Prof. John Mearsheimer on Israel-Gaza, Escalation Risks, Ukraine War, & More
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, President Joe Biden delivered a fiery, impassioned, angry speech today about the sacred virtues of American democracy and the sinister menace posed to all of that by someone named Donald Trump.
Biden depicted himself and his party as the sole guardians of American democracy and even compared Trump to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis explicitly.
Democratic operatives oozed with emotion and inspiration upon hearing this speech.
The New York Times gave it a big thumbs up in its news article proclaiming that Biden was spirited in his speech and they were thrilled that Biden had made this the centerpiece of his campaign going into 2024.
There's just one small problem with this claim.
Biden and the Democrats are the very same people currently trying to ban their principal political opponent from appearing on the ballot.
They're the same people trying to imprison their principal political opponent.
They're the same people who were found by four separate federal judges, one district court judge and three appellate court judges last year, to have committed one of the gravest violations of the First Amendment free speech clause in years by using the CIA, FBI, CDC, and other agencies to coerce Big Tech to purge the internet of dissent from their policies.
And they're the same people who are trying to ban even members of their own political party, Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson, from launching a primary challenge to Biden by refusing to even permit debate.
And they're even acting to strike all those primary challengers from the ballot so that Biden is the only one people can vote for.
We have heard it said before, like everybody, that it is sometimes necessary to burn the village in order to save it.
But generally, we don't accept that logic.
And I don't think we ought to accept the notion that Democrats are engaging in classic anti-authoritarian, rather classic authoritarian and anti-democratic measures like this, all because doing so is necessary to save democracy.
Well, look at Joe Biden's speech and these obvious Absurdities.
Then, University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer has definitely been among the most prescient scholars on issues of war and foreign policy over the last several decades, if not the single most prescient.
Virtually everything he warned about what happened at the start of the U.S.
role in the war in Ukraine has come to pass, even though he was, needless to say, repeatedly smeared as a Kremlin agent and Putin apologist along the way.
In 2006, along with Harvard professor Stephen Walt, he wrote the definitive account of the power of the Israel lobby, in the book bearing that name, and was, needless to say, wildly smeared as an anti-Semite.
Professor Mearsheimer has a new article this week that analyzes the formal complaint filed against Israel by South Africa at the court of the International Court of Justice, which alleges that Israel is guilty of war crimes in Gaza.
We'll talk to Meir Scheimer about all matters relating to this US-funded war in Gaza, including the risk of regional escalation, which we covered extensively on our show last night, as well as the latest developments in the war in Ukraine and other aspects of US foreign policy as we head into the 2024 Election.
Our discussions with Professor Mearsheimer are always among our most watched episodes, and for good reason.
Few people think as independently, as informatively, and it turns out, as accurately as he does.
Before we get to our show, a few programming notes.
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We're just about done with an article I've been promising for several days about conservative politics and the U.S.
funding of the war in Israel and the various speech and censorship debates that have arisen since October 7th.
That article should come within the next few hours, which will be published on our Locals platform.
And it's really the way that we Well, we depend upon to support the independent journalism that we're trying to do here.
Simply click the Join button right below the video player on their own page and it will take you directly there.
As a final programming note, I think I mentioned this before on this show, certainly I did on the live show, there will be a debate tomorrow night that starts at 7 p.m.
Eastern that is sponsored by the website Zero Hedge that is about January 6th.
Tomorrow is January 6th.
It will be a debate about January 6th, whether it really rose to the level of an insurrection, whether President Trump is responsible, and all the other matters relating to January 6th, including the FBI's role in it.
Originally, I was scheduled to go to Austin, Texas, in order to participate there due to some logistical reasons.
That didn't work out.
I will be participating remotely.
Joining that debate on the side of the debate that I'm on is Darren Beattie, the former Trump speechwriter who is also a professor at Duke and has been on our show many times, as well as Alex Jones.
So it will be Alex Jones, myself, Darren Beattie on one side.
The other side, the side that essentially defends the Democratic Party, says January 6th.
It's this horrific, historic insurrection.
Will be the YouTuber Destiny and then the Krasenstein Brothers.
I guess what I want to say about Zero Hedge is that I really like what they're doing in trying to create debates of people who are genuinely on opposite sides.
A lot of times debates take place with people who mostly agree on everything except for small little details that are nibbling around the edges.
And the debates are intended to be formal and controlled.
So it's not a circus.
It's not people screaming over each other.
It'll be moderated by somebody, I believe, from the Tim Pool program.
So we're going to stream it on our show live on our Rumble channel as ZeroHedge will also be streaming it on theirs.
Others may be streaming it there.
So I think it'll be, at the very least, a spirited debate.
I think it'll be illuminating and substantive.
I'm confident that there is an attempt to make this debate truly about not only January 6th, but about the real issues underlying the debate that we have been having and will continue to have throughout this election year about that date.
And so I really encourage you, if you have interest, to watch it live.
It'll be on our site afterwards as well, so you can watch it that way as well.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
The President of the United States, Joe Biden, delivered a speech today, which obviously was intended to have this feel of something quite profound.
It was about American democracy and the threats that it is under.
And those threats, according to Joe Biden, unsurprisingly come not from his party or from his administration or his presidency, but rather from Donald Trump and Donald Trump's movement.
It was interesting that he actually didn't suggest that the threat to democracy comes from Nikki Haley or even Ron DeSantis.
Instead, his focus was Donald Trump, to whom he compared to Adolf Hitler and to Nazis.
And this is clearly intended in part to be a preview of the theme of Joe Biden's candidacy that you may think his brain is melting.
You may think the economy is in shambles.
You may think that he's supporting a genocide and Nazi battalions in Ukraine.
But he wants to tell you that as much as you hate Joe Biden, as much as polls show that people don't trust him or have faith in his competence, that basically he's running against Hitler.
That's what American politics in so many ways has been reduced to, is just everybody running around calling each other racist and bigots and Hitler.
We actually prepared a montage from two weeks ago of how every time there's a new war to fight or a potential new war to fight, the leaders of the countries or the groups that the media and the government want you to hate instantly get compared to Adolf Hitler.
And then you have two choices.
You either support the war and you get to be Winston Churchill, brave and steadfast and saving Western democracy from the Nazis, or You'll be condemned if you oppose this new war as being Neville Chamberlain, an appeaser, or even worse, a Nazi sympathizer.
And this is what every side now does.
Obviously people who oppose the U.S.
war in Ukraine were accused of appeasement, accused of being on the side of the Russians.
Putin was accused of being a Hitler figure, which means that anybody who didn't want to go to war against Putin was Neville Chamberlain or even a Nazi sympathizer.
And now, constantly with the war in Israel and Gaza, if you don't support the U.S.
funding of Israel, it means that you're a Nazi as well, because you're probably anti-Semitic, don't like Jews.
That's the only possible reason why you might not support what the Israelis are doing in Gaza.
So the narrative goes, just basically everybody running around calling each other Hitler, calling each other racists and bigots and Nazis.
That's what American political rhetoric has been reduced to.
So this speech was really designed to set that tone, obviously coming one day before January 6.
It's intended to exploit the emotions of January 6, to try and imply or suggest or outright state that we only have two alternatives as Americans.
We either vote for Joe Biden, So let's take a look at a couple of the lowlights or highlights or the most revealing parts to give you a sense for what Joe Biden said.
They apparently did something to make him extra angry and energetic today.
Here's part of what he said.
1,200 people have been charged with assault on the Capitol.
Nearly 900 of them have been convicted or pled guilty.
Collectively, to date, they have been sentenced to more than 840 years in prison.
What's Trump done?
Instead of calling them criminals, He's called these insurrectionists patriots.
Now, let me just stop and say there that of the vast majority of people who have been convicted in connection with January 6 and sent to prison are not even alleged to have engaged in violence, not even alleged to have used violence.
These are nonviolent protesters.
The vast majority, obviously violence was used on January 6 by some of the people who were present.
A lot of them assaulted police officers, but the vast majority of them aren't even accused of engaging in violence.
And now that we got to see all of the video, instead of just the video handpicked by Adam Schiff and Liz Cheney, now that we got to see all of the video, we see that people, a lot of them, entered the Capitol because the police were directing them into the Capitol and they were acting peacefully.
Remember the Q Shaman, who we saw march around, speaking to everybody, sitting on the floor, never engaging in violence, was sentenced to almost four years in prison on top of the nine months that he served, even though he was never accused of violence.
The media and the Democrats invented lies about what happened on January 6th to make it seem worse than it was.
Remember they went around saying that The protesters in defense of Trump murdered a Capitol Hill police officer by bashing his head in with a fire extinguisher.
They said that over and over and over.
It turned out to be an absolute lie.
And the reason they invented so many fabrications is similar to the reason there were so many fabrications about October 7th in Israel.
Dozens of babies beheaded, babies baked in ovens, babies cut out of the womb of their mother's stomach, all of which were debunked by Haaretz and other Israeli newspapers, none of which turned out to be true.
There was one baby killed on October 7th.
Obviously, there were a lot of terrible things that happened on October 7th by Hamas and Israel, just like there were people who used violence on January 6th, and those people who used violence should, of course, be prosecuted.
But when you have to lie about an event to make it worse, it's usually because you're trying to propagandize the public about it.
The only people who died on January 6th, there were a grand total of four of them.
All four of whom were Trump supporters.
Two of whom dropped out of a heart attack.
One of whom dropped out of a speed overdose.
And then the fourth, Ashley Babbitt, who was shot and killed at point-blank range by a Capitol Hill police officer.
Nobody died on January 6th at the Capitol except for those four Trump supporters.
Brian Sicknick died the following day.
He called his parents at night, spoke to them, told his mother he was fine.
And he died the next day of what the coroner ruled was natural causes.
He did not have his head bashed in by a fire extinguisher.
This is a complete lie.
And the vast majority of people that Biden is talking about here are people who did not engage in violence.
They're patriots.
And he promised to pardon them if he returns to office.
Trump said that there was a lot of love on January the 6th.
The rest of the nation, including law enforcement, saw a lot of hate and violence.
One Capitol Police officer called it a medieval battle.
That may be true, he might have said that.
vile rape was called vile racist names he said he was more afraid in the capital of the united states of america in the chambers than when he was fighting as a soldier in the war in iraq he was more afraid inside the halls of congress than fighting in war in iraq that may be true he might have said that but if he did it's pathetic not a single
one of the protesters on january 6th wielded a weapon inside the capital not one let alone discharged a weapon Thank you.
The only one who discharged weapons were the Capitol Hill Police, and the only one who was shot was Ashley Babbitt.
Now there was some terrible assault on some of the police officers there.
I don't think the Capitol Hill Police Force is particularly accustomed to engaging in physical confrontation.
They don't seem to be a very skilled or well-fit fighting force, that's for sure.
So I'm sure it was unpleasant for them.
A couple of them committed suicide later on.
Who knows why suicide is very difficult to assess.
But the reality is that the vast, vast majority of people sentenced for January 6th did not commit violence.
And the only people who died on January 6th, despite the lies repeatedly told by the media in the most melodramatic and manipulative ways, were Trump supporters.
Here is a second segment from our president speaking in a very animated way for him about American democracy and the risks it faces.
Echoing the same exact language used in Nazi Germany, he proudly posts on social media the words that best describe his 2024 campaign, quote, revenge, quote, power, and quote, dictatorship.
There's no confusion about who Trump is, what he intends to do.
No, I think actually that what Biden's saying there is true.
There's no confusion about who Trump is.
And the reason this is such a difficult strategy for Joe Biden, of course he wants to make the election about Donald Trump.
The last thing you want to do is make it about Joe Biden.
No one likes Joe Biden or very few Americans like Joe Biden.
The only chance they have is to try and say that Trump is a Hitler figure.
The problem they have is that Trump was actually already president for four years.
People watched as he did not build death camps.
He did not haul minorities into prisons.
Other than Julian Assange, who is now being prosecuted by the Biden administration, his administration did not imprison journalists or critics of his administration or dissidents.
None of this happened.
The other irony of all of this is that Joe Biden is actually the president who has spent the last 18 months, almost two years now, arming actual Nazis in Ukraine.
How many shows have we done documenting the very pervasive Neo-Nazi ideology that governs the Ukrainians most devoted fighters, the Azov battalion and all those people who appear using Nazi insignia.
Those are the actual Nazis and those are the people that Joe Biden has been arming with lethal weapons for two years now.
That is the Democratic Party.
They see critics of the Democratic Party and they scream Nazi and Hitler.
But then they meet real Nazis, like the real deal in Ukraine, and they say, oh, let's arm these people.
And that's what the Biden administration has done.
Until Israel, that was the most significant foreign policy of the Biden administration is flooding that country filled with Fans of the SS.
Remember when the Canadian Parliament wanted to honour a Ukrainian Canadian who fought in World War II against Russia.
They ended up quite embarrassed because like so many of them it turned out that he was an actual SS fighter.
Now here is Jon Favreau, who's the former Obama speechwriter, so he was the one who wrote Obama speeches.
He's now the host of the popular Among Democrats podcast, Pod Save America, and he wrote, quote, You can tell Biden feels this democracy speech deeply.
He's animated and passionate.
Pretty clear this is why he's running again.
Yeah, he's not running for his own interests.
He's not running because he's a lifelong politician who doesn't know how to give up power.
He's running for you.
He's running to save democracy because he so passionately believes in it.
Now, as I said, trying to claim that Joe Biden is the only savior of American democracy is not only difficult because people watched Trump for four years and they may not have liked a lot of what he did, but they don't think he's Adolf Hitler.
But also, it is Joe Biden who is trying to imprison Donald Trump.
The thing they said Trump was threatening to do with Hillary Clinton and never did.
That is what the Biden administration now, the Justice Department, is trying to do to Donald Trump.
They're trying to imprison him.
There are two cases under the auspices of the Biden Justice Department brought by a special counsel, Jack Smith.
They're trying to turn Trump into a felon.
On top of that, Democratic Party activist groups and interest groups all over the country are trying to keep Trump off the ballot.
So they see polls revealing that more Americans want to vote for Trump as president than any other candidate, and their solution is to prevent Americans from being able to vote for Trump by claiming he committed a crime that he was never even charged with, let alone convicted of, which is insurrection.
And then they turn around and they hold themselves up as the saviors of American democracy, the people trying to imprison their political opponent, ban him from the ballot.
And then they also, and it's amazing how much this has been memory hold, they were found, the Biden administration was, by four federal judges, all four who ruled on this question,
a federal district court judge in the first instance and then three appellate judges a federal district court judge in the first instance and then three appellate judges who unanimously affirmed that ruling, found that the Biden administration engaged in what they called one of the gravest assaults on the First Amendment's free speech guarantee in years, if not in the history of the By systematically weaponizing the CIA, the FBI, the CDC, and other federal agencies to coerce and threaten big tech to censor dissent from the internet.
That was the story that Matt Taibbi and other journalists broke as part of the Twitter files.
And you probably remember that most members of corporate media, upon seeing that story that they didn't break and couldn't break, turned around and said, oh, this story is nothing.
It's a nothing burger.
You should ignore it.
Only for courts to then say that it was a grave assault on the First Amendment free speech, that they were trying to censor the free speech rights of American citizens.
I know you probably don't remember that because it got so little attention in the media and barely anyone talks about it anymore because it's a ruling against Joe Biden and so the media wants to bury it.
But for that same administration that got that ruling against them to then turn around and depict themselves as the savior of American democracy and be taken seriously by the media, is not really amazing any longer, but it is truly illustrative.
Now, even CNN is being very clear about what the Biden strategy is.
And again, this is their only choice.
From January 2nd, how the Biden campaign hopes to make 2024 less about Biden And more about a contrast with Trump.
Quote, the 2024 campaign year for President Joe Biden's inner circle will largely be about carefully ratcheting up the intensity against Donald Trump, weary of voters becoming dulled to what they expect to be the former president's even wilder rhetoric and promises about what he'll do back in power.
Or as some of the younger aides on Biden's reelection campaign have grimly joked, it's about when to go, quote, full Hitler, full Hitler, when the leading Republican candidate's speeches and actions go so far that the Biden team goes all the way to a direct comparison to the Nazi leader rather than couching their attacks by saying Trump, quote, parroted him.
Now, again, it's not only that this is the same administration that's trying to imprison their opponent, trying to bar him from the ballot, who was found also to have committed great First Amendment violations, according to two federal courts by censoring The dissent of American citizens and their speech from the internet by threatening big tech companies, the CIA and the FBI.
It's also the fact that, as the New York Times even acknowledged in June of 2023, that the Ukrainians that the Biden administration has spent the last almost two years now arming with lethal weapons have a extreme fondness for Nazi insignia and Nazi symbols.
They revere as national heroes people like Stepan Pandera.
Who was a collaborator with the Nazis in rounding up Ukrainian Jews and slaughtering Poles?
Here's the headline, Nazi symbols on Ukraine's front lines highlight thorny issues of history.
And it's all about how many times we've seen Ukrainian militia leaders, Ukrainian political leaders, Ukrainian generals and colonels appearing in the media, even in the West, wearing outright Nazi insignia or having pictures of Nazi collaborators on their wall.
I think it's a little bit difficult to try and run a campaign of accusing your opponent, who used to be the President of the United States, of being a Hitler figure when you've spent two years as your primary foreign policy
sending some of the most sophisticated weapons in the world to militias and troops who openly embrace not just Nazi symbolism but neo-Nazi ideology and who for a decade before the Russians invaded were constantly spoken of that way by the Western press, that these were serious Nazi menaces.
There was movements in Congress to try and ban the ESA battalion and others from getting American weapons on the ground, that they were the real Nazis.
And then on February of 2022, that narrative switched.
The Western media stopped calling the ESA battalion neo-Nazis, first started calling them far-right, then nationalists, and then running Slobbering pieces of hagiography.
That's how war propaganda works.
But don't forget what the Biden administration was doing in Ukraine.
Don't forget what they've been doing on the internet according to two federal courts.
And don't forget that they're doing exactly the thing that when we look at other countries where it's being done, we instantly conclude those are the hallmarks not of saving democracy, but destroying democracy, namely trying to keep their primary political opponent ahead in the polls off the ballot.
And also trying to put him in prison.
This seems like a desperate effort to me.
For sure it's going to get cheered by the American media.
I think the most interesting part about it, aside from their recognition, the Democrats' recognition, that they cannot run with anyone thinking about Joe Biden, instead trying to make them think about Trump.
is the fact that they are going to have an extremely difficult time simultaneously deconstructing democracy out of fear of losing while pretending themselves as the saviors.
All right, Professor John Muir Shimer has been a guest on this show several times.
He is a political scientist at the University of Chicago.
He's the author of the 2006 book, The Israel Lobby.
He has a new article out just this week on his Substack, which I highly recommend that we're going to discuss it, among other things.
That is called The Genocide in Gaza, which analyzes the formal complaint filed by the country of South Africa against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
We're going to talk to him about the war itself, the risk of escalation, what's taking place in Ukraine, where there still is a war, even though people seem not to want to talk about it and have forgotten about it, and several other related issues as well.
It's always a pleasure to have him on the program.
Professor Mirsheimer, good evening and thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us again.
It's great to see you.
It's great to see you, Glenn.
I'm glad to be here.
Absolutely.
So let's start with that article that I referenced.
I want to obviously talk about the article where you express your own views on the complaint filed by South Africa and the allegations that it asserts in the documents and evidence it marshals to substantiate it.
But before we get to your views on that, tell us what we need to know about this complaint, the context that led up to it, and exactly what it is that it alleges.
Well, I think there's sort of three important dimensions here.
First of all, it's necessary to show intention.
In other words, the South African lawyers understood that they had to provide evidence that Israel had the intent to commit genocide.
Second, you have to show evidence of destruction and death inside of Gaza that reflects an effort to either destroy the Palestinian population as a whole or to destroy a substantial part of it.
So there's the intention plus the action.
And then the third thing is context.
And what the report does is it shows that although Israel has not engaged in genocide before with regard to Gaza, there's no question that Israel has pursued for a very long time really brutal policies towards the Gazan Palestinians.
And therefore, although this is a more extreme form of behavior on the part of the Israelis, it's not that unusual, not that special, given what's happened before.
So those are the three key dimensions at play here, in my opinion.
So I've been a vocal and I would say unflinching critic of Israeli behavior in general with regard to the Palestinians long before October 7th, Starting on October 8th, I knew what the Israelis were going to do because they were pretty clear in saying exactly what they intended to do in Gaza.
Netanyahu said on the night of October 7th, the morning of October 8th, we're going to extract a price in Gaza unlike anything we've previously done there.
Israeli officials have been making statements even before October 7th, certainly after.
that show a different face of an Israeli government that has become more extreme.
We talked about that the last time you were on my show in late October of last year.
I nonetheless have been a little bit reluctant, and I know you talked about in your article that you had to, to use the word genocide to describe what the Israelis are doing in Gaza, notwithstanding the fact that it's easy to say that it's morally horrific and extraordinarily excessive, notwithstanding the fact that it's easy to say that it's morally horrific and extraordinarily excessive, and to me at least seems like a sociopathic indifference to civilian
Simply because, at least for me, the term genocide is a lot like other terms that we use in our political vernacular like terrorism or hate speech or disinformation that seems to me almost more ill-defined than it is concretely defined.
Do you have that concern about the term genocide that it seems a little bit ambiguous and vague in its definition?
And if not, what is your understanding of exactly what someone has to do, a country has to do to go from simply killing a lot of civilians intentionally or recklessly and then spills over into genocide?
Like what is that line for you and for the definition?
Yeah, I agree with everything that you said.
And as you pointed out in the substack piece that I wrote, I said that up until the truce ended, the truce between the Palestinians and the Israelis on November 30th, I refrained from referring to what was going on as a genocide.
I think from the very beginning you could make the argument that there was genocidal intent there, and a number of historians of the Holocaust made that point very clearly, that if you were listening to what the Israelis were saying very early in the war, it was genocidal intent.
But if you looked at what they were actually doing, I found it anyway hard to make the argument before December 1st that the Israelis were aiming to destroy, and here I'm choosing my words carefully here and I'm reflecting what's in the South African document, a substantial portion of the Palestinian population in Gaza.
If you look at the number of people that were killed up through November 30th and what the Israelis had done, you could make a case, had they not gone back on a rampage starting on December 1st, that yes, what they were doing was horrific, but it didn't qualify as a genocide.
But actually, if you look at what they did after November 30th, starting on December 1st, they actually ramped up the offensive campaign.
And I think if you look at the situation as it's described in the South African document, it's very clear that they are intent on killing a substantial portion of the Palestinian population in Gaza.
And that, I believe, qualifies as genocide.
So just to push on that a little bit, and not even because it's my view, but because it's a view that I know people who disagree with the application of this term would invoke, and I want to hear your view on it, which is that, look, if the Israelis really intended, if their intent really to kill as many Palestinians as possible just to kill them for the sake of erasing them from the land.
The Israelis have one of the mightiest militaries in the world.
They have a capability to kill a lot more Palestinians than they thus far have killed.
I think the official count now now is up to something like 23,000, even if you assume, as I do, that that's probably an undercount because of how many people are buried under the rubble.
Let's say it's 30 percent, 30,000, to about one and a half percent of the population.
It's just an unimaginable number.
But still, if the Israelis had a genocidal intent, that number could be 100,000 or 200,000 in terms of just their military capability.
What is your response to that?
Well, first of all, if you look at past genocides, it's not like all of a sudden there's an on switch and the state goes from doing hardly anything against a rival civilian population, and then all of a sudden goes on a genocidal rampage. and then all of a sudden goes on a genocidal It's not like all of a sudden there's an on switch If you look at the Holocaust, for example, it happened rather gradually.
The Germans moved into The Holocaust rather gradually over the course of 1941.
And I think what a lot of people see here is a gradual evolution that the Israelis, you know, started off thinking they could probably ethnically cleanse.
Gaza without having to kill that many Palestinians.
But the ethnic cleansing hasn't worked, and the Israelis have decided to double down and continue to bomb Gaza and to continue to cut off, in large part, the supply of food and medicine and gasoline the supply of food and medicine and gasoline into Gaza.
Now, what this means is that there is a huge danger that many Palestinians will die of hunger or disease in the months ahead.
And that's why people think that this number of about 22,000 dead Palestinians is going to really increase greatly over the course of the next few months, if not the rest of 2024.
The Israelis are making it clear that this war is going to go on for a long time.
And if you look at the desperate straits that the Palestinians are in, and you think about the medical situation and the food situation, many, many more thousands of Palestinians are going to die.
And this is what causes people to think that a genocide is in train.
In other words, it's not like all of a sudden you go from a situation where there's no bombing to where you wipe out the Palestinian population the next day, right?
Nobody would argue that that's what's happening here.
It's much more evolutionary in nature.
Lots of people have already been killed, and the conditions are in place for a lot more people to die.
And the Israelis show no interest in backing off, and their American supporters, and here we're talking mainly about the Biden administration, have been doing remarkably little to get the Israelis to back off.
Well, that is a good segue into the question I wanted to ask, which is, if we're talking about...
A valid case of war crimes.
And the interesting thing about this document, as you point out, is that it doesn't read like a rhetorically unhinged document.
In fact, the opposite is true.
It's incredibly well grounded in easily documentable facts because a lot of it relies on the statements of Israeli government officials about what their intent is.
You don't have to infer things.
You just can quote.
Some of the most important Israeli officials about what they think they're doing in the war, which in many respects is at odds with what the West believes this war is about and was told this war about, which is to destroy Hamas.
But leaving that aside for the minute, what are the implications for the United States If a very credible case of war criminality and genocide has been presented at this court, given that the United States isn't just a supporter in words of what the Israelis are doing, but is the party that is providing most of the financing and most of the weapons to enable it to happen?
Well, there's no question that the United States is complicit.
The Biden administration is joined at the hip.
With the Netanyahu government.
President Biden makes no bones about that.
And we have been fully supporting Israel in this war.
And we've been doing that economically, militarily, and diplomatically.
And there's no evidence that's going to change.
And if you look at the Geneva Convention of 1948, it's quite clear that if you're a complicitous in a genocide, that you are guilty along with the party that is perpetrating the genocide.
So this has huge consequences for the United States.
And it's why I would expect both Israel and the United States to work overtime in the days, if not weeks ahead, to quash this case.
When you were on my show in, I think it was the very last day of October, so October, November was the general time frame.
We had talked about the Israeli motives in what it is that they were doing.
And of course, again, the claim that we were given, the purpose of this attack was that they were going to destroy Hamas, the party responsible for the attack on October 7th inside Israel that killed at least several hundred Israeli civilians, I think is a fair way of putting that now in terms of what we know for sure.
At the same time, though, the position, the explicit position of many key Israeli officials before October 7th, as part of Netanyahu's government, was that Gaza does not belong to the Palestinians.
Gaza belongs to the Israelis.
It is part of greater Israel, as ordained by God, as ordained by international law.
That territory belongs to us and we should Expel the Palestinians from there, either in full or in large part, so that we then become the majority in that land.
And it seemed to me from the beginning that that was their goal, to ethnically cleanse Gaza, either of all Arabs or enough so that the Israelis are the majority.
Do you think that what you're now saying is the Israeli intention, which is to kill Palestinians in huge number on purpose, is a Do you think it's a tactic or a method for clearing out Gaza of Palestinians?
Or do you think that it's just a kind of desire, sort of like Hitler had with respect to Jews, that the world would be better off if these people didn't exist?
Let me just say, Glenn, I think before October 7th, there was no question that most Israelis, certainly on the right and in the center, understood that ethically cleansing both the West Bank and Gaza would be good for Israel, because Israel has a major problem, and that is that it is an apartheid state.
You can read the reports by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and B'Tselem, which is the most prestigious and largest human rights group inside Israel.
And they have all written lengthy reports that make the case that Israel is an apartheid state.
And I think most Israelis think that this is untenable over the long term.
Can I just interject there just so for people who hear that, just explain what you mean by that.
What is an apartheid state and why is it a phrase that accurately describes the situation in Israel and Palestine?
Well, I think an apartheid state, in very simple terms, is one where the dominant group treats the subjugated group in a cruel manner, and I'm choosing my words carefully here, in a cruel manner over an extended period of time.
And if you look at how the Israelis have treated The Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza since 1967, when Israel acquired those territories, I think there's no question that they have treated the Palestinians cruelly, and it's been certainly for a long period of time.
Now, these reports go into great detail to make the case that Israel is an apartheid state, because this is, much like the term genocide, not a term that you want to throw around in a cavalier way.
And Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and B'Tselem fully understand it.
And that's why they provide thoroughly documented reports that explain why they have concluded That Israel is an apartheid state.
And by the way, I'd say that this is analogous to the document that South Africa provided to the International Court of Justice.
The South Africans are fully aware that they can't make the cavalier charge or a cavalier charge that says that Israel is guilty of genocide.
They fully understood that they had to thoroughly document their case.
And if you look at their document, this is the South African document, it is truly impressive in terms of how clearly It is written how clear the argument is and how much documentation they provide.
And the same thing is true with these reports that make the case that Israel is an apartheid state.
Well, and I think, I guess the point I'm getting at here, too, is one of the things that characterized the apartheid state of South Africa in the 1980s was that the white dominant faction was the minority and were ruling over the majority of citizens who are black.
So you had, it wasn't just that one group was subjugating the other, it was that the minority group was wielding power and the majority of the people had little to none.
When you look at Israel and Palestine and what the whole region that you can call from the river to the sea that both the Israelis and the Palestinians use
What is concerning, I think, a lot of even Israeli officials, and right before October 7th and September, actually, the former head of the Mossad said that Israel is now becoming an apartheid state, is the reality that's almost here and that is going to be here fairly soon, if you look at demographic trends, that there will be more Arabs in what is now considered Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.
Very shortly, if we're not already there, then there are Jews.
And that's when it becomes untenable, when the minority of people who are Jews will be ruling over the majority who are Arabs.
Do you think that the desire to ethnically cleanse Gazans, to either kill enough of them or drive enough of them out, is due in part to the desire to ensure that Jews remain a majority in that land so that people can't accuse it?
Of being an apartheid power in the sense that South Africa was?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And just to go back to where I was, A few minutes ago.
I think that most Israelis in the center and on the right for sure were interested in ethically cleansing the West Bank and Gaza for the reasons that you laid out.
But it was hard to imagine doing that before October 7th.
So the Israelis settled with this mantra that what they were going to do was manage the problem.
And they thought they were managing the problem quite well.
The Palestinians in Gaza were not causing them major trouble.
Every few years they would go in and mow the lawn, as they put it, by bombing the place.
They had things pretty much under control in the West Bank because Mahmoud Abbas was doing a lot of their dirty work.
And furthermore, the Trump administration had started these Abraham Accords, which It facilitated good relations between Israel and a handful of countries in the Arab world.
And then the Biden administration was actually working to create an Abraham Accord between Saudi Arabia and Israel, which was really the big enchilada.
And all of this meant, in the Israelis' mind, that they had the Palestinian problem under control.
And therefore, people were not thinking about ethnic cleansing.
But what, of course, happens on October 7th is this all blows up in the Israelis' face.
And it's quite clear, just given what happened on October 7th, that they have failed to manage the problem.
But furthermore, once this war starts out, you begin to see an opportunity for ethnic cleansing, because you want to remember that the two great past cases of ethnic cleansing in Greater Israel involved what happened in 1948 in the context of a war, and what happened in 1967 on the West Bank, again in the context of a war.
So the Israelis saw this as an opportunity to do the cleansing and solve the apartheid problem.
And I believe that that is the principal reason they went after the civilian population At the start of the war.
Remember, at the start of the war, there were sort of two dimensions to Israeli policy.
One was going after Hamas.
The other was punishing in a really severe way the civilian population.
And I believe that latter strategy, or that latter tactic, whatever you want to call it, was designed to drive out the Palestinians.
When people talk about your outlook or your worldview as an international relations scholar, you are typically referred to as part of the realist school of international relations.
And there was an interview you gave recently with the British journal UnHerd that I had recommended and still recommend that people go watch because you were talking to a Journalist and a host who was pretty adversarial and was kind of saying to you, hey, I'm so surprised you're talking all moralistically about this war, like you're talking about how it's immoral, but you're a realist.
You're supposed to be only thinking about pragmatic outcomes and the like and you explain that you can be a realist and still Have a moral dimension to you as a human being and condemn things that are morally reprehensible but nonetheless realism certainly at least in part considers the realities and the pragmatic dynamics of how power functions in the world.
So when it comes to something like this complaint on the part of a country that is clearly weaker than Israel, South Africa, We're looking at the fact that Israel is not just one of the strongest militaries in the world, but also a nuclear armed power.
Do you think there's really any prospect to impose accountability on a country as powerful as Israel, let alone the United States, through the conventions of international law?
Well, you know very well, Glenn, it's almost impossible to hold Israel accountable because the United States will not let any institution or any other countries do that.
The United States protects Israel at every turn.
And I think as we see events play out with regard to the International Court of Justice, you'll see the United States going to enormous lengths to protect Israel.
The real problem here, and this is the argument that Steve and I made in our book, and I would think that you would agree with us, is that our protection, I'm talking about America's protection of Israel at every turn, allowing it to create a greater Israel, allowing it to do X, Y, and Z, has not worked to Israel's benefit.
It's worked to Israel's detriment.
The Israel lobby in the United States considers itself to be Israel's greatest friend outside the borders of Israel.
I think nothing could be further from the truth.
I think the Israel lobby, by putting enormous pressure on the United States to do whatever Israel wants to do, has not helped Israel and has not helped the United States.
When I have heard defenders of Israel and their legion in the United States, I don't know if there's any parallel to one country exerting such a stranglehold in the imagination and worldview of the citizens of another country.
And your book goes into not just how it's American Jews, but American evangelicals and a lot of people who look at Israel as an important geostrategic or military ally for the United States in that region.
But clearly Israel produces enormous amounts of intense emotions, as you know better than anyone, for having written that book and then provoking the reaction that you provoked.
When I hear people defending Israel, I think a lot of people now acknowledge that there's a lot of killing of civilians going on, that they're using starvation as a weapon, They've said they were going to do that explicitly.
Human Rights Watch has documented that hunger is mass starvation is now being weaponized.
When people have stopped denying that Israel is doing this and now finally having to accept that they're going to these lanes that we haven't seen in a kind of conflict of this kind for a long time.
The argument that they'll eventually end up making is, well, look, war is hell, and people suffer in wars, and people do bad things in wars.
The point of war is to destroy.
The point is to force your enemy into submission.
In other words, basically saying there's really no such thing as international law or legal conventions limiting what can be done in war.
Why is that a worldview that we ought not to accept?
Well, you want to remember that the Genocide Convention was created in 1948.
And between roughly 1941 and 1945, the Holocaust took place.
between roughly 1941 and 1945, the Holocaust took place.
And what people were very interested in doing was trying to make sure that something like that never again happened.
And that was one of the principal reasons for creating the Genocide Convention.
And it's why Israel itself eagerly signed on to it in the beginning.
Now, your point is that international law, and this of course includes the Genocide Convention, doesn't have a lot of teeth, right?
We all understand that.
And we all understand that if Israel and the United States just ignore the International Court of Justice, there's not much that court can do.
It's just the way the world works.
But what we're trying to do here is do everything possible to make sure that we minimize the amount of mass killing and crimes against humanity that take place in the international system, and certainly make sure that if a genocide starts, everything is done to shut it down as quickly as possible.
And I would hope that that's what happens here.
I would hope that even if the International Court of Justice Can't rule against Israel and the United States, that nevertheless, the fact that this whole process is taking place will force both the Americans and the Israelis to back off in Gaza in substantial ways.
This is what we hope.
And this is what we hope because from a moral point of view, obviously not from a realist point of view, but from a moral point of view, what the Israelis are doing with the help of the United States is abhorrent, at least to me.
I want to ask if you think that world opinion is starting to move more or has been moving more in the direction of your view of the conflict and mine when October 7th happened, pretty much all of Western Europe, and I guess Eastern Europe as well, stood up and Very strongly defended the Israelis, vowed to support the Israelis in the war that they were pursuing.
There were Western European countries like Germany and France that actually banned their citizens from engaging in pro-Palestinian protests.
You could do all the pro-Israel protests that you wanted, but no pro-Palestinian protests.
The United Kingdom threatened to do the same.
They enforced it to some extent.
So there's clearly a lot of pro-Israel sentiment, certainly in Western Europe.
And the last time there was a vote at the UN, or one of the last times, it was on a resolution to affirm the right of the Palestinians for self-determination.
Only four countries on the entire planet voted no.
Israel, the US, And then two tiny little Pacific islands, Micronesia and Nauru, the latter of which has a total population of 12,000 people.
So you have Israel and the U.S.
standing completely alone in voting no on this resolution.
Even the abstentions, there were only 10 of them.
The largest of them were Paraguay and South Sudan.
So you have tiny little countries essentially abstaining.
The rest of the world, 172 countries, pretty much every American ally in every region, in every other country, united to vote yes on this resolution to affirm the right of the Palestinians to have self-determination, which obviously has a lot of symbolic importance in the context of this war.
Do you think world opinion, as reflected by that vote, has moved significantly away from the Israelis?
Well, if you go back to October 7, the answer is unequivocally yes, because as you point out, Glenn, in the wake of October 7, there was tremendous sympathy around the world for the Israelis.
And as the war has gone on since October 7th and the Israelis have behaved in increasingly brutal ways, public opinion has shifted against Israel.
Now, it's hard to gauge exactly what people are thinking about this War and about Israel's behavior in large part because lots of people are afraid to voice their opinion.
This is especially true in the media.
I have evidence of people who are afraid to say what they really think about Israel's behavior for fear that the lobby will come down on them like a ton of bricks and they'll lose their job.
But nevertheless, I think that opinion is shifting against Israel And I would add that the fact that Israel is working so hard to knock down the South African case is to me evidence that they understand how much trouble they're in in terms of world opinion.
and how much more trouble they will be in if this South African document begins to get traction, inside the court for sure, but even outside the court.
So I think the Israelis are in real trouble in terms of their moral reputation with regard to public opinion around the world, and I think they recognize that.
There's a sentiment, I think, largely in conservative sectors in American politics, but outside of that as well, where if you say to somebody, if you point out, look, the United States is completely isolating itself in the world, Basically, it's Israel and the United States.
And while the entire world isn't necessarily entirely opposed to Israel, no one is even near at the level of support of the Israelis that the United States is.
They're basically alone.
And a lot of people will say, Why should we care about that?
We should make our own decisions about what's in our interest.
Who cares about the UN?
The UN is a corrupted institution.
I think they kind of see it not as a collection of what it is, which is all the governments in the world who gather and express their policy, but some kind of like leftist Soros funded NGO or something.
And they say, who cares what the UN thinks?
Why should somebody who looks at the world in a realist way care whether or not the United States ends up alienating much of the world or even ends up isolated in the world because of this obsession with standing with Israel?
Well, first of all, diplomacy matters, Glenn.
I mean, a good realist like me places enormous amount of attention on the balance of power.
I think the balance of power matters.
But I would never argue that diplomacy doesn't matter.
And if you're interested in acting on the world stage, You do not want to be diplomatically isolated, and one of the consequences of the fact that we're joined at the hip with Israel is that it causes us diplomatic problems, and that is certainly the case since October 7th.
So this is not a good thing.
With regard to international institutions, It's very important to understand, and this is the realist view on international institutions, which is another way of saying this is my view on international institutions.
International institutions or international legal institutions do not have the ability to coerce great powers like the United States.
Okay.
or Russia, or China.
There's no question they can ignore the dictates of those institutions.
But you want to understand that in a highly interdependent world, like the one that we live in, there's no way you can conduct business without institutions.
And therefore, the United States is a big proponent of institutions.
In fact, if you were to laundry list all the most powerful institutions in the world, you would see that we created most of them.
We wrote the rules.
We wrote the rules with regard to the Genocide Convention.
This is the way the world works.
Powerful states write the rules, and they write the rules and they support institutions more generally because it's in their interest.
So you want to understand that we have an interest in maintaining the United Nations.
We have an interest in maintaining the International Court of Justice.
This doesn't mean we're always going to be happy with what that court or any institution proposes as a solution to a problem.
And in many cases, or in some cases, we may ignore the dictates of the institution.
But the fact is, institutions matter.
to us.
And therefore, we have a vested interest in making sure that we are in sync with what those institutions are doing as much as possible.
I want to ask about the role of China with regard to that, because I do think that for a long time, from the fall of the Soviet Union up until, let's say, 10 years ago or so, the United States pretty much stood alone as the world's only superpower.
Maybe when you're the only superpower in the world and there's no one challenging you militarily or economically, maybe it does matter less.
If you're alienating people because they have nowhere to go, there's one center of power and you either aggrandize that or you don't and that's pretty much how the world works.
But in the last, say, 10 years, there has been the emergence of China as a competitor of the United States, an alliance of BRICS that I know isn't fully formed yet, nowhere near enough to compete with Europe-led economic institutions like the G7 or the G20 even.
But still, there's a rising China militarily and economically.
And there have been American policy elites.
I think we've talked about this before.
Fiona Hill gave a speech last year, even though she's a hardcore anti-Russia hawk, anti-China hawk, warning of European elites that one of the ways China is actually succeeding in getting so much of the world on its side is by convincing the world, oh, look, the United States has been abusing warning of European elites that one of the ways China is actually succeeding in getting They've been throwing their weight around militarily.
We don't do that.
And that's a very convincing narrative to a lot of the world that's making them move away from the United States and move to China.
I always think it's very odd.
It seems to me like the people who say they're so obsessed with China and wanting to defeat China often are the same people who say, who cares if the world likes what we're doing?
Who cares if we isolate ourselves and alienate ourselves from the rest of the world to protect Israel?
We should do what we want.
How serious of a narrative is that, that one of the things that is helping China become a more powerful competitor is their ability to lure other countries on their side with this narrative?
Again, I'm basically in sync with everything that you said.
Let me just embellish it a bit.
I think from, let's say, roughly 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed until about 2017, we lived in a unipolar world where we were the only great power in the system and we felt we could pretty much do anything we wanted and there would not be any really severe penalties for misbehavior.
And as you and I both know very well, we did a lot of foolish things in those years.
And we really didn't get penalized in any serious way.
But what happens around 2017 is not only do you have the rise of China, which you referenced, you also have a case of Russia coming back from the dead.
Russia is resurrected, and it is effectively once a great power.
It is once more a great power.
So, after 2017, you're now in a multipolar world, not a unipolar world where there's just the United States as the sole pole in the system.
Now you have Russia and China and the United States.
But the United States tends to behave like we're still in the unipolar moment, and we tend to think that diplomacy doesn't matter that much.
That we don't need the Russians to help us contain the Chinese?
I mean, one of the great flaws in American foreign policy these days is we've driven the Russians and the Chinese into each other's arms.
From our point of view, the ideal situation would be to have Russia as an ally to help us contain China.
But instead, we have exactly the opposite.
It's because of our boneheaded policies.
But again, what's happened here is that the United States has lost the Midas touch.
We just don't have it anymore.
Our soft power is just gone.
We don't privilege diplomacy.
And in a multipolar world, this creates all sorts of problems because not only the Russians and the Chinese, but a lot of other countries begin to jump into bed with the Russians and the Chinese and look for ways to thwart the United States.
They look for ways to cause us trouble.
So if you're Chinese or you're Russian, and you see that the Americans are isolated with the Israelis in the world, And the Americans are protecting Israel and causing all sorts of problems for America's reputation and America's diplomatic position in the world.
This is mana from heaven for you.
So you see that we have really gotten ourselves into a lot of trouble by not pursuing diplomacy, number one, and number two, by being joined at the hip with Israel.
I want to talk about Ukraine in just a second, but before I do, I don't want to leave this region quite yet of the Middle East because one of the things I remember asking you when you were on my show the last time, and it was only three weeks after the October 7th attack, so things were kind of unclear.
Was what's the risk of escalation?
What's the risk of Hezbollah getting involved in this war?
What's the risk of Iran getting involved in this war?
And I think, you know, I think your answer was basically, well, I hope that doesn't happen, but it's possible.
But we'll see.
Here we are now, you know, almost three months into this war, and certainly it seems to me, I think, like the risk of escalation is higher.
I mean, you have the U.S.
engaging Houthis in the Red Sea over attacks by the Yemenis on various commercial shipping in that sea lane.
You have the U.S., or rather Israel, drone assassinating Near Beirut, a Hamas office.
You have a drone attack in Iraq that the Iraqis are blaming the U.S.
for.
The Israelis bomb Syria regularly.
A terrorist attack in Iran.
The Iranians making a lot more elevated threats.
How do you judge the risk of regional escalation involving those countries, Israel and the U.S., three months into the war now?
Well, it still is somewhat difficult to say exactly where this is headed.
I would be shocked if Iran got into a fight with Israel or with the United States.
I don't see that happening.
The case that scares me the most is Hezbollah versus Israel.
Looking at the press reports today, it's quite clear that the Israelis are really playing hardball with Hezbollah, which is not to say that Hezbollah is not playing hardball with Israel.
But the Israelis look like they're interested in ratcheting up the pressure on Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
Now, the question you want to ask yourself is, what's going on here?
It's very important to remember, Glenn, that one of the big problems the Israelis face today is there are, I think, well over 200,000 people who have been displaced from their homes in northern Israel and in southern Israel.
And let's say the number is 100,000 Israelis who've been displaced from the northern border.
I think that's a good estimate, as best I can tell.
But those 100,000 people who are now in the center of Israel but have homes in northern Israel can't go back there because of the threat from Hezbollah.
And the Israelis have obviously a deep-seated interest, in part for economic reasons, to get those people out of the center of Israel and back to their homes near the Lebanese border.
But it's impossible to do unless they can figure out how to shut down the rocket and missile and mortar fire that's coming from Hezbollah on the other side of the border.
So I think what the Israelis are thinking about doing is upping the ante, playing really hard, playing hardball with Hezbollah.
And the question is, what will Hezbollah do in return?
Will they be able to work out some sort of modus vivendi for the foreseeable future?
In other words, will Hezbollah back off, and will the Israelis back off, and then will those people be able to move back there?
I'm not sure that's going to happen, because you want to remember that Hezbollah is motivated in good part by what's happening in Gaza.
And if the war in Gaza doesn't shut down, one could make an argument that Hezbollah will continue to pummel northern Israel, and that could spin out of control.
There have been a lot of press reports that say that American policymakers at the most senior level, people like the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, have been putting great pressure on the Israelis not to escalate against Hezbollah.
Recognizing that Israel does want to escalate against Hezbollah.
Now, I don't know for sure whether that's true, but I think it just goes to show that the principal danger of escalation lies on Israel's northern border.
Before we get to Ukraine, this is my last question about Israel.
One of the things that is kind of lost to history when people think about the history of the U.S.
and 9-11 was that prior to 9-11, for those eight months of the Bush presidency, the United States was an incredibly polarized country because half the country, Democrats, Liberals, believed that George Bush had been elected illegitimately, that the Supreme Court stole the presidency from Al Gore through the Bush versus Gore decision, and then 9-11 happened and everybody got united behind Bush.
Before the October 7th attack in Israel, there was a level of internal division in Israel on a different universe than what the U.S.
had.
I mean, there was a serious prospect of some kind of civil unrest, principally over the attempt by Netanyahu to remove from the Supreme Court any real power that it had, the only check on what the majority in Israel can do, as well as these corruption charges that Netanyahu faced and the attempt to immunize himself from them.
October 7th happened, all of that kind of got put on hold, and then last week the Supreme Court came and by an 8-7 decision ruled that the law that Netanyahu and his party and his allies got passed to take away this power from the Supreme Court is actually unconstitutional, that the law itself is not valid, that the Supreme Court still retains this power.
What do you see domestically as the challenges that Israel faces?
Are they still just going to remain unified for the foreseeable future because of the various wars that they face?
Or is there a chance that these divisions can start to emerge again?
No, I think the divisions are going to emerge again.
Let's just talk about this basic law that the Supreme Court knocked down.
It's very important to understand that this is the first time in the history of the Israeli Supreme Court that it knocked down a basic law.
Israel does not have a constitution, and its substitute for a constitution are a series of basic laws.
And in this particular case, what the court did with an 8-7 vote, as you pointed out,
Now, what's happened recently when the Supreme Court decided to knock down the basic law is that almost everybody understood that given the fact that Israel was in the middle of a war, this was not a time to have a political fight over the basic law.
But people have not forgotten, and once the dust settles and people revisit that issue, I would imagine that the political conflict inside of Israel will be as contentious as it was before October 7th.
Furthermore, and you do not want to underestimate this, there's going to be an accounting as to who is responsible for what happened on October 7th once the war is over with.
And this is going to be an incredibly contentious issue, because it's going to involve, in large part, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Who is a really powerful figure in the Israeli context, obviously, but is also someone who is intensely disliked by a large chunk of the population.
So the question of who bears responsibility for what happened on October 7th is going to be mixed in with the whole question of this basic law, which has been ruled unconstitutional.
And how that all plays itself out is For sure.
So, in the little time we have left, I do want to talk about the war in Ukraine, which, just by the way, is still ongoing and still a quite serious conflict.
It's kind of amazing, given how heavily the US remains involved in that conflict.
That is something we just kind of have now talked about as an afterthought.
Like, it almost doesn't even matter anymore.
But it is still there.
And one of the amazing things, I think, is that over a year ago, when you and I talked about the war in Ukraine, it was a time of great celebration in Washington, Bipartisan supporters of the war were both anticipating with great glee this counteroffensive that was going to come and transform the war, break through the Russian defensive lines.
Divide the Russian line in order to split it and cause a disintegration of the Russian forces and at the time you were saying none of that was going to happen, that Russia clearly seemed to be winning this war, that it was likely to be a grind, a horrible bloody Deadly grind and that probably there you'd have kind of more or less the status quo for a long time to come.
In other words, the Russians control roughly 20% of Ukraine, which is not a good status quo for Ukraine.
Just this last week, we had some of the first real movement of the positions in several months where the Russians It's a shell of a city.
It's largely destroyed, but strategically, while it's not crucial, it's nonetheless important.
It signifies the Russians are not retreating.
in more than six months.
It's a shell of a city, it's largely destroyed, but strategically, while it's not crucial, it's nonetheless important.
It signifies the Russians are not retreating.
If anything, if anyone's moving, it's the Russians by expanding.
What do you make of all of this?
Where are we with this war?
And what is the Western posture and objective at this point?
Well, as you pointed out, a year ago, it looked like Ukraine was going to win the war.
Ukraine had been quite successful against the Russians in 2022.
And we were hopeful that in 2023, the Ukrainians would finish off the Russians.
And we had great hopes for the so called counter offensive, which started on June 4.
But Before the counteroffensive started, the Ukrainians suffered a serious defeat in the months-long fighting in Bakhmut, and then the counteroffensive turned out to be a bust.
And what really is happening here, Glenn, is that the Russians have, since the fall of 2022, mobilized a huge number of soldiers.
And they have mobilized their industrial base so that they're producing huge numbers of weapons for these increasing numbers of troops who are being seriously trained to launch a major offensive at some point down the road.
At the same time, Ukrainians have suffered egregious casualties.
The counteroffensive that started on June 4th was a disaster for the Ukrainians.
And moreover, the West has been unable to supply Ukraine with the weapons that it needs.
We don't have the industrial base in the West to produce the weaponry that the Ukrainians need to come close to matching the Russians.
So the Russians now have a significant advantage in terms of manpower, and they have a significant advantage in terms of weaponry.
And all the evidence is that this Russian advantage is going to grow over time.
At the same time, if you look at what's happening in the West, especially the United States, there are lots of people, and some of those people are in powerful positions, who've lost interest in supporting the Ukrainians.
They think this is a lost cause.
And this is causing enormous problems for the Biden administration.
Moreover, inside Kiev itself, you have all sorts of political trouble between Generals Luzhny, who heads up the Ukrainian army, and President Zelensky.
They basically hate each other's guts.
And this is a major crisis that doesn't bode well for what's happening on the battlefield.
So if you look at where this war is likely to go over the course of 2024, It appears that the Ukrainians will suffer greater losses than the Russians and that the Russians will conquer more territory.
One of the amazing things and war propaganda is sometimes so astounding is for two years, Western capitals were saying there's only one end to this war and that is full Ukrainian We intend to expel every last Russian troop from every part of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, which they've held since 2014, and which Moscow made very clear they were never going to give that up, that that was existential to them.
But that was the Western definition of victory, was we're going to keep going.
We're going to give Ukraine everything it needs until they have every last inch of their territory back.
Now the Biden administration is constantly leaking to the media that they believe the only solution to this conflict is a diplomatic one.
They're claiming that they always thought that.
And obviously when they're pressuring the Ukrainians to now go to the table, nobody thinks the Russians are voluntarily going to give up All of that territory that they've paid such a large price to gain.
If anything, the question is, are they going to be satisfied with 20%?
So from a Western perspective, growing disenchantment with funding the war.
You actually had a couple of elections in Central Europe and even in Western Europe determined by people running on a platform of no more funding for Ukraine.
What is the West going to do here?
I mean, they're in this situation where they made all these maximalist promises that can never now be fulfilled.
As you say, they can't keep up with the Russian industrial base.
So what is the West going to do?
What are their options?
Well, what we want to do is go to great lengths to get them the money that they need.
We're talking about, we meaning the Americans, giving them 60 plus billion dollars.
And many people think that if they get those 60 plus billion dollars, they're in good shape.
I think they'll be in better shape, but they will not be in good shape because you can't fight a war with the Beatles.
What you need are artillery pieces, artillery shells, aircraft, tanks.
You need lots of weaponry.
And the fact is, we don't have the weapons to give them.
And we don't have the weaponry to give them in the next two or three years.
This is why I think the Biden administration is hinting that it would like to negotiate a deal with the Russians.
And the deal would basically freeze the status quo on the ground, where Russia would keep, let's say, about 20 to 23 percent of the territory of Ukraine, which it now controls.
This is what you were talking about before.
And in return, Ukraine could become part of NATO.
The Russians have made it very clear they're not going to buy this deal.
And in fact, I believe the Russians have made it clear they want to conquer a lot more territory, because they don't trust the Americans.
They don't trust the Ukrainians.
They understand they're in the driver's seat now.
Now is the time to take more Ukrainian territory.
Now is the time to weaken Ukraine further, make it a really weak, rump state, and Uh, and make sure that it's in no position to join NATO.
So I think the Russians will say that they're willing to negotiate or they're willing to talk.
They'd be foolish not to say that.
But they're not going to cut a deal that's favorable to the West.
If you look at the deals that people in the West are talking about, there are always deals that are designed to bamboozle the Russians.
We were pretty good at bamboozling the Russians for a while, and Putin now admits, by the way, that he was bamboozled.
He's angry at himself for having been bamboozled by the West.
But he's not going to be bamboozled again, as long as he has a military advantage on the battlefield.
Certainly a significant military advantage.
He will do everything he can to grab more and more territory that houses Russian speakers and ethnic Russians, and that does everything possible to make rump Ukraine weak and ineffectual.
Well, last question.
You know, we spend a lot of time every year we report on the approval of the military budget.
It goes up every year.
We run through all those statistics.
It's almost a trillion dollars a year now.
The United States spends three times more than the next largest spender, which is China.
It spends more than the next 16 countries combined.
All those statistics.
We know so well, so we're constantly hearing about how much money we're just spending on this gigantic military and I think a lot of people have trouble understanding, I think I do as well, why it is that the United States Joining with all those native countries as well.
It's not like the United States has been financing and funding the war in Ukraine alone.
They've had all these Western European countries, wealthy countries, with them, cannot provide basic artillery to Ukraine and keep up with the Russians who we were told were so isolated, were under so much sanctions, had a very primitive oil-based economy.
Why, given all of that that we pour into our military, can we not get artillery to keep up with them?
Well, remember we were talking before, Glenn, about the fact that in the unipolar moment, which ran from roughly 1991 to 2017, the United States was the only great power in the world.
So we were not thinking about fighting a great power war, whether directly or through a proxy like Ukraine.
It was just not on our radar scope.
So we thought there was no need to have this industrial base that could produce huge numbers of artillery pieces and huge numbers of artillery shells.
Then we move out of the unipolar moment into multipolarity in 2017.
And even though relations between China and Russia deteriorate, nobody anticipated that we would be involved in a war like the one that broke out in 2022.
So we continued to allow our industrial base to deteriorate.
Then the war broke out, and we thought we would win a reasonably quick victory.
We thought the Ukrainians would do very well, as they did in 2022, and we thought that the sanctions would cripple the Russians.
So nobody was thinking about a long war.
with a need for artillery rounds and artillery pieces.
Then all of a sudden, starting in 2023, we realized, oh, my goodness, we're in a war of attrition.
We need to produce huge numbers of these kinds of weapons.
But we couldn't do it because we didn't have the industrial base.
The Russians, on the other hand, had the industrial base.
They were prepared to fight a war of attrition.
So we were caught with our pants down.
Now, there's no question we spent huge amounts of money on defense, but what we like to buy are really sophisticated weapons in small numbers.
that are designed to win quick and decisive victories, not to fight wars of attrition.
So we have this situation now where we are in a war of attrition in Ukraine.
Of course, we're not doing the actual fighting.
The Ukrainians are, but we're up to our eyeballs and alligators in that war.
But we now face a situation where we don't have the necessary weaponry that our proxy, the Ukrainians, needs.
And I would argue that if you look at the possibility of a war in East Asia, Between the United States and China over Taiwan, and let's hope that doesn't happen.
But I don't think the United States, given the state of its industrial base and how we have spent money building weapons since the end of the Cold War, is in a position to fight a long war, like the Ukraine war, against the Chinese over Taiwan.
So I think we have to do some really deep thinking about how we reorient our building of weaponry and prepare ourselves for future conflicts.
Well, Professor, it's always a pleasure.
Unfortunately, we don't have any accountability in our foreign policy expert class or in our pundit class.
So all the people who have made promises and statements about the war in Ukraine who turned out to be wrong will pay no career price.
They'll be the people presented as the experts for the next war.
But I think anyone paying attention knows that despite all the smear attacks and things that were said about you, a lot of what you said ended up being Very vindicated, and that's something that at least on our show, where we think accountability matters, we really appreciate.
So it's always great talking to you, and we hope to have you back on soon.
Thank you for your kind words, Glenn, and I look forward to being back.
Absolutely.
Have a great evening.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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As one final reminder, tomorrow night at 7 o'clock p.m.
in a debate about January 6, taking place on January 6, organized by the site Zero Hedge, there will be a debate in which I'm participating that we will stream live here on my Rumble channel, in which I will be debating the question of January 6th, whether it was an insurrection, whether Donald Trump engaged in insurrection, questions about the FBI involvement and related issues.
And on one side of the debate will be myself, partnered with Darren Beatty, the former Trump speechwriter who's been on the show several times, as well as Alex Jones.
On the other side will be the YouTuber Destiny and the two Krasnestein brothers.
I think they're twins.
I have trouble keeping track of them.
But anyway, they'll both be there.
And it's part of this attempt by Zero Hedge, which I really support.
I think we need a lot more of that to try and structure and organize Formal debates between people who genuinely disagree about important issues to enable people to come together and in a structured and organized way so it's not a circus people screaming on top of each other.
They'll be moderated.
There'll be different questions that people are supposed to address as part of each debate.
We'll see how much structure prevails.
I'm hoping at least a good amount will, but I really think it'll be an informative and illuminating debate.
I think it'll be an entertaining debate.
So for those interested, you can tune in tomorrow night at 7:00 PM live.
It's Saturday night here on our channel.
It'll obviously be available if you wanna watch it after that as well.
For those that have been watching this show, we are as always very appreciative We hope to see you back on, well, tomorrow night, on Saturday night, but certainly on Monday night and then every night at 7 p.m.
