to possess to ensure its security and the issuing of strategy states pursue to meet this satisfactory level of security. Ultimately, Mearsheimer's offensive neorealism draws a much more pessimistic picture of international politics characterised by dangerous inter-state security competition likely leading to conflict and war. Status quo v. power-maximizing states John Mearsheimer's offensive neorealism intends to fix the "status quo bias" of Kenneth Waltz's defensive neorealism. While both neorealist variants argue that states are primarily concerned with maximising their security, they disagree over the amount of power required in the process. To the contrary of defensive neorealism according to which states are status quo powers seeking only to preserve their respective positions in the international system by maintaining the prevailing balance of power, offensive neorealism claims that states are in fact power-maximising revisionists harbouring aggressive intentions. Indeed, in offensive neorealism, the international system provides great powers with strong incentives to resort to offensive action in order to increase their security and assure their survival. The international system characterised by anarchy (the absence of a central authority capable of enforcing rules and punishing aggressors) and uncertainty as to state intentions and available offensive military capabilities leads states to constantly fear each other and resort to self-help mechanisms to provide for their survival. In order to alleviate this fear of aggression each holds of the other, states always seek to maximise their own relative power, defined in terms of material capabilities. As Mearsheimer puts it: "they look for opportunities to alter the balance of power by acquiring additional increments of power at the expense of potential rivals", since "the greater the military advantage one state has over other states, the more secure it is". States seek to increase their military strength to the detriment of other states within the system with hegemony—being the only great power in the state system—as their ultimate goal. John Mearsheimer summed up this view as follows: "great powers recognize that the best way to ensure their security is to achieve hegemony now, thus eliminating any possibility of a challenge by another great power. Only a misguided state would pass up an opportunity to be the hegemon in the system because it thought it already had sufficient power to survive." Accordingly, offensive neorealists such as Mearsheimer believe that a state's best strategy to increase its relative power to the point of achieving hegemony is to rely on offensive