Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings. John Mearsheimer's Theory of Offensive Realism and the Rise of China Furthermore, cooperation is often itself a means to power maximization in the formation of military and security alliancesand thus, cooperation can be a prediction of, not a challenge to, offensive realism. Mearsheimer's theory is built on five bedrock assumptions. China V Rise: Offensive or Defensive Realism Ghazala Yasmin Jalil - JSTOR Instead, the best strategy is a constant effort to maximize power to stay ahead of rivals. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. Any given individuals Darwinian fitness will be increased if they can successfully seize the resources of others at sufficiently low cost.Reference Buss and Shackelford71 Of course, warfare also may be waged for defensive reasons, such as to defend critical resources from the advances of others.72 E.O. That natural selection should have drawn out the same three traits as Mearsheimer may seem a remarkable coincidence. Indeed, Wrangham and Glowacki find evidence that after warriors killed members of a neighboring society, the killers group benefited as a whole via territorial expansion83precisely as has been shown for intergroup killings by chimpanzees. He received a D.Phil. (Examples include the spread of Christianity or Islam at the expense of traditional religions over the last 2,000 years.) The role of war in the evolution of political systems and the functional priority of defense,, For an excellent review of the logic for, and evidence of, adaptations for war, see, Inclusive fitness has recently been the subject of a heated debate in the biological literature; see M. A. Nowak, Corina E. Tarnita, and Edward O. Wilson, The evolution of eusociality,, There is copious evidence from historical and contemporary times that such nepotism is a significant influence in politics. Much of Thayers scholarship centers onlife-sciences insights into political-behavioral topics, including the origins of war and ethnic conflict and the dynamics of suicide terrorism. All anarchy does is remove constraints on pursuing such behavior. The fact that these evolved behaviors are not always beneficial today does nothing to undermine their evolutionary logic or empirical presence. Historically, evidence has often supported this hypothesis.199,200,201 However, we take the position that, on average, state leaders personal interests have significant and genuine overlap with national security interests, not least of which is the survival and prosperity of the state for themselves and their progeny. Offensive realists and other theorists of international relations may see more or less of each. The fact that the five assumptions are instrumental to the theory of Mearsheimer is undeniable. In Waltzs model the absence of an authority above states (the condition of anarchy) forces them to make alliances in order to contain the threats posed by rival powers. Heis the author of Darwin and International Relations: On the EvolutionaryOrigins of War and Ethnic Conflict (University Press of Kentucky, 2004). That is, there is no ultimate authority in international politics comparable to a domestic government that can adjudicate disputes and provide protection for citizens.Reference Waltz25,Reference Waltz26 Without governmental authority, Waltz argues, the international system is a self-help system, where states must provide for their own protection through arms and alliances. Likewise, many other religious and utopian theorists attribute egoism, dominance, and ingroup/outgroup bias to special, or at least changeable, circumstances. Table4. Unsatisfied with military life, he decided to pursue graduate studies rather than become a career officer. The key finding is that humans quickly adopt an us (ingroup) versus them (outgroup) worldview. Offensive realists can thus explain more than the behavior of states or great powers. Thus, the power of sexual selection can lead to the evolution of traits that actually damage survival in order to achieve superiority over other males.Reference Lincoln, Short and Balaban104,Reference Trivers and Campbell105 Reproduction trumps survival in evolution. Evolutionary theory can also explain dominance. As well as being the key behavioral traits identified by Mearsheimer, self-interest, social stratification, and groupish behavior are three of the most prominent behavioral features of social animals. The remainder of the article proceeds as follows. in evolutionary biology from Oxford University and a Ph.D. in political science from Geneva University. An evolutionary foundation offers a major reinterpretation of the theory of offensive realism and permits its broader application to political behavior across a wide range of actors, domains, and historical eras. We recognize that many factors may affect the behavior of states, including bureaucracies, types of government, culture, international institutions, or the international system itself, but we also recognize, as traditional theories of international politics have from the time of Thucydides, that humans affect state behavior as well.Reference Levy202 Many factors come between an individual leader and the behavior of a state, but that does not mean leaders have no effect at all. Those conditions, according to Mearsheimer, create strong incentives for states to behave aggressively toward each other. Because states cannot know with certainty the present or future intentions of other states, he concluded, it is rational for them to attempt to preempt possible acts of aggression by increasing their military might and adopting an assertive position whenever their core security interests are at stake. Males of most mammal species are particularly competitive with each other over females. Behavior intention models, for example, assume people have: a linear time orientation (the future has meaning), an internal locus of control, and the ability to think in probabilistic terms. It contended that a powerful lobby skews U.S. foreign policy against the countrys national interests by securing unconditional support for Israel. Evolutionary theory is especially helpful here because it advances our understanding of the proximate (biological) causes of offensive realist behavior and the conditions under which mistakes are more likely to be made (i.e., conditions that exacerbate egoistic, dominating, and groupish behaviors even where such behaviors may not help to achieve strategic goals). Scholars often argue over whether historically humans experienced a Hobbesian state of nature, butwhatever the outcome of that debateit is certainly a much closer approximation to the prehistoric environment in which human brains and behavior evolved.48,Reference Buss49,Reference Mirazn Lahr, Rivera, Power, Mounier, Copsey, Crivellaro, Edung, Maillo Fernandez, Kiarie, Lawrence, Leakey, Mbua, Miller, Muigai, Mukhongo, Van Baelen, Wood, Schwenninger, Grn, Achyuthan, Wilshaw and Foley50 This legacy heavily influences our decision-making and behavior today, evenperhaps especiallyin the anarchy of international politics. Recently, a 10-year conflict in the Kibale Mountains of Uganda came to an end. Thus far, we have emphasized a state of anarchy in evolutionary history, in which there was no overarching power to provide protection from predators, rivals, or other threats. Hamilton used genetic models to show that, while individual organisms are egoistic, they should be less so in their behavior toward genetic relatives, especially in parent-offspring and sibling relationships.Reference Hamilton87,Reference Hamilton88 This decrease in egoism is because close relatives share many of the same genesone-half for siblings and parents, one-quarter for aunts, uncles, and grandparents, and one-eighth for cousins. Volume 1: Chimpanzees, Bonobos, and Gorillas, Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Punish or perish? Whether or not humans and chimpanzees inherited warlike propensities from a common ancestor, there was nevertheless a strong selection pressure in both species to develop them. Cooperation and peace efforts often fail precisely because people have too rosy a view of human nature and thus fail to structure incentives effectively. First, neorealism does not rely on noumenal ultimate causation, and, second, it explains and predicts variations in the likelihood of war in international politicsparticularly among great powers. We recognize that humans are influenced by culture, norms, rational calculation, and moral principles. PDF JohnJ.Mearsheimer:anoffensiverealistbetween geopoliticsandpower - Springer In this section, we have presented standard biological arguments that egoism, dominance, and ingroup/outgroup bias are deeply rooted behavioral adaptations common among mammals in general and primate species in particular. That certainly may be, as he attempts to demonstrate. Note that we do not intend to make the full case forthe role of evolution in human behavior. The theory of Mearsheimer has five basis assumptions: 1. Mearsheimer: The Tragedy of Great Power Politics Aggression may be a risky strategy, but it is a more attractive option than starvation or other lethal dangers. Mearsheimer explains that when following a realist policy . He is the author of Overconfidence and War: The Havoc and Glory of Positive Illusions (Harvard University Press, 2004), which argues that common psychological biases to maintain overly positive images of our capabilities, our control over events, and the future play a key roles in causing war, and, with Dominic Tierney, Failing to Win: Perceptions of Victory and Defeat in International Politics (Harvard University Press, 2006), which examines how and why popular misperceptions commonly create undeserved victories or defeats in wars and crises. More important, however, is that we both evolved in conditions of free-for-all competitionof anarchywithout any Leviathan to administer life-and-death struggles with rival groups, a situation well recognized in the study of international relations among states. Mearsheimer and Walt in particular make cases for "restraint" and "offshore balancing," meaning a reservation of the use of force to the most serious threats to US power, coupled with a policy to prevent China's assumption of regional hegemony in Asia (Mearsheimer and Walt 2016). A dominance hierarchy is created competitively, often violently, and is maintained forcefully, but it can serve to prevent or reduce conflict within a group because it establishes a pecking order that is generally respected. A comparison among alternative realist theories. Drawing on both disciplines, he is interested in how new research on evolution, biology, and human nature challenges theories of international relations, conflict, and cooperation. This article is dedicated to the memory of Rafe Sagarin, an exceptional ecologist, colleague, and friend who devoted much of his life to bridging the gap between the life and social sciences. This story might have come from any number of bloody human conflicts around the world. These adaptations in turn serve as a foundation for offensive realismwhat Mearsheimer independently identified as self-help, power maximization, and fear. For example, among wolves, lions, and chimpanzees, when members of rival groups are found alone, they are extremely vulnerable and risk being killed.140,141,142 We discussed intergroup killing in chimpanzees earlier, but the pattern is notable among social carnivores, too: Studies of undisturbed wolf populations in Alaska have found that 39 to 65 percent of adult deaths were due to intergroup killing.Reference Mech, Adams, Meier, Burch and Dale143, Of course, the ability to assess threats is much more complex in humans than it is in other animals, and human intelligence gives us a greater repertoire of behavior. Again, the political world mirrors nature: Not everyone can be the alpha male. We prefer a more positive picture of human nature, perhaps one that accords with comfortable modern life in developed states. We should therefore expect instances of evolutionary mismatch in which evolved behaviors lead to poor decisions in modern settings. Structuralism is a method of study that focuses on the interaction of the parts, or units of a system, seeing them as more useful to study than the individual units themselves.27 Waltz uses structuralism to demonstrate how the distribution of power in international politics is critical for understanding whether war is more or less likely.28 By wedding anarchy as an ultimate cause and structuralism as a method of analysis, Waltzs neorealism improves upon Morgenthaus realism in two ways. Offensive realism, more than other major theories of international relations, closely matches what we know about human nature from the evolutionary sciences. First, offensive realism fails to explain why costly wars sometimes occur against the interests of the states that initiate them. This has been done extensively many times elsewhere.Reference Barkow7,Reference Hodgson and Knudsen8,Reference Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby9,Reference Thayer10,Reference Sidanius, Kurzban, Sears, Huddy and Jervis11,Reference Alford and Hibbing12,Reference Gat13,Reference Rosen14,Reference Pinker15 Furthermore, we do not intend to make the full case for whether states do or do not act as predicted by offensive realism, which has also been done extensively elsewhere.Reference Layne16,Reference Mearsheimer17,Reference Labs18 The article focuses instead on our novel theoretical question: Do the core behavioral assumptions underlying the theory of offensive realism map onto evolved human nature? Some evidence suggests that the separation between common chimpanzees and bonobos was quite recent, occurring perhaps only 0.86 million to 0.89 million years ago, although it remains possible that the separation occurred much earlier, between 1.5 million to 2.5 million years ago.Reference Won and Hey166 Either way, humans separated from our common ancestor with both chimpanzee species long before, about 5 million to 6 million years ago. However, if actors seek dominance at least partly because of evolved behavioral dispositions (of which actors may not even be aware), then we may expect sometimes to observe power-maximizing behavior whether or not it is a good strategy. Clearly, not all individuals or businesses or states act the same way all the time or in all circumstances. Psychologists argue that the ingroup/outgroup distinction develops from a need for social identity. All three species descended from an (unknown) common ancestor. 2018. Leaders are forced to maximize power when perhaps they would rather cooperate or share power with others. In short, you do not need group selection to explain altruism. However, a study by Wrangham and Glowacki, which explicitly looked at warfare among hunter-gatherers who were surrounded by other hunter-gatherers, found that warfare was just as common in this more natural setting.Reference Wrangham and Glowacki80 Evidence from across the cumulative research of archeologists and anthropologists indicates that violence is a widespread feature of small-scale foraging societies and follows a pattern that is consistent as far back as we can see in the ethnographic and archeological record.81. Rather, we build on an accumulation of knowledge about human evolution and behavior derived from anthropology, evolutionary biology, experimental psychology, evolutionary game theory, genetics, and neuroscience. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Debate continues as to whether modern states actually do, or should, behave in this way, but we are struck by a different question. Incorporating ideas from the life sciences into the social sciencesrich in the study of culture and institutions and other influences on political behaviorwill help scholars base their theories in rigorous scientific principles and subject their assumptions to empirical testing.Reference Wilson20,21 Our approach draws heavily on evolutionary anthropology, which recognizes that human behavior is in large part the result of evolved cognitive, physiological, and behavioral mechanisms designed to solve recurrent problems confronted by our ancestors in the environment in which we evolved. Third, it is important to remember that the empirical observation of altruism in nature does not imply or demand group selection. First, the group could eliminate or reduce consumption to make the resource last. This foundation permits us to reach realist conclusions about international politics, such as the importance of power in interstate relations, without having to believe in Morgenthaus animus dominandi.
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