John Mearsheimer

John J. Mearsheimer is an American political scientist specializing in international relations and the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he has held a faculty position since 1982. He is the principal architect of offensive realism, a theory asserting that in an anarchic international system lacking a higher authority, great powers possess offensive military capabilities and uncertain intentions, compelling them to maximize relative power—ideally achieving regional hegemony—to ensure survival and security.

Mearsheimer's foundational text, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), applies offensive realism to explain patterns of conflict among major powers across history, emphasizing structural incentives over ideology or domestic politics. Earlier, his Conventional Deterrence (1983) analyzed the conditions under which conventional military forces deter aggression, earning the Edgar S. Furniss, Jr., Book Award. His scholarship critiques liberal internationalist approaches to U.S. foreign policy, arguing they foster unnecessary interventions and fail to account for power dynamics.