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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

How Positions Are Taken and Defended in Modern Wars

With John Mearsheimer as Case Study

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

In an age of live-streamed wars, social media outrage, and instant moral judgment, positions on armed conflict crystallize faster than ever. Yet beneath the noise, recurring patterns appear. Whether the war is in Ukraine or Gaza, whether one's sympathies lie with the West or against it, certain intellectual postures keep reappearing—and they tell us as much about the observers as about the wars themselves.

This essay proposes a simple fourfold typology to understand how such positions are taken and defended: Pro-West, Anti-West, Pro-Victim, and Pro-Power. These are not rigid ideological boxes but rhetorical attractors, ways of organizing the flood of information into coherent stories. As a running example, I will use political scientist John Mearsheimer, whose contrasting analyses of the Ukraine and Gaza wars show how even a self-declared realist can move, consciously or not, between these poles.

1. The Four Archetypal Positions

1. Pro-West

This frame views conflicts primarily through the lens of Western values and alliances. It stresses international law, democracy, and deterrence—the “rules-based order.” The West's interventions, though sometimes flawed, are seen as upholding global stability. NATO, the EU, and the U.S. are treated as guarantors of a liberal world system threatened by autocratic powers.

2. Anti-West

Here the script is reversed: Western hegemony, not its rivals, is the root problem. NATO expansion, colonial legacies, and double standards explain most crises. This stance often attracts left-wing anti-imperialists and right-wing isolationists alike. It offers an explanatory power realism often lacks—but at the cost of overlooking non-Western agency and internal dynamics.

3. Pro-Victim

This is the moral voice of outrage. It centers human suffering, regardless of political alignment, and invokes the language of human rights, international law, and sometimes “genocide.” The lens is humanitarian rather than geopolitical. Yet it can also be weaponized, as competing sides rush to claim victimhood status to win the world's sympathy.

4. Pro-Power

Finally, the realist posture: the world is governed by interests, not ideals. Power and security, not morality, drive history. States seek survival and influence; ethics are secondary or instrumental. This view can be chillingly lucid—or cynically amoral. It underlies much of classical geopolitics, from Thucydides to Kissinger and Mearsheimer.

2. How Positions Are Defended

Each position comes with its own toolkit of defense:

Framing: deciding which facts count. The Pro-West analyst starts the story in 2022 (the invasion); the Anti-West critic starts in 1991 (NATO's march east).

Evidence selection: satellite images versus historical treaties; body counts versus buffer zones.

Moral language: invoking “genocide,” “terrorism,” or “self-defense” locks in emotional allegiance.

Audience targeting: academic, activist, and governmental audiences reward different framings.

Cognitive shortcuts: confirmation bias and identity politics help anchor positions in familiar moral universes.

The crucial insight is that positions are performed. They are stabilized not only by argument but by repetition, signaling, and audience feedback.

3. The Paradox of Mixed Positions

Few commentators stay consistent across conflicts. Someone can be a Pro-Power realist in one war and a Pro-Victim moralist in another. Why?

Different questions invite different frameworks. Asking why a war started calls for structural analysis; asking how it is fought invites moral evaluation.

Asymmetry of actors. A state-to-state war (Ukraine) suits realism; an occupation or blockade (Gaza) triggers humanitarian empathy.

Audience shifts. Scholars addressing policymakers sound different from those addressing activists.

Moral thresholds. Even realists can reach a point where suffering overwhelms theoretical detachment.

4. Mearsheimer's Double Register

John Mearsheimer embodies this split vividly.

Ukraine: The Realist's Realism

In his 2014 Foreign Affairs article “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West's Fault,” Mearsheimer argued that NATO and EU expansion provoked Russia's invasion. He described the war as a predictable reaction to Western hubris. His register was entirely structural: great-power logic, security dilemmas, spheres of influence. The moral language was minimal; the explanatory power lay in cold geometry.

This put him squarely in the Anti-West / Pro-Power quadrant. To many, it sounded like moral equivalence, even victim-blaming. But to Mearsheimer it was sober realism: understanding causation is not excusing aggression.

Gaza: The Realist Turns Moral

Fast forward to 2023-2024. On Gaza, Mearsheimer has used starkly different terms: “collective punishment,” “mass killing,” even “genocide.” The focus is no longer on strategic causes but on human catastrophe and Western complicity. Here the realist dons the mantle of moral witness.

What changed? The structure of the conflict. Gaza is not a balance-of-power contest between states but a long-term occupation and blockade, in which the civilian suffering is impossible to narrate in purely strategic terms. The realist vocabulary simply cannot absorb that scale of moral visibility.

Thus, Mearsheimer appears Pro-Victim and implicitly Anti-West (for U.S. support of Israel). Critics call this inconsistency; others see it as intellectual honesty—adapting one's frame to the nature of the case.

5. Beyond Mearsheimer: The Grammar of Partisanship

The point is not to psychoanalyze Mearsheimer but to show a wider truth: every observer of war operates within a moral grammar shaped by proximity, identity, and narrative tradition. Western publics instinctively universalize their own moral codes; non-Western publics see double standards. Humanitarian discourse seeks universality but is often pulled into geopolitics.

Social media amplifies this: each tragedy becomes a moral referendum. “Where do you stand?” replaces “How did this happen?” The demand for moral clarity overwhelms the need for causal explanation. Realists and idealists thus end up speaking past each other—one describing forces, the other crimes.

6. Toward a More Integral Perspective

An integral approach to war analysis would try to hold these lenses together without collapsing them. It would:

• Recognize the structural causality of power politics (Pro-Power insight).
• Confront the moral reality of suffering (Pro-Victim insight).
• Examine how Western and non-Western narratives mutually reinforce each other (Pro-/Anti-West dialectic).
• And, above all, avoid absolutizing any single register into ideology.

Such an approach would admit that realism without empathy is brutal, and empathy without realism is naïve. Both must be held in creative tension—something few public intellectuals manage.

7. Conclusion

When John Mearsheimer speaks as a realist about Ukraine and as a moralist about Gaza, he mirrors our collective confusion. We oscillate between the cold clarity of strategy and the burning clarity of conscience. Wars force us to choose, but reality refuses such simplicity.

Understanding how positions are taken and defended—how moral language, structural analysis, and political identity interact—is the first step toward transcending them. Only then can we discuss wars not merely as spectacles of outrage or chessboards of power, but as tragic intersections of both.