Military Review English Edition May-June 2016 | Page 33

NEW SECURITY ARCHITECTURE

Uncle Sam pivots to some place he has to pivot away
from another place, and where the United States is
going to pivot away from is Europe. China is a potential
peer competitor, and all that is needed is a major crisis
in Asia and the United States will focus its attention on
that region in laser-like fashion. When that happens,
America’s interest in Europe will diminish significantly.
I like to tell students that historically the United States
has cared greatly about three areas of the world outside
of the Western Hemisphere: Europe, Northeast Asia,
and the Persian Gulf. And, over our entire history,
Europe has been the most important area of the world
for us outside of the Western Hemisphere. We are undergoing for the first time in our history a fundamental
transformation in our strategic priorities. Asia is going
to become the most important area of the world for the
United States, the Persian Gulf is going to be the second
most important area, and Europe is going to become a
distant third.
So, if China continues to rise, we are eventually going to pivot, and that means that we’re going to greatly

reduce our presence in Europe, and we are going to be
much less interested in Europe than we have been over
the course of our history. At the same time, if you look
at what’s happening among America’s allies in Europe,
it seems clear they’re not spending much money on
defense, and it doesn’t look like they are going to come
together to take up the slack if the United States pivots
to Asia. I think the principal bellwether of the trouble
ahead is what’s happening in Britain. Defense spending
is shrinking, and, by the year 2019, all British troops
will be removed from the European continent. This is
an event of great significance. So, what I am saying to
you is that even if we are able to turn around Western
policy and convince Putin that the West has good
intentions, the future of NATO is uncertain, which
means a lot of trouble ahead. For all these reasons I’m
quite sure you cannot go back to the status quo ante in
Eastern Europe.
My bottom line is that we had an excellent situation
with regard to European security before 2008. And we,
meaning the West, blew it big time.

Biography
Dr. John Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the co-director
of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago. A graduate of the United States Military
Academy at West Point, New York, he spent five years in the U.S. Air Force. He received an MA in international relations from the University of Southern California, and an MA and a PhD in political science from Cornell University.
Mearsheimer has published five books and numerous articles about security issues and international politics, has
received a number of teaching awards, and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

MR

We Recommend

I

f you found Dr. Mearsheimer’s comments
provocative or intriguing, your attention is
invited to an earlier manuscript he penned,
published in the September-October 2014 edition of Foreign Affairs, in which he treats the thesis
of Western culpability for events transpiring in
Ukraine in much greater detail. The article can also
be found at:
http://mearsheimer.uchicago.edu/pdfs/Ukraine%20
Article%20in%20Foreign%20Affairs.pdf.

MILITARY REVIEW  May-June 2016

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