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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 4.
Appearances
He's made it clear that anybody with a triple-digit IQ understands that it's nuts to think about recreating the Soviet Union.
He thinks it's a tragedy that the Soviet Union fell apart, but as he made clear in that essay, the July 12, 2021 essay,
And as he made clear in speeches before, immediately before he invaded Ukraine, he accepted the breakup of the Soviet Union and he accepted the status quo in Europe, save for the fact he did not accept the idea that Ukraine would become part of NATO.
It's very hard for me to answer that question because I don't know him and I've not studied him carefully in terms of his overall performance over the course of the 23 years that he's been in power.
I've studied him as a strategist, and I've studied how he deals with the West and deals with the international system more generally since 2014.
And I think he is a first-class strategist.
This is not to say he doesn't make mistakes, and he admits he's made some mistakes, but
But I think that the West is dealing with a formidable adversary here.
And I don't see any evidence that he's either lost speed off his fastball or that power has corrupted his thinking about strategic affairs.
I think that's clear, yeah.
I think, as I emphasized early on in our conversation, that...
leaders' privilege, security, or survival over everything else.
And by the way, he gave a number of talks and press conferences in addition to writing that famous article that you referred to on July 12, 2021.
So we have a pretty clear record of what he was saying, and I would argue what he was thinking, in the run-up to the war in February 2022.
And if you read what he said, it's quite clear that he privileged security or survival.
He was deeply concerned about the security of Russia.
And Russia is a quite vulnerable state in a lot of ways, especially if you think back to what it looked like in the 1990s.
You know better than I do.
It was in terrible shape.
The Chinese talk about the century of national humiliation.
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