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Offensive Realism And Central & Eastern Europe After The Cold War, Dylan Kissane

Dylan Kissane

At the end of the Cold War, John Mearsheimer published the article, “Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War”. The widely-cited piece included four predictions for the post-Cold War European geopolitical landscape founded on the theory of offensive realism, the realpolitik approach that Mearsheimer had established and developed over more than a decade of scholarship. However, the emergence of a post-Cold War and pan-continental peace suggests that something was wrong with Mearsheimer’s predictions and, by implication, the theory that informed them. This article argues that Mearsheimer’s mistake was to rely on a theory that assumed the …