Su tragedie e grandi illusioni: John J. Mearsheimer e la Geopolitica

The article concerns the geopolitical dimension of John J. Mearsheimer’s “offensive realism”, arguing that the geopolitical ideas set out in Mearsheimer’s latest book The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (2018) partly differ from the geopolitical thought outlined in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), by far his most ambitious theoretical work. The article affirms that, while Tragedy offered a geopolitical structuralism that focused exclusively on (global) space, Great Delusion is interested also in place(s). In Tragedy Mearsheimer regards geography as mainly a structural factor that profoundly affects international power politics, asserting in particular that bids for global hegemony are doomed to fail due to the “stopping power of water”. Unlike Tragedy, Great Delusion expounds a political anthropology in which geography (i.e. places) plays an important role also as a source of cultural and national particularism, whose persistence in post-Cold War international system helps explaining the failure of the US policy of global liberal hegemony.