In this video, Professor John Mearsheimer explains the causes and course of the Korean War and why the conflict changed fundamentally in the fall of 1950. What began as a war on the Korean Peninsula increasingly became a direct confrontation between the United States and China.
Mearsheimer examines why North Korea invaded, why the U.S. intervened and what ultimately led China to enter the war. What strategic interests drove these decisions — and why does this conflict still shape the Korean Peninsula today?
This video was produced by John Mearsheimer and published on his YouTube channel on the 7th of October, 2026. We have translated it into German and are republishing it today to help build opinion on this issue in Germany and beyond.
To read the transcript of the interview: The Korean War: America vs China | Prof. Mearsheimer
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John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982. He graduated from West Point in 1970 and then served five years as an officer in the U.S. Air Force. He then started graduate school in political science at Cornell University in 1975. He received his Ph.D. in 1980. He spent the 1979-1980 academic year as a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, and was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs from 1980 to 1982. During the 1998-1999 academic year, he was the Whitney H. Shepardson Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
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