John Mearsheimer argues NATO’s 1999–2008 expansion—ignoring Russian warnings—forced Putin’s 2022 invasion, framing it as a U.S. strategic blunder. He labels Israel’s Gaza campaign genocide, citing demographic engineering and Zionist goals like Ben-Gurion’s 1918 vision, while blaming the Israel lobby (AIPAC, Christian Zionists) for overriding U.S. interests, even suppressing dissent like his London Review of Books article. With 60,000+ Palestinian deaths in Gaza and Netanyahu’s authoritarian crackdown, Mearsheimer warns of escalating extremism—from Temple Mount clashes to potential U.S.-China war over Taiwan—concluding that unchecked hawkish policies prioritize ideology over national security. [Automatically generated summary]
What we're interested in doing is taking the pacifier, the American pacifier that sits over Western Europe and putting it over Eastern Europe and making Europe one giant zone of peace.
And the Europeans liked that idea.
You want to remember, after 1989, lots of Europeans were very worried about Germany, which reunified when the Cold War ended.
And you can understand why Europeans were very nervous.
But as long as the Americans stay in Europe, as long as NATO remains intact, the pacifier is there.
You know, most people don't realize this, but the Soviets and then the Russians were perfectly content to see the United States remain in Europe and for NATO to remain intact after the Cold War, because the Soviets slash Russians understood that we served as a pacifier.
What they didn't want, and they made this very clear, was NATO expansion.
And of course, what we did, starting in 1994, was to expand NATO eastward.
Again, to move the pacifier from over just Western Europe to over all of Europe.
And that is what has produced the catastrophe in Ukraine.
By the time NATO gets to the Baltics and then we start talking openly, as the Biden administration did just openly, like at press conferences about moving NATO into Ukraine, it's very obvious that that's going to trigger a conflict with Russia at some point.
You know, how could it not?
Why didn't anyone pause and say, okay, NATO's great.
Obviously, there's a massive budget.
We're all getting richer from NATO also.
But let's balance that against like a war with Russia.
Just to get the dates right, the second big tranche of NATO expansion, which brings the Baltic states in, is 2004.
The first big tranche is 1999.
That's Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, 99.
Then 2004 is when the Baltic states come in.
2008 is when the critical decision is made, April 2008, to bring Ukraine into NATO.
Okay.
To get to the heart of your question, what's very interesting is if you go back and look at many of the planning documents from the 90s about NATO expansion, people recognize at the time that Ukraine is a special case and it will be a huge source of trouble if we move NATO into Ukraine.
So you can get away with Poland.
You can even get away with the Baltic states, but Ukraine is a different matter.
And it's very important to understand that we understood that from the get-go.
So the question then becomes, what you're asking, is why did we do it, right?
What's going on here?
Why didn't we just back off?
And I think the answer is we thought we could shove it down their throat.
You want to understand, they opposed the 99 expansion, the first tranche.
We shove it down their face, down their throat again.
So in 2008, immediately after NATO says at the Bucharest, April 2008, NATO-Bucharest summit, immediately after he says that NATO says that Ukraine will be brought into NATO, Putin makes it manifestly clear that this is unacceptable, that this is an existential threat, and that Russia will not let it happen.
And by the way, at that April 2008 NATO summit, they said they were not only going to bring Ukraine into NATO, they're going to bring Georgia into NATO.
That's April 2008.
A war breaks out in Georgia in August of 2008 over this very issue.
So you would expect us to back off at that point, but we don't back off.
In fact, we double down.
And then when the crisis first starts, this is in 2014, February 22nd, 2014.
That's when the crisis starts.
That's when the Russians take Crimea.
This is when you understand or should understand the Russians mean business.
Do we back off?
Do we try to accommodate the Russians in any way?
Absolutely not.
We plow forward.
And then, of course, we get the war in 2022.
And you ask yourself, why did we do this?
And by the way, if you look at the process, the decision-making process after Joe Biden moves into the White House in January 2021, January 2021, and then 13 months later, the war breaks out, Biden makes no effort whatsoever to accommodate the Russians.
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But why would you want to?
Even If you have absolute power, which of course doesn't exist, but let's say you believed you had it, why would you want to do that?
I believe that once the decision is made in 2008 that you're going to bring NATO to Ukraine, you're going to bring Ukraine into the alliance, that the idea of backing off is unacceptable to the United States and to the West.
You just don't do that.
That would be a sign of weakness, and we cannot show weakness.
And I think a lot of this thinking has to do with why we won't quit now.
One should say to him or herself at this point, it's time to put an end to this war and accept the fact that the Russians have won an ugly victory.
Well, it is a devastating defeat for NATO because we have invested so much in this war.
The other problem that we face is that the United States, and this is true of both the Biden and Trump administration, consider China to be the principal threat to the United States.
China is a peer competitor.
Russia is not a peer competitor.
Russia is not a threat to dominate Europe.
Russia is not the Soviet Union.
China is a peer competitor.
It's a threat to dominate Asia.
And what we've been trying to do since 2011, when Hillary Clinton announced it when she was Secretary of State, is we've been trying to pivot to Asia.
But what's happened here is we've got bogged down in Ukraine, and now we're bogged down in the Middle East.
And this makes it difficult to fully pivot to Asia.
And this is not in the American national interest.
But to make matters even worse, what we have done is we have driven the Russians into the arms of the Chinese.
If you think about it, we live in a world where there are three great powers, the United States, China, and Russia.
If the United States views China as its principal competitor and the United States is interested in containing China in East Asia, it would make eminently good sense to have Russia on its side of the equation.
Instead, what we've done with the Ukraine war is we've driven the Russians and the army, the Russians and the Chinese closer together.
So that's so obvious, even to me, a non-specialist, just like it's obvious, just look at a map, that it had to have been obvious to the previous administration, but they did it anyway.
So you have to kind of wonder, did they want that?
The Cold War ends, and as you well remember, at the end of the Cold War, China and the United States were basically allied together against the Soviet Union.
So the Soviet Union, the Cold War ends, Soviet Union disappears.
And there's no longer any need for us to have a close relationship with China.
We don't need them to help contain the Soviet Union.
So the question is, what do we do with the Chinese moving forward?
And economically, China is a backwards country in the early 1990s.
What we do is we adopt a policy of engagement with China.
Engagement is explicitly designed to turn China into a very wealthy country.
This is a country that has over four times the population of the United States, and you're talking about making it very rich.
For a realist like me, this is lunacy.
You are, in effect, creating a peer competitor.
In fact, you may be creating a country that is more powerful than the United States.
But the foreign policy establishment in the United States, almost to a person, including hawks like Sbignu Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger, said that China can grow economically.
We can integrate it into institutions like the World Trade Organization and so forth and so on, and it will become a democracy and we will all live happily ever after.
So what we did is that we helped fuel China's phenomenal growth between 1990 and 2017 when it became a great power.
You want to remember that when the Cold War ends and then the Soviet Union collapses in December of 1991, we enter the unipolar moment, which by definition means there's one great power on the planet.
That's the United States of America.
By 2017, there are three great powers on the planet.
And one of those three great powers is a peer competitor.
And we helped create that peer competitor on the foolish belief that if we turned China into a rich country, it would become a liberal democracy and it would become a friend of the United States and it would allow us to run international politics the way we did during unipolarity.
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It's just, but there hasn't, I mean, if you had a field, just pick some other field, structural engineering.
And if you had America's sort of corpus of structural engineers, you know, they also know each other, the eminent ones are friends, and all the bridges they built started to fall down, there would be an immediate reorganization of the field.
You would say, this is just what, you know, you don't know what you're doing.
I don't understand how you could have this many decades of back-to-back foreign policy disasters and not have a wholesale reorganization of like the Brain Trust.
Let me just, let me, I mean, let me just tell you one other story.
Let's go back to the 1990s, talk about NATO expansion.
As I said to you, the Clinton administration made the decision in 94.
One might think that there was overwhelming support for NATO expansion in the foreign policy establishment.
There actually was not.
Bill Perry, who was Clinton's Secretary of Defense, was adamantly opposed to any NATO expansion and thought about resigning as Secretary of Defense over the issue.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs was opposed.
Gene Kirkpatrick, Paul Nitze, George Kennan.
There's a laundry list of prominent people who were opposed to NATO expansion.
Anyway, the decision is made in 94, the first tranches in 1999, and then the opposition disappears.
And as this situation regarding NATO expansion deteriorates over time, especially once the decision is made to bring Ukraine into NATO, you would think that we would begin to do an about-face, that more and more people would begin to appear who make the argument that NATO expansion into Ukraine is a bad idea.
Again, in the 1990s, people were making that argument.
But that doesn't happen at all.
And I become, in many ways, the principal person who argues that we're responsible for the 2014 crisis.
I wrote a piece in foreign affairs after the crisis broke out in February of 2014.
But there are remarkably few people who are questioning whether further pushing down the road to bring Ukraine into NATO makes sense, right?
Well, it will be a devastating blow for us to lose the war in Ukraine.
And when foreign policy elites get desperate, they do reckless things or they talk in reckless ways.
This is why, by the way, the Ukraine war, even once it's settled and becomes a frozen conflict, will be so dangerous.
Because the fact that it is a defeat for the West and that we have been humiliated and that we lost this major war that we were so deeply committed to will give people incentives to try to reverse the tide, to rescue the situation.
And when people are desperate, they sometimes pursue very risky strategies.
So once this war becomes a frozen conflict, we're going to have to worry about it re-escalating.
It seems very easy for a reckless government in Kiev to provoke Moscow, basically.
I mean, you've seen it, sending drone swarms onto air bases or setting the Kremlin on fire, which they did and got no publicity, but they have done that.
It's just, it's this weird asymmetrical arrangement where Ukraine actually has quite a bit of power to stoke a global conflict and incentive to do it, don't they?
Well, I mean, you see this with the Israelis in Iran, right?
In 2024, the Israelis tried to bait us into the war, into a war against Iran on two separate occasions.
And the Biden administration, much to its credit, did not take the bait.
But Donald Trump did take the bait, right?
The Israelis have long had a deep-seated interest in getting us involved against Iran because they understand they can't defeat Iran by themselves and they can do it, they think, with us.
So this is analogous to the situation with regard to Ukraine.
The Ukrainians, as you said, have a deep-seated interest in getting us into the fight.
I'm sure that there are a million factors, but kicking Russia out of SWIFT, just stealing the personal property of the so-called oligarchs, behavior, lawless, crazy behavior like that sends a message to the world that, like, don't keep your wealth in dollars because it can become an instrument of war.
I notice the administration is threatening today that in 12 days we're going to do something with sanctions, then secondary sanctions against China and India if they buy Russian oil.
I don't think secondary, the threat of secondary sanctions is meaningful.
I mean, the economic consequences for the world and for the United States would be disastrous if they actually were put into effect and worked.
I think the Chinese and Indians would just blow them off at this point.
So I don't think that they'll work.
We have no cards to play.
If we had cards to play, Biden would have played those cards.
I mean, one fundamental difference between Biden and Trump is that Biden was fully committed to the war and wanted to do everything he could to make sure the United States stayed in the game and continued to support Ukraine no matter what.
Trump definitely wanted to end the war.
He's been unsuccessful.
He really doesn't know what he's doing.
He doesn't know how to end the war, but he does want to end it.
And the question you really have to ask yourself is, what is he going to put into the pipeline, the Biden pipeline, once the weaponry dries up?
And I don't think that Trump is going to end up giving the Ukrainians a lot more weaponry.
So I think he's going to basically allow the Ukrainians to be defeated on the battlefield.
This is going to be a huge problem for Trump because he's going to be blamed for losing Ukraine.
The problem that Trump runs into is the same problem that Biden ran into with Afghanistan.
Remember, Trump was the one who wisely decided we're getting out of Afghanistan.
But it was Biden who actually took us out of Afghanistan, and that was a disaster.
And he got all sorts of mud spilled on him for taking us out of Afghanistan.
Well, what's going to happen in Ukraine at some point is the Russians are going to win, and Trump is going to get blamed for that.
And I think one of the reasons that Trump is So hesitant on Ukraine is not simply because he's surrounded by advisors who are super hawks on Ukraine and want to hang on to the bitter end.
It's also because Trump understands that when Ukraine loses, it will be seen as having happened on his watch.
It didn't work because Trump would have to accept Russia's three key demands that I spelled out to you at the start of the show.
And those three key demands are unacceptable to almost every person in the American foreign policy establishment and almost every foreign policy elite in Europe.
Trump is an outlier on the whole issue of Ukraine.
He, J.D. Vance, and a handful of other people.
And they're not in a position to bite the bullet and say, we will accept the main Russian demands and go from there.
And by the way, even if they do accept the main Russian demands, the fact is that there will be huge resistance from the foreign policy establishments on both sides of the Atlantic.
I believe that was a smart thing to do and to pursue containment.
He also, Trump, wanted to improve relations with Putin, which I think made eminently good sense.
He couldn't do that in part because of Russia gate, but also because the foreign policy establishment was so committed to NATO expansion.
So he failed on that count.
But the problem is he was surrounded by advisors in that first administration who were all very hawkish on Ukraine and very hawkish about American foreign policy in general, very hawkish about the forever wars.
So what's, I don't understand, since you raised it, what is the connection?
The same people who are telling me we need to fight a regime change war against Iran are the same ones who are hysterical about supporting Ukraine and continuing our war against Russia, the Mark Levins and then the smarter people, but same orientation.
Well, you have a foreign policy establishment, whether you're talking about the Republican side or you're talking about the Democratic side, that is deeply committed to pursuing hawkish foreign policy.
They believe that that's what's good for the United States.
They believe we should spend exceedingly large amounts of money on defense, that we should be willing to use military force in a rather liberal fashion.
They believe that military force can solve all sorts of problems.
They believe that the United States, and this was certainly true during the unipolar moment, can use that military force to spread liberal democracy around the world.
We can spread democracy at the end of a rifle barrel.
This is what the Bush doctrine was all about in the Middle East.
Iraq was just the first stop on the train line, right?
We were going to do Iran, Syria, and eventually everybody would just throw up their hands.
We were going to democratize the entire Middle East, and we were going to use military force to do that.
So we are, in a very important way, addicted to war.
Now, it's important to emphasize that a lot of this has to do with Israel, right?
Because Israel's supporters have a deep-seated interest in making sure that the United States has a remarkably powerful military and is willing to use that military in a rather liberal fashion.
Because they believe that if Israel ever gets into trouble and it needs help from the United States, the ideal situation is to have a U.S. military that's like a cocked gun.
And if you think about the recent war between Israel and Iran, it really wasn't just between Israel and Iran.
It was Israel and the United States against Iran, right?
And the United States had a huge number of military assets in the Middle East, right, that were there in large part to help the Israelis in their war against Iran.
Well, if you think about it, it makes perfectly sense if you're a supporter of Israel to want to make sure that the United States has a large military and that it is willing to use that military and that if need be, it can help Israel if it gets into trouble.
So there's no question that Israel and the United States have sometimes have similar interests and sometimes have different interests.
Let me give you an example of this.
The United States has a vested interest in making sure Iran does not have nuclear weapons.
We're against proliferation.
It's in the American national interest.
It's obviously in Israel's national interest for Iran not to have nuclear weapons.
So two states can have similar interests.
In the case of Israel and the United States, they also happen to have different interests.
And what we have in the United States is a situation where we have this thing called the Israel lobby, which I, of course, have written about with Steve Wald, which goes to great lengths to push the United States to support Israel unconditionally.
In other words, no matter what Israel does, we are supposed to support Israel.
And the lobby is so effective.
It is so powerful.
It is so effective that we basically end up supporting Israel unconditionally.
What that means, Tucker, is in those cases where Israel's interests are not the same as America's interests, we support Israel.
We support Israel's interests, not America's interests, because America.
Because the interests clash in those specific instances.
But can you think of any moment in the last, say, 40 years where there was that clash between non-converging interests where the United States chose its own interests over Israel's interests?
Can you think, conversely, of instances where the U.S. government chose the interests of a foreign power over and against its own interests and its people's interests?
In the case of Israel, you know, we're allied with Israel informally, and they want us to do something that is hurtful to us, does not help our interests at all, but we do it anyway.
Every American president since at least Jimmy Carter has pushed forcefully for creating a Palestinian state.
We have long believed that the best solution to the Palestinian problem, which is the taproot of so many other problems that we face in the Middle East, is to create two states.
So every president has pushed hard, except for maybe Donald Trump, for a two-state solution in the Middle East.
The Israelis have rebuffed us at every turn.
And the end result is we now have a greater Israel, and there's no possibility of a two-state solution.
Because the United States has a vested interest in having peace in the Middle East.
It's not in our interest to have wars in that region.
First of all, it forces us to commit military forces.
It forces us to fight wars.
And that's not in our interest.
And we have long felt from a strategic point of view that what you want to do is make sure you have peace in that region.
You want to remember right before October 7th, Jake Sullivan, who was then the National Security Advisor, was crowing about the fact that we had not seen the Middle East so peaceful in a long period of time.
And he understood full well that this is in our interest.
Well, if you compare the world, you know, on October 6th, 2023, with the world that exists in the Middle East today, we are much worse off today.
Well, if you look at what the definition of a genocide is, right, it's where one country tries to destroy either all or a substantial portion of another group, another ethnic or religious or national group, for the purposes of basically destroying that group identity.
That's what you're talking about here.
I think that that's the definition of genocide.
It's laid out in the 1948 convention.
I think that what the Israelis Are doing fits that description.
And lots of people and organizations agree with me on that point.
It's very important to understand here that just killing large numbers of Palestinians is not necessarily genocide.
I mean, the United States, when it firebombed Japan in World War II, killed many more Japanese than the Israelis have killed Palestinians in Gaza.
There's no question about that.
But no one would ever accuse the United States of executing a genocide against Japan.
The United States was killing large numbers of Japanese civilians.
And by the way, we killed large numbers of German civilians as well.
And if you look at how we treated the Japanese and how we treated the Germans once the war ended, it was very clear that we were not bent on genocide.
This is not to excuse what we did against Japan and Germany.
And I do believe we murdered, I would use the word murdered, large numbers or millions of Japanese and Germans together.
But in the case of what's going on in Gaza, right, what's happening here is that the Israelis are systematically trying to destroy the Palestinians as a national group, right?
They're targeting them as Palestinians, and they're trying to destroy Palestinian national identity in addition to murdering huge numbers of Palestinians.
So West Bank, Gaza, and what we call Green Line Israel.
That's Greater Israel.
Inside Greater Israel, there are about 7.3 million Jews and about 7.3 million Palestinians.
And from the get-go, going back to the early days of Zionism and the views of people like David Ben-Gurion, they believed that you needed a Jewish state that was about 80% Jewish and 20% Palestinian.
In an ideal world, you would get rid of all the Palestinians.
But the least bad alternative is 80-20.
But you actually have a situation in Greater Israel where you have 50-50.
So October 7th happens.
And what the Israelis see is an excellent opportunity for ethnic cleansing.
And they make this clear.
In other words, it's an excellent opportunity to go to war in Gaza and drive the Palestinians out of Gaza and solve that demographic problem that they face.
And by the way, there was another massive ethnic cleansing after the 67 War in the West Bank.
So this is the third attempt at a massive ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
So this is hardly surprising at all.
And in fact, if you go back and read the literature on the creation of Israel, this is all thoroughly documented.
Ethnic cleansing was a subject that the Zionists talked about from the get-go, and they talked about extensively because there was no way they could create a greater Israel without doing massive ethnic cleansing.
You want to remember that when the Zionists come to Israel starting in the late 1800s, early 1900s, there are remarkably few Jews in Palestine.
And those Jews are not Zionists.
The Zionists are the Jews who come from Europe.
And they understand that they're moving into a territory that's filled with Palestinian villages and Palestinian people.
And the question you have to ask yourself is, how can you create a Jewish state on a piece of territory that's filled with Palestinians without doing ethnic cleansing, massive ethnic cleansing?
And the answer is you can't.
So they're talking about and thinking about ethnic cleansing from the get-go.
So the idea that they wouldn't think of what the situation looks like after October 7th is an opportunity to do ethnic cleansing, you know, it belies control.
Absolutely not.
Absolutely not.
And David Ben-Gurion, Vladimir Jabotinsky, all these key Zionist leaders understood that full well.
And they understood that they were going to have to do horrible things to the Palestinians.
They understood that.
And they were explicit in saying that they did not blame the Palestinians one second for resisting what the Jews from Europe were going to do to them.
They fully understood that they were stealing their land.
And they fully understood that it made perfect sense for the Palestinians to resist, which of course they did.
But anyway, just to fast forward to October 7th, what happens after October 7th Is that the Israelis see an excellent opportunity to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians in Gaza?
You have about 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza.
Just to be clear, you have about 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, about 3.2 million in West Bank, and about 1.8 in Greenline Israel.
Okay?
So this is an opportunity to get rid of those Palestinians.
And the way to do it is to turn the IDF, the Israeli military, loose and let them tear the place apart.
And the idea is that that will just drive the Palestinians out.
But the problem that the Israelis face is the Palestinians don't leave.
Both the Egyptians and the Jordanians, which are the two countries that the Israelis would like to drive the Palestinians into, make it unequivocally clear that that's not going to happen.
I don't think it's ever been published in English.
It's just in Yiddish, where he describes what his goals are for a greater Israel.
And it obviously includes Greenline Israel, Gaza, the West Bank.
It includes parts of the East Bank.
It includes parts of southern Syria.
It includes parts of southern Lebanon.
And it includes the Sinai Peninsula.
Just think about that.
That was Ben-Gurion's vision.
And this was a vision that was shared by almost all the early Zionist leaders.
And there are still many people in Israel who are in favor of a greater Israel.
They don't want a tiny Israel.
The Israel that was created in 1948 is a tiny state.
Even with Gaza and the West Bank, it's quite small.
It's a postage stamp-like state, right?
They want more territory, and they believe they have a historical right to that territory.
Israel has never said, these are our final borders.
What are Israel's final borders?
They've never been articulated.
And the reason is the Israelis don't want to say out loud.
The early Zionists did not say out loud what their intentions were.
David Bed-Gurion didn't get up on a soapbox and say, we are going to create a greater Israel, and it's going to include southern Lebanon, southern Syria, the occupied territories, Greenline Israel, the Sinai, and so forth and so on.
It's just a little, I mean, irony isn't powerful enough a word.
I can't think of one.
It's odd that the very same people who are saying we need to consider tactical nukes in order to preserve the territorial integrity of the sovereign nation, Ukraine, because national borders are sacrosanct.
You know, that's our, our sacred norms are violated when those borders are violated, are saying it's totally okay for this one country to like take over other countries.
In other words, whatever Israel does, especially vis-a-vis the Palestinians, the United States backs them to the hilt.
And the fact that they're changing borders, I mean, I look at what they're doing in Lebanon and Syria, and you would think that the United States would have a vested interest in trying to put pressure on the Israelis to stop causing murder and mayhem in Lebanon and in Syria.
The second goal that the Israelis have is they want to make sure that their neighbors are weak.
And that means breaking them apart, if you can, right?
And keeping them broken.
So the Israelis were thrilled that mainly the United States and the Turks broke apart Syria.
One could argue that Syria was even broken before Assad fell.
But the Israelis want Syria to be a fractured state.
They want Lebanon to be a fractured state.
What they want in Iran, you know, we talk about the nuclear program, the nuclear enrichment program, and the argument is sometimes made that the principal goal, the only goal, is to go in and eliminate their nuclear capability.
Because anytime the Egyptians or the Jordanians get uppity about Israel, the United States reminds them, you better behave yourself because we have huge economic leverage over you.
You have to be friendly to Israel.
So Jordan and Egypt never caused the Israelis any problem.
In the Middle East, our policy is profoundly influenced by Israel.
We give, as I said to you before, we have a special relationship with Israel that has no parallel in recorded history.
Just very important to understand that there is no single case in recorded history that comes even close to looking like the relationship that we have with Israel.
Because again, as I said, states sometimes have similar interests, and this includes the United States and Israel, but they also have conflicting interests.
And when a great power like the United States has conflicting interests with another country, it almost always, except in the case of Israel, acts in terms of its own interests, America first.
But when it comes to Israel, it's Israel first.
And if you go to the Middle East and look at our policy there, there's just abundant evidence to support that.
So then the question, I mean, there are so many questions, but the question is why?
Like, what is that?
And I think it's really causing serious problems in the current ruling coalition because the contradiction is too obvious.
It's not America first.
And people can see that because it's so evident.
But what are the causes of it?
Like, why would for the first time, as you said in recorded history, a nation spend, you know, whatever it is, a trillion dollars a year, in effect, to serve the interests of another country?
It's not, you know, the most powerful movements in history are fueled by an idea that it's usually the most powerful or fueled by an idea that it's like true, right?
But I never hear anybody make a detailed case for why the United States benefits from the current arrangement.
Never.
No one, ever.
Nikki Haley came as close as anyone by saying the United States gets a lot more out of the relationship than Israel does, but then never explained how exactly that works.
So it's not a matter of like convincing people, clearly.
I think that in the past, when I was younger, the lobby operated on two levels.
One was the policy level and two was the popular discourse.
And I think in terms of the popular discourse for a long, long time, right?
And this would be well into the 2000s, the Israel lobby, the Israel lobby basically influenced the discourse in ways that made the Israelis look like the good guys.
And it made it look like every time the United States supported Israel, it was because it was in our national interest.
So the discourse was not at odds with what was happening at the policy level.
Now, the situation you described, which I think is a perfect description of the situation that we face today, is that the lobby has lost control of the discourse.
And people now understand that the United States is doing things for Israel that are not in the American national interest.
Furthermore, they see the lobby out in the open engaging in smashmouth politics.
People are now fully aware that there is a lobby out there, that it's trying to control the discourse.
And in fact, it basically does control.
Maybe that's a bit too strong a word, but it's close.
But so you have what you were describing Is the disconnect between the discourse and the policy world that now exists?
But what I'm saying to you is you want to remember that the lobby was immensely successful for a long period of time because the discourse and the policy process looked like they were in sync.
I often think about my own evolution in this regard.
When I grew up as a kid, I was heavily influenced by Leon Uris's book, Exodus, and the subsequent movie with, I think, Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint.
And that, of course, that Exodus story portrayed the Israelis in the most favorable light and the Arabs or Palestinians in the most negative light.
So for much of my life, you know, up until the late 80s, early 90s, I thought the Israelis were without a doubt the good guys up against the bad guys.
And it was really David versus Goliath as well.
And the Israelis were David up against an Arab Goliath.
That was the picture I had in my head.
But then in the late 80s, early 90s, a group of historians in Israel called the New Historians came on the scene.
And the problem is that something else occurred in the late 90s, early 2000s, which fundamentally affected Israel's position, and that's the internet.
Because once you get the internet and once you get social media and the mainstream media is not the sole source of information on these issues, the story about the real creation of Israel and what Israel is doing today is available to the vast majority of people.
But it does seem like so you were describing the two separate tiers, the policy and the discourse about the policy, and that one remains basically the same, but the other has changed just so radically, so radically and so fast that it's gone off in some dark directions that I just want to say on the record, I totally disapprove of.
I don't think you should hate anybody, period, especially groups of people.
It's immoral.
And I mean it.
But that's happened because there's been an avalanche of new information, a lot of which is totally real.
People haven't seen it before and their minds are exploding.
And so public opinion is moving so radically in the other direction.
And your life, I mean, I should say for people who aren't familiar with your background, you wrote a book with Stephen Walt of Harvard.
You're at the University of Chicago.
So both of you are, you know, have tenure or famous in your world.
You're not crazy.
And you write this book in 2007.
And both of you are immediately attacked in like pretty shocking ways, also defended by some of your colleagues, but really maligned for it.
And now, 18 years later, people are saying that Mearsheimer guy, actually, he was kind of right about everything.
So that's a reflection, I think, of the change in public opinion.
But that's not sustainable.
You can't have in a democracy a policy that's 180 degrees from public opinion over time.
That just doesn't work.
So you have to either change the policy or change public opinion.
And no one's even making any attempt at all to change public opinion through good faith argument, through like, hey, I know you think this, but you're wrong.
And here's why.
There's zero, none.
It's shut up, Nazi.
Okay.
And that's not working.
So I really think the only option is to stop the conversation.
Or maybe I'm missing something.
Like censorship is The only option if you want to maintain status quo.
And I mean, this is what happened to me and Steve.
You know, we originally wrote an article and we at one point thought the article would never be published.
After we wrote the article and we went through all sorts of interactions with the Atlantic Monthly that had commissioned the article, we put the article in the back closet and just said...
I mean, what invariably happens in these cases is that down at the lower levels of a journal or a newspaper, people will be interested in somebody writing something on the Israel lobby or writing a piece that's critical of Israel.
But then as it filters up the chain of command and people at the top see it, they kill it.
Oh, that's definitely what happened at the Atlantic Monthly.
They killed it.
And then Steve and I went to Princeton University Press and a handful of other journals and asked if they would be interested in either the article or turning the article into a book.
And in all of those cases, everybody at first exudes enthusiasm.
They think it's a great topic.
Something needs to be written on it, which of course is true.
But then they think about it for a month and you get a call back and they've lost interest.
So Steve and I actually put the articles, I said, in that closet and just said.
No, as I used to like to say, if Adolf Hitler were alive, he would have thrown Steve's wife and his two children in a gas chamber.
I mean, the idea that we're anti-Semites, I mean, this is a laughable argument.
We're both first order phylo-Semites.
I mean, I can't prove that, but it's true, in my humble opinion.
But anyway, we were certainly, you know, at the top of our academic disciplines and highly respected, which is not to say people didn't disagree with what we wrote.
How ashamed was he when he, because I'm not going to name him, I know the editor.
This is a pretty well-known editor who's just been in magazine journalism for decades and, you know, has a high regard for himself and good reputation and all that stuff.
And he's told from somebody else who's more powerful than he is, you can't do this.
And so what we did was we put it in the back closet.
And I remember Steve and I had a conversation, and I think Steve said to me, this is why we have tenure, so that you can spend two years of your life writing something that never gets published, and you're not punished in terms of promotion to tenure, right?
But anyway, what then happened is that somebody inside the Atlantic, who was actually involved in the original commissioning of the article, gave a copy to a very prominent academic who had contacts, close contacts at the London Review of Books.
In other words, from a geopolitical point of view, right?
Because Israel and the United States sometime have different interests, it makes no sense for us to support Israel unconditionally.
We should support Israel when its interests reflect our interests, but otherwise not.
But that's not the case.
So that's another way of saying what we're doing is not in our strategic interest.
Okay.
Third part is it's not in our moral interest, because when you look at what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians, this violates basic American precepts, liberal precepts.
So from a moral point of view, what's happening in Israel doesn't make sense.
So then the fourth part deals with the question of why we do this.
Fair question.
If we don't do it for strategic reasons, we don't do it for moral reasons, why do we do it?
Yeah, it's very important to emphasize it's a loose coalition of individuals and organizations like APAC, the Anti-Defamation League, and so forth and so on, that work overtime to support Israel.
Loosely coordinated.
I think your description was right on the money.
Very important to understand, it is not a Jewish lobby, and it is not a Jewish lobby because many Jews don't care much about Israel and many Jews are opposed to what Israel or the Israel lobby is doing.
It is just a little bit odd that you could on Christian grounds support the bombing of a Christian church.
I mean, there are lots of theological differences between sex and Christianity, but if you're getting to the point like where Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, is, where you think Jesus is commanding you to support the murder of Christians, you don't need to be like a theologian to think maybe I've gone off course.
Now that things that, you know, everyone was afraid to talk about any of this to the extent that people understood it because they don't want to be called names.
And because those names are, it's horrible to be called that.
And it's almost sometimes it's true, but for most people, it's not true at all.
They're not hateful.
That's not why they have these views.
So once those slurs lose their power, as I think they quickly are, in the same way the word racist lost its power from overuse, like, where are we?
So the problem is that inside of American society, you're moving towards a situation where increasing numbers of people in the body politic are critical of Israel, extremely critical of Israel, because older people are dying off and those younger people are turning into older people.
So the body populace in the United States is going to be more critical of Israel over time, not less critical.
At the same time, Israel continues to behave that way.
And the question is, how long can we go on with the lobby operating out in the open and engaging in smash mouth politics?
And I attacking Americans in the most vicious way who have no animus toward anyone, but just want to help their own country, they're somehow criminals.
Do you think it's weird that in 2025 we can measure everything from your heart rate to sunspots that we don't know how many people were killed in Russia, Ukraine, or Palestine?
And with regard to the case of Israel-Palestine, the real problem here is that so many people are buried.
They're missing.
There's a study that somebody did recently, it was a legitimate study, that said that they believe, or the study concludes, that there are about 400,000 missing people in Israel.
I'm just saying that there are obviously lots of missing people, right?
Well, if you look at what the Israelis have done in Israel, excuse me, what the Israelis have done in Gaza, I wouldn't be surprised if the number is, you know, 400,000 dead.
But who knows?
But I think, you know, 60,000, roughly 60,000 is the number that lots of people use on dead.
Well, the news reports say that the Israelis and the Americans are talking to the Libyans and the Ethiopians and the Indonesians about accepting the Palestinians, or at least a substantial portion of that, let's say, 2 million that are left.
But if they actually tried that, I mean, that's so grotesque that you'd think, I mean, wouldn't the world just blow up if they tried to do that?
Move hundreds of thousands of people against their will from one, from their land, which they've been on for thousands of years into some foreign country and just like, that's cool.
You know, just to go back a bit, when the war starts on October 7th and then the fighting goes on into 2024, the Israeli military is asking Netanyahu to tell them what the final political plan is.
In other words, once the war ends, what's the plan for dealing with the Palestinians?
And Netanyahu refuses to give the military a plan.
I also think it has a terribly corrupting influence on your society at large.
I think once this war comes to a conclusion, hopefully that will be sooner rather than later, and the Israelis take stock of what they have done, this is going to have a deeply corrosive effect.
Well, yeah, because I mean, the things that are going on to Jewish Israelis at the hands of their own government right now are I'm not an expert on Israel, but I've been multiple times and I've always really loved it.
I mean, it's such an amazing place.
But it was liberal in a fundamental way.
That's why I always liked it.
I mean, not liberal like Democratic Party liberal, but just like civil liberties liberal.
The fact is that he is not unrepresentative of the largest society.
There are surely people on, let's use the word left for lack of a better term, there are certainly people on the left who oppose what he's doing and would be more amenable to a political solution.
But their numbers are small and dwindling.
And I think the overwhelming majority of Israelis support Nenyahu.
That's why he's still in office, despite the fact he was responsible for what happened on October 7th.
The buck is supposed to stop at his desk, but he's not been held accountable because the Israelis want him in charge.
So it's not like, you know, he's the odd man out here.
Furthermore, if you look at the political spectrum in Israel, there are many people who are to the right of him who are growing in political importance.
When you and I were young, people like Smotrich and Ben Gavir, right, who are far to the right of Netanyahu, you know.
Well, there weren't that many of them, or at least that I was, I mean, again, I'm not an expert, I don't speak Hebrew, but I mean, I've, you know, been around it a lot.
And I felt like, again, it was a pretty liberal European type society.
And my point to you is it's only going to get worse.
So the argument that Netanyahu is the problem, it's an argument that many liberal Jews here in the United States like to make.
If only we can get rid of Netanyahu, our troubles will go away and we'll get some sort of moderate leadership and work out a modus vivendi with the United States.
So there's the second temple was obviously built on the mount in Jerusalem.
It was knocked down by the Romans in AD 70, and a few hundred years later, the Muslims built the third holiest site in Islam, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, there, and beneath it is the foundation of the temple.
That's the western wall.
So that's the geography.
But there is this push to rebuild the third temple, but there's a mosque on the site.
Well, the Israelis are very powerful vis-a-vis the Palestinian population.
And they would, I guess, go to great lengths to suppress any insurrection.
And if they had to kill lots of people, they'd kill lots of people.
Look at what they're doing in Gaza.
The Israelis are incredibly ruthless.
There's just no question about that.
And they believe that Palestinians are subhumans, two-legged animals, grasshoppers.
They use those kind of words.
And you take what they've been doing in Gaza.
It's easy to imagine them doing horrible things to the Palestinians if they were to rise up over what's happening with regard to the Temple Mount.
And in terms of the Jordanians or the Egyptians or the Saudis, are they going to do anything?
I doubt it.
I mean, they'll make a lot of noise verbally, but in terms of actually doing anything to Israel, the Israelis basically calculate in all these instances that what they can do is horrible things.
And then with the passage of time, people will forget.
And not only will they forget, but we'll go to great lengths to help them forget.
You know, we'll rewrite the history.
That's the idea.
So I think that your assessment of what we should expect with the Temple Mount is probably correct.
I mean, this is one of the problems that many Western Jews worry about.
You know, payback is going to come, not in the form of attacks on Israel, but in the form of attacks on Western Jews in places like the United States or Europe.
And I think that is a real possibility.
Let's hope it doesn't happen.
But the number of people who are in the Arab and Islamic world who are absolutely enraged by what is going on in Gaza is not to be underestimated.
And they have a second strike capability, as you point out.
You know, I was talking about building armor divisions.
That's foolish.
They're not going to build armor divisions, but there are other ways to deal with this.
Again, you want to go back to 9-11.
This gets back to the whole question whether Israel is a strategic liability or a strategic asset.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is the principal planner of 9-11, now in Guantanamo, and Osama bin Laden both explicitly said that their principal reason for attacking the United States on 9-11 was the United States' support of Israel's policies against the Palestinians.
You just want to think about that.
The conventional wisdom in the United States is that Israel had nothing to do with 9-11, and these Muslims attacked us because they hate who we are.
And it does make everybody into a wacko thinking about it.
I mean, if you want to end so-called conspiracy theories, tell the truth.
And then no one has to theorize, would be my view.
So you just, you have a piece out.
It's my last question to you.
Thank you for spending all this time.
You have a piece out that describes what you believe the world will look like in 50 years.
And I should say, just to toot your horn, since you're not going to do it, that you've been right on some of the big, big, big questions and you've stood essentially alone in your field in your predictions and have been vindicated on them, not just about the power of foreign lobbies, but about China and about NATO.
And so I do think your opinion on this matters.
Can you just give us a sense of 10 years hence, what's America's place in the world?
Well, I think if you look out 10 years, even if you were to look out 20 or 30 years, I think in all likelihood, the system, the international system will continue to be dominated by three countries, the United States, China, and Russia.
And I think the United States and China will remain the two most powerful countries on the planet.
And the U.S.-China competition over the next 10 years and even beyond that will influence international politics more than any other relationship.
I think that once you begin to project out past 10, 20 years, the United States's position vis-a-vis China, I think, will improve for demographic reasons.
I think the Chinese population is going to drop off at a much more rapid rate than the American population.
And moreover, the Americans can rely on immigration to rectify the problem.
So if you look at population, which is one of the two building blocks, population size, one of the two building blocks of military power, the other is wealth.
The United States, looking out 20, 30, 40 years, looks like it's in quite good shape, right?
Now, what's happened since 2017, and really even before that, is that with the rise of China, the United States lost its position as the unipole, as the clearly dominant power in the international system.
And we now have a peer competitor.
So when people talk about American decline, they're correct that we have had decline, let's say, since 2017, when China became a great power, although it started before that.
So you want to remember the two main building blocks of military power are wealth and population size.
You take that wealth, you take that population size, and that's what allows you to build a powerful military.
That affects your position in the balance of power.
And remember when I talked about engagement, we made China rich.
We made China wealthy.
So China always had that huge population.
And as a result of engagement during the unipolar moment from roughly, let's say, 1992 to 2017, we helped China get rich.
And that rich, that wealth, coupled with that population side, China becomes a great power.
Okay.
So we are losing relative power over that entire time period.
And that's when China then becomes a great power.
And we now have a competition where the United States is still more powerful than China overall.
But the Chinese are closing the gap.
So we're still losing relative power to the Chinese.
And I would bet over the next 10 years, we will lose relative power.
Not a substantial amount, but some.
But still, the United States will probably remain 10 years from now, the most powerful state in the system.
And the Chinese will be right behind us.
The Russians will remain the weakest of those three great powers.
But if you project out, you know, 30, 40 years, that's when I think the United States will widen the gap with China, because population-wise, the Chinese population as a result of the one-child policy will decline significantly.
And our population size without immigration will not decline as significantly as the Chinese population will.
But we also have immigration as our ace in the whole.
So we can bring in immigrants as we have done in the past, and we will remain in quite good shape.
So I think the long-term future for the United States, in terms of raw power, looks quite good.
That's not to say our policies will be wise, because as you and I know, the United States has used that massive power that it's had in the past in oftentimes foolish ways.
In the international system, in international politics, because there's no higher authority that can protect you if you get into trouble, it's very important to be powerful, right?
You can't dial 911 in the international system and have someone come and rescue you.
And in a world where another state might be powerful and might attack you, it's very important to be the most powerful state in the system.
And the last thing you want to do is be weak.
You want to remember the Chinese refer to the period from the late 1840s to the late 1940s as the century of national humiliation.
And remember, we talked earlier in the show about NATO expansion.
We talked about why we continued to push and push and push, even though the Russians said it was unacceptable.
And I said to you, we were going to shove it down their throat.
And why were we going to shove it down their throat?
Because we thought they were weak.
You never want to be weak.
You want to be powerful.
The problem with making that argument today, for me to make that argument to you and to many people I know, is that we all understand that the United States has been incredibly powerful and it's used that power in foolish ways, in ways that don't make us happy.
And therefore, the idea of having all this power leads us to think or leads many people to think that we'll use that power foolishly.
And I fully understand that.
But my argument is you still want to be powerful just because it's the best way to survive in the international system.
It's the way to maximize your security.
But hopefully you'll use that power smartly.
Although, given America's performance in recent decades, there's not a lot of cause for hope.
I don't think it's likely in the foreseeable future.
The problem is, it's an incredibly difficult military operation for the Chinese because it involves an amphibious assault.
They have to go across the Taiwan Strait, which is a large body of water.
And amphibious assaults are very difficult.
And in all likelihood, the Americans will come to the aid of the Taiwanese.
The other thing is the Taiwan, I mean, the Chinese, unlike the Americans, don't fight wars all the time.
The last time China fought a war was in 1979.
Just think about that, 1979 in Vietnam.
Yeah.
They were foolish enough to follow in our footsteps.
And we were fool enough to follow in the French footsteps and go in there.
So they went in in 1979 and got whacked, but they've not fought a war since then.
So they don't have a highly trained military that has lots of combat experience that would be capable of launching one of the most difficult military operations imaginable, which is an amphibious assault across the Taiwan Strait into the face of resistance from not only the Taiwanese, but the Americans.
So I think that will keep a lid on things for the foreseeable future.
I don't think the Chinese will attack.
I think that what they'll wait for is the right moment, hope that the world changes in ways that makes it feasible for them to do it.
So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing this show.
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