“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.”

American political scientist and international relations scholar

John Joseph Mearsheimer is an American political scientist and scholar of international relations, and a professor at the University of Chicago. He is known for his work on great power politics and the theory of offensive realism. His writing and teaching focus on how states compete for power in an anarchic international system. He has become widely associated with realist thinking in international affairs, especially questions of security, rivalry, and the behavior of major powers.