I had not listened to the grand old man of political science, John Mearsheimer, for a long time when, today, I heard his recent conversation with Glenn Greenwald. What he said about the currently burning matters of Greenland, Venezuela, Iran, Gaza and Ukraine did not surprise me. His position on these topics is above all reasonable and rational – as was his initial position on Ukraine in 2015. After all, he is a “realist”. He does not pretend to know what will happen in 24 hours, but he peers into the distance and assesses the long-term effects of today’s foreign policy. With regard to Ukraine, ten years after his warnings in 2015, he has been proven right.
Due to those warnings in 2015, the Western press dropped their former star political scientist as though he were a carrier of the Bubonic Plague.
Only on one point did Mearsheimer disappoint me today, not – I repeat not – because I assume he is wrong, but because I hope he is wrong. (The distance between hope and assumption is as that between myself and the moon.) Glenn Greenwald quoted President Lula of Brazil, who claims to dream every night of “de-dollarisation”. To my chagrin, Mearsheimer told Glenn Greenwald that he did not foresee “de-dollarisation” for at least five to ten years.
John Mearsheimer is the antithesis of a vulgar man. He is eminently courteous, soft-spoken, the perfect diplomat, you might say, because he makes no secret of being in every sense an “American”, although he so deeply regrets the foreign policies espoused by his country’s administrations over the past decades.
I recommend the said conversation.
For instance, on a topic about which I, who am anything but a diplomat. howl with rage, he tells us, smiling dangerously, what he thinks will happen next:
You have this so-called cease-fire. The fact is, it’s not been a cease fire from the Israeli perspective. The Israelis have basically continued to behave as if there were no cease-fire. By the way, they’ve done the same thing in Lebanon. … and what they’ll do, they’ll engineer some crisis where they blame Hamas for a gross violation of the cease-fire and say that this is reason for Israel to go in and “finish the job”. … The Israeli goal here is to either drive all the Palestinians out of Gaza into Somaliland or Egypt or whatever or if not do that, kill them. Right? Either starve them to death or bomb them to death or some combination of the two.
The Mearsheimer smile! Paraphrasing the Israelis who refer to the Palestinians as though they were cattle, he beamed his terrifyingly benign smile at us.
Alas, even Mearsheimer cannot foresee any Armageddon for that most vile of entities, Israel. Not as long as the USA, his country, still has its fangs planted in the world economy. Yes, there are many of us who dream of de-dollarisation.
Glenn Greenwald did not question him about Europe’s growing authoritarian tendencies. I wonder why. Does Glenn Greenwald not know how bad things are here now?

One morning last year, the above appeared on one of the walls of the British Royal Court of Justice.
The authorities wasted no time having the stencil removed, leaving its shadow. And this is where we are now: Liberal Democracy.


