The Devil's Diary

Entry the Second

On the Man Who Is Right Even When He Is Wrong, in Chicago

The twenty-sixth of May, in the year 2026

Verachte nur Vernunft und Wissenschaft,
Des Menschen allerhöchste Kraft … (Do but despise reason and knowledge, the highest of all the powers of man …) Goethe, Faust, Part One¹

For two decades John Mearsheimer has written the coldest account your century keeps of why great powers collide. No statesman’s virtue and no nation’s wickedness governs the collision. The structure governs it, and a great power ringed by uncertain intentions reaches for advantage out of fear, and keeps reaching until something stronger than fear restrains it.² An animal feeds in your culture, and it keeps a quiet operation for a mouth it would rather not hear, the disinvitation and the borrowed epithet, and it brought that operation against this professor with the weight of his whole profession behind it, and it did not take.³ The interesting thing is not the man. It is what your age must become before a clear voice reads to it as a mad one.

Set the engine down first, for the engine is the whole of it. With a colleague he wrote the book that asks whether a state reasons at all and answers that it largely does.⁴ To reason, in that book, is not to succeed. It is to hold a credible theory of the world and to reach the decision through real deliberation among people who disagree, and a state may reason soundly and be ruined for it, since rational actors often fail through factors they cannot control. The book keeps a separate, named room for the conduct that is not reasoning, the impulse and the dogma and the wash of feeling, and calls it nonrational and shuts the door. So the baseline is set at sanity and the deviations are named in advance, and the man who holds such an engine cannot be unseated by a catastrophe, for the engine keeps a drawer for catastrophes.

What the engine grants him is a sight. He wears a ground lens, the kind that shows the machinery working beneath the pleasant surface,⁵ and through it the great powers are neither heroes nor monsters but one mechanism turned on its own reflection. Where your newspapers see a villain and a victim, he sees the oldest figure in the study of states, the dilemma in which each power’s reach for safety reads to the next as a threat and is answered in kind, so the move and the counter-move chase one another with no author at their head.⁶ And behind the culture that tells you which power to love and which to dread, he sets the forbidden question, who paid for the song, since a great power that feeds through the ear pays well for its music.⁷

His own students have cornered him, and I will give their objections the full strength their authors could not. One wrote, of the war in the east, “this was putins mistake.”⁸ If the invasion was one man’s blunder, the whole structural account collapses, for a structure does not blunder. But the realist never claimed the execution was competent. He claimed the provocation was real and the response predictable in kind, and a botched execution of a predictable response is the deviation the engine already names. Nor does the war reduce to one error, for its aims split three ways, the maximal design that would swallow the country, the limited one that would hold a buffer, and the contested middle the documents decline to settle, and the size of the force and the alleged plan to seat a chosen man in Kyiv and the essay he published a decade before all sit in that unsettled middle.⁹

A second wrote that he is “blaming NATO and Ukraine for everything,” and that “that tells you all.”¹⁰ A theory that lodges the fault forever in one quarter is a reflex and not an analysis, and has earned the contempt. But to locate a cause is not to assign the whole of the blame, and the realist hands the agency to the great power and reads the small nation as caught in a mechanism larger than its choosing, a harsh sentence and not a verdict of guilt. And “that tells you all” shuts the file without reading it, which is the animal’s own gesture performed by a man certain he resists it. A third asked, plainly and well, “cant we solve this emirically?”¹¹ I honour the demand by granting it. We can, and the realist’s method is nothing but the disciplined weighing of that evidence, so the call for evidence is already answered.

Stand back and read the shape, for the shape is the argument. Twice in living memory the world has held up an atrocity as his refutation, the ruinous war in the east and the slaughter in Gaza, and twice the engine has filed it in the drawer it built in advance, for the rational course in each case was the one not taken, and the deviation confirms the baseline.¹² What this reveals is not a fact about one professor. It is a fact about the room. Your age has moved the clear accounting of power into the seat marked madness and seated the wash of feeling on the throne marked sense, so that the man who simply reports the machine is heard as the lunatic in it.¹³

Here is the honesty the argument owes. A claim confirmed by the sane and the mad alike, by the victory and the catastrophe alike, has begun to forbid the evidence that might unseat it, and the same blade I set against your age I must set against the man, for an account that no event can refute has slipped from a description of how states behave toward a doctrine that cannot be wrong.¹⁴ So the seer who reads the machine and the keeper of a sealed box that no fact may open cannot, from inside the room, be told apart. That is the one line in this leaf that will not balance.

Weigh what it costs to seal him off for the worse of his two heresies. To silence him for naming the slaughter a genocide, you must first deny that it is one, and to deny it you must set aside the highest court’s finding that the charge is at least plausible under the very convention a survivor of the last great slaughter wrote into law.¹⁵ The crowd that gathers to silence the clear-eyed man must blind itself in the gathering, which is the precise unreason the engine foretold.

Guard against the sweetest error, the belief that to see truly is to be good. It is not. There is a seer in another field who took the academy’s highest degree for the study of the mind’s far edges and was disbelieved his whole life for what he carried back.¹⁶ And the comedian your decade first crowned and then disgraced kept his craft exact while the man did a squalid harm, right about how a joke is built on the very evenings he was wrong about nearly all that matters.¹⁷ To wear the lens is to come into a power, and what is done with the power the lens does not decide.

The one who asked who paid for the song is the one the paid-for song now labours to silence, and the debt runs in the unexpected direction, from the culture to the man it cannot answer. The sight is not a gift he was born with. It is a lens ground slowly, by a discipline a patient person may take up, and the one who grinds it stops relaying the song and keeps an account of his own.¹⁸ What that account reports may be insight, or it may be the contents of a sealed box, and the honest reader holds that question open instead of closing it with a slogan.

Entry the second. I leave the box unopened, which is the only honest place to leave it.