Judging Freedom - Prof. John Mearsheimer: Will Russia and China Back Iran?

Episode Date: August 8, 2024

Prof. John Mearsheimer: Will Russia and China Back Iran?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi there, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, August 8th, 2024. Professor John Mearsheimer joins us now. Just a little historical footnote. You probably remember 50 years ago today as the day that Richard M. Nixon resigned the presidency. I was a law student. I thought the world was going to cave in. I thought it was part of a coup. And of course, we keep learning more and more about Watergate and about the corrupt process that pursued him. But to matters more relevant, I have a lot to talk to you about with respect to Israel and with respect to Russia. I want to start with Russia.

What is the significance of this attack in Kursk, whereby, according to President Putin, civilian residents were attacked, civilians were killed, and Ukrainian military took over and seized a Russian town? I don't understand what the Ukrainians are doing here. It makes no sense to me at all. I don't understand what the military objective is. And in fact, if anything, what this is going to do is detract from their effort in the eastern part of Ukraine to stymie the Russian steamroller, which is consistently moving forward every day and attriting the fighting units that the Ukrainians have arrayed on that eastern front. I mean, what the Ukrainians should be doing with those forces that they've sent into Russia in the Kursk area is those forces should have been sent to the front lines in the eastern part of Ukraine to buttress the forces that are buckling underneath the Russian steamroller. It makes no sense to attack into

Kursk. What are they going to gain from doing this? Are they going to, you know, help win the war? Not at all. So this is a foolish last minute gamble from my perspective on the part of the Ukrainians to try and turn things around. According to Gilbert Doctorow, the soldiers who did this were the best that Ukraine has, whereas the military farther west that is attempting to, unsuccessfully of course, to delay the Russian onslaught are the worst that the Russian has, that the Ukrainians have. He thinks that this was done just for PR purposes, much like the boasting about flying F-16s over Kiev, which are useless, and that that was done for PR purposes. Do you agree with that? I think one could argue in a compelling way this is being done for PR purposes. As I said in my

initial comment, I can't see what the military value of this is. I can't see how it shifts the military balance in any meaningful way. And as I said, I think if you're really interested in stymieing the Russians, it would have made much more sense, and this is what Gilbert was saying, to take those forces and send them to the east to try and stop the Russians as best that they can. There's no question from all of the news reports that the unit that was sent into Russia in the Kursk area was an elite fighting unit. So you would think an elite fighting unit would be the ideal unit to send to the front lines in the eastern part of Ukraine and not to send heading towards Kursk. And yet an elite fighting unit is used to target Russian civilians rather than a bona fide military target. That's crazy, is it not? Yeah, it just it doesn't make any strategic sense. And as all sorts of people have commented, the Ukrainian leadership is taking a beating in the Ukrainian blogosphere from all of

the Ukrainian individuals who follow this war closely and comment on what Ukraine is doing and how it's faring on the battlefield. So it's not like you have Westerners like us or the Russians criticizing this operation. Many Ukrainians who follow Ukrainian strategy closely and are rooting hard for Ukraine think that it makes no sense at all. Professor Miroslav Sharma, you have an extraordinary piece, a masterpiece, if I may call it that, in your Substack column this week, which is long and detailed and worth reading, about who caused the Ukraine war. Many of the arguments in there you have made on this show. I'm deeply gratified for that and elsewhere,

and the audience is familiar with many of those arguments. This is a detailed piece with a lot of history, and I commend it to everyone to read it. After you did all the research that you had to do in order to write this lengthy piece. Is there any question in your mind but that the United States government is absolutely wrong when it says Putin wants to take over Ukraine, Putin wants to run Ukraine, and when he finishes taking over Ukraine, he wants to invade other countries in Eastern Europe. Is there any question in your mind? There is no question in my mind.

My good friend Steve Walt has advised me not to make the argument that there is no evidence to support the conventional wisdom, which you just articulated about Ukraine. And I understand Steve's point, because what he's saying is you don't want to use extreme language and use words like no evidence. And he says, you should say there's little evidence. My response to Steve is, I would say there is little evidence if there was any evidence, but there is no evidence to support the conventional wisdom. This is one big lie. And the lie is being made or offered in order to generate political support for the people that are articulating the lie. The neocons in the State Department, the State Department itself, the Secretary of State, the head of national security, and to the extent he knows what he's talking about, I don't want to get personal, the President of the United States. I agree with that, but I'll take it a step further.

I think it's very important to understand that this question of who is responsible for causing the Ukraine war matters enormously because it is directly related to the question of who has blood on his hands. That's the issue here. In other words, is it Joe Biden and his lieutenants? Is it the West that has blood on its hands for causing this disaster, or is it Vladimir Putin? And the reason that we invented this story that it was Putin and that he was interested in conquering Ukraine and making it part of a greater Russia, and then he was going to go into Eastern Europe and recreate the Soviet empire. The reason we invented this story is that we want to make the argument he is responsible for the war and he has blood on his hands.

So this is a really high stakes issue. And it's not going to go away because what's going to happen here is that ultimately this war is going to end. People are going to understand it's a total disaster for Ukraine, which of course it is. And the question is then going to come front and center, who has blood on his hands? And is it Biden and company or is it Putin and company? It's Biden and company plus NATO, plus the Western neocon mentality. Yeah, it's the West more generally. Before we transfer over to Israel and Gaza and Hezbollah and Iran, how much longer do you think Ukraine can hold out? Very hard to say. My guess would be that in 2025, this war will come to an end, or at least the shooting

will come to an end. I think that will be a consequence of events on the battlefield, number one, and two, the damage that the Russians are doing to the electric grid inside of Ukraine. I think given the egregious damage that the Russians are inflicting on that grid, and the fact that winter is coming, and given the fact that the Ukrainians are suffering enormous casualties on the battlefield, I think it'll be sometime in 2025 that you have a ceasefire. Here's a cut from President Putin. It's two months old, but he says clearly the threat to Europe does not come from Russia. The threat to Europe does not come from Russia. The main threat to Europeans

is their critical and increasing dependence on the United States in military, political, technological, ideological and informational aspects. Europe is being marginalized in global economic development, plunged into the chaos of challenges such as migration and losing international agency and cultural identity. I think they have his finger right on it. important to understand that when the decision was made to expand NATO eastward to include Ukraine, that Angela Merkel and Nicholas Sarkozy, who were present at the meeting, both were opposed. They were both adamantly opposed to bringing Ukraine into NATO because they knew it would have disastrous consequences. It was the United States that forced Merkel and forced Sarkozy to go along with issuing a communique at the end of the meeting,

this is in April 2008, that Ukraine would become part of NATO. And that's when the ball got rolling. And the Americans have continued to push hard on that theme since April 2008. And the Europeans, of course, fell in line at Bucharest and have remained in line. But the Europeans, and here we're talking mainly about the West Europeans, not the Poles and the Baltic states, but the West European states understood from the get-go that this was a bad idea, and they are now paying the price for following the Pied Piper. Transitioning to Israel, Professor Mearsheimer, do you think that the apparent forever wars, I think he used the phrase, Israel must live on the edge of a sword, that Prime Minister Netanyahu is threatening, will have the effect of uniting or unifying

the liberal secular Jews and the Zionist fanatics in Israel? Well, I think that this is a very tricky question. I mean, there's no question that almost everybody in Israel has come to the conclusion, rightly or wrongly, that they're doomed to be in a permanent state of emergency and the threat of war from their neighbors and from the Palestinians is not going away anytime soon. So I think there's unanimity on that dimension of the question that you're asking. Nevertheless, there are significant disagreements inside of Israel on how to deal with that threat environment. And you see it today with regard to the question of a ceasefire in Gaza. There are just lots of people who believe that the Israelis could accept a ceasefire. And of course, Prime Minister Netanyahu disagrees with that, at least

so far. So there are real differences in that regard. The same thing is true with regard to Gaza. There are a lot of Israelis who tend to be in the center who do not want to remain in Gaza. They think that it's a hornet's nest and Israel should get out. But then you have all sorts of people on the right who would like to kill all the Palestinians in Gaza, ethnically cleanse it, and build settlements in Gaza because they think Gaza is part of the Holy Land. How do you view everything that's happened lately? The videos of torture, the IDF tortures being arrested, and then the beneficiaries of a

jailbreak, the government agreeing not to prosecute them, the long-distance assassinations in Tehran and in Beirut, language from the finance minister Smotrich like, we should really just starve these people to death but the world wouldn't let us do it the Knesset debating whether or not the torturers should have carte blanche that is no prosecution for what they do an actual legal immunity the Knesset debating whether or not the jailers can just put a bullet in the head of the Palestinian prisoners on the theory that they need more bedroom. All of this, how do you view this?

Where do you see this going? Well, I think you have to separate what's going on inside Israel from how Israel deals with its external environment. And to start by talking about what's happening inside Israel, as I've long argued, Israel is an apartheid state. And to run an apartheid state, you have to turn the Palestinians into sub horrible ways the victims, the second class or third class people who live in your society. And this has been happening inside of Israel for a long time. The Israelis have been torturing prisoners, doing terrible things to the Palestinians for a long, long time. And what happened on October 7th is that those terrible practices that the Israelis employ against the Palestinians were ramped up. And what you see today is that the Palestinians are being treated in the most horrendous ways. And most people in the West cannot believe that

the Israelis are doing this because it's so out of line with what you would expect from a liberal democracy. But if you look at how the Israelis themselves think about it, it's quite remarkable how much support there is for this behavior. Channel 12 in Israel recently ran a survey asking Israelis whether they thought it was okay for an Israeli person to rape a terrorist, okay? Is it okay for an Israeli to rape a terrorist? 47% of Israelis, according to Channel 12 in Israel, 47% of Israelis said it's okay. And 42% said it's not okay. What does this say about Israeli society? This is horrible. But that's what you're dealing with. And by the way, there's a new report out from B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights group called Welcome to Hell, which lays out in deep detail what has been happening in Israeli prisons to Palestinians since October 7th.

And that report, by the way, makes it clear that what has been happening since October 7th may be a ramped up version of what was happening before October 7th, but never lose sight of the fact that those prisoners were being treated in the most brutal ways before October 7th as well. This is the raid on the prison by the right-wing Israeli settlers who succeeded in getting the police to back down after the second one of these and extracting the nine IDF soldiers. The IDF soldiers had raped this one young man, not only with their body parts, but with foreign objects that they couldn't remove from him. And so when they sent him to a hospital, the physicians reported this. None of those nine

rapists and torturers will be prosecuted. All have been extricated from jail and the charges dropped. I did not know that, but I would be less than honest if I didn't say I'm hardly surprised at all. Again, that Channel 12 survey said that 47% of Israelis think it is legitimate for someone in the IDF to rape a terrorist. And since all Palestinians are effectively terrorists in the minds of many Israelis, this is hardly surprising that they're doing things like this. Go ahead, please. I'm sorry. I was just going to say what's remarkable is how little condemnation there is of this

behavior in the West, especially in the United States. That brought me to my next question. Does the United States government ever second guess Israel? Second part of the question, does the United States government ever say no or stop to Israel? Well, as you know, the answer is hardly ever. And if we do tell them to stop or we do criticize them, we do it with very vague language because we never really want to get too tough on them. And it's just the way it operates. I mean, the Israelis can do pretty much anything they want, especially when it comes to the Palestinians. I think if you're talking about Israel dealing

with China, you're outside the region, then the United States has a bit of leverage. But if you're talking about inside the region and you're talking about the Israeli-Palestinian issue, Israel can do pretty much anything it wants. And by the way, with regard to Iran, just to talk about the external environment and how the Israelis deal with their external environment, it's quite clear that the United States does not want to get involved in a war with Iran. And now on two occasions, the Israelis have taken military measures that were designed to drag us into a war with Iran. And we were unable to prevent that from happening. And once it did happen, once, you know, the attack on April 1st took place,

you remember that's when they hit the Iranian embassy in Damascus. And then on July 31st, when they took out Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, in both of those cases, we did not condemn Israel for what they did. And this is just, you know, normal behavior on our part. Do you expect a significant or a pinprick or none retaliation from Iran for the Israeli assassination in Tehran? Well, the Iranians have said that there's going to be a significant response, and I will take them at their word. It is possible that they will change their mind. There's no question that the Americans have been going to enormous lengths to get them to limit the attack. And it may be that they've figured out that there are good reasons to limit the attack in significant ways. I don't know what those are, but they have said that they're going to come full

force. They're really going to slam Israel. And I would think that that's true. And by the way, you want to remember that they're not the only actor that's coming after Israel. Hezbollah is coming after Israel too. They've promised that. You want to remember that there were twin assassinations here. The Israelis assassinated a Hezyeh in Tehran. And by the way, the next day, on August 1st, they announced that Mohamed Def, who was the military leader that they had claimed to assassinate on July 13th, they announced on August 1st that he was dead. So if you think about it, what they've done here is on July 30th, assassinated one leader in southern Beirut. On July 31st, they assassinated another leader in Tehran. And then on August 1st, they announced

that the earlier killing had been successful. And what the Israelis are doing, and you don't see much discussion of this in the media, or at least in the mainstream media, what the Israelis are doing is they're pursuing a decapitation strategy. They're basically betting that they can kill the leadership of these various opposing organizations and that that will produce some sort of meaningful military victory for them. This is a delusion. We have a whole literature on decapitation strategies. You kill one leader and they just bring in another leader. And the idea that that new leader is going to make peace with Israel is not a serious argument.

But why are they pursuing a decapitation strategy? Why are they doing this? It's because they really don't have an alternative. They have no way out of the mess that they're in. That's true in Gaza, and it's true with regard to Hezbollah, Iran, and Hamas more generally. I'm going to ask you in a minute about animosity in the region generated by Prime Minister Netanyahu's government, but first I want you to listen to a statement made on August 5th, so just four days ago, by the Turkish foreign minister. It is no longer acceptable for America to try to sweep aside and mitigate every evil Israel does. Let them heed our warnings.

I say this as the children of the region, as the people of the region. The emotional atmosphere the region is going through, the psychological state of the people, the images of massacres they see on the screen every day, the fact that no help is being extended to the helpless Palestinians. And in the face of this, Muslim countries are constantly being lectured on other unnecessary issues, has long since exceeded the limits of tolerance in terms of democracy and human rights. What, if anything, do you think Turkey will do? What pressures are there from the street on the Turkish government? Judge, let me make a quick point here,

just a more general point. Sure. Very important to understand that Turkey is probably the one country in the region, except for maybe Iran, where the leadership is as critical of Israel as the public is. As we've talked about before, in most Arab countries, and this is certainly true in Egypt and Jordan, there is not significant criticism from the top regarding Israeli behavior. And if you go to the street, there is huge anger towards Israel. And the elites in countries like Jordan and Egypt are doing everything they can to make sure that the volcano doesn't explode and they don't get pushed out of office. Turkey, on the other hand, is a case where the elites, this is Erdogan and his foreign minister, as we just heard, are as enraged and as angry about what's going on with regard to Israel. And also with regard to the United States, you do not want to underestimate the anti-Americanism inside of Turkey today.

It is off the charts because of what's happening in Gaza. But anyway, the Turkish government and Erdogan in particular has said that if the Israelis go to war in Lebanon, that Turkey will come in and Turkey will join the fight. Now, the question is, will they actually do that? Back to the question you were asking me about Iran, will Iran actually attack Israel? Back to the question you were asking me about Iran. Will Iran actually attack Israel? And as I said to you there, it's hard to believe they won't after they said they would. And I sort of come to the same conclusion with regard to Turkey. The Turkish government has said that if the Israelis go into Lebanon, that Turkey will come in to help the Lebanese.

And if Turkey helps the Lebanese and the United States helps the IDF, what do you have? Two NATO countries fighting each other? Yeah, yeah. I mean, as you know, you can tell all sorts of nightmare scenarios about how this escalates. And I don't know exactly what Iran will do. I don't know exactly what Hezbollah will do. And then we have

to ask ourselves the question, let's assume that Hezbollah and Iran both attack Israel. And let's assume that those attacks are reasonably limited, right? Not massive attacks. Question then is, what will the Israelis do? Will the Israelis limit their retaliation? I doubt that. I think the Israelis place a very high premium on escalation dominance. They've always thought that the best way to deter their adversaries was to make sure that as you went up the escalation ladder, they dominated the other side. So one could argue that even if Iran and Lebanon launch rather selective attacks at Israel, that the Israelis will go back at them really hard. And if that happens, then the question is, what will Hezbollah do? What will Iran do? And to go to the subject we're talking about, what will Turkey do?

What will the Russians do? And these are all open questions because none of us can say for sure exactly what's going on here and how will this play itself out. defensive weaponry. It has already delivered, I'm not sure what you call it, some sort of electronic devices that render the internet useless in Israel. President Putin has made it clear whose side he'd be on. Let me take this even farther. Do you think the Chinese will get involved? No, I don't think the Chinese will get involved. I think the Russians are already involved in the ways that you described. They're giving ground-based air defense systems. They're giving radars. They're giving jamming equipment to the Iranians. How much, we don't know. There are some people who posit that given how late in the game the Iranians are getting this equipment, it's likely that the Russians will be manning the equipment, that you couldn't train the Iranians up quick enough to use

this new equipment. I don't know whether that's true, but it would not be surprising if the Russians actually help the Iranians. I mean, you want to remember, we're helping the Israelis in this expected fight, and we helped them in the big fight on April 14th when Iran attacked the last time. So the Russians could be very well involved in the fighting in a very sort of subtle way. Who knows? But they're already committed to helping Iran. I mean, what we're doing here with the Israelis is that we're driving the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, and the North Koreans closer and closer together. It's the axis of resistance on a global scale. And there's no evidence that this is going to change anytime soon.

And this is certainly not in our interest. And as I've said to you before, you want to remember that if the Israelis slam Iran, they are going to give Iran very powerful incentives to acquire nuclear weapons. The Iranians are not far from the point where they have nuclear weapons, and we should be doing everything we can, and the Israelis should be doing everything they can to make sure they don't cross the nuclear threshold. But given our actions, and especially given Israel's actions, we're giving Iran very powerful incentives to acquire nuclear weapons. And the question is, will the Russians help us prevent that? I wouldn't bet a lot of money on it. Are you talking about Iran developing nuclear weapons or getting them from their friends in Pakistan? No, developing them.

We worry about the Saudis getting nuclear weapons from the Pakistanis. We believe the Saudis gave the Pakistanis monetary assistance to acquire the bomb and that the quid pro quo is that China will give nuclear weapons to Saudi Arabia if Saudi Arabia needs those weapons. You want to remember that Saudi Arabia has said that if Iran gets nuclear weapons, they will get nuclear weapons. And that's where the Pakistani connection comes in. I'm not saying that would happen, that Pakistan would give them a nuclear weapon. But the case of Iran, Iran has a very sophisticated nuclear infrastructure, and they're enriching uranium up to 60%. And that's just a hop, skip, and a jump away from enriching Ukrainian up to 90%, which is weapons-grade uranium.

So the Iranians are not far from the point where they would have sufficient weapons-grade uranium to develop at least one, maybe two or three bombs. And it would not take them that long to do it. And it would be extremely difficult for us and for the Israelis to prevent that. So what we want to do is we don't want to give the Iranians an incentive to cross the nuclear threshold, you attack a state with your military forces, you give that state a very powerful incentive to acquire what we call the ultimate deterrent, i.e. nuclear weapons. So all I'm saying here is that as this plays out now, everybody should keep in mind that it has consequences for whether or not Iran goes nuclear. Professor Ramir Shamrit, thank you very much. I have to tell you that right now you have the largest live audience you've had on the show, which is a considerable number. And of

course that, as you know, once it's streamed, which it will be in a few minutes, is extrapolated and magnified many, many times. Thank you for your thoughtfulness and thank you for your analysis. Deeply appreciated. And I already look forward to it again next week. You're welcome, Judge. And I look forward to it as well. Thank you. Thank you. A great mind, a great man, and we are all deeply grateful for all of his time. Coming up at four o'clock Eastern this afternoon, the Intelligence Community Roundtable. I know it's Thursday,

but we're doing it on Thursday this week with Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson. And at five o'clock Eastern, worth waiting for Colonel Douglas McGregor, Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thank you.