In 2007, Walter Russell Mead penned a sharp review of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Mead’s pen filleted the book, saying it would give “aid and comfort to anti-Semites wherever they are found.” At the same time, Mead graciously gave the book’s authors the benefit of the doubt: “All of this is deeply contrary to the intentions of the authors; written in haste, the book will be repented at leisure.” Alas, Mearsheimer did not repent.
Instead, a few years later, Mearsheimer endorsed what Mead called a “genuinely anti-Semitic book.” Mead offers varying characterizations of The Israel Lobby’s authors. Of Walt, Mead stipulates, “I think he’s wrong about why American policy is so supportive of Israel, and I think his errors confirm anti-Semites in their prejudices, but I don’t have any reason to go beyond that.” But Mearsheimer, Mead adjures, “seems to have danced with the dark side a little more intimately.” The author Mearsheimer promoted is Gilad Atzmon, who doubts the historical record on the scale and horrors of the Holocaust, blames the Jews for Adolf Hitler’s behavior, and, noted Mead, traffics in blood libel.
Now, in 2026, while the United States is at war with the world’s leading sponsor of Islamist terrorism, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mearsheimer is still at it. Just a few weeks ago, as Tucker Carlson was crashing out against President Donald Trump’s military campaign against Iran to stop its reign of terror and illegal nuclear weapons pursuits, Mearsheimer made this public statement, through off-putting smirks: “There is no country on the planet that is crueler and more deadly than Israel.”
This is quite the charge by a man who was once taken seriously for articulating his theory of “offensive realism” in international relations — an offshoot of the work of Hans Morgenthau. Today, he’s mostly famous for being wrong on basic, easily knowable facts and also for chronically engaging in logical fallacies that seem to always lead to the conclusion that America is to blame for our enemies’ bad behavior. (Maybe the most interesting thing about Mearsheimer’s journey is that the truly remarkable alliance between Israel and the United States is one of the clearest examples that thoroughly undermines his theory about international relations.)
Mearsheimer has argued that realism requires serious students of strategy to view nations as caring primarily about power and security, not ideology or their systems of government. He glosses over the idiosyncratic strategic cultures within societies, insisting that China, for example, whether led by Ronald Reagan or Xi Jinping, would essentially behave the way it is behaving today, which Mearsheimer asserts is in China’s national interests. To Mearsheimer, allies are not really motivated by domestic political matters or values; they are dangerous millstones around the necks of great powers. Ditching them frees up countries such as China to behave as they want.
Mearsheimer has been right and even insightful about the danger of liberal idealism — the belief that there can be supranational motives or organizations that subsume the desire of nations to protect their sovereignty and defend their survival. But his brand of realism has also led him to confusion and error. It is true that the United States unintentionally enriched our greatest adversary — China — who is now engaged in a massive military buildup and strategic nuclear breakout. Bringing China into the global economy didn’t liberalize China; instead, it enriched the Chinese Communist Party, which, as Xi Jinping regularly explains, remains committed to Marxist–Leninist ideology, with appeals to Confucianism. Without understanding what motivates Xi and the CCP, one’s realism isn’t going to be truly realistic.
Similarly, the Trump administration has argued that the ideology of the Islamic Republic of Iran makes its pursuit of nuclear weapons unacceptable and explains why it is so devoted to exporting the so-called Islamic Revolution through terrorist proxies. The Islamic Republic’s radical commitment to spreading terrorism, and to the destruction of the Jewish state and its closest ally, the United States of America, combined with its weapons and especially its nuclear program make it an unacceptably dangerous enemy.
What’s more, the American people mostly agree and have for decades. The complex and meaningful relationship between Christian Americans and Jewish people generally, and the Jewish state specifically, is in fact an important area of study that would help make sense of how well the two nations have so closely worked together and how they view threats to their shared interests. The genocidal behavior of Hamas and an uncomfortably significant number of people in Gazan society cannot be rationalized by arguments stemming from power imbalances and realpolitik divorced from ideology. On October 7, Hamas terrorists celebrated raping and torturing unsuspecting Israelis and called their parents in Gaza, who tearfully praised them for their sadistic barbarism and even eventual “martyrdom.” Contrast this with the extraordinary lengths the Israelis go to protect a single life, including the lives of Gazans living above Hamas’s war-making tunnels.
And today, it is the U.S. and Israeli commitment to peace, civilization, and will to live and prosper that has resulted in a joint military operation that has dominated the Iranian skies, nearly eliminated its air force and navy, and penetrated its leadership. It is their respective systems of government — which have produced highly competent militaries and technologies, intelligence operations, and disciplined soldiers and spies — that are crushing the repressive Iranian regime. Mearsheimer’s problem isn’t ultimately with the “Jewish lobby,” a normal, functioning lobby in the United States, alongside all sorts of other interest groups and lobbying efforts. Rather, his problem is with reality.
Some may still be holding on to that hope held by Mead almost 20 years ago that Mearsheimer himself doesn’t hold antisemitic views and that his analyses can help us navigate modern international crises. But as with nations, we can know something of what a person values by his actions; and in that vein, Mearsheimer’s dancing with the dark side matters.
One reader, in response to an earlier essay by Mearsheimer in the London Review of Books, noted: Perhaps you know, perhaps you don’t, that the longer, unedited version of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s essay posted on Harvard and Chicago University websites is being distributed by the PLO in Washington, and is being hailed by Abdul Moneim Aboul-Fotouh, a senior member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and by David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader. He had this to say about it: “I have read about the report and read one summary already, and I am surprised how excellent it is. It is quite satisfying to see a body in the premier American University essentially come out and validate every major point I have been making since before the war even started.” He added that “the task before us is to wrest control of America’s foreign policy and critical junctures of media from the Jewish extremist neo-cons that seek to lead us into what they expectantly call World War Four.” I don’t want to be in such company, and neither should you. Please cancel my subscription.
Cheers, Michael Taylor from Old Malton, North Yorkshire.
Twenty years later, with a growing number of people in America harboring antisemitic views and cynicism about America’s goodness and the importance of morality and the character of a nation, we would do well to heed Taylor’s clarity and conviction.