It never ceases to amaze me how experts at something can't resist trying to be experts at everything. His examples from political science are just so off, but I have to concentrate on his example of Mearsheimer. Far from being one step or two ahead of the crowd, Mearsheimer's problem has been that he's still standing back in the 1980s. His realpolitik approach was refreshing and appealing for the time whensomewhat phony Cold War ideology and its false equivalences and distinctions permeated our politics and academia. But in trying to fit world events to his great power nonsense, he deeply distorted what happened in Ukraine in 2014 and seems unable to see that Russia has never truly acted like a modern state but remains an internal empire that while spanning a continent has an economy the size of Brazil, and less institutional capacity than most Latin American nations. The idea that we could somehow make common cause with Russia to counter China's rise has always been an old joke. The 2022 war in Ukraine was expertly predicted by a political scientist, but it was in 1993, when my grad school professor Ilya Prizel pushed back against all the End of History BS and said Russia would eventually assert itself in the middle of Europe, if desperately. He was dead right.