John Mearsheimer quotes

The ideal situation for any state is to experience sharp economic growth while its rivals' economies grow slowly or hardly at all. (John Mearsheimer)
In the anarchic world of international politics, it is better to be Godzilla than Bambi. View quote
John Mearsheimer
The sad fact is that international politics has always been a ruthless and dangerous business, and it is likely to remain that way. View quote
John Mearsheimer
States care about relative wealth, because economic might is the foundation of military might. View quote
John Mearsheimer
Great powers must be forever vigilant and never subordinate survival to any other goal, including prosperity. View quote
John Mearsheimer
Simply put, the most powerful state is the one that prevails in a dispute. View quote
John Mearsheimer
A state's potential power is based on the size of its population and the level of its wealth. View quote
John Mearsheimer
Bandwagoning is a strategy for the weak. View quote
John Mearsheimer
China, in short has the potential to be considerably more powerful than even the United States. View quote
John Mearsheimer
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. View quote
John Mearsheimer
States have two kinds of power: latent power and military power. (John Mearsheimer)
In an ideal world, where there are only good states, power would be largely irrelevant. View quote
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. View quote
John Mearsheimer
Decapitation is a fanciful strategy. View quote
John Mearsheimer
The most dangerous states in the international system are continental powers with large armies. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
John Mearsheimer
Important benefits often accrue to states that behave in an unexpected way. View quote
John Mearsheimer
I believe that the existing power structures in Europe and Northeast Asia are not sustainable through 2020. View quote
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. View quote
John Mearsheimer
This self-defeating behavior, so the argument goes, must be the result of warped domestic politics. (John Mearsheimer)
When World War II started on September 1, 1939, the German army contained 3.74 million soldiers and 103 divisions. View quote
John Mearsheimer
Specifically, the presence of oceans on much of the earth's surface makes it impossible for any state to achieve global hegemony. View quote
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. View quote
John Mearsheimer
In short, unbalanced bipolar systems are so unstable that they cannot last for any appreciable period of time. View quote
John Mearsheimer