John Mearsheimer Quotes

29 Sourced Quotes

The Soviet Union and its empire disappeared in large part because its smokestack economy could no longer keep up with the technological progress of the world's major economic powers.

John Mearsheimer
In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler believed that his great-power rivals would be easy to exploit and isolate because each had little interest in fighting Germany and instead was determined to get someone else to assume the burden. He guessed right.

John Mearsheimer
In an ideal world, where there are only good states, power would be largely irrelevant.

John Mearsheimer
Offensive realism predicts that the United States will send its army across the Atlantic when there is a potential hegemon in Europe that the local great powers cannot contain by themselves.

John Mearsheimer
... If China continues to rise, you better be very careful, because that will drive the United States stark raving crazy....

John Mearsheimer
In short, unbalanced bipolar systems are so unstable that they cannot last for any appreciable period of time.

John Mearsheimer
A potential hegemon, as emphasized throughout this book, must be wealthier than any of its regional rivals and must possess the most powerful army in the area.

John Mearsheimer
States care about relative wealth, because economic might is the foundation of military might.

John Mearsheimer
The German air offensives against British cities in World Wars I and II not only failed to coerce the United Kingdom to surrender, but Germany also lost both wars.

John Mearsheimer
In the anarchic world of international politics, it is better to be Godzilla than Bambi.

John Mearsheimer
Great powers must be forever vigilant and never subordinate survival to any other goal, including prosperity.

John Mearsheimer
When an aggressor comes on the scene, at least one other state will eventually take direct responsibility for checking it.

John Mearsheimer
States have two kinds of power: latent power and military power.

John Mearsheimer
I believe that the existing power structures in Europe and Northeast Asia are not sustainable through 2020.

John Mearsheimer
The sad fact is that international politics has always been a ruthless and dangerous business, and it is likely to remain that way.

John Mearsheimer
The ideal situation for any state is to experience sharp economic growth while its rivals' economies grow slowly or hardly at all.

John Mearsheimer
Preserving power, rather than increasing it, is the main goal of states.

John Mearsheimer
Important benefits often accrue to states that behave in an unexpected way.

John Mearsheimer
The liberal tradition has its roots in the Enlightenment, that period in the eighteenth-century Europe when intellectuals and political leaders had a powerful sense that reason could be employed to make the world a better place.

John Mearsheimer
Specifically, the presence of oceans on much of the earth's surface makes it impossible for any state to achieve global hegemony.

John Mearsheimer
This self-defeating behavior, so the argument goes, must be the result of warped domestic politics.

John Mearsheimer
Simply put, the most powerful state is the one that prevails in a dispute.

John Mearsheimer
China, in short has the potential to be considerably more powerful than even the United States.

John Mearsheimer
Furthermore there's the whole argument that the administration made, that so many people were killed by chemical weapons. Their number was around 1,400, the fact of the matter is that over 40,000 other people were killed with bombs and bullets, before those 1,400 people. If 40,000 people were killed, and that didn't provide a moral justification for intervention, what's the moral justification for killing, people... when 1,400 die with chemical weapons. I don't get it, in fact, I don't think there's a moral case to be made for intervention.

John Mearsheimer
A state's potential power is based on the size of its population and the level of its wealth.

John Mearsheimer
When World War II started on September 1, 1939, the German army contained 3.74 million soldiers and 103 divisions.

John Mearsheimer
The optimists' claim that security competition and war among the great powers has been burned out of the system is wrong. In fact all of the major states around the globe still care deeply about the balance of power among themselves for the foreseeable future.

John Mearsheimer
The most dangerous states in the international system are continental powers with large armies.

John Mearsheimer
The cycle of violence will continue far into the new millennium. Hopes for peace will probably not be realized, because the great that shape the international system fear each other and compete for power as a result. Indeed, their ultimate aim is to gain a position of dominant power over others, because having dominant power is the best means to ensure one's own survival.

John Mearsheimer