John Mearsheimer

“I'm a realist, and I thought from the get-go that NATO expansion was going to lead to one heck of a lot of trouble. And it eventually did.”

“States that promote liberal hegemony invariably damage the fabric of liberalism inside their own borders.”

“There are three basic routes to escalation inherent in the conduct of war: one or both sides deliberately escalate to win, one or both sides deliberately escalate to prevent defeat, or the fighting escalates not by deliberate choice but inadvertently.”

“When you're a country like Ukraine and you live next door to a great power like Russia, you have to pay careful attention to what the Russians think, because if you take a stick and you poke them in the eye, they're going to retaliate. States in the Western hemisphere understand this full well with regard to the United States.”

“I believe that nationalism is the most powerful political ideology in the world.”

“Someone who is Irish can have a loyalty to Ireland. The problem is when you raise the subject of dual loyalty, many people tend to think of it in the context of the old anti-Semitic canard and making the argument that Jews are disloyal to the U.S.”

“You are going to have a situation where India and the United States, Vietnam and U.S., India-Japan, Australia-U.S. are all going to be allied in a balancing coalition against China.”

“Although the U.S.-Soviet rivalry was global in scope, its center of gravity was the Iron Curtain in Europe, where both sides had massive armies and air forces equipped with thousands of nuclear weapons.”

“Now that the Cold War is over with, it's kind of hard to take the Soviet Union seriously. We won, period. We ran them into the ground and that was the name of the game. It was a strategy of preponderance.”

“A crusader impulse is deeply wired into liberal democracies, especially their elites.”

“I think the United States is a thoroughly nationalist country.”

“Survival should be the number one goal, states can have all sorts of goals that are deeply immoral or unethical. But that doesn't mean they're irrational.”

“A critically important issue when talking about America's terrorism problem is the matter of how U.S. support for Israel's brutal treatment of the Palestinians relates to what happened on September 11.”

“Even if Iran did have a nuclear weapons capability, they could not use that to blackmail the United States or to attack; the United States has a retaliatory capability, so Iran is a minor threat at best.”

“To be sure, no one will miss such by-products of the Cold War as the Korean and Vietnam conflicts.”

“Respect for sovereignty is the most significant norm in international politics, and its purpose is to minimize war and facilitate peaceful relations among states.”

“States that teach a dishonestly self-exculpating or self-glorifying history should be publicly criticized and sanctioned.”

“Great powers react harshly when distant rivals project military power into their neighborhood, much less attempt to make a country on their border an ally.”

“NATO expansion, E.U. expansion, and turning Ukraine and Georgia and other countries into liberal democracies were all about creating a giant zone of peace that spread all over Europe and included Eastern Europe and Western Europe. It was not aimed at containing Russia.”

“The more closely any ism accords with human nature, the more relevance it will have in the real world.”