In international relations

International relations

International relations is the study of relationships between countries, including the roles of states, inter-governmental organizations , international nongovernmental organizations , non-governmental organizations and multinational corporations...

, offensive realism is a variant of political realism. Like realism, offensive realism regards states as the primary actors in international relations. However, offensive realism adds several additional assumptions to the framework of structural realism. John Mearsheimer

John Mearsheimer

John J. Mearsheimer is an American professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He is an international relations theorist. Known for his book on offensive realism, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, more recently Mearsheimer has attracted attention for co-authoring and publishing...

 developed this theory in his book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics is a book by the American scholar John Mearsheimer on the subject of international relations theory. In the book, Mearsheimer lays out the theory of offensive realism, showing its key assumptions, evolution from early realist theory, and providing some...

.

Theory

Offensive realism is a structural theory which, unlike the classical realism of Morgenthau

Hans Morgenthau

Hans Joachim Morgenthau was one of the leading twentieth-century figures in the study of international politics...

, blames security conflict on the anarchy

Anarchy

Anarchy , has more than one colloquial definition. In the United States, the term "anarchy" typically is meant to refer to a society which lacks publicly recognized government or violently enforced political authority...

 of the international system, not on human nature

Human nature

Human nature refers to the distinguishing characteristics, including ways of thinking, feeling and acting, that humans tend to have naturally....

 or particular characteristics of individual great powers. In contrast to other structural realist theories, offensive realism believes that states are not satisfied with a given amount of power

Power in international relations

Power in international relations is defined in several different ways. Political scientists, historians, and practitioners of international relations have used the following concepts of political power:...

, but seek hegemony

Hegemony

Hegemony is an indirect form of imperial dominance in which the hegemon rules sub-ordinate states by the implied means of power rather than direct military force. In Ancient Greece , hegemony denoted the politico–military dominance of a city-state over other city-states...

 (maximization of their share of world power) for security and survival.

John Mearsheimer

John Mearsheimer

John J. Mearsheimer is an American professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He is an international relations theorist. Known for his book on offensive realism, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, more recently Mearsheimer has attracted attention for co-authoring and publishing...

 summed this view up in his book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics:
This behavior is known as "power maximization." In this world there is no such thing as a status quo

Status quo

Statu quo, a commonly used form of the original Latin "statu quo" – literally "the state in which" – is a Latin term meaning the current or existing state of affairs. To maintain the status quo is to keep the things the way they presently are...

power, since according to Mearsheimer:
States fear one another, as they assume that the other state intentions are not benevolent. The states have various goals, but survival is the most important one. Whenever states cooperate, such initiatives are doomed to be unsuccessful or short-lived, as the fear of one another, desire for hegemony and security, driven by the need to survival, create fatal tensions.

As John Mearsheimer has been quoted in explaining, Offensive Realism follows from a core of assumptions from basic Realism. These are:

1. The international system is anarchical
   Anarchy
   Anarchy , has more than one colloquial definition. In the United States, the term "anarchy" typically is meant to refer to a society which lacks publicly recognized government or violently enforced political authority...
   
   
2. States are rational
   Rationalism
   In epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification" . In more technical terms, it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive"...
   
   
3. States have survival as their primary goal
4. All states possess some offensive military
   Military
   A military is an organization authorized by its greater society to use lethal force, usually including use of weapons, in defending its country by combating actual or perceived threats. The military may have additional functions of use to its greater society, such as advancing a political agenda e.g...
   
    capability
5. States can never be certain of the intentions of other states (i.e. all states are security seeking)

Offensive realism also dismisses democratic peace theory

Democratic peace theory

Democratic peace theory is the theory that democracies don't go to war with each other. How well the theory matches reality depends a great deal on one's definition of "democracy" and "war"...

, which claims that democracies—specifically, liberal democracies

Liberal democracy

Liberal democracy, also known as constitutional democracy, is a common form of representative democracy. According to the principles of liberal democracy, elections should be free and fair, and the political process should be competitive...

—never or rarely go to war with one another.

Criticisms

Political scientists whose primary focus is bargaining models of international conflict note that Mearsheimer's offensive realism ignores the fact that war is costly. Since those costs in turn make war inefficient, states (even those who do not have hegemony) have incentive to construct bargained settlements. For instance, in a bipolar world with a 70%/30% power breakdown, states would prefer a corresponding 70%/30% breakdown in resources rather than having some of those resources destroyed over the course of fighting. Due to this inefficiency--war's inefficiency puzzle

War's inefficiency puzzle

War’s inefficiency puzzle is a research question asking why unitary-actor states would choose to fight wars when doing so is costly. James Fearon’s Rationalist Explanations for War and Robert Powell's In the Shadow of Power, which launched rational choice theory in international relations, provide...

--the constant fighting Mearsheimer proposes would actually make states less secure because the repeated costs of fighting eventually deplete all of that state's power.