What is Wrong with Mearsheimer’s Offensive Realism?

The present paper calls into question one of the most prominent International Relations theories: John J. Mearsheimer’s offensive realism. By bringing to bear the conceptual apparatus of Austrian- and public-choice-style political economy, the article demonstrates Mearsheimer’s conception to be either substantively unsound or logically fallacious. More specifically, three of the notorious five ‘bedrock assumptions’ of offensive realism – uncertainty regarding other actors’ intentions, the primacy of survival, and the rationality of statesmen – are, depending on interpretation, either untenable or insufficient to support the conclusions Mearsheimer purports to have established. Thus, the article contends that offensive realism is a faulty approach to international politics. This is largely due to the neglect of economic science, which results in the latent assumption of the absoluteness of national survival as a goal of states. It is this assumption that underlies the entire edifice of offensive realism and simultaneously renders it surprisingly utopian and idealistic.