‘Waltz, Mearsheimer and the post-Cold War world: The rise of America and the fall of structural realism’

Abstract

The explanatory power of structural realism in the post-Cold War world has been hotly debated in the international relations literature. Critics pronounce the death of structural realism in this new world order, whereas proponents maintain that this approach still manages to shed a great deal of light on international affairs, even after the end of the Cold War. In this article, the two main branches of structural realism, Kenneth Waltz’s defensive realism and John Mearsheimer’s offensive realism, are challenged on their own terms to assess whether they are still useful in explaining world politics in the post-Cold War era. The results indicate that neither Waltz’s defensive realism nor Mearsheimer’s offensive realism can account for international politics under hegemony or unipolarity, and that their theories have consequently had no explanatory power since the end of the Cold War.