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John J. Mearsheimer
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The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (Updated Edition) Updated Edition, Kindle Edition

by John J. Mearsheimer (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 714 ratings
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"A superb book.…Mearsheimer has made a significant contribution to our understanding of the behavior of great powers."—Barry R. Posen, The National Interest


The updated edition of this classic treatise on the behavior of great powers takes a penetrating look at the question likely to dominate international relations in the twenty-first century: Can China rise peacefully? In clear, eloquent prose, John Mearsheimer explains why the answer is no: a rising China will seek to dominate Asia, while the United States, determined to remain the world's sole regional hegemon, will go to great lengths to prevent that from happening. The tragedy of great power politics is inescapable.
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  1. ISBN-13
    978-0393349276
  2. Edition
    Updated
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    W. W. Norton & Company
  5. Publication date
    January 17, 2003
  6. Language
    English
  7. File size
    6684 KB
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This hardheaded book about international relations contains no comforting bromides about "peace dividends" or "the family of nations." Instead, University of Chicago professor John J. Mearsheimer posits an almost Darwinian state of affairs: "The great powers seek to maximize their share of world power" because "having dominant power is the best means to ensure one's own survival." Mearsheimer comes from the realist school of statecraft--he calls his own brand of thinking "offensive realism"--and he warns repeatedly against putting too much faith in the goodwill of other countries. "The sad fact is that international politics has always been a ruthless and dangerous business," he writes. Much of the book is an attempt to show how the diplomatic and military history of the last two centuries supports his ideas. Toward the end of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, he applies his theories to the current scene: "I believe that the existing power structures in Europe in Northeast Asia are not sustainable through 2020." Mearsheimer is especially critical of America's policy of engagement with China; he thinks that trying to make China wealthy and democratic will only make it a stronger rival. This is a controversial idea, but it is ably argued and difficult to ignore. --John Miller

From Publishers Weekly

The central tenet of the political theory called "offensive realism" is that each state seeks to ensure its survival by maximizing its share of world power. Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, sets out to explain, defend and validate offensive realism as the only theory to account for how states actually behave. He proceeds by laying out the theory and its assumptions, then extensively tests the theory against the historical record since the Age of Napoleon. He finds plenty of evidence of what the theory predicts that states seek regional dominance through military strength. Further, whenever a condition of "unbalanced multipolarity" exists (i.e., when three or more states compete in a region, and one of them has the potential to dominate the others), the likelihood of war rises dramatically. If history validates offensive realism, then the theory should yield predictions about the future of world politics and the chances of renewed global conflict. Here Mearsheimer ventures into controversial terrain. Far from seeing the end of the Cold War as ushering in an age of peace and cooperation, the author believes the next 20 years have a high potential for war. China emerges as the most destabilizing force, and the author urges the U.S. to do all it can to retard China's economic growth. Since offensive realism is an academic movement, readers will expect some jargon ("buckpassing," "hegemon"), but the terms are defined and the language is accessible. This book will appeal to all devotees of political science, and especially to partisans of the "tough-minded" (in William James's sense) approach to history. Maps.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0022Q8CVY
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; Updated edition (January 17, 2003)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 17, 2003
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 6684 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 756 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 714 ratings

About the author

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John J. Mearsheimer

John J. Mearsheimer

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John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982. He graduated from West Point in 1970 and then served five years as an officer in the U.S. Air Force. He then 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.

Professor Mearsheimer has written extensively about security issues and international politics more generally. He has published six books: Conventional Deterrence (1983), which won the Edgar S. Furniss, Jr., Book Award; Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (1988); The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001, 2014), which won the Joseph Lepgold Book Prize and has been translated into eight different languages; The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (with Stephen M. Walt, 2007), which made the New York Times best seller list and has been translated into twenty-four different languages; Why Leaders Lie: The Truth about Lying in International Politics (2011), which has been translated into twelve different languages; and The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (2018).

He has also written many articles that have appeared in academic journals like International Security, and popular magazines like Foreign Affairs and 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, the folly of invading Iraq, and the causes of the Ukrainian crisis.

Finally, Professor Mearsheimer has won a number of teaching awards. He received the Clark Award for Distinguished Teaching when he was a graduate student at Cornell in 1977, and he won the Quantrell Award for Distinguished Teaching at the University of Chicago in 1985. In addition, he was selected as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar for the 1993-1994 academic year. In that capacity, he gave a series of talks at eight colleges and universities. In 2003, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
714 global ratings
El libro llegó en mal estado
2 Stars
El libro llegó en mal estado
Llegó el libro que pedí, y llegó rápido, pero no era nuevo, y estaba en mal estado, como se muestra en las fotos. No fue por lo que pagué.
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Top reviews from the United States

Claude
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book!
Reviewed in the United States on April 14, 2024
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This is a great book! Mearsheimer brilliantly covers a wide range of global issues while presenting his realist perspective: “Offensive realism.” It is a must-read by everyone curious about global politics or International relations students.
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Paul Eres
5.0 out of 5 stars A new understanding of why wars occur.
Reviewed in the United States on August 13, 2017
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If you're interested in this, you are probably a political science or international relations student, which is a shame because very few general readers would pick this up, and it's those who need it the most, this really deserves to be a best-seller. I majored in biochemistry and am an indie game developer, never took a single class in political science, but on a friend's recommendation who was majoring in that I read this book, and I've re-read it several times over the years, and it's become one of my favorite books (certainly in my top 10 of nonfiction).

Basically, this book presents an overarching theory of why wars exist, one that is precise enough to allow even uninformed readers to make predictable, and historically accurate, and precise predictions about when a country will go to war (and why). Most people believe wars to happen for one of several reasons -- "human nature" (because humans just like fighting and are inherently violent or stupid or something), or perhaps the war over religion and ideology, or perhaps over resources. I'd guess that almost everyone believes war happens for one of those reasons.

This book dispels that notion very cleanly and completely. After you read it, you'll realize that nations go to war simply because they are afraid. They know that if they lose a war against a greater power, their nation is done for -- it will become occupied, or a puppet state, of a greater power, and lose whatever power they had. Nations do not want that to happen, they are terrified of being dominated by greater nations. And this is a systematic thing, no individual might consciously decide on this, but this is how all nations do seem to work: they are afraid of being conquered, so they go to war to make sure they are the one who conquer, not the one being conquered. This central notion that fear of being conquered by another nation, and not anything else, drives almost all war is the main thesis of the book, and it's argued for very convincingly, with a lot of historical examples.

So, the first way a country can be certain it's not going to be conquered by its neighbors is to become the strongest power in its major landmass -- the regional hegemon. Most nations in a position to do so will try to gain regional power -- that is what China is doing in asia, that's what the US did the Americas, and that's what various european countries (e.g. England, France, the Dutch, the Germans, the Russians) have attempted to do for europe, and so on.

By this thesis, it may seem counter-intuitive, but according to this idea, the reason Germany went to war was not because they were nationalistic or inherently violent, or because of the ideological differences between fascism, capitalism, and communism, or because wanted to purify Europe of undesirable races, or even that they were angry over the conditions imposed on them after WW1 (though that's part of it), but simply because Germany feared being conquered and wanted to become the most powerful nation in Europe to make sure they would survive.

This is a *very* different understanding of war than most people have, I want to emphasize that again. And it sounds strange at first, but this book will probably convince you of it (as evidence, Germany in WW1 had a very different ideology, but the conditions were somewhat similar, and they still went to war, for the same reason they did go to war in WW2. Sometimes WW1 is blamed on entangling alliances or the assassination of an archduke, but, in reality, according to this theory, Germany went to war in WW1 for the exact same reason they want to war in WW2, because they saw an opportunity to become local hegemon of Europe, and took that opportunity).

If you still aren't convinced, that isn't of course the job of this review, it's the job of the book; the number of examples used in the book far exceed would I could bring up here. And the author's writing is much better than mine in any case. I'm just trying to explain why I like the book: because it gives you a different opinion of war than the usual one, and does so very convincingly, through factual argument, and explains it in a simple to understand way (you don't need to have even taken a political science course to follow along with the argument).
94 people found this helpful
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David Lindsay
4.0 out of 5 stars Great Power History
Reviewed in the United States on May 4, 2015
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The Tragedy of Great Power Politics is an accessible history of great power behavior since the 18th century. John Mearsheimer is a professor at the University of Chicago. Mearsheimer believes that once countries become economically strong they seek to dominate their region militarily. They “are always searching for opportunities to gain power over their rivals, with hegemony as their final goal.” He calls this “offensive realism.” In the final chapter, he discusses the rise of China and predicts that it will attempt to dominate Asia. He believes that this will lead to conflict with the US.

To prove his theory, Mearsheimer examines the behavior of five countries over the last 200 years: Japan (1868-1945), Germany (1862-1945), Soviet Union (1917-1991), Britain (1792-1945), and the U.S. (1800-1990). Japan and the Soviet Union provide strong support for the theory. Before WW2 Japan was imperialistic and invaded Korea, China, and the Soviet Union. Its attempts to become an Asian hegemon inevitably led to its clash with the U.S. Russia has always been an imperialistic power and over the centuries expanded its empire from Europe to the Pacific coast. During the Soviet era, it grabbed Eastern Europe.

Germany is an example of how offensive realism can lead to disaster. After reunification in 1871, Germany started to flex its muscles and frighten its neighbors. By 1900 it had overtaken Britain to become Europe's largest economy. Russia, France, and Britain initially formed a defensive alliance, but this did not deter Germany, it just became more paranoid. Mearsheimer argues that it was inevitable that a powerful Germany would try to dominate Europe. However, historians like Margaret MacMillan believe that war could have been avoided had Bismarck still been around. Unfortunately for Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union, they were not allowed to dominate for long. They became victims of their own ambition and this seems to be the main weakness of offensive realism as a survival strategy.

Britain is not a good fit for Mearsheimer's theory. It was never interested in dominating Europe. It controlled 59% of global wealth in 1860 but it never tried to conquer Europe. Mearsheimer claims that the English Channel made invasion too difficult. However, Britain's traditional strategy was to contain potential threats by manipulating either Germany or France. This did not stop Britain from aggressively grabbing territory in parts of the world where it faced little or no opposition.

Mearsheimer claims that Britain was too weak to stop the U.S. from taking over its Caribbean colonies in the 19th century. Apparently, the U.S. resisted the temptation to invade because the British colonies kept slaves. He does not seem aware that Britain ended slavery long before the U.S. The main reason the US did not attack was Britain's navy. For much of the 19th century, the U.S. lacked the military strength to prevent European intervention in the New World. But since European meddling threatened British as well as American interests, the Monroe Doctrine was enforced by the Royal Navy. At the end of the 19th century, America could deploy two battleships to Britain’s forty-four.

Mearsheimer describes the U.S. as the "poster child for offensive realism." Mearsheimer sets out a narrative to explain how American foreign policy developed over the centuries. He argues that it first dominated the Western Hemisphere before extending its reach to Asia and Europe. The invasion of Canada in 1812 and the Monroe Doctrine were part of a plan to dominate the Americas. Once that was achieved the U.S. stopped Japan and Germany from dominating Asia and Europe in the 20th century. The U.S. continued to view the British Empire as a threat and Roosevelt set about dismantling it during WW2. Once WW2 was won, the Soviet Union became America’s new adversary and it maintained forces in Europe to check Soviet expansion, but also to prevent the Europeans from fighting each other.

Mearsheimer argues that the U.S. is often in denial about its behavior and Americans are taught that the U.S. is altruistic and a force for good in the world. Mearsheimer states that “idealist rhetoric provided a proper mask for the brutal policies that underpinned the tremendous growth of American power.” In 1991 the U.S. became the world's only super-power and according to Mearsheimer, its main foreign policy objective was to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival. Following the difficult wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. is less certain of its global role. Mearsheimer claims that America's foreign policy elite is still largely made up of offensive realists, but these days they prefer to keep their views under wraps.

Mearsheimer believes that the rise of China brings a new set of problems. America is facing its first serious economic competitor since it overtook Britain in the 19th century. He predicts that China will pose a threat to U.S. dominance in Asia. Mearsheimer is worried that if nationalists in China continue to pursue a policy of "Asia for the Asians" this will make future conflict inevitable.

I found the book an enjoyable read but Mearsheimer has a surprisingly superficial grasp of world history. However, he does provide a helpful explanation of American foreign policy over the past 200 years. It is clear that the world will always be a dangerous place and America will continue to attract rivals trying to knock it off its pedestal.
44 people found this helpful
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EmQueGeeAye
5.0 out of 5 stars For my son
Reviewed in the United States on March 3, 2024
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I purchased this for my son to have for a college class. It was a suggested reading. I guess so far everything is ok
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Robert Clarke
5.0 out of 5 stars Critical to understand international relations
Reviewed in the United States on July 23, 2023
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This was one hell of a book. John Mearshimer is widely debated among international relations scholars, and even those who dislike him often have to contend that he's been deeply influential.

In "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics" he makes the case for what he calls Offensive Realism, a theoretical framework for understanding how powerful nations have peacefully and military interacted throughout history - and how they will continue to in the future.

In it, he unpacks numerous dense historical examples, compares the results against his theory and those of more traditional realist thought as well as liberal international relations theory, and attempts to make predictions about the future of relations between China and the United States. Nearly a decade old, the book has already made some unsettlingly accurate predictions about the course of the relationship.

For those looking to understand why states like Russia may have chosen to bumble into Ukraine, why China may try to take Taiwan, or why the United States intervenes in so many far flung places, it's a vital read.
3 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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FRED THUM
5.0 out of 5 stars Literatura fundamental
Reviewed in Brazil on May 9, 2023
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Para quem estuda Relações Internacionais, essa é uma obra absolutamente fundamental. Certamente está entre as obras indispensáveis de ler de cabo a rabo para compreender o ambiente internacional.
3 people found this helpful
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Damian Cortes
5.0 out of 5 stars Muy buen producto
Reviewed in Mexico on April 25, 2022
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Librazo, sin duda un clásico en teorías de las relaciones internacionales.
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Gianmario Pisanu
5.0 out of 5 stars No frills. Must read.
Reviewed in Italy on February 9, 2023
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No frills analysis of great powers relationships over the last two centuries. Perfectly current. Must read.
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José B.
5.0 out of 5 stars Un libro muy pertinente con la situación geopolítica actual.
Reviewed in Spain on June 6, 2022
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La vuelta del “realismo” teórico que la realidad en la práctica ha corroborado su vigencia.
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Catherinechueng
5.0 out of 5 stars it is a circle, rising and fall. We ...
Reviewed in Canada on September 20, 2017
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it is a circle, rising and fall. We need to learn how they rise and fall and avoid the traps and mistakes.
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