John Mearsheimer

John Joseph Mearsheimer (born December 14, 1947) is an American political scientist and international relations scholar who belongs to the realist school of thought.

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

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

Mearsheimer is best known for developing the theory of offensive realism, which describes the interaction between great powers as being primarily driven by the rational desire to achieve regional hegemony in an anarchic international system.

In accordance with his theory, Mearsheimer believes that China's growing power will likely bring it into conflict with the United States.

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

When he was eight, he moved with his family to Croton-on-Hudson, New York, a suburb in Westchester County.

When he was 17, Mearsheimer enlisted in the U.S. Army.

After one year as an enlisted man, he obtained an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point, which he attended from 1966 to 1970.

Commissioned at graduation, Mearsheimer then served five years as an officer in the United States Air Force.

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

He 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.

From 1978 to 1979, he was a research fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.

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

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

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

Mearsheimer's books include Conventional Deterrence (1983), which won the Edgar S. Furniss Jr. Book Award; Nuclear Deterrence: Ethics and Strategy (co-editor, 1985); Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (1988); The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), which won the Lepgold Book Prize; The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007); and Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics (2011).

His articles have appeared in academic journals like International Security and popular magazines like the London Review of Books.

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

Mearsheimer has won several teaching awards.

Mearsheimer's first book, Conventional Deterrence (1983), addresses the issue of how the decision to start a war depends on the projected outcome of the war, in other words, how the decision makers' beliefs about the outcome of the war affect the success or failure of deterrence.

Mearsheimer's basic argument is that deterrence is likely to work when the potential attacker believes that an attack will be costly and is unlikely to succeed.

However, if the potential attacker has reason to believe the attack will entail low costs and is likely to succeed, deterrence is likely to break down, which is now widely accepted to be how the principle of deterrence works.

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

He lays out three strategies.

Firstly, an attrition strategy entails a high level of uncertainty about the outcome of war and high costs for the attacker.

Secondly, a limited-aims strategy entails fewer risks and lower costs.

Thirdly, a blitzkrieg strategy provides a way to defeat the enemy rapidly and decisively with relatively low costs.

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

From 1989 to 1992, he served as chairman of the department.

He also 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.

In addition, he was selected as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar for the 1993–1994 academic year.

In that capacity, he gave a series of talks at eight colleges and universities.

During the 1998–1999 academic year, he was the Whitney H. Shepardson Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City.

In 2003, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In his 2007 book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, Mearsheimer argues that the Israeli lobby wields disproportionate influence over U.S. foreign policy.

His more recent work focuses on relations between the United States and China and the West's involvement in the war in Ukraine.

A 2017 survey of U.S. international relations faculty ranks him third among "scholars whose work has had the greatest influence on the field of IR in the past 20 years."

He 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.

The Award Committee noted that Mearsheimer is "one of the most cited International Relations scholars in the discipline, but his works are read well beyond the academy as well."