Judging Freedom - Prof. John Mearsheimer: Ukraine Collapsing

Episode Date: July 11, 2024

Prof. John Mearsheimer: Ukraine CollapsingSee 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, July 11th, 2024. Professor John Mearsheimer joins us now. Professor Mearsheimer, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you for accommodating my schedule. As we speak, the president of the United States is concluding his role as a host of the NATO leadership, which is in Washington, D.C., celebrating its 75th anniversary. I don't want to get into the use or misuse of the word celebration. From their perspective, it's a celebration. They haven't released their official communique yet, but they did leak some drafts of a few paragraphs, and two of them referred to Ukraine's entry into NATO as inevitable and irreversible. Were you surprised that something as reckless as that was leaked at a time like this? I was a bit surprised. I mean, given how

reckless the Biden administration can be, you never are completely surprised by something like this. But I didn't think that they would go that far. If anything, they seemed before this meeting to be hedging on this issue. So I was a bit surprised. Here's Secretary Blinken yesterday being even more specific. Maybe you know what this phrase means, a well-lit bridge to NATO, but let's hear him say it. We have an incredibly robust package that will be unveiled over the next couple of days at NATO that builds a very clear, strong, robust, well-lit bridge to NATO membership for Ukraine, including, as you mentioned, the first time NATO's dedicated a command

to helping an aspiring country join the alliance. This in and of itself is extraordinary. Dedicated a command to help an aspiring country join the alliance. We built a well-lit bridge. And then his colleagues saying irreversible and inevitable. Are they trying to poke the Russian bear? I think they are poking the Russian bear, whether they're trying to or not. I think that he's mainly concerned with convincing the Ukrainians that we're with them, that we have their back. I mean, the Ukrainians are doing terribly on the battlefield. The Russians have the upper hand. And it's hard to argue that the Russians are not going to win this war in one way or another. Hard to see how the Ukrainians can reverse it. And the Ukrainians need to believe that we're with them if they're going to continue to believe, foolishly, I think, but continue to believe that they stand a chance of stemming the tide and maybe even eventually reversing it. And they have good

reasons to doubt that the United States is fully committed to supporting them, especially because it seems likely that President Trump will return to the White House in the fall. I'm not saying that's axiomatic, but given where the politics in America are today, it does look like Donald Trump will be back in the White House, and Donald Trump has very little interest in supporting the Ukrainians. So the Ukrainians are deeply worried about their future, and I think what Biden is mainly doing is telling the Ukrainians we have their back. I would argue that one of the reasons the Ukrainians don't want a ceasefire is because if there is a ceasefire, they would have to get rid of martial law. And with no martial law, they'd have to have an election. And if there's an election, it's inconceivable that President Zelensky would be reelected.

What do you think? I think that's one reason. The fact is that there are a number of reasons they don't want to cease fire. First of all, I think if Zelensky moved to get a ceasefire, there's a good chance he might be assassinated. A number of people on the far right in Ukraine have made it clear that a ceasefire is unacceptable. Furthermore, the Americans would be very unhappy with a ceasefire. The West more generally would be unhappy with a ceasefire. And then if you look at the terms of a ceasefire, what the Ukrainians and the West would, in effect, have to accept is the movement of all Ukrainian troops out of those four oblasts that the Russians have annexed but don't fully control yet. So those Ukrainian forces would have to be moved out. The Ukrainians would have to recognize the annexation of those four oblasts

by the Russians. And furthermore, the Russians insist that the Ukrainians declare neutrality and that they will never join NATO. These are the preconditions to move to negotiations. These are the preconditions that produce a ceasefire plus negotiations. It's hard to imagine the Ukrainians, Zelensky in particular, accepting that. So what I'm saying to you is that this is a case of overdetermination. The factor that you point out is true, but there are a host of other factors as well. And that's why the Ukrainians, unless they're defeated in a catastrophic way on the battlefield in eastern Ukraine in the next couple of weeks, are not going to move towards the state. What a mess the Americans have created. What a far better deal for human life would have been the case had Boris Johnson and Joe Biden not interfered with the Istanbul agreement negotiated in the spring

of 22. Absolutely, but I'd go a step further than that. What a mess the George W. Bush administration created in April 2008 when it started pushing this train out of the station, when at the end of the NATO summit in Bucharest, this is again in April 2008, we said that Ukraine would become a member of NATO. This is when all the trouble started. It's been downhill all the way. And I would argue that this one is not going to improve in any meaningful way for the foreseeable future. You're going to have constant trouble between the West and Ukraine on one side and Russia on the other side. This is a disastrous situation and it has no solution that I see. You mentioned a few minutes ago Zelensky and the Ukrainian

hierarchy here. Two days ago in Washington, D.C. on July 9, talking about the potential advent to the presidency of Donald Trump, cut number 16. I hope that the United States will never seriously think to go out from NATO. I think so. But it's not my thoughts. And I hope that if people of America will vote for President Trump, I hope that his policy with Ukraine will not change. You know, Trump isn't known for being a deep thinker on these things and sometimes changes his mind,

but he's been fairly consistent on this, that he would put an end to the war and an end to USAID. Well, USAID ending would end the war just like USAID to Gaza would end that war almost as soon as the aid stopped. Yeah, there's no question that if Trump cut off all aid to Ukraine, that would put a quick end to the war, or at least create a ceasefire. But I don't think Trump is going to end the war. I think that his boasts about ending the war are empty boasts. And I say that in large part because he was asked the question at the debate with Joe Biden, whether he would accept the two Russian demands to start negotiations. In other words, the Russians have said that before we start negotiations, the following two demands have to be accepted. Number one, you have to recognize that we now own these four

oblasts, and you have to remove all Ukrainian troops from them, number one. And number two, you have to declare Ukraine a neutral country, no Ukraine and NATO. Those are the two preconditions. And Trump was explicitly asked by the moderator whether he would accept those two conditions. And he said, without hesitation, no. And once you say no to that, there is no way you're going to have negotiations. Because the fact is that Vladimir Putin does not trust Donald Trump any more than he trusts Joe Biden, any more than he trusts Barack Obama. Putin has learned his lesson. You do not want to trust any American leader. If a President Trump promised President Putin that NATO would never move one inch eastward,

would Putin accept or rely on that promise? Well, it has to be combined with, first of all, getting all Ukrainian troops out of those four oblasts that they're now in and fighting with the Russians over, and accepting the fact that those four oblasts have been lost to Russia forever. And that is just a starting point, because then the negotiations have to take place. And if you go back to the negotiations that took place right after the war started, we saw back then that the Russians put significant demands on the Ukrainians, which they accepted in principle, to reduce significantly the size of the Ukrainian military so that it had hardly any offensive military

capability. So that whole issue has to be resolved. There's just a whole slew of issues that have to be resolved beyond NATO membership and beyond those four oblasts. And I think Vladimir Putin wisely is not in the business of trusting American leaders, whether it's Donald Trump or Joe Biden. And furthermore, even if his instincts are to trust Donald Trump, which I'm sure they're not, but let's assume I'm wrong, and he trusts Donald Trump, Donald Trump is not forever. He's at some point going to leave the White House after a second term. And when he leaves the White House, Putin or his successor will be dealing with the new American leader.

And it may be another Joe Biden. So what Putin has to do now is he has to get a solid deal that puts Russia in the catbird seat for the foreseeable future. And that means playing hardball with the West. That means playing hardball with Trump. And I don't think Trump is going to make the concessions that are necessary to satisfy Putin. Trump has been rather reckless. At one point he said if Putin had attacked Ukraine in his watch, he would have sent missiles to Moscow. That, of course, I don't even think the people that he would have ordered to do that would have complied with such an order. I agree with that, by the way. I don't think that would have complied with that order. And rightly so. But here is President Biden two days ago. This is really a remarkable statement, remarkable for its ignorance on how he believes or he says he believes Ukraine will stop Putin. Number seven, Chris. In Europe, Putin's war of aggression against Ukraine continues.

And Putin wants nothing less — nothing less than Ukraine's total subjugation to end Ukraine's democracy, to destroy Ukraine's culture, and to wipe Ukraine off the map. And we know Putin won't stop at Ukraine. But make no mistake, Ukraine can and will stop Putin. I mean, this is really reckless for him to say that Putin wants to wipe Ukraine off the map, that Putin wants to destabilize Ukrainian democracy. Joe Biden and his buddies in 2014 destabilized Ukrainian democracy. Joe Biden and his buddies in 2014 destabilized Ukrainian democracy when they chased the popularly elected president out of the country. Absolutely. I mean, the idea that

Putin is bent on creating an empire in Eastern Europe and then, you know, marching on Western Europe and that he's this great threat to start World War III is simply not a serious argument. There is no evidence to support it. And when you look at how much military power the Russians have, they're in no position to do that. I think they're in no position to conquer and occupy all of Ukraine and then integrate it into a greater Russia. It's just not going to happen. They don't have that kind of military capability. I don't know what the heck Biden is talking about. And furthermore, all of his comments about how Ukraine can or will prevail on the battlefield is just more poppycock. The Ukrainians are in deep trouble on the battlefield. The situation continues to erode

more and more every day. And we do not have the capability to rectify the imbalance of manpower and of weaponry and create a situation where Ukraine can stymie the Russians. It's just not going to happen. And these are just assertions. Here's what President Putin thinks of Joe Biden's poppycock. Number four, Chris, you should not make Russia out to be the enemy. You're only hurting yourself, Joe, I'm adding Joe, with this. They thought that Russia wanted to attack NATO. Have you gone completely crazy? Who came up with this? It is complete nonsense, you know, total rubbish. He's right. He's right. I mean, how can you disagree with him? Right. And we will be called Putin's puppets, of course, but the fact is that you and I believe

in facts and logic, along with Vladimir Putin, and our leaders have basically decided that facts and logic don't matter. And they're heavily into propaganda. So we get all this propagandizing and all these delusional statements, and it just makes a bad situation worse. Is the Ukraine military collapsing? Collapsing is a very tricky word. It is losing on the battlefield and it is in danger of collapsing. It has not collapsed yet. And I think it's quite remarkable how tenacious the Ukrainians are. When you look at the imbalance of manpower, you look at how old the Ukrainian soldiers are. They say that, you know, the average age of a Ukrainian soldier is 43 years old. You look at the imbalance in weaponry, you look at the huge number of casualties the Ukrainians

have suffered, and then you take into account that Russian air power dominates the skies, and they're dropping these really large and accurate bombs on all sorts of Ukrainian military installations. When you take all those things into account, it's amazing how hard the Ukrainians have fought and continued to fight. But my view is at some point, it's going to crack, that they just can't hold on. The losses are just too great. The Russians just have too much firepower. Professor Mearsheimer, I want to transition over to the other hotspot, which is Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. Since last we spoke, two bombshell reports have been released, one by one of the most widely respected and oldest medical journals in the world, the British journal The Lancet, which predicts that 186,000 people are dead or will soon be dead as a result of the IDF incursion and slaughter in Gaza. And the other, an investigative report by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which reports what a lot of us have been saying, our colleagues Aaron Mate and Max Blumenthal have been saying this for eight and a half months now,

that on October 7th, more Israelis were killed, military and civilian, by the IDF employing their so-called Hannibal Doctrine, whereby they kill their own people rather than allowing them to be captured as hostages. We'll start with the latter. Does any other country publicly proclaim the right to slaughter its own people, to shoot them in the back? Excuse me. I know of no other case. This is the only case I know of. And by the way, I think that we should applaud both Max and Aaron and the electronic intifada as well for making the argument for a long time that the Hannibal Doctrine had been employed by the Israelis and getting smeared in the process.

They were all thoroughly smeared for making that argument, and Haaretz has now produced this story that makes it clear that they were spot on. And the Netanyahu administration has not denied the Haaretz reporting, which is now five days old. You would think they'd be all over it if they had evidence with which. It's irrefutable. They show Netanyahu administration documents in the report. No, the fact is that this is being documented. There's a big investigation taking place inside the IDF to assess what happened on October 7th. The Israelis have a deep-seated

interest in figuring out what went wrong on October 7th. And in the process, they will produce a thorough study. And in producing that thorough study, they will show quite clearly that the Hannibal Doctrine was invoked, and it resulted in many Israelis being killed by the Israeli military. And there's no way that Netanyahu can get away with this, because it's all going to come out into the open very soon. Were you surprised at the numbers articulated in the Lancet report, Professor Mearsheimer? No, not at all. And let me explain to you what's going on there. When you have a war, people on each side die in one of two ways. One is through violent action. These are direct deaths. And the other category is indirect deaths. This is where your means of survival are undermined and therefore large numbers of people die. Now, the number that has been floating around, the 37,400 Palestinians who are now dead, that number is violent deaths. There's been

37,400 violent deaths. The question is, how many deaths have there been and are there likely to be that are indirect in nature? These are deaths that come from the fact that water, food, and medicine, hospitals, all of these essentials have been destroyed or forbidden from coming into Gaza, which leads to all sorts of problems like starvation, disease, exposure, dehydration, right? And people die in large numbers. So it's very important to understand, in addition to all the people who have been directly killed by violent means, lots of other people are being indirectly killed by the fact that Israel is making Gaza unlivable, okay? Now, there are all sorts of epidemiological studies that show for every one person in a conflict killed by violence, somewhere between three to 15 times as many people are killed by indirect means.

For every one person killed violently, somewhere between three to 15 times as many people are killed indirectly. Now, what the Lancet study does is it assumes that four people are dying indirectly for every one person killed violently. So what you get, they say, is 186,000 instead of 37 plus thousand. I'll just walk you through the numbers. To take it a step further, we all know that a lot of people are dead and they're underneath the rubble. We also know that in recent months, the Palestinians have had a great deal of trouble reporting deaths because the infrastructure has been so thoroughly destroyed, including the hospitals and all the records-keeping institutions. So let's assume that you have 37 plus dead that we know of, and you have another 13 who are either under the rubble or just haven't been reported for a total of 50. So there are 50 who have been killed, 50,000 by violent means.

The Lancet report assumes that four times as many people have been killed or will be killed indirectly. As you know, four times 50,000 is 200,000. So that would be 200,000 plus 50,000. So that's 250,000 people either dead or will be dead as a result of what the Israelis are doing in Gaza. And that, as the Lancet report makes clear, is probably a low number, right? Because what the Israelis are doing to make Gaza unlivable, it is so horrible what the Israelis are doing that if you talk about the three to 15 times

as many deaths and you only use four times, you're down at the low end. It's, as they say, a conservative estimate. So I think 250,000 dead is a low end number. And they're 186,000 number. So anybody who can test the argument that there is a genocide taking place in Gaza could think long and hard not just about the violent deaths, but the indirect deaths as well. So you ended where I intended to pick up with my next question. There is no serious intellectually honest argument to be made that this is not genocide or that this is not a war crime. 250,000 deaths is more than 10% of the population. No question. And it's not like the war has now ended and we're just waiting for this to play out and we will then see a total of 250,000 deaths. The Israelis are

continuing to murder huge numbers of Palestinian civilians. And furthermore, they're preventing food and water and fuel and medicine from getting into Gaza. And they're wrecking the hospitals in Gaza. So what's happening here is that this number is going up day by day, and there is no end in sight. Netanyahu was asked today when he saw the war ending, and he makes it very clear that he sees no end in sight. So this number is just going to go up and up. And just like with the Haaretz report, the Netanyahu government has not denied the Lancet report. Well, there's no way you can deny it. I mean, the 30- They're not interested in truth. They're interested in propaganda.

Yeah, but it's getting very hard for them to get away with it, right? Because people are now onto them. The fact that we now know the Hannibal Doctrine was employed on October 7th really matters. It shows that they were lying. Furthermore, all those stories about beheaded babies and rapes and so forth and so on that have not proved true have gone a long way to undermining the starvation or the devastation in Gaza. It's the fault of the United Nations. Right. If the United Nations and all these international organizations were doing their job, there would be, you know, no starvation, no shortage. They murdered United Nations aid workers.

Exactly. It's absolutely horrible. Professor Mearsheimer, this has been a master class on a very serious, profound, and sickening subject, death in Gaza, but a master class for everyone who watches this show to understand. I'm deeply grateful for it and grateful for your time as always. As I was telling you before we started, I'll be gone for two weeks, but look forward to seeing you upon my return at the very end of July and the very earliest parts of August. Thank you, my dear friend.

You're welcome, and have a wonderful vacation. You deserve it. Thank you. Thank you. All the best to you. Truly, truly a gifted academic mind with the gift for explaining hard truths so that we can all understand them. Following up on Professor Mearsheimer at five o'clock, and we've been waiting for him, the inimitable Max Blumenthal. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thanks for watching!