Piers Morgan Uncensored - John Mearsheimer: On Israel-Hezbollah, US Elections & Russia

Episode Date: September 24, 2024

The resumé of John Mearsheimer reveals a man of both intellect and pragmatism. Once an officer in the United States Air Force, he’s now a lauded professor at the University of Chicago with a highly critical eye turned to international relations. John takes aim at the continuing violence in Gaza, and claims that the Israeli government is actively committing a genocide in the region. Piers plays devil’s advocate, and John bats away his criticisms. The real fight begins when Piers turns the conversation to support for Ukraine, which John sees as a doomed endeavour. While John argues for an end to the conflict as soon as possible, Piers holds him to the logical conclusions of his position, which is that failing to support Ukraine would be a reward for the dictator in the Kremlin. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

that is just not a serious argument. Existential threat to Israel is not a serious argument. There's not a serious argument. This is not a serious argument. I'm not about to give you an answer. Explain to me, here is how Hezbollah or Iran or Hamas is an existential threat to Israel. Explain to me. They're Tweedl-D and Tweedledum.

It's Ukraine and the whole question of how to deal with Russia where you see a substantial difference. If Trump wins, then he will actually. very differently towards Russia and towards the Ukraine war than Kamala Harris will. How can it be morally right to let a ruthless dictator illegally invade a sovereign, democratic, European country? The Ukrainians are doomed.

The best thing to do at this point in time is put an end to the war. The Middle East is on the brink of a massive regional conflict as Israel bombards, has bowled targets in Lebanon. Ukraine's President Zelensky is in Washington, seeking trump-proof security guarantees and permission to fire American rockets at targets inside Russia.

And in just 40 days, America will choose this next president, a decision that will have sweeping ramifications for the conflicts now roiling the world. There's a lot, therefore, to discuss. And returning to Unsensit, with his unique analysis, Professor John Mearsheimer, great to have you back on Unsensin.

Glad to be here, Pierce. There's so much to unpack with you, and I'm sure you've been giving all these huge news stories, a lot of your mental attention. Let's start with this growing crisis between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Obviously, since October the 8th, Hezbollah has been firing rockets into Israel, displacing 10 to thousands of Israelis. They have a right to defend themselves, and they've now very clearly put a marker down that they are going to exact punishment for what has been going on and once again the debate is raging about what is proportionate and where this will lead

and could it lead to a full scale war do you accept first of all that israel has a right to defend itself against his bowler sure i mean who would disagree with that so in terms of what they've been doing in the last week is does that all fall under a reasonable self-defense Well, the question you really want to ask yourself is, where does this all lead? The fact is the Israelis have a huge problem here, and that is that as long as they continue the war in Gaza, Hezbollah has said that it will continue to fire rockets into northern Israel. And Israel has no intention of ending the war in Gaza, and as a result, Hezbollah has no intention of ending the firing of rockets in New Zealand. missiles into northern Israel. And the Israelis want to do something about this because approximately

60,000 people have been displaced from the northern part of Israel to the central part. And the Israelis want to move them back because this has all sorts of economic consequences. And more generally, they want to deal with the Hezbollah problem once and for all. So the question is, how do they do that? And they don't want to invade. That's quite clear. And absent invading What they're trying to do is massively punish Hezbollah and Lebanon and get them to throw up their hands. This is a coercion strategy. And you have to ask yourself whether you think the Israelis are capable of coercing Hezbollah to surrender to Israeli demands, i.e. stop firing rockets and missiles into northern Israel.

And there is no evidence no matter how hard Israel hits Lebanon that Hezbollah is going to stop firing rockets and missiles into northern Israel. So it doesn't look like Israel's strategy is going to work. The remarkable attack that they launched on electronic devices, pages, walkie-talkies, and so on, which appeared to impact on 3,000 or more members of His Boland, along with some civilians who were killed in the process. There's a big debate about whether that was lawful. The law is quite complex in that regard, in a sense that, for one of a better phrase, booby-trapping people through electronic devices, if you can't guarantee that they are enemy combatants, but could also impact on civilians, then that could be a breach of international law. That could be a war crime.

What do you think of that? I think it was a war crime. I think that it was an indiscriminate way of attacking Lebanon or attacking Hezbole. They had to know that lots of civilians were going to have those pagers and would be maimed or killed as a result. And even though, you know, there is no question that Hezbollah fighters would die in the process or be wounded in the process. There was going to be, you know, indiscriminate killing of lots of civilians. And I would say that that is an act of terror.

But Hezbollah doesn't give a damn about what Israeli civilians it kills when it launches its rockets. So what's the difference? Israel doesn't give a damn either about killing Palestinians in Gaza or killing civilians in Lebanon. The idea that Israel is going to great lengths not to kill civilians, and Hezbollah and Hamas are not doing that. It's just not a serious argument.

All you have to do is look at all the civilians that the Israelis have killed, both in Lebanon and in Gaza. And many more Palestinian civilians and Lebanese civilians have been killed than Israeli civilians. It's not even close. That is true, but you could use the same argument

as Israelis have done that in World War II, nobody questioned the volume of civilian casualties when the Allies went after the Nazis, for example, when we were carpet bombing cities and so on. When people use that announcement, What do you say to them? Well, your argument is that because atrocities have been committed by the allies in the past,

there's nothing wrong with Israel murdering huge numbers of civilians in Gaza. Well, that's not my argument. It's an argument. Well, to be clear, it's not my argument. It's an argument I hear a lot from the Israeli side, which is why are you lecturing us when our ratio of combatants, terrorists to them and to me, but when they go after Hamas and And they believe they're killing two Hamas terrorists for every civilian that's being killed, and that that ratio stands comparison with any modern warfare.

I don't think you can look at ratios. First of all, I reject that ratio. But I don't think you have to look at ratios to make an assessment of whether or not the Israelis are acting according to the laws of war or not. If you look at what they're doing in Gaza, it's clear to me that it's a genocide, that they are actually trying to murder huge numbers of Palestinians and effectively drive the Palestinians out of Gaza. This is a clear case of a state, Israel, pursuing ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

They want to drive the Palestinians out. They want to make Gaza unlivable. And in the process, they are murdering huge numbers of civilians. And this is why the International Court of Justice ruled this past January, that there is sufficient evidence to make the case that the Israelis are plausibly committing genocide in Gaza. What they would say is that they face an existential threat fueled by Iran from Hamas and Hezbollah, right on their border, that neither Hamas nor Hezbollah make any pretense of presenting an existential threat to Israel. Hamas is spokesman within days of the October the 7th terror attack,

brazenly said we want to keep doing this as much as we can. When you have an enemy so publicly and brazenly saying, we're going to commit terror attack after terror attack against you of that magnitude, what else do you do when those terrorists operate amongst civilians and build huge tunnel systems around civilian locations? How else actually do you go after them? Well, first of all, Pierce, the idea that Hamas or has, Bala represented an existential threat to Israel is not a serious argument.

Just take Hamas, for instance. There's no way Hamas could capture for any sustained period of time territory inside Israel, much less threatened its survival. With regard to the fact that Hamas is interested in launching terrorist attacks against Israel, from Hamas's point of view, this makes perfect sense, because the Palestinians are basically enclosed in a giant open-air prison. And what they're trying to do is, in effect, break out of that open-air prison. And one of the ways they do that is through terrorist attacks at Israel.

And this, of course, is what happened on October 7th. It's not like October 7th happened in a vacuum. It's not like the Palestinians in Gaza were a bunch of Nazis who were just simply interested in crossing the border into Israel and murdering large numbers of Jews. The Palestinians were basically prisoners in this giant open-air prison. And what they were trying to do was get out of that situation,

and one can hardly blame them. But it's not as simple as that, is it? Because Amas had had power since 2005. It's pretty obvious now. They spent the billions of dollars that were funneled their way in building this intricate tunnel system. in plotting to attack Israel, isn't it?

I mean, you know, I think a lot of people, the people I feel sorry for are the Palestinians who did not want to be under Hamas control, who didn't vote for them, and who could recognize, as many of them will have done, that this was a pathway to madness. And what they did in October the 7th, that the sheer scale of it,

I mean, 8,000 people or more were killed or wounded in that attack. It's one of the worst terror attacks of modern times. So wouldn't you say that you dispute their ability to be an existential threat? Well, actually, if they carried on doing that kind of thing, and Hezbollah joined in with far more firepower as they have, and Iran believed they really had Israel on the back foot, and they got others involved as well,

then it could be an existential threat to Israel, couldn't it? No. I mean, I think what you're missing here is the big picture. I mean, what's going on is that Gaza, and the West Bank are part of a greater Israel. And this greater Israel is an apartheid state. And if you look at how the Palestinians in Gaza and the Palestinians in the West Bank live, it's hardly surprising that they're trying to rebel against Israel.

If you were a Palestinian and you were living in Gaza, I can be certain that you would be resisting against the Israelis the same way the Palestinians are. Well, I certainly, listen, I don't dispute that there's been a form of occupation. And we've seen evidence of that this week when Al Jazeera Studio in Ramallah is suddenly shut down by the IDF. That can only happen if there is an occupying country exercising that kind of banana republic control over and other people. So I accept that. I've never disputed that.

But I do dispute your characterization of the threat as not being remotely existential. given you have them backed by Iran, and given Hezbollah, certainly, is a far more dangerous and far better armed and more populated group of terrorists than Hamas. If they all got together, I think, and others joined in and felt they had Israel on the run, I can see why Israel feel the way they do. Explain to me, peers, how Hezbollah or Iran or Hamas is an existential threat to Israel. Explain to me. How are they an existential threat?

When you have tens of thousands of terrorists intent on committing heinous, large-scale terror attacks, that is an existential threat, isn't it? No, it is not. You don't have tens of thousands of terrorists. They're probably about 30,000 fighters in Hamas and 30,000 fighters in Hezbollah. They don't have tanks. They don't have infantry divisions. They don't have artillery. In what way could they possibly be a threat to Israel?

which is the most powerful military force in the Middle East. And Fulmore is joined at the hip of the United States. Well, surely we saw exactly what kind of threat is... This is not a serious argument. I'm about to give you an answer, which is that on October the 7th last year, we saw exactly what a serious threat was. 2,000 Hamas terrorists came over the border and committed a series of appalling massacres.

So right there is the threat, isn't it? By Israeli accounts, 1,200 people died. died. This is truly regrettable. A nearly 7,000 were wounded. Nearly 7,000 were wounded. But this hardly represents an existential threat. Well, nearly 7,000 were wounded. I mean, if you extrapolate that to America and a country of that size, then you're talking about 3911s. It's something else here now, something new. From exclusively on Paramount Plus, it's the series Stephen King calls scariest hell. Everything here is impossible, but it's also real. sci-fi vision comes at the best show streaming right now we're running out of time and we still don't know the rules don't miss what the movie blog calls something you need to watch saving those children is how we all go home from binge all episodes exclusively on paramount plus again there is no way that killing 1200 Israelis represents an existential threat there is no way that Hamas represents an existential threat

or that even Hezbollah and Iran represent an existential threat. How is Iran in any meaningful way going to threaten the survival of Israel? Well, by fueling this kind of terror. I mean, the implication of what you're saying is, would you have been happy, then, to have allowed Hamas to simply stay in power? Would you be happy now if they wanted to stay in power? Listen, I think from an Israeli point of view, you don't want Hamas in power,

although I will note to you that Benjamin Netanyan, was perfectly happy to have Hamas in power before October 7th. I agree. But I understand why he doesn't want it in power now. I understand that. But he talks about defeating Hamas in Gaza, and he's not defeated Hamas in Gaza. He's not going to defeat Hamas.

And he has not defeated Hezbollah and Lebanon. And he is not going to defeat them no matter what he does in the future. I mean, look, I think, Netanyahu has a lot of self-interest here, which is connected to his huge unpopularity with his own people who will clearly get rid of him in the moment this war or wars is over. He also then faces corruption charges in a courtroom.

So, you know, I'm very skeptical of what his real motivation is for prolonging all this. And I don't think he has a plan or cares that much for what happens after it. So you don't have to, you know, I'm not here to defend Netanyahu in any way. In fact, I think the whole region would be better.

off without Hamas and without Netanyahu and without his Bala. That's what I think. Well, the truth is you wouldn't have Hamas and you wouldn't have a problem if there was no occupation. The tap root of the problem here is what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians. Again, the Israelis are creating a greater Israel, which includes the West Bank and Gaza. And in the process of creating that greater Israel, they have built an apartheidon. state, and you should expect the Palestinians who live in that apartheid state to resist mightily,

and that's exactly what's happening. And unless there's some self-determination for the Palestinians, you're going to have more and more uprisings in the future. You want to remember what happened on October 7th was not the first instance of the Palestinians rising up. There was the first Intifada in the late 1980s. There was the second Intifada in 2000, and there'll be more interfaith. father's more October 7th in the future in large part because how the Israelis treat the Palestinians.

Let's move on to the U.S. presidential race because that will have consequential impact, of course, on things like what's happening between Israel and Hamas and Hezbollah. What's your assessment of where this race is now, Professor Vizsham. Just quickly, Pierce, I don't think that the outcome of this, presidential race will have any effect on what's going on in the Middle East. The United States will continue to support Israel unreservedly or unconditionally, whether Donald Trump is in the White House or Kamala Harris is in the White House. Nothing's going to change. But to get back to your more general question, I think that with regard to the two candidates,

the only issue, the only major foreign policy issue where there is a disagreement, is Ukraine. I think with regard to the Middle East, as I just said, they're Tweedledee and Tweedledum. I think with regard to China, there's no meaningful difference between Trump and Harris. It's Ukraine and the whole question of how to deal with Russia where you see a substantial difference and how they think about the issue. It's quite clear that basically what Kamala Harris would like to do is continue the Biden policy of supporting Ukraine unreservedly and doing everything. possible to defeat the Russians. Trump, on the other hand, wants to work out an agreement with the Russians that ends the war in Ukraine. And I think he does not care that much, whether it

appears that Russia has won the war, however you want to describe that. So I think that if Trump wins, and if, and this is a big if, he is able to implement the policy that he is articulating on the campaign trail, then he will act very differently towards Russia and towards the Ukraine war than Kamala Harris will. You said to me earlier this year, the only way this war ends is if Ukraine loses on the battlefield. But the longer it goes on, and the more extraordinary resistance the Ukrainians have shown, many people thought this could be over in a few days at the start of this. Clearly, that is not the case. We're two and a half years in now.

and Zelensky is asking for the same weaponry that is currently being used by the Russians to bombard his country. From a moral position, is there any reason why if countries like the United States, the UK, Germany, France and others have been supplying weapons for the Ukrainians to defend themselves? Is there any moral argument outside of just a fear of triggering some nuclear response from Russia

and we'll come to that. But is there a moral difference between giving them tanks and planes and so on and giving them missiles which can fire into Russia itself? My view is, Pierre, is that the morally correct position to take today is to not give them any more weapons and to push them very hard to reach a negotiated settlement with the Russians. The fact is that the Ukrainians are losing bad, on the battlefield. There is an abundance of evidence to support this, and the situation

only gets worse moving forward. So for people who are advocating that we should give them more weapons and continue to urge the Ukrainians to fight on, what you're doing is putting the Ukrainians in a position where they're just going to lose more territory to the Russians, and many more Ukrainians are going to die. They're not going to win. The morally correct That is the position one should take if one is interested in saving Ukrainian lives, and that's the position I take, is that this war should be ended as quickly as possible. How can it be morally right to let a ruthless dictator illegally invade a sovereign, democratic, European country, help himself to vast ways of its land, murder enormous numbers of its people?

And then you would want me to expect that the moral answer to all this is to let him have his way and win. How is that morally right? Well, I think your description of what Putin has done doesn't mesh with the facts. The idea that the Russians have come in and murdered huge numbers of Ukrainians is simply not the case. How many they murdered? This war has been largely confirmed. I don't know what the exact number is, but if you look at the number of civilians who have died in Ukraine, the number... I'm not being funny, but how can you make that assessment if you don't know the answer? Well, what you have to do is let me finish answering the questions before you interrupt me

because it's very difficult to get my words in. You said there weren't that many killed. And then when I said, well, how many have been killed? You didn't know. So I just asked you, why did you make the initial statement then if you don't know the answer? No, the question you asked initially was how many people have they murdered. Yeah. And I don't know how many people they've murdered.

I said the number of civilians who have been killed. is around 10,000, maybe 15,000, but it's very important to understand that the Russians alone did not kill all those civilians. A lot of the civilians have been killed by the Ukrainians as a result of the ongoing battles. And I can't tell you exactly how many people have been killed, and I can't tell you how many people

that the Russians murdered or the Ukrainians murdered. Right. It just seems to me you're slightly guessing, aren't you? I told you that the number I ascertain from looking through the media reports is somewhere between 10 and 15,000 civilians have died in Ukraine. And if you call that guessing, fine. But I believe the number is around that, yeah. Look, I don't even know what the exact number is in terms of Russian military. casualties and Ukrainian military casualties. There are huge disagreements on what those numbers look like.

I can tell you what my estimates are, but my estimates are not ones that I'm fully confident are correct in large part. Right. But that's why... Okay, but that's why the morality question to me is important, because you're saying the moral thing to do is to stop the slaughter of Ukrainian people. They don't agree with you. The Ukrainian people want to fight.

and they want to fight to the end. And that should be, to me, their moral right to make that decision for themselves. And I just cannot get my head round why it's morally correct to let a Russian dictator go and do what Putin's done and win and keep what he's stolen.

Why is that morally right? Because there's nothing that we can do to turn the tide on the battlefield in Ukraine. There is. There is, though. We do not have the ability. We could give them the missiles they want. Missiles are not going to make any difference.

The idea that giving them attackums where storm shadows is going to turn the tide on the battlefield is not a serious argument. The Ukrainians are doomed. What really matters here are the number of troops, the number of artillery pieces on the front lines, and the amount of air power each side has over the battlefield. And there, the Russians have,

a decisive advantage, and that advantage is increasing by the day. And there's nothing we can do to reverse that. The Ukrainians are doomed. And given that the Ukrainians are doomed, the best thing to do at this point in time is put an end to the war. That's the morally correct position, at least from my point of view. I don't agree. And I'll tell you why. Would you have said the same thing about the British in World War II? No, I would not have, but those are not analogous situations. Why? We were under existential threat from the Nazis. As you well know, the British won the war because the British had the Soviet Union and the United States on their side. Yeah, and because Churchill said he wasn't going to accept that we were necessarily doomed.

He was correct. And the head result is that he won the war. But he won the war because he had two powerful allies who got directly involved in fighting against Nazi Germany. Right. That's not going to happen in the case of the Ukrainians. So why are not going to commit ground forces to come to the defense of the Ukrainians. Right. So my question about the morality of that is actually why wouldn't we? Why wouldn't we? If this is a NATO country, we would. It's not clear we would, but we probably would. But the fact is we're not going to do it. And the fact that we're not going to do it tells me that the morally correct position is not to fight to the last Ukrainian.

I mean, that's what you want to do. You want to fight to the last Ukrainian. I know. I want them to have the... No, I want them to have the right to do it. because you think that's the morally correct position. No, it's because... It's not my idea of a morally correct position. Well, it's because I've been to Kiev, I've met the people,

and they've made it emphatically clear to me all the people I met of all ages, that that's exactly what they want to do. Yeah, they do. They want to fight to save their country. Look, if you look at public opinion polls, they're at odds with your statement that every single Ukrainian wants to fight to the last of Ukraine.

I just said everyone I met. That's not true. There's surely some who do, and I'm sure... The vast majority in those polls do support what I'm saying. But the fact is that even if that's true, even if they want to fight to the last Ukrainian, from my point of view, that's not the morally correct thing to do. Right. But how can it be morally right to let a Russian dictator win?

What are you going to do to reverse it? Help the Ukrainians repel him. What are you going to do to reverse it? Well, you help the Ukrainians repel Putin in a brilliant way they've been doing for two and a half years against all expectations. They are massively exceeded. all the doom-laden predictions of the first few weeks and months of his war. And I think we should support them in the way we've been doing by giving them everything they are

for. Let's be honest about this. What Putin does, he just waves his nuclear rattle and he terrifies people. But every red line that he said has been crossed. He said if you give them tanks, that will be a red line for me. We did. He didn't do anything. He said, if you give them aircraft, air fighter jets, that's a red line.

We crossed that red line. Nothing happened. And so on. There is no evidence that he means any of his saber rattling about nuclear weapons because he knows the moment he uses a nuclear weapon, he's dead and Russia's vaporized. That's a reality.

And I don't know why we allow ourselves to be held ransom by this monstrous dictator who just thinks that a nuclear deterrent means he can just go, I'm going to nuke you if you don't let me do what I want. That to me is immoral. Look, your problem, peers, is that you're living in the last months of 2022 when the Ukrainians were on a roll and it looked like they were going to do very well against the Russians. If you look at what happened in 2023 and what's happened now in 2024, the first nine months of this year, it's quite clear that the balance of power has shifted to size.

in the Russians' favor. And there is nothing we can do to rescue the situation. There are no magic weapons that we can give to the Ukrainians that are going to allow them to win this war. They're going to lose the war. There's nothing we can do about that. You don't seem to understand that. No, no.

And given the fact that there's nothing we can do about it, it makes sense from a moral point of view to end the war as quickly as possible. No, that doesn't make it, no. I don't agree with you that it's morally right to just surrender. If they want to continue fighting, it is their country, it's their people, and they want to continue fighting, and their president wants to have as much weaponry as he can to try and repel the Russians.

And I think we have a moral duty to give it to him. And I think it's morally reprehensible to say, actually, no, we're going to decide what you want, we're going to decide what your people want, we're going to decide how much of your country you get to keep. And at the end of all this, actually, the morally correctness, thing to do, President Zelensky, is give him everything and let him win. I think that is morally despicable, personally. I don't know what you're so upset about, Pierce, because the fact is the U.S. government agrees with you. You and the U.S. government and the West European governments

and the East European governments are going to fight to the last Ukrainian. Good. And I think this is, from a moral point of view, and from Ukraine's point of view, and from Ukraine's point, of view the wrong thing to do. Professor Meershawmert, I always enjoy having you on. I enjoy our debates, and I thank you very much for coming on. And history, I guess, will prove one of us wrong or one of us right, but we'll keep having you back, and we'll keep debating it because I think people enjoy these debates, and I appreciate your time.

Thank you.