John Mearsheimer

speaker

2,303 appearances 7 recordings 5 series first heard Nov 2023 last heard 28 May

John Mearsheimer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 4.

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So there you have an argument that economic interdependence leads to peace.

And then the third liberal argument has to do with institutions, sometimes referred to as liberal institutionalism.

And this is the argument that if you can get states into institutions where they become rule-abiding actors—

they will obey the rules that dictate that war is not acceptable.

So if you get them to accept the UN rules on when you can and cannot initiate a war, then you'll have a more peaceful world.

So those are the liberal theories.

And as you can tell, they're very different from...

realism as articulated by somebody like me.

If they think it's necessary to kill the golden goose because of security concerns, they will do it.

The point is that economic interdependence

at its root, has prosperity as the core variable.

In the realist story, the core variable is survival.

And survival always trumps prosperity.

So if you go back,

to the period before World War I. We're in Europe.

It's 1913 or early 1914.

What you see is that you have an intense security competition between all of the great powers.

On one side, you have the triple alliance, and on the other side, you have the triple entente.

You have these two alliances, and you have an intense security competition between them, okay?

At the same time, you have a great deal of economic interdependence.

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