Tag: John Mearsheimer

Legal Illegal: The Question of Whether this War is Legal is the Wrong Question

2 March 2026

Stephen Gowans

Democrats are incensed that the US war on Iran is illegal. But how many US wars and other interventions, including sanctions, have been authorized by the Congress and blessed by the UN Security Council? Since 1945, the year the UN Charter came into force, most US wars and sanctions campaigns have either been undertaken without Congressional approval or have contravened international law or both. Criminal US wars and sanctions are not an anomaly; they’re the norm.

Reacting to the norm as if it’s an aberration is part of an ideological process of maintaining the legitimacy of the US state. The state’s lawless conduct is reliably characterized as a departure from the norm, rather than the norm. “This isn’t who we are. We uphold and live by international law. The current war is an exception.” No, it’s not. It’s precisely who you are.

Reacting to the norm as if it’s an aberration is a reflection of what the philosopher Charles Mills called ‘the epistemology of ignorance” – refusing to see what’s staring you in the face. For example, one can only believe that the United States is a beacon of liberty and paladin of democracy by refusing to see that:

  • the country carried out a genocide of the indigenous people and stole their land;
  • enslaved millions of Africans and exploited their labor;
  • didn’t give women the vote until 1920;
  • failed to provide blacks even formal civil liberties until 1965;
  • established formal colonies in Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands, and informal colonies around the world;
  • practices democracy for the few billionaires and political impotence for the many;
  • defends and upholds the exploitation of wage and salary earners as a matter of law and high moral principle.

There has been a substantial increase in freedom and democracy since 1776, but that’s only because the people who were so long denied these advantages fought long and hard to win them. It would be more accurate to say that contained within the US nation has been a movement of the oppressed and exploited that has fought heroically against a contending movement of oppressors and exploiters. The two movements continue to define political struggle in the United States today, and around the world.

Democrats and liberals who oppose this war (mainly because it’s Trump’s war), also contribute to maintaining the fiction that the US state is legitimate by demonizing the war’s victims. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman began his blog today with a shockingly puerile assertion: “The Iranian regime is evil, and it would be a good thing if this war leads to its demise.” In other words, maybe the war is illegal, but the Iranian regime is heinous, so we can be assured that at the end of the day Washington’s intentions are good and everything will work out for the greater benefit of humanity. Apparently, childish analysis disqualifies no one from winning a Nobel Prize in economics. It may even be a prerequisite.

To return to the lawlessness of US wars. The trouble with dwelling on the illegality of US interventions, as if they could be expected to be otherwise given that they almost always are illegal, is that, not only does this buttress the notion that the conduct of the US state is, at its core, legitimate (when it clearly is not), but avoids asking the relevant question: Why is this intervention being undertaken?  For surely, if we’re troubled by the kinds of wars, both military and economic, that the United States and its pals wage against what are usually largely defenseless countries and peoples, we should want to know what causes them, so that we can know how to put an end to them.

Since February of 2022, the month Russia tried to conquer Ukraine, I’ve spent much of my time studying the origins of major wars. This has led me to the works of international relations (IR) scholars, including the neo-realists, the most visible of whom, these days, is John Mearsheimer. IR scholars can be commended, Mearsheimer included, for seeking the root causes of war, rather than indulging in pointless moral sermonizing. But they can’t be commended for their analyses.

Take Mearsheimer, for example. He began by articulating a model of major wars based on security competition within an anarchic inter-state system. States, he argued, try to maximize their military power in order to defend themselves against the possible aggressions of rival states. On this basis, he predicted that the United States would avoid major wars in the Middle East and Eastern Europe in order to concentrate on containing China, its closest near-peer rival. When Washington embroiled itself in major wars in the Middle East, contrary to Mearsheimer’s theorizing, he declared the Middle East an anomaly, and attributed the failure of his theory to account for US conduct to an alleged hijacking of the US state by Israel and its lobbyists.

In fact, Mearsheimer’s argument that the Israel lobby runs US foreign policy, while allowing him to get out from under the failures of his “offensive realism” thinking, is part of the same ideological process of maintaining the legitimacy of the US state that is expressed in portrayals of illegal US warfare as a departure from the norm. Don’t blame the US state for its malignant wars on West Asia; at their core, the US policy- and decision-makers are decent and benign human beings who want to do the right thing. The trouble is that they have fallen under the sway of the Israeli Svengali.  The idea that Jews lurk in the shadows manipulating world events refuses to die.

I have leaned toward Lenin’s analysis of war, articulated in his voluminous writings from 1914-1918 on the first world war. The obvious limitation of Lenin’s thinking is that it is based on one war and the events leading up to it. He didn’t undertake an historical survey of wars, and obviously, could not take account of wars that have been fought since. Moreover, he used the term imperialism in a highly inconsistent way which has led to no end of confusion. All the same, I have found his thinking to offer a useful way to think about war waged by major powers.

Unfortunately, those who might be interested in Lenin, often read him second hand, rather than exploring what he said in his own words, free from the interpretations of others. Furthermore, on matters of war, they usually consult his pamphlet on Imperialism, which, in my view, is the least interesting and useful of his war-related work, though, sadly, the most frequently consulted.

Unlike IR realists, such as Mearsheimer, who are IR theorists because they want to advise the US foreign policy establishment on grand strategy, Lenin’s aim was to understand the origin of war in order to bring about a world whose realization would mean the end of war. In this respect, his concerns resonate best with those of anti-war activists, a compelling reason for turning to him rather than Mearsheimer and his IR colleagues, whose careers in academe tend to depend on how helpful their work is to a US foreign policy establishment whose aim is to exploit other countries and cement US domination over the rest of humanity.

Back to legality. Should it matter whether a war is legal? Who decides what is legal or illegal? It certainly hasn’t been people trying to free their country or class from exploitation. The United States and other large powers wrote international law and control the Security Council. If the Security Council says a war is legal, does that make it just?

I would argue, and so did Lenin, that a just war is one that brings us closer to a world free from the exploitation of one class by another and of one state by another. That is a just war, worth fighting, even if it is condemned by the US Congress and prohibited by international law and the Security Council.

Musical coda

The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy: A Realistic Marxist View vs. Mearsheimer’s Realist View

By Stephen Gowans

May 21, 2024

Recently, Laurence H. Shoup presented data in Monthly Review that shows that the key personnel of the organizations comprising the Israel lobby, as identified by political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, are also the key personnel of the leading US foreign policy think-thank, the Wall Street-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The key foreign policy members of the Biden cabinet, the secretaries of state, treasury, defense, along with the director of the CIA, national security advisor, and US ambassador to the UN, are all CFR members. Cabinets in previous administrations have also drawn heavily from the Wall Street-based organization to fill top cabinet posts.

Shoup has argued in two books and multiple articles that US foreign policy is shaped by a Wall Street power elite operating largely through the Council on Foreign Relations to serve the economic interests of the US economic elite, the country’s ruling class. This is a Marxist view.

The Marxist view contrasts with the view of John Mearsheimer who has recently argued that US foreign policy—not just that touching Israel, but all US foreign policy—is shaped by a powerful lobby of Jewish and Christian Zionist business people who have used their wealth and influence to pressure US decision-makers to put Zionist interests ahead of US interests.  

These two views differ on the following questions:

Who decisively influences US foreign policy? Mearsheimer says wealthy and powerful Zionists, both Jewish and Christian. A Marxist view says that a Wall Street power elite holds decisive sway over US foreign policy, and Shoup shows that the group includes members of and overlaps the Israel lobby.

What is the aim of US foreign policy? Mearsheimer says the aim is to protect and advance the Zionist project, in contrast to a Marxist view which says it is to protect and advance Wall Street’s interests around the world.

Is Israel a foreign policy asset? Mearsheimer says that far from being an asset, Israel is a liability, because Zionism creates problems in the Middle East which demand incessant US attention, diverting Washington from devoting its full energies to containing China, its principal foreign policy threat. A Marxist view holds that defending and promoting the interests of its patrons has always been central to the Zionist project and that this makes Israel a valuable instrument to be used in defending Wall Street’s interests in the Middle East.  

Mearsheimer recently presented an argument that supports the idea that the US foreign policy establishment subsumes the Israel lobby, as Shoup has shown, though it was hardly Mearsheimer’s intention to support a Marxist view. We might suppose that the Israel lobby focuses on US-Israel relations, while the ambit of the US foreign policy establishment is broader—the world as a whole. But Mearsheimer sees the lobby’s ambit as coterminous with that of the US foreign policy establishment; in his view, Israel is not the only matter that commands the Israel lobby’s attention; it is also concerned with US foreign policy as a whole.  Even to Mearsheimer, then, the Israel lobby looks like the US foreign policy establishment in the breadth of the regions in which it takes an interest.

But here’s where Mearsheimer introduces a new element into his thinking. Not only does he believe that the Israel lobby has pressured the US foreign policy establishment into robustly backing Israel, he also makes an argument that can be construed to mean he believes the Israel lobby has pressured US decision-makers into adopting an interventionist foreign policy everywhere in the world.  Asked whether the lobby is concerned with US-Israel relations alone, Mearsheimer replies (at 14:32):

“The fact is that the lobby is deeply interested in seeing the United States involved militarily all over the planet. The reason is, is that if the United States is intervening all over the planet, that means it will have a commitment to intervening in Israel. You don’t want a situation where the United States pulls back its forces, implements a policy, a foreign policy, of restraint, and is very reluctant to interfere in other places around the world, because if that’s the case it means that Israel may get into a conflict and the United States might not be willing to intervene on its behalf. So, the lobby has had an interest in seeing the United States pursue a very aggressive foreign policy all across the globe.”

One interpretation of the text above is that Mearsheimer believes the Israel lobby has caused US foreign policy to be globally interventionist. Another is that he sees the lobby as favoring a broadly interventionist policy, but doesn’t go so far as to suggest it has caused US decision-makers to adopt one. But if the Israel lobby is powerful enough to cause US decision-makers to support Israel unconditionally as Mearsheimer contends, we might expect it also to be powerful enough to cause decision-makers to support a globally interventionist foreign policy that supports the Jewish state. It seems likely that Mearsheimer is arguing that the Israel lobby not only causes US decision-makers to favor Israel unconditionally but that it also causes them to adopt a globally interventionist foreign policy.  This extends the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis considerably, from: the Israel lobby causes US decision-makers to back Israel unconditionally to: the Israel lobby causes US foreign policy to be robustly interventionist around the world.

Mearsheimer defines the lobby as a group of wealthy and powerful people who are committed to Israel. We might ask what lies behind their commitment. Mearsheimer cites Zionist convictions. The Israel lobby comprises people who are either Zionist Jews or Christian Zionists, he argues. But is that the only reason to be committed to Israel? Could one not also be committed to a policy of the United States backing Israel owing to the role the Jewish state is able to play as an outpost of US elite interests in the Middle East? Pace Mearsheimer, could it be that US foreign policy is shaped by US decision-makers guided by a Wall Street-based power elite that perceives Israel as an asset able to defend US ruling class interests in the Middle East in return for helping it carry forward the Zionist project?  

Political Zionism has always rested on the idea of a quid-pro-quo between settler Jews emigrating from the West and the governments of the Western states from which they emigrated. The former would represent the interests of the latter in West Asia and North Africa, serving as a bulwark against Arab and Muslim nationalist interests, in exchange for the latter’s support for the Jewish settler project in Palestine. That project would inevitably arouse the enmity of the natives, who would naturally bristle at their displacement and the negation of their national aspirations.  A Western backer would be vital to the project’s success, and Israel would return the favor by countering forces that opposed its sponsor’s interests in the region.

Israel, of course, isn’t the West’s only choice as proxy in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Washington could look to Arab states to help police the Middle East and assert US profit-making and strategic interests in the region. Indeed, Washington has done this, establishing relations with a series of royal and military dictatorships, including Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait.

The trouble is that US support in the Middle East is largely limited to the autocrats Washington helps keep in power over the opposition of their populations. It would be difficult for US-backed Arab despots to mobilize their countries against other Arabs and Muslims, specifically Iran, Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Ansar Allah in Yemen—states and movements which reject US domination of the Middle East. US-backed autocrats command little support at home. Their populations are imbued with nationalist aspirations, and unlike Israeli Jews, reject the idea that the region ought to be subordinate to US leadership. Tel Aviv, in contrast, can mobilize Israeli Jews against Arabs and Muslims, who are viewed as hostile barbarians, embittered against Israel, and bent on eliminating the Jews as a people.

To put it another way, Israeli Jews, who largely see themselves as Westerners, identify with the Western world and its project of imposing US leadership on the globe, including on the energy-rich and therefore strategically important Middle East; Arabs and Iranians are far less likely to share this view. Native states are, thus, poor choices as effective proxies for US interests in the Middle East. Israel, which sees itself as the West’s outpost in West Asia and North Africa, is, in contrast, a superb choice, motivated to cooperate with the US agenda by its security concerns which can only be satisfied by the United States and its Western partners and a common Western culture and commitment to the ideas of manifest destiny, Western superiority, and the desirability of US global leadership.

Mearsheimer has been known to reply to challenges to his view by asking, “Then why does the lobby exist?” The fact of the existence of an organization with a specific aim is hardly evidence that the organization has achieved its aim. The Democratic Socialists of America exist as an organization to bring socialism to the United States. Is the United States socialist?

The reason the Israel lobby exists is to shape public opinion, media coverage, intellectual discourse, and the research agendas and curricula of the universities and schools, and where public opinion cannot be manipulated to Israel’s advantage, to discourage elected representatives from responding to public opinion by initiating legislation or government action that could interfere with Washington’s accustomed support of its Israeli client. The lobby, as Shoup points out, is largely focused on electoral contests, not on twisting the arms of the unelected Wall Street-connected personnel who occupy the consequential foreign policy roles in the state—the secretaries of state, defense, treasury, chief of the CIA, and UN ambassador, and their phalanx of deputies and undersecretaries—all of whom are largely removed from the influence of public opinion. The role of the Israel lobby is, in short, to persuade US society and its elected representatives to accept US support of a client in the Middle East whose conduct is likely to inflame public opinion against it.

The idea that the Israel lobby is able to shape all of US foreign policy, as Mearsheimer contends, is, to use one of his favorite locutions, just not a serious argument. The idea that the Israel lobby causes US decision-makers to put Israeli interests ahead of US interests, fails to grasp (i) the complementarity of the two country’s interests; (ii) the trouble that local forces of independence and national assertiveness in the Middle East can create for US ruling class interests in the region; and (iii) the role Israel plays as the “rock, an extension of the West, against which the waves of… Arab [and Muslim] nationalism will be broken,” as Moshe Dayan, an Israeli chief of defense staff, minister of defense, and minister of foreign affairs, once put it.

Mearsheimer’s view comes perilously close to the idea that a cabal of rich Jews and their Christian Zionist friends pull the strings in Washington, diverting the country’s government from pursuing US interests to pursuing Jewish Zionist interests in the Middle East. Some might say the Marxist view is hardly different; it too attributes US foreign policy to a cabal, except, in this case, a cabal of Wall Street financiers. While it might seem on the surface that this is so, the Marxist view sees US foreign policy as reflecting the character of US society—one devoted to capitalism, indeed, thoroughly dominated by it, where the idea that billionaires, wealthy investors, and top-level corporate executives exercise considerable sway over almost every aspect of US society, including public policy, is almost axiomatic. As a 2014 study of over 1,700 US policy issues by the political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page showed, “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial impacts on government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.” The Council on Foreign Relations is only one of many instruments the US ruling class uses to influence public policy. It also funds the political campaigns of candidates that will support pro-business policies; donates to universities to shape their research agendas and influence who they hire and fire; owing to its significant wealth, lobbies the legislative and executive branches of government to a degree which unions, working people, and grassroots groups, which command significantly less wealth, are unable to do; and owns and controls the mass media, allowing it to shape public opinion and set the public policy agenda. The US ruling class uses all of these mechanisms to influence US foreign policy and tilt it in favor of US ruling class interests. The Marxist view, thus, holds that a class, not a cabal, pulls the strings in Washington, using its ownership and control of the economy to fund political campaigns, lobby government, and shape the public discourse, in its interests.

In contrast, Mearsheimer’s view is hardly different from the idea that a cabal of wealthy Zionist Jews and Zionist Christians has hijacked the US state in order to use it to serve the interests of Jews in Israel at the expense and to the detriment of the citizens of the United States. This view shares similarities with reactionary views that date as far back as 1789 and continued into the late nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century–ideas about conspiracies of wealthy Jews operating in the background to pull strings and shape world politics to the benefit of Jews and at the expense of everyone else. If wealthy Jews were once thought by reactionaries to be behind everything they hated–the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks, international capitalism–they have become, in Mearsheimer’s hands, the reason why the United States supports Israel; in other words, they have been made to reprise their role as scapegoats.

Related:

Israel is a Class Issue

The Israel Lobby and the US Foreign Policy Establishment Are Largely the Same, Reflecting the Complementarity of US Elite and Israeli Colonial Settler Interests