John Mearsheimer: The Palestinian Genocide and How the West Has Been Deceived Into Supporting It

John Mearsheimer: What’s happening in Gaza is genocide. The United States should have nothing to do with it. (00:00) An Update on the Ukraine/Russia War (05:13) The West’s Ridiculous Russophobia (15:47) Why Do We Still Have NATO? (28:29) The Growing Threat of China and How the US Empowered Them (43:30) The US Puppet Called Zelensky (59:13 ) The Palestinian Genocide Paid partnerships with: PureTalk: Go to https://PureTalk.com/Tucker to make the switch Byrna: Go to https://Byrna.com or your local Sportsman's Warehouse today. Identity Guard: Get a 30-day free trial and over 60% off when you sign up at https://IdentityGuard.com/Tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones, like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers, not available in all states.

• 0:29Tucker Carlson?

  Professor, thank you for doing this. The arc of, and it's not the topic of today's conversation, but the arc of your career, as someone who's just watched it pretty carefully all of these years, you've wound up where I think all of us want to be, which is universally respected regardless of an oracle. It must be sort of nice to look back and be vindicated. So anyway, so I'm honored to have you. Where are we in Ukraine right now?

• 0:52Speaker 02

  Well, we're in deep trouble if you mean the United States and Ukraine.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  You talk about we. The fact is that the Russians are winning the war and there's no way that Ukraine can rescue the situation. If you look at the balance of power in terms of weaponry and in terms of manpower, the number of soldiers that each side has, the Ukrainians are in a hopeless situation. And furthermore, they're heavily dependent on the West for support. And President Trump has made it clear that he's not going to refill the Biden pipeline once all the weaponry in that pipeline runs out. So the Ukrainians are doomed. And if you look at what's happening on the battlefield, it's quite clear that the Ukrainians understand that.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  Their defenses are slowly but steadily collapsing. Now, one might say, well, can't we get a negotiated settlement? Can't we bring this war to an end? And the fact is that neither the Ukrainians nor the West, and here we're talking mainly about the Europeans, is willing to cut a deal that's acceptable to the Russians. So there's no way you're going to have a diplomatic settlement to this war. It's going to be settled on the battlefield, and the Russians are going to win an ugly victory, and you're going to have a frozen conflict. Why can't you have a negotiated settlement? Because Russia has a set of demands.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  There are three main demands, and I'll spell them out in a second, but they are unacceptable to the Ukrainians, they're unacceptable to the West. Donald Trump may find them acceptable, but he's surrounded by people in his administration, and certainly true in the American foreign policy establishment, who wouldn't accept those demands. And the big three demands are, number one, that Ukraine has to be a neutral state. It cannot be a NATO, and it cannot have a security guarantee from the United States or from the West more generally. So it has to be neutral.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  Second is that Ukraine cannot have a significant offensive military capability. Ukraine has to be demilitarized to the point where it doesn't present a threat to Russia. And then third, and maybe most important of all, the Ukrainians and the West have to accept the fact that Russia has annexed Crimea and those four oblasts in eastern one-fifth of Ukraine that they now almost occupy. So in other words, you're asking Ukraine to give up about 20% of its territory, and the Ukrainians won't do that, and they won't agree not to be a NATO, and they will not

• 4:05Speaker 02

  agree to disarm in some meaningful way. So there's no way you get a settlement.

• 4:11Tucker Carlson?

  So, but there will be a settlement by your description because there will be a victory. So there will just be, it's not an official settlement, but there will be a new status quo in which Russia controls a fifth of what was Ukraine. And that's just going to happen. So why wouldn't you want to get out of that with as little destruction as possible?

• 4:33Speaker 02

  Well, you're going to get an armistice in all likelihood. And this is why we say you'll have a frozen conflict that will present all sorts of problems moving down the road. I have long argued that the Ukrainians should cut a deal now because what's going to happen is the Russians are going to end up taking more territory. And the Russians have made it clear that any territory they take, they'll keep. And furthermore, more Ukrainians are going to die the longer the war goes on. So if you believe like I do, and many people do, that Ukraine is losing, the smart thing to do is cut a deal now and minimize your losses, both in terms of territory and people killed on the battlefield.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  But you just can't sell that argument.

• 5:19Tucker Carlson?

  And why can't you sell that argument?

• 5:21Speaker 02

  I think it's probably nationalism in the case of the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians view the Russians as existential threat and they're willing to fight and die in huge numbers. They're willing to make incredible sacrifices to do everything they can to win this war, and they just won't quit. And in terms of the West, it's easy for the West.

• 5:44Tucker Carlson?

  So I just want to say, I understand that and respect that. I think they're wrong, but I think it's self-defeating, but I certainly think it's honorable, those impulses. But I don't understand the West's stake in this exactly.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  Well, I don't believe the West has a strategic stake in this for one second, but the Russophobia in the West is so powerful at this point in time that, especially among the elites in Europe and in the United States, that getting them to concede that the Russians have won this war, or going to win this war, is just unacceptable.

• 6:23Tucker Carlson?

  And have legitimate security concerns on their border. I mean, that...

• 6:27Speaker 02

  They're not allowed, the Russians are not allowed to have legitimate security concerns in the minds of most Western elites.

• 6:35Tucker Carlson?

  Why?

• 6:37Speaker 02

  I don't know. It befuddles me. If you look at the Russian reaction to NATO expansion into Ukraine, which I believe is the taproot of this war, it's analogous to America's Monroe Doctrine. The United States, under those circumstances, would allow the Soviet Union to put missiles in Cuba, or to locate a naval base at Cienfuegos in Cuba. That was just unacceptable. This is what the Monroe Doctrine is all about. We'd never allow China to station military forces in Mexico or in Canada. But yet, we think we

• 7:18Speaker 02

  have the right to move NATO far enough eastward to include Ukraine and then put NATO assets, including American military assets, in Ukraine. And this is not of concern to the Russians. They shouldn't care. They should recognize that Ukraine has the right to do whatever it wants. NATO has the right to expand wherever it wants, and Russia has no say in the matter. The Russians, of course, don't accept this, because they have a Monroe Doctrine of their own. But we can't get it through our thick skulls that this is foolish thinking on our part and is destined to lead to trouble, as it has.

• 7:58Tucker Carlson?

  It's interesting that the standard that US foreign policymakers apply to Russia is different from a standard they'd apply to any other country, including China, and even North Korea. They just, they don't have the same level of emotion about any other place. It's Russia, Ukraine. And I, I find it baffling, because on some level, this is, as you said at the outset, this is not about America's strategic interests. We don't really have many there. This is about an almost overwhelming emotional response from our leadership class to this conflict, to this region. I think it's weird.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I think also at this point in time, we have convinced ourselves, both the Europeans and the Americans, that Russia is a mortal threat to dominate all of Europe. This is a ridiculous argument, of course.

• 8:51Tucker Carlson?

  Do you think it is ridiculous?

• 8:51Speaker 02

  It's a ridiculous argument. As you have seen, the war started in 2022. We're well over five years into this war. And the Russians have had a very difficult time conquering the eastern one-fifth of Ukraine. Just think about that. Over three-plus years, they have been unable to conquer all of the territory in those four oblasts that they've annexed. Please tell me how this army is going to overrun all of Ukraine, then overrun Eastern Europe, and then overrun Western Europe. This is a laughable argument. Furthermore, if the Russians are foolish enough to try to occupy Western Ukraine, they're going to find themselves

• 9:36Speaker 02

  in a quagmire. They're going to find themselves dealing with a huge amount of resistance from all of those ethnic Ukrainians in the western part of Ukraine who hate Russians. This is why I don't think Putin is going to even try to conquer the western half.

• 9:53Tucker Carlson?

  Much less Poland and Romania and the rest.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  Exactly. Their view on that, by the way, in terms of occupying Eastern Europe, is we've been there, done that, and it did not work out very well. Remember, they occupied Eastern Europe roughly from 1945 to the early 1990s, when they pulled out after the Cold War ended. They had to invade Hungary in 56. They had to invade Czechoslovakia in 68. They had to put down a major insurrection in East Germany in 1953. They almost went into Poland three times. They had their hands full dealing with the Romanians and the Albanians and the Yugoslavs. I mean, the idea that a country like Russia is going to invade and

• 10:36Speaker 02

  occupy and run the politics of countries in Eastern Europe is a remarkably foolish idea. And again, they don't even have the military capability to do that.

• 10:47Tucker Carlson?

  But that is the idea. And when you talk to Europeans about it, as I often do, they say,

• 10:53Tucker Carlson?

  Putin's aim is to restore the Soviet Empire. And he said that, and you know, just listen to what he says. He wants, he pines for the Soviet era and he wants to restore it.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  He's never said that. In fact, he said that, you know, he can understand why someone in his or her heart pines for the Soviet Union, but in his or her head, it makes absolutely no sense. He said that the idea that you can recreate the Soviet Union, number one, and then to recreate the Soviet Empire is a pipe dream. And you might not like Vladimir Putin, but he is a very smart man. He is a first class strategist and he surely understands that, you know, the idea of recreating the Soviet Union or the Soviet Empire makes no sense at all.

• 11:40Tucker Carlson?

  If it ain't broke, don't fix it. It's a cliche for a reason, because it's pretty good advice, but sometimes it's not true. Cell phones are a glaring exception. You've got your cell phone, you've had it for years. You don't change. Sometimes your cell phone battery life fades, or maybe your processor can't keep up. But your phone is bound to run into trouble eventually, no matter what the problem is. And replacing it early is much better and often far cheaper than replacing it too late. Enter Pure Talk. This month, if you switch to a qualifying $35 plan, 35 bucks, Pure Talk will give you a Samsung Galaxy A36 completely free, literally free, just 35 bucks a month for talk, text

• 12:23Tucker Carlson?

  and data, and you get to restart your phone lifecycle without paying for a brand new device. So it's a scam free deal, all on America's most dependable 5G network. It's like a cell phone that works as well as any other. It's just way cheaper and they're not scamming you. So switching is a win for everybody. You save money on your cell phone bill. Pure Talk grows to hire more Americans and support more veterans, which it does. So go to puretalk.com/talker to get your free phone today. That's puretalk.com/talker to switch to our wireless company. It's America's wireless company. It's Pure Talk.

• 12:57Speaker 03

  We all hear the radio ads about the IRS. They tell you to be afraid, to be scared, and they try to frighten you into calling. I'm not here to do that. Tax relief advocates is different. TRA is here to tell you that if you owe money to the IRS, whether it's 5,000, 50,000, or 500,000, we have a solution. It doesn't matter if you're sitting in your car, at work, or with your kids. No matter where you are, call now. 800-576-4705. Don't lose hope. TRA can eliminate or reduce what you owe to the IRS. Generous programs are now available that can give you a fresh start. Our passion is taxes and helping individuals fix their IRS problems. We have over 1,000 5-star reviews on Google and an A+ with the Better Business Bureau. You don't need to be afraid of the IRS any longer.

• 13:42Speaker 03

  End your tax nightmare today by visiting us online at TRA.com or call 800-576-4705. That's 800-576-4705. Tax Relief Advocates. Real solutions for real people.

• 13:57Speaker 04

  Imagine if every time inverse Kramer or another top investor bought a stock, you bought it too. In your own brokerage account, automatically. Well, that now exists and it's called Autopilot. Built by the team behind the viral Pelosi Stock Tracker, Autopilot lets you browse their marketplace of strategies run by proven investors or AI-driven models. Just find one with a high return, connect your personal brokerage account like a Schwab or Robinhood, and every trade they make, you make automatically. Your money never leaves your own account. Autopilot just mirrors the moves. So now, no more guessing, no more staring at charts, and no more checking the market between meetings. Also, over 1.3 billion is already invested.

• 14:40Speaker 04

  So if you wanted to check it out, search Autopilot in the App Store or go to joinautopilot.com. That's joinautopilot.com. Investing has risks, like the loss of principal.

• 14:51Tucker Carlson?

  You spent 10 years in the US military, graduated West Point during the Cold War.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 14:56Tucker Carlson?

  So your life for 10 years was focused on the Soviets, of course.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  No question.

• 15:02Tucker Carlson?

  No question. So that's 10 years. That's a long time in your young life. How were you able to transition mentally from viewing Russia as an enemy to viewing them as, you know, another country?

• 15:16Speaker 02

  It's an interesting question.

• 15:17Tucker Carlson?

  Why weren't others able to do that?

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Well, a lot were, but a lot weren't. I think that what happened was that during the Cold War, when I started to think about the US Soviet competition, the subject that I got interested in was the conventional balance of forces in Europe. It was the NATO Warsaw Pact balance. And I wrote my dissertation on the subject of conventional deterrence, and it focused on the NATO Warsaw Pact balance. And my argument was, which was very controversial at the time, was that the Soviets were not 10 feet tall. And actually, if a war did break out in Central

• 16:01Speaker 02

  Europe, the West or NATO would do very well, that we would hold off the Soviets, that they would not win a quick and decisive victory, which is the conventional, was the conventional wisdom at the time. So in a very important way, I was engaged in threat deflation. I always thought, when you looked at the Soviet Union, this is during the latter part of the Cold War, when I was coming of age, that we greatly overestimated the threat, and that the Soviet Union was not 10 feet tall. So, once the Cold War ends, and then we segue into the unipolar moment, I'm already moving in that direction. And then, during the 1990s,

• 16:45Speaker 02

  the Soviet Union, which has become Russia, is a total basket case. I mean, it's, the only threat that it represents is to itself.

• 16:53Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  Doesn't represent a threat to the West. And in fact, Tucker, NATO expansion, which really gets going in 1994, that's when Bill Clinton decides to expand NATO, is not designed to contain Russia, because there is no Russian threat.

• 17:11Speaker 02

  So then Putin comes to power and what happens from about 2000 up until the present is that the West, and here we're talking about the United States as well, of course, becomes increasingly Russophobic and hostile to Putin. And I think it's in large part because Putin stands up to us. I think that we get used to the idea, certainly in the 1990s, that we call the shots. It's the unipolar moment. And when we tell countries to jump, their only question is how high. And we get away with that, to some extent, with Putin to begin with. But then he begins to play hardball with us. And he gives a

• 17:52Speaker 02

  very famous speech in Munich in 2007, where he throws down the gauntlet. And from 2007 forward, relations really deteriorate. And as they deteriorate, the Russophobia comes racing to the fore and remains for a million places today.

• 18:12Tucker Carlson?

  What, what is the point of NATO now? Why do we still have NATO? What's its objective?

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Well, I think if you asked most Europeans, and even many Americans in the American foreign policy establishment, the argument would be that NATO serves as a pacifier. In other words, it keeps the peace in Europe. The United States is the most powerful state in NATO. And the United States sits on top of all the European countries. It provides security for them. It provides a nuclear umbrella for them. And that prevents the European countries from engaging in security competition with each other. So we are a pacifying force. And this is the reason that the Europeans today

• 19:04Tucker Carlson?

  To prevent intra-European conflict?

• 19:06Speaker 02

  Intra-European conflict, right?

• 19:07Tucker Carlson?

  Interesting.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  Well, if you think about it, up until 1945, when World War II ends, you had had two world wars in the first half of the 20th century. And then if you go back in time, European countries had been fighting against each other, almost since the beginning of time.

• 19:26Tucker Carlson?

  Well, that's why there are so many European countries, and so many languages, and different distinct cultures. I mean, You might also make the argument that's why Europe was so successful because they were.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  You can certainly make that argument and you can make the argument that that's why they were able to conquer huge chunks of the planet and create these empires because they were very good at projecting military power.

• 19:48Tucker Carlson?

  These were martial societies before they became tourist destinations.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  Yes, but, but anyway, what happens during the Cold War is the Soviets dominate one side of Europe and we dominate the other side of Europe. And as long as those two great powers are dominating those two halves of Europe, the countries located below them cannot fight among themselves. Okay. So what happens when the Cold War ends in 1989 and then into the 1990s is that we decide that we're going to expand NATO eastward. And as I said to you, it's very important to understand that when we expand NATO eastward in the 90s and then the early 2000s, we're not aiming at containing Russia. What we're

• 20:34Speaker 02

  interested in do is doing is taking the pacifier, the American pacifier that sits over Western Europe and putting it over Eastern Europe and making Europe one giant zone of peace. And the Europeans liked that idea. You want to remember, after 1989, lots of Europeans were very worried about Germany, which re-unified when the Cold War ended.

• 21:00Tucker Carlson?

  Of course, yes.

• 21:01Speaker 02

  And you can understand why Europeans were very nervous.

• 21:04Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 21:05Speaker 02

  But as long as the Americans stay in Europe, as long as NATO remains intact, the pacifier is there. You know, most people don't realize this, but the Soviets and then the Russians were perfectly content to see the United States remain in Europe and for NATO to remain intact after the Cold War. Because the Soviets/Russians understood that we served as a pacifier. What they didn't want, and they made this very clear, was NATO expansion. And of course, what we did, starting in 1994, was to expand NATO eastward,

• 21:48Speaker 02

  again, to move the pacifier from over just Western Europe to over all of Europe. And that is what, that is what has produced the catastrophe in Ukraine.

• 21:59Tucker Carlson?

  By the time NATO gets to the Baltics, and then we start talking openly, as the Biden administration did just openly, like at press conferences, about moving NATO into Ukraine, it's very obvious that that's going to trigger a conflict with Russia at some point. You know, how could it not? Why didn't anyone pause and say, okay, NATO's great? Obviously, there's a massive budget, we're getting richer from NATO also. But is it, let's balance that against like a war with Russia? We don't want that. Did anyone raise that point?

• 22:30Speaker 02

  Couple of points. Just to get the dates right. The second big tranche of NATO expansion, which brings the Baltic States in, is 2004.

• 22:40Tucker Carlson?

  Yep.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  The first big tranche is 1999. That's Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, 99. Then 2004 is when the Baltic States come in. 2008 is when the critical decision is made, April 2008, to bring Ukraine into NATO. Okay. But to get to the heart of your question, what's very interesting is if you go back and look at many of the planning documents from the 90s about NATO expansion, people recognize at the time that Ukraine is a special case, and it will be a huge source of trouble if we move NATO into Ukraine. So you can get away with Poland, you can even get away with the Baltic States,

• 23:26Speaker 02

  but Ukraine is a different matter. And it's very important to understand that we understood that from the get go. So the question then becomes, which you're asking, is why did we do it? Right? What's going on here? Why didn't we just back off? And I think the answer is, we thought we could shove it down their throat. You want to understand, they opposed the 99 expansion, the first trudge. We just shoved it down their throat.

• 23:53Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, what's Boris Yeltsin going to do about it?

• 23:55Speaker 02

  That's right. That's exactly right. What's he going to do about it? And then 2004, Putin's in control now. We shove it down their face, down their throat again. So in 2008, immediately after NATO says at the Bucharest, April 2008 NATO Bucharest summit, immediately after he says that NATO says that Ukraine will be brought into NATO. Putin makes it manifestly clear that this is unacceptable, that this is an existential threat and that Russia will not let it happen. And by the way, at that April 2008 NATO summit, they said they were not only going to bring Ukraine into NATO, they're going to bring Georgia into NATO.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  That's April 2008, a war breaks out in Georgia in August of 2008 over this very issue. So you would expect us to back off at that point, but we don't back off. In fact, we double down. And then when the crisis first starts, this is in 2014, February 22nd, 2014. That's when the crisis starts. That's when the Russians take Crimea. This is when you understand or should understand, the Russians mean business. Do we back off? Do we try to accommodate the Russians in any way? Absolutely not. We plow forward. And then, of course, we get the war in 2022. And you ask yourself, why did we do this?

• 25:23Speaker 02

  And by the way, if you look at the process, the decision-making process after Joe Biden moves into the White House in January 2021, January 2021, and then 13 months later, the war breaks out. Biden makes no effort whatsoever to accommodate the Russians. So again, the question is, why? What's going on here?

• 25:45Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  We're just going to shove it down their throat. We think we're Godzilla. We think it's still the unipolar moment.

• 25:53Tucker Carlson?

  We're sorry to say it, but this is not a very safe country. Walk through Oakland or Philadelphia. Yeah, good luck. So, most people, when they think about this, want to carry a firearm, and a lot of us do. The problem is, there can be massive consequences for that. Ask Kyle Rittenhouse. Kyle Rittenhouse got off in the end, but he was innocent from the first moment. It was obvious on video, and he was facing life in prison anyway. That's what the anti-gun movement will do. They'll throw you in prison for defending yourself with a firearm. And that's why a lot of Americans are turning to Burna. It's a proudly American company. Burna makes self-defense launchers that hundreds of law enforcement departments trust. They've sold over 600,000 pistols, mostly to private citizens who refuse to be empty-handed.

• 26:37Tucker Carlson?

  These pistols, and I have one, fire rock-hard kinetic rounds, or tear gas rounds, and pepper projectiles, and they stop a threat from up to 60 feet away. There are no background checks, there are no waiting periods. Burna can ship it directly to your door. You can't be arrested for defending yourself with a Burna pistol. Visit Burna, B-Y-R-N-A, dot com, or your local sportsman's warehouse to get yours today. byrna.com.

• 27:03Speaker 05

  Progressive's Accident Response can contact emergency services if you're in a major accident. The only thing worse than someone you love being in an accident is not being able to help them. So Progressive is here to help when you can't. So get peace of mind knowing your loved ones are protected with Progressive's Accident Response. Learn more at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Limited availability in California. Driver is responsible for emergency and towing charges not covered by the policy. Coverage subject to policy, terms, and conditions.

• 27:34Speaker 06

  Now for a quick message from Anthropic, the team behind Claude, the AI built for businesses. Customers count on their bank, and banks count on their most important systems. Now those systems count on Claude, and nine of the Fortune 10 companies use it for critical work. See why leading companies trust Claude at claude.ai/span.

• 27:57Tucker Carlson?

  But why would you want to, even if you have absolute power, which of course doesn't exist, but let's say you believed you had it, why would you want to do that?

• 28:04Speaker 02

  I believe that once the decision is made in 2008, that you're going to bring NATO to Ukraine, you're going to bring Ukraine into the alliance, that the idea of backing off is unacceptable to the United States and to the West. You just don't do that. That would be a sign of weakness, and we cannot show weakness. And I think a lot of this thinking has to do with why we won't quit now. One should say to him or herself at this point, it's time to put an end to this war and accept the fact that the Russians have won an ugly victory. But we can't bring ourselves to do that. That would be showing weakness. So instead, we continue to plow on.

• 28:49Tucker Carlson?

  But in, you know, attempting to show strength, we reveal weakness. I mean, that's my concern is, you know, once you project force and it doesn't work, then you're revealed to the world as weak. The limits of your power are obvious to everybody. It's better to threaten than have, you know, your true power concealed. People can guess at what you can do. But now there's no guessing. We couldn't be Russia.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  And that's correct.

• 29:13Tucker Carlson?

  Right. So we lost a war to Russia. It's a proxy war, but it was a war. And so what does that mean?

• 29:21Speaker 02

  Well, it is, you know, a devastating defeat for NATO.

• 29:29Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  Because we have invested so much in this war, right? The other problem that we face is that the United States, and this is true of both the Biden and Trump administration, consider China to be the principal threat to the United States. China is a peer competitor. Russia is not a peer competitor. Russia is not a threat to dominate Europe. Russia is not the Soviet Union. China is a peer competitor. It's a threat to dominate Asia. And what we've been trying to do since 2011, when Hillary Clinton announced it, when she was Secretary of State, is we've been trying to pivot to Asia. But what's happened here is we've got bogged down in Ukraine and now we're bogged

• 30:14Speaker 02

  down in the Middle East and this makes it difficult to fully pivot to Asia and this is not in the American national interest. But to make matters even worse, what we have done is we have driven the Russians into the arms of the Chinese.

• 30:31Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 30:31Speaker 02

  If you think about it, we live in a world where there are three great powers, the United States, China and Russia. If the United States views China as its principal competitor and the United States is interested in containing China in East Asia, it would make eminently good sense to have Russia on its side of the equation.

• 30:49Tucker Carlson?

  Of course.

• 30:50Speaker 02

  Instead, what we've done with the Ukraine war is we've driven the Russians and the army, the Russians and the Chinese closer together.

• 30:56Tucker Carlson?

  So that's so obvious even to me, a non-specialist, just like, it's obvious, look at a map, that it had to have been obvious to the previous administration, but they did it anyway. So you have to kind of wonder, did they want that?

• 31:12Speaker 02

  I think you're underestimating how much strategic sense the American foreign policy establishment has.

• 31:21Tucker Carlson?

  So they're just so incompetent, they didn't see that coming?

• 31:24Speaker 02

  Yes. I mean, I'll take it a step further.

• 31:27Tucker Carlson?

  Come on.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  Let's talk about China. This is an even bigger issue. The Cold War ends, and as you well remember, at the end of the Cold War, China and the United States were basically allied together against the Soviet Union.

• 31:44Tucker Carlson?

  Of course, that was the whole point.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. So the Soviet Union, Cold War ends, Soviet Union disappears and there's no longer any need for us to have a close relationship with China. We don't need them to help contain the Soviet Union. So the question is, what do we do with the Chinese moving forward? And economically, China is a backwards country in the early 1990s.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  What we do is we adopt a policy of engagement with China. Engagement is explicitly designed to turn China into a very wealthy country. This is a country that has over four times the population of the United States, and you're talking about making it very rich. For a realist like me, this is lunacy. You are, in effect, creating a peer competitor. In fact, you may be creating a country that is more powerful than the United States. But the foreign policy establishment in the United States, almost to a person, including hawks like Bignu Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger,

• 32:55Speaker 02

  said that China can grow economically. We can integrate it into institutions like the World Trade Organization and so forth and so on, and it will become a democracy, and we will all live happily ever after. Right? So what we did is that we helped fuel China's phenomenal growth between 1990 and 2017, when it became a great power. You want to remember that when the Cold War ends and then the Soviet Union collapses in December of 1991, we enter the unipolar moment, which by definition means there's one great power on the planet.

• 33:39Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 33:40Speaker 02

  That's the United States of America. By 2017, there are three great powers on the planet. And one of those three great powers is a peer competitor. And we helped create that peer competitor on the foolish belief that if we turned China into a rich country, it would become a liberal democracy, and it would become a friend of the United States, and it would allow us to run international politics the way we did during unipolarity. This is a remarkably catastrophic decision.

• 34:14Tucker Carlson?

  It must be strange for you, having spent your life in this one field, both in the military effectively and then in academia. And you've had tenure at Chicago since 82, is that right?

• 34:25Speaker 02

  I went to Chicago in 82. I got tenure in 1987.

• 34:30Tucker Carlson?

  So you've been there over 40 years, working on this suite of topics, this group of topics. When you look around and everybody, even the most famous people in your field are buying into something that's stupid, how does that make you feel? Brzezinski and Kissinger are saying things that are just like, obviously dumb. That must be weird.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  It's very weird. I remember I debated Zbigniew in the early 2000s at Carnegie in Washington DC on whether China could rise peacefully. And there's actually a big story in Foreign Policy, the magazine, that has an abbreviated transcript of our debate. And I remember Zbigniew was arguing that China can rise peacefully. And I was arguing that China could not rise peacefully and that our policy of engagement was foolish. And as he was speaking, and I was sitting on the dais, I was saying to myself, I don't get what's going on here. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who's about 10 notches to the right of me on almost all foreign policy issues, shouldn't be making this argument, but he's making this argument.

• 35:38Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 35:38Speaker 02

  And I'm the one who looks like a super hawk. When, at the end of the Cold War, I was more on the dovish side, arguing the Soviets were not 10 feet tall. And of course, Big was always arguing the Soviets were 10 feet tall. So it was really perplexing. And throughout the 90s and throughout the early 2000s, when I argued China could not rise peacefully, I could not get a hearing in the United States. People just didn't take me seriously. They'd say, John's a very smart guy. He's very entertaining. He's amusing, but he's basically crazy when it comes to China. That was the view. Now, of course, I think everybody understands that I was basically right and they were wrong.

• 36:20Tucker Carlson?

  Your identity is constantly under attack. And just the last year, Americans lost over $16 billion to scammers online. Anyone can fall victim to this. Your social security number, your bank account, your credit profile can be exposed and you won't even know it. And the second they are exposed, thieves can take out loans in your name, open credit cards, wreck your life financially. Identity Guard can save you. Identity Guard monitors everything from your credit card to your bank accounts, your social security number, looking for early signs of fraud before damage is done. If something weird happens, you get an instant alert. If someone does steal your identity, Identity Guard's expert team works directly with banks, credit card companies, and lenders to shut it down quickly and the scam. Having your identity stolen is a nightmare.

• 37:04Tucker Carlson?

  Someone in this country becomes a victim of identity theft every six seconds. Identity Guard protects you. 30-day free trial and exclusive discount at identityguard.com/tucker. Protect yourself before it's too late. Identityguard.com/tucker.

• 37:21Speaker 05

  Progressive's Accident Response can contact emergency services if you're in a major accident. The only thing worse than someone you love being in an accident is not being able to help them. So Progressive is here to help when you can't. So get peace of mind knowing your loved ones are protected with Progressive's Accident Response. Learn more at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Limited availability in California. Driver is responsible for emergency and towing charges not covered by the policy. Coverage subject to policy terms and conditions.

• 37:52Speaker 06

  This podcast is supported by Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude. Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.

• 38:18Tucker Carlson?

  It's just, but there hasn't, I mean, if you had a field, just pick some other field, structural engineering. And if you had America's sort of corpus of structural engineers, you know, they all sort of know each other, the eminent ones are friends, and all the bridges they built started to fall down, there would be an immediate reorganization of the field. You would say, this just, you know, you don't know what you're doing. Look, look at the results. I don't understand how you could have this many decades of back-to-back foreign policy disasters and not have a wholesale reorganization of like the brain trust.

• 38:54Speaker 02

  I agree. Let me just tell you one other story. Let's go back to the 1990s, talk about NATO expansion. As I said to you, the Clinton administration made the decision in 94. One might think that there was overwhelming support for NATO expansion in the foreign policy establishment. There actually was not. Bill Perry, who was Clinton's Secretary of Defense, was adamantly opposed to any NATO expansion and thought about resigning as Secretary of Defense over the issue. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was opposed. Gene Kirkpatrick, Paul Nizza, George Kennan.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  There's a laundry list of prominent people who were opposed to NATO expansion. Anyway, the decision is made in 94, the first tranche is in 1999, and then the opposition disappears. There's no more opposition.

• 39:50Tucker Carlson?

  Disappears.

• 39:51Speaker 02

  Disappears. And as this situation regarding NATO expansion deteriorates over time, especially once the decision is made to bring Ukraine into NATO, you would think that we would begin to do an about-face, that more and more people would begin to appear who make the argument that NATO expansion into Ukraine is a bad idea. Again, in the 1990s, people were making that argument. But that doesn't happen at all. And I become, in many ways, the principal person who argues that we're responsible for the 2014 crisis. I wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs after the crisis broke out in February of 2014.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  But there are remarkably few people who are questioning whether further pushing down the road to bring Ukraine into NATO makes sense, right?

• 40:44Tucker Carlson?

  No, they're doubling down.

• 40:45Speaker 02

  They're doubling down.

• 40:46Tucker Carlson?

  And then you're getting people at the Atlantic Council saying, you know, well, I guess we have to use nukes now. I mean, you see people get not just refuse to reflect or repent, but become like actively crazy, just crazy. Like, no, tactical nukes, I mean, you know, we're not going to win without them. People are saying that, as you know. What is that?

• 41:08Speaker 02

  Well, it will be a devastating blow for us to lose the war in Ukraine. And when foreign policy elites get desperate, they do reckless things or they talk in reckless ways.

• 41:24Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  Right. This is why, by the way, the Ukraine war, even once it's settled and becomes a frozen conflict, will be so dangerous. Right? Because the fact that it is a defeat for the West and that we have been humiliated and that we lost this major war that we were so deeply committed to will give people incentives to try to reverse the tide, to rescue the situation. And when people are desperate, they sometimes pursue very risky strategies. So, once this war becomes a frozen conflict, we're going to have to worry about it reescalating.

• 42:04Tucker Carlson?

  It seems very easy for, you know, a reckless government in Kiev to provoke Moscow, basically. I mean, and you've seen it, you know, sending drone swarms onto air bases or in, you know, setting the Kremlin on fire, which they did, and got no publicity, but they have done that. It's just, it's this weird asymmetrical arrangement where they, Ukraine actually has quite a bit of power to stoke a global conflict and incentive to do it, don't they?

• 42:38Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. That's exactly right. What they want to do is they want to see the war escalate because they want to bring us in. If the Ukrainians have any hope of rescuing the situation, it's to bring NATO into the fight.

• 42:53Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  Actually doing the fighting.

• 42:55Tucker Carlson?

  And... We've seen this in other regions. It's a bad idea to get, allow other countries an incentive to suck in the United States because they will.

• 43:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I mean, you see this with the Israelis in Iran, right? In 2024, the Israelis tried to bait us into the war, into a war against Iran on two separate occasions. And the Biden administration, much to its credit, did not take the bait. But Donald Trump did take the bait, right? The Israelis have long had a deep-seated interest in getting us involved against Iran because they understand they can't defeat Iran by themselves. And they can do it, they think, with us. So this is analogous to the situation with regard to Ukraine. The Ukrainians, as you said, have a deep-seated interest in getting us into the fight.

• 43:49Tucker Carlson?

  So as long as we're tied to Ukraine, if there's an implicit security guarantee, which there kind of is at this point, I mean, there has been, why don't we have an interest in like controlling the government of Ukraine? So you can't, in other words, why do we have Zelensky running Ukraine, this unelected lunatic running Ukraine, when we have skin in the game? Like, why, why do we allow that?

• 44:13Speaker 02

  Well, we've been content with Zelensky up to now. And the Europeans love Zelensky.

• 44:19Tucker Carlson?

  Why?

• 44:20Speaker 02

  Because he's committed to continuing the war. And he is very good at public relations in the West. He has excellent advisors. He's a former actor. He knows how to play the game. So he's good at dealing with the West. And, and he does what we want. I mean, it's not like he's doing things that we don't want him to do.

• 44:44Tucker Carlson?

  No, that's right.

• 44:45Speaker 02

  He, he is our man. And once he ceases to be our man, we'll go to great lengths to put somebody else in his place.

• 44:51Tucker Carlson?

  But both Europe and the United States have become poorer and weaker during the course of the Ukraine war, partly as a result of the Ukraine war. So I don't really see how we're winning. How is US benefiting from this? How was, how was Western Europe benefiting from this?

• 45:07Speaker 02

  Well, I think that it's Europe, Western Europe in particular, that's been hurt economically by this war, not so much us. And one could argue that we've, we've benefited on the margins at the expense of the Europeans.

• 45:21Tucker Carlson?

  Well, the US dollar kind of.

• 45:24Tucker Carlson?

  Is, I mean, it's no, it's obviously not a safe haven anymore. So, I mean, it's just a matter of time, I would say.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  Well, the question is, how much of that is due to the Ukraine war versus other American policies?

• 45:34Tucker Carlson?

  I'm sure that there are a million factors, but kicking Russia out of Swift, just stealing the personal property of the so-called oligarchs, behavior, lawless, crazy behavior like that, sends a message to the world that like, don't keep your wealth in dollars because it can become an instrument of war. I mean, that's my view on it anyway.

• 45:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's no question about that.

• 45:55Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 45:56Speaker 02

  There's no question about that, that, but we, the problem is that we're now so deeply committed.

• 46:04Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 46:04Speaker 02

  That we, we just can't turn the ship around.

• 46:07Tucker Carlson?

  Do we have any leverage at all left? I noticed the administration is threatening today that in 12 days, we're going to do something with sanctions, then secondary sanctions against China and India. They buy Russian oil. I mean, is that any of that meaningful?

• 46:26Speaker 02

  I don't think secondary, the threat of secondary sanctions is meaningful. I mean, the economic consequences for the world and for the United States would be disastrous if they actually were put into effect and worked. I think the Chinese and Indians would just blow them off at this point.

• 46:43Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 46:43Speaker 02

  So I don't think that they'll work. We have no cards to play. If we had cards to play, Biden would have played those cards. I mean, one fundamental difference between Biden and Trump is that Biden was fully committed to the war and wanted to do everything he could to make sure the United States stayed in the game and continued to support Ukraine no matter what. Trump definitely wanted to end the war. He's been unsuccessful. He really doesn't know what he's doing. He doesn't know how to end the war, but he does want to end it. And the question you really have to ask yourself is, what is he going to put into the pipeline, the Biden pipeline, once the weaponry dries up?

• 47:27Speaker 02

  And I don't think that Trump is going to end up giving the Ukrainians a lot more weaponry. So I think he's going to basically allow the Ukrainians to be defeated on the battlefield. This is going to be a huge problem for Trump because he's going to be blamed for losing Ukraine. The problem that Trump runs into is the same problem that Biden ran into with Afghanistan. Remember, Trump was the one who wisely decided we're getting out of Afghanistan. Yes. He was smart to do that, but it was Biden who actually took us out of Afghanistan.

• 48:06Speaker 02

  And that was a disaster and he got all sorts of mud spilled on him for taking us out of Afghanistan. Well, what's going to happen in Ukraine at some point is the Russians are going to win and Trump is going to get blamed for that. Yeah. And I think one of the reasons that Trump is so hesitant on Ukraine is not simply because he's surrounded by advisors who are super hawks on Ukraine and want to hang on to the bitter end. It's also because Trump understands that when Ukraine loses, it will be seen as having happened on his watch. No question. Yeah, no question. He doesn't want that to happen.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  This is why Trump was deeply committed to negotiating a settlement. Why couldn't, why didn't that work? It didn't work because Trump would have to accept Russia's three key demands that I spelled out to you at the start of the show. And those three key demands are unacceptable to almost every person in the American foreign policy establishment and almost every foreign policy elite in Europe. Trump is an outlier on the whole issue of Ukraine. He, J D Vance and a handful of other people. And they're not in a position to bite the bullet and say, we will accept the main Russian demands and go from there.

• 49:33Speaker 02

  And by the way, even if they do accept the main Russian demands, the fact is that there will be huge resistance from the foreign policy establishments on both sides of the Atlantic.

• 49:46Tucker Carlson?

  So sometimes when people sell products on TV, "I love this product, I use this product." There's the question in the mind of the viewer, "Does this guy really use the product? Does he really love the product? Would he keep the product at home? Ask my dogs." Yes! Now, we are in a garage. I'm not gonna tell you where it is, because, again, this is prepping. But this is my garage. There's a gun safe. And this is a part of my stockpile of Ready Hour. Completely real! The second I put it here, the second Ready Hour sent it to me, I felt peace of mind. Because no matter what happens, we're not going hungry in my house. I moved a lot of fishing gear out of the way to keep it in my garage. And ever since it's been here, I have felt the peace of mind that comes from knowing

• 50:31Tucker Carlson?

  my family's not going hungry no matter what. LastCountrySupply.com. LastCountrySupply.com. It can be in your garage along with the peace of mind that comes with having it.

• 50:41Speaker 05

  Progressive's Accident Response can contact emergency services if you're in a major accident. The only thing worse than someone you love being in an accident is not being able to help them. So Progressive is here to help when you can't. So get peace of mind knowing your loved ones are protected with Progressive's Accident Response. Learn more at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Limited availability in California. Driver is responsible for emergency and towing charges not covered by the policy. Coverage subject to policy terms and conditions.

• 51:11Tucker Carlson?

  Well, I can't think of a group I'm less interested in listening to than the foreign policy establishment. I mean, again, that just seems so totally discredited. It's like dating tips from Jeffrey Epstein. It's like, who cares what they say? But I guess...

• 51:24Speaker 02

  Well, they still wield enormous power.

• 51:26Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, apparently they do.

• 51:27Speaker 02

  This is the problem that Trump faces, right? I mean, Trump had this problem in spades the first time he was elected. Trump comes into the White House, and he has to pick advisors. But it's not like he has a large number or given a small number of foreign policy experts who share his foreign policy views, right? Because he has to draw from the establishment. So you want to remember that Trump was very interested in improving relations with...

• 52:01Speaker 02

  Russia and with Putin in particular, the first time round, and he failed completely. Where Trump succeeded was on China. Trump abandoned engagement. We talked about engagement being a disastrous policy. Trump abandoned engagement and moved to containment in 2017. He ran as a candidate in 2016 explicitly against engagement, got rid of it immediately. I believe that was a smart thing to do and to pursue containment. He also, Trump, wanted to improve relations with Putin, which I think made eminently good sense. He couldn't do that in part because of Russiagate, but also because the foreign policy establishment was so committed to NATO expansion. So he failed on that count.

• 52:46Speaker 02

  But the problem is, he was surrounded by advisors in that first administration, who were all very hawkish on Ukraine and very hawkish about American foreign policy in general, very hawkish about the forever wars, right?

• 53:03Tucker Carlson?

  So what's, I don't understand, since you raised it, what is the connection? The same people who are telling me we need to fight a regime change war against Iran are the same ones who are hysterical about supporting Ukraine and continuing our war against Russia, the Mark Levin's and then the smarter people, but same orientation. What do they have in common? I don't really understand.

• 53:30Speaker 02

  Well, you have a foreign policy establishment, whether you're talking about the Republican side or you're talking about the Democratic side, that is deeply committed to pursuing hawkish foreign policy.

• 53:43Tucker Carlson?

  Just for its own sake?

• 53:44Speaker 02

  No, no, they believe that that's what's good for the United States. They believe we should spend exceedingly large Amounts of money on defense that we should be willing to use military force in a rather liberal fashion. They believe that military force can solve all sorts of problems. They believe that the United States, and this was certainly true during the unipolar moment, can use that military force to spread liberal democracy around the world. We can spread democracy at the end of a rifle barrel. This is what the Bush doctrine was all about in the Middle East. Iraq was just the first stop on the train line, right? We were going

• 54:26Speaker 02

  to do Iran, Syria, and eventually, everybody would just throw up their hands. We were going to democratize the entire Middle East, and we were going to use military force to do that. So we are, in a very important way, addicted to war. Now, it's important to emphasize that a lot of this has to do with Israel, right? Because Israel supporters have a deep-seated interest in making sure that the United States has a remarkably powerful military and is willing to use that military in a rather liberal fashion. Because they believe that if Israel ever gets into trouble and it needs help from the United States, the

• 55:06Speaker 02

  ideal situation is to have a US military that's like a cocked gun. And if you think about the recent war between Israel and Iran, it really wasn't just between Israel and Iran. It was Israel and the United States against Iran, right?

• 55:24Tucker Carlson?

  Clearly.

• 55:25Speaker 02

  Clearly, right? And the United States had a huge number of military assets in the Middle East, right, that were there in large part to help the Israelis in their war against Iran. Well, if you think about it, it makes perfectly sense, if you're a supporter of Israel, to want to make sure that the United States has a large military and that it is willing to use that military, and that if need be, it can help Israel if it gets into trouble.

• 56:00Tucker Carlson?

  I didn't hear any reference to American interests in that description.

• 56:05Speaker 02

  Well, when it comes to Israel, right, and what Israel needs, right, that has little to do with American interests, right? The truth is, any two countries in the world are going to have similar interests plus different interests.

• 56:24Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 56:24Speaker 02

  Right? So there's no question that Israel and the United States have sometimes have similar interests.

• 56:30Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 56:30Speaker 02

  And sometimes have different interests. Let me give you an example of this. The United States has a vested interest in making sure Iran does not have nuclear weapons.

• 56:38Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 56:38Speaker 02

  We're against proliferation. It's in the American national interest. It's obviously in Israel's national interest for Iran not to have nuclear weapons. Right? So two states can have similar interests. In the case of Israel and the United States, they also happen to have different interests. And what we have in the United States is a situation where we have this thing called the Israel lobby, which I, of course, have written about with Steve Walt, which goes to great lengths to push the United States to support Israel unconditionally. In other words, no matter what Israel does, we are supposed to support Israel.

• 57:20Speaker 02

  And the lobby is so effective, it is so powerful, it is so effective, that we basically end up supporting Israel unconditionally. What that means, Tucker, is in those cases where Israel's interests are not the same as America's interests, we support Israel. We support Israel's interests, not America's interests, because...

• 57:43Tucker Carlson?

  Over and against America's interests.

• 57:45Speaker 02

  Of course. Because the interests clash in those specific instances.

• 57:49Tucker Carlson?

  Right. Which is, as you noted at the outset, just the nature of sovereign countries doing business with each other, you're going to agree on some things and disagree on others.

• 57:57Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 57:58Tucker Carlson?

  But can you think of any moment in the last, say, 40 years where there was that clash between non-converging interests, where the United States chose its own interests over Israel's interests?

• 58:15Speaker 02

  No, no, I can't think of anything that fits that description. I mean, one could argue that Israel wanted us to fight against Iran in 2024, that they tried to bait us into attacking Iran in April and then in July. And as I said before, the Biden administration did not take the bait.

• 58:40Tucker Carlson?

  Can you think conversely of instances where the US government chose the interests of a foreign power over and against its own interests and its people's interests?

• 58:51Speaker 02

  Besides the Israeli case?

• 58:53Tucker Carlson?

  No, no, in the case of Israel. You know, we're allied with Israel informally and, you know, they want us to do something that is hurtful to us, does not help our interests at all, but we do it anyway. Can you think of examples of that?

• 59:09Speaker 02

  Two-state solution is the best example. Every American president since, at least Jimmy Carter, has pushed forcefully for creating a Palestinian state. We have long believed that the best solution to the Palestinian problem, which is the taproot of so many other problems that we face in the Middle East, is to create two states. So every president has pushed hard, except for maybe Donald Trump, for a two-state solution in the Middle East. The Israelis have rebuffed us at every turn. And the end result is we now have a greater Israel and there's no possibility of a two-state solution.

• 59:52Tucker Carlson?

  How does it hurt the United States not having a Palestinian state? Why is it in our interest? Why has every president pushed for that?

• 59:58Speaker 02

  Because the United States has a vested interest in having peace in the Middle East. It's not in our interest to have wars in that region. First of all, it forces us to commit military forces. It forces us to fight wars and that's not in our interest. And we have long felt, from a strategic point of view, that what you want to do is make sure you have peace in that region. You want to remember, right before October 7th, Jake Sullivan, who was then the National Security Advisor, was crowing about the fact that we had not seen... The Middle East so peaceful in a long period of time.

• 1:00:39Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:40Speaker 02

  He understood full well that this is in our interest. Well, if you compare the world, you know, on October 6th, 2023, with the world that exists in the Middle East today, we are much worse off today. This is not in our interest. And this is in large part because of Israel. And this is just a strategic dimension. We're not even talking about the moral dimension. I mean, the Israelis are executing a genocide in Gaza, and we are complicitous in that genocide.

• 1:01:14Tucker Carlson?

  When you say it's a genocide, what do you mean?

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  Well, if you look at what the definition of genocide is, right? It's where one country tries to destroy either all or a substantial portion of another group, another ethnic or religious or national group for the purposes of basically destroying that group identity. That's what you're talking about here. I think that that's the definition of genocide. It's laid out in the 1948 convention. I think that what the Israelis are doing fits that description.

• 1:01:59Speaker 02

  And lots of people and organizations agree with me on that point. It's very important to understand here that just killing large numbers of Palestinians is not necessarily genocide. I mean, the United States, when it firebombed Japan in World War II, killed many more Japanese than the Israelis have killed Palestinians in Gaza. There's no question about that. But no one would ever accuse the United States of executing genocide against Japan. The United States was killing large numbers of Japanese civilians. And by the way, we killed large numbers of German civilians as well.

• 1:02:38Tucker Carlson?

  Millions.

• 1:02:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. For purposes of ending the war. We wanted to end the war. And if you look at how we treated the Japanese and how we treated the Germans once the war ended, it was very clear that we were not bent on genocide. This is not to excuse what we did against Japan and Germany. And I do believe we murdered, I would use the word murdered, large numbers or millions of Japanese and Germans together. But In the case of what's going on in Gaza, right? What's happening here is that the Israelis are systematically trying to destroy the Palestinians as a national group, right?

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  They're targeting them as Palestinians and they're trying to destroy Palestinian national identity in addition to murdering huge numbers of Palestinians.

• 1:03:31Tucker Carlson?

  And I mean, it's not just a rage reflex. This is a strategy, of course, two and a half years later, almost three years later. What is the strategy? What's, what's the, the goal of this?

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  My view on this is that the Israelis have long been interested in expelling the Palestinian population from Greater Israel. If you look at Greater Israel, this includes, includes the Israel that was created in 1948 and the occupied, plus the occupied territories. This is the West Bank.

• 1:04:07Tucker Carlson?

  The post 67.

• 1:04:07Speaker 02

  Post 67, West Bank and Gaza. So West Bank, Gaza, and what we call Green Line Israel. That's Greater Israel. Inside Greater Israel, there are about 7.3 million Jews and about 7.3 million Palestinians. And from the get-go, going back to the early days of Zionism and the views of people like David Ben-Gurion, they believed that you needed a Jewish state that was about 80% Jewish and 20% Palestinian. In an ideal world, you would get rid of all the Palestinians, but the least bad alternative is 80/20.

• 1:04:51Speaker 02

  But you actually have a situation in Greater Israel where you have 50/50. So October 7th happens and what the Israelis see is an excellent opportunity for ethnic cleansing and they make this clear. In other words, it's an excellent opportunity to go to war in Gaza and drive the Palestinians out of Gaza and solve that demographic problem that they face.

• 1:05:14Tucker Carlson?

  That's such a... A dark thing, and therefore that's a very strong allegation. On what basis are you making it?

• 1:05:21Speaker 02

  Oh, there's just a huge amount of data that supports this in the Israeli press. They have, they have been perfectly willing to make this argument loudly and clearly. The issue of genocide, which I'll get to in a second, is a different issue. I'm separating ethnic cleansing from genocide. So what happens after October 7th is that the Israelis see an opportunity to drive the Palestinians out of Gaza. And you want to remember that you had massive ethnic cleansing in 1948, when the state is created. Virtually all of those people in Gaza are descendants of the ethnic cleansing of 1948.

• 1:06:03Tucker Carlson?

  Were kicked out of another place.

• 1:06:05Speaker 02

  And sent to Gaza.

• 1:06:06Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:07Speaker 02

  And by the way, there was another massive ethnic cleansing after the 67 war in the West Bank. So this is the third attempt at a massive ethnic cleansing in Gaza. So this is hardly surprising at all. And in fact, if you go back and read the literature on the creation of Israel, this is all thoroughly documented. Ethnic cleansing was a subject that the Zionists talked about from the get go, and they talked about extensively because there was no way they could create a greater Israel without doing massive ethnic cleansing. You want to remember that when the Zionists come to Israel, starting late 1800s, early 1900s, there are remarkably few Jews in Palestine.

• 1:06:51Speaker 02

  And those Jews are not Zionists. The Zionists are the Jews who come from Europe.

• 1:06:56Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:06:56Speaker 02

  And they understand that they're moving into a territory that's filled with Palestinian villages and Palestinian people. And the question you have to ask yourself is, how can you create a Jewish state on a piece of territory that's filled with Palestinians without doing ethnic cleansing, massive ethnic cleansing? And the answer is you can't. So they're talking about and thinking about ethnic cleansing from the get go. So the idea that they wouldn't think of what the situation looks like after October 7th is an opportunity to do ethnic cleansing. You know, it belies

• 1:07:34Tucker Carlson?

  So it wasn't really a land without people for a people without land.

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  Absolutely not. Absolutely not. And David Ben-Gurion, Vladimir Jabotinsky, all these key Zionist leaders understood that full well. And they understood that they were going to have to do horrible things to the Palestinians. They understood that. And they were explicit in saying that they did not blame the Palestinians one second for resisting what the Jews from Europe were going to do to them. They fully understood that they were stealing their land. And they fully understood that it made perfect sense for the Palestinians to resist,

• 1:08:17Speaker 02

  which of course they did. But anyway, just to fast forward to October 7th. What happens after October 7th is that the Israelis see an excellent opportunity to ethically cleanse the Palestinians in Gaza. You have about 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza. Just to be clear, you have about 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, about 3.2 million in

• 1:08:45Tucker Carlson?

  West Bank.

• 1:08:46Speaker 02

  West Bank, and about 1.8 in Green Line Israel. Okay, so this is an opportunity to get rid of those Palestinians. And the way to do it is to turn the IDF, the Israeli military, loose and let them tear the place apart. And the idea is that that will just drive the Palestinians out. But the problem that the Israelis face is the Palestinians don't leave. Both the Egyptians and the Jordanians, which are the two countries that the Israelis would like to drive the Palestinians into, make it unequivocally clear that that's not going to happen.

• 1:09:25Tucker Carlson?

  That's Jordan is just a giant refugee camp already.

• 1:09:27Speaker 02

  It already is.

• 1:09:28Tucker Carlson?

  From all these other wars that have been inspired for the same reason. So I mean, I think Jordan is, what percentage Jordanian is Jordan? I mean, tiny percentage.

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  It's definitely less than 50%.

• 1:09:41Tucker Carlson?

  Way less.

• 1:09:41Speaker 02

  Way less.

• 1:09:42Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:43Tucker Carlson?

  And Egypt has 100 million people already, so.

• 1:09:47Speaker 02

  But here's what happens, Tucker. And I think it makes sense if you listen to the logic. They start with the goal of ethnic cleansing. I don't believe they want to murder all of the Palestinians in Gaza. They just simply want to drive them out. But the problem is they don't leave. And then the question is, what do you do? And what they do is they continue to up the attacks, increase the attacks, kill more and more people in the hope that they will drive them out.

• 1:10:22Tucker Carlson?

  And I'm sorry, I should have asked you, why do they want Gaza in the first place? This seems a lot of trouble, killing all these people, committing, you know, atrocities on camera. I mean, the press are barred, but we're still getting a lot of video out of the area. That's a big hit. Why do you, why would you be willing to go through all of that to get Gaza? Why do they want it?

• 1:10:44Speaker 02

  Well, the Zionists from the beginning have wanted a greater Israel. And David Ben-Gurion wrote a piece in 1918. And David Ben-Gurion, of course, is the founding father of Israel. Wrote a piece in 1918. I don't think it's ever been published in English. It's just in Yiddish, where he describes what his goals are for a greater Israel. Right? And it obviously includes Green Line Israel, Gaza, the West Bank. It includes parts of the East Bank. It includes parts of Southern Syria. It includes parts of Southern Lebanon, and it includes the Sinai Peninsula. Just think about that.

• 1:11:27Speaker 02

  That was Ben-Gurion's vision. And this was a vision that was shared by almost all the early Zionist leaders. And there are still many people in Israel who are in favor of a greater Israel. They don't want a tiny Israel. The Israel that was created in 1948 is a tiny state.

• 1:11:49Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:11:49Speaker 02

  Even with Gaza and the West Bank, it's quite small. It's a postage stamp-like state. Right? They want more territory, and they believe they have a historical right to that territory. Israel has never said, "These are our final borders." What are Israel's final borders? They've never been articulated. And the reason is, the Israelis don't want to say out loud. The early Zionists did not say out loud what their intentions were. David Ben-Gurion didn't get up on a soapbox and say, "We are going to create a greater Israel, and it's going to include Southern Lebanon, Southern Syria, the occupied territories, Green Line Israel, the Sinai, and so forth and so on."

• 1:12:34Tucker Carlson?

  It's just a little, I mean, irony doesn't, isn't powerful enough a word. I can't think of one. It's odd that the very same people who are saying, "We need to consider tactical nukes in order to preserve the territorial integrity of the sovereign nation, Ukraine, because national borders are sacrosanct." You know, that's our, our sacred norms are violated when those borders are violated, are saying, "It's totally okay for this one country to like take over other countries."

• 1:13:03Speaker 02

  But this gets back to my point to you. We, yes, we, I agree completely. We support Israel unconditionally, right? In other words, whatever Israel does, especially vis a vis the Palestinians, the United States backs them to the hilt. And the fact that they're changing borders. I mean, I look at what they're doing in Lebanon and Syria, and you would think that the United States would have a vested interest in trying to put pressure on the Israelis to stop causing murder and mayhem in Lebanon and in Syria. But we do hardly anything at all.

• 1:13:40Tucker Carlson?

  And those are real countries. Those are ancient countries and beautiful, beautiful countries with sophisticated, intelligent people and like that the roots of Christianity are there. And like, it's not, in other words, I mean, there's a sense if you're fighting over Sinai or something, it's one thing, but like Lebanon? I mean, that's like one of the great countries in the world. Syria, same thing, and they're being destroyed. I don't understand why people allow that to happen.

• 1:14:04Speaker 02

  Well, let me explain to you what Israel's goal is here. First of all, Israel's goal is to create Lebanon's realm. That's what I was describing to you when I said. What Ben-Gurion's vision was regarding borders. So do you define the word? Lebanon's round means living room. You, you, you want, you want a big country. You want lots of space. Yes. For your people. Yes. Strategic depth. Strategic depth, yeah. And so that's one goal. The second goal that the Israelis have is they want to make sure that their neighbors are weak. And that means breaking them apart if you can. Right? And keeping them broken.

• 1:14:46Speaker 02

  So the Israelis were thrilled that mainly the United States and the Turks broke apart Syria. One could argue that Syria was even broken before Assad fell. But the Israelis want Syria to be a fractured state. They want Lebanon to be a fractured state. What they want in Iran, you know, we talk about the nuclear program, the nuclear enrichment program. And the argument is sometimes made that the principal goal, the only goal is to go in and, and eliminate their nuclear capability. That's a lie. Well, it's just part of the story. You could call it a lie. What, what the Israelis want to do is they want to break Iran apart. They want to make it look like Syria. Right?

• 1:15:32Speaker 02

  You want neighbors that are not powerful. You want them to be fractured. Jordan and Egypt, they have a different solution there. And what's happened is because those countries are economically backwards, the United States gives them huge amounts of economic aid. I've noticed. Yep. And, and that's done for a purpose. And anytime the Egyptians. And what's the purpose? Because anytime the Egyptians or the Jordanians get uppity about Israel, the United States reminds them, you better behave yourself because we have huge economic leverage over you. You have to be friendly to Israel. So Jordan and Egypt never caused the Israelis any problem.

• 1:16:15Tucker Carlson?

  It sounds like our entire foreign policy, at least in the Western Hemisphere, is based on this one country.

• 1:16:20Speaker 02

  Well, I would say in the Middle East.

• 1:16:23Tucker Carlson?

  Well, yeah.

• 1:16:24Speaker 02

  In the Middle East, there is no question, people now call it West Asia, I believe, I call it the Middle East. In the Middle East, our policy is profoundly influenced by Israel. We give, as I said to you before, we have a special relationship with Israel that has no parallel in recorded history. It's very important to understand it. There is no single case in recorded history that comes even close to looking like the relationship that we have with Israel. Because again, as I said, states sometimes have similar interests, and this includes the United States and Israel.

• 1:17:05Tucker Carlson?

  For sure.

• 1:17:06Speaker 02

  But they also have conflicting interests. And when a great power like the United States has conflicting interests with another country, it almost always, except in the case of Israel, acts in terms of its own interest. America first. But when it comes to Israel, it's Israel first. And if you go to the Middle East and look at our policy there, there's just abundant evidence to support that.

• 1:17:32Tucker Carlson?

  So then the question, I mean, there's so many questions, but the question is why? Like, what is that? And it's, I think it's really causing serious problems in the current ruling coalition because it's, the contradiction is too obvious. It's not America first. And people can see that because it's so, so evident. But what are the causes of it? Like, why would, for the first time, as you said, in recorded history, a nation spend, you know, whatever it is, a trillion dollars a year, in effect, to serve the interests of another country? Like, why?

• 1:18:08Speaker 02

  Well, I believe there's one simple answer, the Israel lobby. I think the lobby is an incredibly powerful interest group, and I'm choosing my words carefully. It has awesome power and it basically is in a position where it can profoundly influence US foreign policy in the Middle East. And indeed, it affects foreign policy outside of the Middle East. But when it comes to the Middle East, and again, the Palestinian issue in particular,

• 1:18:47Speaker 02

  it has awesome power and there's no president who is willing to buck the lobby.

• 1:18:54Tucker Carlson?

  What sort of power is it? Because it's not rhetorical, it's not, you know, the most powerful movements in history are fueled by an idea that's usually the most powerful or fueled by an idea that's like, true, right? But I never hear anybody make a detailed case for why the United States benefits from the current arrangement. Never, no one, ever. Nikki Haley came as close as anyone by saying the United States gets a lot more out of the relationship than Israel does, but that never explained how exactly that works. So it's not a matter of like convincing people, clearly. So what is it a matter of? Where does that power come from?

• 1:19:35Speaker 02

  Well, let me put this in a broader context. I think that in the past, when I was younger, the lobby operated on two levels. One was the policy level and two was the popular discourse.

• 1:19:51Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:19:52Speaker 02

  And I think in terms of the popular discourse for a long, long time, right? And this would be well into the 2000s.

• 1:20:03Speaker 02

  The Israel lobby, the Israel lobby, basically influenced the discourse in ways that made the Israelis look like the good guys. And it made it look like every time the United States supported Israel, it was because it was in our national interest. Right? So the discourse was not at odds with what was happening at the policy level.

• 1:20:28Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:20:29Speaker 02

  Now, the situation you described, which I think is a perfect description of the situation that we face today, is that the lobby has lost control of the discourse. And people now understand that the United States is doing things for Israel that are not in the American national interest. Furthermore, they see the lobby out in the open, engaging in smash mouth politics. People are now fully aware that there is a lobby out there, that it's trying to control the discourse. And in fact, it basically does control, maybe

• 1:21:09Speaker 02

  that's a bit too strong a word, but it's close. It basically does control the policymakers. So now you have this real disconnect.

• 1:21:17Tucker Carlson?

  Well, it controls the policymakers. I mean, we just, that's demonstrable, you know, I think. It's measurable.

• 1:21:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:22Tucker Carlson?

  So.

• 1:21:23Speaker 02

  Yes. But you, so you have, what you were describing is the disconnect between the discourse and the policy world that now exists. But what I'm saying to you is you want to remember that the lobby was immensely successful for a long period of time, because the disc, the discourse and the policy process looked like they were in sync.

• 1:21:44Tucker Carlson?

  So successful that just basic historical facts about the creation of this nation-state in 1948 are like unknown to people. And it's shocking to hear them. And you think, well, that can't be right. That's like so far from what I heard as a child, that that's obviously, what? All the Christians were kicked out? All these Christians were kicked out of their historic homelands there? And of course, many more Muslims? And did that really happen? I mean, people just have no idea what the facts are. It's kind of interesting.

• 1:22:13Speaker 02

  Yes, well, the lobby went to great lengths to make sure that you didn't know the facts.

• 1:22:17Tucker Carlson?

  And anyone who said the facts out loud was like a, like a lunatic or a jihadist or a hater of some kind.

• 1:22:25Speaker 02

  And anti Semite.

• 1:22:26Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:26Speaker 02

  Self-hating Jews. You know, it's very interesting. I often think about my own evolution in this regard. When I grew up as a kid, I was heavily influenced by Leon Yuris's book Exodus and then the subsequent movie with I think Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint. And that, of course, that Exodus story portrayed the Israelis in the most favorable light and the Arabs or Palestinians in the most negative light. So for much of my life, you know, up until the late 80s, early 90s, I thought the Israelis were without a doubt the good guys up against the bad guys. And it was really David versus Goliath as well.

• 1:23:08Speaker 02

  And the Israelis were David up against an Arab Goliath. That was the picture I had in my head. But then in the late 80s, early 90s, a group of historians in Israel called the New Historians came on the scene.

• 1:23:24Tucker Carlson?

  Benny Morris.

• 1:23:25Speaker 02

  Benny Morris, Avi Shleim.

• 1:23:27Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:28Speaker 02

  Ilan Pappe.

• 1:23:30Tucker Carlson?

  Some of them were amazing.

• 1:23:31Speaker 02

  Amazing. Yeah.

• 1:23:32Tucker Carlson?

  I agree.

• 1:23:33Speaker 02

  And, and what they did was they had access to the archives.

• 1:23:36Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:23:37Speaker 02

  And they told the real story.

• 1:23:39Tucker Carlson?

  And that was a moment where I think the country felt, Israel felt confident enough to allow that conversation internally and that honesty.

• 1:23:47Speaker 02

  I think that's exactly right. The lobby had been so successful. Israel had been so successful.

• 1:23:53Tucker Carlson?

  Yes. I went there. I was amazed. What a beautiful place. Great people. It was great.

• 1:23:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. They thought they controlled. They had things under control.

• 1:24:02Tucker Carlson?

  They did.

• 1:24:03Speaker 02

  That's right. And that they could allow these historians to tell the truth. Now, I believe they could have gotten away with it if they had stopped expanding, or if they had agreed to a two-state solution. The problem is that after the early 1990s, when this literature came out, the Israelis continued to act in barbaric ways towards the Palestinians.

• 1:24:33Tucker Carlson?

  Well, they had a prime minister who tried to reverse the trend and then he was shot to death.

• 1:24:39Speaker 02

  He was moving in that direction. I think there were a number of Israeli leaders who understood that the course that Israel was on was unsustainable.

• 1:24:49Tucker Carlson?

  You often heard them say that.

• 1:24:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:51Tucker Carlson?

  And there was a robust debate within the country about this.

• 1:24:54Speaker 02

  Well, whether they would have agreed to a Palestinian state ultimately is an open question. But the fact is, Rabin was killed, Ehud Barak, who made moves towards a two-state solution, ultimately couldn't pull it off. And we are where we are today. And the problem is that something else occurred in the late 90s, early 2000s, which fundamentally affected Israel's position, and that's the internet. Because once you get the internet, and once you get social media, and the mainstream media is not the sole source of information on these issues,

• 1:25:34Speaker 02

  the story about the real creation of Israel and what Israel is doing today is available to the vast majority of people.

• 1:25:45Tucker Carlson?

  And it's shocking to people. So you have to shut down the internet. You can't allow that.

• 1:25:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can try to shut down the internet, but you know, there are limits to what you can do.

• 1:26:00Tucker Carlson?

  But it does seem like, so you were describing the two separate tiers, the policy and the discourse about the policy, and that one remains basically the same, but the other has changed just so radically, so radically and so fast that it's gone off in some dark directions that I just want to say on the record, I totally disapprove of. I don't think you should hate anybody, period, especially groups of people. It's immoral. And I mean it. But that's happened because there's been like an avalanche of new information, a lot of which is totally real. People haven't seen it before and their minds are exploding. And so, public opinion is moving so radically in the other direction. I feel it all around me. Do you feel this?

• 1:26:42Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 1:26:43Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah. And your life, I mean, I should say for people who aren't familiar with your background, you wrote a book with Stephen Walt of Harvard, you're at the University of Chicago. So both of you are, have tenure, are famous in your world. You're not crazy. And you write this book in 2007, and both of you are immediately attacked in like, pretty shocking ways, also defended by some of your colleagues, but really maligned for it. And now, 18 years later, people are saying, that Mayor Shimer guy, actually, he was kind of right about everything. So that's a reflection, I think, of the change in public opinion. But that's not sustainable. You can't have in a democracy,

• 1:27:24Tucker Carlson?

  policy that's 180 degrees from public opinion over time. That just doesn't work. So you have to either change the policy, or change public opinion. And no one's even making any attempt at all to change public opinion through good faith argument, through like, hey, I know you think this, but you're wrong. And here's why. There's zero, none. It's shut up Nazi. Okay. And that's not working. So I really think the only option is to stop the conversation. Or maybe I'm missing something. Like censorship is the only, the only option if you want to maintain status quo.

• 1:28:00Speaker 02

  Well, there's no question that they're trying to stop the conversation.

• 1:28:05Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:28:05Speaker 02

  No question. I mean, they went to great lengths to shut down TikTok and the evidence is that the lobby played a key role.

• 1:28:14Tucker Carlson?

  Just banning one of the world's biggest social media apps because it says things you don't like.

• 1:28:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, this is the way they've always behaved. The lobby's always behaved this way. And I mean, this is what happened to me and Steve. You know, we originally wrote an article and we at one point thought the article would never be published. After we wrote the article and we went through all sorts of interactions with the Atlantic Monthly that had commissioned the article, we put the article in the back closet and just said...

• 1:28:48Tucker Carlson?

  So you were asked to write a piece about the influence of a foreign lobby, the Israeli lobby in Washington, which is one of many foreign lobbies in Washington, but is by far the most effective and the biggest. And you write the piece and they didn't run it?

• 1:29:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:03Tucker Carlson?

  Why?

• 1:29:04Speaker 02

  Because they got cold feet. I mean, what invariably happens in these cases is that down at the lower levels of a journal or a newspaper, people will be interested in somebody writing something on the Israel lobby or writing a piece that's critical of Israel. But then as it filters up the chain of command and people at the top see it, they kill it. Right? And...

• 1:29:27Tucker Carlson?

  And that happened to you?

• 1:29:28Speaker 02

  Oh, that's definitely what happened at the lobby, at the Atlantic Monthly. They killed it. And then Steve and I went to Princeton University Press and a handful of other journals and asked if they would be interested in either the article or turning the article into a book. And in all of those cases, everybody at first exudes enthusiasm. They think it's a, it's a great topic. Something needs to be written on it, which of course is true. But then they think about it for a month and you get a call back and they've lost interest. So Steve and I actually put the, the articles, I said, in the back closet and just said...

• 1:30:10Tucker Carlson?

  What's wild is you're both, at this point, very well known and you're just, can you explain who Steve is to your co-author?

• 1:30:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, Steve is a chaired professor at Harvard University. And at the time that we wrote the lobby... Article, he was the academic dean at the Kennedy School.

• 1:30:28Tucker Carlson?

  Okay, so I just, I, I'm sure a lot of people already know that, but I just want to make it totally clear. You're not two random guys on the internet who are like anti Semites or something at all. You're like the, some of the most famous people in your field and you're totally moderate. I don't even know what your politics are, but you're not a political activist at all.

• 1:30:46Speaker 02

  No, as I, as I used to like to say, if Adolf Hitler were alive, he would have thrown Steve's wife and his two children in a gas chamber. Right? I mean, the idea that we're anti Semites. I mean, this is a laughable argument. We're both first order Philo Semites. I mean, I can't prove that, but it's true in my humble opinion. But anyway, we were certainly, you know, at the top of our academic disciplines and highly respected, which is not to say people didn't disagree with what we wrote.

• 1:31:17Tucker Carlson?

  But you weren't crackpots at all.

• 1:31:19Speaker 02

  And the other thing is, I want to make it clear that we worked very carefully with the Atlantic to get our final draft, draft up to their standards. Right? We did what they wanted. And, and you also want to remember that Steve and I are both excellent writers. Many academics cannot write clearly. Whatever you think of the substance of our views, there's no doubt that we're two of the best writers in the business. And it's the two of us working with the editors at the lower rungs of the Atlantic monthly that produced what I thought was an excellent article. But anyway, it was killed there and we couldn't get it published.

• 1:31:58Tucker Carlson?

  Kind of proven your point.

• 1:31:59Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. Exactly. And, uh, uh, by the way, I probably shouldn't tell this story, but I'll tell you, I, we told the editor at the Atlantic as we were going through the process that we thought he was getting cold feet. And he was quite offended by that. And he said to us, just to prove that that wasn't true, he would give us a $10,000 kill fee. That means if they didn't take the article, they'd give us $10,000. So I said to Steve, I remember it very well. That's the fastest $10,000 we ever made. He said, Oh, John, you're being too cynical. Anyway, we collected the 10.

• 1:32:43Tucker Carlson?

  Did he paid you?

• 1:32:44Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. I mean, but what, what he did.

• 1:32:47Tucker Carlson?

  How ashamed was he when he, because I'm not going to name him. I know the editor. This is a pretty well-known editor. He's just been in magazine journalism for decades and, you know, has a high regard for himself and good reputation and all this stuff. And he's told from somebody else who's more powerful than he is, you can't do this. How embarrassed was he in that conversation?

• 1:33:07Speaker 02

  I had no evidence that he was embarrassed.

• 1:33:09Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, so he has no soul.

• 1:33:11Speaker 02

  No, I mean, who knows, you know, what kind of face he had to put on things. I don't know what happened inside The Atlantic. I've never been told. But, uh, but again, he said he'd give us a $10,000 kill fee because he thought the piece was going to go forward. And somebody, uh, sat on him and told him that that was not going to happen. I don't know what happened, but I don't want to be too harsh on him because this is the norm.

• 1:33:41Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:42Speaker 02

  This was the norm.

• 1:33:43Tucker Carlson?

  He didn't own the magazine.

• 1:33:44Speaker 02

  And so what we did was we put it in the back closet. And, and I remember Steve and I had a conversation and I think Steve said to me, this is why we have tenure, so that you can spend two years of your life writing something that never gets published and you're not punished in terms of promotion to tenure, right? But anyway, what then happened is that somebody inside The Atlantic, uh, who was actually involved in the original commissioning of the article, gave a copy to a very prominent academic who, uh, had, uh, who had, um, contacts, close contacts at the London Review of Books.

• 1:34:25Speaker 02

  And, uh, that academic, who I knew very well, uh, sent me a note and said that Mary K. Wilmer's, uh, he said, I got a hold of your manuscript and, uh, I sent it to Mary K. Wilmer's at the London Review of Books and she'd be very interested in publishing it. And, uh, So I then, I remember I was in Heidelberg, Germany. I called up Mary Kay and she published it, thankfully. It was like a bomb. It was like a bomb went off. I'll remember that. I remember that. So. Yeah. So the piece, The Atlantic comes out in the London Review of Books. What's the thesis of the piece? If you could just sum it up for people who didn't read it. Well, the argument basically has four parts to it. The first says that the United

• 1:35:10Speaker 02

  States has this special relationship with Israel. It's unparalleled in history. We give Israel unconditional support, huge amounts of military and economic aid. That's the first part. Then the second part says it's not for strategic reasons that we do this. Then the third part is. Can you explain what that means? It's not in the American national interest. In other words, from a geopolitical point of view, right? Because Israel and the United States sometime have different interests. It makes no sense for us to support Israel unconditionally. We should support

• 1:35:51Speaker 02

  Israel when its interests reflect their interests, but otherwise not. But that's not the case. So that's another way of saying what we're doing is not in our strategic interest. Okay? Third part is it's not in our moral interest because when you look at what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians, this violates basic American precepts, liberal precepts, right? So from a moral point of view, what's happening in Israel doesn't make sense. So then the fourth part deals with the question of why we do this. Right. Fair question. Right. If we don't do it for strategic reasons, we don't do it for moral reasons,

• 1:36:32Speaker 02

  why do we do it? And the answer is the lobby. So that's the story, the lobby.

• 1:36:40Tucker Carlson?

  And the lobby is a very large, complex, informal organization of which AIPAC is a part, but not the total.

• 1:36:51Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:36:53Tucker Carlson?

  And then you describe how that works.

• 1:36:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's very important to emphasize it's a loose coalition of individuals and organizations like AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League, and so forth and so on, that work overtime to support Israel loosely coordinated. I think your description was right on the money. Very important to understand, it is not a Jewish lobby, and it is not a Jewish lobby because many Jews don't care much about Israel, and many Jews are opposed to what Israel or the Israel lobby is doing.

• 1:37:32Tucker Carlson?

  Including many religious Jews, Torah Jews, sincere, sincerely Jewish Jews disagree. I know some, so I know.

• 1:37:40Speaker 02

  Absolutely. There are a large number of Jews who are anti-Zionists.

• 1:37:44Tucker Carlson?

  I'm aware.

• 1:37:44Speaker 02

  Right? So you're exactly right. So it's not a Jewish lobby for that reason, but also there are the Christian Zionists.

• 1:37:53Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:37:53Speaker 02

  Who are a core element of that lobby.

• 1:37:56Tucker Carlson?

  I've noticed.

• 1:37:57Speaker 02

  You know, Christians United for Israel, for example. So that's why we call it the Israel lobby.

• 1:38:04Tucker Carlson?

  And what explains the enthusiasm of Christian groups for policies that kill Christians in the Middle East?

• 1:38:14Speaker 02

  Well, they have this belief that until Israel controls all of Greater Israel, right, it gets back all the territory that is rightfully.

• 1:38:30Speaker 02

  Theirs, you won't have the second coming. So they are deeply committed, these Christian Zionists, to supporting Israel's conquests and supporting Israeli expansion for religious reasons.

• 1:38:47Tucker Carlson?

  And are there defined borders that when reached will trigger the second coming?

• 1:38:52Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 1:38:53Tucker Carlson?

  When we say Greater Israel, do we have a clear map in mind of what that will mean?

• 1:38:58Speaker 02

  No. No, whenever you talk about Greater Israel, there's hardly ever a real map in mind. I talk about it in terms of the occupied territories plus Green Line Israel. But obviously, the Israelis themselves, most Israelis, I think, have a bigger map in mind.

• 1:39:16Tucker Carlson?

  Do we know where that ends? I mean, it doesn't go to Cairo, I assume?

• 1:39:20Speaker 02

  No, no. I think the Sinai, what they take of Egypt, I think, will, if they can, will be the Sinai. And I don't think they would take all of Syria or all of Lebanon, but they would take big chunks of the south of those two countries. But, but, but the idea behind the Christian Zionists is that to facilitate the second coming, you know, for religious reasons, we should support Israel. But this does, as you say, cut against the fact that the Israelis oftentimes treat Christians as badly as they do Muslims.

• 1:40:01Speaker 02

  There was recently a case where they bombed a Catholic church in northern Gaza. And Trump was infuriated when he heard this and he called up Netanyahu and told him, this is recently, like, within the past two weeks, told Netanyahu that he had to apologize. And the Pope even spoke out on this. But even there, the criticism is quite muted because, again, hardly anybody in the West really criticizes Israel in a meaningful way.

• 1:40:30Tucker Carlson?

  It is just a little bit odd that you could, on Christian grounds, support the bombing of a Christian church? I mean, there are lots of theological differences between sex and Christianity. But if you're getting to the point like where Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House is, where you think Jesus is commanding you to support the murder of Christians, you don't need to be like a theologian to think, maybe I've gone off course? No?

• 1:40:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're not going to get any argument from me on that.

• 1:40:57Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah. So where does it go from here now that things that, you know, everyone was afraid to talk about any of this to the extent that people understood it because they don't want to be called names and because those names are, it's horrible to be called that. And it's almost, sometimes it's true, but for most people, it's not true at all. They're not hateful. That's not why they have these views. So, once those slurs lose their power, as I think they quickly are, in the same way the word racist lost its power from overuse, like, where are we? What do we, what happens next?

• 1:41:32Speaker 02

  It's hard to tell a happy story, but here's how I think about it. The first question you want to ask yourself is, what are the Israelis likely to do moving forward? In other words, if the Israelis all of a sudden got reasonable, a lot of these problems would go away. But there is no sign the Israelis are going to get more reasonable. If anything, the political center of gravity is moving further and further to the right in Israel as the years go by. So Israeli behavior in the Middle East, if anything, is likely to be even more aggressive and more offensive to people around the world.

• 1:42:15Speaker 02

  So what does that mean here in the United States? It means that the lobby is going to have to work even harder than it's now working. And again, you want to remember, the lobby's now out in the open and it's engaging in smash mouth politics, but it's going to have to work harder. Now you say to yourself-

• 1:42:34Tucker Carlson?

  Most vicious people I've ever dealt with, ever.

• 1:42:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Anybody who's dealt with them, and I've dealt with them for longer than you have, understands full well what you're talking about. But see, here's the problem, Tucker. The problem is that support among younger people for Israel is much weaker than it is among older people.

• 1:42:55Tucker Carlson?

  Including Jews.

• 1:42:57Speaker 02

  Including Jews, yes, yes. Very important to emphasize that. Very important. So, the problem is that inside of American society, you're moving towards a situation where increasing numbers of people in the body politic are critical of Israel, extremely critical of Israel, because older people are dying off and those younger people are turning into older people. So, the body populace in the United States is going to be more critical of Israel over time, not less critical. At the same time, Israel continues to behave that way. And the question is, how long can we go on with the lobby operating out in

• 1:43:41Speaker 02

  the open and engaging in smash mouth politics?

• 1:43:44Tucker Carlson?

  And I- Attacking Americans in the most vicious way, who have no animus toward anyone, but just want to help their own country, they're somehow criminals? Like, that, that, that can't go on long. That's too stupid to work over time, no?

• 1:44:02Speaker 02

  I agree. Look at what's happening on campuses, right? Here you have these students out there protesting, protesting a genocide, right? Many of the students who are out there protesting are Jewish. This cannot be emphasized enough. Many of them are Jewish. And all of a sudden, they're turned into raving antisemites. This is all about antisemitism. It has nothing to do with the genocide that's taking place in Palestine. This is crazy, right? And, and I talk to people on campuses, everybody understands this. Everybody understands that this has nothing to do with antisemitism. I've been in academia-

• 1:44:48Speaker 02

  For decades, I've been at the University of Chicago for 44 years. Before October 7th, nobody at Chicago or Harvard talked about an antisemitism problem. It was just unheard of. Huge numbers of administrators, including provosts and presidents, were Jewish. Huge numbers of deans and faculty members were Jewish. Huge numbers of students, graduate and undergraduate, were Jewish. This is a wonderful thing. Nobody was ever critical of it. Was there an antisemitism problem? I never heard about it, and I don't know anybody who was talking about it. But all of a sudden, after October 7th, what we discover is that these college campuses

• 1:45:32Speaker 02

  are hotbeds of antisemitism. This makes no sense at all, because of course, they were not hotbeds of antisemitism. What they were were hotbeds of criticism of Israel and what it was doing to the Palestinians. But you can't say that.

• 1:45:48Tucker Carlson?

  Why?

• 1:45:51Speaker 02

  Because you are, in effect, bringing attention to the genocide that's taking place in Gaza, and that is unacceptable. I mean, newspapers like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, they never even used the word genocide or anything approximating that. It's just verboten. And the idea is to make Israel look like, if anything, it's the victim. That's the Wall Street Journal's principal mission, right? To make Israel look like it's the victim.

• 1:46:21Tucker Carlson?

  Wall Street Journal is so discredited as a newspaper, it's like, I wouldn't, I'd rather read The Guardian. I mean, I'd rather read anything other than the Wall Street Journal.

• 1:46:31Speaker 02

  Well, I like to argue that the Wall Street Journal is two newspapers in one. The news and then the opinion.

• 1:46:38Tucker Carlson?

  It's all been corrupted. It changed leadership, and it's just, the whole thing is total. I know some great people who work there still, and they're honest people. But the paper is the most dishonest, I would say, of all papers. That's just my view, and I used to write for them, so.

• 1:46:54Speaker 02

  Well, you'll get an argument from me. As bad as the New York Times and Washington Post are, they pale in comparison to the Wall Street Journal.

• 1:47:01Tucker Carlson?

  I totally agree, and at least the New York Times and especially the Washington Post are just like liberal papers. Okay, there's Democratic Party papers. I know exactly what you are. I'm not, like The Guardian, just a left-wing paper, socialist paper. I'm not shocked by anything. They're pretty upfront about it. The Wall Street Journal is uniquely offensive to me because of the deception involved. They pretend to be one thing, but they're very much not that thing. They're something entirely different and they're stealthy and incredibly dishonest. And I look forward to their demise with un-Christian enthusiasm. Excuse me. But anyway, can I just ask you like a question I should have asked before? You have this population of over 2

• 1:47:43Tucker Carlson?

  million people. How many remain in Gaza now? Do we know? There's no news coverage allowed, so we don't, I guess maybe we don't know, but.

• 1:47:50Speaker 02

  Well, there are 2.3 million to start.

• 1:47:53Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:47:54Speaker 02

  That's the approximate number who are there. It appears that some have gotten out. It's hard to gauge how many. There was one person who told me he thought that about 100,000 had gotten out. Another person told me 50,000. I'm not sure.

• 1:48:14Tucker Carlson?

  But not a million.

• 1:48:15Speaker 02

  Oh, no, no, no, no. The question is how many have been killed.

• 1:48:18Tucker Carlson?

  Right. Do we have any idea?

• 1:48:20Speaker 02

  Not really. There, you know, the estimates are around 60 million. I'd be 60 million. Excuse me, 60,000.

• 1:48:29Tucker Carlson?

  Do you think it's weird that in 2025, we can measure everything from your heart rate to sunspots, that we don't know how many people were killed in Russia, Ukraine, or Palestine? We can't even, I've never met anyone who can give me a hard number on Russian casualties, Ukrainian casualties, or dead Palestinians in Gaza. That's weird.

• 1:48:53Speaker 02

  It's weird. They're two different cases. I mean, the Ukrainians have a deep-seated interest, for example, in not revealing how many people have been killed.

• 1:49:04Tucker Carlson?

  Of course, and so do the Russians, by the way.

• 1:49:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:49:10Speaker 02

  And with regard to the case of Israel, Palestine, the real problem here is that so many people are buried. They're missing. There was a study that somebody did recently. It was a legitimate study that said that they believe, or the study concludes that there are about 400,000 missing people in Gaza.

• 1:49:35Tucker Carlson?

  400,000?

• 1:49:36Speaker 02

  400,000, yeah. Now, I'm not saying that's true. I'm just saying that there are obviously lots of missing people, right? Well, if you look at what the Israelis have done in Israel, excuse me, what the Israelis have done in Gaza, I wouldn't be surprised if the number is, you know, 400,000 dead.

• 1:49:59Speaker 02

  But who knows? But I think, you know, 60,000, roughly 60,000 is the number that lots of people use on dead.

• 1:50:09Tucker Carlson?

  So of the remaining, you know, probably less than 2 million, but close to 2 million people, it's a lot of people. Where do they go?

• 1:50:21Speaker 02

  I mean, this is a great question.

• 1:50:22Tucker Carlson?

  Can there actually be in 2025, a transfer of people like that? I mean, the Second World War wasn't that long ago. Like, people have memories or impressions of what it looks like to move that many people. It's just not, that's not good.

• 1:50:40Speaker 02

  Well, the news reports say that the Israelis and the Americans are talking to the Libyans and the Ethiopians and the Indonesians about accepting the Palestinians, or at least a substantial portion of that, let's say 2 million that are left.

• 1:51:01Tucker Carlson?

  But if they actually tried that, um, I mean, that's so grotesque that you'd think, I mean, wouldn't the world just blow up if they tried to do that? Move hundreds of thousands of people against their will from one, from their land, which they've been on for thousands of years, into some foreign country and just like, that's cool, we're doing this, it's for their safety? Could you actually do that?

• 1:51:28Speaker 02

  Well, I didn't actually think that the Israelis could execute a genocide in Gaza. I didn't think they'd be able to do what they have done since October 7th.

• 1:51:37Tucker Carlson?

  I guess there are no rules. You just do what you can do and.

• 1:51:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're, we're at a point where you want to say that that is a possibility. I'm like you, I find it hard to imagine. I'm sickened by this, the whole process, the whole thing. I just.

• 1:51:54Tucker Carlson?

  And what they all get on boats or something and like people have iPhones, they can, I mean.

• 1:52:00Speaker 02

  Well, also I think there'll be resistance, right? I mean, Hamas is still there. The Israelis have not defeated Hamas, right?

• 1:52:08Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:09Speaker 02

  So, but your question is a great one. The question is, where do we end up here?

• 1:52:14Tucker Carlson?

  What the hell?

• 1:52:16Speaker 02

  Where do we end up? You know, just to go back a bit, when the war starts on October 7th and then the fighting goes on into 2024, the Israeli military is asking Netanyahu to tell them what the final political plan is. In other words, once the war ends, what's the plan for dealing with the Palestinians? And Netanyahu refuses to give the military a plan. And the military says, we can't.

• 1:52:49Tucker Carlson?

  His own military.

• 1:52:50Speaker 02

  His own military, the IDF. The military says that we can't wage the campaign without knowing what the end game is, right? Okay. But Netanyahu won't tell them what the end game is because the end game is to drive all the Palestinians out. The reason that Netanyahu has no plan, right, for dealing with the Palestinians at the end of the fighting is because he expect them, he expects them to all be gone. Okay? Now, what we're saying here is that hasn't happened. It's hard to imagine that happening, right? And although the Israelis have been murdering huge numbers of Palestinian, at some point, a substantial number are going to be left. So the question is, what does that look like?

• 1:53:34Tucker Carlson?

  And they probably won't be more moderate by that point.

• 1:53:37Speaker 02

  No, but what they're going to end up in is a giant ghetto, right? Or a concentration camp. That's what they're building now. And again, this gets back to our earlier discussion of what this means for Israel's reputation in the United States and in the West more generally. You're going to build a ghetto. You're going to put, you know, 2 million people in a ghetto and continue to starve them? Is this sustainable?

• 1:54:03Tucker Carlson?

  It does tend to affect your moral authority when you do that.

• 1:54:08Speaker 02

  I also think it has a terribly corrupting influence on your society at large.

• 1:54:13Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:14Speaker 02

  I think, once this war comes to a conclusion, hopefully that will be sooner rather than later, and the Israelis take stock of what they have done, this is going to have a deeply corrosive effect.

• 1:54:28Tucker Carlson?

  Well, yeah, because, I mean, I mean, the things that are going on to Jewish Israelis at the hands of their own government right now are, I'm not an expert on Israel, but I've been multiple times, and I've always really loved it. I mean, it's such an amazing place. But it was liberal in a fundamental way. That's why I always liked it. I mean, not liberal, like Democratic Party liberal, but just like civil liberties liberal.

• 1:54:54Speaker 02

  If you were Jewish.

• 1:54:56Tucker Carlson?

  Of course. That's a totally fair point that kind of went over my head on my trips there. But you're absolutely right.

• 1:55:03Speaker 02

  And it was designed to go over your head.

• 1:55:05Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, and it did. You're absolutely right. But my point is, the things that are happening now to Israeli citizens are so shocking to me. The total elimination of free speech. You say certain things, you can go right to jail. Question like, what the hell happened on October 7th, which is a completely fair question. In any free society, that should be allowed. Not allowed. Banning people from leaving the country? Your right to travel, especially to leave, is a foundational right. They're telling Israeli citizens you're not allowed to leave? I don't know. Why is that not a big story? I don't really get it. And then the treatment of Christians, which is disgusting. Those are all signs

• 1:55:47Tucker Carlson?

  that the society is becoming illiberal, really is becoming authoritarian. Very, I mean, that's authoritarian. You're not allowed to leave the country? You can't say what you think? That's not a free country. And those are all downstream of the military response post-October 7th. So I think it makes your point. This is corrupting to their society, as the stuff always is. 9/11 was totally corrupting to our society.

• 1:56:10Speaker 02

  I agree. Just add a couple of points to that. The Israeli military has a huge PTSD problem. Oh, I bet. Really? Yeah, yeah. And the Jerusalem Post had a piece, I think it was the Jerusalem Post, had a piece the other day that said there have been five suicides after the, during the past two weeks. So they're having a significant problem with suicide, significant problem with PTSD. And they're having huge problems getting reservists to report for duty. I bet. Because the Israeli military is heavily dependent on reservists. Yes.

• 1:56:50Speaker 02

  And the reservists have basically had it. And so this war is having a corrosive effect. And the thing you want to understand is there's no end in sight. There really isn't. Yeah. And now they're in southern Lebanon, now they're in southern Syria. Wouldn't the United States shut this down tomorrow? Like, not one more dollar for this stuff. You blew up a church? No. No more money for you. The fact that the Israelis are so dependent on us, as we were talking about before, and we were just, you know, hitting on the tip of the iceberg, they are so dependent on us, means we have tremendous coercive leverage over them. This is why, this is why the lobby has to work so hard, right? We have tremendous coercive leverage on them.

• 1:57:33Speaker 02

  So we could shut this down. We could fundamentally alter. This afternoon. I don't want to go that far, but we'd need a couple of days, but. Yeah, no more money for you if you do one more. Well, we could also punish them in significant ways. We could easily bring Israel to its knees. And by the way, I have long argued that that would be in Israel's interest. It is not in Israel's interest. Of course it would. It is not interest in the interest of Jews around the world for this craziness to continue. This craziness should end right away, for the good of Israel, for the good of Jews, for the good of the United States. It makes no sense at all.

• 1:58:11Speaker 02

  To what extent is this Netanyahu?

• 1:58:16Tucker Carlson?

  Like you often see him singled out as, you know, the guy who's pushing this, whose vision this is. If Netanyahu retired tomorrow, would this continue?

• 1:58:28Speaker 02

  Yes. The fact is that he is not unrepresentative of the larger society. There are surely people on, let's use the word left for lack of a better term. There are certainly people on the left who oppose what he's doing and would be more amenable to a political solution. But their numbers are small and dwindling. And I think the overwhelming majority of Israelis support Netanyahu. That's why he's still in office, despite the fact he was responsible for what happened on October 7.

• 1:59:02Tucker Carlson?

  Of course.

• 1:59:02Speaker 02

  He was in charge. The buck is supposed to stop at his desk, but he's not been held accountable because the Israelis want him in charge. So it's not like, you know, he's the odd man out here. Furthermore, if you look at the political spectrum in Israel, there are many people who are to the right of him.

• 1:59:25Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:59:25Speaker 02

  Who are growing in political importance. When you and I were young, people like Smotrich, right, and Ben Gavir, right, who are far to the right of Netanyahu, you know?

• 1:59:36Tucker Carlson?

  Well, there weren't that many of them, or at least that I was, I mean, again, I'm not an expert. I don't speak Hebrew, but I mean, I, you know, been around it a lot. And I felt like, again, it was a pretty liberal European type society. That was my impression of it.

• 1:59:50Speaker 02

  Well, those days are gone.

• 1:59:51Tucker Carlson?

  Yes. No, I know.

• 1:59:52Speaker 02

  Those days are gone. And my point to you is it's only going to get worse. So the argument that Netanyahu is the problem, it's an argument that many liberal Jews here in the United States like to make the wet, like to make, if only we can get rid of Netanyahu, our troubles will go away and we'll get some sort of moderate leadership and work out a modus

• 2:00:15Speaker 02

  vivendi with the United States. But I don't think that's going to happen.

• 2:00:19Tucker Carlson?

  What happens on the Temple Mount, do you think? So there's a, the second temple was obviously built on the mountain in Jerusalem. It was knocked down by the Romans in AD 70 and a few hundred years later, the Muslims built the third holy site in Islam, the Al-Aqsa Mosque there. And beneath it is the foundation of the temple. That's the Western Wall. So that's the geography.

• 2:00:45Tucker Carlson?

  But there is this push to rebuild the third temple, but there's a mosque on the site. My sense is that's coming to a head. Do you have any feeling about that?

• 2:00:57Speaker 02

  I think you're right. I think the further right Israel moves, or the more hawkish it becomes, the more likely it is that will come to a head. There's no question that certainly the religious right in Israel is deeply committed to building a third temple.

• 2:01:19Tucker Carlson?

  But you'd have to blow up the mosque to do it?

• 2:01:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:01:26Tucker Carlson?

  And what would happen if someone blew up the third holy site in Islam in the middle of Jerusalem?

• 2:01:32Speaker 02

  Well, the Israelis are very powerful vis a vis the Palestinian population. And they would, I guess, go to great lengths to suppress any insurrection. And if they had to kill lots of people, they'd kill lots of people. Look at what they're doing in Gaza. The Israelis are incredibly ruthless. There's just no question about that. And they believe that Palestinians are subhumans, two-legged animals, grasshoppers. They use those kind of words. And you take what they've been doing in Gaza. It's easy to imagine them doing horrible things to the Palestinians if they were to rise up

• 2:02:17Speaker 02

  over what's happening with regard to the Temple Mount. And in terms of the Jordanians, or the Egyptians, or the Saudis, are they going to do anything? I doubt it. I mean, they'll make a lot of noise verbally, but in terms of actually doing anything to Israel. The Israelis basically calculate in all these instances that what they can do is horrible things. And then with the passage of time, people will forget. And not only will they forget, but we'll go to great lengths to help them forget. You know, we'll rewrite the history. That's the idea. So I think that your assessment of what we should expect with the Temple Mount is probably correct.

• 2:02:57Tucker Carlson?

  Feels like that's a, I mean, that's a, you know, there are a billion Muslims. So.

• 2:03:03Speaker 02

  But they have a huge collective action problem. What are those billion Muslims going to do? I mean, they can't organize themselves into armored divisions and strike into Israel.

• 2:03:14Tucker Carlson?

  No, but they could. I mean, I think we learned from nine 11, a small group of determined people can have a big effect on events.

• 2:03:21Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, well, that's all coming too, right? I mean, this is one of the problems that many Western Jews worry about, that, you know, payback is going to come, not in the form of attacks on Israel, but on, in the form of attacks on Western Jews in places like the United States or Europe.

• 2:03:41Speaker 02

  And I think that is a real possibility. Let's hope it doesn't happen. But the number of people who are in the, in the, in the Arab and Islamic world, who are absolutely enraged by what is going on in Gaza is not to be underestimated. And they have a second strike capability, as you point out. You know, I was talking about building armored divisions. That's foolish. They're not going to build armored divisions, but there are other ways to deal with this. Again, you want to go back to nine 11. This gets back to the whole question whether Israel is a strategic liability or a strategic asset.

• 2:04:19Speaker 02

  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is the principal planner of nine 11, now in Guantanamo, and Osama bin Laden, both explicitly said that their principal reason for attacking the United States on nine 11 was the United States's support of Israel's policies against the Palestinians. You just want to think about that. The conventional wisdom in the United States is that Israel had nothing to do with nine 11, and these Muslims attacked us because they hate who we are. Nothing could be further from the truth. Obama, Obama, Osama bin Laden and KSM, again, have both explicitly said that it was US

• 2:05:04Speaker 02

  policy toward Israel that caused nine 11.

• 2:05:07Tucker Carlson?

  Why do you suppose that so many nine 11 documents are still classified almost 25 years after the fact?

• 2:05:15Speaker 02

  I don't know. I mean, why are so many Jeffrey Epstein documents effectively classified? Why are so many Kennedy assassination documents still not released?

• 2:05:28Tucker Carlson?

  Still not released, that's correct.

• 2:05:30Speaker 02

  You know, you really do wonder. They obviously have something to hide. In most cases, it's very hard to divine what it is that they're trying to hide. And that's certainly true with regard to nine 11. But, but we just don't know.

• 2:05:47Tucker Carlson?

  We don't know. And it does make everybody into a, into a wacko thinking about it. I mean, if you want to end so-called conspiracy theories, tell the truth. And then, you know, no one has to theorize would be my view. So you just, you have a piece out is my last question to you. Thank you for spending all this time. You have a piece out that describes what you believe the world will look like in 50 years. And I should say, just to toot your horns, and you're not going to do it. You've been right on some of the big, big, big questions. And you've stood essentially alone in your field, in your predictions that have been vindicated on them. Not just about the power of foreign lobbies, but about China, about NATO. And so I do think your opinion on this matters.

• 2:06:32Tucker Carlson?

  Can you just give us a sense of like 10 years hence? What's America's place in the world?

• 2:06:38Speaker 02

  Well, I think if you look out 10 years, even if you were to look out 20 or 30 years, I think in all likelihood, the system, the international system will continue to be dominated by three countries, the United States, China and Russia. And I think the United States and China will remain the two most powerful countries on the planet. And the US-China competition over the next 10 years and even beyond that will influence international politics more than any other relationship.

• 2:07:12Speaker 02

  I think that once you begin to project out past 10, 20 years, the United States' position vis a vis China, I think, will improve for demographic reasons. I think the Chinese population is going to drop off at a much more rapid rate than the American population. And moreover, the Americans can rely on immigration to rectify the problem. So if you look at population, which is one of the two building blocks, population size, one of the two building blocks of military power, the other is wealth. The United States, looking out 20, 30, 40 years, looks like it's in quite good shape,

• 2:07:55Speaker 02

  right? Now, what's happened since 2017, and really even before that, is that with the rise of China, the United States lost its position as the unipole, as the clearly dominant power in the international system, and we now have a peer competitor. So when people talk about American decline, they're correct that we have had decline, let's say, since 2017, when China became a great power, although it started before that.

• 2:08:31Tucker Carlson?

  That's the second time you made reference to 2017 as the threshold for China. What is the definition? How does a country go from being a big power to a great power?

• 2:08:40Speaker 02

  It develops enough military capability to put up a serious fight against the most powerful state in the system.

• 2:08:47Tucker Carlson?

  Thank you.

• 2:08:47Speaker 02

  Right. So you want to remember, the two main building blocks of military power are wealth and population size. You take that wealth, you take that population size, and that's what allows you to build the powerful military. That affects your position in the balance of power. And remember, when I talked about engagement, we made China rich, we made China wealthy. So China always had that huge population, and as a result of engagement...

• 2:09:13Speaker 02

  During the unipolar moment, from roughly, let's say, 1992 to 2017, we helped China get rich. And that rich, that wealth, coupled with that population side, China becomes a great power, okay? So we are losing relative power over that entire time period. And that's when China then becomes a great power. And we now have a competition where the United States is still more powerful than China overall. But the Chinese are closing the gap. So we're still losing relative power to the Chinese. And I would bet over the next 10 years, we will lose relative power. Not a substantial amount, but some.

• 2:09:58Speaker 02

  But still, the United States will probably remain, 10 years from now, the most powerful state in the system, and the Chinese will be right behind us. The Russians will remain the weakest of those three great powers. But if you project out, you know, 30, 40 years, that's when I think the United States will widen the gap with China. Because population-wise, the Chinese population, as a result of the one-child policy, will decline significantly. And our population size, without immigration, will not decline as significantly as the Chinese population will. But we also have immigration as our ace in the hole. So we can bring in immigrants, as we have done in the past,

• 2:10:43Speaker 02

  and we will remain in quite good shape. So I think the long-term future for the United States, in terms of raw power, looks quite good. That's not to say our policies will be wise, because as you and I know, the United States has used that massive power that it's had in the past in oftentimes foolish ways.

• 2:11:05Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, and is that power worth having? I mean, I don't know, it's more complicated than it sounds. I mean, do people's lives improve, which seems like an important measure? Not the only measure, but certainly one.

• 2:11:16Speaker 02

  Well, this is the realist in me, Tucker. In the international system, in international politics, because there's no higher authority that can protect you if you get into trouble, it's very important to be powerful, right? You can't dial 911 in the international system and have someone come and rescue you. And in a world where another state might be powerful and might attack you, it's very important to be the most powerful state in the system. And the last thing you want to do is be weak. You want to remember, the Chinese referred to the period from the late 1840s to the late 1940s as the century of national humiliation.

• 2:11:59Tucker Carlson?

  Yes, it was too.

• 2:12:00Speaker 02

  Yes, and why did they suffer a century of national humiliation? Because they were weak.

• 2:12:06Tucker Carlson?

  Because they were divided.

• 2:12:07Speaker 02

  Right, and remember, we talked earlier in the show about NATO expansion. We talked about why we continued to push and push and push, even though the Russians said it was unacceptable. And I said to you, we were going to shove it down their throat. And why we were going to shove it down their throat? Because we thought they were weak. You'd never want to be weak. You want to be powerful. The problem with making that argument today, for me to make that argument to you and to many people I know, is that we all understand that the United States has been incredibly powerful and it's used that power in foolish ways, in ways that don't make us happy.

• 2:12:50Speaker 02

  And therefore, the idea of having all this power leads us to think, or leads many people to think, that we'll use that power foolishly. And I fully understand that. But my argument is, you still want to be powerful just because it's the best way to survive in the international system. It's the way to maximize your security. But hopefully, you'll use that power smartly. Although, given America's performance in recent decades, there's not a lot of cause for hope.

• 2:13:20Tucker Carlson?

  Do we wind up in a war with China over Taiwan?

• 2:13:25Speaker 02

  I think it's possible. I don't think it's likely in the foreseeable future. The problem is, it's an incredibly difficult military operation for the Chinese because it involves an amphibious assault. They have to go across the Taiwan Strait, which is a large body of water, and amphibious assaults are very difficult. And in all likelihood, the Americans will come to the aid of the Taiwanese. The other thing is, the Taiwan, I mean, the Chinese, unlike the Americans, don't fight wars all the time. The last time China fought a war was in 1979. Just think about that, 1979.

• 2:14:05Tucker Carlson?

  Vietnam.

• 2:14:05Speaker 02

  In Vietnam, yeah, where they were foolish enough to follow in our footsteps.

• 2:14:10Tucker Carlson?

  Yep.

• 2:14:10Speaker 02

  And we were fool enough enough to follow in the French footsteps and go in there. So they went in in 79 and got whacked. But they've not fought a war since then. So they don't have a highly trained military that has lots of combat experience, that would be capable of launching one of the most difficult military operations imaginable, which is an amphibious assault across the Taiwan Strait into the face of resistance from not only the Taiwanese, but the Americans. So I think that will keep a lid on things for the foreseeable future. I don't think the Chinese will attack. I think that what

• 2:14:54Speaker 02

  they'll wait for is the right moment, hope that the world changes in ways that makes it feasible for them to do it.

• 2:15:02Tucker Carlson?

  They're good at waiting.

• 2:15:03Speaker 02

  They're good at waiting. That is, I think that's true. So I don't think, and I want to underline, I'm using the word think. The other point, just very quickly, we do live in a nuclear world, and we have nuclear weapons, and they have nuclear weapons. And the incentive for them to avoid a war with the United States, and for us to avoid a war with them because of nuclear weapons is very great. So that may really put a damper on things if we ever get into a serious crisis.

• 2:15:34Tucker Carlson?

  Professor, thank you for spending all this time. That was wonderful.

• 2:15:38Speaker 02

  It's my pleasure, Tucker. Thanks very much for having me on the show.

• 2:15:41Tucker Carlson?

  Thank you for doing this and congratulations on being vindicated after all these years. That must be nice. Whether you admit it or not, you have been. So, thank you.

• 2:15:52Speaker 02

  I'm going to plead the Fifth Amendment. Thank you again.

• 2:15:59Tucker Carlson?

  We want to thank you for watching us on Spotify, a company that we use every day. We know the people who run it, good people. While you're here, do us a favor. Hit, follow, and tap the bell so you never miss an episode. We have real conversations, news, things that actually matter, telling the truth always. You will not miss it if you follow us on Spotify and hit the bell. We appreciate it. Thanks for watching.