Judging Freedom - Prof. John Mearsheimer: Is Israel Over-Extended?

Episode Date: January 9, 2025

Prof. John Mearsheimer: Is Israel Over-Extended?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, January 9th, 2025. Professor John Mearsheimer joins us now. I know I've said this before, but I have to say it again. Thank you for all of your help and collaboration, Professor Mearsheimer joins us now. I know I've said this before, but I have to say it again. Thank you for all of your help and collaboration, Professor Mearsheimer, including the many, many communications we've had off air during 2024. And I fervently hope that they will continue and maybe even accelerate in 2025. It's been a pleasure. And the audience, of course, loves it. I've been dying to ask you this all week, and it's not even the advertised subject of this segment we're now beginning. You have developed an expertise in the concept of the regional hegemony. China has its area of hegemony.

Leave them alone. The U.S. has its area of hegemony. Leave us alone. The U.S. has its area of hegemony, leave us alone, although the U.S. tries to get into other people's. Russia has its area of hegemony, leave it alone. What will happen in the Kremlin if the United States, by hook or by crook, by sale and acquisition or by military force acquires Greenland? Well, I don't think there's much the Russians can do to prevent it. I don't think they're going to get into a fight over Greenland. What's going on here is in large part a consequence of the Ukraine war. I don't think that most people realize this, but as a result of

the Ukraine war, we in effect picked a fight with Russia. And Russia and the United States are both mortal enemies, and we're both physically located, even without Greenland, in the Arctic. Furthermore, as a result of the Ukraine war, Finland and Sweden have joined NATO. That means of the eight countries that are physically located in the Arctic, seven of them are NATO countries. Now, this is a huge problem for the Russians because there's all this activity, this new activity up in the Arctic because the ice is melting. So what the Russians have done, they didn't want to do this, but we in effect forced their hand, is they've invited the Chinese to go up to the Arctic with the Russians.

Oh my goodness. The fact that there are seven NATO countries out of the eight up there. So what you have is an area of increasing strategic concern where the Russians are nervous and the Russians have invited the Chinese in. And of course, we're getting nervous as well because we understand the importance of the Arctic. So it's not that surprising that Trump is talking about taking Greenland. Do you subscribe to the theory that some of your colleagues on the show, for whom I know you have a lot of respect, and it's a bilateral respect, of course, have, which is that Trump is anticipating an embarrassing and humiliating American defeat in Ukraine and will divert attention from that humiliation to some other triumph, whether it's the seizure of Greenland, the seizure of the

Panama Canal, or even attacking Iran? I think that's possible, even likely. But I think even if you didn't have the impending Ukraine disaster, Trump would still be doing this. Trump is Trump. He's a master showman, and he is at the helm, or shortly will be at the helm, of the most powerful state on the planet. And he's come to recognize that he can say almost anything and get away with it. And given his basic personality, he does shoot off at the mouth all the time. So I think even without Ukraine, he would be doing this. But nevertheless, he does face a huge problem here. That is that Joe Biden has successfully kicked the can down the road, much the way Trump kicked the can down the road,

much the way Trump kicked the can down the road on Afghanistan, and it ended up in Biden's lap. Ukraine now ended up in Trump's lap. And when it all goes to hell in a handbasket, all the Democrats and all the anti-Trump people are going to point their finger at Trump and say he failed, it was a massive disaster for the United States and he's responsible. Would you put it past Joe Biden? And now that's a big question because who knows what he knows. Would you put it past the Biden administration, which must mean Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan and Lloyd Austin, to start a war with Iran in the next 10 days can really leave a disaster in Trump's lap?

I think that's a bridge too far. I think they want to create all the trouble they can for Trump. There's no doubt about that. And they've been quite successful. But I find it hard to imagine that they would start a war against Iran with a few days left in the administration. Were you surprised at the comments by General Keith Kellogg, President-elect Trump's designated envoy for Ukraine-Russian matters, who basically threatened Vladimir Putin by saying, if President Putin doesn't come willingly to a negotiating table and seriously discuss a ceasefire, we will increase the level of military aid. I'm paraphrasing,

I'm even dialing it back a little bit, his language was a little stronger. We will increase the level of military aid we've been sending to Ukraine. I was somewhat startled to hear that from the mouthpiece of a man who said he could end this war in 24 hours. Yeah, I was somewhat startled as well. But, I mean, Keith Kellogg is a super hawk. He's been a super hawk on Ukraine for a long time. So in a certain way, you would expect him to make these kinds of arguments. But at the same time, he's been appointed to be the point man on Ukraine by Trump. And that happened quite a while ago. And you would think that he's now,

by now, he's studied the problem closely. And he understands that making statements like that is not smart at all. The statement that I just summarized that you and I are discussing is only about six or seven days old. This is not something he said three months ago. Yeah, exactly. By the way, I read this morning where he said that he plans to settle this conflict in 100 days. He says that that is now his goal. And he even hints that he may be able to do it before 100 days are up. How could he possibly do it? He can't, in my opinion. The Russians are in the driver's seat.

The Russians, for good strategic reasons from their perspective, are driving a hard bargain. And it's almost impossible for me to see President Trump accepting the terms that the Russians demand. And therefore, I don't think this is going to be settled in 100 days. I know this is going to aggravate some of our viewers because we've played this quite a bit. But here's Tony Blinken's view. We'll play the shorter version of Ukraine and Russia today. Cut number two. Do you feel like you've left Ukraine in the strongest position that you could have? Or what are the things that you could have done differently?

Well, first, what we've left is Ukraine, which was not self-evident because Putin's ambition was to erase it from the map. We stopped that. Putin has failed. His strategic objective in regaining Ukraine has failed and will not succeed. Ukraine is standing. And I believe it also has extraordinary potential not only to survive, but actually to thrive going forward. And that does depend on decisions that future administrations and many other countries will make. I mean, where is he going with Putin? Putin's goal was to erase Ukraine from the map. There's no evidence of that. And this mantra about Putin has failed. This is the nonsense that Biden was saying when he was making speeches about it a year and a half ago. Yeah, there is zero evidence, and I mean zero

evidence that Putin was bent on conquering Ukraine. This is a myth that people like Blinken have been purveying for a long time now. But the more important point at this juncture is to understand that Tony Blinken is in good part responsible for wrecking Ukraine. He has helped destroy Ukraine. If he had not played a key role in precipitating this war, Ukraine would be intact today. The fact is that the Biden administration, in effect, pushed the Russians into this war. They, in effect, drove the Russians into a position where they felt, the Russians, that they had no choice but to attack Ukraine. And the Biden administration, this of course includes Blinken, thought that we could win the war, that we could wreck Russia as a great power.

So early in that conflict, when there was an opportunity to settle this one, where Ukraine would have been much better off then than it is now, Blinken and company said, no, let's not settle it. Let's continue the war because we could defeat Russia. He was wrong he failed he helped wreck ukraine and it's very important to understand that he has lots of blood on his hands i couldn't agree more in this farewell tour of his much of which is about a 90-minute interview uh a video interview with a reporter from the new york, to me shows, I think he has duped

himself into believing this, although some of the things he says, he says with such body language that he can't possibly believe what he's saying, but enough about him. If Trump pulls us out of NATO, what happens to NATO? Well, NATO's dead without us. I mean, it just doesn't work. The key point that you always want to remember about NATO is that it is an alliance that's basically run by the United States and that the Europeans always been happy to allow the United States to run the alliance. When we run the alliance, we in effect solve all the collective action problems that you get in a big institution like that. And if you take the United States away, you want to remember that you have a series of states, a series of nation states

left over. There's no such thing as Europe. It's not like there's one big Europe that then becomes NATO. It's a bunch of states, and those states have different interests. They have different ways of thinking about the world, different priorities. And the question is, who corrals all those states, organizes them in ways that you get a coherent NATO policy? The United States does that. You take the United States away, and each of those countries will be at each other's throat. Well, what is your view on the likely outcome of the political situation in Germany? And if the hard right, and maybe it's not that hard right, if the anti-immigrant nationalist party, forget the name, AFD, actually take power in Germany, that Germany would leave the alliance. And I don't think it would leave the EU either. I think that it would be a serious blow to NATO. And you want to understand that what's happening here is that NATO

is on the verge of suffering two serious punches to the gut. One is that Donald Trump is going to come into the White House, and he loathes the Europeans, who he thinks are a bunch of free riders, and he really has no use for NATO. So that's problem number one that they face. And the second big problem that all these NATO states face is that we're going to lose in Ukraine. And this is going to be a major league humiliation. So the future of NATO in general is in question. And then you throw into that a situation where you get a government in Germany that stays in NATO but has no enthusiasm for NATO or for American policy, and you have a prescription for really big trouble. What's happening in Europe?

The government of Germany has collapsed. The government of Austria has collapsed. France changes prime ministers every three or four months. Is there a theme or an undercurrent of something that you can put your finger on, Professor Mearsheimer? Very important. You want to also remember that in Romania, you had an impending election where it looked like the far right was going to win and the governing forces canceled the election. So that's just another country. I mean, what's happening in Europe is what's happening in the United States. And basically the liberal order that was created after the Cold War ended and that flourished in the 90s and in the early 2000s is coming apart at the seams. And it's not just the international liberal order or the liberal

international order that's coming apart at the seams. It's liberalism and or liberal democracy inside of particular states. And in effect, what's happening is that nationalism is rearing its head. Nationalism is challenging the unbounded liberalism that we had in all of these states for most of the post-Cold War period. I want to talk to you about another area of your expertise, which is the relationship between Israel and the United States and the extraordinary influence that the government of Israel has through American dollars on the government of the United States. In the past week, two events involving Israel and free speech occurred. Mike Waltz, Congressman Waltz, who is soon to become National Security Advisor Waltz,

a position, by the way, that does not require an FBI background check or Senate confirmation, but does entitle him to the highest level of national security clearance, said that the Trump administration will be very concerned about and will be monitoring speech critical of Israel and supportive of the Palestinians. At the same time that that happened, the New York Times rejected a very expensive full-page ad from an American Quaker organization, which asked the government of the United States to stop funding genocide because the New York Times refused in a paid ad to characterize what's happening in Gaza as genocide. You have any thoughts on these two events? Yes. I mean, it's part of a broad pattern,

and it certainly shows the enormous power of the Israel lobby here in the United States. But what's going on is that it's more and more recognized that number one, Israel is an apartheid state, and number two, that Israel is executing a genocide in Gaza. And there is actually huge resistance to those two facts inside of the United States. There are a lot of people who want to speak out. And this is what you get with this advertisement that the New York Times rejected. What the New York Times was very upset about was that the word genocide was used in the advertisement. The New York Times said, you can't use the word genocide. You want to think about that. This is a country where there's all, of evidence that it's committing a genocide. And you have an organization that wants to put an ad in the New York Times that uses is under siege here in the United States in certain

quarters, and more and more people are talking out about apartheid and genocide. And the Israel lobby is going to enormous lengths to put pressure on policymakers and on journalists and on university presidents to suppress that speech. They don't want people talking about genocide and apartheid. Were you surprised that Mike Waltz did this? Or is the mentality the same? No matter who runs the government, one team has D after their names and the other has R. Of course. And that's because the lobby is so powerful. I mean, there's no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans on this issue. As I said, the last time I was on the show, you know, people have been saying that from a hardliner's point of view inside of Israel,

they're really thankful that Trump is replacing Biden because Biden wasn't supportive enough of Israel. This is a little argument. Biden was fully supportive of Israel. He backed him at every turn. How can Trump be any different? The Trump administration, and this of course includes people like Michael Walz, and the Biden administration will act the same way towards Israel. They have no choice. They would pay a god-awful price if they challenged Israel in any meaningful way because again, the lobby is so powerful. Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, destroyed 90 to 95 percent of it, neutralized for a while Hezbollah, seized 40 percent of the land area of Syria, and is now claiming it is part of Israel.

Is it overextending itself? Well, I think there's not much question that's overextending itself. Just to take Gaza, for example, you want to remember that the Israelis were in Gaza until 2005, and they got out. And they got out because they were overextended. It was just too demanding to stay in Gaza and manage it. And instead, what they did was turn it into an open-air prison. They're now in Gaza. There's no evidence they're going to leave. And furthermore, they're now in southern Lebanon. And as best I can tell, they're not going to leave southern Lebanon. They're now in Syria.

And as best I can tell, they're not going to leave Syria. And you want to ask yourself, just to take the Syrian case, what's going to happen in Syria? Do you think the new Syrian government, do you think the Turks are going to be happy about Israel occupying a large slice of Syria, and they're just going to accept it? I wouldn't bet a lot of money on that, and I wouldn't bet a lot of money that Hezbollah doesn't come back into the fight if Israel doesn't leave southern Lebanon. And you can rest assured going to Gaza that Hamas is still alive and well. The Israelis now acknowledge that and that Hamas will retaliate and do everything it can to drive

the Israelis out. So they have a lot of problems facing them. I know you are an academic and your expertise is geopolitics. You're not a shrink, but I want you to watch the body language on the following clip. Cut number six. Do you, Secretary Blinken, worry that perhaps you have been presiding over what the world will see as a genocide? No. It's not, first of all. Second, as to how the world sees it, I can't fully answer to that. But everyone has to look at the facts and draw their own conclusions from those facts.

And my conclusions are clear. Pitiful. Yeah. It's like the earlier clip you played about Ukraine. You remember he was saying that we basically have prevailed in Ukraine, Ukraine in great shape. You just sort of say to yourself, what planet is this guy living on? And the same thing is true with regard to what's happening in Gaza. I would say to him, okay, you don't want to call it a genocide. What do you call it? Mass murder? You believe the Israelis are creating massive war crimes?

General Yalom, Boogie Yalom. Our friend and colleague Max Blumenthal was quite critical of the reporter from The New York Times whose name is escaping me for not following up much along the lines that you just suggested. This clip makes Tony Blinken look terrible, or he himself makes himself look terrible, but she could have followed up along the lines that you just articulated. Why do you think Trump is blaming the desire for recapturing the Panama Canal

on the presence of Chinese. I mean, is there any evidence that the Chinese have taken over the canal or are operating it secretly or openly? No, no. I mean, China is not a threat, a military threat anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. And the United States will not let China become a military threat in the Western Hemisphere. This is the Monroe Doctrine. It hasn't gone away. I don't understand why Trump is so interested in taking back the Panama Canal. It doesn't make sense to me at this point in time. One could hypothesize a situation where it might matter, you know, 20 or 30 years from now. I think it's extremely unlikely, but you could imagine a scenario. But there's no scenario today that justifies that

kind of talk. Greenland is a different matter, as we were talking about before. Greenland is, you know, up there in the Arctic, and it matters greatly for strategic purposes. But the Panama Canal, I just don't understand it. Do you understand why he wants to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico? Well, he wants to humiliate the Mexicans. He does. He does. I mean, we've been watching him humiliate Justin Trudeau. Justin Trudeau really looks like a pathetic figure because Trump towers over him, and

Trump is able to use his New York City rhetoric to really make Justin Trudeau look like a small figure. And so I think he's just poking fun at Canada. And I think he's poking fun at Mexico. I think so as well. I can't imagine Canadians voting to join the United States. If they did add 20 more Democratic senators to the Senate and another hundred Democratic representatives to the House, Trump will have cooked his own goose. But I think it's just fanciful. I think he enjoys stirring the pot. In the Trudeau case, he arguably fomented Trudeau's departure. Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth in that. I would point out to you that he is a classic bully.

If he sees an opportunity to bully someone, he'll jump at it every time. But, you know, he never ceases to surprise us. Your friend and colleague and sometimes debating adversary, Professor Jeff Sachs, I don't know if you know this, gave a talk a few monthsminute clip, he ripped into Bibi Netanyahu, really ripped into him. He even used some foul language, which I thought was uncharacteristic of Jeff, but he made his point. Donald Trump posted a reference to that in a laudatory way on his own Truth Social account. I assure you that Netanyahu and his folks are aware of that. Yeah. Well, I think that Trump deep down has no use for Netanyahu and understands that Netanyahu, much like him, is a bully. And Trump at the same time understands that because of the power of the lobby, you know, because of the power of Miriam Adelson and people like that, he has to be careful. So I think in a way that was a subtle dig at Netanyahu.

And as you say, it's hard to believe that Netanyahu didn't understand what Trump was doing. Right, right. Professor Mearshamer, it's always a pleasure. We could talk all afternoon. Thank you very much for your time. I hope you'll visit with us again next week, my dear friend. I look forward to it. Thank you. Thank you. A great man, such a brilliant brain. The opportunity to pick his brain is one of my professional joys. Another professional joy is to be able to pick the brain of Colonel

Larry Wilkerson, who will be with us at three o'clock this afternoon. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.