By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

It doesn’t take much time to compile from the works of John Mearsheimer a file of his mistakes of prediction, miscalculations of US and Ukrainian operations, and strategic misjudgements about the US war against Russia in Europe.

And yet, despite the plainness of this record, Mearsheimer is treated as a valuable asset, if not agent of influence by the Russian state propaganda organs which quote him with approval, and by US podcasters who advertise themselves as pro-Russian and who engage Mearsheimer to that end.  Mearsheimer has enjoyed something similarly official in China.

Watch this brief sample of Mearsheimer on the present war.

This ought to be familiar for another American political reason.  It’s Joseph Nye’s soft power idea from Harvard revitalized by Mearsheimer as his offensive realism idea at the University of Chicago.   Because Nye is now dead (2025); because, before he expired, Nye was recognized by his targets to be just another US warfighter for the same old empire; and because the Trump Administration has replaced soft power, propaganda and USAID tools of policymaking with hard power, US Department of War tools, the political equivalence of Nye and Mearsheimer has not been understood.

 Why have Russians who have been the targets of US warfighting since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 failed to see this equivalence? Why are American university professors credited with theories that are provably  wrong on the evidence, believed by the Russian targets of US warfighting? Why doesn’t the Hundred Years’ American War against Russia produce of theory and practice of a different kind and a different source?

The answer is that the Russian Army’s advance on the Ukrainian battlefield has not been matched by the advance of Russian ideology against the thrall in which US ideologists and influencers continue to be held in some Russian power centres. This outcome is evidence that Nye’s idea is still  succeeding in Moscow. And so long as this is true, Mearsheimer’s idea will also enjoy Russian success, no matter how wrongheaded it is.

A Soviet education in Marxism and mathematics isn’t necessary, though, for this equation to be invariably true: S (Soft power) equals H (hard head) equals W (wronghead).

This recalculation has not yet occurred for Mearsheimer but it is bound to happen. Well, maybe not. As Anton Chekhov once explained to Russians, what ought to happen is not bound to happen. “They say –” Chekhov wrote in his note-book in 1921, “they say ‘In the long run truth will triumph’ but it is untrue.”

Mearsheimer realism turns out to be Mushheimer imperialism. That’s a triumph for him for the moment. It will remain true for long as the empire has its run no matter what can be seen and said from the record.  

by Editor - Thursday, July 30th, 2026