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John J. Mearsheimer (born December 1947) is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He is a well known neorealist. Mearsheimer attracted considerable public attention when he co-authored and published a working paper on "the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby".

Early Years

Mearsheimer was born in December 1947 in Brooklyn, New York. He was raised in New York City until the age of eight, when his parents moved his family to Croton-on-Hudson, New York, a suburb located in Westchester County. At age 18, Mearsheimer enlisted in the U.S. Army. After two years as an enlisted man, he was faced with the choice of attending the United States Military Academy at West Point, or going to Vietnam and serving as an infantryman. He chose West Point, which he attended from 1966-1970. After graduation, he served for five years as an officer in the U.S. Air Force. After leaving the Air Force, Mearsheimer earned a Masters Degree in International Relations from the University of Southern California in 1974. He subsequently entered Cornell University as a graduate student and earned a Ph.D. in government, specifically in international relations, in 1981. From 1978-1979, he worked as a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, in Washington, D.C. From 1980-1982, he worked as a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs.

University of Chicago

Since 1982, Mearsheimer has been a member of the faculty of the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He became an associate professor in 1984, a full professor in 1987, and was appointed to the Harrison chair in 1995. From 1989-1992, he served as chairman of the department.

Mearsheimer has written extensively about national security policy and international relations theory, especially neorealism, which he defines as a state’s tendency to attempt to gain as much relative power as possible and eventually become the hegemon of the international system.

Mearsheimer’s books include Conventional Deterrence (1983), Nuclear Deterrence: Ethics and Strategy (1985), Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (1988), and The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001). He has also written numerous book chapters, journal articles, and newspaper op-ed pieces.

Finally, Mearsheimer has won a number of teaching awards. 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. 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. In 03, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

"Israel Lobby" Controversy

In March 2006, Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, the academic dean and Robert and Rene Belfer Professor of International Relations at the Kennedy School of Government, published a working paper and an article in the London Review of Books on the negative effects of "the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby". They define the Lobby as "the loose coalition of individuals and organisations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction". The articles generated considerable media coverage throughout the world. For full details see The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Offensive Realism

John Mearsheimer is the leading proponent of a branch of realism called offensive realism. Offensive realism is a structural theory which, unlike the classical realism of Morgenthau, blames security conflict on the anarchy of the international system, not on human nature. In contrast to another structural realist theory, the defensive realism of Waltz, offensive realism believes that states are not satisfied with a given amount of power, but seek hegemony for security. Mearsheimer summed this view up in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics:

Given the difficulty of determining how much power is enough for today and tomorrow, great powers recognize that the best way to ensure their security is to achieve hegemony now, thus eliminating any possibility of a challenge by another great power. Only a misguided state would pass up an opportunity to become hegemon in the system because it thought it already had sufficient power to survive.

In this world, there is no such thing as a status quo power, since according to Mearsheimer, "a great power that has a marked power advantage over its rivals is likely to behave more aggressively because it has the capability as well as the incentive to do so." He has also dismissed democratic peace theory (which claims that democracies—specifically, liberal democracies—never or rarely go to war with one another).

Although Mearsheimer does not believe it is possible for a state to become a global hegemon, he believes states seek regional hegemony. Furthermore, he argues that states attempt to prevent other states from becoming regional hegemons, since peer competitors could interfere in a state's affairs. States which have achieved regional hegemony, such as the U.S., will act as offshore balancers, interfering in other regions only when the great powers in those regions are not able to prevent the rise of a hegemon.

Mearsheimer has been a vocal critic of American policy toward China. Though China does not have openly militaristic ambitions today, he thinks that by trading with China and helping its economy, the United States is providing a base from which the Chinese could seriously threaten American national security in the years to come. Furthermore he thinks that China's neighbours are increasingly worried about the growing power of China and that there are already indications that they are trying to balance China by improving ties with the United States, making the U.S. an offshore balancer.

Positions

Nuclear proliferation

In 1990 he published a controversial essay called Back to the Future where he predicted that following the Cold War, Europe would revert to a multipolar environment similar to that in the first half of the Twentieth Century.

In this essay and in the 1993 paper called The case for a Ukrainian nuclear deterrent, he argued that to reduce the dangers of war, the United States should encourage Germany and Ukraine to develop a nuclear arsenal, while working to prevent the rise of hyper-nationalism.

Iraq War

Mearsheimer is a visible opponent of the Iraq War. In 2002, he was one of thirty professors to endorse a letter in the New York Times arguing against President Bush’s intention to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein from power. He felt that invading Iraq would distract from the war against al Qaeda, which he described as a greater threat to national security. The war was unnecessary, Mearsheimer felt, because the United States could continue to effectively contain Hussein, as it had done for over a decade since the Gulf War. His thinking on the matter is underpinned by a belief in a rational deterrence theory of weapons of mass destruction - namely, that there is no way by which a power with nuclear weapons equal to or less than another power can effectively coerce it into policies against its choosing (this presumes, and he holds, that Saddam Hussein was a rational actor). Mearsheimer predicted that after invading Iraq, the U.S. would need to occupy it for decades. He also wrote several Op-Ed pieces in 2003, including An Unnecessary War and Keeping Saddam in a Box in which he made the same points. In a December, 2004 interview , Mearsheimer argued that the architects of the invasion, however misguided, were motivated by a sincere desire to protect American interests. This contrasts with the viewpoint put forth in his March, 2006 paper with Walt (discussed in the section below on the Israel Lobby): "the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure".

References

1. The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government Working Paper, Submitted 13 March 2006
2. The Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, London Review of Books, 23 March 2006
3. Mearsheimer, John (2001). The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. New York: W. W. Norton. p. 35. ISBN 0-393-02025-8.
4. An unnecessary war, John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, Foreign Policy, Jan/Feb 2003.
5. Keeping Saddam in a Box by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, New York Times, 2 February 2003
6. American Amnesia Interviews John Mearsheimer
7. Alex Safian in The Jewish Press, Will the real John Mearsheimer please stand up

See also

• Great Powers
• Hegemony
• Realism in international relations
• Political power
• Power projection

External links

• John Mearsheimer's Home Page
• All Publications by John Mearsheimer
• John Mearsheimer a Short biography, The Globalist
• Conversations With History Interview, conducted by the Institute of International Studies at Berkeley
• Lying in International Politics by John J. Mearsheimer, University of Chicago, August 22, 2004
• American Amnesia Interviews John Mearsheimer, American Amnesia Blog, December 2004
• Hans Morgenthau and the Iraq War: Realism Versus Neo-Conservatism by John J. Mearsheimer, OpenDemocracy, May 19, 2005
• Recent survey recognizing Mearsheimer as one of the five most important IR scholars of his time.
• The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy A Harvard Study, March, 2006
• WSJ response to Mearsheimer-Walt working paper on the Israel Lobby
• Kennedy School removes its logo from lobby 'study' Rosner's Blog, Haaretz, March 22, 2006
• Analysis of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
• "A Lobby, Not a Conspiracy" by Tony Judt, The New York Times, April 20, 2006
• "Yes, It's Anti-Semitic" by Eliot A. Cohen, Washington Post, April 5, 2006
  • "Stephen Walt Responds to the Washington Post's Nazi Smear" -New York Observer
• (a response to the critiques) John Mearsheimer & Stephen Walt, May 11, 2006
• Transcript of C-SPAN interview, June 23, 2006
• "Pronouncing Blame on the Israel Lobby Authors" -Timothy Stinson, Al-Jazeerah.info

• 1947 births
• International relations scholars
• Political scientists
• University of Chicago faculty
• Living people
• West Point graduates
• United States Air Force officers