Professor John Mearsheimer identifies three global crises: the Gaza war, the Ukraine-Russia conflict, and US-China competition. He argues NATO expansion forced Putin's preventive war in February 2022, rejecting imperialist narratives while asserting Ukraine will likely lose more territory due to inferior manpower and artillery. Regarding East Asia, he insists the US must contain China's regional hegemony, noting US Taiwan defense remains clear regardless of Ukraine's outcome. On Gaza, Mearsheimer expresses moral concerns over Israel's proportionality and destruction, clarifying his previous genocide allegations do not endorse leveling Gaza as necessary against a militarily weak Hamas lacking Iranian firepower. He supports Julian Assange's freedom and offers no definitive verdict on whether Biden or Trump would ensure global safety. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Why NATO Provoked Putin00:14:41
Well John Mearsheimer is one of the world's big thinkers, a scholar of war, power and politics in the global arena.
He's an essential and influential voice of clarity in a pretty chaotic world.
But he's controversial too, blaming the West for Putin's invasion of Ukraine and arguing that Hamas is not an existential threat to Israel.
It was NATO expansion that forced Putin to launch a preventive war.
I mean it is if you take your interpretation of Putin's motivation.
There is no evidence to support your view.
How many more things does he have to do before the blinkers come off of it?
The truth is I don't think it matters anyway.
In fact, I would argue Ukraine has already lost.
You've been criticized for this.
You're Putin's useful idiot.
But I think most of what Putin said was genuine.
I think when I heard him tell that cock and ball story about, I thought, I don't believe a word this guy says.
And I'm surprised somebody as eminent as you does, because you said Israel is committing genocide with genocidal intent.
You want to be very careful here.
One-on-one, Professor John Mearsheimer, uncensored.
Professor, great to have you on our censored.
I'm pleased to be here.
Just explain to me the state of the world right now.
How worried should we be?
Well, I think we should be very worried.
There are three main areas of the world to be concerned about.
The two most obvious areas are one, the Middle East, where we have this raging war between the Israelis and the Palestinians in Gaza that threatens to escalate.
Furthermore, we have an ongoing war in Ukraine involving Ukraine and Russia that could possibly bring the Western powers in and present us with a great power war.
And then third, an area that one could argue is the most dangerous area in the world, especially from the American point of view, is East Asia, where you have an intense competition set in between the United States and China.
So we have three big regions of the world where there is a lot of trouble or a lot of potential for trouble.
I want to ask you about two of your positions, and correct me if they're not your positions, but I think I'm right in saying that you draw a distinction between the merits of Russia's invasion of Ukraine as opposed to China's potential invasion and takeover of Taiwan.
In the case of Taiwan, you think America should intervene, but in the case of Ukraine, you don't think America should be getting involved.
What is the ideological difference here for those who are watching from the sidelines and thinking, well, hang on, aren't they pretty similar scenarios?
Piers, it's not so much an ideological argument that I have regarding the two wars it has, or two crises.
It has more to do with my realist worldview.
I think in the case of Ukraine, it was NATO expansion eastward and the attempt to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia's borders that forced Putin to launch a preventive war in February of 2022.
I don't think that Putin was an imperialist and was bent on conquering all of Ukraine and then going into Eastern Europe.
I think he was reacting mainly to NATO expansion.
I think with regard to East Asia, it's a very different story.
China is a peer competitor of the United States.
And from China's point of view, it makes eminently good sense to try to dominate East Asia or Asia more generally, the way the United States dominates the Western Hemisphere.
And in the American case, we have a vested interest in making sure that China does not dominate Asia.
We're going to go to great lengths to contain China the same way we attempted to contain the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
So you have an old-fashioned security competition in East Asia involving one state pursuing regional hegemony and another state trying to prevent that.
And that's a fundamentally different situation than the one you see in Ukraine.
I mean, it is if you take your interpretation of Putin's motivation.
I mean, I would take issue with that because I think Putin is a former KGB guy who never thought the Soviet Union should be broken up.
He would love to restore it as much as he could.
He sees himself as a kind of modern-day czar.
I think he has an extraordinary disregard for human life.
I think he's become a sort of mafia boss running a gangster country.
And I think he just took his opportunity to illegally invade a sovereign democratic country, whether he likes it or not.
That's what Ukraine is.
And if the West allows him to get away with this, I would not be remotely confident that he would not want to then stomp his way through into other countries.
Why are you confident he wouldn't want to do that?
Well, you raise a lot of different issues.
And let's first go to the whole subject of what his motivation was for invading Ukraine.
My argument, as I said, was that he was prompted by NATO expansion.
This was a preventive war to stop Ukraine from joining NATO.
Your argument is that he's basically an imperialist, that he's bent on conquering all of Ukraine.
And then when he's finished conquering Ukraine, what he's going to do is move into Eastern Europe.
And he's going to, if not restore something that looks like the Soviet Union, he's going to create a greater Russia coupled to a Russian empire.
I think that's your view, which is, of course, fundamentally different than mine.
My argument is that there is no evidence to support your view.
I do not think you can point to anything that Putin said or anything that Putin wrote that indicated that he was interested in conquering all of Ukraine.
Why would you believe it?
With respect, though, Professor, why would you believe Vladimir Putin if he told you what the weather was?
I mean, the guy is a serial liar.
I judge people by their actions.
All I'm seeing is a Russian dictator illegally invading a sovereign democratic country and seizing large chunks of it, causing absolute mayhem.
And I see, to my surprise, a lot of American commentators, particularly on the conservative side, who seem fairly relaxed about letting Putin keep the land he's stolen.
And that would never have happened in conservative circles 30 years ago.
I'm kind of mystified why you would allow Putin to win.
Well, allowing Putin to win, let's just put that aside for a second.
The point is that I think there is no evidence to support your view that he was an imperialist.
I don't think you or anyone else can point to evidence that he said he was interested in making Ukraine part of a greater Russian.
Well, he's on the record as saying he's interested in...
Well, hang on.
He's on the record as saying he thinks the breakup of the Soviet Union was a mistake.
Right.
And he says that anybody who is interested in trying to recreate the Soviet Union doesn't have a brain in their head.
He's made it perfectly clear that he's not trying to recreate the Soviet Union, even though he readily admits that he misses it.
Well, he invaded Georgia.
He seized Crimea.
He's now invaded Ukraine.
How many more things does he have to do before the blinkers come off a bit, if you don't mind me being so impertinent?
No, but the question is, Piers, why did he invade Georgia, right?
Why is he at war with Ukraine?
And it all goes back to the April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, where NATO said that both Georgia and Ukraine would become a part of NATO.
And unsurprisingly, a few months later in August of 2008, the Georgia-Russia war broke out, and it was over this very issue.
And in 2014, a major crisis broke out over Ukraine.
And it was over this issue of NATO expansion and the efforts to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia's borders.
Putin made it clear in April 2008.
And by the way, Putin was at the Bucharest summit that this was an existential threat to Russia.
And he said he would go to great lengths to prevent Ukraine from becoming part of NATO.
And that's precisely what's happened.
Right, but the other way of looking at it is that he has behaved in exactly the way that cynics like me predicted he would behave.
And that that is actually the behavior of not somebody fearing NATO encroachment, but somebody who wants to just seize territory.
I would note to you that I argued in 1993 that Ukraine should keep its nuclear weapons because there was a serious possibility Russia might invade Ukraine.
And that was a catastrophic error to tell Ukraine to give them up.
That's correct.
And I argued in 2014 in a famous article in Foreign Affairs that if we continue to pursue bringing Ukraine into NATO, the end result would be big trouble.
I was interested both in 1993 and in 2014 in making sure that Russia did not invade Ukraine and Ukraine did not get wrecked.
It was the West.
It was the Western foreign policy establishment and the mainstream media that thought that it didn't matter what Putin said because we could shove NATO expansion into Ukraine down his throat.
And that was a giant mistake on the part of the West.
And the end result is that Putin responded and he responded by invading Ukraine in 2022.
And we now have this disastrous war.
Yeah, but I would argue you're being, well, you're putting a lot of good faith into Putin and taking him at his word.
I would argue that what Putin has done in the last few years illustrates exactly why it was the correct decision to try and move countries like Ukraine into NATO, because they were always going to get attacked and invaded by Putin if he thought he could get away with it.
And what concerns me now is I think he is going to get away with it, because I can see the American support, which is so absolutely crucial to Ukraine being able to hold Russia off or even to prevail, is disappearing because the conservative right in America is putting huge pressure to stop any funding going to Ukraine, which again, I think, is a real sea change in the conservative right view of people like Vladimir Putin.
I think there's no question that it's quite surprising what's happened in terms of Republican support for Ukraine.
I did not think this would happen.
But the truth is, I don't think it matters anyway.
I think that whether or not we had Western support, whether or not we gave Ukraine the $60 billion wouldn't matter.
And in the end, Ukraine would lose.
In fact, I would argue Ukraine has already lost.
And the argument I would make is Ukraine has now lost 20 plus percent of its territory.
And we know from the counteroffense of last year that there's no way that Ukraine is going to take back that territory.
So that territory is lost.
The question is, what does the war look like going forward?
My argument is that moving forward, Ukraine is going to lose more territory.
More people are going to die.
And the principal reason this is the case is that this is a war of attrition.
And in a war of attrition, the balance of manpower, the balance of artillery, and the balance of air power all matter greatly.
And if you look at all three of those balances, they are decisively.
decisively against Ukraine right now, and they only get worse with the passage of time.
Just take artillery.
The truth is, if Ukraine had kept its nuclear weapons, I don't think Putin would have done this.
And secondly, if Ukraine had been fast-tracked into NATO, I don't think Putin would have done this.
He would not have attacked a NATO country, knowing that there is that agreement that if you attack one of them, they all attack you back.
So in a way, you could, it's chicken and the egg, isn't it?
It's who you believe.
You have a, you know, you seem a firm conviction that we should take Vladimir Putin at his word.
You've been criticized for this.
You've been, listen, you have a lot of supporters.
You're extremely eminent in your field.
I don't remotely suggest otherwise.
But you've had people like the journalist and Pulitzer Prize winning historian Anne Applebaum, who's accused you of being Putin's useful idiot, her quote, not mine.
I mean, how do you respond to people that see you like that?
As I often say when I was a little boy, my mother taught me, when you can't beat people with facts and logic, what you do is you smear them.
You engage in name-calling.
And Anne Applebaum is famous for that.
She is unable to beat me with facts and logic, so she calls me Putin's puppet.
I don't take these arguments seriously.
The question is, what do the facts say?
And if you look at the facts, it's quite clear that Putin was not bent on conquering all of Ukraine.
I would point out to you, Piers, that shortly after the war started, as you know, it started in February of 2022 and almost exactly two years ago, shortly after the war started, Putin and the Ukrainians were negotiating a deal to end the war.
And that deal did not include Putin conquering all of Ukraine.
All Putin wanted to do, as is clear from the historical record, is make sure that you got a neutral Ukraine, which meant that Ukraine would not be part of NATO.
What happened immediately after the war started in Istanbul is clear evidence, in my opinion, that Putin was not bent on conquering all of Ukraine.
He just wanted to make sure it did not become part of the Western Alliance.
The Neutral Ukraine Strategy00:12:02
I mean, how sure are you?
I watched Putin's interview with Tucker Carlson the other day, and he talked about this and blamed Boris Johnson for scuppering the peace deal, telling Zelensky not to do any deal with Putin.
But I watched Putin, and I saw somebody who's, for example, his half-hour rambling answer to Tucker Carlson's first question, giving his version of the history, was so completely skewed to one way of thinking, to Russia's way of thinking.
And the rest of his general demeanor in that interview suggested to me a narcissist, a quite delusional guy, a pretty nasty piece of work, certainly not somebody that I would instinctively want to trust.
Did you watch the interview and did you feel comfortable about absolutely trusting what Putin says?
Look, I watched the interview and I have read the interview a couple times, the transcript.
I don't absolutely trust anybody, and I fully understand that all of the players in this conflict, just like all the players in the conflict in the Middle East, have a vested interest in skewing the truth when it suits their interests.
But I think most of what Putin said was genuine.
I don't think he was lying.
You can disagree with this.
Well, let me pick you up on one point which seems very relevant to our debate about this, which is that he effectively said in his rambling revisionism that Poland started World War II by not cooperating with Hitler, leaving Hitler with no choice but to invade Poland.
That sounds remarkably similar to what Putin is saying about the reason to go to war in Ukraine.
And yet we know that what he said about Poland is completely untrue.
I agree with you about his comments regarding the origins of World War II.
It was the one place in his commentary and when I read the transcripts that sort of jumped out at me, I think his explanation of how Poland effectively costs.
Well, it was complete nonsense and it was designed to protect the dictator, in that case, Adolf Hitler, from legitimate criticism of illegally invading Poland.
Putin in his head just flipped it around and said, no, It was all Poland's fault because they didn't cooperate with Hitler.
Just as he says now, it's all Ukraine's fault because they didn't do what I wanted them to do.
And I see a parallel there, which is not conducive to me taking Putin at his word.
Look, I don't want to get into the business of comparing Putin to Hitler.
And I completely agree with you that Putin misrepresented the origins of World War II in Europe.
So there's no dispute there.
But going back to Ukraine, which is the issue on the table, there's no question that he insisted that Ukraine not become a part of NATO.
He viewed that as an existential threat, as did all his lieutenants.
It's just a Russian version of the Monroe Doctrine.
Here in the United States, we do not allow distant great powers to come into our backyard.
And Putin was making a similar argument.
And we decided that we could shove NATO expansion down his throat.
And we failed.
It's a pretty straightforward story, in my opinion.
Well, of course, if we'd succeeded faster in bringing Ukraine into NATO, then we would have stopped Putin attacking Ukraine because they would have been part of NATO.
In the same way that if we hadn't taken the nuclear weapons away or persuaded them to give them up, I think he wouldn't have done it either.
I think you're right that if Ukraine had been in NATO, that Putin would not have attacked NATO.
Right.
So the real thing.
It seems to me the real failure was we didn't.
We didn't do it fast enough.
Well, we didn't do it fast enough to justify Ukraine's membership because Putin managed to attack them before they became a member.
And they're becoming a member precisely to stop him attacking them.
And you agree that if they were a member of NATO, he wouldn't have attacked them.
So again, it comes back to chicken and the egg.
And look, we're going to disagree about this.
It's an interesting debate.
And I know from talking to people I know in Russia that this is the belief in Russia.
They believe in Putin's version of events.
I just think when I heard him tell that cock and bull story about Poland being responsible for the start of World War II, I thought, I don't believe a word this guy says.
And I'm surprised somebody as eminent as you does.
You know, I would point out to you that Jens Stoltenberg, who is the head of NATO, reiterated my argument this past Saturday in Kyiv, and he has made my argument eloquently before.
Stoltenberg, again, who is the head of NATO, argues that the war was largely a result of NATO expansion and that Putin was bent on preventing Ukraine from joining NATO.
So you want to understand that there are important people in the foreign policy establishment out there who agree with my line of argument.
Well, I also understand that Hungary only today, the parliament in Hungary has approved Sweden's bid to join NATO.
That's the last hurdle for them to become the 32nd member.
Finland also, of course, is heading that way.
So NATO is expanding, whether Vladimir Putin likes it or not.
And the reason these countries want to be in NATO is precisely to protect themselves from Vladimir Putin or his ilk attacking them.
I don't dispute that, but Ukraine in NATO or Georgia in Ukraine, or Georgia in NATO, or Belarus in NATO are a very different matter because of geographical location.
I mean, Ukraine matters enormously to the Russians for geostrategic reasons, and Sweden doesn't.
And therefore, Putin is certainly willing to allow Sweden to come in NATO, into NATO, if he can prevent Ukraine from coming into NATO.
How does this war end in Ukraine, do you think?
I think what you're going to get is an ugly victory.
I think the Russians will end up conquering another four oblasts in eastern Ukraine, in addition to the four oblasts they now control.
I think they'll end up with about 40% of pre-war Ukraine under their control.
In fact, they'll annex that territory.
And I think that you will be left with a dysfunctional rump state in the form of Ukraine.
And I think that Rum state will not end up joining NATO.
Do you accept that if Putin is allowed to achieve that, taking 40% of this sovereign democratic country, as I keep saying, that that will likely speed up China, a big ally of Russia, will likely speed up China's inclination to take Taiwan, which it wouldn't even have to do with an invasion.
It could just surround Taiwan and take it that way.
But do you accept that the consequence of allowing Vladimir Putin to be seen to be successful is that it's likely to encourage China sooner rather than later to take Taiwan?
No, I don't think what happens in Ukraine will have much effect on Chinese behavior in East Asia to include Taiwan, the South China Sea, and the East China Sea.
But just to stick to Taiwan, I think the Chinese understand full well that we will defend Taiwan, that they're not going to take Taiwan back.
I think we've made it clear to them that Taiwan is of great strategic importance to the United States, and we will fight and die to keep Taiwan on our side of the ledger.
President Biden has said this four separate times, I would note.
And I have talked to Chinese policymakers and Chinese scholars over time who all fully understand that the United States would defend Taiwan.
And I think it's so important to us strategically not to let China take Taiwan that the Chinese have no doubts about the fact that we would respond regardless of what happens in Ukraine.
Are you comfortable and confident that Donald Trump would share that view?
I'm confident that Donald Trump would share that view.
I mean, first of all, the Republican Party is filled with China hawks.
There's no question, as you pointed out earlier in the show, that the Republican Party or large chunks of the Republican Party have lost interest in supporting Ukraine.
But some of those people argue that supporting Ukraine is a bad idea because we're taking our eye off the real threat, which is China.
So I think the Republican Party in general is primed to defend Taiwan.
And I think most of Trump's advisors who I know who deal with the China threat are fully committed to defending Taiwan.
So I would think that if President Trump or if we get another term with President Trump, that he would defend Taiwan.
The problem I see it is if you're China, if you're President Xi, you've seen America pull out of Afghanistan overnight in the most appalling, catastrophic manner, which had immediate, terrible consequences, not least for millions of Afghanistan's women who were sent straight back to the medieval dark ages with the Taliban.
But also the betrayal of so many people that worked alongside American and British forces in Afghanistan who were left behind and the people who died on that terrible day.
They've seen that happen.
They've seen that the conservative right in America increasingly has no stomach for a prolonged fight in Ukraine, even though it's only been going two years, which in terms of wars, historically is not that long a time, that they've already lost their resolve to continue helping Ukraine beat Putin there.
And I'm not sure that Xi wouldn't conclude, as I would if I were him, that actually America wouldn't go to war if they took Taiwan, that they would threaten to, but that they wouldn't actually want to have a true World War III over Taiwan.
When I was young, I was in the American military from 1965 to 1975, which was coterminous with the Vietnam War.
And when we lost in Vietnam, there were a number of people who argued that our humiliating defeat would embolden the Soviet Union in Europe, and they would think about attacking NATO and defeating NATO.
That did not happen.
And all the evidence is that the Soviets understood that Vietnam was not of great strategic importance to the United States, but Western Europe was of enormous strategic importance to the United States, and we would fight and die to defend Western Europe.
So our defeat in Vietnam didn't embolden the Soviets in any way.
And I think the same logic applies here.
We fought for 20 years in Afghanistan.
We realized finally that we couldn't win and we got out.
But that doesn't mean we wouldn't fight and die in East Asia to prevent China from taking Taiwan.
China is a serious threat to the United States.
It is a peer competitor.
Afghanistan was not a peer competitor.
And as I said before, I think the Chinese have no doubt that the last thing they want to do is pick a fight with the United States, regardless of what happened in Afghanistan and regardless of what the outcome is in Ukraine.
Hamas as an Existential Threat00:13:17
Let's move to Israel-Hamas, the war obviously in the Middle East.
I've carried out many, many debates in this.
And I've repeatedly made the point that I've personally felt quite a moral quandary, not about Israel's right to defend itself, but the proportionality of its response.
And like most people, I would say now, outside of Israel, I have serious concerns about what is going on in Gaza, the absolute wholesale destruction of the north, the same heading now to the south, the fact that in a population of 2 million with a million people under 18, you have just a mass slaughter of innocent children with no sign of abating.
And the fact that the end game seems so vague and not thought through that Israel seems to think it can have some form of occupation indefinitely after this until they are comfortable about how Palestinians are led.
And that, of course, is the catalyst for the grievances in the first place, which is Palestinians feeling, well, we should have our own state.
We shouldn't be controlled by Israel.
Nor do I think the mass slaughter of children will do anything other than lead to a new radicalization of the people who lost those children and wanting them to hate Israel even more than they have done already.
So for all sorts of reasons, I look at it now and think this is just a massive mess.
And I think morally, Israel's losing the high moral ground it had in the immediate aftermath of October 7th.
It's very hard to disagree with anything you said.
I mean, this is a tragedy of great proportions.
It's just horrible what's happening.
And I don't know what to say in response to what you said.
I mean, where I would question what you've said before about this is you said Israel is committing genocide with genocidal intent.
The argument that comes back from Israel is we've been accused of being genocidal for decades, and yet in that time the population in Gaza has massively increased, which suggests we're not very good at genocide because it is about the eradication of a people.
And that secondly, in relation to this, if you have a populace that is hiding 35,000 terrorists or they are deliberately hiding themselves amongst the civilian population, there is simply no other way to get Hamas out and to kill the terrorists than the way they are prosecuting this war.
So they would say that it's not genocide because if it was genocide, they would just drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza and kill everyone.
Well, you want to be very careful here because you're coming close to making the argument that because it's so difficult to get Hamas, Israel would be justified in leveling Gaza and killing virtually the entire population.
No, no, I don't think that.
I think that I'm giving their argument is that.
I'm not saying I endorse that argument.
And I've already expressed that I have serious concerns about what is happening, mainly because the end game, I don't think, has been remotely thought through.
So no, I'm not endorsing that.
But that is the argument Israeli after Israeli says to me on this program.
Well, I think there's no debate between you and me on whether Israel has a right to defend itself.
I mean, I think everybody I know believes that Israel had a right to respond to the Hamas attacks.
And I think, in my opinion, Israel had a right, or certainly it was appropriate, to go after Hamas, given what Hamas did.
The question is, what about the idea of launching a punishment campaign against the civilian population in addition to going after Hamas?
What the Israelis are doing is they are inflicting massive damage on the civilian population.
They've killed huge numbers of civilians.
They've destroyed much of the infrastructure.
They've desecrated cemeteries.
They've destroyed hospitals.
They've destroyed mosques.
And they've gone to great lengths to prevent food and medicine and water and fuel from coming into the Gaza Strip.
And this is having and going to have disastrous consequences.
This is much more than just going after Hamas.
This is going after the entire population.
And this is what led to the South Africans taking this case to the International Court of Justice.
And the International Court of Justice, looking at a lot of the evidence as I just described it, said that there was a plausible case here that the Israelis were committing genocide.
Now, the International Court of Justice did not say this is genocide.
They said there is enough evidence to support the argument that genocide might be taking place here.
And what the ICJ wanted to do was get Israel to back off from attacking the civilian population and instead focusing on killing Hamas.
The ICJ did not say that the Israeli defense forces could not continue the fight against Hamas.
They said that was fine.
But what the ICJ said the Israelis should stop doing is threatening and killing the civilian population.
But how, just to come back to the point I made earlier, how does Israel get rid of Hamas and kill the terrorists who were behind what happened on October the 7th, the worst attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust?
How do they do that if Hamas is embedded, as we can see from all the tunnels that have been unraveled and so on, all near hospitals and schools and all the places Israel has always said they were putting tunnels?
How do you attack an enemy like that without a lot of collateral damage?
And how do you distinguish their defense of the way they're doing it from the defense that, say, we the British had in World War II when we killed a lot of German civilians in trying to defeat the Nazis?
Well, look, the fact is that the Israelis cannot defeat Hamas unless they either ethnically cleanse Gaza, in other words, drive all the Palestinians out, or kill all the Palestinians.
They're not going to defeat Gaza.
I mean, excuse me, they're not going to defeat Hamas.
And if they do defeat Hamas, another group will rise up to replace Hamas.
So they are between Iraq and a hard place.
Benjamin and Etanyahu can talk about winning a total victory and destroying Hamas and demilitarizing and de-radicalizing the Gaza Strip.
But that's simply not going to happen.
Well, on that, I totally agree.
That's what I mean about the plan for what they see as the post-victory plan, I think, is for the birds.
I just don't think it has any bearing on the reality of what is likely to happen.
I mean, you've called Hamas a resistance group, and you said they don't represent an existential threat to Israel.
Now, on that point, I would take issue with you because they've come out since October the 7th, Hamas.
Their official spokesman is on the record of saying that they will try and do this again and again and again.
That does represent an existential threat to Israel.
Look, there's no question that Hamas would like to make Israel disappear from the map and to replace it with a Palestinian state.
When you look at what's called Greater Israel today, what the Israeli Jews want is that they want that Greater Israel to be a Jewish state.
Hamas wants it to be a Palestinian state.
So there's no question that Hamas, in theory, is an existential threat to Israel.
But Hamas does not have the military capability to threaten Israel in a serious way.
What did it have?
About 30,000 fighters in total on October 7th?
And not all of those went into Israel proper.
But 30,000 Hamas fighters is not an existential threat to Israel.
Israel has one of the most powerful conventional forces on the planet.
It has nuclear weapons.
Hamas is just not that serious a threat.
What happened on October 7th is that the Israelis foolishly let their guard down.
They didn't pay attention to serious indicators that Hamas was preparing to attack.
And their defensive capabilities were remarkably weak.
And they were remarkably unprepared for what happened on October 7th.
They got caught with their pants down, much as they did in 1973 when the Egyptians crossed the Suez Canal.
But again, this is not an existential threat to Israel.
Well, it could be if you add Iran to the mix, and a lot of people believe that because of the Abraham Accords and because of countries like Saudi Arabia looking to get into bed politically with Israel and so on, that Iran did see this as an existential threat to their control in the region or otherwise.
And if you add Iran to the mix, backing Hamas, backing Hezbollah, it could represent collectively an existential threat to Israel.
And they certainly feel that.
And they certainly feel that that is something they've got to take very seriously.
There's no question that Israel has a variety of adversaries on its borders.
It has Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south.
There's no question about that.
And it has all sorts of problems on the West Bank.
I don't deny that.
But if you take those various threats together and you throw in the Iranians, you still do not have an existential threat.
How does Iran threaten Israel?
Explain to me what military capabilities Iran has that can be used against Israel.
Well, nobody thought that Hamas could carry out what they carried out on October the 7th.
Many people think that they were given the training and the equipment by Iran.
If you were to massively increase that training and military capability, which Iran has the ability to do in arming Hamas, in arming Hezbollah and Lebanon and so on, if Iran was to really step that up, then surely that could represent a massive threat to Israel.
There's no way that Iran can do that.
There's no way Iran can help Hamas create mechanized infantry brigades or armored brigades and give them the firepower and airpower to destroy Israel or seriously threaten it or present an existential threat, whatever rhetoric you want to use.
It's not going to happen.
Well, but with respect, Professor, nobody thought that Hamas could carry out what they did on October the 7th, least of all Benjamin Netanyahu and his government, who were completely caught unawares, despite boasting of having the best security and the best intelligence of any country in the world.
That clearly was not the case.
People literally paraglided in and attacked people at a concert.
I don't dispute that for one second, but to present Israel with an existential threat, you would need a massive increase in the military capabilities of Hamas.
And that is not on the horizon.
That is not going to happen.
And the same thing, by the way, is true with regard to Hezbollah.
Hezbollah is more of a threat to Israel than Hamas is, because Hezbollah has about 150,000 rockets and missiles that are aimed at Israel.
And a good number of them are precision-guided munitions.
If Hezbollah and Israel were to get into a fight and Hezbollah were to launch that inventory of rockets and missiles that it has, it would do enormous damage to Israel.
So Hezbollah is a greater threat.
But even there, Hezbollah is not an existential threat.
An existential threat involves an adversary who has the capability to threaten your survival.
And as I said before, I do believe that Hamas would like to have the capability to threaten Israel's survival because Hamas would like to replace Israel in what is today Greater Israel.
Free Speech in Modern Democracies00:03:02
Professor, we've had a fascinating, wide-ranging conversation, all conducted, I think, with respect and courtesy.
Why don't we see more of this in the world?
Why has this kind of conversation, this kind of debate, now been replaced by screaming at each other and people taking tribal positions on social media and wanting to literally silence anyone who has a different view?
I'm not sure I have a good answer to that.
I certainly agree with your description of what's going on.
I find it actually quite depressing that people engage in name-calling, they engage in screaming at each other.
And furthermore, all sorts of people who have views that are contrary to the conventional wisdom get frozen out of the mainstream.
And I could tell you all sorts of stories in that regard.
I think that's not healthy at all.
I have kind of an old-fashioned view of how liberal democracies are supposed to work.
We're supposed to have a marketplace of ideas.
People are supposed to be able to exchange ideas.
And if people think that John Mearsheimer has foolish ideas on Ukraine or on the Middle East, that's fine.
We should have a discussion about it.
And if my ideas are so foolish, people should be able to use facts and logic to knock me down.
But you don't get a lot of that in this day and age.
People get frozen out, or if they're included in the debate, they tend to get smeared if they're not in agreement with the majority view.
It is extraordinary, isn't it, that in democracies like the US, the UK, and many others, you're seeing people who identify as liberals actually behaving like the fascists that they profess to hate most.
No, I think there's no question about it.
I mean, liberals should be tolerant.
If you think about liberalism and what is at the essence of liberalism, liberalism is predicated on the assumption that people cannot agree about first principles.
Just very important to understand that.
You go back to Hobbes, you go back to Locke.
They understood people cannot agree about first principles.
So what you have to do is you have to create a society where people have the space to live their own life according to their own first principles.
And they have to be free to express their own views without having to worry about being attacked by someone who disagrees with them.
And very importantly, sitting underneath that liberal enterprise has to be the norm of tolerance.
If you and I disagree, I have to tolerate the fact that you have a particular view, and you have to tolerate the fact that I have a different view.
This is what keeps us all together and makes the society work.
And actually, it's how you work.
So liberals.
Yeah, it's how you work out problems in societies, right?
I mean, you debate it vigorously, and then you reach points of agreement and consensus.
Julian Assange and Leaks00:03:08
And you don't feel like under threat by doing that, or that somehow you're diminishing yourself.
You feel that for the greater good, this is progress, that you come together, you debate, you argue, and out of it comes a better solution.
I agree with that completely, but as you said, that's not the way we seem to work these days.
It's such a shame.
I want to end with one question about Julian Assange.
A lot of debate about whether he should be extradited to the United States.
Where do you sit on that?
Well, I've actually made a video making the argument that the British High Court should set him free and he should not be sent to the United States to be tried.
As you know, he's been indicted here in the United States.
My view is that Julian Assange is effectively a journalist.
He's not an insider who leaked information.
I think we have a system here in the United States where insiders, people who have access to classified material, frequently leak that information to journalists and the journalists then publish the information.
The most famous case of this, of course, is the Pentagon Papers, where Daniel Ellsberg was the insider.
He had access to these classified documents called the Pentagon Papers, and he leaked them to the New York Times, and the New York Times published those papers.
What we have with Julian Assange is that there was an insider, Chelsea Manning, who had a clearance and who had access to classified material.
And Chelsea Manning leaked that information to Julian Assange.
And Julian Assange published it on WikiLeaks.
Now, I think in this case, it was Chelsea Manning who was the equivalent of Daniel Ellsberg.
Daniel Ellsberg is not the equivalent, or Julian Assange is not the equivalent of Daniel Ellsberg, because it was Manning who was the leaker, like Dan Ellsberg, right?
And I think Assange was like the New York Times, and he published these documents.
And I think that journalists should be free to do that, because I think it's very important in a liberal democracy like the United States or a liberal democracy like Britain, where the government sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes pursues foolish or reckless policies, that we have mechanisms that allow information to get out to show that the government is pursuing these foolish policies so that the public can push back.
And I think that, of course, happened in the case of the Pentagon Papers.
And I think that Assange, in a very important way, has performed a public service by putting these documents into the public domain that show that the American government behaved foolishly or recklessly on a number of occasions.
And that gave us, the public, an opportunity to push back.
Trump's Dovish Geoeconomics00:03:03
I think this is a healthy situation.
And I think you always want to keep in mind that the government or the state in a democracy as well as a non-democracy has a deep-seated interest in keeping information from the public.
And this is sometimes necessary, but not always good.
Well, as you say about the definition of news, it's something that someone somewhere doesn't want published.
And I think I completely concur with your assessment.
Final question.
And you're only allowed a one-word answer.
Would the world be a safer place if Biden or Trump wins in November?
One word answer.
I don't know.
I can't believe you don't have an answer for me, Professor.
I think it's very hard to say what Trump will be able to do when he gets re-elected.
I mean, just to elaborate a bit, I think that Trump, much to his credit, is not a warmonger.
Trump brags about the fact that he's the only president in recent times who didn't start a war.
You know why?
Because it's bad for business.
He thinks it's bad business because it costs so much money.
I think there's a lot of truth in that, by the way.
I don't think he's interested in geopolitics.
I think he's interested in geoeconomics.
Absolutely.
But regardless, he's not that interested in fighting wars.
And he represents the dovish side of the Republican Party, and he is certainly outside the mainstream in the United States in terms of his foreign policy views.
But on the other hand, he may be a prisoner of the blob or the foreign policy establishment, and he may be forced to act in very hawkish ways.
With regard to Biden, one could argue that Biden has been badly burned by his hawkish policies.
He is in deep trouble in the Middle East.
It's threatening his chances of getting re-elected.
He's in deep trouble in Ukraine because the Ukrainians are on their heels.
And if he has trouble in East Asia with the Chinese over Taiwan or over the South China Seas, that will be even worse news for him.
So one could argue that moving forward, Biden will be much more cautious.
I'm not saying that's true.
It's very hard to predict the future when it comes to thinking about how Trump and Biden would behave.
But you can make a case that Trump will be quite dovish, although maybe not.
And you can make a case going in the same direction for Joe Biden.
And I just don't feel comfortable telling you that either Trump or Biden will do more for world peace than the other.
Professor John Mejean, what a pleasure to talk to you at last.