Judging Freedom - Prof. John Mearsheimer: US and the Unipolar Moment

Episode Date: February 22, 2024

Prof. John Mearsheimer: US and the Unipolar MomentSee 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, February 22nd, 2024. Professor John Mearsheimer joins us now. Professor Mearsheimer, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you for your time and thank you for your analysis. I want to go back into history, recent history, in an area that I know you have spoken of and written about extensively. What is or was the unipolar moment? The unipolar moment is a period, and I'll describe it in greater detail in a second, where there is only one great power in the system, in the international system. You and I were born during the Cold War, and that was a bipolar system. And it was bipolar because there were two poles or two great powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. And what happened is we went from a bipolar world, the world we grew up in, to a unipolar world.

And then in about 2017, we went from a unipolar world to a multipolar world. And it's multipolar because there are three great powers in the system now, the United States, China, and Russia. And when you talk about what a pole is, unipolar, bipolar, multipolar, a pole is a great power. So we went in our lifetimeipolar moment roughly around 1991. As you know, the Cold War ended in 1989. And then in December 1991, the Soviet Union disappeared. It fell apart. So at that point in time, we clearly had one great power. And most people would agree that that lasted until about 2017. And it's not because Donald Trump came into the White House in 2017 that we moved from unipolarity to multipolarity.

It's just that the balance of power had shifted to the point where you could now consider China to be a great power and Russia to be a great power. In the case of Russia, what had happened was that Vladimir Putin, after taking office in 2000, slowly but steadily resurrected Russia from the dead. And it was effectively a great power by 2017. And of course, China, because of all of the economic development that took place in the 1990s and in the first 15 years of this century was by 2017, powerful enough economically and militarily to be considered a great power. So today we live in a multipolar world. And how do you define a great power? Is it economic as well as military? Well, the two building blocks of power are wealth and population size. And just to go to the Chinese for a second,

they've always had the population size. The Chinese now have roughly four plus times as many people as the United States. So they have a huge population. What they didn't have until recently was the wealth. They now have population plus wealth. And population are the two building blocks that you employ to build military power. And of course, the Chinese are building significant military power now because they have the wealth and they have the population size. So military power in the final analysis is what describes the balance of power or defines the balance of power. But what really matters are those two building blocks, population size and wealth. And one of the reasons that the United States is likely to be incredibly powerful for the foreseeable future is because we're an immigrant culture. If you look around the world, all countries are depop problem. It's called immigration. You open the

sluice gates, huge numbers of immigrants come in, and the country continues to grow in size. So I would argue that long after we're dead, let's say in the year 2075, I think the United States will be more powerful relative to China than it is today, because China's population will by then have shrunk significantly, and ours will have grown significantly because of immigration. This presumes, of course, that we do not shut the doors to immigrants because of some xenophobic impulses that infect the government. Yeah. I mean, I've actually looked quite closely at this. Basically, immigrants started flowing into the United States in about 1835, the big five European groups, German-Americans, Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans,, Jewish Americans, and Polish Americans. Those are the big five groups. And they came in in huge numbers between 1835 and 1924.

And 24 is when we shut the gates, not completely, but pretty much closed. From 24 until 1965. It's in 1965 when we opened the gates again, and huge numbers of immigrants flow in. Although this time they don't come from Europe, they come from Hispanic countries, mainly in this hemisphere, and they come from Asia. And the Trump administration and lots of people in the United States who have nativist sentiments would like to shut down immigration. And they may succeed. It's possible. But there will come a time where there is an imperative to let those people in that

would just need immigrants. I think there was an opening in the Reagan years when an amnesty was granted to about, whatever the number was, it was unknown and probably unknowable of immigrants here illegally. The Romano-Mazzoli bill, I remember Congressman Mazzoli's name on the bill. It was a Democrat and a Republican. I forget who his colleague was. Okay, back to the unipolar moment. Of the tripolar moment, which we have now, which is the most antagonistic of the three to the other two? Look, there's no question that the United States is the most powerful state on the planet. It's the most powerful of those three great powers. And China is a close second. China is a peer competitor. The Russians, well, Russia is a distant third. And virtually everybody who thinks about the

threat environment that the United States operates in will tell you that China is the principal danger to the United States. Now, there are different interpretations of how dangerous it is. But leaving that aside, China is the principal competitor of the United States. Russia is not. And the fact that we're fighting a war against Russia and Ukraine is remarkably foolish because we have no beef with Russia. And if anything, we should have good relations with Russia. And to the extent that we have conflictual relations with any country, that's China, because it is a peer competitor. But what accounts for American animosity towards Russia? Is it just this blind belief of the neocons that because President Putin is not Thomas

Jefferson, he should be driven from office? Well, I actually think the conflict with Russia is in large part a vestige of the unipolar moment. And what happened is when the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union disappeared and the United States was Godzilla, it decided that it was going to go around the globe and it was going to do massive social engineering. It was going to spread its institutions all over the planet. It was going to promote democracy by promoting color revolutions like the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Rose Revolution in Georgia. And what happened in Europe is that we

decided that we wanted to take that liberal zone of peace that we had created in Western Europe during the Cold War, and we wanted to extend it eastward. And it's hard to believe now, but NATO expansion was initially not aimed at a Russian threat, because there was no Russian threat. Russia was remarkably weak in the 90s and in the early 2000s. So we weren't trying to contain Russia. But what we were doing by spreading this liberal order eastward was antagonizing the Russians. And every time they protested, we doubled down. And the end result is we ended up in this war that we're now in with the Russians. But it is not a result of decisions that were made in multipolarity so much. It's mainly a result of what happened in the unipolar moment. But if I were to modify my question about which is the more antagonistic, which is the more

antagonistic toward either one of the other two, your answer would be the United States toward Russia. Russia is not antagonistic towards China answer would be the United States toward Russia. Russia is not antagonistic towards China. China is not antagonistic towards Russia. Or do you think China is antagonistic towards us? I think we're more antagonistic towards China than China is towards us. What China would like to do is continue to grow peacefully and eventually just dominate Asia. They may have to use military force to take Taiwan. They may have to use military force to take the South China Sea. But I think in the meantime, the Chinese would like to grow peacefully. This was Deng Xiaoping's famous strategy for how China should proceed as it grew economically and militarily more powerful.

The problem is that the United States is scared stiff about the growth of Chinese economic and military power. And the United States has moved into East Asia to contain China. Let's return to the frivolity of the United States using Ukraine as a battering ram to drive Vladimir Putin from office. How well is that going? How bad off is the Ukrainian government and military as we speak? Two years almost to the day, Professor Mearsheimer, after the special military operation was commenced. Well, I think things are going very badly for Ukraine. There's almost no question about that. They're doing poorly on the battlefield.

And it's quite clear that the balance of power between Ukraine and Russia is widening in the Russians' favor. And that means that as time goes by, the Russians will do better on the battlefield than the Ukrainians. There's lots of talk in the United States, mainly in the foreign policy establishment, about rearming Ukraine so that it can reconquer that territory that it has lost. Even though it failed last year with the famous or infamous counteroffensive, the belief is that eventually Ukraine can take back that territory in the east that Russia now controls. This is delusional. The Russians are going to keep that territory. And the really interesting question is,

how much more territory are the Russians going to capture? Because again, the balance of power is shifting towards the Russians. Every indicator that you look at to determine who is likely to win this war says the Russians are going to win. There are no advantages that the Ukrainians have. One could argue it's a wash with drones. Okay. But leaving drones aside, where you just have a wash, the Russians have an advantage in manpower. They have an advantage in equipment. They have an advantage in firepower. And they are going to inflict more defeats on the Ukrainians. And there is nothing that the Ukrainians and the West can do, in my opinion, to prevent that. And the American government is too ashamed, embarrassed, arrogant, whatever the adjective you want to use to acknowledge that. Yeah, there's no question about that. I mean,

what we're talking about here is who is going to get blamed if Ukraine loses. Correct. And if you believe what President Putin said to Tucker Carlson in that now famous interview, he basically said, if the U.S. stops arming Ukraine, the special military action is over in three weeks. We could debate whether it'll be over in three weeks or three months, but it doesn't matter very much because it would be over. There's not much question about that. And you would then get a frozen conflict. I mean, I think Putin made it clear in the interview, and he's made it clear on countless occasions, he does not intend to

conquer all of Ukraine. And therefore, Russia will not win a decisive victory. It will not decisively defeat Ukraine. There will be a Ukrainian rump state left in place, and you will have a frozen conflict between the Russians on one side and the Ukrainians on the other side. And this will mean more trouble for the foreseeable future. Switching gears to the other hotspot, as far as you know, have officials in the State Department, going back as far as you want to Harry Truman's time, ever acknowledged sotto voce that the two-state solution is dead on arrival and is impossible to achieve? Stated differently, is all this two-state talk by Tony Blinken and Joe Biden and the others just a fig leaf? No, I think they believe it, but that just indicates that when it comes to this issue,

they're fools. I think they genuinely believe you can get a two-state solution. I think they genuinely believe that there's this huge number of people in Israel who are reasonable and can be convinced that we can get a two-state solution. They're wrong, and the evidence here is overwhelming that that is not the case. And it's also quite clear that the United States cannot put pressure on Israel. We can't use all that coercive leverage we have to get the Israelis to accept the two-state solution. So even if we wanted to coerce the Israelis, we can't do it. So there's not going to be a two-state solution. What would happen if Joe Biden called up Benjamin Netanyahu and said, stop the onslaught tomorrow or no more spare parts, no more sea, whatever they call them, those huge transport planes, no more ammunition, no more weapons, no more cash, everything stops? Benjamin Netanyahu would change his policies quite quickly. And if he didn't,

he would be overthrown. The only country in the world that really is propping up Israel and supporting it is the United States. We support them at every turn. They wouldn't have been able to fight this war in Gaza the way they have fought it without American support. And of course, we protect them diplomatically at every turn. If we turned on Israel and we used our coercive leverage against them to get them to fundamentally alter their behavior in Gaza, it would have an amazing effect, in my opinion, on the Israeli body politic and on Benjamin Netanyahu himself. But you see, the thing is that Netanyahu and almost all Israelis understand we're not going to do that. They understand they can thumb their noses at us and it just doesn't matter because of the Israel lobby. The United States is not in a position to use its coercive leverage. And it has a huge amount of coercive leverage that it could use against Israel.

It's not going to use it. And they know that. And again, it's because of the lobby. Before we get to the lobby, the power of which you have great expertise on. Here's a clip of Benny Gantz. The liberal Democrat who will likely replace Netanyahu at the next election when Likud no longer has the ability to form the Israeli government. Tell me if what you are about to hear doesn't sound like it was written by Netanyahu. The world must know, and Hamas leaders must know, if by Ramadan hostages are not home,

the fighting will continue everywhere to include Rafah area. We will do so in coordinated manner, facilitating the evacuation of civilians in dialogue with American and Egyptian partners to minimize the civilian casualties as much as possible. Have they done anything to minimize the civilian casualties as much as possible? I think if you look at what the Israelis have done since the International Court of Justice issued its findings in late January, there is no evidence that the Israelis have tamped down their murderous policies in any way. And in fact, you could make an argument that the policies remain pretty much the same. So there's just no question on that count. With regard to Gantz, I don't think there's much daylight between Gantz and Netanyahu, as you say. On foreign policy. On foreign policy.

Right. Yeah. But you have said this long before today. It was just startling to me. I mean, Gantz was his bitter, bitter adversary, but it was startling for me to actually hear him say words that were antagonistic, even more so than what Prime Minister Netanyahu has said. The hearings before the ICJ, as you know, continue. We're going to play a clip from the American representative, whose words are unsurprising, and who ends this clip by saying what I think is a facade, but you think they really believe, the two-state solution. I'm going to guess that between you and I, we don't know who this fellow is, because unlike the other countries, the United States did not send a John Mearsheimer type, a universally

recognized expert in the field as an academic or a lawyer, they just sent a deputy assistant legal advisor in the State Department. Well, here he is. Earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of State Blinken traveled to the region for the fifth time since October 7 and discussed the sets of commitments that all parties would need to make. As he explained, there will be difficult choices necessary to realize the vision of a long-elusive prospect of true peace and true security. He also reinforced that the diplomatic path to a just and lasting peace and to true security for all in the region continues to be a path to an Israel that is fully integrated into the region with normal relations with the countries of the region

and with firm guarantees for its security. He underscored that this must include a concrete path to a Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel. We know that a concrete path to a Palestinian state, living side by side with Israel, is impossible. Are normalized relations with the other countries in the region even possible in light of the genocide in Gaza? Well, the big question has to do mainly with Saudi Arabia, because as you well know, Saudi Arabia and Israel, with help from the United States, were working on putting into place another Abraham Accord before October 7th. And there was all sorts of optimism here in the United States and in Israel and Saudi Arabia, that that Abraham Accord would be put

in place. And that would have basically normalized relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. And it would have been a huge feather in Israel's cap and in America's cap. But that's all gone by the wayside now. And the Saudis have made it clear that that's not going to happen until you get a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders. So I think that the October 7 events have fundamentally changed how Arab states, especially the Saudis, now think about dealing with Israel. What about Turkey, Jordan? I'll keep Iran out of the picture. What about Turkey and Jordan? Turkey's a major economic powerhouse that the Israelis have to deal with, isn't it? Well, the Israelis and the Turks have had quite bad relations in recent years,

and I don't think the Israelis held out much hope that they could significantly improve relations with the Turks. The Saudis were the people they really wanted to cut a deal with. But as a result of October 7th and what's happened since then, relations between Turkey and Israel have soured. They have gotten much worse. And I don't think there's much hope for improvement in the near future. With regard to Jordan, there are real limits to what the Jordanians can do other than protest against what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians in Gaza. They have been protesting loudly and clearly, and I don't think it's had that much impact on Israeli behavior or on American thinking, but they are protesting. Is any state actor or non-state actor prepared to use force to stop the Israeli slaughter in Gaza, or do we have to wait

for the Israelis to attack Hezbollah? Well, there are two actors that have turned to military action in support of Hamas. First and most important are the Houthis and what's going on in the Red Sea. The Houthis have made it very clear that they will stop attacking American and British shipping and ships that are headed towards Israel as soon as the Israeli military stops operations in Gaza. So the Houthis clearly are responding to events in Gaza. And I think Hezbollah is as well. And one could make the argument that these militias in Syria, these are the Iranian-supported militias in Syria and Iraq, are two other actors who have jumped into action in part to support the Palestinians in Gaza. Would it be a mistake for the Israelis to invade Lebanon and take Hezbollah on toe-to-toe? I think it would be a mistake. I mean, by all accounts, Hezbollah has somewhere in the

range of 150,000 rockets and missiles. A good number of them are precision guided, and they have the ability to wreak destruction in wide swaths of Israeli territory. And I think Iron Dome, the Israelis' air defense system, would in the end be overwhelmed. So the Israelis wouldn't end up knocking down anywhere near all of those rockets and missiles that Hezbollah launched. Furthermore, if the Israelis go in with ground forces into southern Lebanon, that is not likely to work out well. They did that in 1982, and they did that in 2006. And in both cases, it ended up causing more trouble than it did solving any meaningful problems. So a land attack into southern Lebanon won't buy them much.

If Hezbollah were to launch rockets and missiles at Israel, then Israel would probably bomb Beirut, and they would probably go to great lengths to make Beirut look like Gaza. I'm not sure that this would be a solution to Israel's problems. And in fact, it would just do much more damage to Israel's position in the world. It would strain relations with the United States even more. So from my point of view, picking a fight with Hezbollah is not a smart thing to do for the Israelis. If Benjamin Netanyahu were to threaten the use of nuclear weaponry,

would that startle anybody? I mean, stated differently, do all state actors, even though the U.S. won't admit this, know that the Israelis have offensive nuclear weaponry? I don't think, first of all, everybody understands that the Israelis have nuclear weapons. I don't think there's any reasonable chance that Israel would threaten to use nuclear weapons. I think the only circumstance under which Israel would use nuclear weapons is if its survival was threatened. In 1973, when the Israelis got caught by surprise by the Egyptians in the Sinai and by the Syrians on the Golan Heights, the Israelis began to prepare to use their nuclear weapons because they thought their survival was at risk. But those days are

gone. There's no way that Hezbollah or Hamas or any other actor in the Middle East can threaten Israel's survival. And therefore, there's no reason for Israel to pull out its nuclear weapons and threaten to use them. I think the Israelis have overwhelming conventional military power vis-a-vis virtually all of their adversaries. And as a result of that, they don't have to even think about using nuclear weapons at this point. Is there any political force in the United States sufficient to challenge or neutralize AIPAC and the Israeli lobby and the so-called donor class? I mean, is there any reasonable prospect that Joe Biden or another occupant of the White House, would have a more rational view about the value of Israel as a national security asset to the United States and a more heartwarming view about the plight

of the Palestinian people? No, I think at least not in the foreseeable future. The lobby is remarkably powerful, and it understands that it has a tough job these days. I mean, protecting Israel in the international court of opinion, in the court of opinion here in the United States, is not easy to do. And the lobby has nevertheless redoubled its efforts. And it is a very formidable interest group. And there is no other rival interest group to challenge it. And if you look at how our political system works, there's no reason to think that the forces are going to line up so that the lobby is going to be weakened in some meaningful way. And President Biden is going to line up so that the lobby is going to be weakened in some meaningful way. And President Biden is going to be able to do what is in the American national interest.

That's just not going to happen. Hasn't happened for a long time. And there's no evidence it's going to happen anytime soon. I say this with great regret, but I am a realist with a little R as well as a big R. My apologies to our audience because we've played this clip many times, but I want you to see it. This is a Palestinian representative before the International Court of Justice. Now, this application, which is the same application at which the American lawyer spoke, challenges Israel's right to occupy any of the land between the river and the sea. But the application is very interesting because it shows a series of maps starting in 1948 and going up to Prime Minister Netanyahu's famous or infamous, wherever you want to look at it, map of Israel at the United Nations two weeks before October 7th.

But I'm going to ask you about the historical accuracy of these maps. Allow me now to show you five maps. The first one is historic Palestine. This is the territory over which the Palestinian people should have been able to exercise their right to self-determination. Instead, the General Assembly recommended the partition of Palestine, ignoring the will of our people as shown in the ونحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نحن نح Israel, as shown in the third map. This was the start of the Nakba, the disposition, the displacement and replacement of our people, the denial of rights and discrimination that continues to this very day. إسرائيل ثم اتخذت المباكرة من فلسطين ومن يوم الأول من تلك التخصصات بدأت في التقليد والتحديد من المنطقة بأهمية تجعل تخصصاتها مستقيمة. تركنا مع نموذج المتجمعات المتجمعات من فلسطين تمنع إستقرار نظامنا كما يظهر في الماك 4.

إسرائيل أرادت جيوغرافية فلسطين ولكن ليست ديموغرافيا. لذا استمرت تسحب أشخاصنا من خارج منزلهم من خارج من دولهم. هنا هو الماك الخامس. كان يُظهره من خلال إسرائيل للجنة الأساميلي في سبتمبر الأخير. تسمى هذا المدينة الأخيرة الجديدة. هذا لا يوجد لا يوجد فلسطين على هذا الماكهة. فقط إسرائيل ممتازة بكل الأرض من الجردان الى

المدينة المدينة. هذا يظهر لك ما هو مجال الإستقبال المستمر في إسرائيل to the Mediterranean Sea. This shows you what the prolonged, continuous Israeli occupation of Palestine is intended to accomplish. The complete disappearance of Palestine and the destruction of the Palestinian people. The complete disappearance of Palestine and the destruction of the Palestinian people

is not that history lesson essentially and intellectually irrefutable? Yes, there's no question about that. What's going on here today is that you have a greater Israel. That's the last map. And the problem, as I've said before on the show, is the problem from an Israeli point of view is that there are roughly 7.3 million Palestinians in greater Israel and 7.3 million Israeli Jews. And the end result is that you have an apartheid state. This is an apartheid state. Greater Israel is an apartheid state. And what the Israelis want to do is they want to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians in Gaza. That's what's been going

on since October 7th. And they also want to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians in the West Bank so they can create a population distribution that greatly favors the Jews over the Palestinians. So the land has all been taken now. If you go back to roughly 1900, you had a piece of territory that was Palestinian. There was no Jewish settlements in that state. And then you fast forward to the present, you have a greater Israel that is basically a Jewish state. But the problem is forward to the present. You have a greater Israel that is basically a Jewish state. But the problem is that inside that Jewish state, you have as many Palestinians as Jews, and you get apartheid. And the question is, how do you solve that? And the only real way you can solve it from the Israeli perspective is ethnic cleansing. Will this apartheid ever end? Well, if you don't get ethnic cleansing,

let's assume that they're not the Israelis, and let's hope this happens, that the Israelis are unable to cleanse the Palestinians in Gaza, and they can't cleanse the Palestinians in the West Bank, then you still have an apartheid state. And the Israelis fully understand, the lobby understands that defending an apartheid state is an incredibly difficult task. This is why, as I said before, the lobby has to work overtime these days. They've had to redouble their efforts. Because the problem is that so many people are now aware of what Israel is up to. When you and I were young, we didn't know any of this. And we had a rather idealized view of Israel. But that worldview that we had has gone away. We've been educated. And all sorts of people besides us

have been educated. And this presents huge problems for Israel, because it is an apartheid state. And you remember when South Africa was an apartheid state. And you remember what happened to South Africa. The Israelis and their supporters here in the United States live in fear of Israel's future because it's an apartheid state. Here's somebody that knows what an apartheid state is. This is the South African ambassador to the Netherlands arguing before the, number three, Chris, arguing before the International Court of Justice this week. Israeli apartheid must end. Palestine, the last unfulfilled sacred trust of civilization for whom the international community bears responsibility, must now be fulfilled. The Palestinian people must be permitted to exercise their inalienable right to self-determination.

Mr. President, South Africa bears a special obligation both to its own people and the international community to ensure that wherever the egregious and offensive practices of apartheid occur, these must be called out for what they are and brought to an immediate end, and that the perpetrators of such egregious breaches of parentary norms of international law be held accountable. Do you think those perpetrators will ever be held accountable? Not in the foreseeable future. I would note to you, by the way, Judge, if you think about Tony Blinken and Joe Biden and their views on a two-state solution and the views of many Americans, including many American Jews, about the need for a two-state

solution, they are basically saying that they recognize that the Palestinians deserve a state of their own. They're saying they believe in Palestinian self-determination, which is very important to understand that. This is why American presidents, since Jimmy Carter, have backed the two-state solution. They understand that the Palestinians deserve a state of their own. And furthermore, that's the only way you're ever going to have some sort of meaningful peace agreement or peace in this region, right? And nevertheless, they can't use American course of leverage to push the Israelis to accept the two-state solution. But while they say they believe in the two-state solution, they are supplying the equipment and ammunition to destroy it,

to destroy a whole population of innocent people. I agree. You're not going to get any argument from me. As you and I have talked about before, we're complicitous in this genocide. And with regard, the hearing that you just played the two clips from doesn't deal with genocide. The case that's now before the- It deals with occupation. Yes, exactly. And to put it in slightly different terms, it deals with apartheid. That's what's going on here. And it's reflected in the South African gentleman's comments, right? There's no question about that.

But we are not only the United States supporting the genocide in Gaza, we're supporting an apartheid state. We have allowed the Israelis to create an apartheid state since 1967. And we not only allowed it, we supported it. We backed them at every turn. And the question you want to ask yourself is, why is this the case? Why is it that the United States has this special relationship with Israel? You wrote the book on it, The Lobby. Yes, exactly right. Professor Mearsheimer, it's such a pleasure.

I can't believe we've been talking for 40 minutes. It went by like that. It's a great history and geopolitical lesson from a master. Thank you very much, my dear friend. You're more than welcome. Okay, we'll see you again soon. A master indeed. Tomorrow, Aaron Maté and, of course, everybody's favorite late in the

afternoon, a little bit earlier, I think one o'clock Eastern time tomorrow, the Intelligence Community Roundtable with Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Продолжение следует...