John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He is on the Advisory Council of The National Interest, and his most recent book, Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics, was published in January 2011 by Oxford University Press.

¹ Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest (Summer 1989).

² Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs 70, no. 1 (1990/1991).

³ Ian S. Lustick, Our Own Strength Against Us: The War on Terror as a Self-Inflicted Disaster (Oakland, CA: The Independent Institute, 2008).

⁴ Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, September 2004); John Zogby and James Zogby, “Impressions of America 2004: How Arabs View America; How Arabs Learn about America” (Washington, DC: Zogby International, 2004).

⁵ Andrew Enterline and J. Michael Greig, “The History of Imposed Democracy and the Future of Iraq and Afghanistan,” Foreign Policy Analysis 4, no. 4(October 2008). In an examination of forty-three cases of imposed democratic regimes between 1800 and 1994, it was found that 63 percent failed.

⁶ Jeffrey Pickering and Mark Peceny, “Forging Democracy at Gunpoint,” International Studies Quarterly 50, no. 3 (September 2006).

⁷ Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).