“The U.S., over the course of the 1990s and the first decade-and-a-half of the 2000s, went to great places to make China more and more economically powerful. We, in fact, have created a potential peer competitor. This is remarkably foolish.”

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.