You're listening to Robert Wright's Non-Zero Podcast.

Hi, John.

Hi, Bob. How are you?

Good. How are you doing?

I'm doing fine. As spring is coming, it's hard not to feel much better.

Okay. Well, yeah, it feels that way here, too. Let me introduce us. I'm Robert Wright, publisher of the Non-Zero Newsletter. This is the Non-Zero podcast.

You are John Mearsheimer. And I think you're getting to the point where you may need no introduction for most people, but just in case, you've long been well known in academic circles as an eminent scholar in international relations and a particularly full-throated and strict advocate of the realist perspective, as they call it.

You've become known more widely lately as a result of the Ukraine war because you have some,

I guess, controversial views in particular that had U.S. foreign policy been conducted more wisely,

there might not be a Ukraine war, for example. And in fact, you said some years ago, you said,

if we don't straighten out this NATO issue, if we don't give Russia some reassurance that

Ukraine will never join. NATO, there will be trouble. I think you said

Russia will wreck Ukraine, and to some extent, I guess that is happening. So I want to talk about

all that. I want to also talk about China. And at the risk of oversimplifying your view, I want to explore the fact that

you're in, well, more hawkish on China than Russia. It's safe to say. And look at how that kind of flows

from your worldview. In the course of that, I want to look at the question of how we should

think of, you know, state actors and state leaders when we formulate U.S. foreign policy.

You know, should we think of them as rational actors, strictly pursuing national interest?

I think that's pretty close to your view.

You've got a book coming out this summer called How States Think,

The Rationality of Foreign Policy,

co-authored with Sebastian Rosado that explores this in-depth.

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