Seminar Series on the Use of Force and Dimplomacy

John Mearsheimer

Wednesday, April 13, 2011
3:30 p.m.
Mershon Center for International Security Studies
1501 Neil Ave., Columbus, OH 43201

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John Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service professor of political science and the co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982.

Mearsheimer has written extensively about security issues and international politics more generally. He has published five books: Conventional Deterrence (Cornell University Press, 1983), which won the Edgar S. Furniss, Jr., Book Award; Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (Cornell University Press, 1988); The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (Norton, 2001), which won the Joseph Lepgold Book Prize; The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy with Stephen M. Walt (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), which made the New York Times best seller list and has been translated into nineteen different languages; and Why Leaders Lie: The Truth about Lying in International Politics (Oxford University Press, 2011).

He has also written many articles that have appeared in academic journals like International Security, and popular magazines like the London Review of Books. Furthermore he has written a number of op-ed pieces for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times dealing with topics like Bosnia, nuclear proliferation, American policy towards India, the failure of Arab-Israeli peace efforts, and the folly of invading Iraq.

Mearsheimer has won a number of teaching awards. He received the Clark Award for Distinguished Teaching when he was a graduate student at Cornell University in 1977, and he won the Quantrell Award for Distinguished Teaching at the University of Chicago in 1985.

He graduated from West Point in 1970, and then served five years as an officer in the U.S. Air Force. He started graduate school in political science at Cornell University in 1975. He received his Ph.D. in 1980. He spent the 1979-1980 academic year as a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, and was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs from 1980 to 1982. During the 1998-1999 academic year, he was the Whitney H. Shepardson Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

For his presentation, Mearsheimer will discuss how when the Cold War ended in 1989, there was much optimism about the future of international politics, and especially America's ability to lead the world toward the millennium. Two decades later, pessimism has replaced optimism, as the United States finds itself in losing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and unable to get Israel, Iran and North Korea to change their behavior on matters of critical importance to Washington.  Mearsheimer will attempt to explain what went wrong and what can be done to fix the problems plaguing U.S. foreign policy.

John Mearsheimer
R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science
University of Chicago