Judging Freedom - Prof. Mearsheimer: Who Really Started Ukraine War?

Episode Date: September 26, 2023

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Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, September 26, 2023. Our guest today, our very special guest today, is the world-renowned Professor John Mearsheimer. Professor Mearsheimer is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point. His PhD is from Cornell University. He is on the faculty of the University of Chicago, arguably the most demanding academic institution in the country. He is one of the world's foremost authorities on the geopolitics of our day. Your humble anchor, your humble host, has been a fan of Professor Mearsheimer's for many years, and I am deeply grateful that he's able to join us today, as are, I know, nearly all of you. So Professor Mearsheimer, welcome here. Thank you very much

for giving us your time today. My pleasure, Andrew. You have written extensively on the Ukraine war. You've spoken extensively on the Ukraine war. Tell us how it is that the fault for the Ukraine war coming about lies with the West and not with Moscow. Well, there are two different interpretations of what caused this war. One is that Vladimir Putin was an imperialist. He was an expansionist, and he was bent on creating a greater Russia. And the reason that he invaded Ukraine in February of 2022 was that he wanted to conquer all of it, incorporate it into Russia, and then he was going to move on to conquer other states in Eastern Europe. This is clearly the conventional wisdom in the West, and it's obvious that this is the conventional wisdom because it portrays Vladimir Putin as the bad guy. This was, in this

account, an unprovoked attack. This is the theory espoused by the so-called neocons and by the globalists in Western Europe and the globalists in the American State Department. Yes, and that probably includes about 95%, if not 99% of the foreign policy establishment. So I am speaking to an iconoclast. I'm sad to say that in this case, that's true. Because the truth is, Andrew, there is virtually no evidence to support that conventional wisdom. All the evidence is that what caused this war was the West's efforts to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia's border. And the key element of that strategy was to make Ukraine a part of NATO. And I would note that Jens Stoltenberg, who is the NATO Secretary General, has just said that that was the cause of the war. It's the first time that anybody in the West has spoken the truth. But nobody wants to hear this, despite the fact that Stoltenberg said it, because it portrays us as being principally responsible for the war, which is a

way of saying we have blood on our hands. And to advance an untruth of this magnitude, the American Congress is willing to spend $113 billion. The President of the United States is willing to commit to the killing of Ukrainian and Russian youth. I don't know what to say other than I agree with you. It's just hard to believe, truly hard to believe when you look at the suffering that's taking place, especially in Ukraine, that we were foolish enough to push NATO eastward into Ukraine when the Russians made it manifestly clear from the get-go that they would destroy Ukraine before they would let this happen. Did the United States State Department, Defense Department, Biden administration, Jake Sullivan, not take into

account the massive death and destruction that would occur almost exclusively because of Western military aid to Ukraine. Actually, let me hold that question. Did they not take into account how the Russians would react, knowledgeable as they were, of Jim Baker and President George H.W. Bush's promise, NATO will never move one inch eastward, how Russia would react to its having moved 800 miles eastward, Poland, and then trying to assimilate Ukraine. What did they expect President Putin to do? Well, as best I can tell from the available evidence, they expected President Putin to attack Ukraine. There is hardly any evidence that we took serious steps to prevent this war in January or February of 2022. It's actually quite remarkable when you look at

the record how little we did, if anything, to prevent the war. So I think we expected the Russians to attack. And I believe that we thought we could defeat the Russians. And the key to our success would be twofold. First, we thought the Ukrainians, who we had trained and armed, would fight quite well. But most importantly, our sanctions would bring the Russians to their knees very quickly. That was the great miscalculation that we made. The sanctions didn't work. But we thought they would work, and we thought that was the war-winning weapon. We'll put aside the constitutional, the dubious nature of the sanctions. The President Biden could just say to the people importing Stolichnaya, it was $100,000 worth of Stolichnaya vodka at Port Newark, but the people that imported it couldn't get paid

because it had to go through a Russian bank and come from a Russian company in St. Petersburg. This is one of many, many examples. Put that aside. Did they actually have economists advise them that the sanctions would weaken Russia? And do they recognize that the sanctions have had the opposite effect? Look at the success or what appears to be the success or the popularity, I should say at this point, of BRICS. Yeah. I mean, I think it's manifestly clear at this time to almost everybody, including the

people in the Biden administration, that the sanctions did not work. And in fact, to the extent that the sanctions are really hurting any countries, those are the countries in Western Europe, especially the Germans. So if anything, the sanctions have backfired. But your question is, what were we thinking going into this conflict? Did we have economists who paid careful attention to the question of whether or not sanctions would work. My bet, and we don't have access to the inside records, but my bet is we did not pay serious attention to that question,

and we just assumed that sanctions would work. As you know, the United States is sanctions happy. We're sanctioning more than half the world at this point in time. We think it's a tremendously effective weapon, and that we can use it to coerce other countries, or if we get into a war with them, defeat them. But the fact is, if you look carefully at the record of sanctions, they usually don't work. And against a country like Russia, it was not likely that they would work. And of course they haven't. When the Western leaders speak with each other, do they utter what Secretary General Stoltenberg either intentionally or mistakenly uttered out loud that we caused this? Does Tony Blinken saying to his opposite numbers

in Paris or Berlin or London, we've got to get out of this because we're not going to prevail militarily, because their public statements are about as harsh as can be, and it's hard to believe that they believe what they're saying, Professor. I believe in Blinken's case that he really does believe it. He almost has to believe it. Otherwise, he would have to face up to the fact that he is one of the principal causes of this war. So I think he believes it. I don't think he's terribly smart either. I would imagine that Jake Sullivan

is more sophisticated based on my dealings with him, and he understands there's a large element of truth in what Stoltenberg had to say. But at this point in time, the establishment is going to push very hard to continue purveying the conventional wisdom, because the conventional wisdom is designed to make us look like the good guys and Putin look like the bad guy. So I would not expect them to take their foot off the accelerator on this one. But you have written that Ukraine will for sure lose this war. And I guess you're telling us that the people who decide how many bullets we send and how much cash we send and indirectly how many human beings will die, reject that argument or fear that argument and want to delay it?

Well, they thought for a long while that there was a clever strategy that we could employ to defeat the Russians. They looked at these two tactical victories that the Russians had last year in Kharkiv and Kherson. And they figured that with this counteroffensive, which was launched on 4 June of this year, the Ukrainians would deliver the Russians a hammer blow, push them to the negotiating table, and the Ukrainians in the West would be in the driver's seat and we'd get a really good deal. This has obviously not happened. The balance of power has shifted over the course of 2023. And we're now in a situation where the Ukrainians are doomed to lose. There's just, in my opinion, no way they can win unless the Russians completely

collapse. And there's no sign that that's going to happen. If you look at the population size of Russia compared to the population size of Ukraine, you realize that the Russians will produce many more soldiers than the Ukrainians, which really matters in a war of attrition. Furthermore, the Russians have much more artillery than the Ukrainians have, and they're getting even more artillery than the Ukrainians have over time. And artillery matters enormously in a war of attrition. So given the artillery balance, given the population balance, or I should say imbalances, it's hard to see how the Russians don't win this war. You mentioned earlier interactions you had with Jake Sullivan. Don't tell us what we shouldn't hear, but does the administration consult with you,

Professor Mearsheimer? No, not at all. No administration has ever consulted with me because I'm much too much of a contrarian. If you don't... Why, we love you. No, if you don't conform to what is the conventional wisdom inside the foreign policy establishment in the United States, people don't want to talk to you. I would think that they would want you to challenge their thinking, even if it's at a roundtable with a light lunch or with a cup of coffee. But they don't want that. I agree 100%. I would just point out to you that I opposed the Iraq war, along with a number of my friends in 2003. And I believe we're very smart. We know a lot about war. And I believe we had good arguments. The administration, it was the Bush administration then, had absolutely no interest in hearing what we had to say. And

my rhetoric about that situation is exactly the rhetoric that you were just putting forward. You would think these people would want to hear what their critics have to say so that they can either knock their critics down or make an adjustment in their policy to accommodate some good points that the critics made. But that's not the way things work in the United States anymore. You're either on board or you're not. The United States of America, now I'm going to go into an area of your fellow West Pointer and a person whose work I admire almost as much as I admire yours, Andrew Bacevich, Professor Bacevich, the United States of America leads

an international order destined, well, in the U.S. view, to enhance U.S. empire, but destined to collapse. Why is that Western order, led by the United States of America, not hesitating to use violence, either by others or by us, destined to collapse? Well, it's destined to collapse for two reasons, in my opinion. One is with the rise of China and the resurrection of Russian power, we've moved from a unipolar world where we dominated the planet to a multipolar world where we can no longer dominate because we have two other great powers to deal with. The second reason is we behave in such a ham-fisted way that we alienate countries all over the world. And if you're going to have a rules-based order

and you expect other countries to obey these rules, which you have largely written, then you have to obey them as well. And you have to operate in ways that are somewhat accommodating to other countries in the world. But our basic policy dictum is it's my way or the highway. So when you combine that, again, with the shift in the global. But our basic policy dictum is it's my way or the highway. So when you combine that, again, with the shift in the global distribution of power, the liberal international order that we constructed during the unipolar moment is kaput. My way or the highway, and it doesn't matter which party is in the White House or which party controls Congress. The impulse for empire seems to be the same from post-World War II up to the present moment.

Yeah, I refer to the Republican Party and the Democratic Party as Tweedledee and Tweedledum. I agree with you. I refer to them as the war party. I sometimes add other words in there, warfare, welfare, national security, deep state, whatever you want to call it, that's them. I've taken to saying, Andrew, that I think the United States is addicted to war. It's quite remarkable the extent to which we're willing to go out and fight wars. And anybody who protests against that policy is persona non grata. And of course, the last declared war was World War II. Since then, all these wars, all this military activity, at the impulse of the executive, Congress either funding it or looking the other way.

I remember when Barack Obama bombed Libya and was asked, why didn't you make a war powers resolution information to the Congress? Well, I didn't use the military. Who the hell did you use? I used the CIA. He didn't say CIA. He said I used other assets that were not military. So there's so much at the president's fingertips that allow the president to avoid the strictures of the constitution. And Congress, as I said, often looks the other way. I mean, the last time Congress tried to stop a president, I think, was probably Richard Nixon when he bombed Cambodia and the War Powers Resolution didn't stop him at all. Yeah, I think it was in the Gerald Ford years. It was when Vietnam was going down the tubes. South Vietnam was going down the tubes. In the spring of 1975, Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford wanted to use military

force to intervene, as we had intervened with air power in May of 1972. But Congress laid down the law and said, absolutely not. And we stood aside while South Vietnam fell to North Vietnam. I sometimes joke that if we hadn't had that congressional legislation, we'd still be fighting in Vietnam today. Wow. Wow. And bringing you back to Ukraine, Professor Mearsheimer, do the globalists, does the State Department, does the Defense Department, do their colleagues in Western Europe at least have a theory as to how Ukraine can prevail. I don't mean a theory from February of 22, but a theory now after all the horrible things that have happened to Ukraine. If Tony Blinken were here and we weren't taping this and he were being candid, what would he say? They have no strategy. And the simple reason is there is no strategy. I mean, I can't think of one.

I'm sure you can't think of one. And you and I are both clever guys who are very well educated and good at making clever arguments. And if we can't come up with a clever strategy that stands some reasonable chance of pulling our chestnuts out of the fire, you can rest assured that the likes of Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan and Joe Biden are not going to find that magic formula. It just doesn't exist. We're screwed. How do you see this ending, Professor Mearsheimer? Well, my view is, if you look at the balance of forces, the Russians are building up a mighty army. They mobilized 300,000 troops in late September of last year, that's

2022. And they have at least 400,000 people who will have enlisted over the course of this year, 2023. So that's adding 700,000 troops to the number that existed when the war began. And some people argue that there are secret mobilizations taking place on the Russian side as well, but they're going to have a huge army. They have almost total control of the skies. They have a huge advantage in weaponry. And the Ukrainians have been chewed up badly. So I think what will happen is the Russians will conquer more territory. But I do not think they will go into Western Ukraine. And the main reason is that Western Ukraine is filled with ethnic Ukrainians who hate the Russians. And they would be occupying territory that would lead to no end of trouble. As I like to say, it would be like

swallowing a porcupine. So my guess is that they'll take four more oblasts. They'll end up taking close to 50% of Ukraine and incorporating it into Russia. And then they'll go to great lengths to make sure that Ukraine remains a dysfunctional rump state, which is effectively what it is now. So I like to say that the Russians will win or are likely to win an ugly victory. I've argued that the globalists, and I've mentioned a number of names and I've forgotten, but I have to add her. My audience sometimes thinks I'm picking on her, Victoria Nuland, that the globalists want to use Ukraine as a battering ram to drive President Putin from office. So two questions for you before we finish, Professor Mearsheimer. Is President Putin more powerful and stable in office now, or was he more powerful and stable in office two years ago? And two, do you fear the introduction of American ground troops? With regard to the first question, I think when you had that big dust-up with Prokosian

involving the Wagner Group, that it looked like Putin was not in the best of shape in terms of the stability of the regime. But he's dealt with Prokosian. Prokosian's out of the picture, obviously. The Wagner group is off the table. And because Russia is doing very well on the battlefield and the future looks good, I think Putin is in excellent shape. I think he's in as good shape as he was before the war started. I mean, our great hope, especially at the time of the Prokhorin affair, was that Putin would be toppled, some peace-loving doper would come into power and cut a deal with

us. That was not a reasonable hope, in my opinion, but regardless, it's no longer possible. Putin is here for the foreseeable future, unless he has a heart attack or something like that. Your other question was what? Do you fear an expansion of the war involving American ground troops? In other words, another Vietnam, another disaster. Well, it would be much worse than Vietnam. You want to remember Vietnam was a war between a great power of the United States and a minor power of Vietnam. For sure the Chinese and

the Russians helped the Vietnamese, but we were not fighting each other on the battlefield. This would be a great power war. I mean, if we get into the actual fighting in Ukraine, it's the United States versus the Russians. And that would be an absolutely horrible situation. I think it's unlikely in large part because I think the Biden administration, to its credit, understands that that's something we absolutely want to avoid. But the question you have to ask yourself is, if I'm right, and the Russians are sort of on the verge of going on a roll, and the Ukrainians are really in desperate straits, what are we going to do? Are we going to stand aside? I mean, this is going to be a humiliating defeat for us. It's a humiliating defeat for NATO.

The temptation for us to get involved will be great. I've long argued that the two great dangers are, number one, that the Russians are losing, in which case I think it's likely they would use nuclear weapons. Or number two, the Ukrainians are losing, suffering a devastating defeat, or in the process of suffering a devastating defeat, and we come in to rescue them. Now, I don't think that's likely, but you and I know enough about the foolish moves the United States has made, you know, over the past few decades, that you don't want to rule out that possibility. Again, I don't think it's likely, but it is scary. I mean, we're in a very dangerous

situation here. I wish they would listen to you. Professor Mearsheimer, it's been a pleasure. I hope you'll come back again. I can tell from the comments and the number of people watching that your time and your intellect and your sharing your intellect with us are very much appreciated. Thank you, Andrew, and I'd be happy to come back another time. Thank you. Thank you again, Professor. There you have it, my friends. We've been talking about Professor Mearsheimer for a long time. I thought it was a terrific interview, very, very enlightening. I wish I had professors like that, like he is, when I was an undergraduate. More as we get it. We're up to 202,000 subscribers. 250,000 by Christmas time

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