Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 7/17/26 John Mearsheimer on Iran, Ukraine and the Future of American Power

Episode Date: July 19, 2026

Scott interviews John Mearsheimer. They take a step back and take a big picture look at both the conflict with Iran and the ongoing war in Ukraine. They then take an even bigger step back and consider whether the escalating great power competition we’re in right now was ever inevitable. Discussed on the show: Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism by Robert Pape US Strikes on Iran Intended to Create Options for Trump to Escalate Conflict (Libertarian Institute) John Mearsheimer is an American political scientist and international relations scholar. He is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books such as The Tragedy of Great Power Politics and The Israel Lobby. Sign up for the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom at scotthortonacademy.com For more on Scott's work: Check out The Libertarian Institute: https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott's other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott's books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/43D82oY (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/4eMQblu Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/4a5fKvx Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott’s full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tax Attorney Matt Sercely https://agoristtaxadvice.com; Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.com; Expat Money https://expatmoney.com/scott; and Crowdhealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/ (use promocode Horton) You can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/https://scotthortonshow.com or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Audio cleaned up with the Podsworth app: https://podsworth.com Use code HORTON50 for 50% off your first order at Podsworth.com to clean up your voice recordings, sound like a pro, and also support the Scott Horton Show! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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to be an expat, whether you're afraid of the coming collapse or just fighting. modern day price inflation, find out what you need to know about how to protect your neck at expatmoney.com slash Scott. Ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest reporting to the American people. What's going on in this country? We're dealing with Hitler revisited. This is the Scott Horton show. Libertarian foreign policy, mostly.

When the president doesn't, that means that it is not only... We're going to take out seven countries. They don't know what the fuck. Stand doing. Negotiate now. End this war. And now, here's your host, Scott Horton. All right, to you guys, introducing John J. Mearsheimer,

professor of political science at the University of Chicago. Of course, famously the co-author of the Israel Lobby, but also the author of a great many things, including the great delusion, how states think, the tragedy of great power politics and all this. And as you guys probably know, he's widely considered with his buddy Stephen Walt to be sort of co-dean of the realist school

of American foreign policy academics. And of course, you see him everywhere because he's got so much to say about our current conflicts these days. Here is his substack, John's substack, meersheimer. Substack.com, which features so many of those great interviews. and yeah, we have a lot to talk about today.

First of all, I think I want to start with asking you about your opinion about the regime change that Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu actually did accomplish in Iran, as it was put in a thing I was reading this morning, that in fact the Mullahs have been sidelined and the government is now run by the IRGC, much more than before and that they're younger and angrier and more hardline than the former religious authorities

who had held sway. But I wonder whether you think that that's really right, that there's been much of a change there and or what it portents. I sort of kind of think, based on like what J.D. Vance was saying, I can see this as a cope

from the White House as well, that like, oh, it's so hard to deal with the new guys because there's so much worse. But then again, that's usually how it goes when you do a decapitation. I know that because I read Andrew Coburn's book about it. But anyway, so what do you think about all that? I think that's true, but I'd add two further points.

One is if you look at how hawkish Ayatollah Khamani number one was, this is the Ayatollah who was murdered on February 28th and compare how hawkish he was to his son, who is now in charge, Ayatollah Khomeini number two, it's quite clear that number two is more hawkish than number one. That's point number one. And they say he fought in the Iran-Iraq war, in the IRGC, right? Yes, yes.

And he was very hawkish. And apparently he was taken with the idea that Iran should develop nuclear weapons. and his father, of course, was deeply opposed to that. Second point I would make is I think when it came to signing the Memorandum of Understanding on June 17th, there were two factions in Iran, a very hawkish faction and a more moderate faction. And the more moderate faction won out. The Hawkish faction believed that it was too soon to sign the Memoramorandum of a understanding, it would have been better to let more time go by before reaching a deal with the

United States because Iran actually gained leverage by waiting. But anyway, the moderates won. You got the memorandum of understanding. And shortly thereafter, President Trump felt that he was in a position to undermine the memorandum, especially on Article 5, which dealt with the Strait of Hormuz. And, of course, we're now back to shooting at each other. And what this has done is it's put an end to the memorandum of understanding, at least for the time being, and it is strength in the hands of the hardliners. So I would say the next time we try to cut a deal,

get another memorandum of understanding with the Iranians, it's going to be more difficult because the hardliners position has been reinforced. And now, would you say that that split between the hardliners and the more reasonable is that split between the MOLA versus the IRGC and military-type leaders, or that somewhat overlaps, but not entirely? Let me make a point about your use of the word more reasonable. I don't think the moderates are necessarily more reasonable.

If I had been reigning, pardon, I said more negotiable, maybe. Well, all I would say is that you had a balance of power apparently between these two factions. And given what happened after the 17th of June, I think the balance has shifted in favor of the hardliners. and I think it's going to be much more difficult for us to reach an agreement with the Iranians at some point in the hopefully not too distant future, in large part because they really don't trust us now. I mean, they didn't trust us June 17th. But I think that the Iranian moderates who were in charge are probably surprised by what's happened. I'm sorry.

I forget who to give credit to for this. But I read or I was told or something, forgive me, that the only person who was booed at the funeral was the president of Iran because he said conciliatory things. Both the president and the foreign minister came under siege at the funeral and had to be scurried away. And it was because they were saying more supposedly, moderate things compared to making Harline revenge-laden statements.

Was that it? That got them booed? I'd put it in slightly different terms. It's because they won the debate. They got the memorandum of understanding, and then it backfired on them. They were wrong, and they were paying a price for being wrong. I see. Now, I'm not sure what to compare it to, but the funeral for the Ayatollah has included,

apparently millions, like high single digit millions. I don't know if they broke 10 million or not, but apparently they even took him to Karbala and Najafin, Iraq and back and did it to her all around Iran and just, I wonder, I guess, it seems like this is probably the biggest single event that his killing in the funeral and everything about it, that this is like the single biggest single thing to happen to Shiite Islam in a very long time, right?

And I wonder, like, you know, how serious this is in terms of what it will mean as a kind of signpost on the path of confrontation here. It's a pretty hard thing to take back killing a state and religious leader like that. And we saw all the banners demanding revenge at the funeral and all that kind of thing. And the Shiites, they can take their victimhood and revenge nests very seriously sometimes. and I think, you know, I'm a broken record on this, but we've been dealing with bin Ladenites this whole time. We have not had a, you know, satanic versus type fatwa against the whole West

by the Ayatollah Sistani or Kamenei or somebody like that this whole time. But it seems like that's a potentiality. And even regardless of that, it seems like this is just such a huge and galvanizing event for the Shiites. that it must be meaningful in terms of the future of their power in the region anyway. The way I think about this is to reflect on the Kennedy assassination, which of course took place back in November of 1963.

The entire country was horrified, shocked by this, whether you were Republican or Democrat, hardly matter. matter at all. The fact was that your president, the president of the United States, had been murdered. Now, hypothesized a situation where that murder had been committed by a foreign country. Let's say the Soviet Union or Cuba had clearly been responsible for murdering President Kennedy. What do you think the American people would have thought about how to deal with Cuba or the Soviet Union after the assassination, virtually everybody, everybody would have been enraged and wanted revenge. And in fact, if it had been Cuba, you could rest assured we would have gone after Cuba with a vengeance, maybe not the Soviet Union because it had a nuclear arsenal. But even there,

I think there was a very good chance we would have gone after the Soviet Union, had the Soviets has been responsible for Kennedy's assassination. So you don't even need the religious element here to understand how the vast majority of Iranian people feel about what happened. This is a violation of Iranian sovereignty, a foreign country came in and assassinated the leader of their country. And whether you like the leader or not, he was the leader.

And needless to say, this enraged, huge numbers of Iranians, and they want revenge. I find this hardly difficult to understand. And I think you don't even need the religious angle to make the case for why the Iranians have rallied around the flag and are deeply interested in revenge. Yeah. Well, you know, like, thinking back to Robert Pape's emphasis on. in his studies of suicide bombings, where he talks about it's the differentness of the occupying army that matters the most

if you're going to get suicide attacks. If you had Iraq occupied for Iran, by Iran, for example, well, they're Persians and not Arabs, but they do their cousins in a lot of ways, and that's one thing. But put white Christian combat soldiers on the ground in Iraq, you're going to bring on the suicide attacks, that kind of thing.

There's a major differentness here. It's not exactly occupations. but having their, you know, bringing religion back into it, having this guy who's, you know, their FDR plus their Pope at the same time, basically, that's obviously oversimplification, but he is not just their JFK, right, but their head of their religious order as well, having him killed in that brutal fashion. And in a sneak attack in the middle of negotiations, you know, stabbing the back day of infamy style, like the ugly. kind of way that it could be.

I wonder whether you worry that the religious angle does make it worse, right? Just the same as all of bin Laden's grievances were one thing, but him saying, and this is all an affront to Allah, and that's why you better get on that plane boy what made it worse, you know? I personally don't think that the religious angle matters that much.

I think any time you assassinate the leader of a particular country, you're asking for really big trouble. The key point here is that before the assassination, there were a huge number of people inside of Iran who were profoundly dissatisfied with the regime and wanted to do away with the regime. At the end result of this decapitation strategy, this killing of the leadership,

is that you created a rally around the flag effect. And now what we're doing is just making the situation worse because we're back to bombing Iran and doing destruction that it is likely to cause the average Iranian to be outraged at the United States. Not that the Afrogeranian wasn't already outraged by the 40-day bombing campaign, which started off with the assassination of Ayatollah Khomeini. My mom always told me, you keep drinking that much coffee. You're going to turn into some. Well, look, it's true. now I'm a coffee.

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Well, speaking of Bob Pape, and this goes to right straight out of his textbook pages here, right? This is what he would have told you 17 years ago or whatever, just as an academic exercise, that any president who starts a war with Iran is going to fail, and then he's going to get frustrated. And then he's going to keep bombing. because he can't think of anything else to do,

and that this is the escalation trap, that if I blow you up, that means then you're supposed to have to do what I say, but that doesn't work. Well, I think the matter is more complicated than that. I think that we started off with a bombing campaign on February 28th that was built on the assumption that bombing alone could topple the regime.

And I think that Bob's work, on strategic bombing makes it manifestly clear that that was not going to work. And of course, the historical record is clear on this issue as well. Regime change through bombing alone is just not going to work. But the key point here is that the bombing campaign only lasted 40 days. It's just important to understand that. We stopped the bombing campaign on April 8th. Remember, it started on February 28th. We stopped it on April 8th because it wasn't working.

We were running out of munitions. And then we switched gears and we went to a blockade. That was on April 13th. And the blockade lasted a little over two months and it came to an end when we signed the memorandum of understanding on June 17th. And you want to understand after April 8th, and then as we transitioned into the blockade, there was hardly any bombing of Iran by the United States. And the Iranians were not bombing military targets that belonged to the United States in the region, because both sides then had a blockade. But as I said, the blockade didn't work either. What subsequently happened after the Memorandum of Understanding was signed is that,

that we moved back to a campaign that involved bombing, but it was not a strategic bombing campaign like the 40-day war at the start of the conflict. It was a tit-for-tat campaign. And that's where we're engaged in now. It's just tit-for-tat. These are much smaller-scale attacks by both sides on the other side. They're not the same as what we saw in the 40-day war.

But in addition to going to a tit for tat strategy, after the memorandum of understanding fell apart, we've also reinstated the maritime blockade. So we're back to blockade plus tit for tat. So it's just very important to understand that our strategy has evolved in significant ways over time. But the end result is that we have been unable to get the Iranians to dance to our tune or to surrender or to sign an agreement that's favorable to us. The only agreement the two sides have signed is the 17 June Memorandum of Understanding. And that was basically a surrender document from the American side. The Iranians won on almost every count.

If you look at all 14 points, it was basically an Iranian victory. And the question you have to ask yourself is, do we have a military strategy that can win this war in some meaningful way against the Iranians? Again, we tried the air war. It didn't work. We tried the blockade. It didn't work. And now we're trying tit for tat. And it's not working.

And there's no reason to think it will work. So the end result is we do not have a winning strategy here. We're just flailing around, just hoping something will work. But there's no reason to think that any of these different approaches we've tried are going to prove successful. Well, and importantly, like you were alluding to before, tit for tat sure looks like explosions inside Iran. And, you know, politically speaking, that just hardens everybody against as you were saying before, against those who said we should pursue diplomacy.

It's already failed from, you know, maybe a simplistic, but Iranian point of view here. But I want to bring up J.D. Vance on the Joe Rogan show. I don't know if you had a chance to see that. But what he did not say was, the war is back on and those Iranians only understand force and a bunch of crap like that. In fact, what he did was he spent the whole time defending diplomacy

from attacks by the war party and saying they are called. calling me an anti-Semite and saying that I hate Israel and all these things, but that is not true. The president told me to seek a deal and that's what I'm doing. And he said, listen, Joe, you and your friends with a few RPGs could close that straight. The only way to open that straight is through diplomacy. There is no military solution. And he called out Mike Pence, who had called him out and said, well, I want to hear your plan.

I know you don't have one. The only way to solve this is through talks. So I was, you know, very happy to hear him say that. I was very happy that Trump appointed him and not Rubio to try to solve this in the first place. At least we know seemingly that he wants to, right? He volunteered for the job and wants to solve the thing. So that brings up the theory that I have that I wanted to test on you, which is that between the lines of the memorandum of understanding possibly

and would include, I don't know, actual statements, but sort of a wink and understanding between the American and the, Iranian sides here, even through their Omani or Pakistani interlocutors or whatever, would be that, look, in the 60 days or however long it takes to get a final deal here, we're going to have tit-for-tat problems in the straight, and we're going to have problems back and forth between Israel and Hezbollah and southern Lebanon. And those things aren't really going to be solved until the end. but we should not let those things derail talks that are still on, at least, you know, even if they're on pause, that we're still working toward a final goal. And as, as Vance said on the show, that there's only two

stipulations that Trump told them to solve. Make them promise not to make nuclear weapons and make sure that there's free travel through the street. And that those things he said can only be accomplished through diplomacy, so he demands the war party back off and all of that. So, I guess I wonder whether you think that that is sort of a common understanding that these two major issues, the occupation and the fight in southern Lebanon and who controls a straight, really aren't going to be solved until the end. And so the memorandum of understanding, you know, maybe is not all the way canceled, but is just that that's sort of part of the memorandum of understandings that we're going to have all these difficulties on the way to a final deal

because that's how difficult it is. I'm not too sure I agree with you. Look, the way the memorandum of understanding was set up, you had to do two things up front. Number one is you had to stop the shooting to include in southern Lebanon. And number two, the straight had to be open, which meant it both blockades

had to be put aside. And then once that happened, you had 60 days of negotiations to deal with, number one, the nuclear issue, and number two, a handful of economic issues involving Iran. This is things like reparations, frozen assets, the elimination of sanctions, and the question of who controls the straight, moving forward. So just very important to understand that you needed a ceasefire and you needed the straight open just to get things going so you could deal with those other issues. So you can't put the opening of the straight and a ceasefire towards the end of the negotiating process. That has to be up front. And it looked in the immediate aftermath of June 17th, like we had opened the strait, and except for what was happening in southern Lebanon, there was no shooting taking place.

There was no tit for tat. But then President Trump screwed things up by thinking that he could open basically an American-dominated channel through the Strait of Hormuz running along the Omane coast. And the Iranians told him in those uncertain terms that was not going to happen. And if you look at Article 5 of the Memorandum of Understanding, it makes it clear that we, the Iranians, are in charge of administering the street. So the idea that you Americans can create your own channel is unacceptable. We refuse to accept that, and we opened the channel along the Omani Coast. Iranians reacted by shooting its shifts.

It went through that channel, and then the tit for tat strategy started. So it's President Trump who began this problem after we signed the Memorandum of Understanding, and it's President Trump who initiated the tit-for-tat strategy and refuses to back down. So I don't understand how anybody could claim that President Trump is trying to shut this one down. I think that Vance understands quite correctly that there's no military solution here. I'm not sure that Trump understands that. Otherwise, he wouldn't be engaging in a tit-for-tack strategy. I think Vance, who was enthusiastic about the diplomacy, understood we have the military option.

So I think at this point in time, it looks, at least from the outside, like there's a difference between Vance and Trump. Yeah, there very well could be. So now here's a piece by Carl Anzalone at the Libertarian Institute. U.S. strikes on Iran are intended to create options for Trump to escalate. And I guess, you know, this is in regards to maybe seizing an island or something, possibly going after the uranium again. He's hitting bridges and other infrastructure. The Iranians are threatening to hit back hard.

So I don't know if it is just tit for tat. And this was kind of my reference to Pape earlier, where it's just sort of out of frustration that Trump is, you know, going back to war, maybe not full-fledged war, but he doesn't seem to know what else to do. And this is the problem, right? is for Vance to really solve it, Trump has to concede too much,

as you point out in every interview and in this one. We lost the war. We're in no position to force them to give up their uranium or their friendship with Hezbollah or the PMUs in Iraq or any other thing. And so their missile capability. And so for Trump to get a deal, he has to climb down 11 steps

to the very bottom rung of his ladder. And that's just too much crow for the man to eat. And it's still him. the same guy who made the mistake is the same guy in the chair for the next two and a half years still. So we're in a real behind it looks like, John. Well, the point is, Scott, he did climb down and, in effect, concede defeat when he signed a meet random of understanding. Didn't he change his mind again, though? No, I fully understand that.

I fully understand that. He believed that he could up the ante in the straight, of Hormuz by creating an American-dominated channel. He thought he could get away with that. He thought he could leverage over the Iranians. And he was wrong. So he's back to square one. The key point you want to keep in mind when you think about this

is that the dynamics of the conflict have not changed since June 17th. The dynamics that forced him to sign this surrender document are still the same today. You talk about escalation. If you go up the escalation ladder, we lose. We have no ground forces option here. This is not a serious argument. I want you to tell me, how many combat troops do you think there are in the Persian Gulf, U.S. combat troops?

And you understand you need U.S. combat troops if you're going to invade islands or the mainland of Iran. By my count, you probably have at the most six to eight thousand combat troops against a country that has 93 million people, a huge military, forbidding terrain. It's just not possible. And we have never seriously count using land forces against Iran. It just makes no sense at all. And then you wanna talk about going back to the bombing campaign, the 40-day war?

We quit the 40-day war because it wasn't working and we were running out of munitions. And by the way, by engaging in this tit for tax strategy, we're continuing our losses in precious munitions. precious weaponry. This makes no sense at all. Trump can't continue a tit-for-tat campaign forever. We don't have the weaponry to pursue such a strategy. So, you know, escalation. By the way, yesterday, or last night, it appears, President Trump struck bridges and power stations inside of Iran. And unsurprisingly, the Iranians retaliated against a power station and a desalination plan in Kuwait.

The Iranians have made it very clear. You want to play tit for tat? We'll play that game and we'll do enormous damage to countries in the Middle East that are allied with the United States. Countries like Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, so forth and so on. So you go up the escalation ladder. I don't believe we win. I believe if you go up the escalation ladder, they hold most of the cards, if not all the cards.

And so Trump is flailing around here. And he's at some point going to have to recognize the fact the Iranians are not going to came. This gets back to our earlier discussion, Scott, as you pointed out quite correctly. The Iranians are in a situation with a hard line are now dominating the moderates. And in a world where the hardliners are dominating the moderates

and where the moderates got their way on June 13th and the ensuing results were that the United States welched on the deal, the hardliners are in a stronger position than ever. They're not going to quit easily. So I don't know where we go from here. Yeah. All right, you guys, let's talk about crowd. Health at join crowdhealth.com slash Horton and or use the promo code Horton there to join

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in the right hand margin at Scott Horton.org. Well, and this has been with different details, this has been the form of the discussion for months now is we are up against a brick wall militarily, and yet politically, public choice theory says that Donald Trump has to lose too much base to follow through, as you say, he already surrendered in the MOU,

but he has trouble following through because it's just too much. So one of my favorite phrases in foreign policy studies these days is even Robert Kagan. I really like picking on Bob Kagan. and he's the guy that coined benevolent global hegemony in 1996 with Bill Crystal and toward a neo-Raganite foreign policy and all of this. And he says, oh, man, this is worse than losing the Vietnam War

because actually, it turns out Vietnam didn't matter. But Iran does and the Persian Gulf does. And what Trump really did here, and I'm paraphrasing off on my own here to whatever. But what Trump did was he essentially called his own bluff for the American military's own bluff, that we are the conventional. military power that dominates the Persian Gulf in this unquestioned pattern since really Roosevelt, but definitely since the Carter doctrine, that this is an American lake and this is all we secure

it and we are the world empire and especially the Middle Eastern one and that Trump has just blown all that up by putting all of our bases up for target practice by the Iranians in the way that he has. As just a Logan from Cato said, well, it's a military base you can't fight a war from. And so at this point, and I'm asking you to extrapolate a little bit forward here, regardless of exactly how the war is resolved right now, but just going forward into sort of the medium term, do you agree, is it looked to you? Like, the entire question of America's conventional military power has been raised, not just in the Middle East, but in East Asia and Europe and everywhere. I mean, no one doubts that we can defend our own country with H-bombs, but can we really dominate

other regions of the planet with our exquisite missile systems that we have so few of as it looks like Trump really just ran himself straight into a brick wall in a George W. Bushian fashion here which he absolutely did not have to do

but in a way that really calls the bluff of the American Empire in the Middle East. And then sorry, two-part question, I've been arguing that, hey, and check out the punchline. It doesn't matter the American people at all. It doesn't matter to us at all.

why do we need an empire in the Middle East at all? But then I saw you in an interview say, actually doesn't even matter to the American Empire at all. That if whatever the status has changed in the Middle East between Iran and the other players and American power there, that our balance of power overall in terms of Russia and China and Europe and the United States on the planet Earth, this is a marginal difference either way,

even for the empire, never mind for the American people. But I wonder if you could expand on that a bit. Look, I think you have to distinguish between pure power or the balance of power or the distribution of power in the world on one hand, and then the ability of the United States to project that power into different regions of the world. In terms of the balance of power in the world, this war is going to have zero effect on the balance of power.

The United States is not a weaker country in terms of how much power it has relative to China and Russia as a result of this war. I like to talk about the Vietnam War in this context. We suffered a humiliating defeat. We suffered a decisive defeat in Vietnam between 1965 and 1975. It had zero effect on the balance of power. And in fact, 14 years later, we won the Cold War and we emerged as the Unipole. Now, where the war in the Gulf matters concerns our ability to project power. As you were saying, Scott, before the war, it looked like the United States had built this formidable alliance structure in the Gulf region with the six GCC states,

and that it not only had a formidable alliance structure, It had a formidable basing structure in all of these countries, and that gave us the ability to project that awesome power that we control into the Persian Gulf. What this war has done, again, has not diminished our power, but it is shown very clearly that our ability to project power into the Gulf has been shown to be not very formidable at all. And in fact, all those bases have been, these are the American bases,

have either been badly damaged or destroyed. And our allies no longer believe that they can rely on us to provide security for them. The American security umbrella really doesn't work. And in fact, the American bases in the region basically serve as a giant magnet or Iranian ballistic missiles and drones. So instead of protecting these GCC states, we're actually causing enormous damage to them because we picked this fight with Iran. So all this is just a way of saying that our situation in the goal. region in terms of projecting military power into that area has been shown to be not very great.

It's been diminished in significant ways as a result of what's happened to all our bases. So it's our power projection capability that's been affected here, not our raw power. All right. Now, one last thing on this before I try to switch to Ukraine on you here. Benjamin Netanyahu. Donald Trump told the New York Times, David Sanger, what a difficult man or something like that. I think they're friends.

Obviously, they're friends. They get along. They're in this together. There seems to be in the press some daylight between them. Obviously, people have to speculate how much. much of that is pro wrestling agreed beforehand on the telephone that like, listen, our guys are going to say some bad things about you and you're going to say some rude things about us, but we're going to go ahead and trudge through this together. After all, the guy might be a

psychopath, but he's not schizophrenic, right? He knows, Benjamin Netanyahu knows good and well the limits of American military power, just as well as the Pentagon has explained them to Trump, clearly here, that we didn't get our regime change. We can only go so far with this. So, but I wonder whether you think that Netanyahu is ready and willing to completely screw over Trump. And when it comes to real final negotiations here to start the war again, if not against Iran, at least against Hezbollah in a way to be a spoiler and ruin the thing, or whether ultimately Israel's the junior partner and they're going to have to do what the president says because he's the boss. And he only has one option here, which is, as we've been talking about,

to go ahead and let G.D. Vance solve this at the table one way or the other sooner or later. Well, I think Netanyahu's main concern has to do with Lebanon. I think he does not want the United States to force him to abandon southern Lebanon and stop the war with Hezbollah. I think the Israelis are committed to defeating Hezbollah, decisively defeating Hezbollah, and actually controlling and eventually annexing southern Lebanon, up to at least the Latani River. I think that's what the Israelis want. And what they really fear is that the Iranians will put great pressure on the Americans

to not let that happen. And the Americans will then put great pressure on the Israelis. And by the way, in this regard, I would imagine that once negotiations start again between the Iranians and the Americans, the hardliners in Iran will insist that before, there is, before negotiations are set in place, this time, the Israelis are going to have to leave southern Lebanon. And if the Americans don't force these rallies to leave southern Lebanon, there'll be no negotiations. I wouldn't be surprised if that is the Iranian position the next time

around. And this, of course, is an Israeli nightmare. It's not only Netanyahu, it's all sorts of other Israeli foreign policy elites who want Israel to remain in southern Lebanon and to have a free hand dealing with Hezbollah. With regard to the war, I think the Israelis have come to understand that the United States is not interested in restarting the 40-day bombing campaign, which is what the Israelis would like to see happen. And they're probably happy that this tit-for-tat campaign is taking place, the memorandum of understanding it was signed on 17 June now appears to be dead because that gives them freedom of action in Lebanon. But the question really that matters is what happens in terms of U.S.-Israeli relations vis-à-vis Lebanon moving forward. Again, I think the Iranians

will put great pressure on us to put pressure on the Israelis to get out of southern Lebanon. Okay, and then sorry, one last thing before I ask you about Ukraine again. Is, well, speaking of Ukraine, is Iran, China's Ukraine that they're using against us to inflict a strategic defeat on the United States in that way that Biden and his group thought they were being so clever by getting the war going in Ukraine against Russia? I think at the very least the Chinese have a deep-seated interest, as do the Russians, I might add, in making sure that Iran does not lose the war to the United States and that indeed the United States ultimately loses. Now, there's a more interesting question. I don't think that question or that issue is all that interesting.

I think it's quite clear that the Chinese or the Russians want to see us lose and they want to see Iran win. The interesting question or the more interesting question, question is whether you think the Chinese want to see a protracted war. Do the Chinese want to see us engaged deeply in the Middle East with military forces for a long time to come? Because you understand that if that is the case, it weakens our ability to pivot to Asia to contain the Chinese. The United States has, long had a containment policy in East Asia focused on China, of course. And is China backing Russia in Ukraine and using Ukraine the same way America is using Ukraine against Russia to inflict a strategic defeat on them? Is China supporting Russia in order to prolong that war to inflict a strategic defeat

on the United States? Because after all, we're spending a hell of a lot more money and weapons in Ukraine than anyone else. the Russians included. The same basic logic I laid out regarding China and Iran applies to China and Russia in Ukraine. There's no question that Chinese do not want to see Russia lose in Ukraine, and they do not want to see the West, and here we're talking mainly about the United States, win in Ukraine. Same basic logic as applies to the Middle East with regard to Russia.

The war interesting question with regard to China and Ukraine is whether or not the Chinese are interested in seeing a protracted war in Ukraine. In other words, when they look at the fact that this war has gone on and on, it's lasted longer than World War I. Do they think that's a good thing because it's pinning down the United States in Ukraine and making it difficult for? the United States to pivot to Asia. I don't know what the answer is to that. You can find evidence that the Chinese would actually like to end the Ukraine war. You can find evidence that the Chinese would actually like to end the Iran war. But you can find evidence on the other side as well.

And I don't know where the bottom line lies with regard to either conflict. Well, even there, the fact that it's not open and shut case against it, but that it makes perfect sense, right? That if you put yourself in the shoes of the ministers in Beijing, that that might be a clever thing to do to the United States would be to ramp up costs for us so far from home and all of that. So we did to the Soviets in Afghanistan. Sure. And that's what they said they were doing in Ukraine was the Afghanistan model, even just three months after losing Afghanistan themselves. But now I want to play this clip here. I interviewed you 12 years ago about Ukraine. And here's some of what you said.

I mean, well, there were doubters in the 1990s. As I said before, there's no question. I'm looking at the date. I'm sorry. I got it on double speed, don't I? I was listening to it on double speed, everybody. Give me a break. Here we go.

In 19 to late 1990s about NATO expansion, there was significant resistance inside the government and outside the government. and the forces in favor of expansion had to work very hard to prevail. But by the year 2000, once the first expansion had taken place, this is the one that brings in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, once that had taken place, the opposition to further NATO expansion basically melted away. And everybody seemed to get on the bandwag. So in the 2000s, there was a great deal of enthusiasm for more and more.

expansion. People talked about an open door. And of course, the more expansion you had, the closer you got to the Russian border. And another way of putting that is the closer you got to including Ukraine and Georgia. And I think it's fair to say that Putin and the Russians more generally drew a red line in the sand and said that Georgia and Russia are not going to become part of NATO. And I think if you look at what's going on now with regard to Ukraine, I think basically Putin is saying that if the West and Kiev continue to insist that Ukraine has to become part of the West, we the Russians will wreck Ukraine before we let that happen. Now, must feel pretty foolish, huh?

Oh, I mean, boy, did you get that one right? And what a shame. They didn't listen to you. So this is in August. This is a few months into the so-called civil war, which we know now from great reporting by Zach Dorfman and whoever it was at the New York Times, that CIA was running that civil war from the very, very beginning.

It was John Brennan and Barack Obama's war there. And so this was recorded in August of 14, just after you wrote your famous piece for foreign affairs, why the Ukraine crisis is the West's fault. And that's your famous quote, from your millions and millions and millions of views speech on YouTube that you gave in 2015 about this issue. And that was your phrase that I think you coined in the foreign affairs piece and you used

on my show. And then again, in that speech was that Russia will simply wreck Ukraine rather than let America run off with it. So how were you able to see that so clearly when so many other professionals in your same line of business could not? I mean, I just thought it was patently obvious that if you take a military alliance

that had been a formidable foe of the Soviet Union, which was the predecessor state of Russia, and you run it right up to Russia's border, you are really asking for trouble. And I think that lots of people understood that in the 1990s, a lot of documents have now been released on the decision-making process during the Clinton administration on NATO expansion. And there's lots of evidence that policymakers understood that Ukraine was a very special case. And I think what happened here, Scott, and it's reflected in

my comments is that there was significant opposition in the 90s, and I mean significant opposition from a wide variety of people, to include people like Paul Nitzha, the Secretary of State, excuse me, the Secretary of Defense, Bill Perry, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and of course, very famously, George Kennan. Brent Scolcroft, even. Brent Scowcroft, exactly. people understood. But then, as I said in that old interview that I did with you, the opposition melted away in the 2000s. And I think what happened here is that the first trunch of expansion,

which was in 1999, was successful. The Russians opposed it, but they accepted the fact that it was going to happen, and it happened. Then the second tranche of expansion, which was a big tranche, a big bang, right, which involved the Baltic states, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia, and Bulgaria. That happened in 2004. And the Russians swallowed hard and accepted it. So by 2008, when you decide that you're going to bring Ukraine and Georgia into the alliance, you've already had two big tranches of expansion. and despite Russian protests, they were successful. So in 2008, when the Russians protest bitterly

against the announcement that Ukraine and Georgia will be brought into the alliance, the Americans and more generally people in the West say, ah, this is just the Russians complaining has happened with the first two tranches, and we'll just shove it down their throat. There's nothing they can do about it. We're incredibly powerful.

Russia is a basket case. It's not as bad as it was under Boris Yeltsin, but it's still in terrible shape. It's in no position to contest us. So we'll just move forward. And they were wrong. It was a bridge too far. And what happened here, to be very clear,

is that not only was Ukraine of enormous strategic importance, because it was a huge piece of real. a state right on Russia's border. But what also happened is that the Russian military capability grew over the course of the 2000s. So after 2008 and certainly after 2014, when the crisis broke out over Ukraine, the Russians had a more formidable military, and they were in a better position than to contest the Americans. So what I'm saying to you, Scott, is the stakes were higher, number one, and number two, Russia's ability to contest NATO was greater after 2008 than it was before 2008 than it was in 2004 with the second tranche, and certainly in

1999 with the first tranche. And what then happened is that we pushed forward. And every time there was any resistance, we doubled down. And the end result is we got a major crisis in 2014. And then the war that's still ongoing broke out in February 2020. Right. You guys, me here for tax attorney Matt Sersely at agoristaxadvice.com. And he is just a real hawk.

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Well, and as I show in my book, I'm only finally getting the audio book done of Provoked, and it actually gets tedious how many times I quote in there, even Brasinski and Kissinger, two of the leader, leading advocates of NATO expansion, and so many of their contemporaries, contemporaries too, saying, well, of course we have to make a special case for Ukraine.

We'll call it the Finland model. We'll call it the Austria model from the old Cold War and we'll make it a neutral state, a bridge between the two. Ken Pollock, who is one of the main advocates of Iraq War II on the supposed liberal Democrat side, wrote a whole monograph about this in 2018 at the height of Russia Gate, so nobody paid attention or cared. But there are so many people who warned that they knew exactly that this is, and I'm sorry, Like I say, even Robert Kagan, even Brasinski and Kissinger, two of the leading hawks on this said, well, come on, be reasonable, dude. We're not bringing Ukraine into NATO. That'll lead to a war with the Russian Federation.

That's crazy. Very importantly, Scott, at the actual April 2008 summit in Moukest, where the decision was made that Ukraine and NATO would, I shouldn't mean, that Ukraine and Georgia would become part of NATO. both Uncle Merkel and Nicholas Sarkozy adamantly opposed the decision. And Merkel later said that she opposed the decision to bring Ukraine into NATO because she understood that Putin would interpret it as a declaration of war. Just think about those words. Uncle Merkel, no pussycat, says that she was opposed to bring a, Ukraine into NATO because Putin would interpret it as a declaration of war.

You get it. George W. Bush, who was in the last year of his presidency, and Condoleezza Rice, his secretary of state, pushed hard, overwhelmed Merkel and Sarkozy and other European leaders who did not want to go down this road to accept the idea that we should bring Ukraine into NATO. And off we went. Now, it's just because we discussed this before, and I know this comes up in interviews a lot, about how deliberate this all was or how anti-Russia this all was.

And I agree with you that there's a lot of delusion in Washington about the magical power of liberalism and how we just have to spread our umbrella to include everyone, even though obviously that includes, pardon me, even though that obviously excludes somebody and in provoked, it's a litany of all of these warnings going back to the 90s. Everyone who opposed NATO expansion,

the number one overriding reason was because it's an unnecessary provocation against the Russians. It's not like they were complaining that it costs too much. They like spending money. It was that this is an unnecessary provocation against the Russians all the way through.

And there's definitely a strain of, yeah, but what are they going to do about it? And also of, and you could tell they believe their own BS about this, like Obama's guy McFall saying to them, it's a defensive alliance, okay? So don't be threatened by it, because we would never attack you with it.

Don't be stupid. It's defensive, defensive, defensive. And therefore, if they react against what we're doing, well, that's just their problem. Or we don't even have to take them seriously because they know it's a defensive alliance and that we would never do anything. So there's a lot of sort of just disdain and disregard

for the Russians, no matter what they say, and no matter how they react. But it seems like, at least among some of these people, possibly including George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and others, that a lot of this does have to do with sticking it to the Russians. And you can even go back to, and I cover this in detail and provoked, go back to our policy in the Caucasus Mountains in the late 1990s, when Bill Clinton and the CIA, working with the British and the Saudis,

are backing bin Ladenite suicide bombers, as long as they are helping keep this old Soviet pipeline from being turned back on again. They want it, and this is why they did the BTC pipeline, to make sure to cut out the Russians and cut out the Iranians and make sure the oil out of the Caspian goes west. And Strobe Talbot in the Clinton years originally said, this is a bad idea because this is really just an insult on top of injury to the Russians

when we should not be picking a fight with them. We want to cooperate with them. But then the Hawks, Sheila Hesslin and the others on the National Security Council, changed his mind. And the policy was to do this explicitly to spite the Russians and to make sure that they were excluded. And even though they knew it would lead to a reaction and resentment, they decided to do it anyway because they had high time preferences

instead of low ones, essentially. And Dick Cheney, this is something that Brandon Weikert pointed out that I really wish I had written about in Provoked, that I totally overlooked this. It was how angry Bush and especially Cheney were that Putin voted no or wouldn't even allow the issue to go forward on supporting the Iraq War and the UN Security Council. They never even tried the second resolution

because Putin would have vetoed it. And so they were so pissed off about that. They hated Russia for that. And that's something that I overlooked that I'm sure that Weikert is really on to something there. But what do you think about that? Well, the way I think about it is if you go back to the Clinton years, the 1990s, when NATO expansion became American policy,

you see hardly any evidence that we view the Russian, as a dangerous adversary that had to be contained, and that was the reason we were expanding NATO. Well, right, pardon me, but what about not a dangerous one, but a weak one that we want to keep our boot on their neck and prevent them from getting up? Because it's not like we occupy them the way we occupy Germany and Japan. We can rebuild them because we pown them.

But if we help build up Russia, they'll just be stronger and independent from us sooner. So we want to keep them down while they're down. I don't see much evidence of that. I think that the Clinton administration had a very favorable view towards Boris Yeltsin. They helped to keep him in power by helping him to get reelected. I think it was in 1997, if my memory's correct. Yeah. And I think they understood that NATO expansion was a problem for Yeltsin, but what they tried to do was assuring. that they were on Yeltsin's side, they were on Russia's side, and Yeltsin had to understand that the United States was a benign hegemon, and what it was really interested in doing is spreading this wonderful set of institutions that had created peace in Western Europe into Eastern Europe

and making Europe peaceful. And I think if we talk to people like Michael McFaul, that is their view of what the Americans were trying to do. Initially, that they were not interested in containing Russia. They were interested in spreading liberal democracy and liberal institutions eastward and incorporating more and more countries into the alliance, into the EU, and so forth and so on. I think, however, there's no question that things begin to go south after a few years in the 2000s. You remember the first real sign of trouble, in my opinion, was the 2007 speech that Putin gave in Munich at the famous security conference, where he really lambasted the West

for not taking into account serious Russian interests. And I think after 2007, relations between Russia and the United States, began to change in a serious way. And I think it's no accident that it was in April of 2008, which is a year plus after the Munich conference that we decide to expand NATO into Ukraine and into Georgia. I think after 2007, we're beginning to think of the Russians as more of a threat. And we are much more hostile to the Russian,

after that. This is not to say we were being nice to the Russians between, let's say, 2001 when the Bush administration comes into power and 2007, when Putin gives this speech at Munich, because obviously Putin wouldn't have given the speech at Munich had he not been upset with what the West was doing. So I think after Clinton leaves office, we slowly but steadily begin to put our cross hairs on the Russians. And I think it accelerates after 2007. And it certainly accelerates after 2008. Well, you have, you know, Bush tearing up the ABM treaty and effectively killing start two. You have all the color-coded revolutions, which are all at Russia's expense and the anti-ballistic missile systems going into Romania, Poland, and the Czech Republic and all of that. And then Cheney's

big villainous speech was in, I think, 2006, or six. or five, where he went after Putin for charging Ukraine, the market rate for natural gas instead of giving them their special discount. So that was a pretty harsh speech. I'm pretty sure that was in 05. Might have been 06. So, yeah, there was a lot going on there already. Now, I guess let me ask you about the current war,

because it seems to me, like, at least in the campaign, that Trump was sincere about wanting to end the war. But he just can't because he just got inaugurated for his second term right at the wrong time when Russia is winning, but slowly, and Ukraine is losing, but slowly. And, you know, Ukraine has home field advantage and they're backed by Western money and weapons. And so it doesn't nullify Russia's advantage, but it diminishes it some. And here we are having this conversation in the summer of 2006, which I'm surprised by, you know, I would have thought it would have ended a long time ago now. But I just don't see a good way out of it unless Putin is willing to back down and

give up half of Ziproja and a third a curse on. Otherwise, and, you know, for that matter, everything east of the river and Odessa and the potential of all of the southern coast and all that. And I don't think he's going to do that. So I don't know what you think, but it seems like speaking of rocks and hard places, here's a war that nobody wants to end except the poor population of Ukraine, who I think in the latest poll 66% said they wanted a negotiated solution. But they're just extras in our movie here.

Yeah, I mean, from Russia's point of view, the possibility of Ukraine winning this war and joining NATO, joining the West is an existential threat, right? It's just very important to understand that. From Ukraine's point of view, Russia conquering territory in Ukraine and turning Ukraine into a dysfunctional rum state is often. obviously an existential threat. So you have a situation here where you have the Russians on one side who see what the Ukrainians in the West are doing is an existential threat. And you have the Ukrainians on the other side who see what the Russians are doing is an existential threat.

And invariably, this means there's no bargaining space between the two sides. Now, one could argue that there is a possible solution here, and that is that the Europeans and the Americans, the West more generally, moves in and acts as something of an arbiter, or puts coercive leverage, uses its coercive leverage against Ukraine to cut a deal between the Russians and Ukraine and settle this war. This is what Trump wanted to do, as you described it. This was Trump's goal. But that has not happened.

And in fact, the Europeans have convinced themselves that Russia is an existential threat to Europe. Well, if the Europeans and Ukraine both view Russia as an existential threat, and the Russians view the Europeans and the Ukrainians as an existential threat, there's no way that you put an end to this war other than on the battlefield. One side has to win and the other side has to sign an armistice. Otherwise, the war just goes on and on. So I don't see any diplomatic solution any way you can stop the fighting short of one side prevailing in the conflict. And that's the best we're in.

As you said, Trump's instincts were to try to avoid this. Trump wanted to establish good relations with Putin, and he wanted to shut the war down in Ukraine. But he was incapable of doing it for two reasons. One, when it comes to diplomacy, he is incapable of executing, period. And second, is you very well know, and as I very well know, the U.S. foreign policy establishment is filled with super hawks who have no interest in ending war and didn't agree with President Trump and did everything they could to undermine her.

So when you marry the incentives of most people in the foreign policy structure to Trump's incompetence, you end up in the mess that we're entering it. Yeah. Well, and it looks like too, and I said this as soon as the war broke out, I go, look, you know, war is just a government program. and apply the same economic perspective that you would to an American war, to the Russian one, that it's a self-licking ice cream cone. You can see it already.

The first thing that they did was draw a line around all the people in Ukraine who like them the most and say that they're all Russians now, not Ukrainians anymore. Well, the Russian leaning guy used to win elections over there. That's why America had to keep overthrowing the government, right? But now no one who likes Russia is ever going to win again, and they'll be lucky if they're not ruled by Andrew Bletsky, the neo-fascist lunatic, current, you know,

brigadier general of the Third Army Corps in some kind of fascist coup. So, and then even if they just take the Donbass and Ziprojan Curzon, they still leave a lot of Russian speakers in Harkiv and Sumi and Denepro-Prabask in these territories east of the river. And so now, from the point of view of a government, those people, those poor people are being left outside of Russian protection. And they need protecting too. But then if they take all that land up to the river, Kiev's right on the river.

So now they have their enemy city right there on the border of their new kind of state, and it's a rump state run by hard right-wingers out of far western Ukraine. And then so what are they going to do with them? I'm projecting a few years into the future here. Never even mind then kind of licking their chops at seizing Odessa and marching all the way to Transnistria and all that. But what about just the sunk-cost fallacy of... of oops, we've created an enemy rumped state in Ukraine

that's way worse than the Ukraine we invaded in 22. So now what are we going to do with Andrew Beletsky's new neo-fascist regime or whatever? And then in the West, that's where you have forests and swamps and Carpathian mountains from which to fight an insurgency indefinitely, especially if backed by the West. So it seems to me like Russia's best case scenario here is a very Pyrrhic victory where any place where they finally draw the line and stop fighting, they're going to regret this.

Well, my argument all along has been that the Russians are going to win an ugly victory. And what I mean by that is they're going to end up taking a substantial portion of Ukrainian territory. I don't think they'll go into territories that are filled with ethnic Ukrainians. I think they'll stay away. But they'll take a substantial portion of. of Ukrainian territory. And they will do everything they can to turn Ukraine into a dysfunctional rump state. I think this is one of the reasons they'll have a powerful incentive to take Odessa

to make sure that Ukraine has no court on the Black Sea. And they'll do everything they can over time to make sure that that dysfunctional rum state called Ukraine stays terribly dysfunctional. all of this is to say, Scott, that you're going to have poisonous relations between Russia on one side and Ukraine and the West on the other side for as far as the eye can see. I see no way that you're going to get some sort of meaningful peace settlement where the two sides are able to create some sort of meaningful modus of NDI. I just don't think it's going to happen. This is going to continue to be a very dangerous region of the world. And all of this is to say, I believe that the April 2008 decision to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO will eventually be seen as one of the most catastrophic mistakes any foreign policy makers have ever made.

Check it out, you guys. I'm a total twin. I'm really so proud of this. And I love these guys. Connor Boyack and Elijah Stanfield, they write and draw the great Tuttle Twins books, teaching kids about real principles of liberty so that your kids don't have to grow up, Cami.

And this is their monthly magazine, The Tuttle Times. And check it out. I'm in it. Well, first of all, there's a great ad for the Scott Horton Academy. But also, look at this, 100 years of blowback. And it's about the total twins. Go down to the skate park and they meet me,

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You know who doesn't have a self-evident unalienable right to live flies. You know they defecate and puke every time they land on everything they touch. So what you should do is get yourself. yourself a bug assault gun and then use it to kill them when they're trespassing on your property. That's what I do. I shoot them dead. And what you do in order to get one of these things is just follow the link in the right-hand margin, a very top link in the right-hand margin at scotthornton.org.

And in fact, what you might consider would be stopping by that link every time you go shopping on Amazon.com. And that way, the Scott Horton show gets a little bit of a kickback from Amazon's end of the sale. Your price does not go up. one penny. And so check it out at Scott Horton.org. All right, guys, let me take a second to tell you about expat money at expatmoney.com slash Scott. It's a guy named Mikhail Thorup. He's a great guy. I've met him. And he's been an expat for many years and knows the rules and regulations all around the world

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Sure, one more question. Okay. It's a big one though, but humor me. This is where I test my naive libertarian non-interventionism against your hard-nosed realism and real real politique here. So much of the last 25 years of your life and mine have been spent, and not just that, longer than that, have been spent critiquing the very poor decision-making in Washington,

which is to say, right, that neither of us are Marxists who think that any of this is all the inevitable course of history. We had George W. Bush as a president, for God's sake, and he did things that he did not have to do, just for one example of our bad leadership. I like to say you could have had Biden win the election of 88 and really Biden's been the president the whole time. That's the buffoonery of the stewards of American power

since the end of the last Cold War. It's just been terrible. But then, so that raises the question then of how much of this is inevitable and how much of this could have really gone the other way. I mean, Putin still calls us our American partners and still, to some degree, wants to be part of European Christian Western civilization with us. And yet our government doesn't seem to ever want to allow that. But it just seems like if we had, say, for example, Dr. Ron Paul as president and John Mearsheimer as Secretary of State during many of these intervening years,

that actually we wouldn't have to be in this pitted great power competition. with Russia and China. We wouldn't have to worry about the consolidation of Europe under German control turning against us or any of these things that we actually could have more or less the pipe dream that they sold of just free trade and liberalism and cooperation under the UN system

and treaties to more or less keep the peace and negotiate new borders at tables instead of fighting over them all this time. Bill Clinton didn't have to set the Kosovo precedent. George Bush didn't have to turn it. in the Middle East upside down, you know, and all the expansion into Europe and all these things. I know that you've been very critical of America, you know, doing so much to help boost up the Chinese economy because ultimately they're going to be a problem for us.

But it seems like if we had done that without being a problem for the whole damn world, this whole time and the belligerent way that we have, that we could even have a much more cooperative and, you know, co-dependent and co-equal kind of relationship with China than the adversarial one that we have right now. So, but I know that in your theories, hey, great power's going to great power. So, right, I don't want to oversimplify things or sound too polyana-ish around here, but it just seems like to me we've had Bushes and Clintons and Bidens and McCain's in charge, and that's the real problem here when things could be so much better, could have been.

Well, this is a very big question. It has many dimensions, and I'd need at least another hour to lay out my views in a meaningful way. But I'll take a quick crack at it. First of all, I distinguish between great power politics and the Forever Wars. And I think if you look at the world from roughly 1992 to 2017, there was only one great power on the system, and that was the United States. It was the... Why 17?

Pardon? Why 17? Because that's when China and Russia became great powers, and you moved from unipolarity to multipolarity. What was the actual event, though, that marked the switch? No event. As I before, power is largely a function of material capabilities. It was the growth of the Chinese economy, which is a result of our engagement policies,

and it was the fact that Putin brought the Russian economy back from the dead after he took power in late 1999. So that by 2017, both Russia and China had the material capabilities to qualify as a great power. and most people, starting in roughly 2017, began to talk about living in a multipolar world. In fact, President Trump took office for the first time in January 2017, and almost all the documents on security that came out of the administration in the first two years referenced the fact that Great Power Politics was back on the table. You understand that a unipolarity, which went from 19. 1992 to 2017, you had only one great power, the United States, by definition, and therefore

you could not have great power politics. You need at least two great powers to have great power politics. So what happens in the period between 91 and 2017 or the Unipolar moment is you have the forever wars. That's where the forever wars take place. And that's where people like us were arguing that these wars are remarkably foolish, that we're going to succeed hardly anywhere. In fact, we're going to fail almost everywhere. And I opposed the forever fiercely, including the 2003 war against Iraq. And I argue that we should not stay in Afghanistan after 2001, which, of course, we did. But anyway, the Forever Wars are different than great power politics. And my view is that once Russia and China are great powers and you're in a multi-polar

world, and you have three great powers now, including the United States, of course, the great power politics is back on the table. And I think that there is absolutely no reason for the United States and the Russians to have bad relations. I think there should not be a conflictual relationship between Moscow and Washington. But my view, as you surely know, is that given how powerful China is, and that given the fact that China has the capability to possibly dominate all of East Asia, the way we dominate the Western Hemisphere, it was inevitable that you would have an intense security competition between the United States and China. Again, just to go back to the Russians so that I can make my perspective clear, I don't think it was inevitable that you would have an intense security

competition between Russia and the United States because Russia is too weak. It's the weakest of the three great powers. There's no way Russia is going to dominate all of Europe. This is not the Soviet Union. And in fact, the United States should have good relations with the Russians. But my argument is that China is a fundamentally different situation. The U.S.-China relationship is like the U.S.-S.-soviet relationship during the Cold War. These are the two most powerful, great powers in the system. And they are at loggerheads, and they will remain at loggerheads. And the situation in East Asia will remain very dangerous.

for the foreseeable future, in my opinion. But again, my bottom line is that I distinguish in my own head between great power of politics on one hand and the forever wars on the other hand. But as far as our conflict with China is simply inevitable because of their GDP, right? At some point, when they're as wealthy as us and they can afford a big Navy,

then that means we have to be competitors and not partners. Is there the rising power? We're the falling one, and it's Victor Davis-Hansons, we're all Greeks now or whatever thing. No, you don't want to identify with Victor Davis-Hanson or anyone else. My argument is simply that in a world where there's no higher authority that can protect you if you get into trouble, it's very important that you be, you mean in a particular state, be very powerful.

You want to maximize the amount of power that you have. If you're not powerful, as the Chinese can tell you, you suffer the century of national humiliation. You understand that that's what happened to the Chinese when they were weak. They suffered the century of national humiliation. My question for you is, who was at the other end when they dialed 911? And I'll tell you what the answer is, nobody. And in a world where there's nobody at the other end when you dial 911,

you are, by definition, in a self-help world. And when you're in a self-help world, you want to be really powerful. You want to be the United States of America. None of us go to bed at night worrying about any country in our region in the Western hemisphere attacking us. Why is that the case? It's because we're so powerful. Well, that same logic applies to China.

If you're China, don't you want to be by far the most powerful country in East Asia? Don't you want to make sure that there is no other country in your region that could possibly attack you? Don't you want to avoid anything that approximates the century of national humiliation? The answer is unequivocally yes. The Chinese will tell you this. They want to be powerful. And by the way, they don't want the United States in their backyard.

Just like we don't want any great power in our backyard, as you know we have the Monroe doctrine, just as the Russians don't want NATO in their backyard. Same basic logic applies to the Chinese. they want to dominate East Asia, and they want to dominate East Asia for good strategic reasons. As I often say, if I were the National Security Advisor in Beijing, I would advise Xi Jinping to dominate, if he could, East Asia, because it is the most secure security situation that you can achieve. But, of course, the United States doesn't want China to dominate East Asia.

just as we didn't want the Soviet Union to dominate Europe during the Cold War, just as we moved against Imperial Germany, Imperial Japan, and Nazi Germany, as well as the Soviet Union during the 20th century. This is great power politics. It's just the way the system works. Am I happy about that? No. But I'm a realist, and I'm a realist with a capital or as well as a small art,

and you have to accept the way the world works. You have to accept the way great power politics works, in my humble opinion, and do everything you can to minimize the possibility of war. I want to be clear here. Because I believe that the world is nasty and brutish, I'm not arguing that we should go out and start wars against China or Russia and so forth and so on, that we should engage in endless great power wars. That's not my argument. My argument is the United States is in a very secure position, and we should go to great lengths to maintain the present balance of power.

We should go to great lengths to make sure China does not dominate East Asia. But I'm not interested in starting a war against China. I'm simply interested in containing China, and the same way I was interested in containing the Soviet Union. I mean, we had this major paradox, right, where the biggest threat to America, though, is our own power and that our national government has too much of it, right? Any government strong enough to keep the peace between the 50 states

is strong enough to try to extend their security umbrella of liberalism throughout the whole world until it blows up in all of our face, to the point where we can get in a nuclear war over stupid old Taiwan. This is going to be my final point. Okay, sorry, I know I've kept you too long. The problem is not that the United States has too much power. The problem is how the United States uses its power. You want your country, whether you're Chinese, Russian, American, Israeli, you name it.

You want your own country to have a lot of power. for purposes of self-protection, for purposes of security. The question is, how do you use that power? And the point I've tried to make throughout this show, and one that I'm sure you agree with, is that if you look at how the United States has used its power in recent decades, certainly since the Cold War ended, it's quite clear that we have employed that abundant power

that we possess in remarkably foolish ways, not only in terms of fighting these forever wars, but also in terms of NATO expansion and what that meant for our relations with Russia and what that means for security in Europe moving forward, as we talked about before. So again, I think it's not so much the question of power itself. that's of great importance here. What really matters in our discussion that is, is how you employ that power. Yeah.

And yeah, well, and we will just have to leave it there. I promise next time I bring you on, I won't keep you for two hours like this, but it's been so much fun. Thank you so much for coming on, John. You're welcome. The Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom,

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