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Rodney Rockwell's avatar

https://x.com/DrewPavlou/status/1716388303006745064

Mearsheimer probably shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

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Alexander Kurz's avatar

I am not interested in arguments about M as a person. His argument in the book I link above is that the attitude that international relations can be made more peaceful by converting with the use of force authoritarian regimes to democratic ones does not work. Would you agree with his specific argument on this point?

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Chris Torris Olsen's avatar

There's vanishingly little evidence in Mearsheimer's writings. It's generally ivory tower stuff, hanging onto a weird balance-of-power ideology that the rest of us left behind at some point after World War 1. I haven't read this book but I have studied a lot of his papers, and I don't have much more to say than that he's kind of an idiot who happens to have connections and clout.

Just the exerpts from chapters in the TOC there are delusional. "The costs of liberal hegemony begin with the endless wars a liberal state ends up fighting to protect human rights and spread liberal democracy around the world. Once unleashed on the world stage, a liberal unipole soon becomes addicted to war." – saying this while living in literally the most peaceful time in human history, especially when the book was written but even including events of the last few years, is just... dumb. Again, it's just arguing over opinions about how he wants the world to be without actually providing evidence.

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Alexander Kurz's avatar

Can I take your reply as asserting that, in your opinion, trying to convert with the use of force authoritarian regimes to democratic ones is good foreign politics?

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