80 Facts About John Mearsheimer

John Joseph Mearsheimer is an American political scientist and international relations scholar.

John Mearsheimer is the R Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.

John Mearsheimer was born in December 1947 in Brooklyn, New York City to a family of German and Irish descent.

When he was 17, John Mearsheimer enlisted in the US Army.

In 1974, while in the Air Force, John Mearsheimer earned a master's degree in international relations from the University of Southern California.

John Mearsheimer entered Cornell University and in 1980 earned a doctorate in government, concentrating his studies in international relations.

From 1980 to 1982, John Mearsheimer was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs.

Since 1982, John Mearsheimer has been a member of the faculty of the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago.

John Mearsheimer became an associate professor in 1984 and a full professor in 1987 and was appointed the R Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor in 1996.

John Mearsheimer holds a position as a faculty member in the Committee on International Relations graduate program, and he is a co-director of the Program on International Security Policy.

John Mearsheimer's articles have appeared in academic journals like International Security and popular magazines like the London Review of Books.

John Mearsheimer has written op-ed pieces for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune.

John Mearsheimer received the Clark Award for Distinguished Teaching when he was a graduate student at Cornell in 1977, and he won the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at the University of Chicago in 1985.

John Mearsheimer is the recipient of the American Political Science Association's 2020 James Madison Award, which is presented every three years to an American political scientist who has made distinguished scholarly contributions.

John Mearsheimer popularized the term rollback to describe the geopolitical strategy of inciting unrest in a rival country while supporting government change covertly or overtly.

Specifically, John Mearsheimer argues that the success of deterrence is determined by the strategy available to the potential attacker.

John Mearsheimer concludes by emphasizing the importance of a robust intellectual community that can hold "defense intellectuals" accountable:.

In 1990, John Mearsheimer published an essay in which he predicted that Europe would revert to a multipolar environment, similar to that of the first half of the 20th century, if American and Soviet forces left after the end of the Cold War.

John Mearsheimer argues it to be strategically unwise for Ukraine to surrender its nuclear arsenal.

In op-ed pieces written in 1998 and 2000 for The New York Times, John Mearsheimer explains why it makes sense for India to pursue nuclear weapons.

John Mearsheimer argues that India has good strategic reasons to want a nuclear deterrent, especially to balance against China and Pakistan and to guarantee regional stability.

John Mearsheimer criticized the American counterproliferation policy towards India, which he considers to be unrealistic and harmful to American interests in the region.

At the Korea Global Forum 2023 organized by South Korea's Ministry of Unification in Seoul, John Mearsheimer stated at keynote speech that North Korea possessing nuclear weapons is not an ideal situation, but can be seen as "force of stability".

John Mearsheimer stated that possession of nuclear weapons by the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War played a big role in both sides not attacking each other.

John Mearsheimer recognizes that states often find institutions to be useful, but the imperative of relentless security competition under anarchy means that state behavior is primarily a function of the distribution of power in the international system.

John Mearsheimer summarized that view in his 2001 book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics:.

John Mearsheimer dismisses democratic peace theory, which claims that democracies never or rarely go to war with each other.

Nevertheless, John Mearsheimer mentioned in 1990 the existence of a "watchman".

In January and early February 1991, John Mearsheimer published two op-eds in the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times and argued that the war to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi forces would be quick and lead to a decisive US victory, with less than 1,000 American casualties.

John Mearsheimer argued that Israel's strategy was "doomed to fail" because it was based on the "faulty assumption" that Israeli air power could defeat Hezbollah, which was essentially a guerrilla force.

John Mearsheimer said that the Israel lobby played a key role in enabling Israel's counterproductive response by preventing the US from exercising independent influence.

John Mearsheimer was critical of Israel's offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip that began in December 2008.

John Mearsheimer argued that it would not eliminate Hamas's capability to fire missiles and rockets at Israel and that it would not cause Hamas to end its fight with Israel.

John Mearsheimer emphasizes that the only hope for Israel to end its conflict with the Palestinians is to end the occupation and to allow the Palestinians to have their own state in Gaza and the West Bank; otherwise, Israel will turn itself into an "apartheid state", which would be a disastrous outcome for Israel, the United States, and especially for the Palestinians.

In remarks made at the International Spy Museum in 2010, John Mearsheimer asserted that a nuclear Israel was contrary to US interests and questioned Israel's accountability in the matter.

John Mearsheimer asserts that China's rise will not be peaceful, and that the US will seek to contain China and to prevent it from achieving regional hegemony.

John Mearsheimer argues that although containing China militarily is possible, economic containment of China is not.

John Mearsheimer believes that China will attempt to dominate the Indo-Pacific region just as the US set out to dominate the Western Hemisphere.

John Mearsheimer stressed that China was simply following America's example in that regard:.

John Mearsheimer wrote a book, Why Leaders Lie, which analyzes lying in international politics.

John Mearsheimer argues that leaders lie to foreign audiences because they think that it is good for their country.

John Mearsheimer argues that leaders are most likely to lie to their own people in democracies that fight wars of choice in distant places.

John Mearsheimer says that it is difficult for leaders to lie to other countries because there is not much trust among them, especially when security issues are at stake, and trust is needed for lying to be effective.

John Mearsheimer argues that there are five types of international lies.

John Mearsheimer explains the reasons for leaders pursuing each of the different kinds of lies.

John Mearsheimer emphasizes that there are two other kinds of deception besides lying: "concealment", a leader remaining silent about an important matter, and "spinning", a leader telling a story that emphasizes the positive and downplays or ignores the negative.

John Mearsheimer proposed that the United States change its policy and enable Ukraine to become an independent nuclear power, saying "Ukrainian nuclear weapons are the only reliable deterrent to Russian aggression".

John Mearsheimer wrote that "Russia has dominated an unwilling and angry Ukraine for more than two centuries, and has attempted to crush Ukraine's sense of self-identity", and that some Russian officials "reject the idea of an independent Ukraine".

John Mearsheimer said that a Russian war against Ukraine might lead Russia to "reconquer other parts of the former Soviet Union".

John Mearsheimer opined that, if Russia attacked Ukraine, "great powers would move quickly and sharply to contain further Russian expansion".

John Mearsheimer responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West.

John Mearsheimer called Putin "a first-class strategist who should be feared and respected" on foreign policy.

John Mearsheimer argued that Putin is driven by "legitimate security concerns" and does not want to occupy Ukraine.

John Mearsheimer argued that Russia's annexation of Crimea was driven by fears of losing its Sevastopol Naval Base.

John Mearsheimer highlighted Russian opposition to Ukrainian NATO membership over the years, and the Western analysts who warned against it.

John Mearsheimer argued that the United States would react the same way to a rival military alliance on its border: "Imagine the American outrage if China built an impressive military alliance and tried to include Canada and Mexico".

John Mearsheimer wrote that the US and its allies have pushed for the eastward enlargement of NATO and the EU despite Russian opposition, pointing to the 2008 Bucharest summit and the 2009 Eastern Partnership initiative.

John Mearsheimer concluded that they "should abandon their plan to westernize Ukraine and instead aim to make it a neutral buffer state between NATO and Russia".

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, John Mearsheimer re-affirmed his belief that the West were largely to blame.

In June 2022, John Mearsheimer delivered a speech on "The Causes and Consequences of the Ukraine War".

John Mearsheimer said there is no evidence that Putin wants to conquer Ukraine, and no evidence that Russia wants to install a puppet government.

John Mearsheimer argued that if Putin did want to conquer Ukraine, he would have used a larger army.

John Mearsheimer believes Putin has been telling the truth about his motives, saying Putin "does not have a history of lying to other leaders" or to foreign audiences.

John Mearsheimer wrote that Putin recently likened himself to Tsar Peter the Great, who, Putin said, had justly returned land to Russia; and that Russia's foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said that Russia's goal was to "free Ukraine's people from the 'unacceptable regime' in Kyiv".

John Mearsheimer wrote that Mearsheimer cherry-picked official statements by Russia's leadership and takes them at face value.

Kostelka said that John Mearsheimer "remained oblivious to Russia's numerous lies on public record, including Putin's original denial of any involvement in Crimea in 2014, which was followed by open boasting about the annexation a few months later".

John Mearsheimer wrote that Russia only failed to take over the country because of a "disastrous miscalculation by the Kremlin".

John Mearsheimer was interviewed by Chotiner again in November 2022, after Russia annexed four provinces of Ukraine.

John Mearsheimer said that Putin only wanted to control those four provinces and "to make sure that the Ukrainian rump state that is left is neutral and is not associated with NATO in any formal or informal way".

John Mearsheimer was challenged by Chotiner, who said his arguments were contradicted by Putin's statements and actions.

John Mearsheimer believes that the best outcome would be a volatile frozen conflict, while the worst outcome would be nuclear war, which he considered unlikely.

John Mearsheimer stated in an interview broadcast on C-SPAN that liberal hegemony represents a "great delusion" and that much more weight should be associated with nationalism as a policy of enduring geopolitical value than the delusions he associated with liberal hegemony.

John Mearsheimer concluded by predicting that the liberal international order would be replaced by three distinct "realist orders" in the near term: "a thin international order", primarily concerned with arms control and managing the global economy, and two bounded orders, led respectively by China and the United States.

John Mearsheimer makes important reference to Laurence Lampert's nihilistic Strauss interpretation in his book The Great Delusion.

John Mearsheimer and Walt state that it is a sophisticated study but contains questionable measures of key concepts and that the measures to test their idea do not capture the theories' core concepts.

In 2019, John Mearsheimer said that his preferred candidate in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries was Bernie Sanders and that economic inequality was the greatest problem faced by the United States.

John Mearsheimer has said that he has very liberal views on gay rights and gay marriage, and expressed support of gender equality.

John Mearsheimer maintained that Carr's points were still as relevant for 2004 as for 1939 and went on to deplore what he claimed was the dominance of "idealist" thinking about international relations in British academic life.

In October 1991, John Mearsheimer was drawn into a bitter controversy at the University of Chicago regarding Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, then a visiting professor from Germany.

John Mearsheimer joined other University of Chicago faculty in writing a joint piece for Commentary that reacted to Noelle-Neumann's reply to the accusation against her.