John Mearsheimer

John Joseph Mearsheimer is an American political scientist and international relations scholar. He is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago.
Mearsheimer is best known for developing the neorealist 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, in the 2001 book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, Mearsheimer says that China's growing power will likely bring it into conflict with the United States.
In his 2007 book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, Mearsheimer argues that the Israel lobby wields disproportionate influence over U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. His more recent work focuses on criticism of the "liberal international order" and why he believes that [|the West is to blame] for the Russo-Ukrainian War.

Early life and education

Mearsheimer was born on December 14, 1947 in Brooklyn, New York City as one of five children to Thomas Joseph Mearsheimer and Ruth Margaret Baumann, in a family of German and Irish descent. His father was a civil engineer and a colonel in the United States Air Force Reserve. As a United States Military Academy graduate, his father served in the United States Army Air Corps during WWII, and with the Air Force Reserve during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. As a civil engineer, he worked for various railroads and was the chief engineer of the Grand Central.
When he was eight, Mearsheimer moved with his family to the village of Croton-on-Hudson, New York, a suburb in Westchester County, New York. When he was 17, he enlisted in the United States Army. After one year as an enlisted man, he obtained an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, which he attended from 1966 to 1970. Receiving a Bachelor of Science degree from the United States Military Academy in 1970, Mearsheimer served five years from 1970 to 1975 in the United States Air Force, rising from a Second Lieutenant to the rank of a captain before resigning. He married Mary T. Cobb in 1970 with whom he has three children, a daughter and two sons.
In 1974, while in the Air Force, Mearsheimer earned a Master of Arts in international relations from the University of Southern California. Not satisfied with his career at the United States military, he resigned from the Air Force and pursued further graduate studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, earning a Master of Arts and a Ph.D. in government in 1978 and 1981, respectively. He concentrated his studies in international relations with a peace studies fellowship from Cornell from 1978 to 1979. In the summer of 1978, he interned at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. From 1979 to 1980, he was a research fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, having received a Hubert H. Humphrey doctoral fellowship. From 1980 to 1982, Mearsheimer was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs.

Career

Since 1982, Mearsheimer has been a member of the faculty of the Department of Political Science at the Social Science Division at the University of Chicago. He was appointed as assistant professor in 1982, as associate professor in 1984, and as full professor in 1987. He served as chair of the Department of Political Science from 1989 to 1992. He was appointed the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science in 1996. 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. He is also a member of the American Political Science Association and served as the co-chairman of its Commission on History, Social Science and International Security Affairs from 1987 to 1990.
Mearsheimer is a member of the editorial boards of the academic journals International Security, Security Studies, Joint Forces Quarterly, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, Asian Security, China Security, and International Relations.

Awards and honors

Mearsheimer's books include Conventional Deterrence, which won the Edgar S. Furniss Jr. Book Award from the Mershon Center for International Security Studies; Nuclear Deterrence: Ethics and Strategy ; Liddell Hart and the Weight of History ; The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, which won the Lepgold Book Prize; The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, a New York Times Best Seller; and Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics. Mearsheimer's work has been translated into numerous languages, including Chinese, Greek, Portuguese, Arabic, Indonesian, Polish, Spanish, and Turkish.
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. He received a grant from the American Philosophical Society in 1984 and was a George Kistiakowsky scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences from 1986 to 1987. 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; Morris Abrams Award in International Relations, 1980; 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, Mearsheimer was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 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." Mearsheimer has been listed as a noteworthy political scientist by Marquis Who's Who and Encyclopædia Britannica describes him as a "a prominent American scholar of international relations best known for his theory of offensive realism". A 2017 survey of US international relations faculty ranks him third among "scholars whose work has had the greatest influence on the field of International Relations in the past 20 years."

Research and major publications

Mearsheimer popularized the term rollback to describe the geopolitical strategy of inciting unrest in a rival country while supporting government change covertly or overtly.

''Conventional Deterrence''

Mearsheimer's first book, Conventional Deterrence, 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. For Mearsheimer, failures in the modern battlefield are caused mostly by the potential attacker's belief that it can successfully implement a blitzkrieg strategy in which tanks and other mechanized forces are employed swiftly to cause deep penetration and to disrupt the enemy's rear. The two other strategies are unlikely to lead to deterrence failures because they entail a low probability of success, accompanied by high costs or limited gains and the possibility of the conflict turning into a war of attrition. However, if the attacker has a coherent blitzkrieg strategy available, an attack is likely to ensue because its potential benefits outweigh the costs and risks of starting a war.
Besides analyzing cases from World War II and the Arab–Israeli conflict, Mearsheimer's 1983 book extrapolates implications from his theory for the prospects of conventional deterrence in Central Europe during the late Cold War. In the chapter "Why the Soviets Can't Win Quickly in Central Europe" argues that a Soviet attack is unlikely because the Soviet military would be unable to successfully implement a blitzkrieg strategy. The book argues that the balance of forces, the difficulty of advancing rapidly with mechanized forces through Central Europe, and the formidable NATO forces opposing such a Soviet attack results in low chances for the Soviets to start a conventional war in Europe.

''Liddell Hart and the Weight of History''

Mearsheimer's second book, Liddell Hart and the Weight of History, reassesses the intellectual legacies of the 20th century British military theorist B. H. Liddell Hart.
Mearsheimer's arguments about Liddell Hart generated varied responses. For example, the founder of the Israel Defense Forces Operational Theory Research Institute, Simon Naveh, concurred in a separate study, which found that "by distorting the actual historical circumstances of the Blitzkrieg formation obscured its temporal and cognitive origins.... The early-1950s display of the transformed version of Blitzkrieg as a historical fact, carrying the joint signature of Liddell Hart and Guderian, lent it an authentic touch and a professional legitimacy that could not be shaken." In contrast, Richard Swain of the US Army Command and General Staff College argued that while "there is a good deal about which Mearsheimer is correct," he likely overstates the extent to which Liddell Hart's historical distortions were consciously self-serving: "To charge Liddell Hart with cleverly creating a deception requires one first to accept that Liddell Hart knew he had been wrong. There is little or no evidence of that."