John J. Mearsheimer
American professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago.
The cycle of violence will continue far into the new millennium. Hopes for peace will probably not be realized, because the great that shape the international system fear each other and compete for power as a result. Indeed, their ultimate aim is to gain a position of dominant power over others, because having dominant power is the best means to ensure one's own survival.
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.
Preserving power, rather than increasing it, is the main goal of states.
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.
Important benefits often accrue to states that behave in an unexpected way.
States have two kinds of power: latent power and military power.
In short, unbalanced bipolar systems are so unstable that they cannot last for any appreciable period of time.
The ideal situation for any state is to experience sharp economic growth while its rivals' economies grow slowly or hardly at all.
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.
When an aggressor comes on the scene, at least one other state will eventually take direct responsibility for checking it.
I believe that the existing power structures in Europe and Northeast Asia are not sustainable through 2020.
Great powers must be forever vigilant and never subordinate survival to any other goal, including prosperity.
Bandwagoning is a strategy for the weak.
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.
This self-defeating behavior, so the argument goes, must be the result of warped domestic politics.
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.
In the anarchic world of international politics, it is better to be Godzilla than Bambi.
A state's potential power is based on the size of its population and the level of its wealth.
Specifically, the presence of oceans on much of the earth's surface makes it impossible for any state to achieve global hegemony.
China, in short has the potential to be considerably more powerful than even the United States.