John Mearsheimer (14 December 1947-) was an American political scientist and international relations scholar who was best known for developing the school of "offensive realism", ddescribing attempts by the great powers to achieve hegemony in an anarchic world. Mearsheimer criticized Ukraine's surrender of its nuclear weapons in 1994 (warning that Ukraine would inevitably face Russian aggression without a nuclear deterrent), opposed the Iraq War, and blamed the United States, NATO, and the European Union for Russia's aggression in Ukraine after 2014.
Biography[]
John Joseph Mearsheimer was born in Brooklyn, New York City, New York in 1947, and he was raised in Croton-on-Hudson in Westchester County from the age of eight. He served in the US Army for a year before attending West Point from 1966 to 1970, after which he served in the US Air Force for five years. After earning a PhD in government from Cornell University in 1980, he worked as a research fellow for the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, and, in 1982, he became a faculty member of the University of Chicago. During the 1980s, he published his first several works, and, in 1990, he predicted that Europe would revert to a multipolar world if both the United States and Soviet Union withdrew from the continent. In 1993, in a Foreign Affairs article, he advocated for Ukraine to keep its Soviet-era nuclear weapons as a deterrent against future Russian aggression, but, from 1994 to 1996, Ukraine agreed to dispose of its nuclear weapons stockpile. He also challenged Hans Morgenthau's theory of statesmen and diplomats dominating international developments, instead emphasizing security competition among the great powers within the anarchy of the international system. In early February 1991, he correctly predicted the course of the Gulf War, being one of the very few voices who predicted a quick and easy war with less than 1,000 casualties for the United States. In 2006, he wrote another article on the power of the "Israel lobby" in the United States, noting the important role of Christian Zionists in the lobby. He also opined that the only way for Israel to make peace with the Palestinians would be to allow for the Palestinians to independently govern the Gaza Strip and West Bank and to end their occupation of the Palestinian territories. In 2012, he predicted that China's rise to power would not be peaceful, and that, while the USA could militarily contain China, they could not do so economically. He rejected the "democratic peace theory", which claimed that democracies rarely went to war with each other; argued that the world's many landmasses and oceans prevented one nation from truly becoming a hegemon, and criticized "liberal hegemony", as trying to integrate China into the liberal international order helped China become a great power. In 2014, he authored an article opining that the Ukraine crisis was the West's fault, as Russia's aggression was caused by its insecurity with NATO and European Union expansion into Eastern Europe and the West's democracy promotion initiatives; he also took the viewpoint that the Euromaidan revolution was a coup against a "democratically-elected president". In 2019, he endorsed the Democrat Bernie Sanders for President of the United States, arguing that economic inequality was the problem faced by the United States.