Academics From The United States

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

"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."

"The sad fact is that international politics has always been a ruthless and dangerous business, and it is likely to remain that way."

"The cycle of violence will continue far into the new millennium. Hopes for peace will probably not be realized, because the great that shape the international system fear each other and compete for power as a result. Indeed, their ultimate aim is to gain a position of dominant power over others, because having dominant power is the best means to ensure one's own survival."

"I've been to China many times, I love going to China, I love the Chinese people and in fact I'm more at home intellectually in China than I am in the west, because the Chinese are basically realists, whereas in the west people are instinctively liberal and they instinctively don't like realism, because it's such a pessimistic way of thinking about the world in past years. [...] When I've gone to China I've often started my Talks by saying it's good to be back among my people, I don't speak a word of Chinese and I feel like I'm a fish out of water culturally, when I'm in China. But intellectually the Chinese are my kind of people, they're realists very interested in theory, I've never gone to any country where people are more interested in international relations theory and talking about the big issues."

"We have a huge amount of evidence that it was nato expansion and the more general policy of making Ukraine a western bulwark on Russia’s border that motivated him to attack on February 24th... For Putin to have said time after time that nato, that Ukraine in nato, was an existential threat to Russia, when in fact it wasn’t, and this was all done to disguise the real motive, which was to incorporate Ukraine into a greater Russia for the purposes of satisfying his imperial ambitions is an argument that is just not supported by the historical record. Putin was very clear, as were all his lieutenants, that their great fear was that Ukraine was becoming a Western bulwark on Russia’s borders. For them, that was an existential threat. It was simply unacceptable."

"For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine's democratically elected and pro-Russian president —which he rightly labeled a "coup"— was the final straw."

"I am surprised that the blacklist did not include the Pope, Henry Kissinger, Noam Chomsky, Jeffrey Sachs, Stephen Walt, Barry Posen, and other prominent figures who have made arguments similar to mine and others already on the list."

"Furthermore there's the whole argument that the administration made, that so many people were killed by chemical weapons. Their number was around 1,400, the fact of the matter is that over 40,000 other people were killed with bombs and bullets, before those 1,400 people. If 40,000 people were killed, and that didn't provide a moral justification for intervention, what's the moral justification for killing people... when 1,400 die with chemical weapons. I don't get it, in fact, I don't think there's a moral case to be made for intervention."

"... after the war, he became a big proponent of the argument that chemical warfare or gas warfare was actually a more humane form of warfare than shrapnel and bombs, because he saw what all those shrapnel and bombs did to all the boys who climbed out of the trenches and tried to cross no man's land, with German machine guns and artillery on the other side, he said I'll take the gas any day. I'm not making the case for gas warfare, but the idea that getting killed by gas is, more horrible than getting ripped apart by shrapnel and bullets is not one I buy. And when I see the Obama administration putting pictures of people killed by gas up on the internet, I say "let's put pictures of the people who got killed by shrapnel up there, and lets have a debate about which pictures look worse". It won't even be an interesting debate, getting killed by shrapnel, in my opinion is a lot more gruesome and a lot worse."

"...If China continues to rise, you better be very careful, because that will drive the United States stark raving crazy...."

"In the anarchic world of international politics, it is better to be Godzilla than Bambi."

"Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and former Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard have been listed by Ukraine among a number of American politicians, academics and activists Kyiv claims have promoted "Russian propaganda."... The list—which also includes retired U.S. Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor, military strategist Edward Luttwak, political scientist John Mearsheimer and journalist Glenn Greenwald—does not explain what the consequences are for those who Ukraine clearly considers responsible for promoting the Kremlin's line.... Mearsheimer is on Ukraine's blacklist for having said NATO provoked Vladimir Putin into war... Mearsheimer... [said] he was disappointed with being listed as a Russian propagandist, while he defended his claim that the war was provoked by the U.S. wanting to accept Ukraine into NATO."

"“Other political scientists work on capillaries. John goes for the jugular”"

"The Great Delusion is a provocative and timely work. But Mearsheimer’s account of the political theories that underpin liberal hegemony is confused and in some respects plainly wrong, while the prospect of American policymakers converging on a consistently realist approach to foreign relations seems remote. One difficulty is that Mearsheimer bases his argument for realism on a misconceived dichotomy. For him, liberalism comes in two versions: progressive liberalism, which favours active government intervention in order to promote positive rights to welfare alongside negative freedoms from censorship and the like, and modus vivendi liberalism, which focuses on the protection of these negative freedoms above all else. Progressive liberals to have come to prominence over the past fifty years ‘include Ronald Dworkin, Francis Fukuyama, Steven Pinker, and John Rawls’. Modus vivendi liberals of recent times, Mearsheimer tells us, include myself and the American political theorist Stephen Holmes. In a longer time frame, ‘John Locke is a quintessential modus vivendi liberal, as are Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek.’ It is flattering to be included in such distinguished company, but Mearsheimer’s analysis reflects a fundamental misunderstanding. No political theorist of whom I am aware would represent Locke, still less Hayek, as a theorist of modus vivendi liberalism. Both were classical liberals who prioritised negative freedom from coercion by the state over other freedoms and values. The progressive liberals Mearsheimer cites hold to a more positive conception of freedom that includes endowing people with the capacities needed for effective action. Such liberals recognise important rights to equality and welfare. Modus vivendi liberals do not fit into this dichotomy since they are ready to promote both positive and negative liberties if they can be shown to help individuals and communities with different beliefs and values to coexist productively in society. The canonical thinker of modus vivendi liberalism is not Locke but Hobbes, for whom all rights, other than the right to avoid a violent death, are subject to the overriding imperative of peace. Such a misunderstanding might not seem too damaging to Mearsheimer’s argument for realism, but it is not without consequences. Mearsheimer suggests that modus vivendi liberalism might offer a template for the kind of realist foreign policy he favours. Yet Lockean liberalism, which he invokes in support of his argument, sits uneasily with realism because Lockean rights are universal. For classical liberals as for progressive liberals, only one kind of regime can be fully legitimate: one that respects human rights, however defined. All other regimes are at best approximations of this ideal. Because its principles are supposed to be universally authoritative, Lockean theory has a built-in bias in favour of liberal hegemony. It is easy to move from the belief that liberal regimes are everywhere the best to the belief that existing liberal regimes have a duty to promote similar regimes throughout the world. (Modus vivendi liberals, by contrast, reject the idea that any regime could be the best for everyone.) Classical liberals have an inherent tendency to support what is now called liberal interventionism."

"I think that nuclear war is most likely if the Russians are losing. If the Russians are losing, if the Ukrainian military is rolling up Russian forces in eastern and southern Ukraine, and the sanctions are working and the Russians are on the verge of being knocked out of the ranks of the great powers, in that situation I think it's likely that the Russians would turn to nuclear weapons, and they would use those nuclear weapons in Ukraine. They would not dare use them against NATO, but they would turn to nuclear weapons. I think, given the fact that the Russians are not losing and, if anything, are winning, therefore the likelihood of nuclear war is greatly reduced. I don't want to say it's been taken off the table for one second, but I think as long as the Russians are on the upside of the battle, not on the downside, the likelihood of nuclear use is very low."

"The Russians are bent on keeping the territory that they have now conquered, and I believe the Russians are intent on conquering more country, more of Ukraine. The Russians want to make sure that Ukraine ends up as a dysfunctional rump state and cannot become a viable member of NATO at any time in the future. So, I think that what the Russians will end up doing is cleaving off a huge chunk of Ukrainian territory, and then going to great lengths to keep Ukraine in a terrible—both economic and political—situation. They'll do everything they can to continue strangling the Ukrainian economy, because they do not want Ukraine to be in a position where it becomes a viable member of the Western alliance."

"People in the West don't want to hear it, but it is true that the Russians were desperate to avoid a conflict. The idea that Putin was chomping at the bit to invade Ukraine so he could make it part of Greater Russia, it's just not a serious argument. The Russians did not want a war, and they did, I believe, everything possible to avoid a war. They just couldn't get the Americans to play ball with them. The Americans were unwilling to negotiate in a serious way. Period. End of story."

"The strategically wise strategy for Ukraine is to break off its close relations with the West, especially with the United States, and try to accommodate the Russians. If there had been no decision to move nato eastward to include Ukraine, Crimea and the Donbass would be part of Ukraine today, and there would be no war in Ukraine."

"If Russia thinks that Ukraine presents an existential threat to Russia because it is aligning with the United States and its West European allies, this is going to cause an enormous amount of damage to Ukraine. That of course is exactly what’s happening now."

"My argument is that... {Vladimir Putin]... not going to re-create the Soviet Union or try to build a greater Russia, that he’s not interested in conquering and integrating Ukraine into Russia. It’s very important to understand that we invented this story that Putin is highly aggressive and he’s principally responsible for this crisis in Ukraine."

"We invented this story that Russia was bent on aggression in Eastern Europe.... This is a story that we invented so that we could blame him (Vladimir Putin). My argument is that the West, especially the United States, is principally responsible for this disaster. But no American policymaker, and hardly anywhere in the American foreign-policy establishment, is going to want to acknowledge that line of argument, and they will say that the Russians are responsible."

"With Ukraine, it’s very important to understand that, up until 2014, we did not envision NATO expansion and E.U. expansion as a policy that was aimed at containing Russia. Nobody seriously thought that Russia was a threat before February 22, 2014."

"We overthrew democratically elected leaders in the Western hemisphere during the Cold War because we were unhappy with their policies. This is the way great powers behave... We went around the world trying to create liberal democracies. Our main focus, of course, was in the greater Middle East, and you know how well that worked out. Not very well."

"When you’re a country like Ukraine and you live next door to a great power like Russia, you have to pay careful attention to what the Russians think, because if you take a stick and you poke them in the eye, they’re going to retaliate. States in the Western hemisphere understand this full well with regard to the United States."

"If Ukraine becomes a pro-American liberal democracy, and a member of NATO, and a member of the E.U., the Russians will consider that categorically unacceptable."

"Nevertheless, what has happened with the passage of time is that we have moved forward to include Ukraine in the West to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. Of course, this includes more than just NATO expansion. NATO expansion is the heart of the strategy, but it includes E.U. expansion as well, and it includes turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy, and, from a Russian perspective, this is an existential threat."

"I think all the trouble in this case really started in April, 2008, at the NATO Summit in Bucharest, where afterward NATO issued a statement that said Ukraine and Georgia would become part of NATO. The Russians made it unequivocally clear at the time that they viewed this as an existential threat, and they drew a line in the sand."

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

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

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

"The optimists' claim that security competition and war among the great powers has been burned out of the system is wrong. In fact all of the major states around the globe still care deeply about the balance of power among themselves for the foreseeable future."

"In short, unbalanced bipolar systems are so unstable that they cannot last for any appreciable period of time."

"When World War II started on September 1, 1939, the German army contained 3.74 million soldiers and 103 divisions."

"The grand old Book of God still stands; and this old earth, the more its leaves are turned over and pondered, the more it will sustain and illustrate the Sacred word."

"Never underestimate the power of the mind to disempower."

"We see, we feel, we change."

"A culture truly changes only when a new way of operating has been shown to succeed over some minimum period of time."

"In a change effort, culture comes last, not first."

"We keep a change in place by helping to create a new, supportive, and sufficiently strong organizational culture."

"Valued achievements connect to people at a deeper level—and a deeper level can change behavior that is generally very difficult to change."

"The rate of change in the business world is not going to slow down anytime soon. If anything, competition in most industries will probably speed up over the next few decades. Enterprises everywhere will be presented with even more terrible hazards and wonderful opportunities, driven by the globalization of the economy along with related technological and social trends"

"One of the most powerful forms of information is feedback on our own actions."

"Without conviction that you can make change happen, you will not act, even if you see the vision. Your feelings will hold you back."

"Great vision communication usually means heartfelt messages are coming from real human beings."

"Good communication is not just data transfer. You need to show people something that addresses their anxieties, that accepts their anger, that is credible in a very gut-level sense, and that evokes faith in the vision."

"Never underestimate the power of a good story."

"No vision issue today is bigger than the question of efficiency versus some combination of innovation and customer service."

"Budgeting is a math exercise, number crunching. Planning is a logical, linear process. Strategizing requires a great deal of information about customers and competitors, along with conceptual skills. Visioning uses a very different part of the brain than budgeting. As the name implies, it involves trying to see possible futures. It inevitably has both a creative and emotional component (e.g., “How do we feel about the options?”). When you use “orthodox planning” to create a vision, frustration and failure are inevitable."

"Motivation is not a thinking word; it’s a feeling word."