John Mearsheimer

The Chinese are my kind of people.

They're realists, right?

They speak my language.

It's the United States that is not very realist.

American leaders have a very powerful liberal bent and tend not to see the world in realist terms.

I believe, by the way, just going back to our discussion of NATO expansion, I think our inability to understand that NATO expansion was

was anathema to the Russians was due in large part to the fact that we just, during the unipolar moment, didn't think of international politics from a realist perspective and didn't respect anyone who thought about international politics from a realist perspective.

If...

Those various American administrations, starting with the Clinton administration, had put their realist hat on.

They would have understood that NATO expansion into Ukraine was not a good idea.

But we had this thoroughly liberal view of the world that dominated our thinking.

And it's gone away somewhat since we've moved into multipolarity, but not completely.

And this makes me a little nervous, right, to pick up on your point.

I mean, the United States is thinking about the world in ways that are somewhat different than the Chinese, who are real as par excellence.

Yeah, I actually think that's right.

I think if the United States, just let me talk a little bit about the United States to get at the issue you're raising.

If the United States pursues a smart containment strategy, given what you just said and I said about the Chinese, I think we will avoid war.

The problem with the Americans is it's not just the liberalism.

It's the possibility that we will pursue a rollback policy.

In other words, during the Cold War, we pursued containment.