Adding Aristotle to Foreign Policy

John Mearsheimer is renowned among those in government, think tanks, and universities who reflect on strategy and foreign affairs. Despite that, he is something of an outlier. It is not merely that he is a realist where most are idealists, but that the account of rationality he relies on in his work is at odds with the majority theory. The R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and with books published by the most prestigious presses in the land, Mearsheimer has risen as far as anyone can in the world of ideas. Yet ever since the Clinton administration’s turn to idealism in foreign affairs, the world’s best-known realist thinker has been a voice crying out in the wilderness. Like his namesake, John the Baptist, much he foretold has come to pass, not least in Ukraine and Israel.