Prof. John Mearsheimer on Trump's attempt to renegotiate an Iran nuclear deal, the U.S./Israeli war with Iran, Israel's U.S.-backed destruction of Gaza, and more. ------------------------------------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
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| Good evening. | |
| It's Tuesday, June 24th. | |
| 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, the past 10 days were filled with extremely weighty and consequential events in foreign policy, obviously, beginning, of course, with Israel's attack on Iran and then Donald Trump's decision to bomb that country's nuclear facilities. | |
| Though that was ended relatively quickly, at least it seems so and one certainly hopes, the fallout is likely to be vast and will unfold over the next many months. | |
| The understandable focus on that war in Iran has also though served to obscure other perhaps equally significant events, including the still worsening Israeli destruction of Gaza, the economic and political fallout from this war, the one we just had in Iran, the prospect of future regional conflict there, the ongoing war in Ukraine, remember that one, that's still going on, and also what we learned from all of these events about Trump's foreign policy. | |
| Given the importance, but also the complexities of all of these developments, we are thrilled to have one of the most knowledgeable and clear-thinking voices anywhere in our political discourse. | |
| He is professor of international relations and political science at the University of Chicago, John Mearsheimer. | |
| Professor Mearsheimer really doesn't need any introduction, especially for our viewers who have seen him on the show many times over the past several years and is one of our most popular and certainly one of our most enlightening guests. | |
| He's the author of the genuinely groundbreaking 2007 book, the Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, as well as a highly influential 2014 article in the Journal Foreign Affairs entitled, Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West's Fault. | |
| We have a lot to talk to him with about, and we will get to it very shortly. | |
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| For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now. | |
| It has become relatively easier over the past, say, year or two, since October 7th, to talk openly about the influence of Israel in U.S. foreign policy, as well as the reason why so many of our politicians seem to prioritize Israel either on par with or even above the interests of the United States. | |
| But back when it was not at all common to do so, our guest tonight, Professor John Mearsheimer, along with Harvard Professor Stephen Walt, wrote what became the groundbreaking book that if you read, you will see the complete relevance of in 2007 called The Israel Lobby that documented all the reasons that that happened. | |
| He has also been, I think, the most prescient, influential voice on warning of the dangers of the war in Ukraine, what likely would happen as opposed to what we were being told would happen. | |
| And we are always delighted to have him on our show. | |
| Professor, it's great to see you as always. | |
| Thanks so much for coming on. | |
| My pleasure as always, Glenn. | |
| All right. | |
| So I was thinking about the trajectory of your appearances here. | |
| And I start with this a lot because it seems like it kind of paralleled what has actually happened. | |
| I remember after October 7th, one of the things we most frequently discussed was the danger that the Israeli destruction of Gaza, which the U.S. paid for and armed, could then lead to broader regional conflict. | |
| We talked about the possibility that they would then attack Hezbollah, that they could do something in Syria to destabilize Syria. | |
| And ultimately, the biggest concern was that it could then lead to what was the cherry on top of the cake for the Israelis, which was a U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran, which we now have witnessed over the last two weeks. | |
| So I want to begin by asking you about the pretext or the justification that was used for this clearly preemptive or preventative attack on Iran. | |
| Iran didn't attack Israel. | |
| They weren't attacking the United States. | |
| They weren't threatening to do so. | |
| And the justification we were given was that Iran had become closer than ever to developing a nuclear weapon. | |
| They were actively attempting to acquire nuclear weapons that if they acquired them, there was a very good probability, certainly more so than any other nuclear-armed country, to use a nuclear weapon either against Israel and or the United States and was therefore an existential threat we had to deal with immediately. | |
| What do you think of that justification just in terms of its ferocity or lack thereof? | |
| Well, I think, first of all, Glenn, there is no evidence that the Iranians were pursuing a nuclear weapon. | |
| And I think almost all the intelligence agencies agree on that. | |
| And the IAEA, the inspectors who have been in there for a long time watching very carefully what the Israelis, I'm excuse me, what the Iranians have been doing, agree that they're not pursuing a bomb. | |
| The problem from Israel's point of view is that they are not that far away from a point where they could build a bomb. | |
| And that's in large part because the Iranians have the capability to enrich uranium, and they've enriched it up to 60%. | |
| And if you enrich uranium to 90%, you are in a position where you are producing weapons-grade uranium. | |
| So all this is to say that the Iranians are a threshold state. | |
| They're not a nuclear weapons state and they're not pursuing nuclear weapons, but they've marched down to the five-yard line, to put it in football terms. | |
| And they are allowed to do that as a member of the NPT. | |
| You're allowed to enrich uranium. | |
| So they're doing nothing that's illegal or nothing that is wrong according to international law. | |
| They have the right to enrich uranium up to 60%. | |
| But again, that leaves them as a threshold state. | |
| And the Israelis consider this unacceptable. | |
| And what the Israelis want to do is they want to eliminate their ability to enrich uranium completely. | |
| But that's only goal number one. | |
| Goal number two, which we should also talk about, is regime change. | |
| The Israelis are interested in more than just eliminating Iran's nuclear capability. | |
| They want to affect a regime change. | |
| Those are the two broad goals. | |
| Yeah, that's why I called the claims about the nuclear program and the threats and fears of it a pretext, because I think ultimately the real goal, much more so than the attack on the nuclear program, which might have been part of the goal, but the real goal was and is regime change. | |
| And I want to get to that, of course, in a second. | |
| But before we do, I just want to stay on this topic a little bit. | |
| You had mentioned that Iran, under the NPT, Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, has the right, like every other state, to enrich uranium to whatever levels they want. | |
| They just can't weaponize that uranium, even if they could and acquire a nuclear weapon. | |
| They have inspection obligations. | |
| But there was a time when Iran did have actual limitations on the extent to which they could enrich, namely when they entered into this deal in 2015 that was very painstakingly negotiated with the entire world, where Iran voluntarily accepted a limit on its ability to enrich uranium that no other country has, namely they wouldn't enrich uranium past 3.6 or 3.7% the amount you need for nuclear energy, but not for a nuclear weapon. | |
| And they also agreed to far more invasive and rigorous inspections and monitoring and surveillance than they have the obligation under the NPT to provide to the IAEA as well. | |
| Do you think it's fair to say that Donald Trump's decision to unilaterally rip up that agreement and his failure and then Joe Biden's failure over four years to enter into a new agreement with Iran that would also provide that same framework of monitoring and surveillance, those same limits, played a major role in how we got to this place where the Israelis perceived that a war was necessary? | |
| Well, I think that it would have been eminently wise for the Israelis to accept the JCPOA. | |
| That's the 2015 agreement that President Obama negotiated with the Iranians. | |
| It was not a terrific deal from the Israelis' point of view. | |
| I fully understand that because it did allow Iran to continue enriching uranium. | |
| But it was the least bad alternative by far, and it was not a bad agreement. | |
| And I think, just to pick up on what you were saying, that President Biden and now President Trump would have been wise to have gone to a new variant of the JCPOA. | |
| I think the biggest problem from my point of view with the original JCPOA, this is the 2015 one, is that it had sunset clauses. | |
| In other words, it ran out over time. | |
| I think if they've right. | |
| But, you know, 2015 was now 10 years ago. | |
| But anyway, I think that you could have put in place a new JCPOA that did not have sunset clauses and that could have shut down this problem for a long, long time, if not once and for all. | |
| I think at the same time, what you had to do is you had to take your gun sites off the Iranians. | |
| The problem is that the Israelis and the Americans have their gun sites on Iran, which gives them a very powerful incentive to be a threshold nuclear state, which is why they want to be able to enrich all the way up to weapons-grade material. | |
| But if you took away the threat and you took away the sanctions and you tried to have some sort of rapprochement with the Iranians, I think the JCPOA would work very well. | |
| And again, it's the least bad alternative because the idea that you're going to bomb the Iranian nuclear weapons program to the point where they can't develop bombs is delusional. | |
| It just can't be done. | |
| Let me ask you about the kind of fear-mongering, though, that did exist, was purposely propagated around the idea that Iran was getting closer to a nuclear weapon, which, as you say, they were enriching at 60%. | |
| First of all, even if you develop a nuclear weapon, you still need a delivery system in order to drop it on the country that people say you want to drop it on, which is another pretty significant barrier to figure out how to put it on a warhead, how to put it on a missile, or how to put it in a plane. | |
| But beyond that, I think the more interesting question is we do have a lot of nuclear states, including states like Pakistan and India and North Korea, to say nothing of the members of the Security Council. | |
| And I think we saw with the United States and North Korea when there were tensions, we backed away almost certainly because they are a nuclear power, and we have to take that seriously as a matter of deterrence. | |
| I think in the India-Pakistan war that broke out for a couple weeks, that got pretty intense between two countries that have deep-seated hatred and distrust for one another, there was a pretty quick end to that as well. | |
| They were very careful about the escalatory ladder because both are nuclear armed powers. | |
| And that has been the basis of nuclear strategy Since other countries besides the United States got it, it's like, look, you can use it, but we have second strike capability. | |
| We'll see it coming. | |
| We can launch before it hits. | |
| And it's mutual assured destruction, meaning if you want to use it against us, you can, but you're going to get obliterated instantly and your whole country is going to be vaporized. | |
| And that has been the reason why there's been this deterrence that has kept the peace. | |
| We got close to nuclear war with Russia in 1962, but even there, you know, we sort of backed out maybe by luck. | |
| But since then, I don't think there's been a lot of instances of that. | |
| So what we're being told is that, look, deterrence works even for India, Pakistan. | |
| It works for North Korea and Kinjong-moon and the society that we're told is kind of like a maniacal cult. | |
| But it won't work for Iran. | |
| Iran would use it against Israel, might use it against the United States, even though they know they would be instantly vaporized if they did, because the leaders of Iran don't really care about preserving their lives. | |
| They're actually part of an apocalyptic, end times, death-glorifying cult. | |
| And the greatest wish they have is to be martyred and to die for some sort of jihad. | |
| And therefore, they're not susceptible to the same rational, pragmatic considerations or enlightened self-interest that all other countries are governed by. | |
| Based on what you know about Iran, based on what we've seen Iran do over the past couple of years, including just now, do you think there's any truth to that? | |
| No, I think it's a myth. | |
| The Iranians have not started a war in 200 plus years. | |
| The idea that Iran is this warlike country that's run by wild and crazy leaders who are just looking for an opportunity to nuke Israel or nuke their Arab neighbors is a ludicrous argument. | |
| The Iranians don't want to disappear from the face of the earth any more than the Israelis do. | |
| I think your point that nuclear, the point you're making, Glenn, is basically that nuclear weapons are a powerful force for peace. | |
| And I think there's no question that if every state in the Middle East had nuclear weapons, it would be a more stable region. | |
| But the problem with that argument is that you cannot guarantee that they won't be used. | |
| And even if there's only a 1% or a half a percent chance that those nuclear weapons will be used, you'd prefer that Iran not have nuclear weapons. | |
| And you would certainly prefer that not every state in the region have nuclear weapons. | |
| But you can't deter, building on your rhetoric, that nuclear weapons create stability. | |
| They do, but they're not perfect. | |
| And again, the great danger is that somebody will use them. | |
| Now, with regard to the Iranians and the Israelis, if you ask me what country in the international system today is most likely to use nuclear weapons, I would say it's Israel. | |
| And I think the nightmare scenario that we have to worry about is that the Israelis believe that Iran getting nuclear weapons is an existential threat. | |
| There's no question about that. | |
| They have this view that the Iranians, if they get nuclear weapons, will use them against Israel. | |
| Well, at this point in time, it looks like the Iranians have very powerful incentives to get nuclear weapons, given what's happened over the past 12 days and even before that. | |
| And furthermore, it looks like they have the capability because we've been unable to eliminate it. | |
| So the question you want to ask yourself is, what are the Israelis likely to do if Iran actually does develop a nuclear weapon? | |
| And I think the Israelis will have a very powerful incentive to go in and take out that capability before it's realized. | |
| And the question then you have to ask yourself is, how can they do that? | |
| And it's quite clear that the only way they can do it is with nuclear weapons. | |
| And do you think the Israelis would use nuclear weapons if Iran were on the threshold of getting a bomb? | |
| I think there is a reasonably good chance that they would. | |
| So what I worry about is not the Iranians getting nuclear weapons and using them against Israel. | |
| I worry about the Israelis using nuclear weapons against Iran when Iran is in the process of acquiring a deterrent. | |
| Yeah, I couldn't agree more. | |
| I mean, the idea that we're claiming and characterizing Iran as this group of people led by end times religious fanatics is so ironic, given that that kind of mentality pervades the U.S. Congress and the executive branch in terms of how they shape foreign policy and the ideological or theocratic foundations of it. | |
| They'll say that. | |
| They'll tell you that. | |
| And of course, Israel as well increasingly has a lot of people who believe that Israel has to expand well beyond what they were intended to be because of what God promised them, the covenant that God made. | |
| So there's a lot of theocratic extremism that's driving a lot of countries. | |
| And I do think Israel has demonstrated it's less limited by ethical, moral, and humanitarian limitations or certainly legal ones than almost any other country. | |
| So let me ask you this, though. | |
| I, of course, understand that Israel, I'm sure, has a part of their kind of national psyche that views the Iranians as their gravest threat and obviously doesn't want them to have nuclear weapons in part out of fear that they're going to use it. | |
| But I think the bigger fear in both Israel and the United States about Iran getting nuclear weapons is that if Iran became a nuclear state, Israel would no longer be able to completely dominate the region as they've been doing. | |
| I mean, we've seen over the last years, not just Gaza, not just the West Bank. | |
| They just bombed Syria again this week. | |
| They took credit for the regime change there. | |
| They took land from Lebanon and bombed, obviously, Lebanon repeatedly over the last several years. | |
| They bombed Yemen, and now they just bombed Iran. | |
| So basically, they can do whatever they want because of their military superiority. | |
| It's been the policy of Washington to ensure that Israel maintains military superiority in that region. | |
| So is that, I get the concern about Iran having nuclear weapons because they might use them. | |
| That's, you know, you don't want to have, You want to have fewer rather than more countries having nuclear weapons, I guess. | |
| But isn't the bigger fear that if Iran gets them, Israel would lose its ability to just bully the entire region and ultimately control the entire region as well? | |
| Well, I think there's no question that Israel is in a position militarily now where it can act as a bully in the region. | |
| And we don't want to underestimate the importance of Israel's alliance with the United States. | |
| I mean, the two of them act as a tag team in the region. | |
| And that's a huge force multiplier for the Israelis. | |
| I have a slightly different view of this than you do. | |
| And I believe that if you go back to the period after Israel was created, the Israelis have had a deep-seated interest in basically wrecking all of their Arab neighbors. | |
| What's happening now to Syria or what's happened to Syria over the past year and a half is what the Israelis would like to do to Iran. | |
| They want to fracture their neighbors, break them apart if possible. | |
| When the Israelis talk about regime change in Iran, they're talking about more than regime change. | |
| They want to break Iran into constituent parts. | |
| The Israelis, for example, have had a deep-seated interest in creating a Kurdish state. | |
| And I've always wondered why the Israelis were interested in creating a Kurdish state and paying so much attention to Kurdish nationalism. | |
| It's because if you created a Kurdish state, you would break apart Iraq, Iran, Syria, and even Turkey. | |
| And this has long been their goal. | |
| It's a divide and conquer policy. | |
| So I think it's just important to understand that they do want to be the most powerful state in the region, as you were alluding to. | |
| But it's more than that. | |
| They believe that the way to do that is to be joined at the hip with the United States, number one. | |
| Number two, be the only state in the region that has nuclear weapons. | |
| Number three, be by far the most powerful conventional force in the region. | |
| And number four, break apart their rivals or put their rivals in a position where they're heavily dependent on the United States. | |
| This is what they've done with Jordan and with Egypt. | |
| Jordan and Egypt have hardly any maneuver room vis-a-vis Israel because they're economically dependent on Uncle Sam. | |
| And Uncle Sam has told them that if they challenge Israel in any way, the United States will make them pay economically. | |
| So that's how you deal with Egypt and Jordan. | |
| And with countries like Syria, countries like Lebanon, countries like Iran, countries like Iraq. | |
| The basic goal there is to wreck those countries, to break them apart, to make them dysfunctional. | |
| And that's the second goal. | |
| That's the regime change goal when you dig down deep. | |
| So let me ask you about that then. | |
| Were there significant advances made in this bombing campaign that was pretty intense and pretty heavy in Iran, principally by Israel, but also by the United States, in terms of destabilizing and wrecking that country? | |
| Or do you think the government of Iran emerges still pretty strong and very difficult to dislodge? | |
| People have been trying to dislodge them for 45 years since 1979, and they haven't gotten anywhere. | |
| How do you see their strength and whether they've been sufficiently weakened and destabilized? | |
| All the evidence, Glenn, is that the bombing campaign by Israel against Iran, which started, of course, on June 13th, has had exactly the opposite effect in terms of the leadership of Iran. | |
| The hardliners have taken over. | |
| The revolutionary guards are in control more than they ever were. | |
| The Ayatollah Khomeini has been weakened because he's been forced to basically go into hiding and he's not in a position where he can command the country in any meaningful way. | |
| And furthermore, all the evidence is that the people are rallying around the flag. | |
| And we have a rich history of this happening every time a country launches a bombing campaign against another country for the purposes of regime change. | |
| We have a rich historical record here, and there is not a single instance, I want to emphasize, not a single instance where bombing from the air alone has caused regime change. | |
| And all the evidence is that it causes a rally around the flag effect. | |
| So the idea that the Israelis are going to cause regime change with their air campaign is not a serious argument. | |
| And if you look at what's happened over the past 12 days, it has not turned out that the country is on the verge of regime change. | |
| If anything, the regime is in a better situation today than it was on June 12th, the day before the campaign started. | |
| So this is a failure. | |
| I think if Israelis and other advocates of regime change in Iran heard you say that, I've seen them do this before, that they would point to the counterexample of Libya where, and Netanyahu specifically cited Gaddafi as the model he wanted Iran to follow. | |
| Imagine hearing that. | |
| Like, oh, I think the model we should give to Iran and make them follow is the one Gaddafi followed, which of course led to not just regime change, but him being raped to death on the street by a gang of madmen. | |
| And there, I think you can make the argument, can't you, that we did actually succeed in destroying the regime solely through a bombing campaign? | |
| No, what happened there is that you had a ground war, right? | |
| We didn't have to invade, but we had proxies who had gone to war against Qaddafi, and we then came in with air power. | |
| But here the argument is that you come in with air power, there's no revolution, there's no war on the ground, and air power precipitates a revolution. | |
| That doesn't happen. | |
| Again, to go back to the Libya case, the revolution had already started, there was, or the rebellion, call it what you want, and there was a huge ground war taking place. | |
| And that's when air power came in. | |
| And in those sorts of circumstances, you can do it, but not in this case. | |
| I mean, you want to remember. | |
| Sorry, go ahead. | |
| No, you want to remember we had to invade Iraq. | |
| Right. | |
| We could not do regime change in Iraq from the air. | |
| Otherwise, we would have done it. | |
| Remember shock and awe? | |
| We went in with shock and awe. | |
| That didn't lead to regime change. | |
| We had to go in, conquer the country, and then spend months looking for some Hussein. | |
| Yeah, and I remember the night of the Israeli bombing or the second night when we heard all these great stories about precise decapitations of the entire Iranian military commander structure that, oh, this was designed to ensure that the Iranians would be so overwhelmed by the show of force that they would essentially submit. | |
| And it was the same thing, shock and awe. | |
| We're going to shock and awe them into submission. | |
| And as you noted, that certainly didn't happen. | |
| But let me just ask you, in terms of, because one of the concerns I have is that although this part of the war for the moment has ended, meaning there's no more planes flying or missiles flying over Iran and killing people and destroying things, I can't believe that regime change is not still very much in the minds of many, many people in Washington and Tel Aviv. | |
| President Trump today said he didn't want regime change. | |
| He thinks the chaos that it would cause would be nowhere near worth the price. | |
| But you certainly have the U.S. and Israel funding various factions. | |
| You have the MEK, other factions that are loyal to the Mossad or to the CIA or the MI6. | |
| And I guess my question to you is, compared to Libya, are those significant? | |
| Are they, those kinds of militias and proxies capable of fighting a meaningful ground war to bring about regime change if they also have the air cover from Israel and the U.S. Well, the fact is that they have not been able to do it up to now. | |
| And after what's happened over the past 12 days, the regime has every incentive to crack down on those groups and make sure that they can't cause any trouble. | |
| Now, can I say with 100% certainty that there won't be an uprising in six months or 12 months? | |
| No, I can't. | |
| It's very hard to say how this plays out over time inside of Iran. | |
| But the fact is that there is no evidence now of an uprising. | |
| And you also have a regime that has powerful incentives to make sure that that remains the case for the foreseeable future. | |
| So I don't think you're going to get regime change. | |
| But Glenn, then the question pops up, what happens if you do get regime change? | |
| What's the happy ending here? | |
| Are you telling me that we're going to get a new regime that is going to say, we don't want nuclear weapons. | |
| We don't want to cause Israel or the United States any trouble in the region. | |
| And we're going to behave ourselves according to the dictates of Israel. | |
| You think that's going to happen? | |
| Well, the dream is to get the Shah's son, who was a puppet of the U.S. and Israel, back into power in Iran. | |
| He's going to fly from Paris or whatever and be welcomed with open arms by the Iranians. | |
| And I think you see he's being treated almost as like Wanguaido, you know, the legitimate president of Iran or the monarch of Iran by multiple Western media outlets. | |
| And that clearly is the plan. | |
| You know, they have that Ahmed Shalabi, too, was going to take over Iraq and be so welcomed despite not having lived in Iraq for 40 years. | |
| That is the vision. | |
| That is the vision. | |
| And if you believe that, I have a bridge I want to sell you. | |
| This is not going to happen. | |
| I would also point out to you, of course, when the revolution in Iran took place in 1979, it was the Shah who was overthrown. | |
| The Shah had an ambitious nuclear program, and the Shah was committed to acquiring nuclear weapons. | |
| And the reason is that it makes sense from Iran's point of view to have nuclear weapons. | |
| You know, Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel and former defense minister as well, once said that he believed that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons because it made so much sense. | |
| Just think about that statement. | |
| He, of course, is a very smart man, and he is correct. | |
| It makes eminently good sense for Iran to have nuclear weapons. | |
| I have said on numerous occasions in public that if I had been the Iranian national security advisor, they would have nuclear weapons today. | |
| I mean, the lesson of the past 12 days is that Iran was foolish not to get nuclear weapons, in my opinion. | |
| And the lesson now is to go out and get nuclear weapons. | |
| Because if you had nuclear weapons, the Israelis and the Americans would not attack you. | |
| So I would just say that even if you get the Shah's son in power in Iran, I bet a lot of money that after a short period of time, he'd be very interested in building nuclear weapons. | |
| Because again, it makes good strategic sense. | |
| Yeah, I don't understand why Iran shied away from that. | |
| And certainly, if you look at, you know, just the course of the last 25 years of history, you go back even further. | |
| The clear lesson is if you are a country with geostrategic importance or lots of resources and want to be independent, the only way that you won't be messed with in a very severe way by the United States, NATO, whoever, is if you have nuclear weapons. | |
| And if you don't, you're going to remain vulnerable. | |
| And we've created a world despite saying we want to minimize the spread of nuclear weapons where we've incentivized any rational leader of any kind of state like the one I just described to get them as soon as possible. | |
| I mean, that's why, you know, North Korea is as protected as it is. | |
| And let me just, I want to get to the aftermath more and focus on that. | |
| But before we do, I just have to ask one more question about how we got to this point. | |
| So you referenced earlier Trump's failure To negotiate a new JCPOA. | |
| Also, Biden didn't do it for four years. | |
| When Trump was inaugurated and got into office in the second term, he made it, you could say, his top priority or certainly one of his top priorities to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran. | |
| And along the way, he was extremely optimistic, basically saying, like, the progress is very real. | |
| It's great. | |
| I really am thankful and happy with how the Iranians are negotiating. | |
| And I believe there's no need. | |
| We were told he stopped Netanyahu because he believed that they were going to get a negotiated deal. | |
| Some of that might have been a ruse, as it turns out. | |
| But certainly at the beginning, I believe Trump was optimistic. | |
| And, you know, Steve Witkoff, multiple times in public, his envoy negotiator, when asked, is this deal going to permit Iran to have some form of enrichment of uranium, some form of centrifuges and reactors? | |
| He said, yeah, of course. | |
| You're not going to get a deal. | |
| Iran has to have the ability to produce nuclear energy. | |
| We want to make sure they're not producing nuclear weapons. | |
| And I think everybody believed that with that framework in place, which is basically the GCPOA that Trump withdrew from, claiming that it was too much of a one-sided deal for Iran, that as long as he just kind of threw some other things in there, you know, symbolic or even meaningful, to allow Trump to say, oh, look, I got a better deal than Obama got. | |
| That's why I withdrew. | |
| I wanted this deal. | |
| This is much stronger for us and better for us. | |
| It just seems so clear that that was very possible. | |
| And along the way, Trump really did change his tune. | |
| And not all that long ago, where he started saying, I thought we were going to get a deal. | |
| Now I'm very pessimistic. | |
| I don't know what got into the Iranians. | |
| They seem to have really changed. | |
| And it seems like my belief is somewhere along the way, Trump started to understand the agreement that was necessary as being Iran gives up all enrichment, despite what Steve Witkoff said at the beginning and what everyone understood, which is you're never going to get a deal where Iran gives up their nuclear energy program, but they will agree not to enrich above a certain amount. | |
| Trump began being convinced by Lindsey Graham or Tom Cotton, Anyahu, whoever, that the only way to get a deal was for Iran to give up complete enrichment. | |
| And when he started hearing back that Iran wouldn't sign a deal to give up all enrichment, that's when he concluded that the Iranians weren't negotiating in good faith and it was time to bomb them. | |
| What is your view of all that? | |
| Was that desire of Trump's to get a new diplomatic deal genuine? | |
| And why didn't it happen? | |
| Well, I agree with everything you said. | |
| Let me just add a little bit to it. | |
| I don't think that Trump was pursuing some sort of ruse in the beginning when he talked about getting a deal. | |
| I think that he and Steve Witkoff thought that they could get a deal. | |
| And they both understood that to get that deal, Iran had to be allowed to have some enrichment capability. | |
| So as you were saying, this would be an updated version of the JCPOA. | |
| And as I said to you before, maybe they could get a JCPOA without sunset clauses. | |
| And that would make it an even better deal than the original JCPOA. | |
| But anyway, Trump and Witkoff thought that they could make that work. | |
| But then the Israel lobby talked to them and told them that was categorically unacceptable. | |
| You want to understand that this is the very issue that Netanyahu fought Obama over. | |
| The reason that Netanyahu hated the original JCPOA was because it allowed for enrichment. | |
| So here you have Trump and Witkoff talking about a new deal, which again, allows for enrichment. | |
| This is just unacceptable to Israel, therefore unacceptable to the lobby and unacceptable to all these cutouts like cotton and graham and so forth and so on. | |
| So they all went to work on Trump and Witkoff. | |
| And Witkoff did an 180-degree turn, as did Trump. | |
| And then they thought what they could do is they could get tough with the Iranians. | |
| And they thought that they had lots of leverage over the Iranians. | |
| But as the Obama administration found out back in 2015, they didn't have that kind of leverage. | |
| The Iranians will not give up their ability to enrich uranium, period. | |
| So there was no solution to this problem other than to try to use military force. | |
| But as you and I have talked about, that was destined to fail. | |
| It has failed. | |
| And by the way, Glenn, the Iranians are now more likely to get nuclear weapons than they were before June 13th after having been bombed and now being in a position where they could throw the IAEA out and there'll be no inspections. | |
| So we're much worse off. | |
| We would be much better off with the JCPOA, JCPOA number two. | |
| It was not a great solution, as I said before, but it was the least bad alternative and not really a bad alternative when you think about where we are now. | |
| So on that question of the Iranian desire to really now acquire nuclear weapon, which if they're thinking at all rationally is what they ought to do, as we discussed, they probably should have done it before. | |
| I think they understand now they definitely should do it. | |
| Trump's claim and therefore the entire administration's claim after that one night of bombing, the three nuclear facilities was we totally obliterated all of their nuclear facilities. | |
| No more uranium rich uranium. | |
| They don't have anything. | |
| They have no capability to enrich uranium. | |
| They don't have enriched uranium. | |
| And then today, a coordinated leak of this DIA assessment of the aftermath of the bombing basically threw a lot of water on, the cold water on that and said, we damaged the facility at Florida, but we certainly didn't compromise its architectural integrity, let alone destroy it. | |
| Maybe we set them back a few months, but that's all. | |
| Do you think there's any truth or possible truth to this idea that, you know, when reporters today asked Trump, like, do they have a possibility of getting a nuclear weapon? | |
| He said, there's no chance they're going to get a nuclear weapon that's the last thing on iran's mind what do you think is the truth about that there's no way we can stop them from getting a weapon uh and all sorts of smart people in israel have said that as well as all sorts of smart people in the united states uh people who view iran as a threat and absolutely do not want iran to have nuclear weapons there just simply is no way that you can prevent that if the iranians | |
| are determined to get a bomb their nuclear establishment their nuclear infrastructure is far too advanced for us to be able to go in there and bomb the place to smithereens and prevent them from acquiring nuclear weapons the only way we can do that is if we invade the country much the way we invaded iraq and we're not going to do that uh we're getting a new deal we're getting a new deal is that still possible i | |
| don't know uh i hope it is but uh i mean the question glenn is how can you make a deal with the united states and israel i mean with trump can you trust trump as far as you can throw him no uh the israelis my god i mean uh you know they are they're you know the canonical rogue state i i don't think i've ever seen anything quite like it uh so the idea that uh you're | |
| going to cut a deal with uh iran's going to cut a deal with the united states and israel and uh you know allow inspectors back in and they're going to greatly reduce their enrichment capability and ship uranium out of the country because they can trust the united states and they could trust the united states to take the sanctions off which they really didn't do last time or they could trust that trump won't change his mind and pull out like he did uh in 2018 | |
| uh so there's just no trust there it's just hard to see how you get a deal i mean i hope i'm wrong i hope they can get a deal but uh it doesn't it doesn't look uh like there's a high possibility one other point just on this clan is i think the israelis are going to be you know chomping at the bit to get back at the iranians they're going to be looking for opportunities to cause the iranians trouble and in that environment the iranians could | |
| have powerful incentive to you know pursue a bomb uh because once they get a bomb once they get a secure second strike capability uh the israelis really can't fool around with them anymore so i i think i think you have to get the israelis to sort of back off and you have to get the americans to back off i think it's easier to get trump to back off at this point because i think trump understands that he's near the edge of the cliff but the israelis uh uh getting | |
| them to back off i think is well nigh impossible and if that is true if i'm right in that regard it's hard to see the iranians not going down uh the route of getting a bomb and it's hard to see them agreeing to a new jcpoa uh on that point um obviously a lot of people were very concerned about vocally opposed to trump getting involved in this war authorizing israel to start the war uh including a lot of his most | |
| influential at least online supporters expressed a lot of uh concern and even opposition and the decision by trump to basically stop the war to say we bombed the facilities that's all we're doing and then he seems like whatever he did did cause at least a ceasefire did cause israel to stop bombing iran after only 12 days this conflict could have gone on a lot more a lot longer gotten a lot worse i'm sure the israelis were eager to do so | |
| i'm sure one of the reasons trump did that was because he didn't want to get dragged into a middle east war knowing that that would probably destroy his presidency uh but why do you think that he was able to get the israelis to stop was there some sense at all that the israelis needed to stop or wanted to stop or was it just pure use of of leverage and force that we we fund you and i'm telling you to stop no i think the israelis | |
| were looking to stop uh first of all there have been a spade of articles in places like the wall street journal and the washington post that said that the israelis were running out of air defense missiles to shoot down the ballistic missiles and even the drones uh and they had about you know another week or two's worth of missiles left and then they would no longer have the capability to take a shot at those incoming ballistic missiles second there | |
| are experts like ted postal who's done a lot of work on this subject over the years but ted postal says that if you look carefully the israelis were shooting down very few of the incoming ballistic missiles most of them were getting through and this is why the israelis were going to great lengths not to let media outlets in to report on what kind of damage was being done inside israel israel was really being pounded and again it was going to run | |
| out of missiles that could be used to protect israel israel as you also know is a very small country it's the size of a postage stamp and a lot of its population a lot of its industry is concentrated in tel aviv and in haifa and the iranians who have lots of ballistic missiles and lots of cruise missiles were really pounding away i don't think the israelis understood that the uh iranians would be able to punish them the | |
| way they have and furthermore you know when you get into a war of attrition like this the balance of resolve really matters because you have two countries that are standing opposite each other pounding each other with missiles and bombs and so forth and so on and resolve matters and it's quite clear that the iranians had the resolve to fight on and on and On. | |
| And it was not clear that the Israelis had that resolve because the Israelis have not been subjected to this kind of punishment campaign for ages, right? | |
| They didn't expect this at all. | |
| So they were surprised by the ferocity and the success of the Iranian ballistic missile and cruise missile and drone attacks. | |
| And I think that if you listen carefully, what the Israelis have been saying over the past few days, including Prime Minister Netanyahu, they were looking for an off-ramp. | |
| So I don't think they were that upset about what happened. | |
| Now, a lot of their cutouts here in the United States will be very upset, and they'll blame Donald Trump, and they'll make the argument that Israel was on the verge of a great victory, and it was just Trump that stopped Israel from winning this victory. | |
| But I don't believe that's the case for one second. | |
| I believe the Israelis had no theory of victory. | |
| They couldn't produce regime change, to go back to our earlier discussion, could not eliminate Iran's nuclear capability. | |
| And again, if anything, they were giving Iran a greater incentive to acquire those weapons without taking away the capability. | |
| So when I think all said and done, the Israelis understood now is time to call a timeout. | |
| So I don't think Trump had a lot of trouble getting the Israelis on board or the Iranians for that matter. | |
| I think one of the things when, and there's a lot of public documentation, but I've spoken to people in the Pentagon and elsewhere in the government, the U.S. government that is, who, you know, they'll tell you that the Israelis were rapidly depleting not just their air defenses, but even things like their munitions. | |
| And so the question often becomes, you know, I think when people hear that, they think, oh, who cares? | |
| The U.S. will just give them, you know, whatever they want. | |
| We've always supplied Israel and their wars, whatever they need. | |
| We just ship to them. | |
| And, you know, one of the things I've learned is the severity of how low American stockpiles are as well when it comes to missiles, when it comes to air defenses, when it comes to munitions. | |
| What is the severity of that in your view and what has caused it? | |
| Well, what has caused it is more than the war against Iran. | |
| It's the fact that Israel is fighting wars all over the place. | |
| But I mean, the American, what has caused the American depletion and the low stocks of the United States with these weapons? | |
| Well, the thing is, Glenn, that we build incredibly sophisticated weapons that are very expensive. | |
| And that means you can't build that many of them. | |
| As we used to say during the Cold War, the Soviets emphasized quantity over quality, and we emphasize quality over quantity, right? | |
| And I think that has basically been the way we have approached building weapon systems over time. | |
| We like to build very sophisticated systems that cost a lot of money and therefore limit the number of systems that you can buy. | |
| And the United States, as you know, has been supplying the Ukrainians with huge amounts of weaponry since the war started in 2022. | |
| That was three years ago. | |
| We have to build lots of weapons to contain the Chinese in East Asia. | |
| And then we have the Israelis who are fighting wars in Gaza, fighting wars against Hezbollah in Lebanon, fighting wars in Syria, and now fighting a war against Iran and expending huge amounts of ammunition. | |
| And that's ammunition that we give them. | |
| And there are just limits on how much we have. | |
| And we can't completely run down our own inventories. | |
| We have to have some weaponry available should trouble start in a place like East Asia. | |
| So there are limits to what we can give the Israelis. | |
| Yeah, we can't sacrifice everything for the Israelis, just turn over the entire Pentagon to them. | |
| I guess there are some limits, and maybe we've run into them. | |
| I also heard that the bombing campaign in Yemen, and there was reporting about this as well, depleted a lot of missiles that were necessary to shoot down ballistic missiles. | |
| It's one of the reasons why Trump stopped that after a month, because so much of what he was promised, he was seeing. | |
| It wasn't happening. | |
| It was extremely expensive, both in terms of money and lives, but also in terms of eroding further the American military stockpile. | |
| So I want to ask you, I just referenced this decision by Trump. | |
| It didn't get a lot of attention, but he cut off that bombing campaign against the Houthis basically in a month. | |
| And it was like a very casual, oh, they promised not to attack our ships, so they're not going to mess with us, and so we're done with them. | |
| It was an obvious desire of Trump to get out of that. | |
| And then I'm not going to say I'm going to give Trump credit for stopping a war after a short period of time that he basically started unnecessarily. | |
| But it is true this war could have gone on a lot longer, assuming the Israelis wanted to. | |
| And I think there's a lot of questions about that. | |
| But what do you think we have learned? | |
| Because I think there's been, when Trump first bombed the Iran authorized Israeli to do this, there was this kind of celebratory ethos among Democrats. | |
| Oh, he is just the same neocon as Bush and Cheney. | |
| Nothing has changed. | |
| Do you think that's a reasonable conclusion from what we've seen over the last couple of months and especially the last couple of weeks? | |
| Or what did we learn about Trump's foreign policy as a result of what he did, not just in Yemen, but what he's doing in Ukraine, Gaza, and now Iran? | |
| It's very hard to read Trump. | |
| I mean, I think that Trump, when he came into office, definitely wanted to put an end to the Ukraine war. | |
| He wanted to work out a deal with Iran. | |
| And I think that he was ultimately interested in ending the genocide in Gaza. | |
| In large part due to his incompetence and the people that he surrounded himself with, he's not been able to end the Ukraine war. | |
| He certainly has not come close to ending the genocide in Gaza. | |
| And he's just up big time in Iran. | |
| So if you look at his performance, it's not very good. | |
| Do I think that he wanted to end these wars, that he's not a warmonger? | |
| I actually believe that is the case. | |
| I don't think Trump is a warmonger. | |
| I don't think that he shares the basic Feltenschang of the neoconservatives. | |
| But anyway, he is basically in a similar position to the one that Joe Biden was in, right? | |
| He's not ended the Ukraine war. | |
| He's not ended the genocide in Gaza. | |
| And indeed, he's continuing to fuel the genocide in Gaza. | |
| And here we are with regard to Iran. | |
| Now, let me just say one more thing about Iran. | |
| I think Trump understands that there's no military solution. | |
| I think he just has to understand that at this point in time, there have to be enough people. | |
| I think J.D. Vance, for example, is one telling him that this is a fool's errand. | |
| But furthermore, he surely understands that a good half of his base is adamantly opposed to what he's doing. | |
| Marjorie Taylor Greene has made it unequivocally clear that she finds this crazy. | |
| Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, all these people just think that this is madness, that getting into a war with Iran, another forever war in the Middle East, is something you don't want to do. | |
| So I think what Trump did is that he bombed Iran on June 22nd. | |
| He treated it almost immediately as a one and done operation. | |
| And if you look at what he's done since then, he is continuing to treat it as a one and done operation. | |
| He does not want to prolong this war. | |
| And I think the big question, Glenn, is whether he can actually shut it down and prevent it from becoming a forever war. | |
| It's going to be a very difficult task because it's an incredibly dicey problem. | |
| If they put you and I in charge, if they told us, you know, we're going to move in the White House and we're going to try and fix this problem, it would be a Herculean task for you and me to solve the problem. | |
| Let's face it. | |
| Can he solve it? | |
| I don't know. | |
| And he's going to have the Israel lobby breathing down his neck. | |
| And that, as you know, makes life very difficult. | |
| So I want to ask you about that. | |
| I just have a few more questions out of respect for the time. | |
| And I definitely want to make sure we talk about Gaza because it's kind of been memory hold for the moment, even though it's gotten a lot worse when you think it can't. | |
| But I want to ask you about that reference to Marjorie Taylor Greene. | |
| I remember I had her on my show, I think, 2023. | |
| She was very outspoken against the war in Ukraine. | |
| And her arguments were, you know, American cities are falling apart. | |
| Our communities are decimated. | |
| American women don't have money for breast for milk, baby's milk, baby formula, you know, the whole litany of things. | |
| And she was saying, we cannot keep financing other countries' foreign wars. | |
| And like everybody who came on my show and said that, I then asked her, well, does that same rationale apply to Israel? | |
| Do you also think we should stop financing Israel and its wars and its military? | |
| And she wasn't ready to say that. | |
| Like most of the people who came on my show back then, they would sort of stumble around knowing that it applies, but not yet willing to say it. | |
| Now you look at Marjorie Taylor Green's saying, she's out there saying, we're fighting wars for Israel. | |
| We should not be doing that. | |
| Why are we paying for Israel? | |
| Why are we so subservient to Israel? | |
| We were supposed to stop wars, but this war is for Israel. | |
| And I'm wondering in all this gloom and darkness, which definitely is there, whether you at least find something optimistic when you compare what the discourse was like when you wrote the Israel Lobby back in 2007 and the vicious, systemic, sustained attacks on you and Stephen Walt for having done that. | |
| My impression is, and polling data certainly has changed about the perception of Israel with younger generation, but my perception is there's a lot more space now in the discourse for not just space, but people are using that space to now really keep asking, like, wait a minute, why are we just always talking about Israel? | |
| Why are our politicians so devoted to Israel? | |
| Why is our foreign policy shaped around Israel? | |
| Why do we accept censorship for them? | |
| Why do we go to wars for them? | |
| And a lot of people who even two years ago were afraid to say it are now saying it quite vocally. | |
| Do you think that has been a significant change and improvement in terms of the ability and willingness, even of American politicians, let alone just ordinary Americans, to raise these kind of questions when you wrote your book, there was no space practically. | |
| You created that space, but it took up until now for it to really people to get comfortable and have it be almost mainstreamed. | |
| Yeah, I agree with everything you said. | |
| You want to remember, we published the book in 2007 and the article was published in the London Review of Books in 2006. | |
| And that's approximately 20 years ago. | |
| So a lot of time has passed. | |
| And over the passage of those, you know, 19 or 20 years, a lot's happened to make people aware of what the lobby is up to. | |
| And I would argue that what's happened since October 7th has made it manifestly clear to huge numbers of people what the lobby is all about and how it really perverts American foreign policy in ways that are not in the American national interest. | |
| And let me make two additional points about that, Glenn. | |
| One is you want to understand that defending Israel has become increasingly difficult for the lobby. | |
| And they therefore have to play smashmouth politics. | |
| And they have to do it in a very public way. | |
| So people now see the lobby in operation, engaging in smashmouth politics, smearing people as anti-Semites, calling Jews even anti-Semites or self-hating Jews in ways that, you know, sort of cut against the way we're supposed to operate here in the United States. | |
| And this has done great damage to the lobby. | |
| There's no question about that. | |
| The second point I would make to you, there's a domestic dimension to this, and that has to do with what's happening on college campuses, right? | |
| You had all these protests against the genocide in Gaza. | |
| And these were people who were legitimately protesting the Gaza genocide. | |
| And what happened was they were tarred and feathered as anti-Semites. | |
| Many of them were deported, put in jail. | |
| This is ludicrous. | |
| You know, I spent my life in academia and up until October 7th, nobody, I mean, nobody ever talked about anti-Semitism in academia. | |
| The idea that Harvard and Columbia had an anti-Semitism problem is laughable. | |
| I mean, if you look at who the presidents of these institutions have been over time, who the provosts and deans and department chairs and donors and donors, I mean, you know, huge numbers of Jews occupied these institutions, which in my opinion, and I want to be clear on this, was a wonderful thing, right? | |
| But there was no anti-Semitism problem. | |
| I never once ran into anyone talking in anti-Semitic terms. | |
| It just didn't happen, right? | |
| But all of a sudden, after October 7th, these places became hotbeds of anti-Semitism. | |
| And these people who were out there, many of them who were Jews, right, who were protesting the genocide in Gaza were tarred and feathered. | |
| And everybody understands what's going on here, right? | |
| Everybody understands that what's happened is that the lobby has moved in and they want to shut down criticism of Israel. | |
| And the way they're shutting down criticism of Israel is they're using what Steve and I called in the book the great silencer, which is the charge of anti-Semitism. | |
| So these protesters of genocide were all of a sudden turned into raving anti-Semites. | |
| Again, even though there was a big Jewish contingent in all of those protests, campus protest movements as well. | |
| Exactly. | |
| Exactly. | |
| But I would just say to you, you know, you go to a college campus, you're dealing with people who have IQs that are up in the 120, 130, 150 range, and they can figure out very quickly what's going on. | |
| This is very bad for the lobby, right? | |
| It's very bad for the lobby. | |
| And I'm just saying to you, don't lose sight of this dimension in addition to the smash mouth politics that's being played vis-a-vis Israel's foreign policy. | |
| And I would add my final point on this is that I think if you look forward, if you look at what's going to happen in the months and years ahead, I think the lobby is going to have to be out in public engaging in these kind of despicable ways for the foreseeable future for the purpose of defending Israel. | |
| And this is now reaching the point, this is what you were getting at, where so many people understand what's going on that it probably will hurt the lobby and will hurt Israel in the long term. | |
| One of the ironies of it is, you know, a major grievance of conservatives over the past decade. | |
| Arguably their principal one, but certainly one of the top grievances that conservatives were voicing is that what liberals do, Democrats do, in order to shut down debate is they call people racist, they call people misogynist, they call people homophobic, transphobic, et cetera, as a way of smearing them and preventing any kind of dogma from being questioned upon pain of standing accused of being a racist. | |
| And I think there was an immediate backlash to that, not immediate, but certainly over time, that not only made that tactic less effective, but it also drained those terms of their sting. | |
| I mean, if you overuse it, if everybody's a racist the minute you disagree with the Democratic Party blank, then people are going to get to the point where they're going to say, I don't think this term matters that much. | |
| And it seems to me like nobody has done more to trivialize the term anti-Semite or anti-Semitism or actually to drain it of its capacity to be a great silencer more than the people who have just almost gotten hysterical and desperate seeing these polling numbers change, seeing these questions being raised about Israel, to now just start almost hysterically and manically branding everyone an anti-Semite. | |
| Like that's going to create a lot of resentment, but also weaken their primary tactic. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| And you don't want to lose sight of the fact that all this behavior, including the complaints of conservatives about the attacks on free speech before October 7th, that all this behavior undermines free speech. | |
| And in a liberal democracy like the United States, which we all love, it's very important that these fundamental values not be undermined. | |
| The idea that you're not free to criticize Israel is a threat to free speech in the United States. | |
| It's a threat to fundamental liberal values. | |
| And this is a terrible thing. | |
| But this is where we are. | |
| There are just so many things that you can't talk about anymore on college campuses. | |
| You know, people look over their shoulder when they talk about all sorts of issues. | |
| It has to do with black-white relations, affirmative action, Israel, Palestine, and so forth and so on. | |
| This is a terrible situation. | |
| We should be free to have an open discourse about these matters. | |
| But that's not where we are today. | |
| Yeah, and it's not just social scoring either. | |
| I mean, there's been hate speech codes implemented at colleges, often at the behest of the Trump administration, to expand the scope of what anti-Semitism means for purposes of discipline and punishment at universities. | |
| You've had people attempting to pass laws on a federal level, like the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, to kind of widen the range of prohibitions on things that you can't say upon being charged civilly or even criminally under our laws. | |
| And I think people are noticing that, and nothing creates more backlash than that. | |
| Like, who are the people trying to restrict what we've always been taught is our birthright? | |
| Like, one of the things that defines being American is the right to express ideas without being punished by them. | |
| All right, let me just, before I let you go, I do absolutely want to talk about Gaza. | |
| And we have a couple of Gazas scheduled for this week, including tomorrow, so we're going to certainly cover it in depth. | |
| But you have not only referred to what's going on there as a genocide, but you've made a very compelling and I think substantive argument as to why there's really no alternative but to call it that, not just in terms of Israeli statements, but Israeli actions. | |
| It's clearly ethnic cleansing. | |
| It's beyond the scope of what you can describe. | |
| And every time you think it can't get worse, it somehow does. | |
| And one of the things that we've seen over the past two to three weeks, maybe a month, while attention was paid principally to Iran, was that the Israelis insisted on not allowing the UN or any other normal humanitarian organization to distribute food in Gaza. | |
| They knew they had to let some food in, and Netanyahu even said, we're not doing it because we want to, we're doing it because we have to placate public opinion. | |
| They created their own system that they controlled. | |
| And one of the things that has happened is that Palestinians go to these aid sites to get some flour to feed their families. | |
| Obviously, starvation and famine is very real in Gaza. | |
| And almost every day, not five or 10 or even a couple dozen, but 100 or 150 people, sometimes less, sometimes more, are just being massacred at these places, I guess, by the IDF. | |
| It's a little unclear because they don't allow one journalist. | |
| And by the way, to your point, I meant to mention as well that there was a German journalist today explaining that the military censorship, if you go to Israel as a journalist, is so aggressive. | |
| She said, they want you to document if a civilian site is hit, but they won't allow you to document when a military installation is hit. | |
| We actually had a reporter, Jeremy LaFredo, on our show, An American, who went to the West Bank when there was that first initial ballistic missile launched by Iran back in 2024 as a retaliation for a bunch of things Israel did. | |
| And he was trying to show that contrary to Israeli government claims that nothing landed, there was real damage at various military airstrips. | |
| And they detained him, imprisoned him, aggressively interrogated him. | |
| So we have extreme censorship in Israel, but also in Gaza. | |
| So it's not that easy to understand what's going on, but it seems like what we've now added to all the other atrocities and war crimes is regular massacres at aid sites. | |
| What, you know, we've used every word we can to express our horror and disgust at what the Israelis are doing in Gaza, but what is going on with these distribution sites as best as you can tell? | |
| What's going on is what you described. | |
| And I think there's no doubt as to what the general outline of Israeli behavior is. | |
| It's absolutely horrible. | |
| And I think what they're doing is they're trying to drive the Palestinians out of Gaza. | |
| In fact, many of the Israeli leaders say that openly. | |
| And the way they're trying to do that is by starving them to death and by killing them, by literally murdering them. | |
| It just, you know, I think in a way what you were saying, which is what I was going to say, is we're beyond words here. | |
| I mean, what can you say at this point? | |
| You know, Glenn, I actually teach on the Holocaust. | |
| I've done that since the mid-1980s. | |
| And in fact, I taught my course, War in the Nation State, this past winter. | |
| And I lectured on the Holocaust. | |
| I have a lecture on the German killing machine in World War II. | |
| And I just find it unfathomable that Jews, who were, of course, the principal victims of what the Germans did between 1941 and 1945, are doing to the Palestinians. | |
| I mean, I just don't understand how they can bring themselves to do that given what happened to them not that long ago. | |
| Again, it's unfathomable. | |
| There's just sort of no words to describe it. | |
| If any people should know better, it's the Israelis, right? | |
| Even if they wanted to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians, okay. | |
| I mean, it's not okay, but that's different than genocide. | |
| The actual idea that they're sort of luring people, they're starving people, and then they're luring them to sites where they can get some food to alleviate their starvation. | |
| And then they shoot them like animals on the spot is just hard to imagine. | |
| How can they be doing this? | |
| I just don't understand it. | |
| It's beyond me. | |
| No, I have to agree more. | |
| I think, unfortunately, I think a lot of Jews look at the Holocaust and the lesson to derive from it, not being about what human beings are capable of doing to other human beings and the importance of having ethical limits around that. | |
| They look at it as a expression of how Jews in particular have been historically persecuted. | |
| And see, when they talk about never again, they don't mean never again in terms of never again, a Holocaust against anyone. | |
| They mean never again in terms of a Holocaust against Jews. | |
| And on some level, I think when you have that in your mind about what the framework of the world is, you can easily justify dehumanizing anyone that you're told is a threat to you, to Jews. | |
| And once you dehumanize them, you know, as we've seen so often in history, anything goes. | |
| Just my last question is underscoring this all the time is that it's not the Israelis doing it on their own. | |
| They wouldn't be able to do it without the U.S. paying for it, without the U.S. arming it, without the U.S. enabling it in every imaginable way. | |
| As you said, Trump did engineer with Steve Witkoff a ceasefire, which seemed to be more real than prior ones. | |
| It lasted a few weeks. | |
| Netanyahu was saying from the beginning, oh, don't worry about this ceasefire. | |
| Trump told me it's just for a few weeks, and I'm going to get to go back to it. | |
| Who knows if that was true, but that's basically what ended up happening. | |
| Do you have any hope that there's any movement from Donald Trump or inside the U.S. government to at some point place limits on this or put a stop to it? | |
| No, I mean, you're now raising the other half of the story, which is the American side. | |
| I go back to the Biden administration. | |
| The Biden administration was filled with liberals who, many of whom had a rich history of opposing human rights violations, people like Samantha Power, who had written a very famous book on genocide and was a very important figure in the Biden administration. | |
| You would have expected her and all sorts of liberals, all sorts of human rights activists to have been speaking out and raising cane over what was going on inside the Biden administration. | |
| Because you want to remember the Biden administration just as much as the Trump administration has colluded with the Israelis in this genocide. | |
| But hardly anyone of that persuasion spoke up. | |
| It's really quite remarkable. | |
| And the same thing is true in Europe. | |
| And I'm shocked that the Germans, I mean, the Germans support the Israelis in Gaza, hook, line, and sinker. | |
| This is just hard to believe. | |
| Because the lesson the Germans learned from the Holocaust is what I described earlier, which is not that we need to make sure that this kind of extermination and genocide never happens again. | |
| It's that we have the duty specifically to Jews and to the Jewish state of Israel to support them, to arm them, to prop them up as penance for what we did to the Jews eight decades ago. | |
| It's not a universal, you know, at the Nuremberg trials, they were very concerned that it was going to be perceived by history as just victorious justice. | |
| You know, we're just killing some enemies because we can, because we won. | |
| And they emphasized, the prosecutors, the judges, that the only way this will ever have validity is if the principles we're propagating here become universal principles and apply to all countries equally going forward, including the countries that have assembled and are presiding over these tribunals. | |
| But I don't think the Germans walked away, at least the modern-day German, with the idea that those were intended to be universal principles to protect humanity. | |
| They walked away with the idea that their unique obligation is to protect the Jews, even if the Jews themselves are committing genocide against another people. | |
| It's not just what the Israelis are doing. | |
| It's the way the world is letting it happen. | |
| Yeah, I agree with you. | |
| But I would just say that the two missions here are not contradictory, right? | |
| You can believe that it's important to make sure that there is never, ever again, a Holocaust against the Jews or a genocide against the Jews. | |
| And at the same time, you can go to great lengths to make sure there is no genocide against another group, be it the Palestinians or anyone else. | |
| And preventing a genocide against the Palestinians doesn't in any way hurt the Jews or diminish the possibility of a genocide against the Jews. | |
| I just don't, I find it hard to understand why more people haven't had the backbone to stand up and condemn what the Israelis are doing and even take action to try to stop it. | |
| Again, we have a huge community of human rights activists and human rights scholars in the United States. | |
| I've dealt with them at great length over the years. | |
| Where are these people? | |
| Why aren't they standing up? | |
| It's really quite remarkable. | |
| I find it less difficult to understand why the Trump people are not standing up. | |
| But the Democrats, the people around Biden, why they didn't stand up? | |
| It befuddles me. | |
| I'm sort of a loss for words with regard to this whole situation. | |
| Other than to say it just makes me sick to my stomach to think about where we are. | |
| Yeah, it's very hard to have to pay attention to it in order to talk about it or to understand it in order to cover it. | |
| But when you do, which is, I guess, your obligation and mine in terms of the work we do, it does psychologically affect you. | |
| You know, you obviously see a lot of horrible things in the world if you pay attention to the world, if you cover the world, if you study it, if you report on it. | |
| But this is something in a completely different category. | |
| It's, as you said, it's almost difficult to comprehend based on your prior understanding of what human beings are, what various people are, what they feel, what they think, how empathy works, to just not only watch it all happen, but even enable it, protect it, finance it, pay for it, which in the case of the United States and even to some extent Europe is exactly what's happening. | |
| All right. | |
| Obviously, it's a running joke that I always have a bunch of other questions that we didn't get to, including ones about China, but also I want to talk to you about the war in Ukraine, which I think people forget is actually still raging. | |
| President Zelensky was at a NATO summit today where, of course, he demanded more money and more arms to continue to fight the Russians. | |
| But every time there's a lot of other wars, a lot of other dangers, a lot of other tensions that, you know, we also have to talk about. | |
| And we only have so much time. | |
| And I don't want to take up all of yours. | |
| So as always, it's great to see you. | |
| It's really enlightening for me to hear you on other shows, but especially on this one. | |
| And needless to say, we'll have you back shortly. | |
| Thanks so much. | |
| You're welcome, Glenn. | |
| I look forward to coming back. | |
| All right. |