What the Sachs–Mearsheimer Debate Misses

The World Is a Sphere, But It Needs Zones of Peace

As members of a global intellectual public, concerned not merely with knowledge but with humanity’s survival, we hunger for debates that are as rigorous as transformative, i.e. debates capable of imagining a fundamentally different world order. The latest exchange between two most distinguished US professors, Jeffrey Sachs and John Mearsheimer, has proven highly attractive and necessary. Yet, in my opinion, it does not transcend existing paradigms (despite the introduction of the concept of “spheres of security”) and offers no solutions for the structural and deep-rooted problems. As promised, albeit with some delay, here I am, stepping into the arena of intellectual giants in international relations and political economy. My intention is not to challenge their brilliance or integrity but to advocate for a pluralization of voices and perspectives. The small states and postcolonial peripheries continue to bear the costs of “great power politics”; perhaps, then, thinkers from the margins also have the right—and indeed the duty—to think aloud, to disrupt, and to contribute their insights to this debate.

We urgently need to insert the small-state perspective into this grand theoretical conversation. The binary framework of “spheres of influence or security” effectively erases the agency of small states, reducing them to passive safety buffers rather than moral and political actors in their own right. Moreover, the debate remains conspicuously silent on the question of morality, while leftist perspectives and critical theory are too often excluded from mainstream IR discourse.

Let us recall Robert Cox’s enduring dictum: “Theory is always for someone and for some purpose.” No theory, however benevolent its intent, is ever truly neutral. Each is born of a particular historical context and serves certain interests—explicitly or implicitly.

With that in mind, I offer the following critical reflections and remarks:

First, for all its analytical rigor, the debate remains trapped within the grammar of state-centric realism. Both thinkers, despite their differences, accept the hierarchy of states as fixed and inevitable. The unequal distribution of power—hard and soft—is treated as a given. In other words, power (military, economic, or cultural) is treated as an exogenous fact, not a social construction. The principle of sovereign equality, enshrined in the UN Charter, is quietly sidelined in favor of a hierarchy of “legitimate” powers’ security concerns and interests. The systemic inequality between “those who decide” and “those who must adapt” remains intact. Thus, the debate reproduces the same geopolitical determinism it seeks to explain. Any critique that does not elevate to the deepest layer — the systemic base - is hollow. Hence the real debate should not be “influence vs. security” but “power vs. justice,” or in Galtung’s terms, “negative vs. positive peace.”

Second, their state-centric lens also overlooks the true roots and engines of global power. The realist orthodoxy blinds us to the true centers of power in the 21st century. States are no longer autonomous actors; they operate within what can be termed the Military-Industrial-Media-Academia Complex (MIMAC), a vast machinery that fuses inequality, coercion, ideology, production, and spectacle. MIMAC not only manufactures consent and controls narratives but also predetermines the boundaries of political imagination and action. It shapes public opinion, militarizes knowledge, and commodifies both war and peace. Even if great powers adopted ostensibly “benign” spheres of security, MIMAC ensures that exploitation, regime change, and the commodification of human suffering remain the system’s lifeblood. The political economy of the Gaza genocide stands as a self-evident indictment of this order. Today’s world can no longer be understood merely as an interaction among sovereign states. It must be conceived as a totality of intertwined capitalist structures and a privatized state apparatus that perpetuates inequality, dependency, and systemic violence under ever-changing ideological banners. What Johan Galtung once called structural violence is not only alive; it has been refined, globalized, and aestheticized through the mechanisms of modern power.

Third, the very idea of drawing spheres is conceptually obsolete and morally dangerous. It presupposes that the globe can be partitioned according to power, as if people, cultures, and ecosystems were negotiable assets. How, for instance, would “spheres of security” accommodate the relations between Russia and China, or India and its neighbors? What about rogue states like Israel, or stateless peoples like Palestinians? In all cases, the “legitimate interests” of the strong are prioritized over the existential rights of the weak. Multipolarity, framed in this way, risks becoming a modernized version of the old “West and the Rest” paradigm, only now replaced by “Great Powers and the Rest.” Hierarchies remain; the names change.

Fourth, from a leftist perspective, the real issue is not about which powers dominate the world but why domination persists at all. The fundamental choice before humanity is the one Rosa Luxemburg identified more than a century ago: socialism or barbarism. Either we democratize global power and reorganize production, global governance, and knowledge production around justice and equality or we descend further into the barbarism of endless war, ecological collapse, and dehumanized society. What Sachs and Mearsheimer treat as a “strategic dilemma” is, in truth, a civilizational one. Johan Galtung’s concept of positive peace, emphasizing equality, social justice, and the absence of structural violence, offers a framework for moving beyond the deterministic logic of great-power realism or liberalism. Galtung’s vision does not seek to refresh past balances of power, but to create new, forward-looking forms of cooperation that empower societies rather than subjugate them. To move beyond this impasse, we must reclaim and expand the tradition of creative peace thinking. Another important thing is that positive peace has both internal and international dimensions; more importantly, it offers a foundation for an emancipatory politics and international order. Such peace requires dismantling the machinery of militarized turbo capitalism and replacing it with cooperative systems rooted in social solidarity, environmental stewardship, and participatory local and global governance. It is not about “balancing” powers, but about transforming the very logic of power itself.

Fifth, there are precedents for this vision. The ASEAN model, with all its imperfections, demonstrates that consensus and dialogue can ensure stability without coercion. Nuclear-weapon-free zones and regional disarmament frameworks reveal that states can voluntarily limit their own capacity for destruction in the name of collective safety. Even small and vulnerable nations have innovated with ideas of neutrality and regional cooperation that defy the dictates of great powers. These examples illuminate a path forward: peace and security as shared human projects, not strategic bargains or demarcations. The intellectual giants probably cannot see well from the heights of empire that for small and vulnerable societies, both “spheres of influence” and “spheres of security” look the same: external domination justified by new vocabulary. In my part of the world, we speak from the epistemology of the margins. And that is a legitimate position in today’s world, even maybe a dominant one if we take into account the Global South’s concerns. We need to deconstruct Western epistemic privilege and reassert moral universality.

The far-left critique also exposes the moral bankruptcy of contemporary geopolitical discourse. The suffering of millions—under occupation, sanctions, or ecological devastation—remains invisible, yet the grand debate framework remains fixated on safeguarding the “legitimate” interests of powerful states. The global South, the dispossessed, the precarious—these are not footnotes to history; they are its conscience. A truly transformative multipolar debate must center on human security, dismantle the privatization of power and challenge structural inequalities.

Sixth, to achieve this, we need a radical re-foundation of global governance. Strengthening the UN must mean not only procedural reform, but moral and structural renewal—restoring its role as a guardian of collective peace rather than a tool of the powerful. Neutrality and non-alignment must once again become expressions of democratic agency, not imposed dependencies. Emerging powers must not reproduce Western imperial patterns but forge a post-imperial multipolarity—one grounded in justice, not in domination.

In conclusion, the Sachs–Mearsheimer debate reminds us not of how much we know, but of how little we dare to imagine. The realism may explain the world, but it can hardly transform it. As the socialist tradition insists, explanation without transformation is complicity with the hyper-imperialism decadence. The decisive question is not how to manage spheres of influence/interest/security, but how to build zones of genuine peace and cooperation.

We indeed live on a shared sphere. The challenge is not to draw lines upon it, but to ensure it remains habitable, just, and free. To reach that harmonious shared sphere of living, we need debates about the future—not nostalgic returns to models that predate the United Nations. My friend Jan Øberg is absolutely right when he insists that we need dialogues about possible futures (in plural) as the only path to jointly create a better one. Geopolitical debates, in contrast, are deeply deficient: they focus on the current events (and status quo), they offer no vision for a different future, no pathways toward structural solutions. They are confined to negotiating minimal compromises to avoid nuclear catastrophe, even if that means accepting a world that is utterly alienated, impoverished, and soulless.