John Mearsheimer: belief

Transcript context

…So geography still has a role to play in the 21st century? Oh, yeah. I think geography’s very important. Big bodies of water really matter. In an ideal world, you’d like to have the Pacific Ocean between you and any potential adversary. 6,000 miles of water, hard to get across. If you’re a country and I’m a country and there’s land between us, I can take my Panzer divisions and I can go right across the land and get into your country or attack your country. And you of course can take your Panzer divisions and come across that same piece of land. But if there’s a big body of water between us, your Panzer divisions can’t go across the water and then the question is how do you get them across the water? And that’s very tricky. And in a world where we have lots of submarines and you have lots of aircraft and you have missiles that are land-based that can hit those surface ships, it is very, very hard to attack across a body of water. And all you have to do is think about the American invasion of Normandy, June 6th, 1944, coming in on Omaha Beach. Oh, boy. That was really difficult. But there is a growing asymmetry of military power there that even though it’s difficult-…

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