1. Introduction

Provides an overview that touches on some of the main themes and arguments in the chapters that follow.

If you have followed the debates about the wars between Russia and Ukraine and between Israel and Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorist proxies of Iran, you will almost certainly have heard of Professor John J. Mearsheimer, a political scientist based at the University of Chicago.

Mearsheimer is the most prominent current advocate of the “realist” framework for analysing international relations. Over recent decades, he has developed and refined his own version of this framework, a theory that he calls “offensive realism.”

In Mearsheimer’s view, offensive realism it both a descriptive and a prescriptive theory. It can describe and explain how states interact with each other in the international system, but it is also capable of yielding insights as to how states should behave, making it a useful tool for policymakers grappling with complex and difficult foreign policy issues.

Issues like, how to explain the Russia-Ukraine war, and who is to blame for it, what could have been done differently to avoid the conflict, and what should be done now.

That certainly sounds like it could be helpful, if the theory is any good. Mearsheimer has not been shy in applying his theory to come up with some rather striking conclusions. Regarding the Ukraine war, he concludes that it is almost exclusively the West’s fault.

In 2014, Mearsheimer wrote an article that appeared in the August edition of Foreign Affairs magazine with the title Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault. He followed that up the following year with a lecture at the University of Chicago almost identically titled Why is Ukraine the West’s Fault? Since being posted to YouTube, this lecture has received 29 million views and nearly 19,000 comments, most praising the perspicacity of Mearsheimer’s take on the issue.

This will strike many people as counter-intuitive, to put it politely. How can the side that launched a massive invasion of Ukraine, the Putin regime, be absolved of all blame for it? A war against a nation that had never attacked Russia, nor shown the slightest intention to do so.

Well, goes Mearsheimer’s explanation, because the West caused the war  by expanding NATO after the breakup of the Soviet Union, and especially by not permanently ruling out Ukrainian membership. In an interview shortly after the 24 February 2022 invasion he said the following:

Now, with regard to the causes, it’s very important to understand that who caused this situation is of tremendous importance, because it involves assigning blame. You really have two choices here; you can argue that the West and especially the United States caused the crisis. Or you can argue that the Russians caused the crisis. But that means that whoever you argue caused the crisis is responsible for this disaster.

A simple binary choice, either Russia or the West caused the problem, according to the professor, and since the West caused it, it is to blame. He does not even seem prepared to contemplate the possibility of shared blame.

How so? According to Mearsheimer, the West (the US and NATO) gave Putin no option but to invade the country, causing a bloodbath that has already killed or maimed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians. Like Martin Luther, the poor fellow could do no other.

Why could Putin do no other? In what sense was he forced to opt for the most extreme response imaginable to this alleged provocation? After all, by pursuing NATO membership, Ukraine and the other post-Cold War NATO joiners were merely exercising a sovereign right that Russia, and its precursor state the Soviet Union, had explicitly recognized in multiple international agreements, including the Helsinki Final Act (1975) and the NATO-Russia Founding Act (1997).

Moreover, as Mearsheimer has himself acknowledged, before Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, the chances of Ukraine being admitted to NATO in the foreseeable future were pretty much dead, given continuing opposition by France, Germany and others (admission of new members requires unanimity of all existing members). Here is what he said in his 2015 University of Chicago lecture:

… by the way, NATO expansion is dead. I’ve talked to countless policy makers, who say it’s dead, but what we have to do is explicitly abandon it, say it is not happening.

After the Maidan Revolution of 2013-14, there was initially little interest within Ukraine in joining NATO, with the first elected post-Maidan president Petro Poroshenko stating it was a low priority and Ukrainian public opinion was strongly opposed. Ukraine even had a constitutional prohibition on joining military alliances or stationing foreign forces on its soil.

By annexing Crimea, and invading the Donbass in 2014, Putin changed that situation overnight. Ukrainian public support for joining the alliance surged to a majority, growing to an overwhelming majority in the years that followed.

The Ukrainian Rada (parliament) voted overwhelmingly to repeal the prohibition on alliances in December of that year. In the explanatory note to the repeal legislation Poroshenko explained the change of position:

“The Russian Federation's aggression against Ukraine, its illegal annexation of Crimea...its military intervention in eastern regions and other forms of pressure” created the need for "more effective guarantees of independence, sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity.”

As a purported realist, you might think Mearsheimer would recognize that there is nothing quite like being attacked by a huge neighbour to cause the victimized country to think anew about its security arrangements. Particularly given that, according to Mearsheimer’s theory, ensuring state survival must be the prime imperative for all states.

More recently, Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 induced Finland and Sweden, both with long traditions of military non-alignment, in Sweden’s case dating back two centuries to the Congress of Vienna, to join NATO after a similarly dramatic shift in public opinion.  

As some Russian commentators have complained, this has turned the Baltic Sea, the gateway to Russia’s main port of Saint Petersburg, into a “NATO lake.”

There is a particular irony here, given Mearsheimer’s tying of blame to causality in the quotation above. If NATO expansion caused Russia to invade, then what caused NATO expansion?

As argued in detail in Chapter 9, the main driver of NATO’s post-Cold War expansion into the former Soviet sphere was the desperation of the newly freed states to be admitted, and that desperation was the direct consequence of Russian behaviour, starting in the early Yeltsin years.

As for Ukraine itself, whose population voted overwhelmingly (92 percent) for separation from Russia in the independence referendum held in December 1991 (defying pleas by President George H. W. Bush that they not do so), but who nonetheless initially held generally positive attitudes toward Russia, Putin has created a poisonous legacy of hatred likely to persist for generations.

So if, contrary to reality, NATO expansion actually was a grave threat to Russia, then Putin’s serial aggression has done nothing but increase it. Yet in his most recent book, Mearsheimer contends that Putin “is a first-class strategist”!

Mearsheimer has been one of the most prolific and influential academic commentators on the Russia-Ukraine conflict since it first went kinetic in 2014. His “it’s all the West’s fault” line has been reiterated in numerous articles, lectures, talks and interviews since.

His ideas find supporters across the ideological spectrum, from Trotskyists on the Left to the neo-isolationist Right, and all points in between. He has made two visits to Australia in 2023 and 2024 sponsored by the classical-liberal think tank the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), one of numerous scholarly audiences he has been invited to address.

The breadth of his ideological appeal is not hard to explain. Old-line leftists, and the modern woke left, are always open to anything that sheets the blame for the world’s problems to the capitalist, “white” West. On the right, the neo-isolationist tendency within national populist movements deprecates anything they see as emanating from the “deep state”, especially the foreign-policy establishments in the US and elsewhere.

That accounts for the ideologues. But what about the scholars? Well, Mearsheimer has a couple of things going for him.

Firstly, he is one of the most well-known, and impressively credentialled, scholars of international relations in the world today. As noted above, he has been the one of the most prominent champions of the realist framework for several decades.

Furthermore, he is a prime example of what the French might term a “pugiliste intellectuel” (intellectual pugilist). He clearly enjoys stating positions that strike many as provocative, or even amoral, and relishes joining the rancorous debates that sometimes follow.

For example, in 1990 he wrote a  long article for The Atlantic magazine titled Why We Will Soon Miss the Cold War that argued that with the removal of the Soviet threat after 1991, Britain, Germany, France and other West European democracies that before 1945 had been at each other’s throats for centuries would likely revert to type.

With the ending of the Cold War, he predicted a new era of possibly violent conflict between them, with Germany once again militarily seizing territory in eastern Europe, even leading to an outbreak of nuclear proliferation. He rejected the idea that the fact these states are now all liberal democracies would have any bearing on their conduct.

To avoid this scenario, he prescribed a policy of trying to perpetuate the Cold War in some form, albeit at a less risky level than before:

The implications of my analysis are straightforward, if paradoxical. Developments that threaten to end the Cold War are dangerous. The West has an interest in maintaining peace in Europe. It therefore has an interest in maintaining the Cold War order, and hence has an interest in continuing the Cold War confrontation.

Thankfully, none what he predicted has come to pass.

In 2006, together with his fellow realist colleague professor Stephen M. Walt, he wrote an article titled The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,  that argued American policy was being distorted, to America’s detriment, by a shadowy, financially and politically powerful pro-Israel lobby, a claim he has reiterated in his commentaries on the current war in Gaza.

And, starting in 2014, with the Russian annexation of Crimea and incursion into the Donbass, he began to weigh in on the Ukraine crisis with his “all the West’s fault” line, which he has stuck to ever since.

Mearsheimer’s position can be distinguished from that of almost all other critics of Western conduct, who typically argue the rapid expansion of NATO in the 1990s and 2000s was imprudent. Most, including Mearsheimer’s close colleague and fellow realist Professor Stephen M. Walt, also condemn Putin’s aggression.

Mearsheimer, by contrast, contends that Western policy not only forced Russia to act as it did, but that the Putin regime acted rationally and rightly by invading.

In all his many commentaries on the Ukraine war, you will not find a word of condemnation of Russian conduct, not a scintilla of moral outrage about Putin’s decision to start this terrible war, nor the atrocious way he has conducted it with indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets, nor of Russian behaviour in the occupied areas, with clear evidence of the widespread and systematic use of torture against the population and mass abductions of children.

Moreover, Mearsheimer concedes that the Russian invasions are illegal according to international law (notwithstanding some risible attempts by foreign minister Sergey Lavrov to argue the contrary), and that they fail to meet the morality-based criteria of Just War Theory that underpin much of the international law of war.

So how does he justify Russia’s aggression?

By reference to his theory, his variant of realism, that he has evocatively named “offensive realism.” In Mearsheimer’s hands, the insights of the realist framework congeal into a dogma, where state actions are dominated by causal laws that largely eliminate the discretion, the agency, of state leaders to respond to challenges and crises in different ways.

It is a strangely deterministic, almost mechanistic, theory. He likens interactions between nation states in the international system to colliding billiard balls, all made of the same stuff, differing only in size reflecting their relative power. His other metaphor is states being locked in an “iron cage” that severely limits their discretion.

Whether democracy or dictatorship, and irrespective of the characteristics of state leaders, their fears, aspirations, neuroses, moral scruples or lack thereof, whether they are rational or not (in his latest book Mearsheimer contends they almost always act rationally). It does not matter whether a state be deemed “good” or “bad” (Mearsheimer’s quotes), they are all compelled to act in predetermined ways, responding to the power dynamics operating in the international system.

Why are states so constrained? Because, according to Mearsheimer, of the “anarchic” nature of the international system, by which he means the lack of a supra-national authority capable of adjudicating and enforcing resolutions to disputes between states. This anarchy, together with the inevitable uncertainty concerning the intentions and capabilities of other states, means that states are required to give absolute priority to their security and survival, even at the expense of legality and morality.

Which raises an obvious problem with Mearsheimer’s insistence that the West is to blame for the Ukraine conflict. How can any state be blamed, if it is causally compelled to act as it does? Blame, after all, is an inherently moral concept. How can a state be blamed if it can do no other? Indeed, this is how Mearsheimer absolves Putin from all blame. But why only Russia?

These ideas are set out in Mearsheimer’s main texts, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001, updated 2014), The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (2019) and most recently How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy (Nov 2023).

In January 2024, Mearsheimer brought his ideas on the circumstances where war can be justified together in a lecture titled War and International Politics in which he argues for what he terms a Clausewitzian approach to war, after the Prussian general and strategist Carl von Clausewitz, famous for the adage “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” For Mearsheimer, war is just another instrument of statecraft, and an underrated one at that.

According to Mearsheimer, in addition to wars of self-defence following attack, and wars authorized by the UN Security Council (the legal wars, according to Article 51 of the UN Charter) as well as pre-emptive wars where an attack is imminent, states should be prepared to wage “preventive wars” and “wars of opportunity”.

He defines a preventive war as a war “aimed at averting an adverse shift in the balance of power.” Imagine how many wars that would justify, given the balance of power in the world is changing continuously as states bolster their respective militaries at different rates. Would the US have been justified in attacking China as soon as it started to develop a blue-water navy on this basis? Presumably yes, according to Mearsheimer’s criteria.

Even more remarkably, Mearsheimer defines a war of opportunity as one where a state “sees an opening to gain more power and enhance its security or perhaps achieve some other objective.” What?

So, it is all about power maximization. Mearsheimer contends that states should seek to maximize their power relative to their actual or potential rivals, and if feasible should aim to become the hegemon, regionally or even globally.

In The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, he is critical of Germany for failing to attack France in 1905, when France’s ally Russia was flat on its back after being defeated in the Russo-Japanese war, instead waiting until 1914 when conditions were much less favourable.

Scratching your head? Here are the relevant passages from the The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. The first affirms that offensive realism is both a descriptive and a prescriptive theory:

It should be apparent from this discussion that offensive realism is mainly a descriptive theory. It explains how great powers have behaved in the past and how they are likely to behave in the future. But it is also a prescriptive theory. States should behave according to the dictates of offensive realism, because it outlines the best way to survive in a dangerous world.

Here he makes clear that, according to offensive realism, states should aim to become hegemonic:

Offensive realists, on the other hand, believe that status quo powers are rarely found in world politics, because the international system creates powerful incentives for states to look for opportunities to gain power at the expense of rivals, and to take advantage of those situations when the benefits outweigh the costs. A state’s ultimate goal is to be the hegemon in the system.

Regarding the situation between Germany and France in 1905 following Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese war:

So France stood virtually alone against the mighty Germans, who “had an opportunity without parallel to change the European balance in their favor.” Yet Germany did not seriously consider going to war in 1905 but instead waited until 1914, when Russia had recovered from its defeat and the United Kingdom had joined forces with France and Russia.

Therefore it follows:

According to offensive realism, Germany should have gone to war in 1905, because it almost surely would have won the conflict.

Which states does Mearsheimer propose should follow the precepts of offensive realism? All of them—or at least all of the states that can realistically aspire to great power status. As he says:

Realists tend not to draw sharp distinctions between “good” and “bad” states, because all great powers act according to the same logic regardless of their culture, political system, or who runs the government. It is therefore difficult to discriminate among states, save for differences in relative power. In essence, great powers are like billiard balls that vary only in size.

So, what kind of world would we have if all the major powers decided to follow the prescriptions of Mearsheimer’s theory? Not exactly a prescription for world peace is it.

In light of this thinking, Mearsheimer’s defence of Russian conduct makes a kind of perverse sense. States should aspire to become, or to remain, hegemonic. Any serious challenge to this aspiration is, according offensive to realism, a legitimate casus belli, a justification for war.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine fits into Mearsheimer’s dubious typology as a preventive war, one justified by an adverse shift in the balance of power. From his War and International Politics lecture:

Consider the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was a preventive war, which is impermissible according to both just war theory and international law. But Russian leaders surely believe the invasion was just or at least justifiable because they are convinced that Ukraine joining NATO is an existential threat that must be prevented. I believe that almost every world leader would think that a preventive war aimed at eliminating a mortal threat is a just or morally correct decision, even if just war theory says it is not.

Preventive war? To prevent what, exactly? What kind of “existential threat” does Mearsheimer have in mind? A possible massive attack by NATO launched through the flat plains of Ukraine, the traditional Western invasion route used in earlier invasions by Napoleon and Hitler?

What is the probability that one day NATO, this diverse thirty-two-member alliance (thirty-three were Ukraine to join) of democracies might decide to attack Russia, holder of the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons? No less a figure than Vladimir Putin ridiculed this prospect when it was put to him at the start of his interview with Tucker Carlson in February 2024 before he launched into a long and tendentious recitation of his version of Russia-Ukraine history.

So, if not that, what is this “existential risk” that justifies starting the first major land war in Europe since 1945, an act that poses all-too-real escalatory risks that really could be existential for Russia and the world?

On one of the rare occasions that Mearsheimer has been pressed about what he means when he talks about an existential risk to Russia, the 2022 conference of the American Political Science Association, he conceded that what was at risk was “Russia’s status as a great power.”

A war, then, to protect national self-esteem. That’s apparently what Mearsheimer means by a preventive war in this case. To say that this trivializes the general understanding of terms like “existential threat”, “national survival” and “mortal threat” would be a massive understatement.

Take a huge risk now to avert a hypothetical and ridiculously improbable future danger? Does that seem rational? Mearsheimer thinks so. In How States Think, he sums up his justification for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as follows: “In short, this was a war of self-defense aimed at preventing an adverse shift in the balance of power.” Self-defence against an adversary that had never exhibited the slightest aggressive intent towards it.

But Mearsheimer is getting close to the heart of the matter when he accepts that it is about “Russia’s status as a great power.” What is needed for a state to be a great power—or more specifically, what does Putin deem necessary to have that status? An empire maybe, or at least a penumbra of states that Russia can dominate, run by regimes of a similar ilk to Putin’s, like Belarus under Alexandr Lukashenko.

Mearsheimer is highly sceptical of this, stating that he “sees no evidence” that Putin has any imperial ambitions. In reality, there is overwhelming evidence, if Mearsheimer had cared to look, that Putin does aspire to reconstitute something like imperial Russia, and that he sees himself as walking in the shoes of Peter I (the Great), the first Russian Tsar to assume the title of Emperor after waging a two-decade war (the Great Northern War) of imperial expansion.

On the 350^th anniversary of Peter the Great’s birth, Putin said this:

Peter the Great waged the great northern war for 21 years. It would seem that he was at war with Sweden, he took something from them. He did not take anything from them, he returned what was Russia’s.

He then compared Peter the Great’s project with his own mission:

Apparently, it is also our lot to return what is Russia’s and strengthen the country. And if we proceed from the fact that these basic values form the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in solving the tasks that we face.

The term Putin and fellow nationalists have for this project is “gathering the Russian lands.” In a 2023 panel discussion on Russian state television Margarita Simonyan, the head of Russia’s overseas propaganda activities, who has very close ties to Putin, conceded that this, rather than fear of NATO, was the main motivation for Russia’s expansionist activities, but it was “inconvenient” to acknowledge this until recently. Here is the exchange:

Question: During the press conference the following day, I heard of a new goal orientation when Putin spoke about the intrinsic unity of the Russian people which we have to achieve without fail. It was voiced for the first time, that all of our activities pertaining to Ukraine are mainly or largely determined through this goal. Do you see this as an advancement in our common and governmental worldview or am I exaggerating?

Margarita Simonyan:  To me this is not an advancement, but a more sincere and more public acknowledgement that this was always the goal. I’m sure you have no doubt that even 20 years ago Putin wanted to gather the Russian world, to defend Russians and to have this opportunity. It was a matter of when we had the ability to do it.

Mearsheimer insists that Putin has no imperial ambitions, indeed that he never even intended to conquer Ukraine, insisting absurdly that the advance on Kyiv was just a negotiating tactic and that his sole motivation was fear of NATO. When Mearsheimer says he sees no evidence of imperial aspirations, we must ask if he has ever bothered to look. As described in Chapter 8, there is overwhelming evidence that Putin has harboured an obsession with restoring Russia’s imperial greatness for at least three decades.

Here is Putin’s real problem with NATO expansion: Once in the alliance, under the protective umbrella of Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, which stipulates that “an attack on one is an attack on all”, a small nation is protected against being forcibly dragged into the Russian sphere of influence and can safely enjoy the prerogatives of genuine sovereignty. Prerogatives that Mearsheimer insists they cannot realistically expect to exercise.

That is why newly freed nations formerly trapped in the Soviet Union or the Warsaw Pact were issuing “desperate entreaties” to be admitted to NATO following the end of the Cold War, according to Mary Sarotte, the American political scientist who has written the definitive account of the post-Cold War NATO expansion.

The smaller such states, especially the tiny Baltic nations, were especially eager, since without alliance protection they really would face an existential danger were Russia to regain the urge and the means to engage in imperial expansion.

So, it is a good thing that they are secure under the protection of the NATO alliance, right?

Not a bit of it! Here is what Mearsheimer said in an interview with Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker magazine in March 2022:

Mearsheimer: There are people who believe that when he is finished conquering Ukraine, he will turn to the Baltic states. He’s not going to turn to the Baltic states. First of all, the Baltic states are members of NATO and—

Chotiner: Is that a good thing?

Mearsheimer: No.

Chotiner: You’re saying that he’s not going to invade them in part because they’re part of NATO, but they shouldn’t be part of NATO?

That is Mearsheimer’s thinking in a nutshell. He argues ensuring state security and survival is the prime imperative of all states, but only great powers can expect to exercise it. After all, the title of his most important book is The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.

And that is not the only prerogative that is limited to great powers. As Mearsheimer said to Chotiner in the same interview:

In an ideal world, it would be wonderful if the Ukrainians were free to choose their own political system and to choose their own foreign policy. But in the real world, that is not feasible.

A grim conclusion from Mearsheimer’s dismal science of international relations.

Which brings us to Israel’s conflicts with Iran and its proxies Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis that began with the genocidal pogrom launched by Hamas against Israel on 7 October 2023.

Mearsheimer has had a great deal to say about these conflicts, delivered with his typical confidence and pugnacity. So, how does he apply his offensive realism theory to these cases?

Recall that when it comes to the Ukraine war, he bases his entire defence of Russian aggression on the supposed existential threat to Russia posed by NATO expansion, especially if it were extended to Ukraine. Mearsheimer bases this on nothing more than Vladimir Putin’s public assertion that it is an existential issue. It is about state survival, which his theory posits is, and should be, the paramount concern of all state leaders.

An extraordinary claim given that neither Ukraine, nor the NATO alliance, have ever expressed the slightest intention to commit aggression against Russia, nor taken any steps directed to this end. On the contrary, as described in Chapter 7, until Russia’s first aggression against Ukraine in 2014 NATO’s capabilities had been reduced to a shadow of their Cold War peak, leading the chief-of-staff of the German army to complain that in the event of conflict the Bundeswehr would stand “more or less empty-handed.”

By contrast, Israel has had to contend with enemies who have consistently, publicly and vehemently, expressed the intention to annihilate the state of Israel, with both Hamas and Hezbollah expressing aspirations to exterminate its Jewish population. The 7 October 2023 attack was a prefiguration of what these outfits would like to inflict on Israeli society as a whole.

At the very least, they and their Iranian puppet-masters hoped that by surrounding Israel with enemies and mounting ever more serious attacks, in due course they could make any semblance of normal social and economic life unviable. Unlike with Russia’s spurious justification for its aggression against Ukraine, Israel faces an all-too real threat to the survival of its state and population.

Given which, Mearsheimer would surely apply his offensive realism theory to this case, wouldn’t he?

Actually, no. In his many commentaries on Israel’s conflicts, neither offensive realism, nor realism more generally, rate even a mention unless specifically raised by his interlocuters.

And he gets quite cranky if anyone presses him about this apparently glaring inconsistency, as when he responded to Freddie Sayers of Unherd magazine last year by saying: “I don’t have to provide a consistency of approach. I’m focussing on what the Israelis are doing in Gaza. I’m not comparing what happened in Gaza with what happened on October 7th and what’s happened in Ukraine. Those are different issues.”

Here is what he said in an interview with journalist Paul Salvatori on Turkish state television:

Salvatori: Perhaps we can start off with this view of offensive realism. Could you, for those who may not be familiar with it, explain what it is and how it might be manifested right now in Israel’s assault on Gaza.

Mearsheimer: Well, I’m not sure that Israel’s assault on Gaza has much to do with realism … Now the reason it doesn’t apply to the Israeli-Palestinian case is we’re not talking about rival states; we’re talking about one state, which is Greater Israel, and we’re talking about the fact that inside of Greater Israel the Palestinians in Gaza are revolting against the Israelis.

This is astonishing. Mearsheimer’s theoretical edifice disappears without trace since, he tries to argue, the direct aggressors against Israel are not themselves state actors, even if they are sponsored by the state of Iran, soon likely to be a nuclear weapon state. It is palpably absurd. Moreover, Iran itself has more recently carried out massive attacks on Israel (massive in scale, though not in impact due to Israel’s superb layered missile-defence systems).

When it comes to Israel’s conflicts, Mearsheimer the hard-headed realist, who insists that when push comes to shove considerations of morality conflict with strategy, moral considerations are and should be subordinated, disappears down a drain-hole. Instead, he engages in spurious and totally unbalanced moral denunciations of Israel, ignoring the wicked dilemma that state faces dealing with adversaries who regard their own civilian populations as martyrdom fodder to be sacrificed in the puruit of their evil ends.

The only commonality in Mearsheimer’s treatment of Ukraine and Israel is that in both cases he strives to construct a rationale for siding with the aggressor in the respective conflicts.

These issues are taken up in greater detail in Chapter 11.

In the chapters that follow, it will be argued that offensive realism is a very bad theory, both hopelessly unrealistic—especially in an age characterized by “personalist” dictatorships, like Putin’s Russia, dominated by a single individual at the apex of power, and if followed would markedly lower the threshold at which recourse to war can be considered justified .

Here is the bottom line. Mearsheimer, with his espousal of his offensive realism theory, has provided a justifying ideology for the coalition of autocracies now collaborating ever more closely to overturn any semblance of a rules based international order, and replace it with one where the great powers are able to bully and intimidate those they see as being properly within their sphere of influence.

It would be a dystopian world where the operative principle would be that of the Melian Dialogue from ancient Greece: “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must”, or more succinctly “might is right.”