There Is No 911 in International Politics

Lex Fridman asks University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer to explain power as he laid it out in *The Tragedy of Great Power Politics*. Mearsheimer's first claim is that power is the currency of international relations: states watch the balance of power and try to control as much of it as they can. The reason is structural, not a personality defect. In the international system there is no higher authority, so if a country gets into trouble and dials 911, "there's nobody at the other end."

Anarchy, he stresses, does not mean murder and mayhem. It is simply the opposite of hierarchy: no world government sits above states, which he likens to pool balls on a table. Thomas Hobbes described individuals competing in a state of nature and escaping it by creating a Leviathan — a state. Domestic politics made that jump from anarchy to hierarchy; international politics never did. Without a world state, each country is left to maximize its relative power, to be, in the playground language of Mearsheimer's New York childhood, the biggest and baddest dude on the block — not necessarily because it wants to beat up others, but because that is the best way to survive.

The warning example is China's Century of National Humiliation, from the late 1840s to the late 1940s, when a weak China was preyed upon by the great powers. The message, he says, is simple and not lost on Beijing: don't be weak; be as powerful as you can. Power itself, in his account, is mostly material. The two building blocks are population size and wealth. China was not counted as a great power until recently because it had people but not money. The United States is powerful because it has both.

Lex notes that Mearsheimer did not list military might as a third pillar. Mearsheimer agrees: a large, rich country builds a large military, and it is the military that fights wars, but the army is a function of people and money, not a separate foundation. Living next to Napoleonic France, Imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, or even the United States — "a ruthless great power" — you do not want to be weak. In 1783 America was thirteen colonies along the Atlantic; by about 1900 it dominated the Western hemisphere, and since then it has worked to keep any peer competitor from arising. If he were sitting in Beijing, he would want to dominate Asia the same way. "They'd be fools not to."

For centuries, Mearsheimer says, international-relations theory has split between realism and liberalism, with plenty of disagreement inside each camp. Realists think power matters, states compete for it, and war is an instrument of statecraft. Liberals are more idealistic — not necessarily naive — and see features of politics that can make the world less competitive than realists expect. He walks through three liberal theories that still dominate the optimistic side of the field.

Democratic peace theory says democracies do not fight other democracies, so more democracies should mean fewer wars. Francis Fukuyama's *The End of History* extends the logic: democracy beat fascism, then communism, and more liberal democracies should follow. Mearsheimer's reply is that all states behave the same way under anarchy, democracy or not. You cannot show that democracies are generally more peaceful than autocracies; you can only show they tend not to fight one another. The version he takes seriously is about intentions: liberal democracies share norms against aggression, so they can read each other. For a realist, uncertainty about intentions is what "helps drive the train," and democracy does not reduce that uncertainty enough.

Economic interdependence theory says countries that get rich trading will not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Institutionalism says locking states into organizations makes them rule-abiding, so UN rules against war will stick. Mearsheimer's counter is the same in both cases. Interdependence is about prosperity; realism is about survival; and "survival always trumps prosperity." Europe in 1913 and early 1914 was densely interdependent and getting richer even as the Triple Alliance and Triple Entente ran an intense security competition. The July crisis still produced World War I. When survival and prosperity collide, survival wins. Rules, likewise, will not stop a state that thinks it is fighting for its life.

Realists themselves split twice. The first cut is human-nature realism versus structural realism. Hans Morgenthau, influenced by Nietzsche's will to power, thought competition comes from something in people. Mearsheimer is a structural realist: the same people, dropped into anarchy, must compete; dropped into a hierarchy with a world government, they would not. He calls that "a world of difference." Inside structural realism the second cut is defensive versus offensive. Defensive realists say the system punishes grabs for more power, so states should sit on what they have. Offensive realists like Mearsheimer say states jump at chances to gain power when success looks likely and the cost looks tolerable.

Lex asks how this explains Hitler. Mearsheimer gives a two-layer answer. The bottom layer is structure: Imperial Germany helped start World War I without Hitler, and a very powerful Germany, boxed in and anxious about the European balance, had "strong incentives to behave aggressively" in the late 1930s. He thinks there is a good chance World War II happens even without Hitler. The top layer is an exception he almost never grants. In modern history he counts only two "congenital aggressors," Napoleon and Hitler. Hitler was probably the most murderous leader in recorded history; Napoleon was not in that category. Both, though, were driven by something you can call a will to power, and that has to be married to the structural story.

What produced Hitler is a different question from what produced the war once he held power after January 30, 1933. Versailles, Weimar's chaos, and the Depression help explain his rise and the resentment he played on. Mearsheimer thinks he stayed wildly popular also because he was the only leader of an industrialized country who pulled his nation out of the Depression, and because specialists insist he was remarkably charismatic — something Mearsheimer cannot see in the footage. Public-opinion polls in West Germany in the late 1940s, after the Third Reich was gone, still showed him remarkably popular. Realism, he adds, does not explain the Holocaust. It is a theory about how states interact, not about every dimension of politics.

Does offensive realism explain the attack on the Soviet Union? Yes, he says, if Hitler and his generals thought they could win quickly — and they did. There was internal resistance before Munich and before Poland, and huge resistance in the army before France, until the Manstein Plan appeared. Before Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, the only case that failed, there was hardly any resistance. The Wehrmacht was a finely tuned instrument; the Red Army had been purged and had looked poor in Finland. Mearsheimer has always had the sense they came terrifyingly close. He is not sure that concentrating on Moscow, or on Ukraine and the Caucasus in 1941 instead of 1942, would have knocked the Soviets out. In the end he thinks the Soviets would have won anyway, but he is not a hundred percent sure.

Lex offers a romantic reading: Russians and Ukrainians do not roll over; they fight and die for the country, and Stalingrad is evidence. Mearsheimer says there is a great deal of truth in that, then unpacks it. Napoleon's 1812 invasion and the 1941–45 war fit the story. World War I does not. The Russian army disintegrated, and Brest-Litovsk surrendered huge amounts of territory after a humiliating defeat. The difference, he argues, was the adversary.

The Soviets in World War II were up against a genocidal enemy. Germans murdered 3.7 million Soviet POWs in all; by December 1941, six months after the invasion, they had already murdered two million — at that point more POWs than Jews. Mearsheimer is not minimizing the campaign against Jews. He is saying Soviet soldiers quickly understood that capture meant death, so they "fought like wild dogs." If Germany had won, the Hunger Plan and Generalplan Ost pointed toward murdering many tens of millions. On his ranking, Jews were first on the genocidal list, Roma second, Poles third, with Soviet POWs and civilians close behind. People figured that out, which gave them very powerful incentives to fight hard.

Why did Russia invade on February 24, 2022? The conventional wisdom, Mearsheimer says, is that Putin is an imperialist bent on a greater Russia, with Ukraine as the first stop and Eastern Europe next. He says there is "zero evidence" for that. There is no evidence Putin wanted to conquer all of Ukraine — or any of it — before the war, and "no way that an army that had 190,000 troops at the most could have conquered all of Ukraine." When Germany went into Poland in 1939, it aimed only at the western half, which is much smaller than Ukraine, and used 1.5 million troops. Conquering and occupying all of Ukraine would have taken at least two million, more likely three. The 190,000-man figure, he says, is not a serious argument.

He adds the diplomatic timeline. In March 2022, immediately after the war started, Putin was negotiating with Volodymyr Zelensky. There were serious talks in Istanbul with the Turks, and Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett was shuttling between both leaders. If the goal were to swallow Ukraine, why negotiate a week in? What they were negotiating, Mearsheimer says, was NATO expansion into Ukraine, which he calls the principal cause of the war. The West does not want to hear that, because it would make the West principally responsible for the bloodbath. So, in his telling, Washington invented a Hitler analogy out of whole cloth.

NATO was a mortal enemy of the Soviet Union; it is a military alliance with the United States at its heart. Americans, he notes, have the Monroe Doctrine and nearly went to war in 1962 over missiles in Cuba. What is good for the goose is good for the gander. After the Cold War, Moscow exacted a promise that NATO would not expand, then protested the 1999 and 2004 enlargements. In April 2008 at Bucharest, NATO said Ukraine and Georgia would become members. Russia drew a red line; that August came the Georgia war. George Kennan, Clinton defense secretary William Perry, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Paul Nitze had warned in the 1990s that expansion would produce disaster. Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy opposed the 2008 pledge; Merkel later said she understood Putin would read it as a declaration of war. The United States kept pushing, it blew up in 2014, the West doubled down instead of backing off, and 2022 followed.

The strategy was broader than NATO: EU expansion and a color revolution aimed at turning Ukraine into a pro-Western liberal democracy on Russia's border. Putin, Mearsheimer says, is not trying to recreate the Soviet Union — he has called that idea nuts — but he does not accept Ukraine in NATO. After more than two decades in power, Mearsheimer still sees him as a first-class strategist playing a weak hand, shaped by a 1990s "Decade of National Humiliation." The United States, the unipole from roughly 1991 to about 2017, never had to think that way. Former ambassador Michael McFaul told Putin not to worry because America is a benign hegemon. Putin did not believe it. What McFaul thinks does not matter, Mearsheimer says. What matters is what Putin thinks.

Asked how the war ends, Mearsheimer is grim. He sees no real prospect of a meaningful peace agreement. The best case is a ceasefire and a frozen conflict that will not be stable: Ukraine and the West will try to weaken Russia; Russia will try to wreck a "dysfunctional rump state" and sow dissension in the alliance, including across the Atlantic. Escalation risk remains. Lex asks whether Zelensky and Putin could sit down, man to man, and cut through it. Mearsheimer's answer is no — and "definitely no" if the United States is in the room. You have to get the Americans out, and even then there is only a sliver of a chance.

Right after the invasion, in March and early April 2022, the Istanbul track and Bennett's shuttle diplomacy were making "significant progress." Then, as Bennett has told it, the United States and Britain told Zelensky to walk. Had they encouraged a deal and worked with Bennett and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Mearsheimer thinks the war might have been shut down. A second chance came in September 2022, after Ukrainian tactical victories in Kherson and Kharkiv. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley said it was time to negotiate, the high-water mark. The White House shut him down. For a deal now, Mearsheimer says Ukraine would have to become truly neutral, sever security ties with the West, and accept Russian control of Crimea plus the four annexed oblasts — about 23 percent of the country. If the war goes on, he thinks Putin will try to take roughly 43 percent, including Kyiv and Odessa.

Lex still believes leaders can pick up the phone. Mearsheimer points to Minsk. Four players — Russia, Ukraine, Germany, France — designed those accords to shut down the Donbas civil war. He believes Putin took them seriously. Angela Merkel, François Hollande, and Petro Poroshenko have all said they were not seriously interested in an agreement; they were buying time to build Ukraine's military. Putin feels bamboozled; trust between Russia and the West is "virtually zero." A leader in an anarchic system, Mearsheimer says, cannot let personal trust go too far, because betrayal can be fatal. He hopes he is wrong. His prediction that the war goes on a long time and ends ugly is one he does not like at all.

Replacing Putin is not a peace strategy. Mearsheimer did not think the Prigozhin mutiny would topple him, and he would bet that a successor would be more hawkish. He even argues Putin was too trusting of the West before the war and has waged a limited war — slow to mobilize, not a punishment campaign against civilians. In a comparison that lands hard in a conversation recorded during the Gaza war, he notes that Israelis had killed more civilians in Gaza in one month than Russians had in Ukraine over eighteen months. If Lex ever sits down with Putin, Mearsheimer would ask why he trusted Merkel, Hollande, and Poroshenko; why he waited until late September 2022 to mobilize; and what his relations with China would look like had Washington not driven him into Beijing's arms.

Mearsheimer reminds Lex that in 1993 he argued in *Foreign Affairs* that Ukraine should keep the nuclear weapons it inherited from the Soviet Union. He was probably the only person in the West who made that case. If Russia ever thought about invading, a Ukrainian deterrent would help prevent war, because a weak state facing extinction is the one circumstance where nuclear use becomes thinkable. Bill Clinton, who forced Kyiv to give the weapons up, has since said publicly — "you can find it on YouTube" — that he made a mistake. In 2014 Mearsheimer also argued that pushing Ukraine into NATO would destroy the country. People did not listen then either.

Nuclear weapons make great-power aggression against another great power much less likely, but they do not take it off the table. In a world of mutual assured destruction, the actual use doctrine is not city-busting. It is what Thomas Schelling called manipulation of risk. Cold War NATO said that if the Warsaw Pact were overrunning West Germany, the alliance would fire a handful of weapons, perhaps in a remote area, to throw both sides onto a slippery slope and leave "the last clear chance to avoid Armageddon" with Moscow. If Russia were losing in Ukraine, Mearsheimer thinks it would do something similar: three or four warheads, or even one in a rural area, a mushroom cloud meant to spook everyone into stopping. Henry Kissinger and Robert McNamara later said they would not have initiated even limited use — better red than dead.

Ukraine has no nuclear weapons, so this would not be a MAD standoff. That makes Russian nuclear use more thinkable than an attack on NATO. Emmanuel Macron and, implicitly, Joe Biden have said the West would not reply with nuclear weapons if Russia used a handful in western Ukraine. David Petraeus has talked about hitting Russian naval assets in the Black Sea and Russian forces in Ukraine — which would mean a NATO–Russia great-power war on Russia's border, with both sides nuclear-armed. Escalation dynamics from there? "Who knows?" That, Mearsheimer says, should scare the living bejesus out of you. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy ordered that no aircraft penetrate Soviet airspace; days later a pilot who had not gotten the message flew deep into it. Bad things happen. We have no empirical basis for nuclear-crisis escalation, "and that of course is a wonderful thing."

Switching to Israel, Lex asks why Hamas attacked on October 7, 2023. Mearsheimer's main reason is "this suffocating occupation." As long as it persists, Palestinians will resist — as they did in the First and Second Intifadas. He doubts the popular theory that the attack was mainly about a looming Saudi Abraham Accord. The operation had been in planning for about two years; the Saudi track is relatively new. Hamas, he thinks, understood the likely Israeli reply. After Operation Cast Lead in 2008–2009, Israel periodically "mows the lawn" in Gaza. The metaphor disturbs Lex; Mearsheimer does not defend killing civilians for a second. The attack killed 1,400 Israelis and took more than 240 hostages. Israel's military response, as they spoke, had killed more than 10,000 people in Gaza, over 40 percent under 18, according to the Palestinian Authority health ministry.

The only path to peace he sees is two states, which American presidents since Jimmy Carter have understood. Israel's political center of gravity has moved steadily right; Benjamin Netanyahu's government wants a greater Israel. Hamas wants a one-state Palestinian outcome. Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas came around to two states; Hamas has not, though Jimmy Carter has suggested it could. After this many civilian deaths, Mearsheimer thinks Israeli animosity makes a deal nearly impossible for the foreseeable future, even before you get to Hamas. He rejects the cynic's line that leaders need the conflict to stay in power. Occupiers want submission, not intifadas. The pounding of Gaza, including what he says are clear violations of the laws of war, is meant to teach Palestinians they are not allowed to rise up.

A ground offensive to "finish off Hamas" will not, in his view, solve anything. The United States may not even allow it to run for the months Israel says it needs. Even if Hamas were destroyed, another group would rise and use terror. Ze'ev Jabotinsky's Iron Wall — beating Palestinians into submission — is "delusional." Palestinians want their own state. Democracy for all inside a greater Israel fails because there are now as many Palestinians as Israeli Jews, and the demographic trend runs against the Jews. Ethnic cleansing fails because Jordan and Egypt have said no, the United States has said no, and Palestinians "will die in place." That leaves two states or a greater Israel that is effectively an apartheid state — the word used in detailed reports by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Israeli group B'Tselem, and not unusual in the Israeli media itself.

Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt said as much when they wrote *The Israel Lobby*: Israel as occupier is not good for Israel. The current cabinet is ideologically committed to all the land between the Jordan and the sea as a Jewish state; Hamas wants the same land as a Palestinian state. Maximalist goals leave little room to compromise, and the hatred this war is fueling may have closed the social basis for a deal even if the politicians shifted. "On the two-state solution," he has taken to saying, "that boat has sailed." He hopes he is wrong. An Israeli think tank tracking protests found that in the six days after October 7, 69 percent of demonstrations worldwide were pro-Palestinian and 31 percent pro-Israel; after October 13 the split was 95 to 5. Launching a punishment bombing campaign, he argues, was strategically stupid as well as a moral stain. It will not produce submission, will not finish Hamas, and is turning the world away.

The Israel Lobby, written with Stephen Walt after a *London Review of Books* article, is the most controversial book Mearsheimer ever published. Their claim is that a loose coalition of individuals and organizations pushes American policy in a pro-Israel direction, producing the closest relationship between two countries in modern history. The American system is built to let interest groups wield influence — the National Rifle Association is the domestic comparison. The lobby, he says, is not illegal, illicit, or a cabal. "It's just a good old fashioned American interest group" that happens to be extremely powerful, operates in the open, and brags about its power. It is not a "Jewish lobby": Christian Zionists are a large part of it, and groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace are not in it. For most American Jews in the coalition, he thinks the driver is nationalism — a tribal sense of belonging to a Jewish nation — more than religion.

The critique is double. No two countries have identical interests all the time, so the United States should be able to put its own interest first when they conflict; the lobby conflates the two. And the lobby has not even been good for Israel. Every president since Carter has tried to push a two-state solution and run into huge resistance whenever Washington tried to coerce Israel. Without the lobby, he believes the United States could have gone a long way toward two states, which he still thinks was in Israel's interest. Instead occupation continued. When Netanyahu equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism, Mearsheimer says you can stretch the word until it is meaningless — in which case much of the American Jewish community, plus the anti-Zionist Jews of the 1930s through 1950s, become antisemites. The chapter on this tactic is called "The Great Silencer." Who wants that label after the Holocaust? It works.

Lex puts the other side: criticizing Israel and the lobby can be a dog whistle for "Jews run the world," and there is a real, sizeable antisemitic population with ready-made conspiracy templates, including the *Protocols of the Elders of Zion*. Mearsheimer says that concern is music to his and Walt's ears. They thought hard about it, went to lengths to say this is not a cabal, and do not believe they wrote "volume two of the protocol." If the arguments were so foul, they could have been beaten in the marketplace of ideas. Silencing critics instead, he thinks, is unhealthy and will in the end foster antisemitism. He also refuses Holocaust comparisons in both directions. Rwanda, the Armenian genocide, and the Holocaust count; Hamas's attack does not "even come close"; Gaza, given indiscriminate bombing and the death toll, he calls a massacre, not a genocide. An IDF spokesman, he notes, has said Israel is not pursuing precision bombing but maximizing destruction. That is the Iron Wall again, and he thinks it fails.

The American reaction to 9/11 and the Israeli reaction to October 7 look similar to him: rage, a rampage, a bad end. A realist prescription would have been a limited military reply plus a smart political strategy. The United States gave Israel a "bear hug and a green light." Netanyahu, hawkish in isolation, almost looks moderate next to his cabinet. Meanwhile the United States is "up to our eyeballs in alligators" in Ukraine and the Middle East, which Mearsheimer sees as a strategic error when the most important theater is East Asia and the most serious threat is China. On Ukraine, the West should never have pushed NATO membership and should have shut the war down in March; on Israel, Washington should be able to treat Israel like a normal country and pressure it when it does something unwise.

Will there be a war with China in the 21st century? Mearsheimer does not know. There is already a serious security competition and a real possibility of war, but the Cold War ran from about 1947 to 1989 without a U.S.–Soviet shooting war, coming closest in 1962. He thinks China will not move on Taiwan militarily in the near future because of geography. "There's this body of water, called the Taiwan Strait," and getting across it is very difficult "unless you can walk on water." Tanks can roll across land; they cannot roll across a strait covered by submarines, aircraft, and land-based missiles. Normandy's Omaha Beach is his reminder of how hard amphibious assault is. Lex notes the growing military asymmetry. Mearsheimer grants it. The water is still there.

Elon Musk has told Lex that the One China policy is a top Chinese priority and unification looks inevitable. Mearsheimer agrees it is a top priority and that Beijing means it. It is also a top American priority not to let China take Taiwan — not mainly because Taiwan is a democracy. First, abandoning Taiwan would wreck the credibility of alliances with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia, which the United States needs to contain a powerful China. Second, Taiwan is the lock on the first island chain: without it, the Chinese navy and air force get into the Philippine Sea and the Western Pacific. The job, he and Lex agree, is to deter an invasion, not to fight one. Build forces, contain China, and avoid provocation. The last thing anyone should want is a Taiwanese declaration of independence, which Beijing has said would mean war.

Deterrence does not require the United States to be able to win. Over time he doubts Washington can beat China in a Taiwan or South China Sea war; he is not sure it can now. Ranked from best to worst: America wins; stalemate, nobody wins; China wins a pyrrhic victory at a godawful price; China wins quickly and decisively, in which case deterrence has basically failed. The workable goal is to make Beijing see a lose-lose bet. If China already dominated Asia and America the Western hemisphere, the security competition would still be intense, mostly through proxies. Mearsheimer first names the Persian Gulf and oil. Lex asks about an Orwellian lineup of Iran, Russia, and China against the United States, Europe, and Israel. Mearsheimer pauses: possible, and he had not thought of it that way before.

He does not sort the world into good guys and bad guys. States are black boxes. As an American he wants the United States to remain regional hegemon in the Western hemisphere and to keep China from becoming the same in Asia. Chinese leaders, he says, are realists to the core — "I'm basically a rock and roll star in China." American leaders have a powerful liberal bent, especially in the unipolar years, and did not respect realist warnings; that is why NATO expansion into Ukraine went forward. The danger now is not only containment but rollback. During the Cold War the public doctrine was containment; the record shows Washington also tried to wreck the Soviet Union. He would not be surprised to see a serious rollback policy toward China, and that is how you precipitate a war. Empathy — putting yourself in the other side's shoes — has to sit next to the competition for power. A little nuclear saber-rattling over Taiwan, reminding Beijing that a desperate war at sea could escalate, is part of deterrence too. Thankfully, he says, Joe Biden does not want a thermonuclear war.

Lex asks what makes empires collapse, treating the United States as one. Mearsheimer does not. An empire, in his usage, folds distant regions into a sphere of influence without absorbing them as the core state — the British pattern in India, Kenya, Singapore, Australia. After the Spanish–American War the United States took a stab at the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, then never got serious. America builds bases and stations troops everywhere, and may wield more influence than Britain did, but it is not running an empire of that kind. Look at a world map in 1922, he says, and the British coloring is astonishing. Then it disappeared, along with the French, Belgian, and Dutch empires.

Two forces finished them. The first is nationalism, rising in the late eighteenth century and exploding in the nineteenth and twentieth: Kenyans, Indians, Pakistanis, Singaporeans, and Americans in 1776 all wanted their own nation-state. "This is my point about the Palestinians. This is Palestinian nationalism. What is Zionism? Zionism is Jewish nationalism." Theodor Herzl's book is titled *The Jewish State*. Both peoples are running the same logic; neither is uniquely noble or uniquely wicked for wanting a state. The second force is cost-benefit after the Industrial Revolution. Empire became "an albatross around your neck." The three truly powerful states of the twentieth century were the United States, Germany, and the Soviet Union. None had an empire. In an industrial world you need a manufacturing base, not colonies. Before industry, conquest paid; after it, governing and repressing cost more than the land returned.

Asked what role America plays in a bookstore history of civilization five hundred years on, Mearsheimer shrinks the horizon to a hundred years and still finds it hard — except for one bet. Power's building blocks are people and wealth, and almost every major country is depopulating. Russia will be much smaller; China will be much smaller. American women are not having lots of babies either, "but we have immigration. We're an immigrant culture." When he hears Donald Trump and others call immigration a terrible thing, he says it is ridiculous. Immigration is what made the country great; his own relatives came from Germany and Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century. Lex's line, which Mearsheimer accepts, is that America has a machine for turning outsiders into Americans.

Samuel Huntington's *Who Are We?* argued that Hispanics concentrated in the Southwest would fail to assimilate and might even seek separation. Mearsheimer says Huntington was warned about that flaw and did not fix it, and that he was wrong: Hispanics are integrating faster and more effectively than the European waves that began around 1835. Germans and Irish dominated until about 1885; then Poles, Jews, and Italians arrived, which is why Ellis Island opened around 1893 after Castle Garden in New York could not handle the flow. The gates shut in a serious way only in 1924, reopened in 1965, and the post-1965 arrivals — mainly Hispanics and Asians — are assimilating faster than the nineteenth-century Europeans, who were treated horribly. There is a famous book titled *When the Irish Became White*. Chinese Americans got the worst of it. The country has gotten better. Generation Z, he notes, is the last majority-white generation. Anyone bothered by that had better get used to it, because Americans are not making enough babies.

The real key going forward is intermarriage — "you wanna eliminate difference." He has two grandsons "who Adolf Hitler would've thrown into a gas chamber," one of them named John Mearsheimer. Stephen Walt's wife and children would have been in the same category. His son-in-law, nieces, nephews, and brothers-in-law are Jewish; people who call him an antisemite, he says, have not met his family. Secular Jewish intermarriage used to run around 62 percent. "They've lost." Lex adds that love is the fastest path to integration. Advice to the young comes in two pieces. His mother said do what "floats your boat," something that puts a bounce in your step when you get out of bed — if your parents want a lawyer and you want to be a policeman, be a policeman. With MIT's Steve Van Evera he invented a Hubris-Humility Index: enough hubris to think you can change the world and sometimes know better than others, enough humility to know your limits and listen.

Is he afraid of death? He is not sure. He does not want to die, because he enjoys life so much. "Given how horrible the world is today, I hate to say that I'm having too much fun," but he loves the work, the curiosity, the conversation. He tells people thank goodness he is only 28, and tries to act it, but at 75 going on 76 he knows, as his mother said, that nothing is forever. He feels he has won the lottery and wants it to last. Lex's last observation is that a man with such bold views, attacked for years, has not gone cynical. Mearsheimer thanks him. Lex closes the episode with Plato: "Only the dead have seen the end of war."