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Jan. 14, 2026 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
59:50
Prof. John Mearsheimer on Why Foreign Involvement in Iran Would Fail, U.S. Aggression Toward Venezuela, Trump's Foreign Policy, and More

Prof. John Mearsheimer joins System Update to discuss the protests in Iran, Trump's removal of Maduro, U.S. aggression toward Venezuela, the war in Ukraine, 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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Professor Mearsheimer, always great to see you.
And fortunately, there's always a lot of military conflicts the U.S. is involved in to talk to you about.
And that's certainly the case for tonight.
So we're looking forward to hearing from you.
I'm glad to be here, Glenn.
All right.
Hard to know which region of the world or conflict that is either ongoing or imminent to start with.
But why don't we talk about Venezuela since at least for the moment, we can talk about things that have happened already in the past and the prospect that things will happen more.
So far, what has happened is that the United States spent several months having a massive military buildup in the area of Venezuela.
We were bombing ships that we were claiming with absolutely no evidence were filled with drugs coming to the United States.
There was a covert CIA destabilization campaign that was there for at least a month that President Trump authorized.
And of course, then the military operation that abducted Nicolas Maduro, the longtime leader of Venezuela, and took him back to the United States to stand trial.
What do you make of all that in terms of what the United States did and what the consequences are likely to be?
Well, first of all, I think what's very interesting from my perspective is that there was no reason for us to do this.
There was no threat from Venezuela.
I mean, for a while, they tried to argue that there was a narco-terrorist threat, but that argument is foolish.
And then they occasionally argued that this is all about the Monroe Doctrine.
We're worried about Chinese and Russian influence in the Western Hemisphere, but there was no military influence in the Western Hemisphere.
There was no threat that China or Russia was going to form an alliance with Venezuela.
So the Monroe Doctrine wasn't operative.
And then we went in.
And the end result is that it appears after listening to President Trump talk that this is really all about oil and that he basically thinks that we own Venezuelan oil and that it's in our national interest to control Venezuela and therefore control its oil.
But in my opinion, that's a foolish reason to attack another country.
So that'd be my first point.
My second point is, despite all the talk about regime change in the media, this is not a case of regime change.
What we did was take the president, we kidnapped him, sent him to Brooklyn to put him on trial, and the vice president was elevated to the presidency.
But the regime is intact.
So the question then is, where does this all lead?
Is Donald Trump going to be able to manipulate Venezuelan politics without changing the regime and just using economic leverage against that regime so that we can control virtually all of Venezuelan oil and use it as we see fit?
If I had to bet, I'd bet a lot of money we will fail.
There's a lot in there I want to unpack, but since you mentioned the Monroe Doctrine, it's always interesting.
War propaganda is, I mean, whatever else you want to say about it is incredibly potent.
It's been evolved and perfected over decades, even centuries.
And it really stimulates our most tribalistic instincts.
And you watched everybody walking around just spouting that all of this is justified by the Monroe Doctrine.
And the people, most of them saying that, have obviously never read the Monroe Doctrine.
I don't even think they had heard about the Monroe Doctrine until just a couple of weeks earlier.
The national security strategy that was published by the Trump administration at the end of 2025 pretty much laid out the argument, obviously anticipating what they were about to do, which was the hemisphere in which we reside is ours to control, that we are going to ensure that we have the governments we want in every country in our hemisphere to ensure stability and cooperation.
And it cited the Monroe Doctrine and even suggested the Monroe Doctrine needs to be updated to be a little bit more aggressive.
And I think Trump likes the idea that it's called the Donroad Doctrine because it's kind of his now, this modified version.
But the Monroe Doctrine itself was being used to suggest that what it says is that the United States has the absolute right to go and just invade any country in our hemisphere in Latin America, bomb whatever we want, take whatever we want.
That's not what the Monroe Doctrine says.
What is the meaning of the Monroe Doctrine and the context in which it was issued?
Well, it's important to understand that the Monroe Doctrine basically says that no distant great power is allowed to form a military alliance with a country in the Western Hemisphere, nor is a distant great power allowed to place its military forces in the Western Hemisphere.
And as you well remember, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviets put nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba, and this was considered categorically unacceptable.
And it led to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and those missiles were removed.
But the Cuban, excuse me, the Monroe Doctrine does not say that a distant great power cannot have economic intercourse in the Western Hemisphere.
And indeed, during the Cold War, the Soviet Union had considerable economic intercourse in the Western Hemisphere.
And China and Russia today having economic intercourse in the Western hemisphere is not a violation of the Monroe Doctrine.
The Monroe Doctrine does not say that we control the political system in every country in the Western Hemisphere.
And if we don't like the politics in those countries, or if we want to exploit the resources in those countries, we have the right to go in and take those resources or topple the regime.
This is not what the Monroe Doctrine says.
This is good old-fashioned imperialism.
And what is happening in Venezuela is not about the Monroe Doctrine.
Great power politics is not involved here.
This is good old-fashioned imperialism.
And in fact, it's quite hard to believe that Trump is actually doing this and that he's so blatant about it when he talks about his goals in Venezuela.
But all right, so first of all, I think it's ironic that if you really want to find a kind of violation that the Monroe Doctrine was intended to prevent, it would be the attempt by NATO and the United States to go right into Ukraine.
And of course, that's Russia's argument for why they were so concerned about what was going on in Ukraine, which was this is our region.
We can't allow this country bordering us to be in a military alliance with a hostile military force.
And so many people who rejected that idea are suddenly now spouting the Monroe Doctrine as though it allows us to do anything we want in the entire hemisphere, never mind countries that are on our border.
But I want to ask you about this, what you describe as kind of Trump's brazenness, like this very brash candor that we're only interested in their oil.
Because when Maduro was taken, I think the expectation, certainly of the Venezuelan opposition, but even all the people in Washington and both parties who have long wanted to change the government of Venezuela, they went around for a while calling Juan Guaido the Mr. President and acting as though he were the president of Venezuela.
There's a long-standing policy in Washington.
Clearly, there was an assumption, and you heard it in the rhetoric, like, yeah, this was necessary because we freed the Venezuelan people of their vicious dictator, that we were going to take down the entire regime and put in Maria Machado or Edmundo Gonzalez, the declared winner of the 2024 election.
And this is going to be real regime change.
And it seems like Trump, at least of now, is of the mindset that we don't want to do that.
We don't want to make the mistake in Iraq where we dismantle the military and the police because it's Bathist and aligned with their loyal to the prior state.
He seems to be saying, we're not interested in bringing freedom and democracy or elections to Venezuela.
We just want to take their oil.
And if the current government is willing to give it to us, that's the easiest way to do it.
On some level, aren't you a little relieved that this kind of restraint is being exercised and that we're not engaged in a full-scale regime change operation, at least as of yet in Venezuela?
Yes, I'm opposed to the imperial nature of this enterprise, stealing Venezuela's oil.
I think it's a terrible thing for us to do.
But I agree with you that it is a good thing that we did not get involved in regime change.
And, you know, a lot of people are running around these days saying that the neoconservatives have captured Trump's foreign policy.
I think that's not true because what the neoconservatives want to do, and you can see this clearly in the Wall Street Journal, is they want regime change.
They want to go in, get rid of the regime, and create a liberal democracy.
Now, Trump is obviously not doing that.
And what's very interesting is he basically thrown Maria Machado under the bus.
Many people thought that he would lead, that this policy would lead to toppling the regime and she would be installed, but that's not happening at all.
He said she's a nice lady.
But she doesn't have much support in Venezuela, according to him.
But Glenn, I think what's very important to understand here is that in a very important way, this is Trump's genius.
He goes to great lengths to use military force, but to use it in a very limited way so that he doesn't get stuck with boots on the ground doing social engineering in places like Venezuela.
I like to say that if you look at his seven military operations that he's launched since he has been in power, and that's less than a year, in every case, what you see is a pinprick military operation.
It's not a major military operation.
It's not a war.
Look at what he did in Iran on June 22nd.
He went in, he bombed a handful of nuclear sites.
And at the end of the day, he declared victory and said, that's the end.
If you look at what he's doing in Venezuela, right?
It's not regime change.
It was basically a kidnapping operation where he had cooperation on the ground from some Venezuelans.
He went in, kidnapped this president, took him out, and that was the end of it.
There's no more use of military force.
In fact, he made much of the fact that he canceled the second wave of attacks.
And then if you look at Greenland, Greenland is the low-hanging fruit.
He's not going to launch a major war against Greenland because there's nobody in Greenland to defend Greenland.
If he takes Greenland with military force, it'll be an easy operation to conduct.
They could put you or me in charge and we'd be successful.
These are the kind of operations that Trump likes.
And in a very way, it's a smart thing for him to do because he doesn't run into the problem that previous presidents run into, have run into, which is they get involved in these quagmires.
Yeah, I've been very opposed to all of the forms of aggression that you identified.
But at the same time, it's absolutely the case that he does do everything possible thus far to avoid a kind of protracted, prolonged conflict, certainly one that's designed to remake the country.
And I actually thought that the best example of this was throughout the 2024 campaign, he was criticizing Joe Biden for having spent a year bombing Yemen, bombing the Houthis in Yemen, saying it was unnecessary.
It was a sign of weakness.
All you had to do was pick up the phone and call them and you get a deal done.
And then Trump's in office for about three weeks and he starts bombing Yemen, exactly what Biden was doing, but even in a more aggressive form.
And there was an expectation that this is going to go on for nine months to a year.
We were going to do everything to degrade finally the Houthis military operation, disperse them, kill a bunch of them, weaken them.
And after about a month, Trump started getting reports about how many weapons we were depleting, how much money it was costing, and the almost non-existent form of progress.
And he just quickly ended that bombing campaign after really less than a month.
Again, declared victories, had the Houthis promised not to attack any more American ships, which they weren't even doing when it started.
They were only attacking Israeli ships.
But I don't know.
I feel like this is something that despite what are his imperial acts and his forms of aggression, he seems hell-bent on not falling into one of these lengthy, protracted, bloody wars that almost every other president has fallen into.
I agree.
And I think your example of the Houthis is right on the money.
I regret that I forgot about it.
He went in.
He fought the Houthis, as you said.
He realized he couldn't beat them.
He quit and declared victory.
The other point I would make to you, Glenn, just in talking about Trump's success here in dealing with the American public with all these military operations, is he moves from one operation to another operation so quickly that before we have an opportunity to critique him for, let's say, doing Venezuela, he's talking about doing Greenland or doing Iran.
Yes, exactly.
And he just has all these different military contingencies, all these different pinprick operations on the front burner.
And he just moves back and forth among them in ways that makes it very difficult for people to criticize him.
He, in effect, deflects criticism.
And you don't get much criticism from the public because, again, he's not committed us to any quagmire, to any forever war.
Right.
No bodybags coming back.
No American troops being stationed.
No invasions, no long-term occupations.
Now, you mentioned before the fact that Trump clearly stated this was about going in and controlling Venezuelan oil.
And you said that was a bad thing to do and that it was likely not to work.
Let's focus on the first part of that, that it's a bad thing to do, that it's classic imperialism.
There are a lot of America first types, Trump supporters who weren't that thrilled with the idea that we were going to go regime change Venezuela.
But once they saw that it, at least, as again, as of now, it wasn't about that.
It was just about taking their oil.
Their view was, yeah, this is what our military is for.
What's the point of having the largest, most expensive military on the planet?
And we're not going to use it to do things like go to a hostile country and take their oil from them so that we can use it to our benefit and benefit the American people.
Why isn't that a good thing to do?
Why isn't that a valid way of thinking?
Well, I think anytime you conduct an operation like this, you have to ask yourself two questions.
Number one, what's the benefits?
And number two, what's the costs?
And I don't see what the benefits are.
I mean, we have plenty of oil.
Trump says that what he wants to do here is drive down the price of oil, get it down below $50 a barrel.
I'm not sure this is going to end up doing that.
And furthermore, lots of people in the oil industry say that if he is successful in Venezuela, he'll do damage to the oil companies in the United States, especially those companies that produce shale oil.
So it's not clear to me what the great benefit is.
And then on the cost side, I don't think he's going to be successful here.
And I think he's going to create a lot of animosity, not just in Venezuela over time, but in all of the Americas.
One point I would make, Glenn, is that we live in the age of nationalism.
And countries in Latin America don't want a bunch of Yankees coming into their country and stealing their resources.
We gave up on that a long time ago.
There's a reason that imperialism, old-fashioned imperialism, disappeared from the planet.
The costs were enormous, in large part because of nationalism.
And the benefits were just not very great.
You didn't have to conquer Venezuela to make the American economy flourish.
We haven't controlled Venezuelan oil for a long time, and our economy has done very well.
What's the argument here that we're really going to juice the economy because we have this Venezuelan oil?
I think that's a laughable argument, not serious, right?
And again, the costs.
This is not going to be cost-free.
Let's see how long Trump is successful at using economic leverage to coerce the existing government into Venezuela to dancing to our tune.
Let's see how good he is at getting cooperation across the board inside Venezuela with his imperialistic plans.
I don't think this is going to work out very well because as I said, old-fashioned imperialism doesn't work in the modern age of nationalism.
Yeah, you know, and a lot of these oil companies have said that the amount of investment it would take to modernize the Venezuelan infrastructure to be able to extract the kind of oil that would make it profitable is enormous.
The costs are enormous.
The timeframe is long.
It's not like it's just sitting there ready.
I think it's been pumping like a million barrels a day, which is nothing because that's their full capacity.
Just honest nationalism point, I think it's so such an important thing because a lot of times, if you say to Americans, this is going to create resentment in other parts of the world, the fact that we have this arrogant posture that we just go and take what we want and do what we want because we're stronger, you know, that creates a lot of animosity.
People say, you know, who cares?
So what?
Why do we have, we don't care what they think.
I just want to give you the example of Brazil.
It doesn't get a lot of attention in the U.S., but to me, it was so illustrative, which is under Lua's presidency, there has been this very strong movement to imprison the former right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro, the Brazilian president prior to Lua, who Trump never really knew that well, but found as like kind of a kindred spirit.
He invited them to Mar-a-Lago.
Trump doesn't speak Portuguese, Bolsonaro didn't speak English.
So it was not like they communicated a lot, but you know, he kind of was favorable to Bolsonaro.
And the fact that they were imprisoning Bolsonaro on charges of an attempted coup and a huge part of his movement made Trump identify with Bolsonaro through his own prism.
Like he was also, they tried to imprison Trump on similar grounds.
And so we immediately thought the imprisonment was unjust.
And then on top of that, there's a censorship regime led by this judge in Brazil that has affected American companies and even sometimes American citizens.
It's very aggressive censorship regime.
And there are people in the State Department who see Brazil, Lua, as this kind of leftist leader in the strain of Hugo Chavez or Maduro, even though he's absolutely not that.
But they got Trump to impose very harsh sanctions on leading Brazilian officials and also tariffs as punishment for imprisoning Bolsonaro and imposing the censorship regime that has become very popular among a lot of Brazilians.
And Lua, who had been very politically weak, saw the opportunity as the clever politician that he is, raised the national banner, the nationalist banner, and said, F you, Trump, F you, America.
Brazil is only going to be governed by Brazilians, not by the United States.
And it caused a, you know, a lot of people who didn't like Lula rallied around this message.
Don't want the United States coming in and controlling Brazil.
And the U.S. completely backed down.
They kept Bolsonaro in prison.
They escalated the censorship regime.
And then Trump lifted the sanctions and the tariffs after meeting a few times with Lua and kind of being charmed by Lua.
But it turned a lot of people in Brazil very much against the United States.
And this is a very important country geostrategically.
China has replaced the U.S. as their largest trading partner because a lot of Brazilians are more comfortable now with the Chinese because of how often they felt bullied by the United States.
I don't think people realize the cost to the United States.
Maybe we could get away with that in like the 90s when we were the only superpower into the 2000s.
There was a lot of sympathy for the U.S. because of 9-11.
But what about this now?
Like, what are the costs of being so brazen in our imperialism and triggering this nationalistic resentment?
Well, the thing you want to remember, Glenn, is that Brazil, although a prominent example, is not the only example of a country in the Western Hemisphere that does not want gringos coming down south and trying to run their politics.
Right, absolutely.
Whether it's Cuba or Mexico or Nicaragua or Peru, Columbia.
Exactly.
These countries view themselves as sovereign countries.
It's very important to understand that the concept of sovereignty, the concepts, the concept of self-determination sits at the heart of nationalism.
And countries on the planet, all countries on the planet, do not want another country coming in and trying to run their politics.
Go back to 2016.
You remember there was all this talk.
I think it's all false, that the Russians intervened in the election and they were responsible for Donald Trump getting elected over Hillary Clinton.
Many Americans were deeply, deeply offended by what the Russians were said to have done because the Russians violated our sovereignty.
Americans are very protective of their own sovereignty.
But the problem with most Americans today, and this is certainly true of American elites, is they cannot put themselves in the shoes of other leaders in other countries.
And they don't understand that what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
If sovereignty is important to us, sovereignty is important to other countries as well.
But what we think we could do is we can go around the world and we can violate the sovereignty of other countries.
And it's cost-free.
But it's not cost-free because number one, you end up with a huge amount of resentment in those countries that you invade and you end up in a forever war.
I learned this when I was a young man during the Vietnam War.
What was the Vietnam War all about?
It was not about fighting communism.
The Vietnam War was all about nationalism.
The Vietnamese wanted self-determination.
They wanted sovereignty.
They didn't want a bunch of French leaders telling them what to do or a bunch of American leaders.
And they were willing to fight and die in enormous numbers to prevent us from dominating the politics of Vietnam.
The same thing happened in Iraq.
The people in Iraq did not want the United States coming in and running their politics.
And therefore, you get yourself into really serious trouble if you get too deeply involved in interfering in countries in the Americas.
And by the way, this gets back to our earlier discussion of Trump.
I actually think in a subtle way, Trump sort of understands that.
I think he went too far in Venezuela and he'll pay a price for it.
There will be significant resistance to his policies.
But he did not go in with boots on the ground.
He did not do regime change because in a certain sense, I think Trump understands the limits of what he can do because of nationalism.
But again, I think he overstepped his bounds in Venezuela.
You know, it's kind of a running joke when you're on our show and you've been on so many times in the last four years now that despite the fact that you're a specialist in a lot of things in international relations, but certainly China is one of them.
A lot of people don't know.
You're kind of like a rock star in China among Chinese students.
When you go there, you're kind of mobbed like you're Elvis Presley.
But I always want to talk to you about China and we kind of never get the opportunity because the U.S. is involved in so many different wars so long.
It was Ukraine and Gaza.
We never get a really a chance to talk to you.
But there is a China question I want to ask you that I think very naturally flows from what we're talking about.
There was this speech by Fiona Hill, who is a very hawkish, she was a very hawkish Trump aide in the Trump, the Trump White House in the first term, very hawkish on Russia, very aggressively supportive of U.S. support for Ukraine.
And yet in 2024, maybe it was 2023, 2024, we covered this a lot at the time.
She went and gave a speech to a bunch of European foreign policymakers and elites.
And the message she delivered was one of the reasons why there's so many countries who are turning away from the United States and instead wanting to deal with China, which has caused China to be able to make great incursions into all sorts of regions of American influence, long-term American influence.
mentioned that Brazil, sitting in our hemisphere, the second largest country, now has China as their largest trading partner, no longer the United States.
She said the reason is because of things like we're doing in Israel and Gaza and Iraq, which and Ukraine, which is we throw our military might around, we start wars, we kind of think we can always get our way.
And the world now has other options, at least China, more multipolar, but certainly another superpower in China.
And then on top of that, there are a lot of leaders who say things like, there's this kind of famous quote from an African leader that says, when the U.S. comes, we get lectures and orders.
When the Chinese come, we get a hospital and a road.
Because the Chinese actually, they're very aggressive in their own region, but they don't really care what kind of other governments other countries have that they deal with.
They don't want them interfering in what they regard as Chinese affairs, that's for sure.
But beyond that, they're not trying to control or dictate.
They want to trade with these countries.
They want influencing these countries for that reason.
And a lot of this kind of warmongering, this constant focus that the United States has on military conflict is alienating the rest of the world.
And the reason why that matters is because, you know, Official Washington claims to care so much about China, sees China as this great adversary that has to be contained.
And in so many ways, we're the ones driving countries away from the United States to China by doing things like admitting that we're just going to Venezuela to steal their oil.
What do you make of that argument?
I would make two points, Glenn.
The first is, I think there is a fundamental difference between the United States and China in terms of how we think about regime change.
The United States is a proud liberal democracy that thinks it is the city on the hill and thinks it has a right, a responsibility, and the capability to spread liberal democracy around the world.
So as soon as the Cold War ends and we're the unipole, we're off on a crusade.
We were crusaders during the unipolar moment.
We were crusading to spread this wonderful political system that we have all over the planet.
We thought we were doing good.
We thought we were a benign hegemon.
The Chinese don't think like that at all.
They don't have an ideology that they're trying to export.
They believe that they have the perfect political system or political ideology for them at home, and they're not interested in exporting it.
And therefore, they don't run around lecturing other countries on what their politics should look like.
We constantly engage in lecturing countries about what their political system should look like.
So there's a fundamental difference there, which you were putting your finger on.
There's a second point I would make to you, Glenn, and that is when people talk about the United States throwing its weight around these days, they talk invariably about military power.
And I think people have lost sight of the fact that our real club that we use effectively today is the economic leverage we have from operating in an interdependent world.
Some people refer to this as weaponized interdependence.
If you look at what's happening in Iran today, basically the United States has been wrecking the Iranian economy.
If you look at what happened in Syria, the principal cause, in my opinion, of the collapse of the Assad government in Syria was what we did to Syria economically.
To take this a step further, if you look at Venezuela, we've wrecked the oil industry in Venezuela.
It was easy pickings for us to go in and cause trouble there.
And if you look at what's going on with regard to Cuba now, right, we understand, or the Trump administration understands that once you cut off the flow of oil from Venezuela to Cuba, Cuba's in desperate straits.
And we're talking about trying to bring down the regime in Cuba.
What's going on here?
It's economic leverage.
We're not talking about invading Cuba, right?
So I think one cannot underestimate the importance of things like sanctions for not only America getting its way, but just for alienating countries as well.
People want to be in bricks.
They want to create an alternative economic system where they're not vulnerable to economic sanctions, where they're not vulnerable to tariffs.
So it's this weaponized interdependence that the Chinese do not have at this point in time that we use quite liberally that generates a huge amount of hostility, but is also, I think, the principal reason for a good number of our successes in foreign policy in terms of toppling regimes.
Yeah, you know, the Brazilian president Louis de Silva says he wakes up every day and he has one dream, and the dream is de-dollarization.
Because as you said, the fact the United States still wields the reserve currency of the international financial system means they can suffocate and choke off entire economies.
And it's ironic because we do that.
We cause economic devastation for the people we claim to care so much about.
And then we point to the bad economies as proof that their leaders are bad people.
Oh, look at the economic deprivations in Venezuela and Cuba and Iran when we're doing everything we possibly can, as we outright admit, to cause that level of suffering economically.
Where do you think efforts are?
And because there have been some symbolic kind of objections.
Saudi Arabia was selling some of its oil on the market away from the dollar.
India was doing the same thing.
The Chinese were buying in other currencies, but very minimal compared to what would need to be done to really overthrow the dollar.
Do you see that as a realistic possibility within the next five to 10 years?
Well, I'm not an economist, Glenn.
And I think you really have to study this issue from an economics point of view before you could form a firm opinion.
My guess from reading lots of newspaper articles and listening to economists actually talk about this subject is that over the course of the next five or 10 years, it's unlikely that will happen.
But I think everybody has a sense that we are moving slowly in that direction.
And countries around the world, especially countries like China, Russia, Brazil, as you say, Iran, would love to reach a point where de-dolarization is effective because that would remove America's economic leverage.
And as I said before, it's not talked about that much because we tend to focus on the military stick.
We tend to focus on hard power.
But I think if you look carefully, our weaponized interdependence really is a deadly effective weapon at damaging other countries.
All right, let's move to Iran It has long been the kind of ultimate wet dream of Israel and Netanyahu to lure the United States into a regime change war with Iran because that would get rid of what is by far Israel's greatest competitor, most formidable competitor in that region.
They obviously, prior to the 1979 revolution that ushered in the current government, had what was essentially an American puppet and a dictator, the Shah of Iran, who the U.S. installed in 1953 by overthrowing the then government, created enormous amounts of resentment inside Iran for the United States for the obvious reason.
Countries, as you said, don't like when foreign governments come in and overthrow their government and impose on them a dictatorship.
Clearly, there is grievance and dissatisfaction among some substantial portion, non-trivial portion of the Iranian people with their government.
A lot of it is economic.
And as you said, the result of things the United States has done to Iran that have caused that.
Obviously, most countries in the world have a non-trivial portion of their population with intense grievances against their leaders, including the United States.
So there are protests, and that says something, but it only takes you so far.
How do you see these protests in terms of whether without overt intervention from the United States, they pose a threat to the Islamic Republic?
Well, let me just say very quickly: when we talk about overt American intervention, we're talking about air power.
We're talking about bombing Iran.
And to be honest, I believe that if anything, if we bomb Iran, we will put an end to the protests and people will rally around the flag.
You want to remember that that's what happened during the 12-day war in June.
Before the 12-day war started, Israel started it on June 13th.
It ended 12 days later, June 25th, and we attacked Iran for one day on June 22nd.
But during that period, the public, the populace rallied around the flag.
They rallied around the government.
And I believe that if we were to launch a major air campaign along with the Israelis against Iran now, that there would be a rally around the government effect.
So I think if you're these.
Similar to how, in a way, October 7th saved Netanyahu.
I mean, Israel was on the verge of major internal strife and it kind of all disappeared with the Hamas attack on October 7th and it caused a certain unity behind the government.
That's very normal.
Yeah, I can even go beyond that.
In Netanyahu's case, he's continued to wage war after war after war.
He's turned Israel into a permanent warfare state.
And I believe that he thinks, and it's probably correct, I'm sad to say, that fighting all these wars will keep the people basically on his side.
They'll complain about him personally.
They don't like him.
They wish he wasn't there in a certain sense, but they're really glad he's there when it comes to waging war because he's proved that he's effective at waging war.
So I think you see that with Netanyahu, not only on October 7th, but beyond October 7th.
And I think you would see the same thing in Iran.
So I think using military force doesn't make any sense.
I actually think in a lot of these cases, if the United States would just get out of a country's face, it would do a lot to produce regime change and a more pro-American government.
And my favorite example of this, by the way, is Cuba.
I think we have threatened Cuba since roughly 1959.
We can't take our gun sights off Cuba.
It's just an obsession with us.
And I think that external threat from the Yankees up north does a great deal to keep Cuba, the Cuban regime intact.
I think we would be much smarter if we wanted to foster regime change in Cuba to just back off and just have good relations with Cuba and let American culture, which acts like acid, bring down the regime in Cuba.
But we're incapable of doing that.
We have to get right up in a country's face.
Now, what's going on in Iran?
To tell you the truth, Glenn, it's very hard to say.
You were talking about propaganda before and how deadly effective American propaganda is.
As I was listening to your talk, I was sort of nodding without moving my head.
You're exactly right.
And when you listen to the American government and the Israeli government, which is also terrific at propaganda, they tell a story that the regime is on its last legs and shortly, in a short period of time, that regime is going to be toppled and we're going to have a new and friendly regime.
There are lots of people on the other side of this debate, and these are knowledgeable people who simply think that's not true.
The regime has faced protests before.
The regime is ruthless.
It has lots of support.
And it is now moving to suppress the regime, suppress the protests.
And in fact, what you're seeing in some cities is massive protests in favor of the regime.
Now, what's the bottom line here?
It's very hard to say, again, because we're dealing with so much propaganda from both sides.
So I don't know where this all ends.
If I had to bet, I would bet on the regime shutting these protests down.
One question is you have Iran has allies.
I think, you know, for a long time, people thought that you couldn't remove Assad because of the importance that the Assad government had toward Russia.
That was a major Russian base of influence in the Middle East.
And it sort of seems like Russia pretty much accepted that he was gone and was falling.
And maybe they had washed their hands of him.
Some reports suggested that, but they certainly didn't do anything, nowhere near what people expected they might, if the Assad regime was actually in danger of falling.
And then you have Venezuela, which has had a traditionally close relationship with Russia, had been dealing with China.
Maduro's gone.
Very little objection or backlash, it seems, from what the countries that ought to have been his allies.
Obviously, the Cubans are the most important ally, and there's only so much they can do.
But now you have Iran, which clearly is what, however organic these protests are, you clearly have the Mossad fueling them.
There's lots of conclusive evidence that that's the case.
You have Trump threatening to bomb Iran in order to help the protests, to facilitate them.
Why are Iranian allies like Russia or China that does at least some business with Iran so seemingly indifferent to all of these cases?
It's, I think, very simple.
They have no military option.
I mean, that's certainly true in the Russian case.
The Russians are involved in a major war in Ukraine, and they're deeply committed to ending that war.
And the last thing they want to do is take their eye off the ball and get involved in a war or any kind of military conflict with the United States over Iran.
It just would not be in their interests.
And therefore, with regard to both Iran and Venezuela, they've allowed the Americans to pretty much have their way.
And they've instead, the Russian leaders have concentrated on. doing everything they can to win the war in Ukraine.
And with regard to China, China's, you know, so far away from Venezuela and so far away from Iran, and it has so little power projection capability.
China has a growing amount of military capability in East Asia, and it is building a blue water navy to project power into the Persian Gulf.
But it's a long way from where it has that kind of power projection capability.
And you want to remember they're up against the United States of America, which is a true superpower and has huge capabilities at projecting power into the Middle East or the Persian Gulf.
And furthermore, Venezuela is in our backyard, right?
They'd be entering into our backyard.
And that would, of course, invoke the Monroe Doctrine and so forth and so on.
So there's no way China or Russia are going to pull either Venezuela or Iran's chestnuts out of the fire.
Let's talk about something that has been almost entirely forgotten, maybe by design, maybe just out of fatigue, which is the Israeli aggression in Gaza.
Obviously, there's nominally a ceasefire in place that President Trump and his negotiators engineered and took credit for and insisted would be honored and maintained.
But whether it's true or not, Trump claims now that he's convinced that the side that's violating the deal is Hamas.
They're attacking IDF soldiers who aren't supposed to be there.
They're not disarming.
And he pretty much said the last time Netanyahu was in the U.S.
I mean, Netanyahu was in the U.S., you know, more than a lot of Americans are.
But he was at Mar-a-Lago and Trump basically said, I'm not worried about anything Israel is doing, meaning they have the green light to do whatever they want.
Seems clear that they have already been continuing their aggression in Gaza, maybe at a scaled-down form compared to what it was before the ceasefire.
But it seems like there's a lot of talk in Israel now about restarting and about kind of finishing the job, the job being getting rid of the Palestinians out of Gaza, taking that land for Israel.
The Gazans who stay might end up in a sort of camp that you could call a concentration camp.
I think there's this plan to deport a bunch of them to what they're now calling Somalia land.
Do you think that this whole focus on Iran is serving to make people ignore and be distracted from what's happening in Gaza?
Oh, absolutely.
The Israelis, I believe, have long understood that any time they stirred up trouble with Iran and brought the United States in and the Americans and the Israelis were talking about attacking Iran or fostering a revolution in Iran, which is what we're now talking about, that this would have the effect of pushing the Gaza genocide onto the back pages of the newspapers.
And I think this is exactly what's happened.
And it's also been facilitated by the fact that you've had this so-called ceasefire, right?
And the fact is, it's not been a ceasefire from the Israeli perspective.
The Israelis have basically continued to behave as if there were no ceasefire.
And by the way, they've done the same thing in Lebanon.
I think Hamas is, this may be too strong a word, but probably not.
Hamas is desperate to have a meaningful ceasefire.
They need a break.
The Israelis needed a break, too.
The Israeli military was in deep trouble when the ceasefire was agreed upon, but then they've had an opportunity to rest.
And I think there are a lot of people in the Netanyahu government who think it's time to get started again.
And what they'll do is they'll engineer some crisis where they blame Hamas for a gross violation of the ceasefire and say this is reason for Israel to go in and finish the job, to use the rhetoric that you were using before, which of course they use all the time.
And the United States, of course, will go along with this because Trump pretty much goes along with anything the Israelis want to do.
So he'll stand aside and his peace plan, which he was hoping to use to help him get a Nobel Prize in 2026, will not work out.
The peace plan will fall apart.
And this is hardly surprising because the Israelis' goal here is to either drive all of the Palestinians out of Gaza into Somaliland or Egypt or wherever, or if not, do that, kill them, right?
Either starve them to death or bomb them to death or some combination of the two.
So it's hard to see how there is any kind of decent solution to this problem.
It looks like the Israelis at some point will go back on a rampage.
Yeah.
All right.
Like we said, we had to do a kind of tour of the various military conflicts.
Those obviously aren't all the conflicts.
There's one left that I, there's not, there's actually several left, but there's one left I want to talk to you about tonight, which is the just grind in Ukraine.
It's now going into its fifth full year, 2022, 23, 24, 25, 26 will be now its fifth full year of combat.
Clearly, President Trump has made efforts to get a resolution to this war.
But I think as a lot of people predicted, it wasn't nearly as easy as he thinks because basically NATO created a definition of victory that they would never be able to achieve and a definition of defeat that they cannot swallow, even though they should, which is giving away Ukrainian land to Russia, even though Russia now occupies it.
And the Russians obviously invested huge amounts in terms of money and prestige and military fight and Russian lives.
And they're not going to just give up a war because Trump wants them to.
So where do you see this all heading in 2026?
Well, to be clear, there's not going to be a diplomatic settlement to this war.
And you've been saying that for years, by the way, on our show.
I have.
But nothing's changed.
No, I know.
The Russians still stick to their non-negotiable positions.
And if anything, the Europeans, and to a lesser extent, the Ukrainians, harden their positions.
The two sides are just light years away from each other.
So there's not going to be any peace agreement and there's not going to be a ceasefire.
Ukraine and the Europeans want a ceasefire, but the Russians believe they're winning on the battlefield.
And therefore, the last thing they want to agree to is a ceasefire.
So all this is to say no ceasefire, no peace agreement.
Therefore, it's going to be settled on the battlefield.
And if you listen to the Russians talk, they are fully confident they will win on the battlefield.
And if you look at what's going on between the Russians on one side and Ukraine and its allies on the other side, it looks very clear to me as if the Ukrainians are doomed.
First of all, Trump has basically withdrew significant amounts of American support for Ukraine, and he shifted the burden onto the Europeans.
And the Europeans don't have the economic wherewithal to support Ukraine over the long term.
This is why they were trying late last year, this is 2025, to steal those frozen Russian assets.
They were trying to steal those frozen Russian assets to use to pay Ukraine because the Europeans don't have enough money in their coffers to pay the Europeans.
So this is a huge problem.
Furthermore, the Europeans and the Americans don't have enough weapons to give to the Ukrainians to redress the weapons imbalance between the two sides.
Furthermore, the most important imbalance by almost all accounts at this point in time is the manpower imbalance.
The Ukrainians are greatly outnumbered on the battlefield, and they don't have a reserve of manpower that they can draw on, in large part because the country is in a demographic death spiral.
One cannot underestimate what a horrible, absolutely horrible situation Ukraine is in.
It is in a demographic death spiral.
It doesn't have the manpower.
Furthermore, Russian air power, Russian missiles are now on the loose.
And about a week ago, the mayor of Kyiv was encouraging the residents of Kyiv to leave the city.
He didn't say you have to leave.
He was encouraging them to leave because the water system, the heating system, and the electricity system has been so badly damaged by Russian attacks that people can't live a decent life there.
In fact, it's not clear people can survive in the dead winter in a city like Kyiv and other cities in the country as well.
So the Russians are pounding the cities.
They're rolling back the Ukrainian forces on the battlefield.
The Americans have lost interest in supporting Ukraine.
The Europeans can't do much to help them.
How can the Russians be defeated?
And the answer is they can't.
First of all, anyone who has some spare time and wants to just go be amazed, go back and look at the interviews Professor Mearsheimer we did with him in 2022.
I mean, like March and April and May of 2022 when everybody was in a war fever about the Ukrainian victory and the feist to Ukrainians, and they were actually fighting better than people thought.
And credit to them for that.
But this is all predictable.
And at least Professor Mearsheimer and a few other people predicted.
It's now sort of conventional wisdom.
I guess the question then, given that everything you just described is so grim and dreary and terrifying for Ukraine and Ukrainians, is why has their position hardened?
Why aren't they willing to agree to a diplomatic resolution when their alternative is everything you just described?
I think it gets back to a word that we were talking about before, Glenn, nationalism.
This is nationalism.
The Ukrainians are willing to fight and die in huge numbers for mother Ukraine.
That's what's going on here.
I've actually thought that the Ukrainians would have crumbled.
This war should have ended in late 2024, late 2025 at the latest.
This war should have been over months ago.
I don't understand why it continues.
I don't understand why the Ukrainians are continuing to fight.
This is just making an absolutely horrible situation even worse.
They're going to lose more territory.
They're going to lose more people.
And as I said, they're in a demographic death spiral.
Why don't they cut a deal?
And I think the answer is nationalism.
They just simply refuse to quit.
The idea that the Russians are going to come in and take their territory is categorically unacceptable to them.
This is what motivated the Vietnamese to fight against us and fight against the French before they fought against us.
They were willing to die in huge numbers.
If you look at the number of casualties that we inflicted on the Vietnamese during the Vietnam War, basically from 1965 to 1972, it's truly amazing.
But the Vietnamese never quit.
They just continued to fight.
And I think you see a similar situation with Ukraine.
I have no other explanation.
But the difference is that the Vietnamese believed they would drive the Americans out.
And it's hard to believe the Ukrainians believe that about Russia.
I agree with that.
That's an excellent point that you make.
And I mean, all I can say is it just shows you that nationalism in some cases, this case, is just so powerful that people are willing to fight and die to the end for what is effectively a lost cause.
Yeah, nationalism is such a potent byproduct of the tribalistic instinct that has been developed in all of us and human beings for thousands of years.
And there's, you know, protests now, as you say, in defense of the Iranian government.
A lot of people on the street who don't even like the Iranian government, who, when asked about Israeli and U.S. involvement in their country, say, we don't like the government, but we will fight and die happily to protect Iran from foreign interference.
I think a lot of people hear that and don't believe it, but there's so much evidence that that is how people are motivated, arguably because that's how we're kind of hardwired in a lot of ways.
And there's so many examples that have proven that people really are willing to do that, even in feudal causes, in order to kind of protect what they believe is rightfully theirs, which is their identity, their nationalistic identity, which ultimately is really their tribe.
It's an often undervalued human instinct.
You know, Glenn, during the Cold War, there was a phrase that I occasionally think about these days that I didn't think much about back then, although I knew the phrase back then.
The phrase was better dead than red.
In other words, if you have a choice between the Soviets overrunning Europe and fighting to the death, you're better off dying.
The idea of the Soviets overrunning Europe, your country, whether you're German or French, unacceptable.
But I think if you think about it, you can make a compelling case that in that situation during the Cold War, you would have been better off red than dead because the red tide eventually subsided.
It wasn't forever.
But I think that was not the way the vast majority of people thought during the Cold War.
Yours truly included.
We thought that it was necessary, you know, if you were in the American military or the German military or the French military to fight to the death to prevent the Soviet Union, the Reds, from dominating all of Europe.
Yeah, it is a very real human drive.
And yeah, it's been proven in every part of the world across cultures, across time.
And I think so often we neglect to include that in our assessment of how people are going to behave.
Well, Professor, it's been super illuminating and thought-provoking and informative, as it always is.
Whenever we have the opportunity to talk to you, we're always thrilled to do so.
Thanks for making the time to come on and talk to us tonight.
And we will hopefully be seeing you again shortly here.
My pleasure as always, Glenn.
I always thoroughly enjoy talking to you.
Same here.
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