John Mearsheimer on Power

"Great powers must be forever vigilant and never subordinate survival to any other goal, including prosperity."

"I believe that the existing power structures in Europe and Northeast Asia are not sustainable through 2020."

"China, in short has the potential to be considerably more powerful than even the United States."

"The most dangerous states in the international system are continental powers with large armies."

"States care about relative wealth, because economic might is the foundation of military might."

"A state's potential power is based on the size of its population and the level of its wealth."

"In an ideal world, where there are only good states, power would be largely irrelevant."

"A potential hegemon, as emphasized throughout this book, must be wealthier than any of its regional rivals and must possess the most powerful army in the area."

"Simply put, the most powerful state is the one that prevails in a dispute."

"Preserving power, rather than increasing it, is the main goal of states."

"States have two kinds of power: latent power and military power."

"Offensive realism predicts that the United States will send its army across the Atlantic when there is a potential hegemon in Europe that the local great powers cannot contain by themselves."

"Bandwagoning is a strategy for the weak."

"The liberal tradition has its roots in the Enlightenment, that period in the eighteenth-century Europe when intellectuals and political leaders had a powerful sense that reason could be employed to make the world a better place."

"In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler believed that his great-power rivals would be easy to exploit and isolate because each had little interest in fighting Germany and instead was determined to get someone else to assume the burden. He guessed right."