Your reply here mostly describes my thoughts on the Sachs/Mearscheimer debate vis a vis "spheres of security". Neither party seemed to me to be engaged in systemic analysis. Sachs' thesis is normative and idealist and fails to take into account why the u.s.' belligerence is increasingly unrestrained (decohering economic base). Mearscheimer kind of trots out his standard realist analysis which imo is mechanistic and can't accommodate factors which don't fit into the behavior of imperialist powers, i.e. also idealist.

That whole thing was kind of hard to listen to for me. Both of those two are useful in different ways but I thought that discussion simultaneously highlighted their limitations.

For ref https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9465503?scrollToComments=true