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Mearsheimer discusses his background, academic interest in international relations & international security issues in particular, his influences, & his offensive realism in the current international context. Mearsheimer spends some energy on Waltz's international relations theory & defends his own theorizing -- ie, his logic of great power action -- in light of some problems in Waltz's thinking. He then offers some remarks on the limits of US power, indicating that its invasion of Iraq was a miscalculation. He also comments on why he adamantly opposed the invasion despite being an offensive realist. Focus turns to Mearsheimer's (1990) prediction that the Cold War will be missed, asserting that it has not happened yet because the US remains in Europe so the European states have not restarted their continental power struggle. He contends that the EU is not a blatant anomaly in his theory & argued that the US should stay out of Europe no matter the consequences. He then spends some time on his idea of the tragedy of great powers, identifying its essence as the security dilemma, which he deems the basic logic of offensive realism, as well as the uncertainty of intentions. D. Edelman

This article is an almost verbatim version of the E.H. Carr Memorial Lecture delivered at Aberystwyth on 14 October 2004. I argue that Carr's central claims in The Twenty Years' Crisis are still relevant today. He maintained in that classic realist work that states are the main actors in world politics and that they are deeply committed to pursuing power at each other's expense. He also argued that British intellectual life in his day was dominated by idealists who largely ignored power politics. Despite the great changes that have taken place in the world since 1939, when The Twenty Years' Crisis was published, states still dominate the international system and they still pay careful attention to the balance of power. Furthermore, idealists now dominate international relations scholarship in Britain, more so than they did in the late 1930s. Indeed, it is hard to find a realist theorist in the contemporary British academy, a situation that would almost surely shock Carr were he alive today. This powerful bias against realism, I argue, is intellectually foolhardy and hurts not only students but the idealist scholars who so dislike realism.

'Does America Need A Foreign Policy?: Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century' by Henry A. Kissinger is reviewed.