John J. Mearsheimer
In an anarchic world with no global authority, great powers are trapped in a relentless, ruthless struggle to maximize military might and achieve regional dominance to guarantee their own survival.
The absence of a central global authority compels states to view one another with suspicion, making survival the primary objective and power maximization the only rational strategy.
A state's actual military capability is fundamentally derived from its latent power, which consists of its overall population size and its mobilizable economic wealth.
Large bodies of water severely restrict the projection of land armies, making true global hegemony impossible and incentivizing great powers to dominate only their immediate geographic region.