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Decapitation is a fanciful strategy.

John Mearsheimer

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John Mearsheimer
Age: 76
Born: 1947
Born: December 14
Military Officer
Political Scientist
Professor
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
John Joseph Mearsheimer
John J. Mearsheimer
Fanciful
Strategy

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Simply put, the most powerful state is the one that prevails in a dispute.
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In an ideal world, where there are only good states, power would be largely irrelevant.
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States have two kinds of power: latent power and military power.
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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.
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Great powers must be forever vigilant and never subordinate survival to any other goal, including prosperity.
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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.
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I believe that the existing power structures in Europe and Northeast Asia are not sustainable through 2020.
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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.
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The most dangerous states in the international system are continental powers with large armies.
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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.
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China, in short has the potential to be considerably more powerful than even the United States.
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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.
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The ideal situation for any state is to experience sharp economic growth while its rivals' economies grow slowly or hardly at all.
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A state's potential power is based on the size of its population and the level of its wealth.
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States care about relative wealth, because economic might is the foundation of military might.
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