Why you better start a denunciation campaign against Mearsheimer starting in week two after the russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 at the Hoover Institution - and then get a more friendly voice to maybe invent a new version of the realist school of foreign relations, you know - like you do… Maybe a fusion between geopolitical realism and idealism, right?
Lets not go to Mearsheimer to explain it this time, lets go to one of his students, Sean Mirski.
Innocent enough, right?
Wright: Let me also tell people a little more about you are you - are still a visiting scholar at the Hoover institution at Stanford University?
Mirski: I am, they keep extending it so I’m not going to say no.
Wright: No don’t uh, and you previously served in the U.S. defense department under both Republican and Democratic administrations - um and you would have a master’s degree from the University of Chicago in international relations or something, you went to Harvard Law School - is that all true?
Mirski: That’s correct, that’s all true.
Innocent enough, right - I mean what could go wrong?
Wright: So you think it was, it was a tactical not strategic blunder to seize Crimea in terms of the motivation - it seems like the threat Russia perceived was at least as direct as most of the threats America is reacting to in your book, in the sense that you’ve got a neighbor right on its border and it has a very important naval base [Sewastopol] in the neighbor, it’s technically a long-term lease but it’s a legacy of the Soviet Union and uh there is what looks like from its point of view - a coup or - an event, a revolution - deposing of a president who was kind of friendly uh and there is in some sense at least U.S. support for what just happened - and the U.S. has professed the intention to have that neighbor be part of NATO and so on - I mean that’s like, compared to most of the things the US has been reacting to uh by intervening in Latin America, that’s a much more direct threat right?
Mirski: Oh, yeah I mean certainly, I think from Russia’s perspective that’s probably the right way to think about it, I mean americans obviously see it a little bit differently, because at least -
Wright: I’ve noticed that - I’ve noticed that… [*smirk*]
Mirski: Yeah [*smirk*], well and you know part of it is I think for most Americans you know the idea of NATO enlargement it seems sort of I don’t want to say innocent [*cough, cough*], but it doesn’t seem or at least it hasn’t seemed targeted at Russia until very recently, ehm but you know part of what makes International politics difficult is that one its very difficult to communicate intentions in a sort of uh deliberate way and number two those intentions can just change over time. and so you know from Russias perspective maybe NATO expanding in your know the 2000 odds and 2000 early 2010s was not aimed at Russia but Russia doesn’t have any way of guaranteeing that once NATO is up at Russia’s border someone doesn’t change their mind - and suddenly NATO’s turned into an anti-russia alliance again and so from Russias perspective I think it’s understandable why they’re concerned that you know countries like Georgia and Ukraine would be potentially offered NATO admission.
Wright: Right and that leads to one kind of abstract question before we get into the history, um you know you said it had no way of of being assured that NATO wouldn’t ultimately be a threat whatever the motivation behind expansion and um this is a common thing I mean there’s a term that doesn’t appear in your book I think uh which is security dilemma. I’m sure you’re familiar with it you studied uh under Mearsheimer at Chicago and that refers to the fact that um you know one nation uh it will it will read something that another nation does as either offensive in intent or potentially offensive uh and will react to it in a way that it sees as defensive but then the other, the other country will - will see it as either offensive in intent misreading it or see it, the motivation, accurately and but also see that potentially this this new thing this new military base somewhere could be put to offensive use and so they react and you get a spiral - […]
So of course when you mention that (“What about in 30 years time? Russia only currently has the demography to do something against the perceived threat.”) in week two of the war towards you psychologist, she snorts at you and strikes even the possibility of that notion down. Just outright. No reason. Because having an education is for pussies. And because by then everyone already knew, that Putin was Hitler, and crazy, and that propaganda NEVER WORKS ON ANYONE ENDUCATED, right?
RIGHT?
I mean you learned at university how it works, and that this is it. But who listens to you, when you say, that Putin likely used Nazis as the “enemy image” to dehumanize the opponent in a war? And used several other Propaganda principles in which he probably didnt believe in personally? Because he might not actually just be mad?
And that gets you another snort and another strike down for even having considered the possibility.
Sorry - I thought I throw in some flavor text - just to lighten the mood a bit. Before we get to the more interesting stuff.
Wright: I hadn’t realized that we had a tendency in the 19th century, if I read you correctly, to characterize part of the threat we faced uh from Europe as ideological in the sense that they were monarchists - right, like today we are framing our foreign policy apparently largely as a global war between democracy and autocracy, for better or worse, by the way the answer is worse, but that’s the way we’re framing it - um and uh - I was surprised by the parallel and uh and but but that’s kind of built in from the beginning, it sounds like.
Mirski: It is although it kind of fluctuates I think in how important it is, um certainly when the United States is for instance declaring the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 and things like that, the like you know distinction between monarchy and democracy is really at its height, uh and I think rightly so - I mean I think the European monarchies at that point were legitimately concerned by the ideological threat that was posed by the United States and that’s true certainly all the way through the Civil War.
France uh during the U.S Civil War invades and occupies all of Mexico and installs an uh a Habsburg Prince on the throne of Montezuma uh and essentially the the explicit reason to do this is to basically start making the hemisphere safe for monarchy.
Emperor Napoleon III basically has this idea that once Mexico is remonarchized he’s going to just start moving south through the rest of the hemisphere and targeting all these Latin American republics making them back into monarchies - and so there is very much that sort of ideological conflict at that point. I do think it ameliorates a little bit in the coming decades, you see you see flavors of it in the sense that obviously in World War One there’s a lot of sort of rhetoric about Prussian autocracy and you know and certainly of course the phrase to make the world safe for democracy comes from Woodrow Wilson at that time [see: Bernays] -- but um but it doesn’t it - ideological factors end up I think receding a little bit around the turn of the century it’s less that and more kind of just pure security kind of interests.
Wright: So in that case, uh so France has this kind of uh Habsburg proxy, I mean for a reason - I don’t know enough about history to understand why, it wasn’t just a french guy but he apparently wasn’t right uh and and uh and then we in that case we basically support a revolution to get rid of him right?
Mirski: Yeah I mean so the the uh the then president of Mexico Benito Juarez um was essentially already you know fighting a civil war against uh Emperor Maximilian the the Habsburg Prince - uh we end up mostly just uh providing his forces with support and sort of uh launch it you know uh I don’t want to say launching a proxy war but it ends up being a proxy war but uh that was very much a conflict that we didn’t necessarily instigate so much as helped uh as far as finish.
Wright: Okay and then what why don’t you maybe list several kinds of interventions, you know several interventions that represent different kinds of of interventions uh in say in between the Civil War uh and uh well you go all the way up to World War one if you want if it’ll help.
Mirski: Yeah well and so it starts out I think um you know up until like 1898 the Spanish-American War there’s not that much there are certainly a few but there’s not as much in terms of direct sort of um the United States is not as interested in sort of meddling around with the internal sovereignty of other nations, the one exception is annexation which always ends up being sort of the last resort for the United States in response to security threat and so in uh I have a chapter in the book about Hawaii where a variety of reasons we were very concerned about Hawaii uh getting annexed by Japan in response essentially we end up annexing Hawaii ourselves um but starting in the Spanish-American War what ends up happening is we’re left with uh we’re occupying Cuba at the end of the war and on the one hand we’ve promised to give Cuba its independence at the start of the war on the other hand we’re very worried that if we just give Cuba its independence uh that uh it’s going to get snaped up by another great power like Germany uh uh basically under on the theory that Cuba is unlikely to stay stable for long it’s going to descend into Civil War and once that happens Germany is just going to come in and to scoop up the pieces and so what we end up doing is uh forcing Cuba to uh install uh the Platt Amendment which is among other things - has provision that gives the United States the right to intervene in Cuban Affairs if things get bad enough essentially that was not -
Wright: That was nice of them I thought. Just send troops whenever we want!
Mirski: Yeah, well and it’s it’s funny because uh one of the debates among historians is what was the kind of original intention of the Platt Amendment uh and I think you know my view is that if you look at the the author of it the primary author of it uh Secretary of State or Secretary of War Elihu Root, he you know I think he genuinely thought it would be a last resort - and he also genuinely thought it would never be used because part of the thought was well if we promise if we tell the Cubans that we’re going to intervene in their politics if they ever have a civil war the Cubans don’t want us in their politics and so they’ll never have a civil war and is this sort of what ends up being incredibly naive, thinking that uh ends up leading the US to take a greater and greater role in the region but that at least was the initial thinking - um but that’s sort of like the you know and that is not a minor imposition on Cuban sovereignty but that ends up being sort of the the lighter edge of interventions as the kind of 1900, yeah 19 odds and the 1910s go on the interventions start to become much more hard-hitting and so in 1905 uh one other example of an intervention is something called customs receiverships so the United States will come in and basically administer the custom houses of our neighbors which is a little bit like the Chinese coming in to administer the IRS uh and the reason that analogy works is because at the time Latin American states essentially drew all of their revenues from taxing trade - through the custom houses and so if you control the custom houses you controlled all internal revenue for the state of the Dominican Republic or Haiti or wherever, and so the US starts coming in and is essentially taking over these custom houses and initially it’s like consensual might not be completely the right word - but at least it’s at the invitation of the Dominican government over time this becomes much less consensual and we start taking over more custom houses. At first we’re just administering them, we’re giving Revenue to the uh to the central governments over time we end up starting to use that financial leash to do other things and so if we don’t like the government or we don’t like what the government’s doing we won’t hand over the revenue and we start starving it of revenue um we end up obviously uh regime change uh first time the United States ever openly overthrows now the government is in 1909 with Nicaragua this starts to become a bit of a pattern over the next decade and so we’ll send gunships and basically uh force president uh presidents and dictators off their uh out of their presidential chairs uh and finally this all just culminates in occupations - uh including I think the occupation of Haiti which lasts for almost two decades from 1915 to I believe 1934. and so that ends up being sort of the spectrum of U.S. intervention during this time and it comes in a lot of flavors, but I think one of the points that I make in the book is that these sort of early “intervention light” end up sort of leading to the heavier interventions in part because they don’t actually fix the problem that the United States is trying to solve.
Wright: The uh on the on the controlling the customs uh what is the customs house is the term or --?
Mirski: Customs receiverships yeah with the custom houses yep.
Wright: Um so yeah I mean we use that as a means of control we also fear that European powers will use it as a means of control right and yes and it’s interesting the extent to which uh both the perception of threat we have and the perception of threat that leads - well whether you want to call it perception of threat but but the motivation that leads some European powers to want to exert control over uh here - is about uh is about financial matters and fear that the other one will control the commerce right? I mean this was an actual European fear was that the U.S uh government was going to basically control imports and exports for the whole hemisphere and I guess one question is I mean how big a part of the motivations especially on the U.S. side but but on both sides were these kind of purely economic things um and did did the nature of international economics subsequently change so that that kind of eventually ceased to be much of a factor per se or what?
Mirski: Uh yeah so that’s actually a great question uh one point to make at the start is uh Europeans were as you mentioned the European -- the concern among American policy makers was that European nations would essentially come in and control these custom houses if the United States did not and the reason why was because Europe basically was owed a lot of money by these countries um but the thing that that statement kind of uh obscures a little bit is that the money that was owed was not really so much debt on contracts although that was part of it it was more that under the international law of the time and a lesser extent today -- um you know if you’re a European country and one of your citizens gets injured in a civil war or you know his property gets stolen you as the European State can essentially Champion their claims against the government in question and as I mentioned a lot of these countries are incredibly politically unstable we’re talking you know a new president every year sometimes multiple times a year and so in the context of all these Civil Wars and revolutions these European states do kind of rank up enormous claims, dealing uh - that stem from the kind of mistreatment of their citizens and property and I think that ends up being actually much more important for European powers than the sort of oh my Bankers went in they signed a contract and now you know the government’s trying to kind of welch on that um it’s just you know that that does play into it to some extent but it ends up being I think a sort of a secondary factor - um and so so you’re right so the American policy makers were a little bit worried that essentially to kind of make uh these countries behave better that the European nations would sort of come in and and start taking over the custom houses -- the the nice thing is that this the situation has improved in that respect in the intervening Century in two ways, one there’s been an important development in international law in part uh - I think originally sort of proposed by Latin American states themselves for sort of obvious reasons but uh eventually championed by the United States to essentially make it unlawful for uh powers to intervene on behalf of for instance like contract debts and things like that and then kind of beyond that initial development there’s been obviously just more of a norm that you don’t get to use military force against another Nation just because you might have you know economic claims against them so that’s been a huge kind of development and one that the United States I think was very very in favor of because it sort of eliminated part of the risk that the United States saw the other aspect of this though that I think has been helpful is that the sort of system of um international arbitration uh particularly investor State arbitration that’s been set up in especially you know the last half century or so, has kind of ameliorated the concerns that a lot of these powers in general have about not not getting fair treatment - because it turns out that the record of essentially suing a state because they expropriated your property or whatever most of these claimants actually win and ended up collecting on kind of the whatever money they’re owed and so because there’s now a mechanism that doesn’t involve using force and that mechanism Works reasonably well I think it’s actually kind of ameliorated some of the pressures you saw um the U.S responding to.
Wright: Yeah it would be nice to ameliorate all the pressures that lead to uh to war and and intervention uh forceful intervention and there were attempts I mean, uh you know like uh here’s a James Blaine the Secretary of State who uh wants to set up a system this is in the late 19th century where the way you’re going to maintain order in Latin America is you know uh a lot of international commerce reciprocal trade relations and the U.S. is going to facilitate arbitration of disputes so it’s kind of like a hemispheric court or something is the idea and you know I even say broadly speaking this is a direction in which you’d like to see the world evolve right you just have ways of solving disputes um but these things seem never to work out uh well enough to prevent another round of intervention right?
Mirski: Yeah, I mean this actually, so Blaine definitely sort of pioneers uh this approach although he’s not that successful at implementing it but um Elihu Root who I mentioned earlier is the author of The Platt Amendment by the time he he ends up being uh Theodore Roosevelt’s uh Secretary of State for essentially the second half of the Roosevelt administration and he is uh he ends up winning I think a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts uh in favor of international arbitration um and one of his big developments is he sets up this uh Central American court of justice this court that is meant to arbitrate all the disputes among the five Central American nations who are always at each other’s throats always invading each other and sort of causing problems and he sees this explicitly as a way of fixing some of the disorder and kind of the the power vacuums that he’s afraid are going to lead to European expansion uh the court though ends up being a bit of a failure part of that I think is that subsequent administrations just don’t take it seriously and Woodrow Wilson eventually just ends up killing it because it gives a ruling on an issue that he doesn’t like and so he essentially uh kind of chucks it out the window.
Wright: Um which president was that I missed it.
Mirski: Woodrow Wilson. Um uh I didn’t get as much into this in the book, uh for a variety of reasons, but uh the Central American Court essentially concludes that some that Wilson’s attempt to corner the market on the the Trans-Isthmian canal by uh taking canal rights to Nicaragua is a violation of the uh rights of its neighbors and the United States doesn’t like that and so it essentially pulls the plug on the court.
NO!? We have definitely not seen that being repeated in the last four months anywhere, right?
Das IWMVienna gibt noch mal bekannt wo es ideologisch steht
RIGHT?
And our rule-based legal order! Dont forget about our rule-based legal order!
Mirski: I think the book sort of one of the themes of the book is that there is this sort of understanding among American policy makers that what happens in Latin America is really what matters most and so a large part of the kind of efforts that we uh you know Pioneer at the global level like the League of Nations, or the United Nations, or the IMF, the World Bank - all of these have roots in Latin America and of course that makes sense that’s the region where we’ve been most involved that’s the region where you know uh whatever -- it’s not always fair to describe our attitude towards Europe as isolationist, but uh at least there’s an argument there when it comes to the western hemisphere - there’s just no argument we’ve always been super involved and so so much of I think American foreign policy uh in you know the kind of post World War II era and post even World War One era really did grow out of what we are doing in our region beforehand both good and bad I should say.
Wright: So did you at any point add up all the interventions all the kind of I don’t know what the term would be - extra legal intervention - or or you know in some sense kind of dubious interventions um, how many roughly in in like let’s say uh I don’t know between the the annunciation of the Monroe Doctrine, even though there wasn’t much enforcement of it for the for the first couple of decades - uh say through World War One?
Mirski: It’s tricky to give an exact number partially because it’s a question of defining terms uh so one of the kind of prevailing practices of the time was that if there’s like a civil war happening in a country, you can land your forces to protect your citizens but they essentially just you know stay around whatever part of the city or citizens are in and don’t really intervene in the rest of the conflict, um if you include stuff like that - as qualifying as a use of force or you know use or threat of force, uh I don’t know what the exact number is but uh it’s going to be something uh I don’t know if it’s triple digits but it’s going to be approaching triple digits.
Wright: Wow.
Mirski: I can say from 1898 to 1918 we were using Force against one of our neighbors an average of almost twice a year um and again some of those are relatively more minor uses of force to the extent that’s a you know way that you can describe this - others you know it’s occupation of entire nations and so it really sort of spans the spectrum and depends depends on what you kind of define as uh and as an extra legal intervention
Wright: Mhm - wha--
Mirski: And of cours -- oh go ahead!
Wright: No go ahead, go ahead!
Mirski: Well I was gonna say there’s also the difficulty of what counts as extra legal, so yeah you know under the Platt Amendment we had the right to intervene in Cuba as a legal matter, I mean one thing that [Elihu] Root was very very concerned about, as a one of the best lawyers of his generation was having a legal basis for doing everything the United States did. That was actually in large part why the Platt Amendment was framed the way it was.
Um and you know the Platt Amendment itself I would - I think it’s fair to count it as a intervention in the sense that the U.S. told the Cubans look you can either let us continue occupying you or even annex you or you can gain your freedom with these conditions and the Cubans chose the latter not exactly a fair choice from the Cuban perspective.
Wright: And we got a pretty sweet deal with the Panama Canal 3D [?] too, I would say or whatever it’s called now. Is it the case I understand it that okay so we signed that treaty but then the person who signed it on the other side wasn’t even an actual Panamanian is that right? Well, he was, he was this like French entrepreneur or something, who can make money if we signed it - so okay, you sign it.
Mirski: Yeah, the Panama Canal story is just one of the I mean just stranger than fiction I think, through and through there was this gentleman uh by the name of […]
[…]
Bunau-Varilla, I was right okay so he um so he’s this Frenchman who’s involved in - so the French would try to build the Panama Canal decades before the United States did, they fail it goes bankrupt. Bunau-Varilla is this Frenchman who was involved in the effort and he’s primarily an engineer but for a variety of reasons he becomes dedicated to having this canal finished under any means uh kind of any way possible and he concludes that the only way to do that is to have the United States build the canal.
The problem is that Colombia essentially doesn’t like the terms that uh it’s representative in the United States Representative negotiated for the Panama canal and so Colombia rejects it -
Wright: And Panama is it I don’t know if you said this and I missed it or Panama is it that - or what we call Panama, was part of Colombia at that point.
Mirski: Yeah sorry I should have mentioned that so Panama is still part of Colombia at this point and uh Colombia rejects the treaty and Roosevelt is furious - Americans in general are annoyed and Bunau-Varilla basically decides uh that the only way to get the Americans to build the canal is for Panama to declare its independence and then to sign a canal treaty with the Americans. And the Panamanians are essentially on board with this, because from their perspective having a canal through their state is going to be a massive economic boon it’s going to make their state kind of important for a variety of reasons and so uh you know, skipping some of the sort of details the panamanians do eventually launch this revolution - uh Bunau-Varilla is heavily involved - he finances a large part of it um it’s always hard to know how seriously to take him because his book is one of the most, I mean his autobiography is just one of the most like puffed up pieces of sort of self aggrandisment you can imagine, but it actually as far as historians can tell, is likely mostly accurate - um but panamanians declare independence and the United States essentially sends eight uh warships down to prevent the Colombians from retaking the province, and so the United States helps Panama uh declare independence at this point - however uh you know the US basically turns to the panamanians and says okay let’s negotiate this treaty and Bunau-Varilla in exchange for his help made the Panamanian uh uh secessionists promise to make him their first representative of the panamananian state in Washington - and they know that this is a bad idea so they immediately send some actual panamanians up to Washington to do the actual negotiations but Bunau-Varilla doesn’t really care very much about Panama does not really care at all about Panama getting a good deal in this treaty or anything like that and so he immediately turns around to Secretary of State John Milton Hay and says listen I’ll sign on whatever terms you want the stronger you can make them for the United States the better because we have to get this through the U.S. Senate and Panama is not in a position to object, because the only reason it’s independent is because the U.S. warships are off its Coast and so uh Bunau-Varilla and Hay sign this treaty, that is just enormously favorable to the United States. When it goes before Congress, one of its opponents - basically says I’ve never seen a treaty that is this favorable to the United States um and you know the U.S. Senate uh passes it and by the time the Panamanians arrive it’s just too late it’s already been signed.
So strange, that we cant hold those kind of debates in Europe right now, right? I mean, we all know this is a conflict based on conflicting value systems right?
Right?
Drei meiner ehemaligen Psychologen würden sagen, beschäftigen sie sich doch nicht mehr so damit.
Meine Psychiaterin würde sagen, sie neigen zu Überinterpretation -- und ich würde einfach nur Ursula Werther-Pietsch, Mitunterzeichnerin der alpbachnahen Initiative “Unsere Sicherheit” (Die sich gegen die österreichische Neutralität ausspricht, und bisher zwei offene Briefe verfasst hat, die dann später Johannes Kopf (selbst ebenfalls Teil der Initiative) beworben hat, und das bereits eine Woche nachdem er zu einem Panel in der Österreichisch Amerikanischen Gesellschaft geladen wurde) zitieren:
Die Gründung einer neuen Schule des Multilateralismus, die realistische und idealistische Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik vereint, wird zur Diskussion gestellt.
Geopolitik nicht als Leitmotiv sehen
Internationale Beziehungen sollen nichts anderes als den täglichen Bedürfnissen im politischen Leben dienen; ihr innenpolitischer Bezug ist daher evident. Allerdings nicht aus der üblichen Perspektive, nämlich dem “Lippenablesen”, um “politisch zu punkten” unter dem Deckmäntelchen des Bürgers als Souverän. Nein, umgekehrt soll Geopolitik, also das Spiel von Machtinteressen auf globaler Ebene, als integraler Teil von menschlicher Sicherheit gesehen werden, als eine gewichtige Dimension, nicht aber als Leitmotiv oder gar übergeordnetes Axiom.
src: click
Weil realistische Schule in Foreign Relations Theory das geht ja nicht mehr, das ist ja Mearsheimer, und wir haben ja gerade gesehen was da selbst bei einem seiner Studenten dabei herauskommt.
Nein, also da doch bitte Mearsheimer ab Woche zwei des Krieges von der Hoover Institution denunzieren lassen. Ist besser so. Er sagt ja auch zu wenig “Werte” und internationales Recht.
Ich muss abschließend noch kurz wie so oft zusammenfassen: Diese Gesellschaft ist das absolut grotesk, abartigst Allerletzte.
Aber auch nur, weil bei uns eine derartige Diskussion in den nächsten 20 Jahren nicht mehr öffentlich stattfinden kann.
