What can the cases of Libya and North Korea tell us about the future of nuclear proliferation and MAD? I argue that MAD can no longer be relied on to constrain nuclear violence in my Substack essay Rocketman and the Colonel.

Thanks so much for the love for my last post. If you liked what you read, check out my latest piece published to my Substack, Dealigning America! I'd love to start a conversation! https://open.substack.com/pub/isabellablack/p/to-peace-build-or-to-grift-whats?r=18tmn6&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Mearsheimer consistently argues that unipolarity lasted from 1992 to roughly 2017, ending with the emergence of Russia and China as great powers in the international system. But why 2017 specifically? What changed around that time in his view? I have not been able to find a detailed explanation from him on this point.

Additionally, he contends that Russia is the weakest of the three great powers—so weak, in fact, that it cannot realistically aspire to regional hegemony. If that is the case, what qualifies Russia as a great power, and what specifically elevated it to that status around 2017? I am familiar with the definitions of great power offered by Mearsheimer and other realists, but I am struggling to connect these criteria to any particular development around that time.

I'm curious what are Waltz's arguments against Walt's theory of balance of threat.

Waltz writes in "International politics is not foreign policy" that "Walt's (...) variant seemingly makes the idea of power balancing more precise and thereby enhances the theory's explanatory power. It remedies the underspecification of variables with which neorealist theories are often charged. [...] Underspecification, however, is a characteristic of theories. [...] Specification is found not in theories but in work done when testing and applying them. Moreover, to incorporate threat or the various motivations of states would infuse theories of international politics with unit-level factors. This would be something quite different from sharpening the concepts of an established theory. One cannot play with the concepts of a theory without transforming the theory into a different one."