John Mearsheimer

John Joseph Mearsheimer (/ˈmɪərʃaɪmər/; born December 14, 1947) is an American political scientist and international relations scholar. He is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.

Mearsheimer is best known for developing the neorealist (or structural realist) 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" (laid down in his 2018 book The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities) and why he believes that the West is to blame for the Russo-Ukrainian War.

Mearsheimer was born on December 14, 1947 in Brooklyn, New York City as one of five children to Thomas Joseph Mearsheimer (1918–2007) and Ruth Margaret Baumann (1922–2011), 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 Croton-on-Hudson, New York, a suburb in Westchester County. When he was 17, he enlisted in the US Army. After one year as an enlisted man, he obtained an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point, which he attended from 1966 to 1970 earning a B.S. Commissioned at graduation, Mearsheimer then served five years from 1970 to 1975 in the United States Air Force, rising from a second in command 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's degree in international relations from the University of Southern California. Not satisfied with his career at the U.S. military, he resigned from the Air Force and pursued further graduate studies at Cornell University, earning a master's and a doctorate in government in 1978 and 1981 respectively, concentrating 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 (research associate) at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs.

Since 1982, Mearsheimer has been a member of the faculty of the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He started as an assistant professor in 1982, became an associate professor in 1984 and finally a full professor in 1987 and was appointed the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor in 1996. From 1989 to 1992, he served as chairman of the department. 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 board of directors of Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society and 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. 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's books include Conventional Deterrence (1983), which won the Edgar S. Furniss Jr. Book Award from the from Mershon Center for International Security Studies; Nuclear Deterrence: Ethics and Strategy (co-editor, 1985); Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (1988); The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), which won the Lepgold Book Prize; The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007), a New York Times Best Seller; and Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics (2011). Mearsheimer's work has been translated into numerous languages, including Chinese, Greek, Portuguese, Arabic, Indonesian, Polish, Spanish, and Turkish.