43+ John Mearsheimer Quotes to Deepen Your Knowledge of Global Politics

John Mearsheimer is an American professor of political science at the University of Chicago. He is a leading scholar in the field of international relations, and is best known for his theory of offensive realism. He is also known for his criticism of the influence of the Israel lobby on United States foreign policy. Following is our collection on famous quotes by John Mearsheimer on education, communism, politics.

Top 10 John Mearsheimer Quotes

1. If Ukraine becomes a pro-American liberal democracy, and a member of NATO, and a member of the E.U., the Russians will consider that categorically unacceptable.
2. In other words, are humans fundamentally social animals who strive hard to carve out room for their individuality, or are they individuals who form social contracts?
3. In short, unbalanced bipolar systems are so unstable that they cannot last for any appreciable period of time.
4. Europe doesn’t matter anymore. You know, Europe is basically a giant museum.
5. 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.
6. If China continues to rise, you better be very careful, because that will drive the United States stark raving crazy.
7. In the anarchic world of international politics, it is better to be Godzilla than Bambi.
8. A state's potential power is based on the size of its population and the level of its wealth.
9. 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.
10. States have two kinds of power: latent power and military power.

John Mearsheimer Short Quotes

• Bandwagoning is a strategy for the weak.
• In an ideal world, where there are only good states, power would be largely irrelevant.
• The most dangerous states in the international system are continental powers with large armies.
• Important benefits often accrue to states that behave in an unexpected way.
• Simply put, the most powerful state is the one that prevails in a dispute.
• Decapitation is a fanciful strategy.
• States care about relative wealth, because economic might is the foundation of military might.
• China, in short has the potential to be considerably more powerful than even the United States.

John Mearsheimer Quotes About Politics

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

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

John Mearsheimer Famous Quotes And Sayings

Great powers of all persuasions care deeply about their survival, and there is always the danger in a bipolar or multipolar system that they will be attacked by another great power. In these circumstances, liberal great powers regularly dress up their hard-nosed behavior with liberal rhetoric. They talk like liberals and act like realists. Should they adopt liberal policies that are at odds with realist logic, they invariably come to regret it. — John Mearsheimer

The strategically wise strategy for Ukraine is to break off its close relations with the West, especially with the United States, and try to accommodate the Russians. If there had been no decision to move NATO eastward to include Ukraine, Crimea and the Donbass would be part of Ukraine today, and there would be no war in Ukraine. — John Mearsheimer

The cycle of violence will continue far into the new millennium. Hopes for peace will probably not be realized, because the great powers 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

If Russia thinks that Ukraine presents an existential threat to Russia because it is aligning with the United States and its West European allies, this is going to cause an enormous amount of damage to Ukraine. That of course is exactly what’s happening now. — John Mearsheimer

We overthrew democratically elected leaders in the Western hemisphere during the Cold War because we were unhappy with their policies. This is the way great powers behave... We went around the world trying to create liberal democracies. Our main focus, of course, was in the greater Middle East, and you know how well that worked out. Not very well. — 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

We invented this story that Russia was bent on aggression in Eastern Europe.... This is a story that we invented so that we could blame him Vladimir Putin. My argument is that the West, especially the United States, is principally responsible for this disaster. But no American policymaker, and hardly anywhere in the American foreign-policy establishment, is going to want to acknowledge that line of argument, and they will say that the Russians are responsible. — John Mearsheimer

After the war, he became a big proponent of the argument that chemical warfare or gas warfare was actually a more humane form of warfare than shrapnel and bombs, because he saw what all those shrapnel and bombs did to all the boys who climbed out of the trenches and tried to cross no man's land, with German machine guns and artillery on the other side, he said I'll take the gas any day. I'm not making the case for gas warfare, but the idea that getting killed by gas is more horrible than getting ripped apart by shrapnel and bullets is not one I buy. And when I see the Obama administration putting pictures of people killed by gas up on the internet, I say let's put pictures of the people who got killed by shrapnel up there, and lets have a debate about which pictures look worse. It won't even be an interesting debate, getting killed by shrapnel, in my opinion, is a lot more gruesome and a lot worse. — John Mearsheimer

My argument is that Vladimir Putin is not going to re-create the Soviet Union or try to build a greater Russia, that he’s not interested in conquering and integrating Ukraine into Russia. It’s very important to understand that we invented this story that Putin is highly aggressive and he’s principally responsible for this crisis in Ukraine. — John Mearsheimer

I think all the trouble in this case really started in April 2008, at the NATO Summit in Bucharest, where afterward NATO issued a statement that said Ukraine and Georgia would become part of NATO. The Russians made it unequivocally clear at the time that they viewed this as an existential threat, and they drew a line in the sand. — 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

When you’re a country like Ukraine and you live next door to a great power like Russia, you have to pay careful attention to what the Russians think, because if you take a stick and you poke them in the eye, they’re going to retaliate. States in the Western hemisphere understand this full well with regard to the United States. — John Mearsheimer

Nevertheless, what has happened with the passage of time is that we have moved forward to include Ukraine in the West to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. Of course, this includes more than just NATO expansion. NATO expansion is the heart of the strategy, but it includes E.U. expansion as well, and it includes turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy, and, from a Russian perspective, this is an existential threat. — John Mearsheimer

With Ukraine, it’s very important to understand that, up until 2014, we did not envision NATO expansion and E.U. expansion as a policy that was aimed at containing Russia. Nobody seriously thought that Russia was a threat before February 22, 2014. — John Mearsheimer

The aim of states is to be the biggest and baddest dude on the block because if you’re the biggest and baddest dude on the block, then it is highly unlikely that any other state will challenge you simply because you’re so powerful. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

Life Lessons by John Mearsheimer

1. John Mearsheimer's work emphasizes the importance of understanding the power dynamics of international relations and the need for states to be aware of the potential for conflict.
2. He has argued that states should pursue their own interests and be wary of the intentions of other states, as well as the potential for miscalculation and conflict.
3. He has also highlighted the need for states to be aware of the potential for military and economic power to be used to gain advantage in international relations.