Prof. John Mearsheimer Dissects Catastrophic US Foreign Policy: Israel-Gaza, Russia, China, & More
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Israeli Strike Kills Aid Workers (5:48)
Interview with John Mearsheimer (16:47)
Outro (1:10:40)
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Good evening, it's Tuesday, April it's Tuesday, April 2nd.
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.
The U.S.
war machine, as always, continues to Unravel.
In Israel, over the last 24 hours, as we reported on last night, the Israelis, with the assistance, as always, of the U.S.
military, attacked the Iranian embassy in Damascus.
An act of profound escalation in the Middle East that's guaranteed to escalate the war, not just between Israel and Gaza, but Israel and multiple enemies, as well as bringing in the United States.
And then on top of that, the Israelis attacked An aid convoy, three cars clearly marked as aid convoys that were intended to feed the people of Gaza, an organization that the IDF had given permission to operate in Gaza, had given permission to travel on the road that it was on, and yet the three cars that were carrying volunteers from five different countries
was attacked by the Israelis, the IDF, using three separate missiles, one for each car as the people scrambled out of one car into the other.
The Israelis attacked that car and ended up shooting with missiles, all three cars, killing all seven of these aid workers from the World Health Kitchen, including three British nationals and an American citizen.
And then at the same time, as we also reported last night, the United States, which has been struggling to get another $60 billion to Ukraine because of how many Americans now oppose any further fueling and financing of that war, have now had a breakthrough.
The war machine in Washington has with the GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson pushing and pushing over the last several weeks in secret to find a way to get $60 billion that Joe Biden asked for to Ukraine to ensure that that war, which is at least as much as a disaster from the American perspective which is at least as much as a disaster from the American perspective as the one in Gaza and the broader one in the Middle East, continues to be fought, to destroy Ukraine, to kill huge numbers of people without any
And in the meantime, the victor of all of this is, in so many ways, the countries that America claims are its primary competitors and adversaries and even enemies, starting with China that has sat back, as often happens, while the United States goes further and further into debt, financing and fueling wars all over the United States, all over the world, rather.
And continues to exploit the anger and resentment being generated by these wars against the United States for the benefit of China and its allies.
In order to break all of this down, we have one of our most frequent guests, one of our most popular guests, and one of our most knowledgeable guests, the political scientist from the University of Chicago, John Mearsheimer, who studies this foreign policy of the United States and the various wars that the United States war machine supports as much as anybody.
He, I think, is one of the best and most articulate advocates of this realist forward policy that is able to translate academic and scholarly knowledge into popular discourse.
We are always delighted to have him on our show.
He's always very popular.
The show is always very well watched, and I think we all come away much more informed.
It's a very nutritious dialogue as well.
So, before we get to all of that and Professor Mirschheimer, a few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
It's not just the Israeli war in Gaza that is starting to unravel out of control, and it's not just the high possibility of further escalations, The United States is already involved in the Middle East in multiple ways because of Israel, including bombing
Alleged Iranian targets in Iraq and Syria as well as bombing targets in Yemen as retaliation for the Houthis targeting commercial shipping to retaliate against the Israeli attack on Gaza.
The United States is involved in multiple ways in the Middle East since October 7th as well as funding the Israeli war and providing them with the weapons, but Israel seems increasingly willing To deviate from every standard, to defy every limit, to trespass every ethical line, essentially in order to demonstrate that they're unconstrained entirely, that nothing can limit what the Israelis do.
And the fact that the United States government and many factions within the United States and the West more broadly continue to defend everything Israel does, even when, as happened yesterday,
The Israelis kill an innocent citizen of the United States, an American citizen using American weapons to do it, in ways that are blatantly unjustified, that have sparked rage throughout the world, including the countries that have stood by Israel most closely, even when the Israelis kill our own citizens.
It seems like our government is willing to justify and excuse everything that they do and continue to pledge further support.
Now, yesterday we went over just how extreme of an act it was for the Israelis to target the Iranian embassy in Damascus.
In general, countries, virtually without limits, respect the inviolability of embassies if for no other reason than they're central to the way that countries protect themselves if
The Iranian embassy in Damascus is now fair game, and obviously Israeli embassies around the world, American embassies would be as well, and that's why it's almost impossible to find examples, even extreme ones, where countries really wanted to invade embassies and yet chose not to, and yet the Israelis blew past
All of the conventions, like the Vienna Convention, that make embassies sacrosanct, part of the foreign soil of those countries whose embassy it is, and bomb the Iranian embassy in Syria, almost forcing the Iranians to retaliate in a way that brings serious risk of escalation, not just for Israel, but for the United States as well.
But the act that has really turned Even parts of the world that have been willing to overlook what the Israelis were doing in terms of using mass starvation and famine as a weapon of war in Gaza have turned a lot of people, if not entirely against Israel, certainly angrier at Helbi than they've ever been, which was this attack on an aid convoy from the World Central Kitchen.
And even the version given by the IDF Is reprehensible.
Even if you believe everything the Israeli military is saying about what happened here, it is morally and legally reprehensible.
Here from Haaretz, the Israeli daily newspaper that have a lot of sources inside the Israeli government from April 2nd, which is today, the IDF drone bombed the World Central Kitchen aid convoy three times targeting an armed Hamas member who wasn't there.
So that's the Israeli excuse, that they knew they were bombing a convoy of aid workers from the World Central Kitchen, which the Israelis say are free to operate in Gaza, are welcomed in Gaza.
They knew they were bombing that convoy.
They're not pretending they thought this was a Hamas convoy.
But their argument was, well, the reason we did it is because we thought, mistakenly as it turns out, that among the seven workers was a single armed militant from Hamas, and therefore we decided to kill them all.
All seven of them just to kill this one armed Hamas operative, which who, whoops, wasn't there, but even if he were...
How would that be justification for extinguishing the lives of seven international aid workers in Gaza with the Israeli permission to feed the starving civilians there?
Quote, the strike on the aid convoy, which traveled along a route approved by the Israeli army, killed seven workers at the World Central Kitchen.
But the target, an armed man thought to be a terrorist, never left the warehouse with the cars.
Now, again, if I were an aid worker in Gaza, given the anarchy in Gaza that has been brought about by the destruction of civilian life and infrastructure in Gaza, I would probably want somebody armed accompanying me.
But even if they had taken an armed person, even one associated with Hamas, how in the world would that justify, from any moral perspective or legal perspective of war, killing everyone in that vicinity?
Yet that's exactly what they did on purpose.
Quote, the Israeli strike that killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in the Gaza Strip on Monday night was launched because of suspicion that a terrorist was traveling with the convoy.
According to defense sources, the cars were clearly marked on the roof and side as belonging to the organization.
Again, this is according to the IDF.
They're admitting that the cars were clearly marked as belonging to this organization.
That is founded by the celebrity chef Jose Andres that who actually came out and supported the Israeli war in Gaza in the beginning and now has decided that his organization which works in war zones needs to feed the people in Gaza and he's worked with the Israeli military to be able to operate there.
And the Israeli military is admitting that they knew this was an aid convoy and yet destroyed it anyway.
Quote, "The war room of the unit responsible for security of the route that the convoy traveled identified an armed man on the truck and suspected that he was a terrorist.
At some point when the convoy was driving along the approved route, the war room of the unit responsible for security of the route ordered the drone operators to attack one of the cars with a missile.
Some of the passengers were seen leaving the car after it was hit and switching to one of the other two cars.
They continued to drive and even notified the people responsible that they were attacked, but seconds later, another missile hit their car.
The third car in the convoy approached, And the passengers began to transfer to it the wounded who had survived the second strike in order to get them out of danger.
But then a third missile struck them.
All seven World Central Kitchen volunteers were killed in the strike.
Think how systematic and deliberate that was.
They knew this was a convoy traveling on a route that the IDF had approved.
When they hit the first car of the World Health Kitchen, The drivers in the car, the people in the car, the volunteers, called the Israeli military, their contacts in the IDF, and said, that missile just attacked our convoy.
And despite that, when they moved to the second car, the IDF then targeted that second car and struck it, killing some of the people.
The ones who were wounded tried to scramble into the third car to get into safety.
And once they got there, The IDF then targeted a third car and killed them all.
Three of the people killed were British nationals.
One was an American citizen.
You would think the U.S.
government would be enraged that one of its own citizens, an innocent person by even the IDF's acknowledgement, was killed using weapons and munitions and drones and bombs paid for by the American government, possibly supplied by the American government itself.
And it's not the first time The Israelis have killed innocent Americans over the last year.
They killed an American journalist in Gaza last year before October 7th.
They killed an American teenager in the West Bank within the last two months.
Now they've killed an American aid worker.
Trying to deliver food to the people of Gaza.
And yet the White House, the Biden White House, when asked about this today, did everything possible to defend the Israelis, saying that there's no evidence they violated any laws of war.
There's no evidence they violated any human rights limitations.
And they repeated their refusal to put any limits of any kind.
on what Israel can do as the United States continues to pay for its war and to provide it with the weapons that it uses.
This is a war that the United States is every bit as much responsible for as Israel, because the U.S.
refuses even to put any limits on the Israelis of any kind.
In fact, yesterday, as CNN reported, the Biden administration is set to greenlight an $18 billion sale of more F-15 fighter jets to Israel.
Remember we reported a couple weeks ago that the Biden administration told the Netanyahu government that invading, attacking Rafah, the refugee camp where most Palestinians are now taking refuge, is a quote, red line that the United States would not tolerate.
And the Israelis said, we don't care about your red lines, we're going to do it anyway.
And the US response was then to turn around and sell a massive amount of F-15 fighter jets to the Israelis.
"The Biden administration is close to approving the sale of as many 50 American F-15, American-made F-15 fighter jets to Israel in a deal expected to be worth more than $18 billion, according to three people familiar with the matter.
The transaction would amount to the largest U.S.
foreign military sale to Israel since the country went to war on October 7th with Hamas, and comes as the administration is also expected to notify Congress soon of a large new sale of precision-guided munition kits to Israel.
The new sales of some of the U.S.' 's most sophisticated weaponry underscores the extent to which the U.S.
continues to support Israel militarily, even as Biden administration officials criticize Israel's operations in Gaza, which have killed more than 32,000 Palestinians since October, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.
Now, the U.S.
government's position is that number is likely undercounted.
Because it only counts bodies that go through the morgue and not the people buried still underneath the rubble, which is a substantial number of people killed.
The situation in Gaza gets worse.
Israel's conduct gets worse.
The American government ties itself to Israel ever more closely, risking further escalation in the Middle East.
And at the same time, the war in Ukraine is still raging on.
Remember that?
And now the U.S.
looks ready to involve itself even further in that war as well to help us understand all of this, the implications of it.
what's going on geopolitically with the United States and various aspects of his foreign policy, we are delighted to welcome one of the best, most informed voices on all of these issues, a good friend of our show.
He is the political scientist and professor, John Mearsheimer.
Professor Mearsheimer, it is always great to see you.
Thank you for taking the time to talk to us tonight.
As always, it's my pleasure, Glenn.
So every time we speak with you, which is once every two or three months or so, sometimes more frequently, I always hope at the end that that will be the last time that we have to discuss these two horrific wars that are raging and that have been raging in the case of Ukraine for more than two years, in I always hope at the end that that will be the last time that we have to discuss And you're And yet every time we come back to you, things only seem to Get worse.
So obviously a lot of people are discussing the targeting of this aid convoy that killed seven aid workers that we just went over.
And I want to get to that with you in just a second.
But before we do, I want to focus instead on the decision by the Israelis to bomb The Iranian embassy in Damascus, which killed seven senior Iranian military officials, obviously attacking an embassy is something that almost no country is willing to do under any circumstances.
We went over some examples last night.
Obviously, the U.S.
desperately wanted to get Julian Assange, claiming that he was harming national security while he was in the Ecuadorian embassy, but respected the sovereignty of Ecuador, did not invade the embassy in 1984.
There were Libyans inside the Libyan embassy in London who were shooting protesters on the street, anti-Libyan protesters.
They were using the embassy as a shooting base and the British did not invade that embassy for the same reason.
This is kind of a sacrosanct principle.
Now, Israel's excuse As always, there were terrorists there.
They were using the embassy as a military staging ground and the like.
This is Israel's excuse for everything that it does.
But what do you make of the implications for international law and the possibility of escalation from this attack on Iran's embassy?
Well, I think it points up very nicely that Israel is basically out of control.
I think when you marry this with what happened with regard to the bombing of the humanitarian Uday convoy in Gaza, you see that there are really no limits to what the Israelis will do.
They think they're just free to do pretty much whatever they want.
This is, I think, here we're talking mainly about the bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus.
I think this is a huge blow to the rule-based international order that the United States prizes so much.
I mean, the Israelis behave like rogues and the United States Defends them at every turn, as you pointed out.
This is not good for the United States.
It's certainly not good for international politics in general.
I'm not sure what the Israelis are up to.
It's kind of difficult to figure out exactly what their motive is.
I think one could argue that they're desperate and they're lashing out.
Things are not going well in Gaza.
Things are not going well with Hezbollah.
There's just a lot of bad news confronting the Israelis, and one could argue that they're just upping the ante to try to get themselves out of this mess.
It also may be the case that they want to drag the United States into the war, and they want to get the United States in a war with Iran.
That's been a longtime objective of the Israeli foreign policy establishment, and one could argue that's what's going on here.
But regardless, it is certainly not good for the United States.
Well, I want to explore that a little bit because at the beginning of the war, the war between Israel and Gaza, the Biden administration deployed very significant military assets to the region, including two aircraft carriers.
And the argument was we're doing this to protect Israel from the possibility of escalation, meaning that if Israel ends up in a war, say, with Hezbollah or with Iran or with other Iranian proxies, we want to make sure that we're in the region, both hopefully in the first instance, we want to make sure that we're in the region, both hopefully in the first instance, to deter that by But in the event it really escalates, we're going to fight to protect Israel.
So here you have a case.
I mean, there's been a lot of bombing of Iranian assets in Iraq and Syria, both by the Israelis and by the U.S., and that's obviously one thing, to bomb Iranian assets, bomb Iranian troops stationed in Syria and Iraq.
This seems like something almost designed to force the Iranians to retaliate because technically They bombed Iranian soil.
I mean, these consulates, these embassies are of a different nature than just, say, the foreign troops or barracks in Syria or in Iraq.
This is almost essentially like under international law, like attacking Iran itself.
What are the kinds of things that Iran could do or might do in order to retaliate?
Something it seems like they almost have to do.
And what are the possible implications of that for the United States?
Well, the fact is that the Iranians don't want a war with the United States.
They've been trying to avoid a war with the United States.
They've gone to great lengths to communicate to us that they don't want a war.
And of course, we don't want a war with them either.
When we first put those two aircraft carriers and the other naval ships into the Mediterranean Sea, It was not so much to protect Israel, I mean there was some of that at play, but it was mainly to make sure that the war didn't escalate and we didn't get dragged in.
We don't want to get dragged into any wars in the Middle East.
We're already fighting the Houthis, that's bad enough, but we don't want a war against Hezbollah and we certainly don't want a war against Iran.
And I think what's going on here, as I alluded to before, is I think the Israelis would like to get us into a war with Iran, and I don't think the Israelis would mind it at all if they got into a war with Hezbollah.
And in fact, in the early months of the war, there was lots of evidence, at least in the That the United States was telling the Israelis that they could not start a war with Hezbollah because there was evidence the Israelis actually wanted to go to war with Hezbollah.
They wanted to deal with that problem militarily.
As you well know, the Israelis believe in big stick diplomacy.
They believe that they can beat other groups or other countries over the head with a big stick and get their way.
It hardly ever works, but that's their sort of modus operandi.
And I think they wanted to pick a fight for a number of months there with Hezbollah, not only to punish Hezbollah, but I think they also saw as an opportunity to do ethnic cleansing on the West Bank.
I think the Israeli view, deep down, is that the bigger the war is, the greater the opportunity for ethnic cleansing, not just in Gaza, but in the West Bank as well.
And as you know, that's their ultimate objective, to cleanse the Palestinians out of both of those two pieces of real estate.
When the war began, there was an essay by Naftali Bennett, who was briefly the Israeli Prime Minister before Netanyahu came back.
He's been regarded as a kind of extremist in Israeli politics, though I guess that concept shifts frequently.
I'm not even sure if Naftali Bennett is really an extremist any longer in the specter of mainstream Israeli politics.
But nonetheless, in The Economist, what he said was, look, the real reason The real motive we have in what we're about to do in Gaza, and I remember being very disturbed by this because I believed it, is not to get rid of Hamas.
We're not really sure we can do that.
How are you really going to ever get rid of Hamas?
Kind of like getting rid of the Taliban.
What we really need to do is show the world and show our enemies in the region once and for all that we are unconstrained.
That they need to fear us, he said, for generations by what they're about to see that we are willing to do.
Meaning that we can't be constrained anymore by international law or by Western concepts of how 21st century wars need to be fought.
He said we need to put fear into the hearts of everyone in the region for generations so that even though they hate us so much, they'll be deterred from ever messing with us because they know what we're willing to do to them.
I, you know, there were obviously debates about what is the Israeli motive.
Other Israeli officials were saying different things about the motive of the war.
It seems to me that there's evidence over the last week with these out-of-control events, as you put it, that that does seem to be at least part of the Israeli motive.
And I realize it's always a little speculative to talk about motives, but do you think that's part of what the Israelis are trying to do as well, in addition to arguably expand the war, drag the U.S.
in, and those other motives you mentioned?
Well, the thing is, Glenn, that's a long-standing strategy among Israeli policymakers.
It goes back to Ze'ev Yabotensky, who was one of the original Zionists and who died well before the state was created.
And he invented this concept of the Iron Wall.
And what you basically just did was describe the Iron Wall, and the basic idea, to sum it up, Sum it up very simply is that you beat the Palestinians into submission.
You beat them up so badly that they throw their hands up and they quit.
And this is what the Israelis have tried to do for decades.
And as we found out on October 7th, and before that with the second intifada, and before that with the first intifada, it doesn't work.
The Palestinians want some form of self-determination.
And the Israelis can't beat that out of them.
But nevertheless, they continue to try.
I would argue, however, that I think in the case of Gaza, there was a lot of this iron wall mentality at play.
But I think their ultimate objective from the start was to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
And I would bet a lot of money that they're deeply disappointed that they have failed so far in that enterprise.
Yeah, I mean there were, you know, and that's why I say like there's usually with motives people still debate why did the United States go to invade Iraq?
What was the motive?
Was it oil?
Was it Israel?
Was it some genuine panic?
You know, it's hard to debate motives when you're talking about a big country governed by multiple factions because the motive might be mixed.
But what I think I'm trying to really ask was, it seems to me, and maybe I'm wrong about this, but it seems to me like at least for the past few decades, One of the strategic goals of Israel was to ensure that they maintained a PR advantage in Western countries and among Western populations.
It was very important to them to depict themselves as being the more humane country, the more victimized country, the country that just wants peace.
And it worked for a long time.
In most Western countries, the populations did.
empathize more with Israel than say with the Palestinians or with other countries that are viewed as enemies of Israel.
It seems to me now like the Israelis are completely unconcerned about how they're perceived in the West because the kinds of things they're doing so openly are almost designed to make Western populations enraged, like killing British and Norwegian and American aid workers with an attack on a convoy like this.
Am I exaggerating the shift in Israeli perception, or do you think that has changed where the Israelis don't really care as much as they once did about how they're perceived in the West?
No, I agree with you, Glenn, and I think the key date here is October 7th.
If you think about how Israel related to the Palestinians, especially the Palestinians in Gaza, before October 7th, they basically treated the place as a giant open-air prison.
And what they were concerned with was managing the problem.
And what they wanted to do is make sure that the Palestinians remained locked up inside Gaza, did not have too much food, and then every few years they would do what they call mow the lawn.
They'd go in there and they'd bomb a portion of Gaza, kill a good number of Palestinians, destroy a good number of buildings, and make it clear to the Gazans that they were in charge and that they were managing the problem.
And you also remember, Glenn, That Netanyahu was actually working with Hamas at the time.
Netanyahu was satisfied that Hamas was in control because Hamas was not interested in the two-state solution, which is exactly what the Israelis wanted to avoid.
The bad guys, from Netanyahu's point of view, were the Palestinian Authority and the West Bank, because Mahmoud Abbas, who heads up the Palestinian Authority, is in favor of a two-state solution.
So Netanyahu wanted to keep Hamas alive and well in Gaza, so that there was no movement on the Palestinian side towards a two-state solution.
So in effect, the Israelis were Managing the problem quite successfully up to October 7th, especially when you throw in your discussion of how they were able to manipulate public opinion, the Israelis were able to manipulate public opinion in the West.
But then October 7th happened, all hell broke loose.
And the problem that the Israelis have is they don't have a solution for solving the problem that's in front of them.
And what they're doing is escalating and escalating and doing more and more wild and crazy things, which is getting them into more and more trouble with the West, including the Biden administration.
But at the same time, they're not solving the problems they face.
So we're gonna get to Ukraine in a minute but I remember from the very beginning when we talked about Ukraine it was always kind of gloomy and left like a little bit with a dreary sentiment because I remember asking you repeatedly every time I talked to you like what is the potential solution for Ukraine and you would pretty much say well there doesn't seem to be one given the way that the West has defined Victory versus what the Russians have said they could accept and can accept.
Those things cannot be reconciled.
And it seems like we're just going to have a war that's just going to kind of plod on forever.
Maybe at some point it'll be more of a frozen conflict.
It's kind of a war that just, you know, where the front line really doesn't change, but the war kind of keeps going.
There's never a negotiated solution because there can't be a peace treaty within the parameters of sideset.
Is that the same at this point for Israel and the Palestinians?
In other words, for a long time, if you asked any Western liberal, they would always say, oh, well, I think there's a solution available.
And that is to have a two-state solution, two nice, peaceful countries living side by side, respecting each other's sovereignty.
The Palestinian state over here, the Israeli state over here.
For so many reasons, most people now admit that's impossible in large part because the Israeli settlements have expanded to such an extent that there's no way to get those settlers out without a civil war in Israel.
And without removing those settlements, there's no land sufficient to create a Palestinian state of any kind that would ever be accepted.
So what is the solution?
Is the same answer that you have for me in Ukraine, which we'll get to in a minute, which is there just isn't one?
I think there's no long-term solution here for the reasons you just elucidated.
My question at this point is whether or not there's a short-term solution.
At some point, the shooting or the large-scale shooting in Gaza is going to end.
And then the question is, who's going to run Gaza?
If you read the Israeli press, there are lots of Israeli military officers who are saying what they need from the Israeli government is some sort of plan for who's going to administer or who's going to run Gaza once the shooting stops.
And Netanyahu has no plan.
So you can go around chasing Hamas forever and ever and playing whack-a-mole with Hamas.
But the problem is it doesn't go away.
And moreover, there's no alternative political organization.
or political architecture that you can set in place in Gaza that can neutralize in large part Hamas and make Gaza work so that the Israelis can get out and you can have some sort of frozen conflict there.
So I don't see what's going to happen here in the short term once the shooting stops.
Who's going to run Gaza?
Who's going to feed all those people?
Where are they going to live, given the number of apartment buildings and houses that have been destroyed?
So it looks to me like this is just going to go on and on and on.
And it's going to be a huge problem for Israel, and it's going to be a huge problem for the United States.
And that's just the short term.
So since we have spent some time talking about the Israeli motive, I think no discussion of the Israeli motive is complete without discussing Netanyahu's personal and political situation.
We discussed the fact that right before October 7th, there was virtually a civil war in Israel over issues like his corruption trial that he was facing, the attempt to remove judicial review from the Israeli Supreme Court, and it basically allowed the Knesset to pass whatever laws they wanted.
There were reservists and Unprecedented conflicts in Israel happening over that political controversy in particular.
Everybody knows Netanyahu is incredibly unpopular.
There's still the issue of whether or not, what kind of blame his government bears for allowing October 7th to happen without detecting it, without having stopped it.
He's politically crippled.
The only thing that's keeping him in office, and therefore the only thing that's keeping him away from possible prison, on that corruption trial and other charges that he might face is the ongoing war.
So in other words, he is personally very motivated to ensure that the shooting doesn't stop anytime soon.
This is something Israelis talk openly about.
How much do you think that's part of the calculus here?
I think it matters for sure, but I think a lot of the discussion about Netanyahu here in the West is built around the assumption that he is the problem, that Netanyahu is the problem.
And if we get rid of him and put somebody like Benny Gantz in, When Naftali Bennett comes back into power, that things would then be better.
But the fact is that within the political context of Israel, Netanyahu is not an extremist.
Benny Gantz and Naftali Bennett share his basic views on what needs to be done in Gaza.
They may be a bit more flexible, but not much more flexible.
So I don't see Netanyahu is that big a problem, and I don't see getting rid of him as any meaningful solution.
In fact, as you can garner from my previous comments, I don't see much of a solution here at all.
But I want to make one additional point, Glenn.
When you talk about possible civil war inside Israel and all the controversy there was about the The rule regarding the judiciary or the Supreme Court in Israel before October 7th, where it did appear that Israel was on the verge of a civil war.
There is another big issue that has recently come to the fore that I believe could cause even more trouble down the road.
And that is that the Supreme Court has basically ruled in a way that's going to force, if it's upheld, it's going to force the ultra-Orthodox to serve in the military.
It's important to understand that about 13% of Israel's population today is ultra-Orthodox, and the ultra-Orthodox men and women do not serve in the military.
They have an exemption.
And if you look at demographic patterns out to the year 2050, the percentage of the Israeli population that's going to be ultra-Orthodox is going to increase to around 30%.
And if you have a situation where now 13% and in the future 30% of your population refuses to serve in the military, and you're facing multiple threats, and you don't have that big a military, you're in real trouble.
But the problem with the ultra-Orthodox is they absolutely refuse to serve in the military.
And I think it's going to be impossible.
I may be wrong, but my sense is it's going to be impossible to get them to serve without some form of civil war breaking out.
So Israel is facing problems on multiple fronts at this point in time.
And moving forward, the situation on almost all those fronts, whether you're talking about Hezbollah, Hamas, the West Bank, this problem with the ultra-Orthodox, the problem with the Supreme Court and the basic law, it's hard to see any of those situations improving over time.
And they all look like they're going to get worse.
I want to talk about the attack on this convoy yesterday because ordinarily in situations like this, the IDF or whatever military comes out and says, oh, we made a terrible mistake.
We thought this was a Hamas convoy.
There was a miscommunication.
We're so sorry that instead the fog of war made us attack an aid convoy.
That's not what the Israelis are saying here.
They're saying pretty much that they're conceding They knew very well that these three cars formed a convoy of the World Food Kitchen aid workers, a popular organization even inside Israel and around the world, that they had approval of the IDF to operate in Gaza.
They were traveling on a route that the IDF had approved.
And the Israelis are basically saying, we knew we were attacking this aid convoy, but we did it because we thought, mistakenly as it turns out, but we thought That among the aid convoy was a single individual who was armed and who had some connection to Hamas.
Now, I don't know, it seems to me like this kind of a rationale, like we decided to wipe out an entire convoy of aid workers because we thought that among them was one armed Hamas member.
is the kind of rationale that's so flagrantly unacceptable, even in a war zone, that it's kind of shocking to hear the Israeli government using that as its story, as its excuse, especially given that citizens of the West, not just Palestinians, were killed.
What do you make of that event and that justification?
Well, the Israelis basically treat Gaza as a free fire zone, which is that anything that moves inside of Gaza is a target that they are free to attack.
And they basically believe that they can get away with it.
Yes, there will be a lot of criticism from the usual circles, but in the end, the Americans will protect them because the Americans always protect them.
And before, when you were talking about the American response to this event, I think everything you said, Glenn, supports the basic point I'm making, that the Americans will not punish them, and if anything, the Americans will protect them.
And this is hardly surprising for anybody who knows anything about Israeli history.
Just go back to 1967, when the Israelis attacked the Liberty.
An American ship that was in the Eastern Mediterranean.
It's quite clear that the Israelis knew that they were killing Americans, and they nevertheless did it.
And there was no punishment for them.
And Lyndon Johnson, who was president at the time, protected the Israelis at every turn.
And there has never been any official investigation of what happened that settled this issue of the liberty In any meaningful way.
And this particular issue that now just took place in Gaza with the humanitarian aid convoy bears marked resemblance to what happened to the Liberty.
And there are other examples as well, including the case a few years ago when Rachel Corey, who was an American aid worker, was run over by a bulldozer in Israel.
She was blatantly killed at the time, and the American government did virtually nothing.
So that then leads to the question of motive on the part of the U.S.
government, because I think people have ordinarily assumed the reason the U.S.
government is so protective of the Israelis, so supportive of the Israelis, and obviously you wrote the book on this so you know as well as anybody, that a major reason is that there's a huge political force inside the United States that makes it politically very difficult to oppose the Israelis, much like the powerful lobby of the pharmaceutical company makes it difficult to oppose that industry or wall street makes it difficult to oppose that or the nra makes it hard to oppose gun control laws you have this powerful lobby that makes it politically difficult in 2024
there is a lot of evidence and i think even the bide administration is now seeing it that their reelection campaign joe biden's reelection campaign is seriously jeopardized the more they stand by the israelis especially the more the israelis do that anger and horrify people because the young voters the left-wing voters the muslim voters and arab voters on whom the democratic party depends in key swing states to get out and vote are
are not only saying but making clear in many ways that they will not vote for Joe Biden in 2024 given the U.S.
support for Israel and yet they seem willing to risk that in order to continue doing it.
Is it just a political calculation that they would suffer more politically if they were seen as abandoning Israel or What is really going on here as to why we're willing to swallow as a country, as a government, even watching our own citizens killed by Israel?
I believe it's the power of the lobby.
I mean, again, you go back to the Liberty.
Why was there never a meaningful investigation of what happened in 1967?
And the answer is the lobby.
Politicians and policymakers who are ambitious live in mortal fear of the lobby, and they should.
The lobby is a remarkably powerful institution or set of institutions and individuals who will go to great lengths to do damage to the career of any person who is critical of Israel.
So you have this situation where the Biden administration stands a very good chance of losing in November because of its unequivocal support of Israel.
Yet it doesn't seem able to do anything to rein the Israelis in.
And And it'll be very interesting, I think, to see what happens if the Democrats lose.
In November, and Biden loses the White House to Trump and people come to the conclusion, or I should say Democrats come to the conclusion, that it was Israel and its behavior in Gaza that is responsible for Biden losing.
It could be at that point that the lobby's influence in the United States, at least on the Democratic side of the political spectrum, begins to really suffer in a major way.
I wouldn't want to say that's going to happen for sure, but it is possible Biden will be beat on this issue.
And again, we want to think about what will be the consequences for the lobby and for Israel if that happens.
So I guess what I've really been asking is, on some level, if you look back at the last 40 years of US support for Israel, even longer, as you said, 50 years, 60 years, including even an Israeli attack on an American ship, the Liberty, and all the other wars the Israelis have fought where the Americans have stood by their side, often at great cost to the United States, The political calculation inside the United States was typically that Americans overwhelmingly supported Israel.
So there was no real political cost to political leaders from standing by Israel.
It was the overwhelmingly popular position for leaders of both parties to take.
Given though that there now is much more opposition to Israel, certainly within the Democratic Party, within young voters, within serious voting bases, and there's been recent polling showing that 70% of Democrats, 55 or 60% of Independents, even 30% of Americans oppose the war that Israel is conducting in Gaza, things, polling data that we haven't really seen before, What is there anything else besides the political consideration?
Because everything that we just talked about, the dangers to Biden's re-election as a result of this policy, is something that they know as well.
They're aware of these dangers as well.
Why are they willing to undertake that possibility that they might lose to Trump over this?
Well, I think you put it right a few minutes ago when you said that they've done a cost-benefit analysis and they believe that the costs of challenging Israel and challenging the lobby would be greater than the costs of continuing to support Israel and tilting more towards the progressive slash Arab-American side.
So they've made that calculation.
The fact is, Glenn, they're between a rock and a hard place.
And I hear I'm talking about the Biden administration and even, you know, officials who were up for election to the Senate and the House.
They're between a rock and a hard place in many cases as well, because they could really pay an awful price for supporting Israel down the line.
Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm wondering whether there's, in addition to the political component, and maybe this is naive, that there's an actual kind of reflex Or even true conviction that the United States is, this is just what the US does.
These politicians, Joe Biden has been in Washington for 70 years, he's been, or 50 years, he's been pro-Israel in the most steadfast, unquestioning way for decades.
And I guess what I'm wondering is, beyond the political calculation, is this pro-Israel sentiment so ingrained as also a conviction, an ideological belief, or a strategic judgment?
That it serves the American interest to do what they're willing to do.
That's what Washington does.
You widen them up and they support Israel.
Look, I think there's no question that what you say is true of Joe Biden, and he said this on numerous occasions, that he is in effect joined at the hip with Israel.
He supports Israel unequivocally.
He's made that point numerous times.
Chuck Schumer is another person who is joined at the hip with Israel and would defend Israel no matter what.
But there are a lot of other people who don't fit in that category, who support Israel because they know the political costs of opposing Israel or opposing the lobby would be so great.
The other thing is, just to go to Joe Biden for a second, Joe Biden is a staunch supporter of Israel.
There's no question about that.
But you can make a very good case that even if you have Joe Biden's worldview, What Israel is now doing is not only not in my political interest—my meaning Joe Biden's political interest—it's also not in Israel's interest.
This is one of the things I've never understood about the lobby.
I think that the lobby has done more damage to Israel over time than good, because it supports Israel no matter what, which means if Israel goes out and does something foolish, The Americans can't put pressure on Israel to change their behavior because the lobby will punish them.
So the lobby has allowed Israel to do lots of foolish things.
Joe Biden, therefore, could conclude that what's going on today, even though the lobby supports it, makes no good sense from either a strategic or a moral point of view.
And therefore, I, Joe Biden, as a defender of Israel, should come down hard on the Israelis to change their behavior.
And of course, that would dovetail with his political interests.
So my point to you is even if you are deeply committed to Israel, like Joe Biden or Chuck Schumer, you can still make a case for getting tough with the Israelis.
And one could argue that's exactly what Chuck Schumer did in the famous talk that he gave saying that it was time to get rid of Netanyahu and bring new leadership in, in Israel.
Right, but I think that's also part and parcel of this strategy that certain American leaders, especially Democrats, like to use.
If you notice, whenever Bernie Sanders now criticizes Israel, he emphasizes the far-right Netanyahu government.
Doing exactly what you suggested just a few minutes ago doesn't make a lot of sense, which is to frame this as the result or a problem of who is leading Israel, as though there's some leader waiting in the wings to replace Netanyahu wants to put a stop to the war in Gaza and solve the problem in a constructive way.
I think there's a lot of political benefit to that formulation so that Bernie Sanders can tell Democrats, I'm not criticizing Israel, I'm just criticizing the far right leadership that they have.
We would all love Israel if they had a good centrist leader again.
Let me just ask you before I move to Ukraine, which I absolutely want to do, I'm not somebody who spent a lot of time worrying about Joe Biden's cognitive capabilities and this question of whether or not he can function mentally the way he did previously.
But I have to say that the events of the last couple weeks when I see things like the Iranians are reaching out through the emissaries they use to talk to the United States and Switzerland to signal, look, we hold you responsible for the attack on our consulate, but we don't want a broader war.
This is very delicate diplomatic maneuvering that's necessary, as well as these considerations that you and I have been discussing about what Biden might be thinking about politically and strategically when it comes to Israel.
Do you worry that he's really not up to the task of engaging in this kind of delicate I don't worry much about that.
I worry about Biden's long-term future in terms of his mental health.
I'm 76 years old, and I have lots of friends who are in their late 70s.
of which he's the face and it doesn't really matter?
I don't worry much about that.
I worry about Biden's long-term future in terms of his mental health.
I'm 76 years old and I have lots of friends who are in their late 70s.
I have a number of friends who are in their early 80s.
And there's no question that once you pass 75, your cognitive skills begin to deteriorate somewhat.
It varies from person to person.
And I think that Joe Biden, who is 80 years old and already is showing some signs of having significant cognitive problems, is gonna have serious cognitive problems in probably two or three years.
This is my gut instinct.
I'm no expert on these things, but just from paying a lot of attention to the issue because of my own age, I worry about him.
At the moment, I think there's not a significant problem.
There's not a serious problem.
And he's surrounded by people who I think can help him if there is any sort of problem.
All these people think the same way.
Right.
I think that Biden, Sullivan and Tony Blinken are birds of a feather.
So I don't think that even if I'm wrong and Biden is not throwing the fastball anymore that it matters that much.
So yeah, I see that.
Yeah.
And for the record, we have not noticed any slowing down on your part at all of anything.
Sometimes quite the contrary.
So just don't want to put that on the record.
All right.
Let's move to Ukraine for a little bit with a little bit of time that we have, because it's really kind of fascinating to me.
You know, there was this surge of public opinion questioning more than ever before whether we should keep sending billions of dollars.
this request that Joe Biden made for $60 billion was made before October 7th, or right around that time.
It's been six months where they couldn't get this through Congress.
They had a change in the House Speaker.
There's a significant portion of the Republican caucus absolutely opposed to sending more money.
And yet, you know, I've been saying all along, on the one hand, it seems like it's very difficult to get more money under these conditions.
On the other, I've never seen the U.S.
military-industrial complex lose when they really want something and they really want to continue to finance this war.
And now it looks like Mike Johnson has found a way or is close to finding a way to bringing this to a House 4 vote.
It will definitely pass with the unanimous Democratic caucus and the majority of Republicans to support this.
What do you think is the thinking in Washington at this point about why they still are so eager to continue this war?
Well, there are a huge number of people who are deeply invested in this war.
If Ukraine were to lose to Russia, it would be humiliating to them individually.
They're committed to Ukraine winning.
They've said that they were going to stick with Ukraine until it won a victory.
So, if Ukraine loses, that would have devastating consequences for individual reputations.
Furthermore, it's quite clear that it would have a devastating effect on NATO.
This is a war that NATO and the West and the United States are all deeply involved in.
And if we lose to the evil Russians, I mean, you want to remember that we're not just dealing with any old adversary here.
We're dealing with the Russians.
Given the Russophobia in the West, especially in the United States, and given the hatred of Putin in the West, and again, especially in the United States, the thought of losing would just be really unacceptable.
And then there's another dimension to this, Glenn, which is that If we do lose, these people are all going to have blood on their hands.
These are all people who were responsible for pushing and encouraging the Ukrainians to fight this war, because they believed that Ukraine would beat Russia.
And if Russia wins, and Ukraine is destroyed, and all that is left is a dysfunctional rump This is going to mean all of these people have blood on their hands, and they want to avoid that as well.
So they're doing everything they can to double down and get Congress to pass the necessary legislation to get this package of financial aid to the Ukrainians.
You know, it's interesting though, and maybe this is too cynical, but in the past when the U.S.
has lost wars, it's happened in Vietnam, it happened in Iraq, it happened in Afghanistan.
The argument was made, well, we didn't really lose the war, we only lost because we were kneecapped, because the people who were opposed to the continuation of the war didn't give us the things we needed to let us win, and therefore we kind of got forced to withdraw.
And had they kept funding it, had they kept giving it the devotion it needed, we ultimately would have won.
On some level, I started seeing this narrative.
Well, if Ukraine loses, it's going to be the fault of the House Republican Caucus for not getting the $60 billion to Ukraine.
It was almost a good way out of the war to say, well, yeah, we lost, but we didn't lose because we were wrong.
It was because the Putinist and the Republican Party didn't get the $60 billion.
You've been saying for a long time now, and you've been proven right, I think everybody can acknowledge that, that Ukraine isn't going to win, that Russia is winning, that Russia will continue to win even with this $60 billion, which isn't going to solve any of the problems that is causing Ukraine to lose their shortage of artillery, their fact that they don't have people to keep sending to the front lines.
So I agree that the goal is to prevent anyone from being able to say with certainty that the United States and NATO lost, which would happen if there was an agreement that gave Russia dominion over any part of Ukraine, including Crimea, which was the definition of victory.
But since winning is not an option, is the thinking of DC, well, let's just keep the war going infinitely so that nobody can ever say that we lost?
I think they're hoping for a miracle.
I mean, for anybody who studies this conflict carefully, it's almost impossible to tell a story as to how Ukraine can win.
Just let's go to the A package.
Let's assume that we give them $60 billion.
They don't need $60 billion.
What they need are weaponry, right?
They need artillery tubes.
They need artillery shells.
They need lots of aircraft.
They need air defense systems.
They need soldiers.
Yeah, absolutely, Glenn.
That cannot be underestimated.
They need soldiers.
They have a huge manpower crisis.
They have a mobilization bill that has been in their parliament for months now, and almost everybody agrees that it's never going to get out of parliament.
So they're not going to have a mobilization plan intact so that they can raise more troops and send them to the front to deal with The massive advantage that the Russians have in manpower.
So it just in terms of manpower alone, we can't do anything to rectify that.
And again, just to go back to the weaponry, we have very little weaponry to give them.
A lot of proponents of continued aid talk as if the weaponry were on the shelf.
And all we need to do is get the money through Congress, then we can take the weapons off the shelf and ship them to Ukraine.
But this bears little resemblance to reality.
Those weapons are not on the shelf.
And it's going to take a long time to produce the weapons to give to the Ukrainians so that they can rectify the situation.
In the meantime, the Ukrainians are losing on the battlefield.
If you read carefully what's being said about events on the battlefield, the Ukrainians are in dire straits.
And there is no plausible scenario for rescuing this situation.
What about the political situation in Kiev?
And I just have a couple more questions for you before I let you go.
But the political unity in Ukraine was very real at the start of the war, certainly throughout 2022 into 2023.
And in the late part of last year, in the early part of this year, we begin seeing some serious divisions where a lot of top Ukrainian officials were openly questioning whether Zelensky had a grasp on reality.
We've seen Top military officials fired for corruption suspicions or even the top military commander has left.
Some factions in Ukraine are now talking openly about opposing Zelensky.
There are no elections happening.
Ukraine is being destroyed.
Each day that we're focused on other things, there's all these controversies over how they're dragging people to the front lines.
Is Zelensky's power and his hold on power Safe for the short and midterm or are there political divisions inside Kiev that are also relevant to the war?
It doesn't appear to an outside observer like me that there is a movement afoot to get rid of him, and there's an obvious replacement.
It may be the case that there are machinations behind the scene that I just don't know about, and he will be overthrown in a week or two.
I would just say I don't see evidence of that.
But there is lots of evidence, as you describe it, that he is in political trouble.
There's no question he was in the catbird seat for roughly the first year of the war.
The war, of course, broke out in February 2022.
And You know, in early 2023, he was in very good shape.
It looked like the Ukrainians had performed very well on the battlefield through most of 2022.
And it looked like the upcoming counteroffensive that was going to start in June was going to produce a significant victory.
So Zelensky was in good shape at that point of time.
And of course, he had Almost unequivocal American support then.
But since the counteroffensive failed in the late summer, early fall of 2023, and since the Americans, and here we're talking mainly about elements inside the Republican Party, began to lose their enthusiasm for Ukraine, to put it mildly, the situation changed.
And over the course of late 2023 and early 2024, I believe the balance of forces has shifted decisively in favor of the Russians.
And as a result, opinion on Zelensky has soured in important ways inside of Ukraine.
So he's in real trouble and he can't rescue the situation.
So, his trouble is only going to get worse.
But the problems here are even bigger than that, because you have problems inside of the military.
There was a general named Zelensky who headed the Ukrainian forces for many years.
What happened recently is that Zelensky fired him, because there were significant differences between him and Zelensky.
He was very popular inside the military, and they replaced him, General Zelensky, with General Sirsky, who is, by almost all accounts, very unpopular inside of the Ukrainian military.
So here you have a situation Where you have an unpopular general in charge of the Ukrainian fighting forces at the same time the Ukrainian fighting forces are suffering significant defeats on the battlefield and the Russians are inflicting massive casualties on them.
So all is not well inside the military as well as inside the political system in Kiev.
So all of this is to say that Ukraine is in deep trouble.
Let me end by asking you about China, which is so ironic.
You know, when you have a foreign policy discussion like this, we are constantly being told that China is our number one adversary, going all the way back to the Obama administration.
We were hearing we have to pivot away from the Middle East, stop caring about Middle East wars, and focus on the Pacific and on Asia and especially on China.
A lot of people say China is still our number one enemy and yet we have a whole conversation like this.
We don't even get to chain it until the very end because the United States is so focused on things like war in Ukraine, war in the Middle East.
And I remember when the U.S.
withdrew from Afghanistan, had spent billions of dollars over 20 years only for the Taliban to just march right back into power as though nothing had happened.
The Chinese released this kind of mocking video saying, oh look, while you were spending, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars, trillions of dollars actually, on all of these wars and we weren't, we used our money instead to build this high-speed rail system that's very modern that connects all of our cities and our rural areas and improved our supply chain.
And so here you have the U.S.
heavily involved again in multiple conflicts.
We're bombing Iraq and Syria and Yemen, funding the Israelis and arming them, funding Ukraine and arming them.
And China's not really involved in any of these wars.
They just seem to be sitting back.
We barely talk about them.
What is the impact on China and its competition with the United States from all of this foreign policy that we just got done analyzing?
I would just note, before I answer your question, that the Chinese have not fought a war since 1979.
That was a long time ago.
And of course, as you described, the United States has been fighting endless wars since the Cold War ended.
It's really quite remarkable what a highly militarized society we live in.
I mean, the real problem here, Glenn, is that it is possible we could have a conflict between China and the United States in East Asia in the immediate or near future.
I mean, who knows for sure, but there is real potential here.
And if you think about a situation where we're in deep trouble in the Middle East, And we're in deep trouble in Europe in the Ukraine war.
If you add to that a conflict where we're actually involved in East Asia, this would be a huge problem for the United States.
So what's happening here is I believe the United States has been going to great lengths to ameliorate the intensity of the competition, security competition with China.
I think last fall when Joe Biden met with Xi Jinping in San Francisco, what Biden was trying to do was just tamp things down in East Asia, because Biden is fully aware that the last thing the United States needs is trouble in East Asia at this point in time.
But I would note to you that the potential for trouble in East Asia is not to be underestimated.
I was just reading today Where the United States, the Japanese and the Filipinos are going to conduct joint naval exercises in the South China Sea.
And it's important to emphasize that the Filipinos and the Chinese have been bumping up against each other in recent months.
There's a real dispute between the two sides over one of these I'm not saying it's going to happen, but it's actually a dangerous situation.
real potential for conflict between the Filipinos and the Chinese.
I'm not saying it's going to happen, but it's actually a dangerous situation.
And I think it's a more dangerous situation at this point in time than the possibility of China invading Taiwan.
And you want to understand that we have a treaty with the Filipinos.
And if the Philippines gets involved in a war with China, we will almost certainly come to the defense of the Filipinos.
And again, just think about it.
The Americans, the Japanese, and the Filipinos are now conducting a naval exercise in the South China Sea, or are about to, and that is sure to infuriate the Chinese.
So, the point here is that in East Asia, the potential for a real shooting match is ever-present, and I think if one were to break out, we would be directly involved, which makes it different than the Ukraine situation and different than the Middle East, where, thank goodness, we're not directly involved in the fighting in either one of those situations.
So, we don't want to lose sight of East Asia and of China.
Well, there's a lot of reasons I very much hope that the two words that the United States is financing and arming end.
One of them is that that way, the next time we speak, we can actually spend a lot more time on exploring the U.S.-China relationship, where the U.S.
has bases all around China, the new deal with Australia, lots of important things to discuss when it comes to the U.S.
and China and East Asia.
It's very difficult when you have all these other words going on, though, to spend a lot of time on that because it's impossible not to talk about It's my pleasure Glenn, and thanks a lot for having me on the show.
Always great to see you.
It's not always super encouraging, but it's always very enlightening.
I am always happy to see you, and I'm really glad that you took the time to come back and hope you'll do so again soon.
It's my pleasure, Glenn, and thanks a lot for having me on the show.
Absolutely.
Have a great evening.
You too.
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