John Mearsheimer Quotes

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

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.

In short, unbalanced bipolar systems are so unstable that they cannot last for any appreciable period of time.

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

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.

When an aggressor comes on the scene, at least one other state will eventually take direct responsibility for checking it.

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.

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

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.

Important benefits often accrue to states that behave in an unexpected way.

Bandwagoning is a strategy for the weak.

The ideal situation for any state is to experience sharp economic growth while its rivals' economies grow slowly or hardly at all.

States care about relative wealth, because economic might is the foundation of military might.

The most dangerous states in the international system are continental powers with large armies.

Decapitation is a fanciful strategy.