John J. Mearsheimer is an American political scientist and international relations scholar who serves as the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He is a leading offensive realist theorist, known for developing offensive realism and for his realist critiques of U.S. foreign policy, particularly its liberal hegemony, interventionism, and favoritism toward Israel. Mearsheimer co-authored, with Stephen Walt, the book 'The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy' (2007), which criticizes the influence of pro-Israel groups such as AIPAC on U.S. policy and critiques neoconservative influence on U.S. Middle East policy.