Judging Freedom - Prof. John Mearsheimer : Trump and Russian Security Needs.

Episode Date: August 21, 2025

Prof. John Mearsheimer : Trump and Russian Security Needs.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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Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, August 21st, 2025. Professor John Mearsheimer joins us now. Professor Mearsheimer, even though we speak frequently, we have yet to communicate since President Putin and Trump met in Alaska. And then President Trump entertained or humiliated, however you want to look at it, EU leaders in the Oval Office. So we have a lot to. discuss. Professor Mearsheimer has the foreign policy of the United States of America in the post-World War II era ever acknowledged the legitimate sovereignty-based security needs of Russia or its predecessor of the Soviet Union. Well, we have basically respected Soviet or Russian sovereign

when they were powerful enough to protect themselves. When they weren't, we took advantage of them. You want to remember that when the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia came on the scene, this is in early 1992. Actually, the Soviet Union collapses in December of 91, but we get Russia in 92. And that Russia is a remarkably weak Russia. And what we do is we shove NATO expansion

down their throats over the course of the 1990s, and really the first decade of this century. And that's the way the United States treats other great powers when they are weak. But if Russia proves that it is tough, it is powerful, it's able to defend its interests, and we at least de facto recognize those interests. And what happened when President Trump met President Putin in Alaska was that President Trump said, I recognize your views on a number of key issues. And the reason that President Trump recognized Russia's interests in that case is because Putin is playing a very strong hand. Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s was playing a weekend, and we slapped him around.

as you would expect. But Putin is in a powerful position now. So a lot depends on how powerful Russia is for whether or not we respect in any meaningful way Russian interests. I wonder if Donald Trump understands what you just articulated. Why would he have suggested to the Europeans on Monday and President Macron and Chancellor Mertz, after they left the White House, both stated publicly that he suggested, and he himself admitted it on Fox News, the use of American military as a security guarantee in the post-special military operation Ukraine. Why would they, in their wildest imaginings, think that Russia would accept that any more than we would accept North Korean troops in Tijuana. Who knows? I mean, when you listen to the discourse in the West

about what's going on in Ukraine, you can only reach one conclusion that these people are detached from reality. I mean, the Russians are not going to accept the West giving Ukraine a meaningful security guarantee. And I would imagine that Trump understands that. And really, all he's doing is throwing the Europeans a bone while he slowly but steadily separates himself from both the Europeans and the Ukrainians. I mean, it's very important to understand what's going on here. I think Trump has come to the realization he cannot settle this war. He and Putin might be able to sit down and reach an agreement. But the problem that Trump faces is that he cannot convince the Ukrainians, and he cannot convince the Europeans to accept that deal. So he's reached the point

where I believe he thinks that it's best if the Europeans and the Ukrainians together, and remember that they're joined it to have, that they deal with Putin. They want to fight them on the battlefield? Fine. They want to negotiate with them? Fine. But he, Donald Trump, is not in a position where he can settle this one and then force both sides to a accept the deal. Do you think that the hour-long lecture that he got from Vladimir Putin, which was probably similar to that 45-minute answer, President Putin gave to Tucker Carlson, essentially a history of the reach seen through Russian eyes, motivated him to drop his demand, Trump's demand, for an immediate ceasefire demand. He had

repeated recently as two hours before when he was. still in Air Force One, and drop the demand of some relationship between NATO and Ukraine? My answer to you is yes and no. I don't think that Putin would be foolish enough to lecture Trump. I think that if you watched how Putin behaved in Alaska and just how he behaves generally, he operates in a very subtle and sophisticated way. And I think he clearly understands. that lecturing Donald Trump is not the way to do business with him. I think, however, that the meeting in Alaska was an opportunity for Putin to explain to Trump in considerable detail what the Russian position is, number one, and to, two, make it clear

to Trump that the Russians were not going to compromise. For example, on the whole business of a ceasefire, the Russians have long said that they would not accept a ceasefire. But people in the West, and this included Donald Trump, couldn't get it through their thick skulls, that the Russians wouldn't accept a ceasefire. But as you well know, Trump came out of the meeting in Alaska saying there's going to be no ceasefire. Now, why is that the case? I think it's because he heard loudly and clearly from Putin. in a respectful way that there was going to be no ceasefire, that there had to be a final peace agreement or the war would continue.

So I think that the meeting was very important for both Trump and Putin in the sense that Putin got to make it clear to Trump what exactly the Russian red lines are. So how does this end? It's probably going to end in the battlefield, not on a conference tape. But when I say this, I mean the special military operations, It'll end when the Ukrainian military collapses or the Russian military has achieved its goals, whichever happens first. Yeah, I mean, we're not going to get a ceasefire.

That's clear. Right. The elections are not going to accept a cease-down. So that brings us to the question of whether or not we're going to get a negotiated settlement. We're not going to get a negotiated settlement because Russia's position versus the Ukrainian-slash-European position is so far apart, or they are so far apart, that there's no way he can come up with a compromise settlement. Wouldn't Rubio and Hegseth and the people that advised the president have told him that,

or was his purpose notwithstanding the publicly stated bravado in going to Alaska and meeting President Putin some other purpose, breaking down the wall that Joe Biden had erected between the two countries, expressing some sort of a warmth and bonding with his opposite number, a prelude to a grand reset between the two countries commercially, etc., independent of Ukraine. The question you were asking is, what did Trump know before he met Putin in Alaska? And I think the key person here is Steve Whitkoff. Kov went to Russia many times, and he met with Putin. Putin surely explained to him what the Russian position was. And in addition, the Russian position was in the public record. It was very clear

what the Russian position was. There's no confusion here. We know. We've known for a long time, at least since last June 14th. This is June 14th, 2024, what the Russian position is. So you expect that Witkoff was fully aware and that he would have briefed Trump and that they would have began to push American policy in a direction that could accommodate the Russian position so that we could work out some sort of deal.

But that did not happen at all. And in fact, if you listen to what Whitkoff has been saying over the period since, Trump moved into the White House and he became the principal advisor on the Russia issue, it is hard to square with the argument that Wittsuff understood what was going on. And therefore, I don't really understood what was going on. You have forgotten more than Wittkoff knows. I mean, he just doesn't know the history.

He may be a great builder and a nice negotiator and a good friend, and he may have impressed President Trump. Could you compare him to your knowledge or Sergei Lavrov's knowledge? He just doesn't have the grasp. It would be impossible for him to have achieved the knowledge of Russian history and culture in six months that you and Lavrov have in 40 or 50 years. I think that's absolutely true. But the thing is, I don't believe he needed all that knowledge,

just to understand the Russian positions. You and I have lots of really smart friends who are capable of operating in a rational legal way. They don't know much about Russia at all, other than what they read in the newspaper. I believe you could take those smart friends of ours and send them to Moscow and have them meet with Putin three or four times and have them read the newspapers every day. And they would figure out very good. quickly what the Russian bottom lines are. And they would then set in motion a policy process for figuring out how to best deal with the Russians. Do you think that Donald Trump had the remotest understanding of Russian history from Whitkoff before he heard it from Putin?

I don't think Donald Trump knows much about Russian history at all. I don't think he knows much about what's happened since the Cold War ended in terms of U.S. Russian relations. I believe that he has a lot of false pictures in his head about this relationship. But the fact is, he's the president of the United States, and it's his responsibility to learn about this situation, to appoint smart advisors, and then figure out how to get out of this mess that Joe Biden created. But he, instead of doing that, came into office arguing that he was going to shut this thing down overnight, giving the impression that it was an easy problem to deal with, thinking that he could appoint people who had no experience, and that they would be able in quick order to solve the

problem and so forth and so on. So he's ended up in this giant mess as a result. We have a lot of clips who have been running of Foreign Minister Lavrov. This is arguably my favorite uh and he says a lot in here even though it's only a minute long chris cut number three definitely yes it was abundantly clear that the esteemed head of the united states and his dedicated team first and foremost genuinely wanted to achieve a comprehensive and lasting result that would be long-term inherently stable and truly reliable quite unlike the european counterparts who at that particular time kept persistently insisting everywhere that only an immediate ceasefire was absolutely needed and after that they would continue to relentlessly

supply weapons to Ukraine. And secondly, it is important to note that both President Trump and his entire team possessed a very clear and comprehensive understanding that this particular conflict in its very essence truly has its underlying causes and deep-rooted origins. Furthermore, they recognize that the discourse and the talk emanating from some European presidents and Prime Ministers, specifically regarding how Russia purportedly launched and unprovoked and entirely unjustified attack on Ukraine is, quite frankly, nothing more than Childish Babel. There is absolutely no other accurate or appropriate way to articulate or describe it. Childish Babel, President Macron, Prime Minister Stormer, Chancellor Mertz, chair of the

EU, the underlying, and then this other crazy woman, Kayakala. Who is she? What is she? I think she's basically the foreign minister of the EU, right? Yeah. She's a hardliner from Eastern Europe. Right, right. But it's very important to understand, Judge,

that it's not just the individuals that you named who believe this false story about how the war was unprovoked and how the Russians were interested in conquering all of Ukraine and then conquering countries in eastern. Europe and threatening Western Europe. That has long been the conventional wisdom in the West, and it's people like you and me and others on this show. And there have not been many of us in terms of numbers in the past who make the opposite argument, which is the argument the Russians make, and which I think is the correct argument that the Russians were threatened

by NATO expansion into Ukraine, and that was what provoked the war. I make one. I make one, One final point on this, it's very important to understand that Donald Trump has been making the argument that you and I make for quite a while now. He's not just now making that argument. And J.D. Vance has made that argument as well. Yes. The problem is that Trump and Vance, in a very important way, have long been outliers inside the administration on this very issue.

Most of the people around Trump identify with Keith Kellogg and Marco Rubio on this issue. And they accept or have long accepted the conventional wisdom, which is that the Russians are an imperial power. Here's the prince of the neocons. Cut number 19, Chris. Either we're going to help Ukraine or we're not. Give them the F-16s, let them fly the planes. artillery to hit targets inside of Russia. How do you deter Putin?

You arm this guy to the teeth. If we pull the plug on Ukraine, it would be worse than Afghanistan. So two and a half years later, you're still standing and you're in Russia. Putin fears Trump, and he's been a, I think he's been tough. And my advice to President Trump and Marco

is if you've got to convince Putin that if this war doesn't end, justly and honorably, with Ukraine making concessions also, we're going to destroy the Russian economy. We have the ability to do it. To Europe, why don't you put tariffs on India for buying Russian oil? To Europe, why don't you threaten China with tariffs

for being the largest purchaser of Russian oil? To Europe, you can do more. If Europe and the United States banded together and we told Russia that if this war does not come to an end, we're going to destroy your fossil fuel economy, this war would come to an end. I think we have the ability to crush the Russian economy, through putting tariffs on people who buy Russian oil and gas, buying cheap oil to prop up his

war machine. And I intend to push that until I can't push anymore. The last part of it, the first part is just nonsense. The last part troubles me, because this guy sits next to the president a couple of times a week in a golf cart when they're going from, you know, one part of the golf course to the next then gets to whisper in his ear, and there's no John Mearsheimer there to correct him. It doesn't matter anymore. The world has passed him by. He can babble like that until he's blue in the face. It just doesn't matter anymore. This one's going to be settled on the battlefield. And the idea that the Russians are going to lose is laughable. And the idea that we can bring new economic sanctions to bear against Russia.

and that's going to put us in the driver's seat is not a serious argument. You want to remember that the reason that we had this meeting in Alaska was because Trump was interested in taking sanctions off the table. He'd got himself into a messy situation where he said he was going to put secondary sanctions on Russia on August 8th. He understood, as he got close to August 8th, that this was a really bad idea because he couldn't put meaningful sanctions on either the Chinese or the Indians. Secondary sanctions were not going to work.

So he was looking for a way out. And what he did was he sent Steve Whitkoff scarring off to Moscow to arrange a quick meeting with Putin. And you want to remember that one of the first things that he said after he came out of the meeting was that the issue of secondary sanctions was off the table. And that's why nobody's talking about it now, because it's not a serious. serious threat, except for people like Lindsey Graham. But Lindsey Graham lives in Cloud Kouka, who can be asked. But there are elements of the deep state that, like what he says, is the CIA not as we speak, Professor Amir Schumer fomenting some sort of wars, civil wars, whatever you want to

call them, in the state of Georgia, not the U.S. state of Georgia, but the country of Georgia. Yes, but we're talking about Ukraine. And the question. is what can we do about Ukraine? And the idea that, you know, we can help the Ukrainians win on the battlefield and that we can cripple the Russian economy with the secondary sanctions is simply not a serious argument. And people shouldn't be paying attention to Lindsey Graham. Trump understands full well after talking to Putin and surveying the actual situation that he basically has no cards to play here. That's the bottom line. He has no cards to play. And by the way, if Joe Biden could have done all these wonderful things to the Russians that Lindsay Graham talks about, he would have

done him because there wasn't a lot of daylight between Lindsey Graham and Joe Biden. You're right. He didn't do those things because he couldn't do those things. Trump can't do those things. We have no cards to play. Trump recognizes that, and that's why he's shifting the burden of managing this conflict to the Europeans and the Ukrainians. He's saying, you folks think that there's a simple solution here. You think you can get tough with Putin and solve the problem. Good luck. What will the deep state do when their foray into Ukraine is a miserable failure

because of the common sense of the president of the United States? they will go to great lengths over time to undermine Russia's position in the international system in general and in the areas of Ukraine that Russia conquers and incorporates into Russia. And at the same time, the Europeans and the Ukrainians will do the same thing. The Russians, for their part, will go to great lengths to sow dissension in the transatlantic relationship. They'll go to great lengths to sow dissension in Europe, and they'll go to great lengths to make sure that Ukraine remains a dysfunctional rum state. What we have done here is a result of the April 2008 decision to bring Ukraine into NATO, and then doubling down at every point down the road, is we have created a catastrophic situation. Wow.

and it is falling to Donald Trump for better or for worse with his lack of historical understanding and even his lack of a sound ideological set of principles to get us out of it. Yeah, and I'm going to make two further points. One, as you want to remember, he was president from 2017 to 2021. When we armed Ukraine to the teeth. Yes, that's exactly right. Right. That's exactly right. So there we are. I mean, but the other thing is that Trump is something of an outlier here. I tried to make that point before. Trump and points are outliers. And Trump is not forever. He's not going to be the president in three and a half more years. And, you know, it's I don't know if it's likely, but there's a very good chance that his successor will look a lot more like Joe Biden than Donald Trump. So we're in real trouble here.

Professor Mary Schumer, a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you very much for your time. These are great conversations that we have. I wish I didn't have another commitment or I'd want to go on for another half hour and steal more of your free time. But thank you very much for it and we'll look forward to seeing you next week. You're more than welcome, Judge. Have a good weekend and I look forward to seeing you next Thursday.

You got it. All the best. And coming up tomorrow, the end of the next. tomorrow, the end of the day, the end of the week, at 4.30 in the afternoon with Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern, the Intelligence Community Roundtable. Justice Napolitano for judging freedom. Thank you.