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June 12, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
27:15
Prof. John Mearsheimer : Can Iran Defeat Israel? (part two)
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Friday, June 13, 2025.
Professor John Mearsheimer joins us now.
Professor Mearsheimer, it's a pleasure.
We originally scheduled this to continue our session from the other day when we had Internet problems.
And, of course, since then, the world and the Middle East has changed.
What's your initial analysis?
I think it's clearly a massive attack.
I mean, they're attacking in waves.
They're attacking all over the country.
And they've made it clear that this is just the beginning.
So this is a major conflict.
And the Israelis are well aware that the Iranians are going to retaliate.
We don't know exactly what that retaliation looks like.
So you're basically going to have a situation where we go up the escalation ladder.
And then the question becomes, what does it look like at the end when this is finally concluded?
Do we know if the Iranian offensive...
Do we know if the Iranian offensive weaponry has been impacted by this attack?
Well, I think there's no question that some of it has.
The question is how much.
The Iranians have a lot of that.
A lot of those missiles, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles hidden underground.
And furthermore, there are just limits to how many of the missiles can be attacked by the Israelis because they can only put so many aircraft over the target.
But at the same time, I think it's quite clear that the Iranians got caught with their pants down.
This was a surprise attack.
Scott Ritter on the show earlier today talked about this being France Pearl Harbor.
I think that is an apt analogy here.
I just had to get up and close the door to try and insulate us from Chris's expressing his opinion on all these things.
There doesn't seem to be any question about United States' involvement after reading what the President said.
I'm not so sure it was wise what he said, but I'd like to read it out loud since it's a Truth Social poster.
Chris, if you want to put it up, please.
This is the President of the United States about 6.15 this morning Eastern Time.
I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal.
I told them in the strongest of words to just do it, but no matter how hard they tried, no matter how close they got, they just couldn't get it done.
I told them it would be much worse than anything they know, anticipated, or were told, that the United States makes the best and most lethal military equipment anywhere in the world by far, in caps, and that Israel has a lot of it with much more to come.
And they know how to use it.
Certain Iranian hardliners spoke bravely, but they didn't know what was about to happen.
They're all dead in caps now, and it will only get worse.
There has already been great death and destruction, but there is still time to make this slaughter with the next already planned attacks being even far more brutal come to an end.
Iran must make a deal before there is nothing left.
And save what was once known as the Iranian Empire.
No more death, no more destruction.
Just do it before it's too late.
God bless you all.
The anti-war president saying, if you don't negotiate the way we want you to, we'll kill you, either directly or through our proxy, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Is that the way you read that?
Yeah, no question about it.
Just a couple other points.
The Times of Israel, It has a big story that's easily accessible on the internet that makes it clear that Trump colluded with Netanyahu to basically bamboozle the Iranians and make it look like there was not going to be an attack, at least until the negotiations were finished.
And in fact, Trump knew the attack was coming as of Monday, and he pretended that he didn't know, and that in fact he was working overtime to make the diplomatic route work.
So he's in collusion with the Israelis on this one.
So Professor Sachs, your colleague, and Scott Ritter say that Trump's behavior in this, as you've just outlined it, That renders anybody who's negotiating with the United States absolutely suspect about whether or not to believe Donald Trump or anything the United States says.
Do you agree with that?
I agreed with that before these attacks took place.
I think any country on the planet that trusts the United States is remarkably foolish.
That includes their close allies as well as their adversaries.
I'm sure that Vladimir Putin doesn't trust Donald Trump as far as he can throw him, and he can't throw him any distance because he can't get his hands on him.
Yeah.
I wonder if Donald Trump shared with Marco Rubio the de jure, not de facto, the de jure Secretary of State the American involvement, or if Mr. Rubio has a problem with the truth.
Here's what he said.
Tonight, Israel took unilateral action against Iran.
We are not involved in strikes against Iran, and our top priority is protecting American forces in the region.
Israel advised us that they believe this action was necessary for its self-defense.
President Trump and the administration have taken all necessary steps to protect our forces and remain in close contact with our regional partners.
Let me be clear.
Iran should not target U.S. interests or personnel.
There's not a word of truth in the first two sentences there, is there?
No.
He was just trying to provide cover early on, but that cover has been blown by today.
Let me make a general point about what I think is going on here.
Please do.
I think Trump has fallen into a trap that the Israelis set.
What I mean by that is I think Israel's ultimate goal here is to make sure Iran does not get nuclear weapons, but they don't have the capability to do that by themselves.
So what the Israelis are doing here with this attack is, number one, they're putting an end to the negotiations.
There's not going to be any more negotiations.
That's meaningless at this point.
But furthermore, they're drawing us into the fight.
The Iranians are going to retaliate, and we have said that we will help defend the Israelis.
Furthermore, this war is going to escalate, and we are going to get drawn in.
Trump has already made it clear that he is standing with the Israelis.
And what Trump has wanted to do was avoid a war, and he wanted to settle this one diplomatically.
Well, there's no diplomatic solution possible now.
And he is in the war with the Iranians.
The allurement to American presidents of the opportunity to kill people in foreign countries must be utterly irresistible.
This so-called anti-war, pro-peace president, we're going to play a clip in just a minute of his, at the time, his surrogates, now members of his cabinet, praising him for being anti-war.
Funding the war in Gaza, even more so than Joe Biden, continues to fund an utterly losing effort in Ukraine.
And now the neocons are triumphant and the Zionists are triumphant by dragging us into, eventually, a war against Iran, which has posed zero, zero threat to American national security.
So much for the anti-war president.
It's hard to disagree with that.
I mean, the only thing I disagree with that you said is I don't call it a war in Gaza.
I call it a genocide.
It is, and I'm entirely with you, and I stand corrected.
Chris, play the clip of Tulsi Gabbard and Bobby Kennedy.
A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for a man who wants to end wars, not start them.
He said, I want to end the wars.
And who has demonstrated already that he has the courage and strength to stand up and fight for peace.
I want to end this surveillance and censorship.
Did we choose censorship or freedom?
I want to protect the Constitution.
I want to protect freedom of speech.
History will look back on us at this moment for the choice that we make.
Did we choose war or peace?
Every one of those statements which were made at the Republican National Convention last summer has been defied poignantly by Donald Trump.
From freedom of speech, ask some Muslims on the Columbia University campus, to these perpetual wars.
I don't disagree.
I don't know what else to say.
I mean, I did not think Trump would turn out to be a warmonger, but he has.
I mean, what else can you say?
Here he is himself in his inaugural address, January 20th.
We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end and perhaps most importantly, the wars we end.
Do you think that the true purpose of this attack, from the perspective of the Israelis and maybe from the perspective of the United States, I'm complicating the question, but nothing's too complex for John Mearsheimer.
Do you think that the true purpose of this attack was to degrade the Iranian Well, I do not think the Israelis have the capability to eliminate the nuclear enrichment capability that the Iranians have, certainly at the Fordow installation.
But even, I think, at Natanz.
It's just not in the cards.
I think it's only the Americans who might, and I want to underline the word might, be able to do that.
But I think, as I said before, the attack is mainly designed to get the Americans in the fight, to end the negotiations, so that we can make sure that Iran does not acquire nuclear weapons.
In other words, we, the United States.
The alternative route to this end is regime change, which is the Israelis go in, they bash Iran, and the end result is that the Ayatollahs are overthrown.
You get a liberal democracy, and that liberal democracy or those new leaders show no interest in acquiring nuclear weapons.
I think that's a pipe dream.
I tend to believe the Israelis understand that's a pipe dream.
I mean, first of all, you want to look at All the states around the world that have nuclear weapons, a good number of them are liberal democracies.
The United States and Britain and India have nuclear weapons.
France has nuclear weapons.
These are liberal democracies.
Moreover, if you're the Iranians, what's the message that you take from what's happened here, whether you're a liberal Democrat or you're an Ayatollah?
The lesson is that you should have gotten nuclear weapons a long time ago, and now you definitely have to get them in.
Look at North Korea.
North Korea got nuclear weapons.
Kim Jong-un is thriving in North Korea.
Colonel Qaddafi got rid of his weapons of mass destruction program.
He's now three feet under.
And look at what's happening to the Iranians.
So the message is clear here.
And I think that tells you that regime change is not going to do the trick.
So what the Israelis want is they want us to do the dirty work.
It's very important to understand that the Israelis have reached a point where they are remarkably dependent on us.
If you look at the weaponry that was used against the Iranians, and I think this includes intelligence too, if you look at the weaponry that's used in the genocide, it's the Americans who provide that weaponry.
And the Israelis are depending on us to help defend them when the Iranians retaliate.
So they are deeply dependent on us, and it's therefore hard.
Hardly unsurprising that they're looking to us to solve their problem.
I don't want to give you heartburn, but probably the most pro-Israeli, pro-war, never met a war, he didn't want somebody else to fight, a member of the United States Senate from South Carolina thinks this is a game.
There it is, on his own account.
Game on!
Pray for Israel.
I don't even know how to analyze the human mind that would say something like that by calling it game on.
This is a massive, unprovoked, illegal war crime attack on a sovereign nation, which the United States duped into a false sense of security by pretending to negotiate it with.
I think we are as culpable as the Israelis are, but that culpability is not going to be redressed by, Right.
But just to take it a step further, it is important to understand that he's just one of many senators and congressmen who are backing Israel to the hilt and will back Israel to the hilt no matter what it does.
He just happens to be more vociferous and more foolish in his public performances than the others.
But he's just one of many.
And as I've said many times, it just goes.
To show you the extent to which Israel and the lobby here in the United States basically owns Congress.
Right, right.
Do we know the nature of the cause?
The BBC described it as unprecedented damage on Iran's elite.
I think they're referring to the attacks on a suburban neighborhood where many of the generals I believe that when all is said and done, the most successful part of the Israeli attack will be the decapitation.
I mean, they actually were able to kill a significant number of Iranian leaders, mainly generals, and they were also able to kill a handful.
Of nuclear scientists.
But the question you have to ask yourself is whether this decapitation strategy will work.
And the fact is that there are people in the second echelon, the third echelon, who will be moved up to replace those individuals.
And I'm sure that in some cases, the second and third echelon people who are moved up will be more competent than the people they replace.
In some cases, they won't.
But the idea that this is a A paralyzing attack that will make it impossible for Iran to wage a protracted war against Israel is, in my opinion, wrong.
I think the decapitation strategy worked in the sense that lots of people in Iran at the top were killed, but beyond that, I don't think it's going to have much effect on the war.
And we don't know of Iran's capability to respond or to retaliate in a massive way because we don't know how much damage the Israeli assault caused.
No, I think that's wrong.
I think they still have the capability to respond in a massive way.
I don't think that the Israelis destroyed so much of their missile inventory that the Iranians can't pound Israel.
And pound American bases in the Middle East and oil installations in the Gulf.
They can do that.
I think there was some damage done for sure, how much we can't tell.
But I don't think massive damage was done.
And by the way, you know, one thing we haven't talked about and few people are talking about is what happens if this war goes on and the Israelis hit oil installations inside of Iran and the Iranians retaliate by hitting oil installations in the Middle East more generally, shut down the flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf.
We'll have $10 a gallon gasoline in the United States.
Thank you, Donald Trump.
Yeah.
Well, you want to say thank you, Israel.
Right.
Well, Israel would be nothing without him.
Is it fair to say the neocons are now triumphant?
I mean, what became of the realists?
What became of the American firsters, the Vice President Vance group that was on that telegram or signal call, whatever it was, that supposedly was arguing for restraint?
They certainly didn't prevail here.
But you want to remember how triumphant everybody was when we went into Iraq.
You know, the first day, first week, it looks terrific.
But then once the cold doucher reality hits, it doesn't look so good.
And I don't think you can tell a good story about how Israel ends up with a happy ending here.
I think that this one will not work out over the long term.
So all the triumphalism that you see today, I believe, will melt away like snow on a May day.
But just a quick point on what happened to the restrainers, what happened to the realists, so to speak.
The fact is, when it comes to foreign policy in the Middle East, Israel owns us, and the restrainers in the end don't matter.
Because Israel can do pretty much anything it wants.
This is a truly remarkable situation that most Americans can't understand.
It's unfathomable that a small country with a couple million people is able to get the United States to do its bidding, to get unconditional support from the United States.
But that's where we're at.
Israel can do almost anything.
I mean, to put a positive spin on what Trump has done, he's in a straitjacket.
He just doesn't have any choice.
There's no way he can really contest the Israelis because the lobby is so powerful that if he Here's Colonel McGregor a few minutes ago.
June turned out to be Iran's Pearl Harbor.
Iran will now react as we did in 1942 when we were caught napping.
What was limited to the region between Israel and Iran will now become regional.
Trump's statements after the fact are an admission Hard to disagree with that.
As I said before, with regard to Scott's comments earlier this morning, I thought the use of the term Pearl Harbor was appropriate here.
And furthermore, as I said, if you look at the scale of these attacks against Iran, it's really quite extensive.
These attacks are quite extensive.
They're supposed to go on for, you know, days, if not weeks.
And I think the end result is you're going to get a major war here.
It's, you know, people who are talking about, let's put a damper on this, let's put an end to this.
I mean, I think this is delusional.
The Iranians simply have to respond, and they have to respond in a massive way, and the Israelis will retaliate.
Then we're off to the races.
And we have 90,000 American troops.
According to Ritter, the vast majority of them are support personnel, not frontline infantry, who are almost in a semicircle in that area.
What happens when some of them get killed?
Well, that will give us an incentive to get deeply involved in the war.
This is what I was saying to you before.
The Israelis have a vested interest in sucking us into the war.
Right?
What they want to do is get Americans killed.
Because if Americans get killed, that guarantees that we come in.
Do you think Donald Trump understands that?
That his buddy BB Nets in Yahoo wants Americans to get killed?
I don't know exactly what he understands.
He obviously has acknowledged that he's thrown his...
I mean, he's with them now, right?
We're joined at the hip, and we're going to get pulled in.
You know, this reminds me a lot of the Cuban Missile Crisis, excuse me, of the Bay of Pigs operation that President Kennedy was involved in in April of 1961, shortly after he became president.
The Bay of Pigs operation, if you look at it, was doomed from the start.
There was no way it would work.
And when you read about it, you wonder what was the CIA thinking when they pushed JFK to launch the boats and to invade in the Bay of Pigs.
Well, what was going on here is the CIA understood That we would be defeated in the Bay of Pigs operation.
But their belief is that Kennedy would then have no choice but to double down, get deeply involved in Cuba, and then that was the way we would overthrow the Castro regime, right?
So, in other words, the CIA understood the initial attack did not achieve its goal.
But the idea was that you suck President Kennedy and his commitment to topple the regime in Cuba.
And in this case, I don't believe the Israelis think.
That they can eliminate Iran's nuclear capability with these attacks.
It just can't be done.
And they understand full well, I'm sure, that they're going to enrage the Iranians, and the Iranians are going to attack Israel.
But this is all good news, because the name of the game is to suck the Americans in, just as they wanted to suck JFK in with the Bay of Pigs operation.
And Trump has played right into the Israelis' hands.
And here we go.
And after the Bay of Pigs, JFK was so furious at the CIA, he said, I'd like to smash them into a thousand pieces.
And then came November 22nd, 1963.
Well, there's no question that he wanted to get rid of the head of the CIA, Alan Dulles, and he did that very quickly.
And he was thinking about reforming the CIA because he understood that it was a rogue actor.
But with regard to the Israelis, right, Israel is a rogue state, and it has us tied around its finger, and it can go off and do all sorts of things, and it knows that it can depend on us to bail them out.
Last question, Professor Mearshamer.
Do you see any military action coming from any other country in the region, notably Egypt or Turkey?
No, I think everybody's going to keep their heads down.
The last thing they want to do is get involved in this fight.
There's nobody that has the capability to take on the Israelis or the Americans.
And I think that all around the region, people regret that this attack has taken place.
They see no good coming from it, quite correctly, I would add.
But they're not going to get involved in the fight.
Professor Mearsheimer, thank you very much.
I know this isn't your usual day or time, and I know this is your second time on with us, and you rose to our call when we learned of these events before the sun came up this morning.
Thank you very much for joining us.
I hope you have a good weekend, and we'll look forward to seeing you at your usual time and place next week.
My pleasure, Judge.
Have a good weekend yourself.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Coming up at 4 o 'clock today, the end of the day, the end of the week, but not the last judging freedom of the week, the Intelligence Community Roundtable with Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson.
4 o 'clock at 4.30, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson on all of this.
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