Maybe it was the AP US History callback of “Monroe Doctrine” in its title, maybe it was the comforting promise of elbow-patched clarity on foreign policy, or maybe it was the single-digit winds compelling us indoors, but students poured into R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science John J. Mearsheimer’s lecture last Thursday night, giving up on seats and piling on top of each other in the doorway.
Mearsheimer, whose snazzy website features a doctored painting of him as “Mearchiavelli,” is a longtime UChicagoan and prolific commentator. His public appearances (prodigiously documented by his Substack) are polished displays of a “great powers” theory of international relations. Unlike the international fumbling he described, “The Monroe Doctrine and the Invasion of Venezuela,” sponsored by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, was a highly-choreographed, straight-to-the-point affair. At five p.m. on the dot, Mearsheimer concessively apologized for not being able to explain fifteen other foreign affair topics related to Venezuela. Then, with a smirk, he retreated: “Truth be told, I’d love to.” And the offensive began.
He began with a polished, tongue-in-cheek, four-point theory explaining how President Trump thinks about military force. First, there has been a shift from a unipolar world to a multipolar one, and Trump pays little attention to other great powers, focusing instead on mid-level and minor targets. Second, as explained with a sidestep and a check-please flourish, Trump uses military power frequently and “with a light touch.” He is uninterested in regime change because “he has no use for liberal democracy anyway”; he simply wants to flex his muscles and have a “mission accomplished moment.” Third, to a chorus of giggles, Trump “floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee,” weaving a global web of spectacles to power his entertainment economy. Fourth and finally, Trump “hates his allies almost as much as he hates his adversaries.”
With this framework, Mearsheimer had loaded the arsenal he then used to deconstruct, in explanations punctuated by grandpa-isms, the American military presence in Venezuela, Iran, India, China, Israel, and Ukraine. Some particularly quippy accounts:
On whether the US invaded Venezuela for ideology, narco-terrorism, or Monroe Doctrine hegemonic defense: “This is just good old imperialism, if you ask me.”
On why, then, Trump invited Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado to the White House: “He just wanted her Nobel Prize.”
On the future of US involvement in Venezuela: “It may be very difficult to fix this problem from Mar-a-Lago.”
On US economic intervention in China: “Trump’s been a pussycat.”
On the Board of Peace’s influence in the Middle East: “Those Hamas people are tough hombres,” followed by, “You should write a paper on this. It’d be very entertaining.”
On Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi: “I appear once a month on [CNN-News18], which is an Indian television station,” he smiled, “so I keep up on my Indian politics … We forced the Indians to play kissy-face with the Chinese.”
We may have been laughing, but Mearsheimer had a more serious project taking effect: building a web of disarmingly clear explanations for US intervention. He is well known for developing a theory in international relations called “offensive realism.” It argues that the anarchic quality of twenty-first-century globalization forces great powers to insure their survival by maximizing their power through local hegemonies. In each of the interventions he described, Mearsheimer was exacting, cutting through distracting narratives to reveal patterns in Trump’s military style. He was wary of mainstream media for manipulating our attention away from less sexy explanations, like our economic leverage in Venezuela or our role in fomenting the protests in Iran. But what stuck me most was the way Mearsheimer was so intentional about keeping us entertained. By stretching his pointer fingers to either side of the room to capture US policy in four different countries with one wry quip, he was fighting primarily against Trump’s hegemonic control of our attention. And with a shifting square dance and an ironic smile, it was clear that Mearsheimer was gaining ground, making quick victories of thorny questions, flitting from one conflict to another.
Conspicuously,
Zoë Feigelson
Image: Victor Gillam, A Thing Well Begun Is Half Done, print illustration, 1899 (Cornell University Library, Ithaca).