Read the transcript of John Mearsheimer’s interview on Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, it’s hard to see how Trump gets a good deal.
First of all, I would dispute your claim that this is a stalemate and people are getting slaughtered on both sides. I think if you look carefully at what’s happening on the battlefield, the Russians are clearly winning. They’re steadily moving forward and capturing all sorts of strategic territory. They’re inflicting, in my opinion, many more casualties on the Ukrainians than the Ukrainians are inflicting on the Russians.
And all of this is to say, I think the Russians are in the driver’s seat. They believe that they have the military capability to win this war. The second point I’d make is that in terms of actually getting a deal, Putin believes that Ukraine in NATO is an existential threat.
And Putin is demanding that the United States and Ukraine accept the fact that Ukraine will never be either a de jure or a de facto member of NATO. Furthermore, Putin is demanding that Ukraine and the West, and here we’re talking mainly about the United States, accept the fact that he has annexed, or Russia has annexed, four Ukrainian Oblasts plus Crimea. Getting the West to accept that, and certainly getting Ukraine to accept that, is going to be extremely difficult, if not impossible.
And the same thing is true with regard to a neutral Ukraine.
So I find it hard to believe how Trump is going to be able to agree to the principal demands of Putin for settling this conflict.
So I don’t think you’re going to get a meaningful peace agreement here. I think what you’re going to get is a frozen conflict. At some point I think the conflict is going to peter out and you’ll have a frozen conflict.
But the end result of that is that the potential for that frozen conflict to turn into a hot conflict once again will be ever present.
PIERS MORGAN: Yeah, I mean it’s almost impossible to imagine, having taken Crimea, if Putin is able to hang on to the territory he’s taken in this phase of his war with Ukraine, that he’s not going to want more.
Ultimately. I mean, why wouldn’t he try and get more? It would be in his nature to do so, wouldn’t it?
JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I agree completely. I think he’s taken about 20% now. He’s taken four Oblasts in the easternmost part of Ukraine plus Crimea.
And I think that he will try to take roughly 40% of Ukrainian territory. I think he’ll try to take Odessa. I think he’ll try to take Kharkiv. And I think he’ll probably try to take two or three other Oblasts.
And what he will attempt to do is turn Ukraine into a dysfunctional rump state and put Russia in a position where it controls a huge swath of territory in eastern Ukraine, including Odessa, which will then prevent Ukraine from having access to the Black Sea.
And the fact is, Piers, every time people in the West and Ukrainians talk about bringing Ukraine into NATO, that just gives the Russians greater incentive to take more territory and to do more to wreck Ukraine.
So this situation, in my opinion, is disastrous for Ukraine. It’s disastrous in the extreme for Ukraine, but it also means that it’s going to be exceedingly difficult for President Trump to get any kind of meaningful peace agreement with the Russians.
Trump’s Proposed Deal
PIERS MORGAN: Well, he’s already come out and explained one way he may try and do this. He wrote on his True Social platform on Wednesday, “I’m going to do Russia, whose economy is failing, and President Putin a very big favor.
Settle now and stop this ridiculous war. It’s only going to get worse. If we don’t make a deal soon, I have no other choice but to put high tariffs, taxes, tariffs and sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States and various other participating countries. Let’s get this war, which wouldn’t have started if I were president, over with.
We can do it the easy way or the hard way, and the easy way is always better. It’s time to make a deal.”
Now Putin responded by telling a Russian state TV journalist, “We believe the current president’s statements about his readiness to work together, we are always open to this and ready for negotiations, it would be better for us to meet based on the realities of today to talk calmly.”
And he described his relationship with Trump as “businesslike, pragmatic and trustworthy.”
I mean, unusually diplomatic from Putin there, but Trump wielding the card of big tariffs in particular that he’s just done very successfully with Colombia in one of the shortest showdowns in history, obviously a very different situation with Putin.
But is he right in saying that Russia’s economy is failing and that actually if America did really turn the screw economically on the sanctions, it could make Putin come to the table?
JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I think that Trump’s comments are divorced from reality.
First of all, as I said before, the Russians are in the driver’s seat on the battlefield. There’s nothing that Trump can do to turn the tide on the battlefield. And this of course is why he emphasizes putting greater economic sanctions on the Russians.
But this is not going to work because there’s hardly any room for more economic sanctions because we have so thoroughly sanctioned the Russians.
Don’t you think Joe Biden, who was deeply committed to defeating the Russians in Ukraine, has put almost all of the possible sanctions on Russia? And the answer is yes, he has.
So it’s not like there are these sanctions in the back closet that Trump can turn to and then bring the Russian economy to its knees. And furthermore, the Russian economy is not doing badly. And by some accounts, it’s doing quite well.
So the idea that he’s going to really damage the Ukrainian, excuse me, the Russian economy, I believe doesn’t make any sense.
But furthermore, let’s assume that he can really hurt the Russian economy.
The question you want to ask yourself is what will the Russians do? Will they capitulate? I do not think they will capitulate because the Russians believe that Ukraine and NATO, they believe that the West winning is an existential threat to Russia.
So the Russians are committed to pay an enormous price to prevail in Ukraine.
So even if I’m wrong and Trump is right and he can damage the Russian economy in a significant way, I think in the final analysis, the Russians will not throw up their hands and surrender. They will continue to fight on.
Russia’s Strength
PIERS MORGAN: Now one response I would have to that, which I just wanted to put to you as a potential like clue that perhaps you may not be entirely correct about your reading of it, is both in Russia’s military and economic strength. What happened in Syria, because it seemed to me very strange that this bunch of rebels were able to run through Syria, depose Bashar al-Assad who immediately fled to Russia, and that Russia basically decamped just as fast themselves and didn’t try to stop this happening, having taken a bit of a stranglehold on Assad’s side a decade ago.
Was there nothing about that that made you think, well, that’s a very curious response by Russia, and that maybe it was a sign they’re not as strong as you think?
JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I think what happened in Syria is that American sanctions on Syria, coupled with the fact that the United States basically controlled all of Syrian oil and therefore cut off the revenues from that oil to the Syrian government, ended up strangling the Syrian economy, which in turn led to the hollowing out of the Syrian army.
So the Syrian army was not capable of putting up a fight in late November when the rebels started their offensive, and it quickly collapsed. Both the Russians and the Iranians were willing to help the Syrian government, the Assad government. They had a deep-seated interest in helping Assad, but they could not help Assad, simply because his army had been hollowed out and was not capable of putting up a fight.
And there was no way the Iranians and the Russians could send their own troops to do the fighting for Assad’s troops.
So the Russians and the Iranians basically had to leave Syria, and it was clearly a defeat for them.
But the situation that Russia faced in Syria is fundamentally different than the situation that the Russians faced in Ukraine. The Russians have a huge army that has become more formidable with the passage of time. The SACEUR, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, who was an American general, General Covello, has said that the Russian army today is a much more formidable fighting force than it was when the war broke out in February of 2022.
