John Mearsheimer: commitment

Transcript context

…So that’s fascinating. So the Chinese are pragmatic about thinking of the world as a competition of military powers, all the ways in which you described the realist perspective. So that’s a hopeful thing, right? If we can achieve stability and a balance of powers through that military competition. Yeah, I actually think that’s right. I think if the United States, just let me talk a little bit about the United States to get at the issue you’re raising. If the United States pursues a smart containment strategy, given what you just said, and I said about the Chinese, I think we will avoid war. The problem with the Americans is it’s not just the liberalism. It’s the possibility that we will pursue a rollback policy. In other words, during the Cold War, we pursued containment. It was whenever anybody talked about American grand strategy towards the Soviet Unions, containment, containment, containment. We now know from the historical record that the United States was not only pursuing containment, it was pursuing rollback. We were trying to roll back Soviet power to put it bluntly, we were trying to wreck the Soviet Union, and I would not be surprised moving forward with regard to China if the United States pursues a serious rollback policy and- So you’re saying throughout history, United States was always doing that. Always. Where’s that from? Why can’t we respect the power of other nations?…

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