John Mearsheimer, professor of international relations at the University of Chicago, has used his star power to articulate an accessible, forceful, and largely well-received critique of US interventions: in the Americas, most recently in the attacks on Venezuela and the energy blockade of Cuba, eastern Europe (Ukraine), and, with Israel, the Middle East. He is one of the few academics who publicly describes Hezbollah as a defensive resistance movement whose origins stem not from terrorism but from the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

Following the logic of what he calls “offensive realism,” Mearsheimer is known for having correctly anticipated the Russian response to the aggressive expansion of NATO’s presence in eastern Europe. Along with the marxist left, he is skeptical of liberal democratic regime change and the US social engineering (e.g., the “color revolutions”) carried out in non-western regimes. He is also among a small number of political intellectuals in America who see Russia’s behavior in Ukraine as a defensive reaction to an existential threat coming from the US and NATO and a response to the proxy war in that country. 

With the successful 2014 US-sponsored putsch in Kiev that installed in power a reactionary Russophobic clique backed by neo-Nazi paramilitary groups, the US-led military pact was poised to make Ukraine the forward flank in efforts to remove Putin from power and turn Russia into a bastardized client state. The new proxy regime in Kiev, intending to reverse the course of history, carried out a policy of ethnic cleansing in the heavily Russophone eastern provinces, the Donbas. This led to regional resistance, an armed assault by Kiev’s military and paramilitary, including their use of cluster munitions, and eventually a Russian invasion in 2022.

Mearsheimer also helped expose the “fifth column” activities of the Israel lobby in the US. Ever since he and Stephen Walt produced their provocative study of the Israel lobby, first an article in the London Review of Books in 2006 and then a best-selling book in 2007, Mearsheimer in particular has been a target of vituperative hatred by defenders of the apartheid state. In the years since, pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel attitudes, including those of a large percentage of American Jews, have grown at a phenomenal rate. 

According to Gallup polls taken in February 2007 and February 2026, American opinion shifted from 58% favoring Israel and 20% supporting the Palestinians to 36% supporting Israel versus 41% sympathetic to Palestine. Most remarkable is the finding that in the latter poll, 53% of young people (aged 18 to 34) supported the Palestinians versus 23% favoring the Israelis. Palestinians have the support of 40% of American Jews, with nearly half of young Jews (under 35) favoring a non-Zionist binational state.

Mearsheimer argues that the Israel lobby has misguided US policy in the Middle East to the detriment of American interests in the region as well as those of Israel itself. Indeed, over 90% of the Arab and Persian worlds oppose the US-Israel alliance, which in itself is a clear indicator of a foreign policy agenda gone awry.

Image: AIPAC headquarters in Mount Vernon Triangle, Washington, D.C. (CC BY 2.0)

The power of the lobby, which was present even before the existence of the Israeli state, increased dramatically after the 1967 war. Various sections of the lobby pressure politicians and influencers and find ready allies in the US government, using the funding mechanism of congressional campaigns, which gives billionaire pro-Israeli donors exceptional political leverage. The Zionist donor class works to secure a steady flow of financial aid and support for Israel and pro-Zionist public opinion. To reject support to Israel invites retaliation from the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most powerful foreign policy lobbying organization in the US and a growing force in the UK.

AIPAC boasts that it backed 362 candidates in 2024 for various elected positions for state and federal office, two-thirds of them Republican, and in each primary where it funded someone on the ballot, it won, while defeating 11 candidates critical of Israel, including progressive House candidates Jamal Bowman (D/NY) and Cori Bush (D/MI). 

Mearsheimer and Walt found that AIPAC and its sister organizations also play an outsized role in influencing public discourse and propaganda about Israel and the Middle East through privileged access to the mainstream media, the major universities (via their endowment funding), and think tanks. They also have extensive control over appointments of key foreign policy positions in government. This has led to Israel being the largest total recipient of US foreign aid in the post-World War II era.

The most potent ideological weapon that AIPAC and other Zionist organizations employ is the branding of those who question the one-sided defense of Israel as “antisemitic.” It’s a means of intimidation that effectively silences non-Jews from expressing reservations about the elevated status of Israel that comes at the expense of American tax payers and most of all, Palestinians. Outspoken Jewish critics are shame-smacked with the label “self-hating Jews.”

On May 1, 2026 the US House of Representatives passed the “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act” in a lopsided vote, 320-91. It remains unpassed to date in the Senate. The bill’s language equates pro-Palestinian protest with antisemitism and thereby censors individuals and groups critical of Israeli apartheid and genocide. This is another indication of the lobby’s power to impose its designs on US politics and politically abuse the First Amendment for its own purposes.

Political scientist Norman Finkelstein, a specialist on Gaza and Israel, has written extensively about how Israelis and their Jewish and Christian fundamentalist acolytes have weaponized the Holocaust for personal and/or political gain. Especially since the 1967 Israel-Arab war, he argues, they have manufactured a narrative of Jewish victimhood vis-à-vis the Palestinians against whom they are allegedly forced to defend themselves. After 1967, the Holocaust and identity politics took root among American Jews not because they were victims, he writes, “but because they are not victims” (p. 15).

In 1969, then Israeli Labor prime minister Golda Meir infamously said,

“We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.”

By this reasoning, one echoed by Israel’s current crop of sadistic racists at the governing helm, the Palestinians are to be blamed for the Israeli mass murder of their children, more than 20,000 and counting since 2023, including those intentionally shot in the head and chest by IDF snipers.

While Mearsheimer makes cogent arguments about the power of the Israel lobby over US policy in the Middle East and Netanyahu’s manipulation of Trump in the joint assault on Iran, that’s only part of the story. What he fails to address, a major weakness of his overall argument, is the colonial and imperialist character of US foreign policy that has been continuous from the annihilation of the indigenous tribes on the American subcontinent, the uses of the Monroe Doctrine, the war on Mexico, and the commencement of their overseas conquests in the Pacific and the Caribbean before the end of the 19^th century. Eisenhower didn’t need the Israelis to organize a coup in Iran in 1953, nor did Bush get permission from Israel to invade Iraq and Afghanistan.

Lacking an analysis of the constitution of the state and its power base. Mearsheimer sees all states as homogenous entities devoid of any clashes amongst its constituent classes, e.g., the interests of workers versus the interests of global corporations. Mearsheimer analyzes international relations under the false premise that all major powers are intrinsically and as relentlessly avaricious and violent as the US. The People’s Republic China, which he sees as America’s natural enemy and an aggressor state, has not in fact invaded any country but for brief skirmishes with India and Vietnam. 

According to a Tufts University study, the US has militarily conducted more than 200 attacks on foreign countries since 1945, 114 of them in the post-Cold War era. There is no comparison between the US and China on the question of military aggression and political coercion over countries. China has one foreign military base in Djibouti; the US has an estimated 800 in some 130 countries. Moreover, China does not wield control over the dominant international economic institutions such as the World Bank, IMF, and the WTO, which force weaker countries to submit to the wishes of the world capitalist order dominated by giant transnational financial and industrial corporations. 

Despite these realities, Mearsheimer believes the US must prepare for a war with China over the status of Taiwan. In 1972 the US signed the Shanghai communique with China stating that

“The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States Government does not challenge that position….” (emphasis added).

Mearsheimer’s alignment with the hawkish line ultimately exposes the limits of his analysis. The ten years he spent in the military apparently have not in his case worn away the militaristic culture that is inscribed in its recruits.

Mearsheimer is correct, however, that the world has moved to a multipolar power structure and that China is close to standing up to the US as a regional hegemon in Asia. But America’s relative decline is not an outcome of China’s aggression as much as the corruption of the US capitalist system, which has deteriorated into an oligarchy in control of the state and its money-driven political process. But the public is not fooled: in 2024, Gallup found a new low, 28%, in its tracking of American adults who believe that democracy is working in the country. 

A Final Word

Mearsheimer sees nothing but a military solution in the case of Ukraine and further aggression by the US in Iran. In his major work on international relations, he wrote: “I define power largely in military terms because offensive realism emphasizes that force is the ultima ratio of international politics” (p. 86). It’s a cynical Hobbesian view that leaves little room for negotiation or the alternative idea of peaceful coexistence. 

Although the US mainstream media (MSM) are locked into the system of propaganda and the maintenance of state legitimacy, there has emerged a dominant new public sphere that is digital and populated by political analysts of many stripes, a number of whom are refugees from the MSM who decided to break the silence about US-Israeli barbarism. Several of these latter voices have audiences in the tens of thousands and even millions and are changing political discourse in the country and abroad. 

As a result, there is a new reality for a majority of Americans who now understand the racial supremacist criminal behavior of the Israelis and their US benefactors – this despite the pro-Israeli and anti-Palestinian prejudices of the large majority of corporate journalists and politicians. One should never underestimate the power that citizens have to construct a realism counter to what they’re spoon-fed by establishment sources. It is now up to the left to further tap into the new media and win over the majority toward a genuinely democratic socialist society and relations with other nations based on mutual respect, the upholding of the UN Charter, and peaceful and progressive collaborations.

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Gerald Sussman is professor emeritus at Portland State University. He is the author or chief editor of seven books, including the most recent one (2025), British and American Electoral Politics in the Age of Neoliberalism (Routledge). Professor Sussman can be reached at [email protected]

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