Conversations in International Relations: Interview with John J. Mearsheimer (Part I)
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117806060939 |
| Published date | 01 March 2006 |
| Date | 01 March 2006 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
International Relations Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), Vol 20(1): 105–123
[DOI: 10.1177/0047117806060939]
Conversations in International Relations:
Interview with John J. Mearsheimer (Part I)
Editor’s Introduction
This is an edited and shortened version of an interview between Professor
Mearsheimer, and, for International Relations, Professor Ken Booth, Professor
Nicholas J. Wheeler, and Professor Michael Williams. It was held in the Department
of International Politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, on 14 October 2004.
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. He was born
in Brooklyn, New York, during the second year of the famous baby boom (1947).
When he was eight, his family moved to the suburbs of New York (Westchester
County). He was an enlisted man in the US Army from 1965 to 1966, and then
entered West Point; he graduated in 1970. After serving five years as an officer in
the US Air Force, he started graduate school at Cornell University (1975), where he
studied with Peter Katzenstein, George Quester, and Richard Rosecrance. He spent
the 1979–80 academic year as a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, and
was a postdoctoral fellow from 1980 to 1982 in a security studies program that
Samuel Huntington had just established at Harvard University.
Mearsheimer has published three books: Conventional Deterrence (1983),
which won the Edgar S. Furniss, Jr., Book Award; Liddell Hart and the Weight of
History (1988); and The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), which won the
Joseph Lepgold Book Prize. He has also written many articles for academic
journals like International Security and popular magazines like The Atlantic
Monthly, as well as Op-Eds for the New York Times.
Finally, Mearsheimer received the Clark Award for Distinguished Teaching
when he was a graduate student at Cornell in 1977, and 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 (1993–4). In that capacity, he gave
talks at eight universities. In 2003, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences.
IR Please tell us how you got interested in the subject?
JM For reasons that are hard to divine, I was fascinated with international
security issues – like deterrence theory – from the moment I was first exposed to
them.
IR Was that because you had been in the Air Force?
JM No. I first became interested in international relations when I was a junior at
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i
West Point. I had little interest in the subject before that, but then I took a political
science course that captured my fancy. I took more courses and discovered that I
had a real passion for it, especially the international security. I decided that after
graduation I would go to great lengths to attend graduate school and get a Ph.D. But
I never thought of becoming a professor. I never saw myself writing articles and
books. I was remarkably naive at the time. The main reason that I wanted to go to
graduate school was because I really loved learning about international politics, not
because I wanted to become a professional political scientist.
IR When you went to West Point were you originally thinking of a career in the
military?
JM No. I actually had no interest in going to West Point. In fact, I always
disliked the military: not for philosophical reasons, but for constitutional reasons. I
hate shaving. I hate sleeping in the woods. I hate uniforms. I hate guns. I hate
authority. So there was nothing about the military that attracted me. In other words,
I didn’t dislike the military because I was a pacifist; I just didn’t like the trappings
of military life. The main reason I ended up at West Point was because my father
really wanted me to go there and he was a powerful force in my life. My father grew
up in New York City during the Depression of the 1930s. His main goal as a young-
ster was to go to West Point, but he could not get in because he had bad eyesight. It
was a bitter disappointment to him; afterwards, he lived vicariously through his
children. I have a sister who went to West Point and a brother who went to the Naval
Academy. So, three out of his five children are service academy graduates. I was his
oldest child and he was determined that I would go to West Point.
IR Did he regard you as a failure when you became a professor?
JM I don’t think my father was deeply concerned about me having an illustrious
military career. He was just deeply concerned with seeing me graduate from West
Point. Once I graduated, I had achieved his dream. I think he would have been very
happy if I had been a successful military officer but for the reasons I elaborated on
earlier, I don’t think it was on the cards.
Both my father and mother are proud of my accomplishments as a professor, and
they certainly don’t consider me a failure for becoming a scholar. But, like most
people outside of academia, they find it difficult to understand what professors do
for a living. For the most part they think our principal mission is to teach; and of
course teaching is a very important part of our job. But research is the other half;
and I would argue that for scholars like us it is clearly the more important half. It is,
however, the part of our job that outsiders – including my parents – find the most
difficult to comprehend. They have trouble understanding that it is of enormous
importance for us to sit around for endless hours just thinking about ideas and then
writing them up in articles and books. They certainly cannot grasp the difficulty of
the enterprise. And when you tell them that you have only one or two courses to
106 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 20(1)
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