Judging Freedom - Prof. John Mearsheimer : The Dangerous Marco Rubio.

Episode Date: October 30, 2025

Prof. John Mearsheimer : The Dangerous Marco Rubio.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Today is Thursday, October 30 at 2025, Professor John Mearsheimer, joins us now. Professor Ramersheimer. We missed you last week. Welcome back. Thank you for returning to the show. Thank you for, as you always do, accommodating my schedule. Why do the neocons want this war so destructive to Ukraine to continue rather than to end? Well, it would be a humiliating defeat for them. This is their war, right? And when you go to war, take your country to war, it's absolutely essential that you win. So they'll do everything they can to prolong this war so that hopefully at some point, from their perspective, things will turn around, we will win, and they'll be able to say we were right all along. I mean, but barring

something catastrophic or monstrous like nuclear weapons or something, isn't it close? to inconceivable, if you pardon that phrase, because it's either inconceivable or it isn't, that Ukraine could win. Yes, I agree with that. But just think about Afghanistan. We were in Afghanistan for 20 years, and they didn't want to get out of Afghanistan either. They wanted to stay in Afghanistan, even though the vast majority of people who looked at the issue understood clearly that we could not win in Afghanistan. We were doomed, but people on the right did not want to leave. And you have an analogous situation here. When President Trump dispatches Secretary of State Rubio to confer on telephone, which I guess means others are listening or

even participating, but not the two presidents, with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. and within an hour of that phone call, Mr. Lavroff says, oh, there's a new condition imposed here, that of a ceasefire. They've known from the beginning we're not in favor of a ceasefire. Can we reasonably deduce that Marco Rubio, whether being faithful to Donald Trump or not, we'll talk about the nuances in a minute, does not want the war to end?

I would just note to you that after the meeting in Alaska, President Trump said in a very clear way that the whole issue of a ceasefire was off the table because the Russians had made it unequivocally clear in Alaska that a ceasefire was not in the realm of possibility. But here we are again talking about a ceasefire. But I would note to you that President Trump occasionally talks about a ceasefire. fire. And if you're Rubio, your defense is that Trump talks about ceasefire from time to time. Of course, Trump is all over the map. Some days he's not talking about ceasefire. Other days he is. So I'm not sure that Rubio is that out of touch or out of sync with what Trump is interested in, because Trump is all over the map.

Well, you and I have often opined, I guess, without evidence, because this is a psychiatric analysis that the president has a tendency to believe whoever has been whispering in his ear last. Now, he is surrounded by neocons and Zionists. We can name them. I don't have to name them, but arguably chief among them, by virtue of the office he holds, is Marco Rubio. I agree 100%. I agree with everything you said. Rubio is the most prominent of that crowd, but he is surrounded by all sorts of people who fit that general description. General Keith Kellogg is another example. There's not much daylight between Kellogg and Rubio.

Right. The problem that Trump faces that he is surrounded in Washington by Hawks, super hawks and the Europeans are super hawks on the Ukraine issue. So if he starts moving towards Putin and he's thinking about accommodating Putin, he is going to get a huge amount of pushback inside of D.C., inside of his administration, and from the Europeans. What is the genesis of the American animosity toward Venezuela and to a, I don't know if it's lesser, to another extent, Colombia and Cuba, and is Marco Rubio? I think the answer to the Rubio question is, yes, is Marco Rubio behind this?

But what is the genesis of this animosity? Trump tried to overthrow the government of Venezuela during his first term and installed this guy that's a CIA asset and now as a grad student in Miami, Juan Guaido. They tried to install him and the Maduro people fought it off. And Guido, I don't think he was even in Venezuela when this happened. and so he's still living? I think since the beginning of the 20th century, the United States has been allergic to having a government in Latin America,

South or Central America, that is left leaning. And any time we see a government that is left leaning in Latin America, we almost always put our gun sights on it and try to tolerate. that regime. Just think about Cuba. Castro came to power in 1959, and basically since then, we've had our gun sites on Cuba, Nicaragua in the 1980s. You know what happened in Chile, Guatemala in 1954. The United States has a rich history of intervening against governments that are seen to be left-wing. And we're not talking about communist governments.

We're talking about anything that's just left-leaning. I mean, this is really ridiculous. We had a left-wing government here for eight years under Barack Obama, and another one for four years under Joe Biden. Well, the question you have to ask yourself is whether you think a left-wing government is a threat to the United States. And this can even include a communist government

like you had in Chile in the early 1970. and the fact is that it's not necessarily the case that a communist government, certainly a left-wing government, would be anti-American. The original Monroe doctrine was aimed at keeping distant great powers out of the Western Hemisphere. And then in the early part of the 20th century, you had the Roosevelt corollary. This is not Franklin Roosevelt. That's Teddy Roosevelt. And basically, the Roosevelt corollary goes beyond worrying about distant great powers and worries about any left-leaning government in Latin America or any government that the United States just doesn't like. And it basically says that we can overthrow that government. We have a right to do that.

So the list is apparently expanding. I'm sorry to expose you to this, but here's the senior senator from South Carolina, Chris, cut number 11. President Trump has decided to treat drug cartels as national security threats. Remember the caliphate, the ISIS caliphate, that President Trump destroyed? We have a drug caliphate in our backyard. Venezuela is run by an indicted drug dealer, Maduro,

who's not a legitimate president of Venezuela. It's a safe haven for drug cartels. So President Trump has a policy that if you're in the drug business, you're a drug cartel and you're having boats come to America, we're going to blow up the boats. I think his policy is going to go on the land. If you're a country housing drug cartels, we're going to treat you as a national security threat to our country. There is a caliphate in our backyard. Colombia, Venezuela, and Cuba are all countries that have allowed drug cartels to operate with impunity, make money off poisoning America, and these countries should be

notice with Donald Trump, the game is changing. This supercilious argument, tarnish them as drug dealers and justify invasion. Venezuela, Colombia, and now Cuba, Cuba can barely put food on the shelves of supermarkets and gasoline in their 1956 Chevroletes, and we're going to invade? What about Mexico? I would imagine that they're loading up the shotgun for Mexico, right? Don't they have drug cartels in Mexico? Yes, they do. And the president has talked about invading Mexico with the consent of President Scheinbaum, you basically told them, are you crazy? No, but seriously, is Marco Rubio with his,

I don't want to get ethnocentric, and I won't, well, he's a Cuban refuge. His parents were Cuban refugees. Is he behind all of this? Is oil behind all of this? Is ideology behind all of this? Well, you want to understand that we were doing this long before Marco Rubio was born. This basic pattern of intervention in Latin America has a rich tradition, as I say, really going back to the early 1900s. I think Rubio exacerbates the situation. He hates the regime in Cuba. He'd love to topple that regime. And I think it is due in part the fact that he is a Cuban American.

And he views Venezuela and Cuba as birds of a feather. So he's perfectly happy to go after Venezuela. But that doesn't mean he's going to forget Cuba. And that's, I think, sort of where we are. And I think, to be honest, if Rubio disappeared from the scene, we'd still be pursuing this foolish policy against Venezuela. Do they want to put their own person in Venezuela, probably this lady that won the Nobel Peace Prize was clearly a CIA asset and we believe a Mossad asset? They want to put her in office.

Does that mean they will then leave Venezuela alone? Or do they want to put American oil companies down there to extract the oil from the earth? Well, I think that they want to clearly put Ms. Machado in office. They want to topple the Maduro government and put her in place. And the idea is, in their mind, that this will all work out swimmingly. It will be reasonably easy to execute. And Venezuela will be in excellent shape once we're done with regime change. And then we can have good relations with that new government.

And we can work out oil deals that will be to our advantage. I would argue, however, that I don't think oil is the critical issue here. I think ideology is the critical issue. But regardless, this is our worldview. But if you look at the history of regime change, attempted regime change, by the United States over time, almost everyone ends up destroying the country where we try to affect the regime change. So the idea that this is going to work out well, and Venezuela is going to live happily ever after, once we get rid of Nicholas Maduro is delusional. It's not true. We're going to wreck the country. And by the way, we're in the process of wrecking the country anyway. Colonel McGregor reports that it takes twice as long to refine Venezuela and oil just because the way the earth is there.

than it does Texas, West Texas crude, and therefore it's a lot more expensive. And we have almost a limitless supply in Texas. This would support your theory that it's ideology rather than oil. I think people think it's oil, A, because it's been going on for a while, and B, because this is the type of thing

that draws Donald Trump wealth, not personal wealth, but wealth for people who can make the investments and somehow return the investments here. here. How about Columbia? What is the beef with Columbia? Well, the president of Columbia has talked tough with regard to President Trump, and President Trump does not like that. The President of Columbia is willing to confront Trump. And as you know, anybody who confronts Trump will pay a price. But furthermore, Colombia is a major source of drugs coming into the

United States. In fact, Colombia sends more drugs into the United States than Venezuela does. If you were really interested in drugs, you'd go after Colombia, not Venezuela. Just think of the legal, law enforcement, constitutional problems of the president painting someone as a narco-terrorist and then killing them like he's doing in the speedboats. trying to do it in Chicago. Hopefully not, but I wouldn't be surprised. I mean, look, he's become the assassin-in-chief. He just thinks he can go out and kill people.

What's really so disturbing about this situation is that the U.S. Navy has the capability to stop these ships, board these ships, and determine who is on them. and what they are doing. But Trump and company have told the Navy not to do that and instead to just blow these boats out of the water and kill who is ever on the boat, not knowing who those people are and not knowing what they have on the boats with them.

And then making the argument that these are narco-terrorists and that they're a mortal threat to the United States, as Lindsay Graham likes to argue. it's just not the way the United States of America should do business. It just shows what terrible shape we're in. In a very important way, this is not even a strategic issue. It's sort of a moral issue. It's an issue that says a lot about us as a country and how we operate.

Well, the president. We're a country where the rule of law matters. Yeah. And the president like his buddy, Prime Minister Netanyahu, are moral relativists. They don't have a standard by which they can port themselves other than power and victory and triumph. Here's Senator Rand Paul. Now, the clip begins with a couple of lines from President Trump because the clip itself is from one of the Sunday talk shows. And the host of the show is running this clip for Senator Rand Paul and Senator Tim Kane.

the subject matter is, is Congress consulted, and what happens when Congress is not consulted, and the president goes about the world seeking monsters to slay? Chris? The land is going to be next, and we may go to the Senate, we may go to the, you know, Congress and tell them about it, but I can't imagine that they'd have any problem with it. I think they're going to probably like it except for the radical left lunatics. All right, so I'll start with you, Senator Paul. What do you need to hear in a briefing?

What questions do you have? You know, it's not so much about a briefing, but we haven't had a briefing. To be clear, we've got no information. I've been invited to no briefing. But a briefing is not enough to overcome the Constitution. The Constitution says that when you go to war, Congress has to vote on it. And during a war, then, there's a lower rules for engagement. People do sometimes get killed without due process.

But the drug war or the war or the crime war has typically been something we do through law enforcement. And so far, they have alleged that these people are drug dealers. No one said their name. No one said what evidence. No one said whether they're armed. And we've had no evidence presented. So at this point, I would call them extrajudicial killings. And this is akin to what China does, to Iran does with drug dealers.

They summarily execute people without presenting evidence to the public. So it's wrong. How can you put a stop to this with a supine Congress? actually, it's not even operating now because of the government has shut down. It's another issue for another time, but even when it is operating, with the exception of Senator Paul and the Senate and Congressman Massey in the House, the Republicans are totally under the thumb of President Trump to the point where he can murder people, literally, and they won't do anything about it.

Well, I just want to challenge something you said before the clip, and you talked about both Netanyahu and President Trump being guilty of moral relativism, I wouldn't call it moral relativism, I'd call it moral bankruptcy. Right. Your language is stronger than mine. I mean, again, we never want to lose sight of the fact that Israel, working hand in hand with the United States, is committing a genocide in Gaza, right? And you could add to that, you know, what's going on with regard to killing these people who are on boats in the Caribbean.

You know, Senator Rand was implying that they're drug dealers and, you know, these drug dealers haven't been tried. We don't know if they were drug dealers. They could have been fishermen. They could have been, you know, just moving some sort of cargo to another place from. Venezuela. Who knows? We're just killing them. And again, you don't want to lose side of the fact that we have a way of getting around this problem, and that is, let the Navy stop the ships and board the ships. Segwaying over to genocide, the IDF announced last night or this morning, I don't know

which time it was, that they killed over 100 people in Gaza City, 24 or 24 or 20, of whom were Hamas members. So 74 or 76 of them were women and children. Now, the excuse given was some Hamas person fired at some IDF people. Well, the IDF people are occupiers and invaders. They have no lawful right under any standard to be there. Correct? Of course, right? The occupation is illegal, period, end of story. But there are a couple other facts here. First of all, how do they know that those 24 people that they killed out of the 100 were Hamas members? How do they know that? They don't know that. They just pulled that number out of thin air. We have no idea how many Hamas people have been killed out of the same.

100,000 who we know have died, how can you tell what the number is? Nobody knows for sure. So I don't believe that number. Furthermore, Hamas has denied that it was responsible for shooting at the IDF. And you want to remember that there are other groups inside of Gaza, some sponsored by the Israelis who might have shot at the IDF. The IDF might have been shot at by one of these groups that's allied with the Israelis because the Israeli government is looking for ways to generate conflict so that they can get the genocide started again. The Netanyahu government is not happy with this ceasefire.

You want to remember that their goal here from the beginning has been to drive. the Palestinians out of Gaza to ethnically cleanse it. And they've ended up in a genocide, committing a genocide, because they can't drive them out. But a ceasefire, you know, with a possible plan along the lines of President Trump's 20-point plan is not what they want, right? They want to go back to the genocide. So it is highly possible that the Israelis provoke this attack, On the IDF. Even by their own standards, we've got to kill 24 or 26 people, but there's 100 there. The concept, and we'll kill all of them, because we don't know who the most people are,

the concept of collective punishment, roundly condemned by Nuremberg, clearly a war crime. Doesn't seem to bother them at all. No, but it's more than collective punishment. It's genocide. They're well beyond collective. punishment. This is genocide, right? Their goal is to kill as many Palestinians as possible. Just look at Gaza. Jared Kushner said on television recently that it looked like Hiroshima. Like it had been struck with a nuclear weapon. He did say that. You want to think about that.

Just want to think about this. The idea that they're going after Hamas and that they're going to great lengths to spare the civilian population is laughable. And furthermore, on top of turning the place into Hiroshima, they're trying to starve the Palestinians in Gaza to death as well. So, you know, when you talk about collective punishment, yeah, it is a form of collective punishment, but the issue here is much bigger than collective punishment. Let me go back to Secretary of State, Rubio, an ardent Zionist, an agent of Mrs. Aylson, you know this stuff better than anybody, you and your colleague, Steve Waltz, how can he possibly be there as the American Secretary of State to bring about peace? He doesn't want peace anymore than Netanyahu wants peace.

Of course, look, the lobby owns Rubio, but the lobby owns Trump. the lobby owns J.D. Vance. All you have to do is just listen to them talk. They tiptoe around criticizing Israel when Israel does something that is contrary to what is in the Trump administration's interests, right? Because they understand that they will pay an awful price if they do criticize Israel. You want to remember that J.D. Vance wants to be president of the United States. And so does Marco Rubio. Exactly. You took the words. right out of my mouth. That's all you have to know. It's all you have to know.

We interviewed Jack Devine earlier today, the former head of the CIA in Latin America. And he, of course, fully endorsed all the killing and bombing on the high seas. He endorsed an invasion of Cuba and Colombia and Venezuela. I denied that the CIA was ever involved in drugs. running. I mean, it was just classic, classic Jack Devine. Some of the chatters are beating me up. Why did you bother putting him on air? Well, it's good to stir the pot every once in a while and get another view. But when I say in social circles around here and in New Jersey, this is a profound violation of the Constitution for Trump to be doing this. People look at me like I have two heads because they believe that the victims are evil and deserve to be eradicated

without any due process whatsoever. And they're hearing that from Donald Trump, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, and J.D. Vance. I mean, there's no question about that. And the Democrats are no better than the Republicans in this regard. I mean, it's not like Joe Biden went to Congress. to get permission to do X, Y, and Z. Right, right. Donald Trump, who didn't, and to go to the genocide, Joe Biden in his time in office,

after October 7th, fully supported the Israelis. One could make an argument that Trump at least got two ceasefires, whereas Biden didn't get a ceasefire. Right. Biden had no interest in a ceasefire. Well, we have this narrative in the United States. about American foreign policy, where we're the good guys and we're up against bad guys, and that allows us to do anything we want, but nevertheless, we're a benign hegemon.

This narrative is deeply wired into the elite, whether you're a Republican or you're a Democrat. It almost doesn't matter. And the number of people who are willing to challenge that narrative, and this includes people like you and me and people who are on your show are a few in number. And the end result is that we just go on and on pretending that we can do anything we want, that the rule of law doesn't apply outside the United States and inside the United States when it comes to national security matters. And the end result of this is that it's having, and I'm choosing my words carefully here, a profoundly corrosive effect on the liberal democratic institutions in this country.

The founding fathers understood that if you fight wars all the time and you build a national security state, it's very hard to maintain a liberal democracy. And we're proving them correct on a daily basis. We'll end with that. I was going to ask you about the streets of Chicago, but we'll wait until the next time when it will probably be worse. Who knows? But thank you, Professor Mirosheimer. Thank you for your last statement. We're going to cut it and post it and promote it all over the place

because it's a brilliant, succinct, historically accurate truism about the problems of searching the world for monsters to slay. As our friend Chas Freeman says, they have a way of following your home. Well put, Chas. Yes. Thank you, Professor Mearsheimer. All the best, my dear friend.

We'll see you next week. Look forward to it already. I do as well. Be well, Judge. Thank you, Professor. Well, coming up at 4 o'clock, do you know the name Joe Kent? Well, you will, after listening to Max Blumenthal. He's the director of the National Counterterrorism Center

who's investigating the FBI to see if they were aware of any foreign influences in the murder of Charlie Kirk. And why is the NYPD in Jerusalem? All of that, 4 o'clock, Max Blumenthal. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.