The Anti-American Academic Who Helped Build the Caliphate

From Ivory Tower to Islamic State

Few voices carry as much weight in international relations as John Mearsheimer. But weight shouldn't be confused with wisdom. The University of Chicago professor recently claimed that President Trump’s support for Israel’s strikes on Iran had shattered U.S. credibility. Mearsheimer couldn’t be more wrong. His analysis is shaped by the same fixed assumptions that have guided his thinking for years: a reflexive distrust of American power and a persistent failure to understand how adversaries think, act, and escalate.

At the heart of this failure is Mearsheimer’s so-called “offensive realism”, a theory that presents itself as hard-nosed and analytical, but consistently fails to align with how the world actually works. It reduces global conflict to raw power, ignoring beliefs, values, and human nature. Worse still, I suggest it has shaped a worldview so bleak, so disturbingly vacant, that it has warped U.S. foreign policy. It has emboldened adversaries and left allies unsure whether America stands for anything at all.

Mearsheimer’s framework appears compelling at first glance. States exist in anarchy. To survive, they must maximize power. Cooperation is fleeting. Conflict is inevitable. Rising powers seek regional dominance; established powers must crush them to survive. Everything revolves around a single variable: material power. Culture is brushed aside. Domestic politics are treated as noise. Leadership and ideology are irrelevant. The scholar reduces nations to lifeless units in a power equation. This is the danger of spending an entire life in an academic tower. The view from above loses sight of the ground below.

Offensive realism can’t explain why some rising powers integrate peacefully while others lash out violently. It can’t distinguish between real security threats and imagined ones. Most fatally, it assumes every great power is hardwired for domination, an assumption that excuses the aggressor and blames the victim.

Academic theories should be judged by their predictive power. By that standard, offensive realism is among the most spectacular failures in modern foreign-policy thinking.

His most infamous misjudgment came at the close of the Cold War. As the Soviet Union fell and the old bipolar order faded, Mearsheimer predicted Europe would descend into chaos. Germany would re-arm. Nuclear weapons would proliferate. Old rivalries — French-German, Slavic-Germanic — would flare back to life in the absence of American power. He was wrong.

What followed was not chaos but integration. Germany didn’t march; it demilitarized. Eastern and Central Europe didn’t reach for nukes; they reached for NATO and the European Union. The alliance expanded not out of naive idealism, but because former Soviet satellites knew the danger of a world without American power.

Offensive realism isn’t a flexible framework. It’s more like a dogma, shut off from evidence, resistant to contradiction, and endlessly self-justifying. When its predictions fail, it doesn’t change. It just doubles down. Nowhere has this been more damaging than in the Middle East. For decades, Mearsheimer argued that the U.S. should adopt a strategy of “offshore balancing”: withdraw troops, cut military commitments, and trust local powers to stabilize the region themselves. Sunni states, we were told, would contain Iran. Order would develop naturally.

Barack Obama, to a large extent, bought into this fantasy. The result was a catastrophe. Syria spiraled into civil war, killing over half a million and forcing millions to flee. Iraq splintered along sectarian lines. Out of that carnage and chaos, ISIS rose, building a brutal caliphate. Iran seized the moment, extending its influence from Lebanon to Yemen through proxies and terror networks. Then came Russia, filling the vacuum and reestablishing itself as a military power in the region for the first time in decades. There was no balancing, only collapse.

Mearsheimer’s theory failed because it treated the Middle East as a cold, mechanical system, a region of rational actors moving predictably across a geopolitical grid. But the Middle East isn’t a chessboard. It’s a hotbed of religious conviction, historical trauma, tribal loyalties, and martyrdom narratives. And by ignoring them, Mearsheimer ignored them all. That same willful blindness runs straight through The Israel Lobby. Co-authored with Stephen Walt, the core argument — that U.S. support for Israel is the product of irrational, lobby-driven pressure — reduced decades of strategic partnership and moral alignment to a crude accusation of manipulation. It cast Jewish Americans as a political problem, not participants. The duo reinforced a dangerous idea: that Jews, no matter how integrated, are never fully trustworthy in matters of state. They cherry-picked evidence, brushed aside counterarguments, and framed Jewish political engagement as inherently suspect. The result was an ostensibly academic text that lent legitimacy to one of history’s oldest prejudices. Its impact was swift and wide. Far-left ideologues and far-right extremists both seized on its claims, using them to argue that Jewish influence is un-American or even subversive. The authors may not have meant to fuel this, but the logic of the book led there. When you suggest that a particular group’s political participation is uniquely threatening, you don’t spark dialogue; you sanction suspicion.

Mearsheimer’s wider worldview carries the same distortions. It sees American power as the root of global instability: alliances become liabilities, U.S. military presence abroad is always a provocation, and aggression from regimes like Iran or China is framed as justified retaliation. This perspective erases the stabilizing role that America has often played, deterring conflict, protecting smaller nations, and holding violent actors in check.

It turns strength into something shameful. It flips the script so completely that the blame for global aggression is placed on the one country that has spent the last century trying to stop it. In Mearsheimer’s world, restraint is expected only from the United States, never from its enemies.

This framing is both incorrect and completely irrational. History reveals a very different reality. The Marshall Plan didn’t cause instability; it reconstructed a shattered Europe and helped prevent the spread of Soviet influence. U.S. security commitments in Asia didn’t lead to war; they established the conditions for democracy, economic growth, and extended periods of relative peace. Mearsheimer can’t, or won’t, see this. His theory overlooks how American power has helped maintain stability in regions and deter aggression. It supported a global order that, while flawed, has kept major wars at bay. The real danger is that his ideas feed the very outcomes he claims to fear. If you believe alliances cause problems, diplomacy shows weakness, and every rival is bent on conquest, you don’t avoid conflict. If anything, you create it. You build a world where trust disappears, retreat becomes policy, and bullies move unchecked. America and its allies face real threats, from falling birthrates to rising extremism. Facing them takes more than cynicism. It takes strength and purpose. It demands strength, clarity, and the will to lead. What it doesn’t require is any more of Mearsheimer’s worn-out model. It’s time to move forward with clear eyes, sound judgment, and a foreign policy rooted in reality, not flawed theory.