Realism’s Blind Spot
What Mearsheimer Misses About Imperial Collapse
John Mearsheimer’s recent appearance on The Chris Hedges Report demonstrates why realist international relations theory, for all its insights, cannot explain the present moment. Mearsheimer describes great power competition accurately. He is right about NATO expansion provoking Russia. He refuses the humanitarian pretences that liberals use to dress up imperial violence. But ask him why this crisis erupts now, in this form, and the framework collapses into personality: Trump as “one-man wrecking crew,” unilateralist with “contempt” for allies and institutions.
Trump inherited institutional ruins and started stripping the copper wiring. The problem is forty-five years of systematic destruction that Mearsheimer’s framework cannot see. It treats states as coherent actors pursuing national interests rather than as instruments of class power managing accumulation crises.
The Institutional Architecture
Start with what Mearsheimer calls the “liberal international order”: the architecture constructed after 1945. Bretton Woods established dollar hegemony. GATT, later the WTO, forced market opening under the banner of free trade. The IMF and World Bank imposed debt discipline on the periphery while financing infrastructure that facilitated extraction. NATO provided the military muscle and prevented independent European security arrangements that might challenge American dominance.
These institutions worked because they channelled American power through mechanisms that looked like cooperation. They prevented alternative development models while presenting extraction as mutual benefit. They functioned brilliantly until profit rates started falling in the 1970s.
Financialisation offered a temporary solution: if surplus could not be extracted from production, it would be extracted from debt, rent and speculation. Neoliberalism dismantled every institutional compromise that had mediated class conflict. Union power, welfare states, public services, regulatory constraints on capital mobility. Thatcher in 1979, Reagan in 1981. All of it had to go.
The 2008 financial crisis exposed financialisation’s limits. What followed was a decade of austerity that destroyed social reproduction while propping up asset values. COVID revealed that states had evacuated the capacity to respond to crisis. They could bail out banks but could not produce masks.
Washington calls this disruption. It is salvage.
States and Classes
When Mearsheimer talks about “what the United States needs” or “American interests,” he naturalises a class project as national destiny. States do not have interests independent of the class forces controlling them. American foreign policy serves specific fractions of capital whose profitability depends on particular international arrangements.
Those arrangements stopped delivering. China built industrial capacity that threatens American technological rents and creates alternative infrastructure for Eurasian trade that bypasses dollar intermediation. Russia retained enough productive capacity to survive sanctions and prove that financial exclusion is not automatically fatal. European allies developed trade relationships with China that made American demands for decoupling economically suicidal.
Trump represents a fraction of capital that recognises multilateral institutions no longer serve accumulation effectively. A domestically oriented, extractive fraction of capital running out of options. Why maintain WTO dispute mechanisms when you can impose tariffs directly? Why fund development banks when China is already financing infrastructure? Why defer to allies when their economies need access to American markets more than America needs their cooperation?
Institutional mediation has become a luxury American capital cannot afford.
The China Contradiction
Mearsheimer treats the shift from engagement to containment around 2017 as strategic miscalculation: America helped build a competitor by integrating China into the global economy. But American capital needed Chinese manufacturing to suppress domestic wages and maximise profits through global supply chains. Offshoring production broke union power, reduced labour costs, generated massive shareholder returns.
The same dynamics that made China profitable for American capital created the competitor now threatening dollar hegemony. Belt and Road constructs alternative infrastructure. Chinese tech development threatens American monopolies. State-directed credit allocation proves capitalist development does not require financialisation. American capital built the workshop that would eventually undercut it.
Russia: The Threat They Cannot Name
One of the strangest moments in the Hedges-Mearsheimer conversation comes when they bond over dismissing Russian military capacity. Mearsheimer argues the Ukraine war proves Russia cannot threaten Europe. “The Russians have had a devil of a time conquering it.” Hedges agrees enthusiastically: the war “exposed the lie that Russia was any kind of military threat to anyone.”
This is wrong on multiple levels.
Russia is winning in Ukraine. Slowly, grinding, brutally, but winning. Western assumptions that sanctions would collapse the Russian economy and Ukrainian resistance would bog Russia down indefinitely have proven false. Russia adapted to sanctions. It maintained domestic production, found alternative trading partners, and ground down Ukrainian defensive positions. The difficulty does not prove weakness. It proves modern warfare against a well-supplied defender is hard, especially when that defender receives NATO intelligence, training, and equipment.
The spending tells the real story. Russia’s 2026 budget allocates 16.8 trillion rubles ($210-217 billion) to defence and security combined, representing 38% of total federal spending. But German intelligence assessment reveals actual spending runs far higher. Their analysis of 2025 found Russia spent approximately €250 billion ($295 billion) on military purposes, roughly 66% more than official figures, because items like Defence Ministry construction, military IT programmes, and social payments to soldiers’ families get deliberately booked under civilian budget headings.
Compare this to Ukraine. Western military aid for 2026 might reach $50-60 billion if the proposed EU loan materialises. The United States approved only $400 million for 2026-2027 combined, down from $14 billion in April 2024. Europe allocated just €4.2 billion in new military aid in 2025, nowhere near enough to offset the American withdrawal.
Russia outspends Ukraine’s total international aid by a factor of four to six. Russia sustains this spending domestically while Ukraine depends on external donors who are reducing commitments. Moscow raised VAT to 22%, cut social spending to its lowest level in twenty years, slashed healthcare and education budgets. Social spending fell from 38% of the budget pre-war to 25% in 2026. The state spends $2.7 billion per week on the war.
Nuclear weapons alone make Russia a threat that cannot be dismissed. But focus on the materialist question neither Hedges nor Mearsheimer asks: what does Russia threaten, and whose interests require Russian defeat?
Russian survival threatens the institutional arrangements through which Western capital has extracted surplus from the former Soviet space since 1991. It threatens energy monopolies: European dependency on American LNG rather than Russian pipelines. It threatens financial dominance. Alternative payment mechanisms built with China demonstrate dollar exclusion is not automatically fatal. It threatens the narrative that American military dominance remains unchallengeable.
European elites manufacture the Russian threat not because Russian tanks might reach Paris but because Russian survival proves alternatives to Western integration remain possible. The threat is viable resistance.
Both Hedges and Mearsheimer miss this because they measure threat in military terms. Can Russia conquer territory? But the actual threat is political and economic. Russia does not need to conquer Western Europe. It needs to survive, maintain its resource base, demonstrate that integration into Western markets is not the only development path. So far it is succeeding while outspending Ukraine’s entire aid package several times over from domestic production.
Mearsheimer notes American elites believed they had “tremendous economic leverage” over Russia through sanctions. The sanctions failed because Russia retained industrial and agricultural capacity. It could produce what it needed and trade outside the dollar system.
American power increasingly rests on financial dominance rather than productive capacity. The ability to exclude countries from SWIFT, freeze assets, deny dollar access seems formidable. But it only works if the target economy depends on financial intermediation rather than making things.
American elites believed their own propaganda about economic “leverage” because they mistake financial dominance for actual power. This is what happens when you offshore production for forty years. You control rent-extraction mechanisms while losing capacity to make what people need to survive. Russia’s survival under sanctions, while spending $200+ billion annually on its military from domestic sources, exposes the neoliberal fantasy that financialisation represents advanced development. Controlling payment systems matters less than producing food, energy, industrial goods.
Imperial Competition and War
Mearsheimer argues “security logics” overwhelm economic cooperation, citing extensive pre-WWI trade that did not prevent war. He is right that economic interdependence failed to produce peace. But he naturalises this as eternal competition for power rather than examining why capitalist states went to war despite economic integration.
Inter-imperial rivalry for markets, resources, investment opportunities intensified as domestic profit rates fell. Economic interdependence did not create peace because it linked competing capitalist empires, each requiring continued expansion. The choice was not cooperation versus competition. It was which imperial bloc would control accumulation mechanisms.
States compete militarily because they compete economically. Military power secures conditions for profitable accumulation. The flashpoints Mearsheimer identifies in the South China Sea and over Taiwan mark sites where competing accumulation strategies collide. But he cannot explain why these collisions intensify now.
Economic integration no longer delivers the profits it once did. China’s development model threatens institutional arrangements through which American capital extracts surplus. Falling profit rates make zero-sum competition for resources more urgent. The security dilemma is real but derivative. It expresses economic contradictions in military form.
NATO as Class Project
Mearsheimer’s NATO analysis reveals realism’s class blindness most clearly. American military presence in Europe acts as a “pacifier” preventing conflict between European states, he argues. Europeans fear American withdrawal because without it, collective action problems and centrifugal forces would tear Europe apart.
This treats postwar European peace as unnatural, requiring external imposition. German capital does not threaten French capital. It penetrates it, merges with it, shares boards with it. The idea that Germany and France might go to war is realist fantasy divorced from how accumulated investments actually function.
NATO guarantees European markets for American capital, prevents independent European security arrangements that might challenge dollar hegemony, maintains forward bases for Middle Eastern resource wars. German capital requires NATO’s eastern expansion to secure cheap labour and resources in former Soviet territories. The “pacifier” protects accumulated investments and maintains the architecture through which surplus flows east to west.
European capitals fear American withdrawal not because they will start fighting each other but because they will lose access to American consumer markets and financial infrastructure. This is why they manufacture the Russian threat even when, as Mearsheimer notes, Russia lacks capacity for westward conquest. The threat justifies military spending (state subsidy to defence contractors), maintains Atlantic integration against potential European autonomy, provides ideological cover for austerity.
The liberal international order required specific conditions: American industrial supremacy, European and Japanese reconstruction, dollar convertibility to gold, cheap oil, technological monopolies. As those conditions eroded, institutional forms became impediments rather than facilitators. Trump’s institutional demolition is capital recognising the old forms no longer deliver. Mearsheimer’s prescription (respect allies, maintain institutions, pursue cooler diplomacy) cannot work because institutions are failing as the material conditions that produced them disappear. You cannot restore an institutional order when the accumulation strategy it served has exhausted itself.
The Fascism Pattern
The podcast ends discussing domestic crisis and political direction. Mearsheimer acknowledges Trump’s base feels economically abandoned. He notes similarities between Trump supporters and democratic socialist supporters. Both respond to material deprivation. He recognises the 1930s divide between fascism and communism as alternatives when liberalism failed.
But he treats economic crises as exogenous shocks that might push politics left or right unpredictably. He has no theory of why these patterns recur.
Capitalist crisis intensifies class conflict. The state chooses between suppressing capital or suppressing labour. Fascism is capital’s emergency response when normal exploitation mechanisms break down. It emerges when working-class organisation poses a revolutionary threat. Fascism does not appear randomly during economic crisis. It appears when capital faces organised labour strong enough to challenge its rule but not yet strong enough to overthrow it. The violence is pre-emptive.
Germany in 1933, Italy in 1922, Spain in 1936: fascism triumphed where communist and socialist movements had built real power but had not yet seized state apparatus. The threat was credible enough to terrify capital into abandoning democratic norms, not so overwhelming that revolution became inevitable. When you cannot extract surplus through markets, you extract it through violence. But you only need that violence when the exploited class has developed the capacity to resist.
This is why Mearsheimer’s framework cannot explain the present moment. Trump does not represent random authoritarian drift. He represents capital’s response to forty years of deliberately weakening labour to the point where organised resistance barely exists. The fascist movements of the 1930s faced genuine revolutionary threats. Trump faces a decimated working class with union density below 10%, no mass socialist party, fragmented resistance.
The paradox: neoliberalism destroyed the working-class power that historically triggered fascist response, but it also destroyed the institutional mechanisms (welfare state, union contracts, public services) that allowed capitalism to grant concessions. What emerges is not classical fascism but authoritarian management of permanent crisis. The violence is not pre-emptive against revolution. It is permanent extraction from a population with no capacity to fight back.
“Liberal democracy is under threat,” Mearsheimer says, naturalising liberal democracy as normal rather than seeing it as a specific arrangement of class forces that functions only under particular accumulation conditions. When capital can grant concessions to labour without threatening profitability.
The Long 1980s demolished those conditions. Neoliberalism destroyed union power, privatised public services, financialised social reproduction, evacuated state capacity. What we are witnessing is the final collapse of institutional compromises capital no longer needs and cannot afford.
Trump is burying something already dead.
The Political Question
Realist analysis suggests better personnel making different choices could manage this. Competent diplomacy, respect for institutions, cooler heads preventing escalation.
The contradictions are systemic. The institutional order collapses because the accumulation strategy it served has exhausted itself. The choice is barbarism versus transformation, not good management versus bad.
Realism describes surface phenomena accurately. States compete for power. Military flashpoints are real. Trump’s erratic behaviour creates war danger. But surface description cannot explain why this crisis takes this form at this moment.
Why Trump now? Why institutional collapse now? Why this specific authoritarian nationalism? Profit rates fall in the 1970s. Financialisation buys time. 2008 exposes the limits. Austerity follows, then COVID. By the time Trump arrives, the institutional shell is already hollowed out.
Trump is symptom, not cause. International disorder is not policy failure. It is capitalism eating itself.
The question is not whether Trump’s unilateralism succeeds. It is whether capital’s crisis response leads to barbarism or opens space for alternatives. Realism cannot formulate that question. Materialism makes it unavoidable.
Against capital, against empire, against forgetting.
Notes and essays from the wreckage of the present.