John Mearsheimer: The Palestinian Genocide and How the West Has Been Deceived (Transcript)

Why? I don’t know. It befuddles me.

If you look at the Russian reaction to NATO expansion into Ukraine, which I believe is the tap root of this war, it’s analogous to America’s Monroe doctrine. The United States under those circumstances would allow the Soviet Union to put missiles in Cuba or to locate a naval base at Cienfuegos in Cuba. That was just unacceptable. This is what the Monroe doctrine is all about.

We’d never allow China to station military forces in Mexico or in Canada, but yet we think we have the right to move NATO far enough eastward to include Ukraine and then put NATO assets, including American military assets, in Ukraine. And this is not of concern to the Russians. They shouldn’t care. They should recognize that Ukraine has the right to do whatever it wants. NATO has the right to expand land wherever it wants, and Russia has no say in the matter.

The Russians, of course, don’t accept this because they have a Monroe doctrine of their own. But we can’t get it through our thick skulls that this is foolish thinking on our part and is destined to lead to trouble as it has.

The Emotional Response to Russia

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s, it’s interesting that the standard that U.S. Foreign policymakers apply to Russia is different from a standard they’d apply to any other country, including China and even North Korea. They just, they don’t have the same level of emotion about any other place. It’s Russia, Ukraine. And I, I find it baffling because on, on some level this is, as you said at the outset, this is not about America’s strategic interests. We don’t really have many there. This is about an almost overwhelming emotional response from our leadership class to this conflict, to this region. I think it’s weird.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think also at this point in time we have convinced ourselves, both the Europeans and the Americans, that Russia is a mortal threat to dominate all of Europe. This is a ridiculous argument.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you think it is ridiculous?

Debunking the Russian Threat Narrative

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: It’s a ridiculous argument. As you have seen, the war started in 2022. We’re well over five years into this war and the Russians have had a very difficult time conquering the eastern 1/5th of Ukraine. Just think about that. Over three plus years they have been unable to conquer all of the territory in those four oblasts that they’ve annexed.

Please tell me how this army is going to overrun all of Ukraine, then overrun Eastern Europe and then overrun western Europe. This is a laughable argument. Furthermore, if the Russians are foolish enough to try to occupy Western Ukraine, they’re going to find themselves in a quagmire. They’re going to find themselves dealing with a huge amount of resistance from all of those ethnic Ukrainians in the western part of Ukraine who hate Russians. This is why I don’t think Putin is going to even try to conquer the western half, much less Poland and…

TUCKER CARLSON: Romania and the rest.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Exactly. Their view on that, by the way, in terms of occupying Eastern Europe, is we’ve been there, done that, and it did not work out very well. Remember, they occupied Eastern Europe roughly from 1945 to the, the early 1990s when they pulled out after the Cold War ended.

They had to invade Hungary in 56, they had to invade Czechoslovakia in 68. They had to put down a major insurrection in east Germany in 1953. They almost went into Poland three times. They had their hands full dealing with the Romanians and the Albanians and the Yugoslavs. I mean, the idea that a country like Russia is going to invade and occupy and run the politics of countries in Eastern Europe is a remarkably foolish idea. And again, they don’t even have the military capability to do that.

Putin’s Actual Position on the Soviet Union

TUCKER CARLSON: But that is the idea. And when you talk to Europeans about it, as I often do, they say that Putin’s aim is to restore the Soviet empire. And he said that. And, you know, just listen to what he says. He wants. He pines for the Soviet era and he wants to restore it.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: He’s never said that. In fact, he said that, you know, he can understand why someone in his or her heart pines for the Soviet Union, but in his or her head, it makes absolutely no sense. He said that the idea that you can recreate the Soviet Union, number one and then two, recreate the Soviet empire is a pipe dream.

And you might not like Vladimir Putin, but he is a very smart man. He is a first class strategist and he surely understands that, you know, the idea of recreating the Soviet Union or the Soviet makes no sense at all.

Transitioning from Cold War Mindset

TUCKER CARLSON: You spent 10 years in the US military, graduated West Point during the Cold War.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: So your life for 10 years was focused on the Soviets, of course.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: No question.

TUCKER CARLSON: No question. So that’s 10 years. That’s a long time. In your young life. How were you able to transition mentally from viewing Russia as an enemy to viewing them as, you know, another country?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: It’s an interesting question.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why weren’t others able to do that?

NATO Expansion and the Russian Response

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, a lot were, but a lot weren’t. I think that what happened was that during the Cold War, when I started to think about the US Soviet competition, the subject that I got interested in was the conventional balance of forces in Europe. It was the NATO Warsaw Pact balance.

And I wrote my dissertation on the subject of conventional deterrence and it focused on the NATO Warsaw Pact balance. And my argument was, which was very controversial at the time, was that the Soviets were not 10 feet tall. And actually if a war did break out in Central Europe, the West or NATO would do very well that we would hold off the Soviets, that they would not win a quick and decisive victory, which was the conventional wisdom at the time.

So in a very important way, I was engaged in threat deflation. I always thought when you looked at the Soviet Union, this is during the latter part of the Cold War, when I was coming of age, that we greatly overestimated the threat and that the Soviet Union was not 10 feet tall.

So once the Cold War ends and then we segue into the unipolar moment, I’m already moving in that direction. And then during the 1990s, the Soviet Union, which has become Russia is a total basket case. I mean, the only threat that it represents is to itself. It doesn’t represent a threat to the West.

And in fact, Tucker, NATO expansion, which really gets going in 1994, that’s when Bill Clinton decides to expand NATO is not designed to contain Russia because there is no Russian threat. So then Putin comes to power, and what happens from about 2000 up until the present is that the west, and here we’re talking about the United States as well, of course, becomes increasingly Russophobic and hostile to Putin.

And I think it’s in large part because Putin stands up to us. I think that we get used to the idea certainly in the 1990s, that we call the shots. It’s the unipolar moment. And when we tell countries to jump, their only question is how high? And we get away with that to some extent with Putin to begin with. But then he begins to play hardball with us and he gives a very famous speech in Munich in 2007 where he throws down the gauntlet. And from 2007 forward, relations really deteriorate. And as they deteriorate, the Russophobia comes racing to the fore and remains firmly in place today.

TUCKER CARLSON: What is the point of NATO now? Like, why do we still have NATO? What’s its objective?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, I think if you asked most Europeans and even many Americans in the American foreign policy establishment, the argument would be that NATO serves as a pacifier. In other words, it keeps the peace in Europe. The United States is the most powerful state in NATO, and the United States sits on top of all the European countries. It provides security for them, it provides a nuclear umbrella for them, and that prevents the European countries from engaging in security competition with each other. So we are a pacifying force.

TUCKER CARLSON: Europeans today, to prevent intra European conflict.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: European conflict. Well, if you think about it, up until 1945, when World War II ends, you had had two world wars in the first half of the 20th century. And then if you go back in time, European countries had been fighting against each other almost since the beginning of time.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that’s why there are so many European countries and so many languages and different distinct cultures. I mean, you might also make the argument that’s why Europe was so successful, because they were competitive.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: You can certainly make that argument. And you can make the argument that that’s why they were able to conquer chunks of the planet and create these empires, because they were very good at projecting military power.

TUCKER CARLSON: These were martial societies before they became tourist destinations.

The Cold War Pacifier Strategy

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yes, but anyway, what happens during the Cold War is the Soviets dominate one side of Europe and we dominate the other side of Europe. And as long as those two great powers are dominating those two halves of Europe, the countries located below them cannot fight among themselves.

So what happens when the Cold War ends in 1989 and then into the 1990s is that we decide that we’re going to expand NATO eastward. And as I said to you, it’s very important to understand that when we expand NATO eastward in the 90s and then the early 2000s, we’re not aiming at containing Russia. 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 like 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 and 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.

The Path to Conflict in Ukraine

TUCKER CARLSON: 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 a war with Russia. We don’t want that. Did anyone raise that point?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Couple points, 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. Then 2004 is when the Baltic states come in. 2008 is when the critical decision is made, April 2008, to bring Ukraine into NATO.

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 oppose the 99 expansion. The first tranche. We just shoved it down their throat.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. What’s Boris Yeltsin going to do about it?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: That’s right. That’s exactly right. What’s he going to do about it? And then 2004, Putin’s in control now we shove it down their throat again.

So in 2008, immediately after NATO says, at the Bucharest, April 2008 NATO Bucharest summit, immediately after 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 22, 2014, that’s when the crisis starts. That’s when the Russians take Crimea. This is when you 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 decision making process, after Joe Biden moves into the White House in January 2021, and then 13 months later, the war breaks out. Biden makes no effort whatsoever to accommodate the Russians. So again, the question is why? What’s going on here? We’re just going to shove it down their throat. We think we’re Godzilla. We think it’s still the unipolar moment.

TUCKER CARLSON: 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?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: 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 themselves, 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. But we can’t bring ourselves to do that. That would be showing weakness. So instead we continue to plow on.

The Strategic Consequences of Defeat

TUCKER CARLSON: But in attempting to show strength, we reveal weakness. I mean, that’s my concern is, you know, once you project force and it doesn’t work, then you’re revealed to the world as weak. The limits of your power are obvious to everybody. It’s better to threaten and have your true power concealed. People can guess at what you can do, but now there’s no guessing. We couldn’t beat Russia, and that’s correct. Right. So we lost a war to Russia. It’s proxy war, but it was a war. And so what does that mean?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: 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 Chinese closer together.

TUCKER CARLSON: So that’s so obvious, even to me, a non specialist. Just like it’s obvious, 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?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I think you’re underestimating how much strategic sense the American foreign policy establishment has.

The China Engagement Disaster

TUCKER CARLSON: So they’re just so incompetent, they didn’t see that coming.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yes. I mean, I’ll take it a step further. Come on, let’s talk about China. This is an even bigger issue. 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course, that was the whole point.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Right. So the Soviet Union, 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 Zbigniew 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: 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. This is a remarkably catastrophic decision.

The Academic Establishment’s Blind Spots

TUCKER CARLSON: It must be strange for you, having spent your life in this one field, both in the military effectively and then in academia. And you’ve had tenure at Chicago since 82, is that right?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I went to Chicago in 82. I got tenure in 1987.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you’ve been there over 40 years working on this suite of topics, this group of topics. When you look around and everybody, even the most famous people in your field are buying into something that’s stupid, how does that make you feel? Brzezinski and Kissinger are saying things that are just obviously dumb. That must be weird.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: It’s very weird. I remember I debated Zbig in the early 2000s at Carnegie in Washington, D.C. on whether China could rise peacefully. And there’s actually a big story in Foreign Policy, the magazine that has an abbreviated transcript of our debate.

And I remember Zbig was arguing that China can rise peacefully, and I was arguing that China could not rise peacefully and that our policy of engagement was foolish. And as he was speaking and I was sitting on the dais, I was saying to myself, I don’t get what’s going on here. Brzezinski, who’s about 10 notches to the right of me on almost all foreign policy issues, shouldn’t be making this argument. But he’s making this argument.

And I’m the one who looks like a super hawk when at the end of the Cold War, I was more on the dovish side, arguing the Soviets were not 10 feet tall. And of course, Zbig was always arguing the Soviets were 10 feet tall. So it was really perplexing.

And throughout the 90s and throughout the early 2000s, when I argued China could not rise peacefully, I could not get a hearing in the United States. People just didn’t take me seriously. They’d say, “John’s a very smart guy, he’s very entertaining, he’s amusing, but he’s basically crazy when it comes to China.” That was the view. Now, of course, I think everybody understands that I was basically right and they were wrong.

TUCKER CARLSON: But there hasn’t been an immediate reorganization of the field. If you had America’s sort of corpus of structural engineers, 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, you don’t know what you’re doing. Look at the results. 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 the brain trust.

NATO Expansion: The Disappearing Opposition

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I agree. 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. Jeane 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 tranche is in 1999. And then the opposition disappears. There’s no more 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, they’re doubling down.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: They’re doubling down.

TUCKER CARLSON: And then you’re getting people at the Atlantic Council saying, “Well, I guess we have to use nukes now.” I mean, you see people not just refuse to reflect or repent, but become actively crazy, just crazy. Like no tactical nukes. I mean, and we’re not going to win without them. People are saying that, as you know. What is that?

The Dangers of Desperation

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: 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 this weird asymmetrical arrangement where Ukraine actually has quite a bit of power to stoke a global conflict. An incentive to do it, don’t they?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: That’s exactly right. What they want to do is they want to see the war escalate because they want to bring us in. If the Ukrainians have any hope of rescuing the situation, it’s to bring NATO into the fight.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Actually doing the fighting.

TUCKER CARLSON: And we’ve seen this in other regions. It’s a bad idea to allow other countries an incentive to suck in the United States, because they will.

The Israel-Iran Parallel

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yeah, well, I mean, you see this with the Israelis in Iran. 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.

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.

TUCKER CARLSON: So as long as we’re tied to Ukraine, if there’s an implicit security guarantee. There kind of is at this point. Why don’t we have an interest in controlling the government of Ukraine? So you can’t. In other words, why do we have Zelensky running Ukraine, this unelected lunatic running Ukraine, when we have skin in the game? Why do we allow that?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, we’ve been content with Zelensky up to now and the Europeans love Zelensky. Why? Because he’s committed to continuing the war and he is very good at public relations in the West. He has excellent advisors. He’s a former actor. He knows how to play the game. So he’s good at dealing with the west and he does what we want. I mean, it’s not like he’s doing things that we don’t want him to do.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s right.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: He is our man. And once he ceases to be our man, we’ll go to great lengths to put somebody else in his place.

The Economic Costs of War

TUCKER CARLSON: But both Europe and the United States have become poorer and weaker during the course of the Ukraine war, partly as a result of the Ukraine war. So I don’t really see how we’re winning. How is the US benefiting from this? How is Western Europe benefiting from this?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, I think that it’s Europe, Western Europe in particular, that’s been hurt economically by this war. Not so much US and one could argue that we’ve benefited on the margins at the expense of the Europeans.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, the US dollar kind of is, I mean it’s obviously not a safe haven anymore. So I mean, it’s just a matter of time, I would say.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, the question is how much of that is due to the Ukraine war versus other American policies.

TUCKER CARLSON: 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, lawless crazy behavior like that, that sends a message to the world that don’t keep your wealth in dollars because it can become an instrument of war. I mean, that’s my view on it anyway.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yeah, there’s no question about that. But the problem is that we’re now so deeply committed that we just can’t turn the ship around.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do we have any leverage at all left? 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 mean, is any of that meaningful?

The Limits of Secondary Sanctions

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I don’t think the threat of secondary sanctions is meaningful. 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. 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?

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.

Trump’s Political Dilemma

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.” He was smart to do that. 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: And I think one of the reasons that Trump is so hesitant on Ukraine is not simply because he’s surrounded by advisers 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: No question.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: He doesn’t want that to happen. This is why Trump was deeply committed to negotiating a settlement.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why couldn’t that work? Why didn’t that work?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: 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, JD 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.

The Foreign Policy Establishment’s Influence

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I can’t think of a group I’m less interested in listening to than the foreign policy establishment. I mean, again, that just seems so totally discredited. It’s like dating tips from Jeffrey Epstein. It’s like, who cares what they say?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: But they still wield enormous power.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, apparently.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: This is the problem that Trump faces. Trump had this problem in spades the first time he was elected. Trump comes into the White House and he has to pick advisors, but it’s not like he has a large number or even a small number of foreign policy experts who share his foreign policy views. Because he has to draw from the establishment.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: So you want to remember that Trump was very interested in improving relations with Russia and with Putin in particular the first time around, and he failed completely. Where Trump succeeded was on China. Trump abandoned engagement. We talked about engagement being a disastrous policy. Trump abandoned engagement and moved to containment in 2017.

He ran as a candidate in 2016 explicitly against engagement, got rid of it immediately. I believe that was a smart thing to do. And to pursue containment, he also wanted to improve relations with Putin, which I think made eminently good sense. He couldn’t do that, in part because of Russiagate, 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.

The Hawkish Foreign Policy Consensus

TUCKER CARLSON: So 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 in its war against Russia. The Mark Levins and the smarter people, but same orientation. What do they have in common? I don’t really understand.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: Just for its own sake?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: No, they believe 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 liberalism 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. 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. 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 US 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: Clearly.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Clearly. And the United States had a huge number of military assets in the Middle East that were there in large part to help the Israelis in their war against Iran. Well, if you think about it, it makes perfect 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.

American Interests vs. Israeli Interests

TUCKER CARLSON: I didn’t hear any reference to American interests in that description.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, when it comes to Israel and what Israel needs, that has little to do with American interests. The truth is any two countries in the world are going to have similar interests plus different interests.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: So there’s no question that Israel and the United States 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: 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 Walt, 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, 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: Over and against America’s interests.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Of course, because the interests clash in those specific instances.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right. Which is, as you noted at the outset, just the nature of sovereign countries doing business with each other. You’re going to agree on some things and disagree on others.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Absolutely.

TUCKER CARLSON: 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?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: No, I can’t think of anything that fits that description. I mean, one could argue that Israel wanted us to fight against Iran in 2024, that they tried to bait us into attacking Iran in April and then in July. And as I said before, the Biden administration did not take the bait.

The Two-State Solution Example

TUCKER CARLSON: Can you think conversely of instances where the US Government chose the interests of a foreign power over and against its own interests and its people’s interests?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Besides the Israeli case?

TUCKER CARLSON: No, 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. Can you think of examples of that?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: The two-state solution is the best example. 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 tap root 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: How does it hurt the United States not having a Palestinian state? Why is it in our interest? Why is every president pushing for that?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: He understood full well that this is in our interest. Well, if you compare the world on October 6, 2023, with the world that exists in the Middle East today, we are much worse off today. This is not in our interest and this is in large part because of Israel.

And this is just a strategic dimension. We’re not even talking about the moral dimension. I mean, the Israelis are executing a genocide in Gaza and we are complicit in that genocide.

TUCKER CARLSON: When you say it’s a genocide, what do you mean?

The Definition of Genocide

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, if you look at what the definition of a genocide is, 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: Millions, yeah.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: For purposes of ending the war. We wanted to end the war. 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, what’s happening here is that the Israelis are systematically trying to destroy the Palestinians as a national group. They’re targeting them as Palestinians and they’re trying to destroy Palestinian national identity in addition to murdering huge numbers of Palestinians.

The Strategic Goal Behind the Violence

TUCKER CARLSON: And I mean, it’s not just a rage reflex. This is a strategy. Of course, two and a half years later, almost three years later, what is the strategy? What’s the goal of this?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: My view on this is that the Israelis have long been interested in expelling the Palestinian population from Greater Israel. If you look at Greater Israel, this includes the Israel that was created in 1948 and the occupied territories. This is the 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 believe 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s such a dark thing. And therefore that’s a very strong allegation. On what basis are you making it?

Evidence of Ethnic Cleansing Plans

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Oh, there’s just a huge amount of data that supports this in the Israeli press that they have been perfectly willing to make this argument loudly and clearly. The issue of genocide, which I’ll get to in a second, is a different issue. I’m separating ethnic cleansing from genocide.

So what happens after October 7 is that the Israelis see an opportunity to drive the Palestinians out of Gaza and you want to remember that you had massive ethnic cleansing in 1948. When the state is created, virtually all of those people in Gaza are descendants of the ethnic cleansing of 1948.

TUCKER CARLSON: Were kicked out of another place and sent to Gaza.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yeah. 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: 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 belongs.

TUCKER CARLSON: So it wasn’t really “a land without people for a people without land.”

The Reality of Early Zionist Plans

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: 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 Green Line Israel.

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.

TUCKER CARLSON: Jordan is just a giant refugee camp already. It already is from all these other wars that have been inspired for the same reason. So I mean, I think Jordan is what percentage Jordanian is Jordan? I mean, tiny percentage Jordan.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: It’s definitely less than 50%.

TUCKER CARLSON: Way less.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Way less. Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: And Egypt has 100 million people already, so.

From Ethnic Cleansing to Genocide

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: But here’s what happens, Tucker, and I think it makes sense if you listen to the logic. They start with the goal of ethnic cleansing. I don’t believe they want to murder all of the Palestinians in Gaza. They just simply want to drive them out. But the problem is they don’t leave. And then the question is, what do you do? And what they do is they continue to up the attacks, increase the attacks, kill more and more people in the hope that they will drive them out.

TUCKER CARLSON: And I’m sorry, I should have asked this. Why do they want Gaza in the first place? It seems a lot of trouble killing all these people, committing atrocities on camera. I mean, the press are barred, but we’re still getting a lot of video out of the area. That’s a big hit. Why would you be willing to go through all of that to get Gaza? Why do they want it?

The Vision of Greater Israel

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, the Zionists from the beginning have wanted a Greater Israel. And David Ben Gurion wrote a piece in 1918. And David Ben Gurion, of course, is the founding father of Israel, wrote a piece in 1918. 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 Green Line 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’s 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. 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 Ben 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, Green Line Israel, the Sinai and so forth and so on.”

The Double Standard on Territorial Integrity

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s just a little, I mean, irony doesn’t, 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. That’s our sacred norms are violated when those borders are violated, are saying it’s totally okay for this one country to take over other countries.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: But this gets back to my point to you. We support Israel unconditionally. 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. But we do hardly anything at all.

TUCKER CARLSON: And those are real countries, those are ancient countries and beautiful countries with sophisticated, intelligent people and the roots of Christianity are there. And it’s not, in other words, I mean, there’s a sense if you’re fighting over Sinai or something, it’s one thing, but Lebanon, I mean, that’s one of the great countries in the world. Syria, same thing. And they’re being destroyed. I don’t understand why people allow that to happen.

The Strategy of Regional Destabilization

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, let me explain to you what Israel’s goal is here. First of all, Israel’s goal is to create Lebensraum. That’s what I was describing to you when I said what Ben Gurion’s vision was regarding borders.

TUCKER CARLSON: So could you define the word?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Lebensraum means living room. You want a big country, you want lots of space for your people.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes. Strategic depth.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Strategic depth, yeah. And so that’s one goal. 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, 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? 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s a lie.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, it’s just part of the story. You could call it a lie. What the Israelis want to do is they want to break Iran apart. They want to make it look like Syria. You want neighbors that are not powerful, you want them to be fractured.

Jordan and Egypt, they have a different solution there. And what’s happened is because those countries are economically backwards, the United States gives them huge amounts of economic aid.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve noticed.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yeah. And that’s done for a purpose. And anytime the Egyptians…

TUCKER CARLSON: And what’s the purpose?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: 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 cause the Israelis any problem.

TUCKER CARLSON: It sounds like our entire foreign policy, at least in the Western Hemisphere, is based on this one country.

The Israel Lobby’s Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, I would say in the Middle East. In the Middle East, there is no question. People now call it West Asia. I believe I call it the Middle East. 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 it. 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: So then the question, I mean, there’s so many questions, but the question is why? Like, what is that? And it’s 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 interest of another country? Like, why? Why?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, I believe there’s one simple answer. The Israel lobby. I think the lobby is an incredibly powerful interest group, and I’m choosing my words carefully. It has awesome power, and it basically is in a position where it can profoundly influence US foreign policy in the Middle East. And indeed, it affects foreign policy outside of the Middle East. But when it comes to the Middle East, and again, the Palestinian issue in particular, it has awesome power. And there’s no president who is willing to buck the lobby.

The Nature of Lobby Power

TUCKER CARLSON: What sort of power is it? Because it’s not rhetorical. It’s not, you know, the most powerful movements in history are fueled by an idea. It’s usually the most powerful or fueled by an idea that’s true. 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 that never explained how exactly that works. So it’s not a matter of convincing people. People, clearly. So what is it a matter of? Where does that power come from?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, let me put this in a broader context. 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: 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 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: 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 smash mouth politics. People are now fully aware that there is a lobby out there that’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. It basically does control the policymakers. So now you have this real disconnect.

TUCKER CARLSON: Controls the policymakers. I mean, we just, that’s demonstrable, you know, I think it’s measurable.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yes, 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.

Historical Narrative Control

TUCKER CARLSON: So successful that just basic historical facts about the creation of this nation state in 1948 are unknown to people. And it’s shocking to hear them. And you think, well, that can’t be right. That’s so far from what I heard as a child that that’s obvious. What? All the Christians were kicked out. All these Christians were kicked out of their historic homelands there and of course many more Muslims. And did that really happen? I mean, people just have no idea what the facts are. It’s kind of interesting.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yes. Well, the lobby went to great lengths to make sure that you didn’t know the facts.

TUCKER CARLSON: And anyone who said the facts out loud was like a lunatic or a jihadist or a hater of some kind.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: An anti-Semite.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Self-hating Jews. You know, it’s very interesting. 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 then 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: Benny Morris.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé.

TUCKER CARLSON: Some of them were amazing.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Amazing. Yeah, I agree. And what they did was they had access to the archives.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: And they told the real story.

TUCKER CARLSON: And that was a moment where I think the country felt Israel felt confident enough to allow that conversation internally. And that honesty.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I think that’s exactly right. The lobby had been so successful. Israel had been so successful.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, I went there. I was amazed. What a beautiful place. Great people. It was great.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yeah, yeah. They thought they controlled, they had things under control. They did. That’s right. And that they could allow these historians to tell the truth. Now, I believe they could have gotten away with it if they had stopped expanding or if they had agreed to a two-state solution. The problem is that after the early 1990s, when this literature came out, the Israelis continued to act in barbaric ways towards the Palestinians.

The Internet’s Impact on Information Control

TUCKER CARLSON: And, well, they had a prime minister who tried to reverse the trend and then he was shot to death.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: He was moving in that direction. I think there were a number of Israeli leaders who understood that the course that Israel was on was unsustainable.

TUCKER CARLSON: You often heard them say that. Yeah, there was a robust debate within the country about this.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, whether they would have agreed to a Palestinian state ultimately is an open question. But the fact is Rabin was killed. Ehud Barak, who made moves towards a two-state solution, ultimately couldn’t pull it off. And we are where we are today.

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.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s shocking to people. So you have to shut down the Internet. You can’t allow that.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yeah, you can try to shut down the Internet, but you know, there are limits to what you can do.

The Disconnect Between Policy and Public Opinion

TUCKER CARLSON: 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 like 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. I feel it all around me. Do you feel this?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Of course, yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: 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 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, 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.

Censorship and Information Control

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, there’s no question that they’re trying to stop the conversation. No question. I mean, they went to great lengths to shut down TikTok. And the evidence is that the lobby played a key role.

TUCKER CARLSON: Just banning one of the world’s biggest social media apps. Because it says things you don’t like.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, this is the way they’ve always behaved. The lobby’s always behaved this way. 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you were asked to write a piece about the influence of a foreign lobby, the Israeli lobby, in Washington, which is one of many foreign lobbies in Washington, but it’s by far the most effective and the biggest. And you write the piece and they didn’t run it?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Because they got cold feet. 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 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right, and that happened to you?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: 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 article, as I said, in the back closet and just said.

TUCKER CARLSON: What’s wild is you’re both at this point very well known in your field. Can you explain who Steve is to your co-author?

The Academic Credentials Behind the Israel Lobby Article

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yes. Steve is a chaired professor at Harvard University and at the time that we wrote the lobby article, he was the academic dean at the Kennedy School.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, so I just want to make it totally clear. You’re not two random guys on the Internet who are like anti-Semites or something at all. You’re some of the most famous people in your field and you’re totally moderate. I don’t even know what your politics are. But you’re not a political activist at all.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: 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 is a laughable argument. We’re both first order philosemites. I mean, I can’t prove that, but it’s true, in my humble opinion.

But anyway, we were certainly at the top of our academic disciplines and highly respected, which is not to say people didn’t disagree with what we wrote, but we weren’t crackpots at all. And the other thing is, I want to make it clear that we worked very carefully with the Atlantic to get our final draft up to their standards. We did what they wanted.

And you also want to remember that Steve and I are both excellent writers. Many academics cannot write clearly. Whatever you think of the substance of our views, there’s no doubt that we’re two of the best writers in the business. And it’s the two of us working with the editors at the Atlantic Monthly that produced what I thought was an excellent article. But anyway, it was killed there, and we couldn’t get it published.

TUCKER CARLSON: Kind of proven your point.

The Atlantic’s $10,000 Kill Fee

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yes, exactly. And by the way, I probably shouldn’t tell this story, but I’ll tell you. We told the editor at the Atlantic as we were going through the process that we thought he was getting cold feet, and he was quite offended by that. And he said to us, just to prove that that wasn’t true, he would give us a $10,000 kill fee. That means if they didn’t take the article, they’d give us $10,000.

So I said to Steve, I remember it very well, “That’s the fastest $10,000 we ever made.” He said, “Oh, John, you’re being too cynical.” Anyway, we collected the $10,000. He paid us. Yes, yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: 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 has a high regard for himself and good reputation. All this stuff. And he’s told from somebody else who’s more powerful than he is, you can’t do this. How embarrassed was he in that conversation?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I had no evidence that he was embarrassed.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, so he has no soul. Okay.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: No, I mean, who knows what kind of face he had to put on things. I don’t know what happened inside the Atlantic. I’ve never been told. But again, he said he’d give us a $10,000 kill fee because he thought the piece was going to go forward, and somebody sat on him and told him that was not going to happen. I don’t know what happened, but I don’t want to be too harsh on him, because this is the norm. This was the norm.

TUCKER CARLSON: He didn’t own the magazine.

From Atlantic Rejection to London Review Success

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: 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 or tenure.

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 close contacts at The London Review of Books. And that academic who I knew very well, sent me a note and said that Mary Kay Wilmers… he said, “I got a hold of your manuscript and I sent it to Mary Kay Wilmers at the London Review of Books, and she’d be very interested in publishing it.”

And so I remember I was in Heidelberg, Germany, I called up Mary Kay. And she published it. Thankfully, it was like a bomb.

TUCKER CARLSON: It was like a bomb went off. I remember that.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: So, yeah, definitely.

The Four-Part Thesis of “The Israel Lobby”

TUCKER CARLSON: So the piece the Atlantic killed comes out in the London Review of Books. What’s the thesis of the piece? If you could just sum it up for people who didn’t read it.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, the argument basically has four parts to it. The first says that the United States has this special relationship with Israel. It’s unparalleled in history. We give Israel unconditional support, huge amounts of military and economic aid. That’s the first part. Then the second part says it’s not for strategic reasons that we do this. Then the third part is it’s…

TUCKER CARLSON: Can you explain what that means? Not for…

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: It’s not in the American national interest. In other words, from a geopolitical point of view. Because Israel and the United States sometimes 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.

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 why we do this.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Fair question. If we don’t do it for strategic reasons, we don’t do it for moral reasons, why do we do it? And the answer is the lobby. So that’s the story.

Understanding the Israel Lobby Structure

TUCKER CARLSON: And the lobby is a very large, complex, informal organization of which AIPAC is a part. But not the total.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Absolutely.

TUCKER CARLSON: And then you describe how that works.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yeah, it’s very important to emphasize it’s a loose coalition of individuals and organizations like AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League and so forth and so on that work over time 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: Including many religious Jews, Torah Jews, sincerely Jewish Jews disagree. I know some.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: So I know absolutely there are a large number of Jews who are anti-Zionists.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m aware.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: So you’re exactly right. So it’s not a Jewish lobby for that reason. But also there are the Christian Zionists.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Who are a core element of that lobby. Christians United for Israel, for example. So that’s why we call it the Israel lobby.

Christian Zionism and the Second Coming

TUCKER CARLSON: And what explains the enthusiasm of Christian groups for policies that kill Christians in the Middle East?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, they have this belief that until Israel controls all of Greater Israel… it gets back all the territory that is rightfully theirs, you won’t have the Second Coming. So they are deeply committed, these Christian Zionists, to supporting Israel’s conquests and supporting Israeli expansion for religious reasons.

TUCKER CARLSON: And are there defined borders that, when reached, will trigger the Second Coming?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: No, no.

TUCKER CARLSON: When we say Greater Israel, do we have a clear map in mind of what that will mean? Could mean.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Whenever you talk about Greater Israel, there’s hardly ever a real map in mind. I talk about it in terms of the occupied territories plus Green Line Israel, but obviously the Israelis themselves, most Israelis, I think, have a bigger map in mind.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do we know where that ends? I mean, it doesn’t go to Cairo, I assume.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: No, no, I think the Sinai. What they take of Egypt, I think will, if they can, will be the Sinai. And I don’t think they would take all of Syria or all of Lebanon, but they would take big chunks of the south of those two countries.

But the idea behind the Christian Zionists is that to facilitate the Second Coming, for religious reasons, we should support Israel. But this does, as you say, cut against the fact that the Israelis oftentimes treat Christians as badly as they do Muslims. There was recently a case where they bombed a Catholic church in northern Gaza. And Trump was infuriated when he heard this and he called up Netanyahu and told him… this is recently, like within the past two weeks… told Netanyahu that he had to apologize. And the Pope even spoke out on this.

But even there, the criticism is quite muted because again, hardly anybody in the west really criticizes Israel in a meaningful way.

TUCKER CARLSON: 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 sects in 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.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yeah, you’re not going to get any argument from me on that.

The Future of American-Israeli Relations

TUCKER CARLSON: So where does it go from here now that things that 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, where are we? What happens next?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: It’s hard to tell a happy story. But here’s how I think about it. The first question you want to ask yourself is what are the Israelis likely to do moving forward? In other words, if the Israelis all of a sudden got reasonable, a lot of these problems would go away. But there is no sign the Israelis are going to get more reasonable. If anything, the political center of gravity is moving further and further to the right in Israel as the years go by.

So Israeli behavior in the Middle East, if anything, is likely to be even more aggressive and more offensive to people around the world. So what does that mean here in the United States? It means that the lobby is going to have to work even harder than it’s now working. And again, you want to remember, the lobby is now out in the open and it’s engaging in smash mouth politics. But it’s going to have to work harder.

TUCKER CARLSON: Most vicious people I’ve ever dealt with. Ever.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yeah, yeah. Anybody who’s dealt with them and I’ve dealt with them for longer than you have understands full well what you’re talking about. But see, here’s the problem, Tucker. The problem is that support among younger people for Israel is much weaker than it is among older people.

TUCKER CARLSON: Including Jews.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Including Jews, yes. Very important to emphasize that. Very important. So the problem is that inside of American society you’re moving towards a situation where increased 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 politic 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 you go on with the lobby operating out in the open and engaging in smash mouth politics?

TUCKER CARLSON: 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. That can’t go on long. That’s too stupid to work over time.

Campus Protests and Anti-Semitism Claims

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: No, I agree. Look at what’s happening on campuses. Right here you have these students out there protesting, protesting a genocide, right? Many of the students who are out there protesting are Jewish. This cannot be emphasized enough. Many of them are Jewish and all of a sudden they’re turned into raving anti-Semites. This is all about anti-Semitism. It has nothing to do with the genocide that’s taking place in Palestine. This is crazy, right?

And I talk to people on campuses. Everybody understands this. Everybody understands that this has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. I’ve been in academia for decades. I’ve been at the University of Chicago for 44 years. Before October 7, nobody at Chicago or Harvard talked about an anti-Semitism problem. It was just unheard of.

Huge numbers of administrators, including provosts and presidents, were Jewish. Huge numbers of deans and faculty members were Jewish. Huge numbers of students, graduate and undergraduate were Jewish. This is a wonderful thing. Nobody was ever critical of it. Was there an anti-Semitism problem? I never heard about it and I don’t know anybody who was talking about it.

But all of a sudden, after October 7th, what we discover is that these college campuses are hotbeds of anti-Semitism. This makes no sense at all because of course they were not hotbeds of anti-Semitism. What they were were hotbeds of criticism of Israel and what it was doing to the Palestinians. But you can’t say that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Because you are in effect bringing attention to the genocide that’s taking place in Gaza. And that is unacceptable. I mean, newspapers like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, they never even use the word genocide or anything approximating that. It’s just verboten. And the idea is to make Israel look like, if anything, it’s the victim. That’s the Wall Street Journal’s principal mission, right? To make Israel look like it’s the victim.

Media Credibility and Bias

TUCKER CARLSON: Wall Street Journal is so discredited as a newspaper. It’s like, I wouldn’t, I’d rather read the Guardian. I mean, I’d rather read anything other than the Wall Street Journal.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, I like to argue that the Wall Street Journal is two newspapers in one. The news and then the opinion, it’s all been corrupted.

TUCKER CARLSON: It changed leadership and it’s just the whole thing is to. I know some great people who work there, so still. And they’re honest people, but the paper is the most dishonest, I would say, of all papers. That’s just my view and I used to write for them, so.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, you’ll get no argument from me. As bad as the New York Times and Washington Post are, they pale in comparison to the Wall Street.

TUCKER CARLSON: I totally agree. And at least the New York Times, the, and especially the New York, the Washington Post are just like liberal papers, okay? There’s Democratic Party papers. I know exactly what you are. I’m not like the Guardian, just a left wing paper, socialist pack paper. I’m not shocked by anything. They’re pretty upfront about it.

The Wall Street Journal is uniquely offensive to me because of the deception involved. They pretend to be one thing, but they’re very much not that thing. They’re something entirely different. And they’re stealthy and incredibly dishonest. And I look forward to their demise with unchristian enthusiasm. Excuse me.

But anyway, can I just ask you like a question I should have asked before. You have this population of over 2 million people. How many remain in Gaza now? Do we know or. No, there’s no news coverage allowed, so we don’t. I guess maybe we don’t know, but.

Gaza Population and Casualties

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, there are 2.3 million. To start.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, to start.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: That’s the approximate number. Who are there? It appears that some have gotten out. It’s hard to gauge how many. There was one person who told me he thought that about 100,000 had gotten out. Another person told me 50,000. I’m not sure, but not a million. Oh, no, no, no, no. The question is how many have been killed, right?

TUCKER CARLSON: Do we have any idea?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Not really. There. You know, the estimates are around 60,000.

TUCKER CARLSON: 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. We can’t even get. I’ve never met anyone who can give me a hard number on Russian casualties, Ukrainian casualties, or dead Palestinians in Gaza. That’s weird.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: It’s weird. There are two different cases. I mean, the Ukrainians have a deep seated interest, for example, in not revealing how many people have been killed, of course.

TUCKER CARLSON: And so do the Russians, by the way.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yeah. 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 as a legitimate study that said that they believe or the study concludes that there are about 400,000 missing people in.

TUCKER CARLSON: 400,000.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: 400,000. Yeah. Now I’m not saying that’s true. I’m just saying that there are obviously lots of missing people. Right. Well, if you look at 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 debt.

Population Transfer and International Response

TUCKER CARLSON: So of the remaining, you know, probably less than 2 million, but close to 2 million people. It’s a lot of people. Where do they go?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I mean, this is a great question.

TUCKER CARLSON: Can there actually be in 2025 a transfer of people like that? I mean, the Second World War wasn’t that long ago. Like, people have memories or impressions of what it looks like to move that many people. It’s just not, that’s not good.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, the news reports say that the Israelis and the Americans are talking to the Libyans and the Ethiopians and the Indonesians about acceptance, least accepting the Palestinians or at least a substantial portion of that, let’s say 2 million that are left.

TUCKER CARLSON: 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 benefit on for thousands of years, into some foreign country and just like, that’s cool, we’re doing this, it’s for their safety. Could you actually do that?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, I didn’t actually think that the Israelis could execute a genocide in Gaza. I didn’t think they’d be able to do what they have done since October 7th.

TUCKER CARLSON: I guess there are no rules. You just do what you can do.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: And yeah, we’re at a point where you want to say that that is a possibility. I’m like you, I find it hard to imagine. Yeah, I’m sickened by this, the whole process of the whole thing.

TUCKER CARLSON: I just know what, they all get on boats or something and like people have iPhones. They can.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I mean, well, also, I think there’ll be resistance. Right? I mean, Hamas is still there. The Israelis have not defeated Hamas. Right, yeah, so. But your question is a great one. The question is, where do we end up here?

Netanyahu’s Endgame Strategy

TUCKER CARLSON: What the hell?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Where do we end up? 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, what. Once the war ends, what’s the plan for dealing with the Palestinians? And Netanyahu refuses to give the military a plan. And the military says we can’t.

TUCKER CARLSON: His own military.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: His own military, the IDF. He. The military says that we can’t wage the campaign without knowing what the end game is. Right, okay. But Netanyahu won’t tell them what the end game is because the end game is to drive all the Palestinians out. The reason that Netanyahu has no plan. Right. For dealing with the Palestinians at the end of the fighting is because he expect them to. He expects them to all be gone. Okay?

Now what we’re saying here is that hasn’t happened. It’s hard to imagine that happening. Right. And although the Israelis have been murdering huge numbers of Palestinian, at some point, a substantial number are going to be left. So the question is, what does that look like?

TUCKER CARLSON: And they probably won’t be more moderate by that point.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: No. But what they’re going to end up in is a giant ghetto. Right, or concentration camp. That’s what they’re building now. And again, this gets back to our earlier discussion of what this means for Israel’s reputation in the United States and in the west more generally. You’re going to build a ghetto. You’re going to put, you know, 2 million people in a ghetto and continue to starve them. Is this sustainable?

Impact on Israeli Society

TUCKER CARLSON: What it does tend to affect your moral authority when you do that.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I also think it has a terribly corrupting influence on your society at large. Yeah, 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, yeah, because, I mean. 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 a 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. But just like civil liberties liberal.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: If you were Jewish, of course.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s a totally fair point. That kind of went over my head on my trips there. But you’re absolutely right.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: It was designed to go over your.

TUCKER CARLSON: Head, and it did. You’re absolutely right. But my point is the things that are happening now to Israeli citizens are so shocking to me. That total elimination of free speech. You say certain things, you go right to jail. Question like, what the hell happened on October 7th? Which is a completely fair question. Any in any free society that should be allowed. Not allowed.

Banning people from leaving the country. Your right to travel, especially to leave, is a foundational right. They’re telling Israeli citizens you’re not allowed to leave. I don’t know. Why is that not a big story? I don’t really get it. And then the treatment of Christians, which is. Is disgusting.

Those are all signs of. The society is becoming illiberal, really. Is becoming authoritarian. Very. I mean, that’s authoritarian. You’re not allowed to leave the country. You can’t say what you think. That’s not a free country. And those are all downstream of the military response post, October 7th. So I think it makes your point. This is corrupting to their society, as the stuff always is. 9/11 is totally corrupting to our society.

Military and Social Breakdown

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I agree. Just add a couple points to that. The Israeli military has a huge PTSD problem.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I bet. Really?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yeah. Yeah. And the Jerusalem Post had a piece, I think it was the Jerusalem Post had a piece the other day that said there have been five suicides after the. During the past two weeks. So they’re having a significant problem with suicide, significant problem with PTSD. And they’re having huge problems getting reservists to report for duty.

TUCKER CARLSON: I bet.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Because the Israeli military is heavily dependent on reservists, and the reservists have basically had it. And so this war is having a corrosive effect. And the thing you want to understand is there’s no end in sight. There really isn’t. Yeah. And now they’re in southern Lebanon. Now they’re in southern Syria, but in the United States.

U.S. Leverage and Potential Solutions

TUCKER CARLSON: Shut this down to tomorrow. Like, not one more dollar for this stuff. You blew up a church. No more money for you.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: The fact that the Israelis are so dependent on us, as we were talking about before, and we were just, you know, hitting on the tip of the iceberg. They are so dependent on us, means we have tremendous coercive leverage over them. This is why the, this is why the lobby has to work so hard. Right. We have tremendous coercive leverage on them. So we could shut this down. Down. We could fundamentally, this afternoon. I don’t want to go that far, but we need a couple days.

TUCKER CARLSON: But yeah, no more money for you if you do one more.

The Reality of Israeli Society and Leadership

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, we could also punish them in significant ways. We could easily bring Israel to its knees. And by the way, I have long argued that that would be in Israel’s interest. It is not in Israel’s interest. It is not in the interest of Jews around the world for this craziness to continue. This craziness should end right away. For the good of Israel, for the good of Jews, for the good of the United States. It makes no sense at all.

TUCKER CARLSON: To what extent is this Netanyahu? Like you often see him singled out as the guy who’s pushing this, whose vision this is. If Netanyahu retired tomorrow, would this continue?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yes. The fact is that he is not unrepresentative of the larger 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 Netanyahu. That’s why he’s still in office, despite the fact he was responsible for what happened on October 7th. Of course, he was in charge. 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 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, who are far to the right of Netanyahu.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, there weren’t that many of them. Or at least that I was aware of. I mean, again, I’m not an expert, don’t speak Hebrew. But I mean, I’ve been around it a lot and I felt like, again, it was a pretty liberal European type society. That was my impression of it.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, those days are gone. 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. But I don’t think that’s going to happen.

The Temple Mount Crisis

TUCKER CARLSON: What happens on the Temple Mount, do you think? So there’s the Second Temple was obviously built on the Mount in Jerusalem. It was knocked down by the Romans in A.D. 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. My sense is that’s coming to a head. Do you have any feeling about that?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I think you’re right. I think the further right Israel moves or the more hawkish it becomes, the more likely it is that will come to a head. There’s no question that certainly the religious right in Israel is deeply committed to building a third Temple.

TUCKER CARLSON: But you’d have to blow up the mosque to do it.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: And what would happen if someone blew up the third holiest site in Islam in the middle of Jerusalem?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: 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. 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: Feels like that’s a, I mean that’s, there are a billion Muslims, so.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: But they have a huge collective action problem. What are those billion Muslims going to do? I mean they can’t organize themselves into armored divisions and strike into Israel.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, but they could. I mean, I think we learned from 9/11 a small group of determined people can have a big effect on events.

The 9/11 Connection and Strategic Liability

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Oh yeah, well that’s all coming too, right? I mean this is one of the problems that many Western Jews worry about that 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. I was talking about building armored divisions. That’s foolish. They’re not going to build armored 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 Muhammad, 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. Nothing could be further from the truth. Osama bin Laden and KSM have both explicitly said that it was US policy toward Israel that caused 9/11.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why do you suppose that so many 9/11 documents are still classified almost 25 years after the fact?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I don’t know. I mean, why are so many Jeffrey Epstein documents effectively classified? Why are so many Kennedy assassination documents still not released?

TUCKER CARLSON: Still not released? That’s correct.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: You really do wonder. They obviously have something to hide. In most cases it’s very hard to divine what it is that they’re trying to hide. And that’s certainly true with regard to 9/11. But we just don’t know.

TUCKER CARLSON: We don’t know. 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.

America’s Future in Global Power Competition

So you have a piece out, is 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, but you’ve been right on some of the big, big, big questions, and you’ve stood essentially alone in your field in your predictions that have been vindicated on them, not just about the power of foreign lobbies, but about China, 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?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: 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 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s the second time you made reference to 2017 as the threshold for China. What is the definition? How does a country go from being a big power to a great power?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: It develops enough military capability to put up a serious fight against the most powerful state in the system.

TUCKER CARLSON: Thank you.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Right, 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 the 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 wealth coupled with that population size, China becomes a great power.

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 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 hole, 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.

The Importance of Power in International Relations

TUCKER CARLSON: And is that power worth having? I mean, I don’t know. It’s more complicated than it sounds. I mean, do people’s lives improve? Which seems like an important measure, not the only measure, but certainly one.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, this is the realist in me, Tucker, 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. 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.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, it was, too.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yes. And why did they suffer a century of national humiliation? Because they were weak.

TUCKER CARLSON: Because they were divided.

The Importance of Power in International Relations

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Right. 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.

The Taiwan Question

TUCKER CARLSON: Do we wind up in a war with China over Taiwan?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I think it’s possible. 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 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: Vietnam.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: In Vietnam, yeah. Where they were foolish enough to follow in our footsteps.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yep.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: And we were foolish enough to follow in the French footsteps and go in there. So they went in in ’79 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.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re good at waiting.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: They’re good at waiting. That is, I think that’s true. So I don’t think – and I want to underline I’m using the word “think.” The other point, just very quickly, we do live in a nuclear world, and we have nuclear weapons. And they have nuclear weapons. And the incentive for them to avoid a war with the United States and for us to avoid a war with them because of nuclear weapons is very great. So that may really put a damper on things if we ever get into a serious crisis.

Closing Remarks

TUCKER CARLSON: Professor, thank you for spending all this time. That was wonderful.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: It’s my pleasure, Tucker. Thanks very much for having me on the show.

TUCKER CARLSON: Thank you for doing this. And congratulations on being vindicated after all these years. That must be nice. Whether you admit it or not, you have been so. Thank you.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I’m going to plead the Fifth Amendment. Thank you again.

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