, and also the US is currently attacking inside Russia. Why wouldn't they assist the Iranians? I don't know. And again, that's why I was wondering whether it was about mutual de-escalation or just pushing one side to stand down.
John Mearsheimer: It's very hard to tell. But again, if you read the newspaper reports, it looked like deterrence — we were trying to deter the Russians from invading the Baltic states. But as I'm saying to you, there's no evidence that the Russians were getting ready to invade the Baltic states. And in fact, if you look at the Kyiv Independent today, it says that the leaders in the three Baltic states do not see any evidence that the Russians are getting ready to attack. In fact, they're trying to assure their publics to relax — that World War III is not going to start tomorrow.
So I don't understand what Ratcliffe was doing. And as I said, I think the one scenario to worry about — not too much, but somewhat — is the whole question of the Storm Shadows and the SCALPs, these sophisticated cruise missiles that the British are giving to the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians used them yesterday, the Russians are enraged about it, and you had Maria Zakharova come out and say that the Russians may strike outside of Ukraine. That obviously would not be good.
Glenn Diesen: Agreed. Well, thank you for taking the time, and I'm sorry we went a little bit over time today. Thanks again.
John Mearsheimer: You're more than welcome, Glenn. It was a pleasure being here.