68 Facts About John Mearsheimer

1.

John Joseph Mearsheimer is an American political scientist and international relations scholar, who belongs to the realist school of thought.

2.

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

3.

John Mearsheimer has been described as the most influential realist of his generation.

4.

John Mearsheimer was born in December 1947 in Brooklyn, New York City.

5.

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

6.

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

7.

John Mearsheimer entered Cornell University and in 1980 earned a PhD in government, specifically in international relations.

8.

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

9.

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.

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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.

14.

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.

15.

John Mearsheimer's works are widely read and debated by 21st century students of international relations.

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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.

19.

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

20.

Also, 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.

21.

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.

22.

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

23.

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.

24.

John Mearsheimer maintains that "institutionalist theories" offered poor alternatives to this grim picture of international politics.

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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.

28.

Night watchman in John Mearsheimer's terminology is a "global hegemon", a theoretical impossibility according to The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.

29.

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

30.

Precisely two decades after John Mearsheimer had detected the watchman in the world for the last time, he rediscovered the watchman, which exists and keeps Europe at peace.

31.

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.

32.

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.

33.

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.

34.

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.

35.

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.

36.

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

37.

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.

38.

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.

39.

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.

40.

John Mearsheimer denied the charges of antisemitism in that he had "no reason to amend it or embellish" his blurb and defended his position.

41.

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.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

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

51.

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.

52.

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.

53.

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

54.

Almost alone among observers, John Mearsheimer was opposed to that decision because he saw that Ukraine without a nuclear deterrent would likely be subjected to aggression by Russia.

55.

John Mearsheimer had warned in 1993 that a nuclear-free Ukraine would remain exposed to the danger of Russian attempts at reconquest.

56.

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.

57.

John Mearsheimer thinks that those who believe that Russia has only been waiting for opportunities to annex Ukraine are mistaken.

58.

John Mearsheimer thinks that in spite of being aware of Russia's rejectionist stance, a stance which is understandable given Russia's security interests, the US would have pushed for the eastward expansion of the EU and NATO and supported the democratization of Ukraine anyway.

59.

John Mearsheimer considers Putin's reaction understandable because Ukraine is "indispensable" as a buffer for Russia's security needs.

60.

John Mearsheimer argued in a piece for Foreign Affairs that Russia's annexation of the Crimea was fueled by concerns that it would lose access to its Black Sea Fleet naval base at Sevastopol if Ukraine continued to move towards NATO and European integration.

61.

John Mearsheimer concluded that US policy should shift to recognize Ukraine as a buffer state between NATO and Russia, rather than attempt to absorb Ukraine into NATO.

62.

John Mearsheimer sees NATO's eastward expansion as a dangerous provocation of Russia.

63.

John Mearsheimer invokes George F Kennan as one of the first critical admonishers who warned in 1998 of the danger of war as a result of eastward enlargement.

64.

John Mearsheimer debated the Russian invasion with Polish MP Radoslaw Sikorski in May 2022.

65.

Sikorski identified Putin as the culprit in conducting the invasion of Ukraine while John Mearsheimer argued that Putin is pursuing a realist geopolitical plan to secure Russian national interests in the presence of perceived threats from an expanding NATO.

66.

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.

67.

In 2019, John Mearsheimer said his preferred candidate in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary was Bernie Sanders.

68.

John Mearsheimer has said that economic inequality in the United States was the greatest problem faced by the nation.