he still believed that his predictions would come true if the US military left Europe. Also, in op-ed pieces written in 1998 and 2000 for The New York Times, Mearsheimer explains why it makes sense for India to pursue nuclear weapons. He argues that India has good strategic reasons to want a nuclear deterrent, especially to balance against China and Pakistan and to guarantee regional stability. He also criticized the American counterproliferation policy towards India, which he considers to be unrealistic and harmful to American interests in the region. International institutions In a widely cited 1994 article, "The False Promise of International Institutions," Mearsheimer tackles popular arguments about the ability of institutions to discourage war and promote peace among states. He recognizes that states often find institutions to be useful, but the imperative of relentless security competition under anarchy means that state behavior is primarily a function of the distribution of power in the international system. Institutions, at best, are "merely an intervening variable in the process" (p. 13). Mearsheimer maintains that "institutionalist theories" offered poor alternatives to this grim picture of international politics. In particular, influential neoliberal institutionalist arguments ignore relative-gains concerns as a barrier to cooperation and fail to provide evidence that instances of cooperation, which are commonly attributed to institutions, would not have taken place in their absence. Other theories such as collective security theory and critical theory likewise fell short on logical and empirical grounds. In a response article, the prominent neoliberal institutionalist scholars Robert Keohane and Lisa Martin acknowledge that seminal institutionalist works tended to neglect the problem of relative gains but maintain that the debate spawned by realist challenges "has made distributional and bargaining issues more salient than they were in early neoliberal thinking" (p. 45). Mearsheimer charges that "a careful look at Keohane and Martin's response reveals that liberal institutionalism in its latest form is no longer a clear alternative to realism, but has, in fact, been swallowed up by it." Offensive realism Mearsheimer is the leading proponent of offensive realism. The structural theory, unlike the classical realism of Hans Morgenthau, places the principal emphasis on security competition among great powers within the anarchy of the international system, not on the human nature of statesmen and diplomats. In contrast to another structural realist theory, the defensive realism of Kenneth Waltz, offensive realism maintains that states are not satisfied with a given amount of