Read the full transcript of a conversation between Judge Andrew Napolitano and international relations scholar Prof. John Mearsheimer on Judging Freedom Podcast titled “Can Europe Survive?” premiered March 20, 2025.
TRANSCRIPT:
Introduction and Middle East Situation
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, March 20, 2025. Professor John Mearsheimer joins us now. Professor Mearsheimer, thank you very much for your time. I want to spend some time speaking to you about Europe and the reaction on the part of the Europeans to the apparent cozying up of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and Trump’s disdain for the amount of money the United States pays in NATO and how a lot of that may end up. But before we do, why did the United States, from your understanding, bomb civilians in Yemen this week, claiming that somehow the Houthis are a danger to US shipping when there’s not a single recorded incident of the Houthis striking an American vessel?
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, as usual, we did this for Israel. Almost everything we do in the Middle East these days is done on behalf of Israel. And the fact is that what’s happened here is that the ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza has broken down and the Israelis have gone back on a rampage. They’re beginning to execute the genocide once again. And the Houthis have said that as soon as that happened, they’d go after shipping in the Red Sea that was aimed at Israel, and they would also fire ballistic missiles at Israel itself. And that’s exactly what’s happened.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: What are they trying to do to prevent goods and supplies and commodities and oil making its way to Israel?
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yes, I think it’s largely symbolic, to be honest, but the Houthis are deeply committed to stopping the genocide. I mean, what’s really kind of amazing here is that if you look at all the different players in the international system, the two players who’ve gone to the greatest lengths to shut down the genocide in Gaza, which one would think is a good thing, are Hezbollah and the Houthis. And in contrast, the United States and its European allies are complicit in the genocide.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: No question about that. Isn’t it odd? I mean, Donald Trump, with some justification, took credit for the ceasefire before he was even in the White House via his aide, Stephen Witkoff, and now he’s trashing his own agreement.
Trump Administration’s Foreign Policy
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: It is odd. I’m actually somewhat surprised. I thought that when they pushed Witkoff and Trump pushed through the ceasefire right before Trump was inaugurated, that they would see to it that you moved from the first phase into the second phase and that they would prevent Israel from stymying movement into the second phase. But, in fact, they have not acted that way. And as you know, it’s Israel that has caused the ceasefire to break down. It is not Hamas and we have nevertheless backed Israel hook, line and sinker. And in fact, Trump has said today that he fully supports the restarting of the genocide in Gaza.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Right before we came on, I was looking at Ha’aretz, an Israeli newspaper that you and I read regularly in English. The death toll in 48 hours in Gaza, 710. I mean, this is just catastrophic. At this rate, this will exceed the slaughter that they perpetrated starting on October 7th or October 8th whenever they invaded. Donald Trump is worse than Joe Biden in this respect. Because you add the domestic repression here, which you and I have talked about, and it seems to be a new incident every day. There’s a medical researcher at Georgetown University or a resident alien, permanent resident alien, who tried to get back into the US they wouldn’t let him back in because they found on his phone criticisms of Trump. But what authority did they get the phone? They don’t have authority just to take his phone, but it took the phone and there it was. And so now they’re not going to let him in. Wait a minute. Criticisms of Donald Trump. What about Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech? That’s pretty clear.
Civil Liberties Concerns
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Look, I think your basic point that overall Trump is worse than Biden is certainly true. If you look at the assault on civil liberties now taking place in the United States, it is really terrible. And it’s Trump at work. Biden, for all his flaws, did not do much on this dimension. He was not good on this dimension. He sided against the protesters who were executing their right to protest Israeli policy in Gaza, but he was not doing anywhere near as much to suppress free speech and freedom of assembly as Trump is.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Yeah, I mean, this stuff is just overt. The case of the young man from Columbia University, you know, Constitution says you have that the government wants life, liberty, or property from you for whatever reason. The litigation must occur in the judicial district in which the government says you did whatever forms the basis for its claims against you. Well, that would be New York City. They shipped them to Louisiana. Why? Because the judges in Louisiana obviously have a more pro-government attitude about immigration. And then the trial judge in New York, before whom his habeas corpus petition was filed, said, well, I’m going to move you to New Jersey. Well, there’s no connection to New Jersey here either. It’s a little bit closer. It’s a lot closer than Louisiana.
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: But…
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Nobody seems to care about the process. Due process is very, very important. Those so-called Gang members from Venezuela. Not a single one of them had due process.
The government didn’t even have their names, much less any evidence against them. It just swooped them up, condemned them on the basis of collective guilt, which is antithetical to due process, and in defiance of a court order, shipped them to El Salvador where they’re in jail cells the size of a coffin.
Resistance and Public Response
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: It’s shocking. And two further points on this. One is you just wonder where all of this leads, because this is just the beginning. Donald Trump is going to be in power for roughly another four years, and the problems associated with Israel, which is what are really driving this whole phenomenon, are not going to go away. So the incentives for Trump to continue to act this way and maybe even double down are great. And then the second point I would make is, where is the resistance? It’s quite remarkable how little resistance there is.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: You’re right, you’re right. You and I lived through the Vietnam War era. The resistance was overwhelming. I’m beginning to think that it was not a principled resistance, that it was just based upon the existence of the draft.
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, it was some of both. And you want to remember that there was evidence that once the draft went away, and the draft went away at the end of the war, the resistance died down significantly.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Right.
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: That is not surprising. But the point I would make here, Judge, is that there is lots of resistance, or there has been lots of resistance in the United States to the genocide in Gaza. But what the Trump administration has done quite successfully at the behest of the lobby, is shut down that resistance. That’s what’s going on here.
Trump’s Foreign Policy Contradictions
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Why isn’t, I don’t know what the alliteration would be to comport with genocide, Joe. Genocide, Donald? I don’t know. But why isn’t there that moniker being painted on him? And here’s a guy who calls himself in his inaugural address a man of peace. Here’s a guy who’s taken American foreign policy with respect to Ukraine and Russia and turned a battleship around 180 degrees. And at the same time, he’s funding slaughter, abject slaughter of women and children and babies in the Middle East. I don’t get it. I don’t get it.
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I’ll give you the answer. It’s very simple. Three words. The Israel lobby.
Russia-Ukraine Situation
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Wow. Let’s just switch gears a little bit. Do you see any significance in the so-called agreement between Presidents Trump and Putin and belatedly Zelensky on this so-called non-ceasefire ceasefire? We won’t attack energy infrastructure, even though each of them is done. Do you see—I’m being a little snarky—do you see any significance in that?
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: No, it’s largely irrelevant. It’s just subject matter that gives us something to talk about on shows like this. This doesn’t matter. What matters is whether or not Trump and Putin can reach an agreement on the three key demands that the Russians have made to settle this conflict once and for all. The Russians have made it unequivocally clear there’s going to be no meaningful ceasefire until there is agreement on their three demands and until you have in place a meaningful peace agreement. And as far as I can tell, we’re nowhere near a meaningful peace agreement. And what we’re talking about is a ceasefire. And again, the Russians say no ceasefire of any consequence until you get a meaningful agreement.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Do you think that Putin said—this is pure speculation—to Trump, turn off the spigot of aid and intel and then we’ll talk?
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I don’t know what they talked about. For me, the really key issue is not that question that you just raised. The key issue for me is what they said about the key Russian demands.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Right.
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: To settle this war, the Americans, the Ukrainians, and the Europeans have to agree to what I think are the three key demands of the Russians. And if you don’t accept those demands, it goes on and on and on.
Trump-Putin Communications
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: They can’t even agree on what they talked about because the Kremlin readout was different from the White House readout. Now, here’s Karoline Leavitt being grilled by a reporter. It may be a Russian reporter, I’m not sure, but in the White House press room about the difference between the two readouts.
[UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Kremlin readout mentioned that Trump and Putin spoke about potential U.S.-Russia hockey games. And the Kremlin readout also said that Russia wanted the US to stop US Intelligence and US Funding to Ukraine. The president has said that that conversation did not happen. Just wondering if you can get us any more clarity on that and also, again, if it’s energy infrastructure or if it’s energy and infrastructure, because I think there is a big difference between that.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: As for the readouts of the call, I would defer you to ours. And when it comes to the topic of hockey, it did come up. However, we’re more interested in securing a peace deal than scheduling hockey games right now.]
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: So who knows what they talked about? They certainly didn’t talk about a ceasefire on the energy infrastructure for two and a half hours. I mean, they must have talked about bigger pictures. You think they talked about realism and reset?
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I would bet that they talked about the Russian demands and they’re just not going public. I find it hard to believe that they talked for two plus hours and didn’t get to the heart of the issue. I mean, Trump has a deep-seated interest in settling this sooner rather than later.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Right? Right.
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: You would think he would therefore bring up, and you would think Putin would bring up the key issues that have to be addressed.
Contrasting Foreign Policies
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Do you see any connection between these two disparate sets of behavior on Trump’s part? One, doing what he can to bring about, short of turning off the spigot of arms to bring about peace in Ukraine. And two, giving Netanyahu whatever he wants to slaughter innocents in Gaza. You see any connection there?
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: No, there’s no connection. As I said, I think the difference is the Israel Lobby has huge influence in the Middle East. If you took the Israel Lobby out of the American political system, let’s assume there’s no Israel Lobby. The United States would have had for many years now, decades now, a fundamentally different policy toward Israel. It is very important to understand. Hardly anyone will say this, but US Policy toward Israel is not in the American national interest. Israel is an albatross around our neck. But no president can challenge Israel in any meaningful way because of fear of the Israel Lobby, and this includes Donald Trump. So you take away the Israel Lobby and I would bet my life savings that Donald Trump would have a fundamentally different policy towards the Middle East and it would look a lot like his policy toward Ukraine. But the fact is, Donald Trump’s views and his policies on the Middle East are heavily influenced by Miriam Adelson and people of that sort.
European Security Concerns
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Okay, let’s transition to Europe. Is there any evidence from any source of which you are aware that Vladimir Putin plans to invade Western Europe?
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: No, it’s not even a serious argument.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Do you think that Starmer and Macron and Mertz and Maloney go to bed at night worrying and wondering if this is going to happen?
The Future of NATO and European Security
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I’m tempted to say no because they’re supposed to be serious people. But just listening to them talk, I’m not sure they’re serious people. I mean, when I listen to Starmer and Macron talk about this coalition of the willing and what it’s going to do in Ukraine and so forth and so on, I tend to think they’re delusional.
And so I find it hard to believe myself, just using my own critical faculties that they think that Russia is going to invade countries in Eastern Europe, much less be a military threat to Western Europe. But they talk about that all the time, so maybe they are delusional.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Is the United States abandoning Europe?
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, I think there’s no question that Trump intends to greatly reduce the American commitment to Europe. I think he does not like the Europeans. He’s contemptuous when it comes to the Europeans. He does not like NATO. He wants to have good relations with Putin and with Russia more generally. And I think slowly but steadily we are moving away from Europe.
Now, whether we fully pull out remains to be seen. I would note to you, Judge, that if you listen to the Europeans talk, if you listen carefully, I think most of the European leaders understand that that is in the offing. They understand that Trump wants out and that relations between the two sides of the Atlantic are not good and not likely to improve and indeed, if anything, get worse. So I would be very surprised if NATO is a meaningful institution by the time Trump leaves office.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: So two observations from my interview last week with Sergey Lavrov. One, I asked him if or when the United States leaves NATO, what will become of it? And he rejected my premise. He doesn’t think the United States will leave NATO.
And two was off the record and not being taped. I said, are you guys really going to… This is at the time that Marco Rubio said he had an agreement with Zelensky for a ceasefire. I said, are you really seriously considering a ceasefire? And he said, where would we… We are. And then he stopped, meaning that close, holding his forefinger and thumb about an inch and a half apart to indicate very close to achieving our objective.
So to the first statement rejecting my premise that the United States will leave NATO, what are your thoughts on that?
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, I think he’s probably right that the United States is not going to leave NATO in a formal sense. But as I was saying before, I think that we are going to greatly reduce our commitment to NATO and we are going to great lengths, we will go to great lengths to turn NATO over to the Europeans, let them run NATO.
I wouldn’t be surprised, for example, if the SACEUR, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, who has traditionally been an American, is at some point in the not too distant future, a European general or admiral. So I think the United States is going to have much less influence in NATO, and I think it’ll probably be as an institution, it’ll probably be a hollow shell by the end of Trump’s term.
American Foreign Policy and Sovereignty
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: If you define realism as a universal respect for the sovereignty, the borders and the legitimate security needs of other countries. Hasn’t NATO collectively rejected realism? And am I not talking to at this very moment the principal progenitor of this theory, John Mearsheimer?
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, there is no question that the United States does not believe in the sovereignty of other countries.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Right?
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: There’s no country that interferes in the internal affairs of other countries more than the United States does. The color revolutions in Eastern Europe, our attempt to do regime change in both Beijing and Moscow are just some examples of our proclivity for violating the sovereignty of other countries.
And I would note to you that we recoil when anybody interferes in our sovereignty. You know, all this talk about the Russians being involved in the 2016 election, it just drove Americans crazy. Even though it wasn’t true. Russia gave was a false narrative. But nevertheless, we don’t like any other country violating our sovereignty. Yet we go around the world violating the sovereignty of other countries. And this does not make good sense.
The Future of Europe
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: What do you think will become of Europe with a diminished NATO and an absent or a diminished US? I mean, is Germany going to rearm and point missiles at Moscow? Is Starmer going to quintuple the size of his 42,000 man army? Are the French going to saber rattle their nuclear weapons?
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, there are two issues at play here. One is what the United States does, but the other issue is how serious you think the Russian threat is. If you believe there’s a serious Russian threat to Europe, then that gives the countries of Europe an incentive to rearm in a systematic way and to coordinate their efforts to try to contain this Russian threat, even in the absence of the United States.
But as you and I were talking about a few minutes ago, there is no serious threat to Europe from Russia. Russia is simply not powerful enough or foolish enough to try to overrun Eastern Europe, much less all of Europe. So the threat is not there, number one.
And number two, the Americans are greatly reducing their presence in European affairs. In all likelihood, what this means is that Europe, the European countries that form what we call Europe, are going to pursue their own interests in ways that lead to clashes among those countries. And you’re going to have a significant collective action problem among the countries in Europe.
And you’re not going to have the Americans there and the Russian threat there to help mitigate these collective action problems. So therefore, in the future, talking about Europe as if it were a single entity is not going to make any sense at all. Because what we’re going to see at play are different countries pursuing their own interests in ways that often clash with the interests of other European countries.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: So if Trump negotiates a deal with the BRICS and opens up channels of commercial intercourse with Brazil, Russia, China, India, South Africa, are they going to keep the EU out? Will the EU want to stay out? Or will they, like Nixon with blue jeans and stereos and washing machines, want to interact commercially with Russia in order to reduce cultural boundaries rather than build them up?
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, I think that if the United States pulls out of Europe and it becomes clear that there is no meaningful Russian threat, once the Ukraine war comes to an end, either through a frozen conflict or through some sort of genuine peace agreement, it is highly likely that different countries in Europe will start trading once again with the Russians. Which countries and how much trade you have and how fast it happens remains to be seen, but I think that that will happen.
You want to distinguish here, when you talk about the United States and Europe, between economic relations and military relations. I think there’s no question that the United States will continue to have extensive economic intercourse with Europe. That’s just going to happen.
The really interesting question is, what about the American military presence in Europe? That gets back to your question about NATO. That gets back to your conversation with Lavrov. That’s not about economic intercourse. That’s about the American military presence in Europe. And that’s a really big question.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Don’t you have about 25,000 troops in Germany?
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yes.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: If Trump brings them home, that is an enormous void, even economically for the Germans, I would think.
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I don’t think the economic dimension matters that much. It will matter some. I think the key point is that the United States is the pacifier in Europe. That’s why the Europeans are desperate to keep us there. They understand that we solved the collective action problem that they face if they have to operate individually, by themselves.
And also we keep the peace because we are so powerful in a very important way. We are the night watchmen. And if you take the night watchmen away in a world where there is no external threat that motivates these countries to come together and coordinate their efforts, then those centrifugal forces that I was talking about begin to have a pretty profound influence on relations among the various states in Europe.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Professor Mearsheimer, always a pleasure. My dear friend. Thank you for letting me run the gamut on the subject matter, but thank you for your time. Thanks for accommodating my schedule. Look forward to seeing you next week.
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Likewise. And as usual, it was great to be here.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Well, thank you. Thank you again, my dear friend. Coming up tomorrow. The Intelligence Community Roundtable with Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern at 4:00 Eastern. Andrew Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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