Pod Insights The Tucker Carlson Show BREAKING: U.S. Resumes Strikes on Iran. A Clean Exit Is Unlikely. Tucker and John Mearsheimer React. About this episode Prof. John Mearsheimer on genocide in Gaza, looming defeat in Iran and the potential of a nuclear strike in Europe.
John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. A leading international relations scholar, he is known for his realist theory that great powers compete for security and influence. He authored The Tragedy of Great Power Politics and co-authored The Israel Lobby and U. S. Foreign Policy with Stephen Walt, and has been a prominent voice in debates on the Iraq War, Ukraine, and Gaza.
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Transcript 24,084 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:28 Tucker Carlson? U.S. Central Command announced just moments ago that the American and Israeli militaries are commencing with strikes on Iran.
0:37 Tucker Carlson? These strikes are reported to be planned to continue for the next several days. In fact, this may well develop into another phase of a full-scale war, a hot war, kinetic war, people dying, bombs dropping, missiles flying. And on one level, this is not surprising, if you haven't been checking in on the progress of our war with Iran. But if you have been sporadically reading headlines about where we are and where this is likely to go, you may be a little bit confused because we were just told the other day that a deal, the President of the United States told us that a deal with Iran is imminent any moment now. We've been hammering out the details. Our crack diplomatic team has been traveling back and forth to Pakistan, and we're very, very close.
1:20 Tucker Carlson? That turns out it's not true. That is, and we counted, the 38th time the President of the United States has announced since March 23rd, an imminent deal with Iran. And like the other 37 times, this one turns out to be completely untrue for whatever reason. And we are back to bombing Iran. And Iran has pledged to respond, not by bombing the United States because they can't, but by hitting our allies in the region, the six Gulf states, who are our closest allies in the Middle East. And they've, almost all of them have sustained tremendous damage, in some cases, very severe damage, to military and civilian infrastructure. And they'll continue to do that. So this is escalating.
2:02 Tucker Carlson? The war is back on, despite repeated promises that it was over, that we'd already won. We can play you a lot of clips. No point really in doing that because it's depressing. We could play you all 38 announcements of an imminent deal. Again, you get the point, but we can't resist playing just one from about six weeks ago. This is President of the United States saying that victory is already ours and we're all really only hanging around to increase the magnitude of the victory. Here's President Trump.
2:35 Speaker 02 We've already won, but I want to win by a bigger margin. But we have, we already, we have destroyed their navy, destroyed their air force, destroyed all of their, if you look at their anti-aircraft equipment, their radar equipment, their leadership, their leadership is destroyed. We've destroyed everything.
2:59 Tucker Carlson? So it's hard to know which of those details is accurate or not because there has been really since February 28th, when this began, a total news blackout on the details of this war. We don't know how many Americans have been killed. We don't know how many have been injured. We don't know how they were killed and injured. We really don't know anything beyond what we read on the internet or in press releases. And in case after case, that has turned out to be untrue. So there really has never been a war of this magnitude with this little factual coverage supplying the public with usable information about how it's going. So we don't really know. We can take some of that at face value. The United States military is formidable. It's huge. It has a budget of over a trillion dollars a year.
3:40 Tucker Carlson? So we can, we can bet that tons of Iranian assets have in fact been destroyed over the last several months. But fundamentally, we can conclude that Iran has not lost this war. In fact, by the only measure that really matters, Iran is winning the war. What's that measure? Well, of course, it's the ability to control the Persian Gulf, the eastern aperture of the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, now famous. And as of right now, Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz. It did not when this war began, now it does. And so what do we learn from this? Well, we learn that President Trump is not a great diplomat.
4:23 Tucker Carlson? He's overselling this like it's an all you can eat buffet in Atlantic City. Oh, it's going to be the best. And so it's tempting to kind of lay all of the blame at Trump's feet. And on one level, it is all his fault. He decided to do this. Whatever pressures he faced, it was his decision. And he has oversold America's position in this. And he is, in some very real way, not good at this. But that would be to minimize the profound nature of this moment. Or really, learning is not simply that Trump is a spotty commander in chief, and certainly no diplomat, and obviously not a dealmaker. If you announce a deal 38 times and it doesn't materialize, you're not a dealmaker.
5:07 Tucker Carlson? What we're beginning to understand, unfortunately for the rest of us, are not just the limits of Trump, but the limits of American power. That's what we're actually learning. How limited the United States is in what it can do and how it can project its will abroad. And a lot of Americans, particularly if you grew up, came of age over the last 30 years, when the United States had really unrivaled power globally, global hegemony was in charge. It was the lone superpower up until maybe 10 years ago. And in the minds of many in Washington, it remains the lone superpower. You imagine that the US government could just kind of affect outcomes by articulating them. Say it out loud and it becomes true.
5:49 Tucker Carlson? Because it has the biggest and famously best military in global history. But despite having that military, despite aircraft carriers that cost $120 billion, start to finish, to put in the water, the United States military has not been able to open that straight to shipping to the rest of the world, to global commodities, in months. And there is no promise that we'll be able to. So we have, first and foremost, learned the limits of American military power. There are some things we just can't do. And you would have thought we'd be able to do them. Iran, fewer than 100 million people, primitive, backward theocracy that everyone makes fun of,
6:33 Tucker Carlson? globally reviled as a medieval state. The US military could not force Iran to do one thing, open up a narrow waterway. So our military power has limits that a lot of us didn't appreciate until February 28th.
6:51 Tucker Carlson? Our economic power has limits that a lot of people didn't fully understand. It's a little confusing after hearing for decades that the United States has one of the world's largest oil reserves and by far the most sophisticated oil extraction technology. Every oil-producing country in the world uses American technology to get the oil out of the ground and the gas. It's a little confusing to learn, but it's true, it turns out, that despite having energy independence, the United States is not at all energy independent. And gas is now more expensive in your town because of this war. Does that make sense? Well, yeah. If you understand the true nature of the US economy, which is globalized.
7:34 Tucker Carlson? The United States economy, like every other economy on the globe, is linked to the rest of the world and dependent on the rest of the world. And so while conceptually, the US may have enough oil and gas to meet its own needs, in real life, the price of Brent crude set on the global market determines the price of gasoline in your town. Which is another way of saying Iran has massive power over the United States economy. Who knew that? We spent decades hearing about how Iran was a military threat somehow. This sanctioned backward country is gonna nuke us for reasons that were never exactly clear, because they hate our freedoms.
8:16 Tucker Carlson? But we thought of Iran, most of us who listened to the media, thought of Iran purely in military terms. Iran is crazy, Iran is heavily armed, Iran is a theocratic Shia death cult, and they want to kill us, and we should worry about Iran's military power.
8:38 Tucker Carlson? Well, here, according to the president, we've eliminated a lot of Iran's military power. It's Air Force and Navy, who knew they had those? But they're gone, in any case, according to him. And Iran is still exercising power over the United States, not just because it's slamming our enemies with drones and missiles, but because it is affecting the price of energy in our country thousands of miles away. And that illustrates a really important truth, which is the United States is not...
9:04 Tucker Carlson? Independent on any level economically because the United States is part of a global economic system that the United States promoted and benefited from in some ways for many decades. So we are ensnared by globalization. There's kind of no way out of it, at least in the short term. You may want to ignore what happens in Iran or the Persian Gulf and say, well, we have, we can meet our needs, but you actually can't. And not just with energy, with every manufactured product, starting with pharmaceuticals and ending with automobiles. All of it is dependent on free trade between nations, on globalization, which again, our country promoted and has benefited from. But now we find out that we have a lot less
9:48 Tucker Carlson? economic power than we thought we did because we're not in control. Control is actually in the hands of international markets, whatever those are, but it's not in our hands. And the third area in which American power has been radically reduced, obviously, is its moral power, which conservatives spend a lot of time making fun of. Moral power? What's that? We don't have to be loved. We have to be feared. But it is also true that those very same people, in fact, acknowledge it when they say, America is exceptional. It is a beacon of freedom to the rest of the world. People look to the United States
10:31 Tucker Carlson? as an example of what we'd like to be. And that's why the majority of global constitutions copy ours, our system of government, liberal democracy. And all of that rested on the idea that the United States, while flawed and capable of fomenting coups and assassinating people, kind of went out of its way to pretend it didn't. Now, why did the United States pretend it didn't? Why did the US government do these things and then deny doing them? Well, because even while doing them, the United States government acknowledged those things were wrong. It is never allowed to kill the innocent. Assassination is not war, it's a crime. Killing the families of people you don't like is not allowed. We have done that, but we've never admitted that we're doing it. We've never done it openly.
11:16 Tucker Carlson? And when caught, we either deny it or apologize for it and put the people who did it on trial. Lieutenant Calley and the rest, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That's why we have war crimes trials to make the statement that we have standards that are above savagery. We're America, we're better than you morally, not just richer, but better than you. And that has power. And we have in fact, used that moral power to our great benefit for a long time. Suddenly that is gone. How do we know it's gone? Because the United States government is no longer pretending that it is not doing certain things that it has never done before, like assassinate people openly, beginning with General Soleimani at the end of Trump's first term.
12:01 Tucker Carlson? It is killing civilians. It blew up a girl's school attached to the IRGC naval base in the opening hours of the war and never apologized for it. Not one time did anyone from the US government say, well, that was awful. Sorry. Not one time. That's just the cost of war, apparently. And more specifically, and in some ways more shockingly, the United States government has threatened to target and then two days ago targeted civilian infrastructure. Meaning the systems that keep people alive, keep civilians alive in Iran and any country.
12:43 Tucker Carlson? Power, water, sewage, desal. Necessary for life. The lives of people who are not fighting in the war, who do not make the decisions that led to the war, who are innocent bystanders. The kind of people you are not allowed to kill on purpose, but when you destroy civilian infrastructure, you are killing them on purpose. And so while the US government in war has destroyed civilian infrastructure at scale, by the way, during the Second World War. This has happened before, but it has never happened so openly and without apology, and never once has any American leader threatened in public to kill civilians unless the government of the country he opposes submits. That's never happened because that's barbaric behavior.
13:28 Tucker Carlson? That's not what civilized nations do. And suddenly, not only is the US government doing that, but no one is saying anything about it. Like, that's just fine. And there's also, of course, because, why wouldn't you, at this point, it's threatening nuclear strikes against entire populations, or as the president himself said, civilizations. Now, let's hope none of that happens, and let's hope there aren't further strikes on civilian infrastructure, that civilians aren't killed on purpose, not simply because we're bleeding-heart liberals who think it's bad, but because it's not good for our country, because, well, in the end, what you do will be done to you. That's almost a physics principle. That's just a fact. That's not moralizing. That's reality.
14:13 Tucker Carlson? What you do will be done to you. And the United States has a lot more civilian infrastructure than Iran does. So if the global hegemon is announcing that it's okay to murder civilians in a country you don't like, whose policies you oppose, it stands to reason that we may be the victim of that kind of thinking. In fact, it's dead certain that we will be the victim of that kind of thinking. Americans will be the victims of that. So this is a huge moment and a huge loss for the United States. But maybe above all, the way in which American power has been reduced, and this is the saddest
14:58 Tucker Carlson? to say out loud, is that it is suddenly obvious to everyone, both in this country and around the world, that the United States does not have sovereignty, which is another way of saying, American leaders aren't really in charge of America. They can make some decisions. They can make noises and give speeches, but big decisions, the ones that change the course of history, are not up to them. They're employees. They're not the boss. Now, who is the boss? Well, that's an open debate.
15:29 Tucker Carlson? But in this war, it has become very obvious, undeniable. In fact, it's been admitted by this administration that the President of the United States didn't decide the time and place of this war. The Prime Minister of Israel decided the time and place of this war. Benjamin Netanyahu was in charge. Admitting that out loud, and of course, it was known to everyone who was paying close attention, is a sea change in the way not just the rest of the world thinks about the United States, but the way Americans think about their own country. Because the premise of our system is that the people who live here are in charge of it and that they can control its outcomes by voting.
16:11 Tucker Carlson? We just had elections in a lot of the country primaries yesterday, and an ever diminishing number of people march off to the polls with the notion in mind that I can change things with my vote. The war in Iran has taught us that actually, on the big questions, the people you elect aren't even in charge. Someone else is, in this case, Benjamin Netanyahu. What are the long-term effects of a population understanding that voting doesn't make any difference? Well, it's hard to know. We've never been here before in 250 years, but it's easy to imagine that radicalism, extremism, violence would be the outcome of that.
16:56 Tucker Carlson? Because if people cease believing that they have any power whatsoever to change a system that is hurting them, there's no peaceful way to make the pain stop. They will use non-peaceful means to get what they want. Democracy, famously, is a pressure-relief valve that keeps people calm. You may not like what's happening right now, but just wait till the election and you can change it. When people start to believe that's not possible, that it's all fake, that in the end, no matter what you vote for or who you elect, Benjamin Netanyahu or some other foreigner is in charge of your country, or the donors...
17:34 Tucker Carlson? Why wouldn't they take extralegal means to express their frustration? Well, they probably would. And you would get a violent, chaotic country like so many countries around the world. So you don't want that. But unless someone restores not just the fiction, but the reality of sovereignty to the United States, meaning you can elect somebody and he can change the system if he wants, if he has a mandate from voters to do it, he can change it in ways that Bill Ackman doesn't like. Unless that is clearly true, then you're going to get a very radical population.
18:16 Tucker Carlson? And if you mix that realization with an economic downturn, which is the obvious end result of this war, who knows what you could get? So the costs of this war to the United States are profound and they have nothing to do with Iran's nuclear program or its navy, assuming it even had a navy. Did Iran have a navy? Who cares? Who cares about its nuclear program? Actually, Pakistan has a nuclear program. Lots of countries you don't think should have nuclear weapons, including Israel and France, have nuclear weapons. What matters in the end is whether the United States survives in recognizable form, and
19:00 Tucker Carlson? this war makes it less likely that it will. Not certain, it's not lights out or anything, but we are clearly on the road to radical destructive change in the United States accelerated by this war, and that's bad. And what about Iran? What's going to happen to Iran after all this? Well, of course, it's impossible to really know. Because this is so dynamic. Again, the announcement was made less than 20 minutes ago that we're back at war, and who knows where that will wind up. But if current trends continue, it seems pretty clear that Iran will emerge from this war stronger, battered, lots of dead people, lots of destroyed infrastructure, probably
19:42 Tucker Carlson? a refugee crisis, not much of a standing army maybe, who knows?
19:48 Tucker Carlson? But it is very hard to believe that Iran will emerge from this without control, maybe shared control with Oman, but still control of the Strait of Hormuz. And that makes, that one fact alone makes Iran a global player in the globalized economy. There is no getting around the fact that if you want to get your commodities out of the Gulf, through which a fifth of global commodities flow, energy, petrochemicals, you're going to have to deal with Iran. So that means that after months of war with Iran, this rogue state, this Middle Eastern North Korea, run by crazy people who are cannibals or throwing gays off buildings for
20:29 Tucker Carlson? fun, that country becomes almost inevitably a real country that other real countries deal with as a peer country. It's also pretty easy to imagine an enhanced Iranian economy, because at some point, US sanctions will either have to be dropped, reduced, or they will just become less meaningful because the US dollar will not be dominant in the way that it is now. And finally, and this is not a minor point either, Iran's image around the world will be enhanced, and even in the region. Now, how would that happen? How would that work?
21:10 Tucker Carlson? How could Iran, which is not Arab, it's Persian, and the Persians and the Arabs do have a long history of animosity toward each other, but also intermarriage and complex relationship, for sure, but some animosity, particularly the Persians and the Gulf Arabs. And it's not just religious difference, there are cultural differences and attitudinal differences that have caused friction between those groups for a long time, but already, Iran, which is bombing Arab countries and destroying Arab countries, is more popular in some Arab countries than it was at the beginning of the war. Now, how could that be?
21:48 Tucker Carlson? Well, because Iran has taken a clear position on the murder of Palestinian civilians, particularly in Lebanon, but not just Lebanon, in the West Bank and Gaza also.
22:02 Tucker Carlson? Iran has tied its ceasefire negotiations to a ceasefire in Lebanon. Now, that's not something that resonates with most Americans, like who cares? But in the Middle East and in the entire rest of the world, really, which is watching this, watching Israel destroy Lebanon for reasons that are not clear at all, murder Christians wholesale in Lebanon, destroy Christian villages, bomb Beirut, not a traditional Hezbollah stronghold. Why are you bombing Beirut? Unclear. But it's happening and the rest of the world is watching carefully because Lebanon is a country a lot of people have been to, probably the most beautiful country in the world, with some of the most sophisticated people in the world. It's not Yemen, it's Lebanon, it's on the Mediterranean.
22:46 Tucker Carlson? And the rest of the world is watching this in horror and no one's doing anything about it. The United States is abetting it. The United States is helping it happen despite what they tell you. Those are American weapons and weapon systems being used to murder Christians in Lebanon. Who is doing something about it? Iran. Hate to say that. Wish that weren't true. Wish it didn't fall to Iran to do something about this, but it has and they are. And they're doing more about this than any other country, including ours, including any of the Gulf states, sorry. Because they are tying the reopening of the strait, which the world wants, to an end to Israeli bombing and murder in Lebanon.
23:27 Tucker Carlson? So in the eyes of the region, whatever people hate about Iran, and there's a lot that the Arabs hate about Iran, they are uniquely standing up for the Palestinians.
23:39 Tucker Carlson? The mass murder in Gaza, the genocide in Gaza, and history will record it as that. It is genocide. It is a state policy to eliminate a people and transfer them out of a land. It is genocide by any definition, is the biggest thing that is happening at this point in history. It is the biggest thing. It is the thing about which the most will be written going forward. How did the rest of the world watch this and do nothing? How did the United States back this? How did the United States become the only country on the planet, other than Israel, to approve of this genocide? These are questions normal people will ask fairly soon. They're asking them now.
24:18 Tucker Carlson? And Iran, for all of its many faults, as an American, it's painful to admit this, has tried to do something about it. So, long term, that doesn't hurt Iran, whatever their motive for doing that.
24:33 Tucker Carlson? That does not hurt Iran. That enhances Iran as a state.
24:39 Tucker Carlson? So, the whole thing, like so much of life, has turned out to be exactly the opposite of what you thought.
24:47 Tucker Carlson? You initiate a regime change war against Iran, you kill its elderly cleric head of state, you blow up a girls' school, you sink its ships, you decapitate its air force, whatever that was, you unleash the full fury of the largest military in human history on this country, and in the end, almost inevitably, that country becomes stronger and the countries that attack it become weaker. Again, only in real life do ironies like this exist, but they are everywhere. In fact, that is the story of life. The opposite happens.
25:25 Tucker Carlson? Who could have called this? Who could have seen this coming? Well, certainly, almost no one in Washington saw this coming, because they've been talking about this war with Iran and the need to decapitate Iran and do something about Iran. America's biggest problem is Iran and their proxies and the Houthis and Hezbollah and Hamas. And they've been yammering on about this at the Brookings Institution and CNN and the Atlantic Council and every place where midwits with overpriced degrees gather to talk about the world that they don't understand, whose languages they don't speak. But whenever they gather in Washington to talk about the world, Iran is at the top of the list of problems we must solve.
26:07 Tucker Carlson? And in almost none of these gatherings has anyone piped up to say, "Well, wait a second. If we do that, the opposite will happen. Iran will become more powerful and will become less powerful." Almost nobody said that in Washington, literally almost nobody. And if there is somebody, who is that person? There wasn't one. But there was at least one person outside of Washington who said this. His name is John Mearsheimer. He's been a professor at the University of Chicago since 1982, over 40 years. And he studies international relations, the way that countries get along with each other, balances of power regionally and globally. And he's smart and he's erudite, but above all, he is wise.
26:48 Tucker Carlson? He draws obvious conclusions from longitudinal data sets, as they say in academia. He looks at what happens over time and tries to understand what this tells us about the way nations behave and about the way people behave, about human nature, which is constant, it doesn't change. And because he is one of the very few people in the field of international relations who has this ability, married to personal bravery, he's willing to say things that are unpopular, which is the rarest of all qualities in academia. Because he has these two qualities, he has been maybe the only guy or one of the very few guys to call it right.
27:29 Tucker Carlson? Back in 2007, he and a friend of his from Harvard called Stephen Walt wrote a book on the so-called Jewish lobby, AIPAC and the whole constellation of nonprofits in Washington that seek to steer the US Congress and the executive of the White House to giving Israel more money and more military aid, to changing the inherent priorities of American foreign policy, which are to protect and enhance the United States, to do things that are good for the population of America, to change that priority to protect Israel, do what Israel wants. And the two of them wrote this fairly famous book about it back in 2007 and were immediately
28:13 Tucker Carlson? attacked, can you guess, as Nazis and antisemites? Well, turns out neither of them was a Nazi or an antisemite, just the opposite, kind of normal liberals, not racist in any sense. And the charge itself was ludicrous.
28:32 Tucker Carlson? You notice what AIPAC is doing? You're an anti-Semite? Feel like if you criticized Pfizer, you're against all science? I mean, it doesn't make any sense. It's a slur. It's slander designed to make you be quiet. And in most cases, it works, which is why they keep doing it. But in this one specific case, it didn't work. John Mearsheimer, who had tenure at Chicago, did not lose his job. And not only did he keep speaking, he upped the volume of his speaking and kept telling the world, though most people didn't listen, what he had personally seen and how he interpreted that. In other words, why does the United States military go to war?
29:11 Tucker Carlson? And Mearsheimer, through close observation, concluded, well, in the modern era, mostly it goes to war, big wars on behalf of Israel. Here is Professor John Mearsheimer in 2007 describing why the US went to war in Iraq.
29:30 Speaker 03 It is manifestly clear to most Americans that the Iraq war is one of the greatest strategic blunders in American history. Our argument is that Israel, and especially the lobby, were two of the main driving forces behind the decision to invade Iraq. It is hard to imagine that war happening in their absence. To start with Israel, it was the only country, besides Kuwait, where both the government and a majority of the population favored the war. The Israeli government, to include Prime Minister Sharon, pushed the Bush administration hard to make sure that it did not lose its nerve in the months before the invasion.
30:16 Speaker 03 Other influential Israelis, like former Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu, also implored the United States to take down Saddam. In fact, Israel was pushing so hard for war that its allies in the United States warned Israeli officials to damp down their rhetoric lest it be seen as a war for Israel. I might also add that President Clinton said in 2006 that "every Israeli politician I knew thought that Saddam was so great a threat that he should be removed, even if he did not have WMD."
31:00 Tucker Carlson? So you can see why Professor John Mearsheimer was considered threat number one by AIPAC, and we'll just use the phrase, and it's amen chorus in the American media. Not because he's a bigot or a Nazi, but precisely because he is not. He's an eminently reasonable man who understands the facts and isn't afraid to say them. He's not acting out of animus. He's acting out of honesty and in fact decency. So you can't have people like John Mearsheimer talking. If people are going to criticize Israel, they should also be attacking Jews. They should be full blown crazy people. People like that are helpful to the cause.
31:38 Tucker Carlson? People like John Mearsheimer tend to provoke an open rational debate on the topic that AIPAC and the defenders of Israel's influence over the United States cannot possibly win because it doesn't make any sense at all. So they don't want to have the debate. So Mearsheimer was basically written out of the world he occupied, though he is a full tenure professor at the University of Chicago, one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Suddenly, he wasn't getting invited to write a lot of New York Times op-eds. In fact, for many years, very few non-experts heard from him at all.
32:18 Tucker Carlson? But he kept saying the same thing, which is the Israeli government and its agents in the United States, registered and unregistered, are pushing the US government toward outcomes that will hurt the United States. And now his ultimate vindication, the war in Iran. And not just the war in Iran, but the war between Russia and Ukraine, which is in fact a war between the United States and Russia. And we got into that war.
32:51 Tucker Carlson? Because of pressure from exactly the same people. The people who have pushed for war in Iran have spent the last five years pushing the United States to go to war with Russia. And that war is still ongoing because of pressure from those very same people. What can you do to monitor important parts of your life that you can't always keep your eyes on? Things like the far corners of a job site, or ranch, or let's say you've got a boat docked somewhere and you can't check on it every day. Cellular security cameras from Defend are the answer. These cameras are very easy to install. No Wi-Fi required, no complex setup process. You don't need to be a master electrician to do it. No running wires all over the place. You just mount the camera, turn it on, and automatically connects to the strongest available
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36:04 Tucker Carlson? So where does this leave us now? Is either one of those wars gonna end anytime soon? Is it possible that either one is resolved in a way that doesn't hurt the US? And what is the motive behind getting the US military, American taxpayers and service members involved in wars in Ukraine and Iran that can't possibly benefit us? Why would you want to do that? And why has our political class allowed it to happen? Those are some of the questions that we asked Professor John Mearsheimer in an interview that every person should listen to. Every American should watch this. So without further delay, here's Professor John Mearsheimer. Professor Mearsheimer, thank you very much. The most vindicated man in America. I think of you all the time.
36:48 Tucker Carlson? By the way, your piece on the Israeli lobby came out in 2006. I just checked. The book came out in 2007, so 20 years ago, and it was widely derided, universally derided in the media as a conspiracy theory. There is no such thing. If that book came out today, how do you think it would sell? Oh, I think it would sell lots of copies.
37:13 Speaker 03 There's no question about that. It sold lots of copies then, although the lobby went to enormous lengths to suppress it. Do you know Abe Foxman, the former head of the ADL?
37:26 Tucker Carlson? Really?
37:26 Speaker 03 Wrote a book attacking our book before our book came out. It was due to come out the same day our book was supposed to come out.
37:37 Tucker Carlson? Actually?
37:38 Speaker 03 Actually, yeah. He wrote a book, Abe Foxman, that was a direct attack on our book before our book was published and he didn't have the page proofs or anything. He was basing his attack on what we had said in the article written the year before. And it was scheduled to come out on exactly the same day that our book came out. And then, of course, the lobby went to enormous lengths to make sure that we got as little attention as possible. They ended up getting us canceled at Google. We were supposed to give a big talk at Google and the lobby moved in and got that talk canceled. We were supposed to give a big talk at the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, which the lobby then got canceled.
38:22 Tucker Carlson? Because the lobby doesn't exist. It's just a conspiracy theory. And if you disagree, the lobby will cancel you.
38:27 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
38:30 Tucker Carlson? Well, I'm just grateful that you lived long enough to see yourself vindicated, completely vindicated, and not just on that question, but on many others. So now, this has got to be, as someone who assesses the world for a living, one of the most interesting moments of your life, because the world is, I don't, well, where are we? Let's just start there. You look out, and what do you see?
38:51 Speaker 03 Nothing but trouble everywhere. And that makes it incredibly interesting.
38:57 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
38:57 Speaker 03 And depressing at the same time. I do wake up sometimes in the morning depressed at the thought that I'm now going to have to go read all the newspapers and all the websites and get the bad news. But it is a fascinating world and trying to make sense of it is a very interesting business. So
39:15 Speaker 03 You know, the idea of coming here to talk to you is very enticing because we get to sort of feel our feel our way around and try and figure out what's going on.
39:23 Tucker Carlson? It's just incredible. And it, I don't know the answer. That's why I'm grateful you're here, but I, I sense that this is a, this is a change that history will record as profound. Like this is not just a bump in the road. This is a, this is a detour.
39:38 Speaker 03 I think with regard to both the Ukraine war and the war against Iran, profound change is going to result from both. I think that Putin is going to win in Ukraine. Ukraine is going to end up as a dysfunctional, rump state. I think in the process of this war, NATO has been wrecked. The US, the US European transatlantic relationship has been badly damaged. And if you go to the Middle East, I think the Iranians are going to come out of this war in much better shape than they went into the war on February 28th.
40:18 Speaker 03 And I think that America's position in the Middle East, and certainly Israel's position, is going to be badly damaged as a result of this war.
40:29 Tucker Carlson? Those are my instincts as well. Along the way to that outcome, which, I mean, nothing's guaranteed, but I strongly agree with your assessment. I think that's very likely to happen in both places, but all kinds of other things could happen. So as bad things, very destructive things. So as you look at both conflicts, which gives you more concern?
40:50 Speaker 03 I find it hard to answer that question because I'm so concerned about both conflicts.
40:55 Tucker Carlson? Let's start with Ukraine.
40:56 Speaker 03 Yeah. And I would just say as a general point, I think that the worst outcome in both cases, and I can expound on each, is the possibility of nuclear weapons being used. And let's start with Ukraine, as you say.
41:12 Speaker 03 The Ukrainians, with strong support from mainly the Europeans but also the United States, have ramped up their drone war and missile war against the territory of Russia. In other words, they're striking deep into Russia and they're doing significant damage inside of Russia. And the Russians believe that this has to stop, especially since the Europeans and the Americans are talking about increasing the volume and quality of the attacks in the future.
41:46 Tucker Carlson? The Trump administration.
41:49 Speaker 03 The Trump administration, yeah. I don't think President Trump himself, but I think the deep state is committed to the Ukraine war still. I mean, Trump has pulled away in a lot of respects, but I think the deep state remains committed, and certainly the Europeans remain deeply committed, to helping Ukraine inflict punishment on the civilian population and on infrastructure deep inside of Russia. And the Russians are having the devil of a time stopping that. And the end result is that there is increasing talk inside of Russia that the only solution
42:29 Speaker 03 to this problem is for Russia to attack with conventional weaponry to start with European countries or NATO countries. In other words, Russia has to stop limiting its attacks to Ukraine, and it has to start thinking about attacking inside of Europe, but with conventional weapons. And the view of many inside of Russia is that if that doesn't work, if the conventional weaponry doesn't stop the attacks on Mother Russia, then what Russia should do is use limited nuclear attacks against NATO countries to send a very clear signal to the Europeans
43:13 Speaker 03 and to the United States that they better... Stop, or this will escalate out of control. So I think there is a serious possibility. I don't think it's a likely possibility, but I think there's a serious possibility that nuclear weapons will be used in the Ukraine war.
43:32 Tucker Carlson? There's been very little coverage in the American press of Ukrainian-European-American attacks on the Russian homeland. To what extent have they caused damage and casualties? And they're serious attacks?
43:46 Speaker 03 Well, they've caused serious damage to the energy infrastructure, and they occasionally kill a good number of Russian citizens. This is nothing like the bombing attacks in World War II,
44:01 Tucker Carlson? Right.
44:01 Speaker 03 or even the American bombing campaign in Vietnam. It's not on that scale. But from a Russian perspective, any serious attacks on Mother Russia are unacceptable. And the problem that Putin faces is that there has long been widespread criticism inside Russia that he has not waged the war against Ukraine vigorously enough. The fact is that Putin and the Russian military, of course, have gone to great lengths to minimize the number of Ukrainian civilians who have been killed. It's very important to understand, you'd never know this from reading the mainstream media in the West.
44:41 Tucker Carlson? No, because he's Hitler.
44:43 Speaker 03 Yes. That the Russians have actually not waged a serious punishment campaign against the civilian population inside of Ukraine, with the possible exception of destroying the electrical grid. But even there, the end result was that not many civilians were killed. But what's happening here is that pressure is beginning to build on Putin to up the ante, to escalate, because of these attacks on Russian infrastructure and on the Russian civilian population. And the pressure is really building. And you see this in the writings of Sergey Karagunov, who is the principal proponent of the view that I just described.
45:25 Speaker 03 Sergey Karagunov says that when he first proposed this view shortly after the war in Ukraine started, this is back in February of 2022, most people viewed him as an outlier. They didn't take his arguments seriously. He says now that the overwhelming majority of people that he talks to inside the Russian elite and even inside the broader population agree with his view that it's time for the Russians to take the gloves off and to begin to attack into Eastern Europe with conventional weapons to start with, of course. But then if that doesn't work, use nuclear weapons. It's time to send a clear message to the West that their attacks on the Russian homeland,
46:09 Speaker 03 their attacks deep into Russia have to stop.
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47:31 Tucker Carlson? I don't want to be, well, before I get to my theories about it, what would be the motive of the United States and Western European countries to accelerate and to fund drone and missile attacks into Russia? Like, what do they hope to achieve by doing that?
47:49 Speaker 03 Well, the Karagunov argument, which I think is correct, is that the Russians believe that they don't think that this is a red line. People in the West, especially in Europe, think they can continue to up the ante and increase the number of attacks and the quality of the attacks, or the lethality of the attacks. Well, there's a belief that this will bring Putin to the negotiating table and that Ukraine will be able to get a favorable deal. In other words, if we increase the scope and scale of these attacks, Putin will surrender.
48:26 Tucker Carlson? Readings will continue until morale improves, kind of thing?
48:29 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah. And so that's the idea. And the argument that people like Karagunov make is that the only way that we can reverse this situation is make it clear to the West that there is a red line here. They don't understand that, but we're going to make it clear. And the way we're going to do it is we're going to attack NATO countries and we're going to dare them to counterattack. And the bet is that the Europeans and the Americans will back off and tell the Ukrainians, no more of those attacks. We won't assist you. We won't provide you with the drones and the intelligence to attack Mother Russia anymore. And that this will work. And the Karagunov view is if it doesn't work, what we'll then do is use nuclear weapons.
49:13 Speaker 03 And that will surely send a clear message that there is a red line here.
49:19 Tucker Carlson? I understand the reasoning. I disagree. I think that the European leaders and American leaders would be thrilled if Russia bombed the Baltics, Eastern Europe, even Western Europe. And I think they'd be more thrilled if they used nuclear weapons because it would give Western leaders a justification for waging an all-out direct war on Russia, which is what they want.
49:43 Speaker 03 I don't think the United States wants an all-out direct war on Russia.
49:47 Tucker Carlson? Good.
49:47 Speaker 03 If it was a nuclear war, that would mean that a large number of people would be incinerated. I mean...
49:54 Tucker Carlson? It does seem like, though, there's this pattern, and I think you see it in this current war, where the West provokes Russia to action so it can cast Russia as Nazi Germany and justify aggression against Russia.
50:07 Speaker 03 There's no question about that, but here we're talking about NATO getting involved in a war, and NATO's in no position to win a war against the Russians, number one. Number two, the last thing the United States wants, given that we're up to our eyeballs in alligators in the Middle East, plus we have to worry about containing China in East Asia, is a war in Ukraine against Russia. And then, most important of all, once you talk about the United States and Russia actually fighting each other, the threat of nuclear escalation goes up greatly, and the last thing we want is a nuclear war over Ukraine, because Ukraine is just not that important.
50:49 Tucker Carlson? It is to some people in the US government. I mean, their ancestors are from there, they identify with it, they really care about it. I mean, of course, I agree with everything you're saying, but I just, then people are not thinking clearly. They really think that by killing civilians or destroying infrastructure in Russia, they can get Putin to, who's under pressure from his right flank, as you just said, to say, "Okay, you're right."
51:14 Speaker 03 Well, Karinaev's point is, you're absolutely right that people in the West are not thinking clearly.
51:21 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
51:22 Speaker 03 So what we have to do is we have to focus the mind, and there's no better way to focus the mind than to pop off a couple nuclear weapons in Europe. That will focus their mind. They will get the message. They will understand that we are then out on the slippery slope to oblivion, and they will back off. But that's the only way you can get them to back off.
51:44 Tucker Carlson? Do you think the people in Russia saying this mean it?
51:46 Speaker 03 Yes. The thing you want to remember, and I think it's very hard for Americans in general to understand this, is that Russia views what's happening in Ukraine as an existential threat. Yes. Ukraine is their backyard. Think back to the Cuban Missile Crisis. The idea of the Soviet Union placing nuclear warheads on missiles inside of Cuba was categorically unacceptable to the United States. Just unacceptable. It was viewed as a threat to our survival. It was a mortal threat. Whether that was right or not is another issue, but that was
52:26 Speaker 03 the view. The Russians have made it clear since 2008, when we said that NATO would expand to the point where it included Ukraine, that this was an existential threat. It would not be allowed to happen. The war broke out in February 2022, and since that war broke out, we have a situation where Ukraine, which was backed by the United States, invaded Mother Russia. Just want to think about that. Ukraine, an ally of the United States, a country we're supporting, invaded Mother Russia. Then, that was in August of 2024, then in February
53:07 Speaker 03 of 2025, Ukraine attacked one leg of the strategic nuclear triad of Russia. It went after its nuclear bomber force. It was supported, again, Ukraine is supported by the United States. It gets intelligence from the United States. These kind of actions were unthinkable during the Cold War. So here you have a situation today where we are right on Russia's doorstep, and we are supporting Ukraine, which invaded Mother Russia and is launching attacks on its strategic nuclear triad. The Russians think that this is categorically unacceptable,
53:49 Speaker 03 and they're going to go to enormous lengths to prevent this from continuing. They're going to win the war. They're determined to win the war. And they're determined to make sure that NATO does not continue working with the Ukrainians to hit targets deep inside Russia. They feel like their survival is threatened. They feel like they've been backed into a corner. And when great powers feel like they've been backed into a corner, you never want to underestimate the risks that they're willing to take. And that's why people should take Karagunov's warnings so seriously.
54:25 Tucker Carlson? I, oh, I do. Um, but the administration doesn't seem to. And I'm confused by why, as a candidate, Donald Trump bragged about, and I think, I think he meant it, I know he meant it, shutting down, you know, bringing a peace between Russia and Ukraine immediately, I can do it in one day, he said, he did seem motivated to do that. Um, he talked about it for years and then didn't do it. Why?
54:57 Speaker 03 Well, let me just start by reminding you that in his first term, when he came into office, he had two goals, two major foreign policy goals. One was to end engagement with China and move to a policy of containment. And he was very successful at that. But he also wanted to improve relations with Russia, with Putin in particular, and do everything he could to peel the Chinese and the Russians away from each other and get the Russians on our side of the ledger. That was his goal. But he was undermined by Russiagate. Just very important to understand that. So when Trump leaves office in 2021, relations between
55:41 Speaker 03 Russia and the United States have hardly improved at all. Now, when he comes into office in January of 2025, at that point in time, his goal is to do in the second term with regard to Russia, what he did in the first term. Okay. So he starts out on the right foot. And lots of people, me included, believe he has all the right instincts and that he's in a position where he can significantly improve relations with Russia, which would certainly be in our interest and maybe even end the Ukraine war, which would be in everybody's interest, including Ukraine's interest.
56:20 Speaker 03 But the problem that he runs into is twofold. First of all, he's ham-fisted when it comes to diplomacy. He's just not good at the art of the deal, at least at the diplomatic level.
56:33 Tucker Carlson? At all.
56:33 Speaker 03 Almost, yeah, at all. There's just no question about that at this point in time. So he fails to shut down the war. And of course, he's facing huge resistance from inside the deep state. Because there are lots of people inside the deep state who don't want to reach an accommodation with the Russians. And there are lots of people on the outside as well in the general foreign policy establishment who don't want to reach an accommodation with the Russians. So that's point number one. But point number two is he then gets deeply involved in the Middle East, especially with the Iran war. And in a very important way, he's now so consumed with Iran that he has hardly any time to pay attention to what's going on in Ukraine.
57:18 Speaker 03 And that allows all of these people in the deep state and in the foreign policy establishment who want to continue to have good relations with the Europeans and Ukrainians and antagonistic relations towards the Russians to dominate the diplomacy in Europe. So for that reason, we're basically back to square one with regard to Ukraine.
57:43 Tucker Carlson? And we have less influence in Europe than we have had in our lifetimes, I would say now.
57:49 Speaker 03 We have less.
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59:19 Tucker Carlson? It does seem like a kind of nihilism, though, to keep lobbying missiles and drones into mainland Russia. Because like, no normal person thinks that that's going to achieve the stated effect. It can only result in something horrible happening. Like I-
59:37 Speaker 03 Let me make two points.
59:38 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
59:39 Speaker 03 One is, if you think about the Russian bombing campaign against Ukraine.
59:46 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
59:47 Speaker 03 Although the Russians have not killed many Ukrainians, as I said before, it was not a punishment campaign. They have done a huge amount of damage to infrastructure inside of Ukraine. The Russian bombing campaign against Ukraine has been much more extensive than the Ukrainian bombing campaign against Russia. But we have seen no evidence that the Ukrainians are willing to throw their hands up and surrender.
1:00:18 Tucker Carlson? Smart.
1:00:18 Speaker 03 Therefore, why would you expect the Russians to throw their hands up?
1:00:23 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:00:23 Speaker 03 And surrender? And in fact, given our previous discussion five minutes ago, what the Russians are talking about doing now in response is attacking into Eastern Europe.
1:00:34 Tucker Carlson? It just seems like there is this misperception, and you see this in a lot of other theaters and countries. Of the leadership of Russia. So we tell ourselves that Putin is an absolute dictator, Chairman Mao-style dictator, who can do whatever he wants, who's got total autonomy, sovereignty in his own country, that there are no competing political forces, he's not under pressure from anyone domestically, he just like wakes up and decides what to do. That's completely false. And then, two, that he's like the most scary Russian nationalist who's ever lived, he hates the West, he wants to rebuild the Soviet Empire. Like, that's not true either. He's pretty moderate by modern Russian standards, no?
1:01:15 Speaker 03 He's very moderate.
1:01:16 Tucker Carlson? Yeah, I know.
1:01:17 Speaker 03 People who argue that we should get rid of him and we'll get, you know, a real peace-knick in his place are living in a dream world. As I said before, he's being criticized far and wide inside of Russia for not having waged the war vigorously enough. In fact, going back to when the war started in 2022, I've argued on a number of occasions that if I were playing his hand, I would have mobilized the Russian military much more quickly than he did, and I would have played hardball in ways that he has not played. So he has been, I don't want to say he's been a pussycat, but the idea that he's been this ruthless leader on the same scale as someone like Adolf Hitler is a laughable
1:02:01 Speaker 03 argument. But what's happened in the West is that we've created this caricature of him, and we've created this Russian threat that bears no resemblance to reality. I mean, you see this when people talk about the danger of Russia conquering Eastern Europe. In other words, a lot of people are saying, we've got to stand up to the Russians now because they're on the verge of conquering all of Ukraine, and once they're done with Ukraine, they're going to move into Eastern Europe. And Putin's ultimate goal is to recreate the Soviet Empire, and of course, he has the wherewithal to do that. That's one set of arguments that you hear. But then you hear the argument that the Ukrainians now
1:02:43 Speaker 03 have the Russians on the ropes. The Russians are in deep trouble. The Russian military is suffering enormous casualties. They're being pushed back to Ukrainians by the Ukrainians. These are two completely different sets of arguments that are at odds with each other.
1:02:59 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:02:59 Speaker 03 And the question is, which one is true? And the argument that the Russians are on their back feet is wrong. The Russians are moving forward, they're steadily, but slowly, winning the war. But the idea that they're going to conquer all of Ukraine, not going to happen. The idea that they're going to conquer territory in Eastern Europe, not going to happen. But people in the West make that argument, this is especially true in Europe. Because they want to create a Russian boogeyman so that the Ukrainians stay in the fight. We continue to support the Ukrainians and we go to great lengths to continue to wreck Russia. There are lots of people, it's important to understand this, who want to wreck Russia.
1:03:42 Speaker 03 They want to continue to do everything they can to wreck the Russian economy. More and more sanctions, that's what we have to do. And support the Ukrainians on the battlefield so that they can turn the tide. And then support the attacks with drones and missiles against Mother Russia. Because that will affect the civilian population in ways that cause the population to rise up against Putin. There's lots of people who still believe this, despite the fact that after four plus years, it hasn't worked. And if anything, the Russians are going to win the war.
1:04:19 Tucker Carlson? I still, after watching this all these years, I still don't fully understand the motive. Here you have one of the most beautiful countries and cultures in the world with flaws. But compared to what? I mean, Russia is a beautiful place, a beautiful culture, a sense of itself. And it's a civilization, not just a country. Why would you want to destroy it? What drives people? I understand why you'd be mad that Putin moved into Eastern Ukraine, fine. But destroy Russia? Where does that come from?
1:04:49 Speaker 03 Well, the United States during the unipolar moment, and unipolar moment runs from about 1992, immediately after the Soviet Union collapses, up until about 2017, is by definition the only great power in the world. And we don't like the idea of being challenged when we are the unipole. We think that it's our way or the highway. And you want to remember that in 2000, this is in the middle of the unipolar moment, Putin takes over in Russia. And Putin, over the course of the time from 2000 up to 2026, has stood up to the Americans.
1:05:32 Speaker 03 He gave a famous speech at Munich in 2007, where he made it very clear to the West that he was sick and tired of how the West was treating Russia. And the fact is, the United States does not like anybody standing up to it. Right? You have to do it our way, right? You have to be subservient. And Putin was not subservient. Contrast him, Putin, with Boris Yeltsin, who ran Russia during the 1990s. Yeltsin basically did what we told him to do. We had him in our hip pocket. That was not true with Putin. So for that reason, we got increasingly angry with Putin as the unipolar moment wore on.
1:06:17 Speaker 03 And then, once Russia becomes a great power in roughly 2017, the United States is interested in knocking Russia out of the ranks of the great powers. Right? We understand that they've become a great power, but we'd like to knock them out of the ranks. And of course, you want to understand that the Russians, after 2017, when they're a great power, are resisting our efforts to bring Ukraine into NATO. And this is just unacceptable to us. So we begin to think of ways to undermine Russia, to knock Russia out of the ranks of the great powers. And if you fast forward to late 2021, early 2022,
1:07:02 Speaker 03 remember, the war in Ukraine starts...
1:07:06 Speaker 03 On February 24th, 2022, if you go back, let's say to December 27, 2021, December 2021, and ramp forward to when the war actually starts, what you see, if you look carefully, is that Putin is going to great lengths to try to avoid a war. He does not want a war.
1:07:28 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:07:28 Speaker 03 The United States makes no effort to work with the Russians to avoid a war. It's really quite remarkable.
1:07:38 Tucker Carlson? Well, and not just that, provokes Russia by sending Kamala Harris to the Munich Security Conference and saying in public to Zelensky, "We want you to join NATO," on camera.
1:07:47 Speaker 03 Absolutely. This is right before.
1:07:49 Tucker Carlson? Yes, in February.
1:07:50 Speaker 03 In February. That's exactly right. And then, just think about this. The war starts February 24th. Shortly thereafter, I mean, a day or two later, Putin sends a message to Zelensky and says, "Let's start negotiating." They first start negotiating in Belarus, and then they go to Istanbul. These are the famous Istanbul negotiations, okay? This is in March, early April of 2022, almost immediately after the war starts. And it looks like the Ukrainians and the Russians may be able to cut a deal. They did not cut the deal, but they're getting closer and closer. Things are working out very well. What happens? Boris Johnson, with support from the United States, of course,
1:08:35 Speaker 03 comes in and he tells the Ukrainians to walk away from the negotiations. Now, the question you want to ask yourself is, "Why did this happen?"
1:08:45 Tucker Carlson? Yes, I've wanted to ask him that, but he won't, he won't talk to me.
1:08:48 Speaker 03 The reason it happened is that we thought that economic sanctions would bring the Russians to their knees. And that the Ukrainians, who we had armed and trained, we meaning the West, had armed and trained between 2014, when the crisis first broke out, and 2022, when the war broke out, the actual war. In that, in that eight-year period, we had armed, we meaning the West, had armed and trained the Ukrainians. And they were a quite formidable fighting force, as the Russians found out over the course of 2022. We believed that the Ukrainian army on the battlefield, coupled with economic sanctions, would do the Russians in.
1:09:33 Speaker 03 And that's why we told Zelensky to walk away from the negotiations in Istanbul. And you want to also remember that late in the fall of that year, 2022, General Milley, who was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, understood that the Ukrainians, by that point in time, had reached the high-water mark. Remember, the Ukrainians had launched two successful offensives against the Russians in 2022, one in Kharkiv, one in Kherson. And Milley said, "This is wonderful, but it's time to cut a deal now, because as time goes by, the balance of power will shift against Ukraine
1:10:18 Speaker 03 and in favor of the Russians." Because at that point, Putin was beginning to mobilize the Russian army in a serious way. I think he called up 300,000 troops in September of 2022. But anyway, what happened was that Milley was told to cease and desist from making that argument. They put Milley in the back closet, said, "No more talk about cutting a deal now, because we think we've got the Russians on the ropes." And you remember, it's in early June, I think it was June 4th of 2023. Remember, 2022 is when the war starts, in June of 2023. That's when the Ukrainians launched that massive offensive,
1:11:02 Speaker 03 where they think they're going to affect the blitzkrieg and bring the Russian military to its knees. This just shows you that we thought... The success that the Ukrainians were having on the battlefield, coupled with the sanctions, would allow us to defeat Russia and knock Russia out of the ranks of the great powers and put an end to having to deal with Vladimir Putin, who wouldn't dance to our tune.
1:11:31 Tucker Carlson? I kind of get it conceptually. And I have no question that you're describing the thinking of the people who made these decisions. But I think if you just ponder like the potential consequences of their plan. So you knock Russia out of the ranks of the great powers. You displace Putin somehow. What happens then? This is the biggest country on earth. It's diverse. It's got all kinds of ethnic groups that do get along sort of. But like it could break apart and it's got a of the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. Destabilizing Russia could be really dangerous for everybody. Did that occur to them?
1:12:09 Speaker 03 No.
1:12:10 Tucker Carlson? Now, how stupid are they?
1:12:12 Speaker 03 Incredibly. Look, as I said to you before, you know, I've studied a lot of international relations over time. And when you corner great powers, when you threaten their survival, you do not want to underestimate how risky the policies will be that they are willing to pursue, okay? And I think if our policy had actually worked, if it looked like the Russians were going to be knocked out of the ranks of the great powers, they would have then used nuclear weapons.
1:12:44 Tucker Carlson? Yes. Or if it did, if the government collapsed, whatever that meant, and we succeeded in killing Putin, which I know we've been trying to do on and off for a long time. Like what then? What if there was a civil war, ethnic breakup of Russia? Like, how is that good for ever, for the rest of the world? It's terrible for Russia, but what about the rest of us? It's not good for us either. Chaos is not good. Is it?
1:13:09 Speaker 03 Absolutely, you're correct. I mean, we could have easily lived with the Russians.
1:13:14 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:13:14 Speaker 03 Putin wanted to have good relations with us.
1:13:16 Tucker Carlson? He wanted to join NATO.
1:13:18 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's the idea that Putin was missing the Soviet Union to the point that he wanted to recreate the Soviet Union and the Soviet Empire in East Europe bears no resemblance to what is in the historical record.
1:13:36 Tucker Carlson? No, it's a child's explanation of it.
1:13:38 Speaker 03 It's just crazy. And by the way, just to go back to Trump, I think Trump's instincts on both China and Russia, starting with his first term and even his second term, in the beginning, his instincts were correct in both cases. It was time to abandon engagement, contain China, and with regard to Russia, it was time to have good relations with Russia, to end the war in Ukraine. This is in his second term because the war didn't take place in his first term. So I think Trump's instincts were good. But again, Trump's problem is that when it comes to diplomacy, he has the Midas touch in reverse. And the end result is that he's made a hash of things with the Russians.
1:14:20 Tucker Carlson? So what's the motive of European leaders, of Macron and Starmer and Merz in Western Europe, and then the various Eastern European leaders? Like, why are they monomaniacally focused on Putin?
1:14:34 Speaker 03 I don't know for sure. It just seems to me that they have convinced themselves that Putin is the second coming of Adolf Hitler. You know, you make these arguments enough times, you come to believe them yourselves sometimes. I don't know what they're thinking. I mean, there's just no evidence to support this argument. In terms of what Putin has said over time, or what he's written over time, or if you just look at the power that's built into the Russian army. This army's had a difficult time capturing the eastern one-fifth of Ukraine. The idea that it's going to conquer all of Ukraine, then roll into Eastern Europe,
1:15:19 Speaker 03 is not a serious argument. And again, he's never said that he was interested in doing that. This is not the second coming of the Wehrmacht. But for some reason, the European elites have convinced themselves that this is the case. And it seems that they won't listen to common sense on this issue.
1:15:39 Tucker Carlson? So the idea is that the largest country in the world by landmass, with the most resources on earth, wants to capture overcrowded, collapsing welfare states and like, do what with them? It's like so nuts, like what would the motive be? Why would the Russians want any of these? Maybe Poland, but even Poland, why would they want that?
1:16:02 Speaker 03 Well, let me offer an alternative view as to why they wouldn't want it. You just, to the one that you just described. First of all, the Russians controlled all of those countries in Eastern and Central Europe
1:16:16 Tucker Carlson? Yeah, I remember.
1:16:16 Speaker 03 During the entire Cold War. And it did not work out very well, right?
1:16:21 Tucker Carlson? And they didn't enjoy it, actually.
1:16:22 Speaker 03 Yeah, the most powerful political ideology on the planet is nationalism.
1:16:27 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:16:28 Speaker 03 And nationalism is all about sovereignty and self-determination. And whether you're Polish, Czech, Hungarian, German, you want to control your own destiny. And the last thing you want is another country, like the Soviet Union, or now Russia, invading your country. And if you're Russia and you invade that country, what you're going to find is a significant amount of resistance. And just think about the Soviet Union. They had to put down a major insurrection in East Germany in 53.
1:17:00 Tucker Carlson? Yep.
1:17:00 Speaker 03 They had to invade Hungary in 56. They had to invade Czechoslovakia in 68. They almost had to invade Poland three separate times. Then they had to deal with the Albanians, the Yugoslavs, and the Romanians, right? Been there, done that, did not work out very well.
1:17:17 Tucker Carlson? You went to West Point, you served as an army officer in the Cold War. Do you think, having studied it, that Russia?
1:17:26 Tucker Carlson? Got a lot out of its empire? Like, was it worth it for them? The Soviet Empire, the Warsaw Pact, the Eastern Bloc? Was that worth having?
1:17:35 Speaker 03 Great question, but let me just say, I was actually an Air Force officer. I was an enlisted man in the Army before I went to West Point. But then I was an Air Force officer.
1:17:45 Tucker Carlson? Really?
1:17:45 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
1:17:46 Tucker Carlson? But you went to?
1:17:47 Speaker 03 I went to West Point. You want to remember that before 1947, that was when the National Security Act created the Air Force Academy. There was no, and created an independent air force. That the air force was actually the Army Air Corps. So West Point provided officers to the Army and to the Air Force. And when I graduated from West Point in 1970, there were a set of limited conditions under which you could go into the Air Force. And I qualified, so I was in the Air Force rather than the Army. The vast majority of my classmates went into the Army, but I went into the Air Force. But I had been in the Army as an enlisted man before I went to West Point.
1:18:31 Speaker 03 So I actually, including my West Point time, spent 10 years in the military. But to go back to your excellent question about the Soviet Union and its experience in Eastern Europe. The reason that the Soviet Union ended up in Eastern Europe is because on June 22nd, 1941, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa for the express purpose of destroying the Soviet Union. Thankfully, the Soviets won the war. But to win the war, they had to drive across Eastern and Central Europe into Germany.
1:19:13 Speaker 03 You remember, it was the Red Army that went into Berlin.
1:19:17 Tucker Carlson? April of 45.
1:19:18 Speaker 03 Exactly. And that's when Hitler, of course, committed suicide. And that war ended on May 8th, 1945. And the Soviets ended up, needless to say, occupying virtually all of Eastern Europe. But what happens after that is that the Cold War breaks out. And you have the United States on the other side of what we came to call the Iron Curtain, called the intra-German border, and the Soviet Union on the other side.
1:19:54 Speaker 03 And I think that there were two reasons that the Soviets had a vested interest and we had a vested interest in keeping that status quo. One is, we didn't trust each other, and we were afraid if we got out, the Soviets would conquer more territory, and they were afraid that if they got out, we would move eastward. That was one reason. But the other reason that we both stayed was the German problem. You want to remember that World War I and World War II were both all about Germany. Very important to understand that. Yeah. We forgot that in the Cold War, because the Soviets defeated Germany. Nevertheless, what happens after 1945 is that Germany is cut in half.
1:20:37 Speaker 03 The Soviets take one side, and we take the other side. And most people don't talk about this in polite company, but we solved the German problem. We cut the country into two parts. Exactly. They occupied, the Soviets, one half. We occupied the other half. And although the Cold War was somewhat dangerous, it was altogether pretty peaceful, as these things go. I mean, we did have the Cuban Missile Crisis and a handful of crises over Berlin, so I don't want to overstate the case. But we never came close to having a serious war in the heart of Europe, and we solved the German problem. But that's why the Soviets stayed. But what eventually happens is two things.
1:21:22 Speaker 03 And this leads to the end of the Cold War and the end of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe. Number one, the Soviet and the Soviet economy begins to run aground. It really starts in the mid 1960s, and it accelerates in the early 1980s. And of course, Gorbachev comes along, and the rest is history. But it's it's fundamental flaws in the Soviet economy that eventually brings the Soviet Union down. But the second thing that happens, getting back to what we were talking about before, is that the Soviets understand that occupying Eastern Europe and Central Europe is incredibly expensive.
1:22:02 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:22:02 Speaker 03 Right. And the people don't want us there.
1:22:04 Tucker Carlson? Right.
1:22:05 Speaker 03 And it's time to go home. And once you go home, a good idea would be to stay out.
1:22:11 Tucker Carlson? Yes. So it wasn't a net benefit. It's not like they stripped it of its resources and got rich doing it.
1:22:16 Speaker 03 Well, they did strip a lot of resources out of Germany, uh, early in the Cold War. But afterwards, no, it was.
1:22:23 Tucker Carlson? Industrial resources, but I mean, they didn't, they weren't there for the coal.
1:22:26 Speaker 03 No, no, no, no. It was not economically a net.
1:22:29 Tucker Carlson? That's what I'm saying, right? It was not, it's not a win.
1:22:32 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah. By the way, if you just think about the collapse of the great empires, you know, we read about the great empires like the British Empire, the Belgian Empire, the French Empire, the Dutch Empire, and so forth and so on. They've all gone away. Okay? And the question you want to ask yourself is why did they all go away?
1:22:50 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:22:50 Speaker 03 There are two reasons that are directly related to what we're talking about. Number one is nationalism. These people in places like India and the Congo, you name it.
1:23:02 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:23:02 Speaker 03 And this was true of the United States back in the day.
1:23:05 Tucker Carlson? Of course.
1:23:06 Speaker 03 Seventeen seventy-six, did not want the British or the French or the Portuguese telling them how their politics should be run. They wanted to be independent nation-states. What I'm telling you is that nationalism, this incredibly powerful force, was the number one reason for bringing down these empires. The second reason was that the economic benefits, once the industrial revolution comes, melt away. Right? Before the industrial revolution, we're in a world where commerce is of great importance. You can exploit these colonies and they make a lot of sense economically.
1:23:51 Speaker 03 But by the 20th century, by the time the Industrial Revolution is in full swing, these empires are basically an albatross around your neck. India is an albatross around Britain's neck, in my opinion. And you'll notice, just going to who the powerful countries are in the 20th century. Germany, the United States, and Russia slash the Soviet Union. The only one that has an empire is Germany, and it's a tiny empire that it acquires in Africa in the late 1800s.
1:24:26 Tucker Carlson? Yeah, tiny, tiny, Namibia.
1:24:28 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, exactly. They're not a major imperial power. So the three behemoths on the planet, Soviet Union, United States, and Germany, do not have empires. Britain, France, Belgium, they have empires. And what good are those empires? The economic benefits are small.
1:24:50 Tucker Carlson? No, it's really the aesthetic benefits that they were after. Like, they just, they fall in love, they're sentimental about their empires.
1:24:56 Speaker 03 Absolutely.
1:24:57 Tucker Carlson? But they're not justified by the math.
1:24:59 Speaker 03 Yeah, they're not justified by the math. And then go back to the nationalism part of the story, right? You know, when you occupy these places, you run into resistance.
1:25:09 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
1:25:10 Speaker 03 Vietnam, French experience in Vietnam, American experience in Vietnam.
1:25:14 Tucker Carlson? Algeria.
1:25:15 Speaker 03 Afghanistan, Algeria. Right, that's exactly what you run into. You know, I've, in 1979, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, everybody said, this is the end of the world, the Soviets are on the march, we're in deep trouble, and we have to do something to counter the Soviets. I said at the time, this is dead wrong, this is wonderful news for us. If you're arms raising with the Soviets, if you're engaged in a security competition with the Soviets, what you want them to do is jump into a place like Afghanistan, just like they should have been happy that we went into Vietnam, right? You're jumping into a quagmire.
1:25:56 Tucker Carlson? You said that out loud in 79?
1:25:58 Speaker 03 I said it out loud, but there was no internet at the time.
1:26:02 Tucker Carlson? So you have a long history of countercultural pronouncements, huh? Well, how did people respond when you said that? Because, I mean, even I remember, I was 10 years old, I remember that vividly, it was hysteria over the invasion of Afghanistan.
1:26:16 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah. No, you should be.
1:26:20 Speaker 03 In fact, you want to know something, just to go to Putin. If you really want to do Putin in, you should welcome in him into the Western part of Ukraine.
1:26:29 Tucker Carlson? Totally right.
1:26:30 Speaker 03 Where there are all those ethnic Ukrainians.
1:26:32 Tucker Carlson? Exactly.
1:26:32 Speaker 03 Who will put up a huge amount of resistance. Cause the Russians untold trouble, right?
1:26:38 Tucker Carlson? Let's completely agree.
1:26:40 Speaker 03 Yeah, I often say the two principal obstacles to aggression today are number one, nuclear weapons and number two nationalism.
1:26:54 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:26:55 Speaker 03 If you really think about it, invading other countries and trying to, you know, do social engineering is going to get you into a lot of trouble.
1:27:03 Tucker Carlson? And I know, and for all the hate, much of it so well deserved toward Israel now. Part of me always feel sorry for Israel because I don't think they're brilliant at all. I don't think they're even very clever because they're ignoring the lessons that you're just describing now, which don't ever change, which is over hubris leads to destruction. Overreach, territorial overreach always weakens you. You can hold Gaza for 65 years or whatever. It's not even, not even 60 years, actually. And the West Bank and all that stuff, but like in the end Lebanon, Israel is kind of ensuring its own destruction by its behavior right now. And I feel sorry for them. They don't seem to know that.
1:27:48 Speaker 03 Well, they have, let me make two points on this. The Israelis have no sense of the limits of power.
1:27:54 Tucker Carlson? Yes, exactly.
1:27:55 Speaker 03 And we have a lot of that.
1:27:57 Tucker Carlson? Oh, I know we do.
1:27:58 Speaker 03 You know, right? But the Israelis have no sense of the limits of military power. They think you can just pound people into submission and you can do that sometimes, but most of the time you can't. Second point I would make to you is if you think about the whole Zionist enterprise, you go back to 1900 and ramp forward to the present. It's an amazing accomplishment that small numbers of European Jews coming out of Europe.
1:28:33 Speaker 03 Could go to the Middle East and could carve out a state, a Jewish state in a sea of Arabs.
1:28:46 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:28:47 Speaker 03 Palestinians. It's really quite remarkable.
1:28:50 Tucker Carlson? Reviving a dead language along the way. No, the whole thing is amazing. I totally agree.
1:28:53 Speaker 03 Yeah. But in the early years, certainly up until 1967, the Israelis have a really powerful sense of the limits of what they could accomplish. And they are very careful, right? They don't have the United States as a great power ally at the time. There's no Israel lobby of any consequence, certainly before 1948. And they're in a sea of hostile neighbors. So they have to be very cautious. They have to be tactically and strategically smart.
1:29:37 Speaker 03 But what happens to Israel over time is not only do the guardrails come off, or maybe put it in slightly different language, not only do the checks come off, but they develop this incredibly powerful military, right? Because of help from the United States, and of course, this is where the Israel lobby comes in, right? But they become a Goliath. They look like a David to begin with, if you think about it. But over time, that David turns into Goliath. And there are no guardrails, right?
1:30:18 Speaker 03 The United States will not only sanction anything they do, it will support what they do with material resources and protect them diplomatically. Just think about the genocide in Gaza. I mean, here we have a people that was a victim of one of the greatest genocides in recorded history not long ago, committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.
1:30:48 Speaker 03 And the United States is complicitous in this genocide, both under the Biden administration and under the Trump administration. This is truly remarkable. And it just goes to show you that Israel can do almost anything, and we protect them, and we provide them with huge amounts of weaponry.
1:31:10 Speaker 03 And this has not worked to Israel's advantage. And in a very important way, the lobby, which is so essential for making this relationship work the way it does, is undermining Israel. All these people like Bill Ackman, who think that they're doing wonderful things for Israel, that they're protecting Israel, are living in a fool's paradise. The best thing that could happen to Israel is if Donald Trump could actually get tough with them, read them the riot act.
1:31:42 Tucker Carlson? Of course.
1:31:43 Speaker 03 And that was true of many previous presidents. People like Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter, these people were not anti-Semites. They actually were Philo-Semites of the first order, and they cared about Israel's security. They just thought that Israel was going about providing for its own security in the most foolish ways, and they wanted to crack down on the Israelis. But they couldn't do that, because the lobby made it impossible to do. And the end result is that Israel is in a deep hole. And what is it doing? Digging deeper. Why? Because it can get away with it, and because it believes that there's got to be some magic military formula that we can find to win against Hezbollah,
1:32:28 Speaker 03 to win against Hamas, to win against Iran, and to have absolute security.
1:32:34 Tucker Carlson? None of these people are parents? Because a parent would know, like, buying your children vodka, probably not a good long-term strategy for their health and happiness. That's basically what we've done for Israel, just to bed at all their worst impulses, backstop them when they get into trouble, made excuses when they get arrested or hauled into the principal's office, just acted like a hysterical single mom, "My baby didn't do it!" You know what I mean? And like, the kid just becomes increasingly unruly and self-destructive. Like, that's exactly what we're watching, I think.
1:33:06 Speaker 03 I think Tucker, what we're saying here, and this gets back to our conversation about how European leaders think about Putin as Hitler, and they think about this great Russian threat, and when we talk now about the Israelis, that there are just a lot of people who are not thinking straight these days. It's really quite remarkable.
1:33:25 Tucker Carlson? What is that? I agree with you. What is that?
1:33:27 Speaker 03 I don't know. I mean, it's a...
1:33:30 Tucker Carlson? Have you seen anything like it in all the years you've been?
1:33:32 Speaker 03 No, not at all. Not at all. I mean, first of all, in the mainstream media during the Cold War, we had a much more vibrant and open-ended debate about foreign policy than we do now. We have a big debate now, but it's sort of the alternative media platforms.
1:33:51 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:33:52 Speaker 03 Like your show, Judge Napoleons, and all these other shows, on one side, and the mainstream media on the other side. But inside the mainstream media, it's truly amazing the extent to which people parrot this conventional wisdom and prevent voices that get heard on the alternative media from intruding into the mainstream.
1:34:14 Tucker Carlson? It's such a narrow band. It's not even a debate, really.
1:34:17 Speaker 03 Yeah. And the thing is that most people in the United States, and I believe around the world for sure, understand that what they're hearing from the mainstream media and what they're hearing from their leaders makes no sense. And this, of course, is why someone like Trump gets elected, right? Because Trump says things that are counter to the conventional wisdom. Forget what he actually does when he's in office. He ran on a platform that there's something fundamentally wrong, and the elites are bankrupt, and people voted for him. And of course, people who think that the establishment, whether you're talking
1:34:59 Speaker 03 about, you know, the foreign policymakers, people at think tanks, or in the mainstream media, if you think that they're bankrupt. In terms of how they're thinking about world politics, you're correct.
1:35:11 Tucker Carlson? But it's not even like a disagree. It's I listen to some of the stuff and I it's not even that I disagree. It's that I'm just confused by how anyone could think that just like basic observations about life that no rational person would deny. Don't push your enemies too far. Don't corner people because you cause them to have no option but to do something crazy. Bring give your opponent some wiggle room, like try to reach a nonviolent accommodation if possible. Don't, if you love someone, don't help them destroy themselves. These are just like obvious, like life lessons that everyone knows, and yet the people who run these countries seem determined to ignore them. So like, what is that?
1:35:52 Speaker 03 I don't know.
1:35:53 Tucker Carlson? And they're not all dumb. I know some of them. They're not dumb. They're not low IQ. It's like they're under a spell or delusion or I don't know what I I'm sincerely confused and it seems global or Western anyway.
1:36:06 Speaker 03 It's Western. No, there's no question about it. It's Western. It's Europe.
1:36:10 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
1:36:11 Speaker 03 And it's the United States. I don't believe it's true in East Asia. I think if you go talk to the Japanese and the South Koreans.
1:36:16 Tucker Carlson? Totally.
1:36:17 Speaker 03 Right. They they think basically like we do. They won't say that.
1:36:22 Tucker Carlson? And the Middle East, same thing.
1:36:24 Speaker 03 Oh, sure, sure, sure.
1:36:27 Speaker 03 I don't, I I simply don't have a good explanation, but just to add to your point. We also just have a lot of evidence over the past decade or so that thinking the way the elite has been thinking does not lead to a good ending. It's it's not like we've had great successes. It's not like the Israelis have had great successes. You know what I mean? I I kind of don't get it.
1:36:56 Tucker Carlson? So we're okay. So back just back to Ukraine. Sorry, I get I have too many questions. How do you think that, what's the most likely resolution to that? And when? If you had to guess?
1:37:08 Speaker 03 I think you're going to get a frozen conflict. And what's going to happen here is that the Russians are almost certainly going to end up conquering the four oblasts that they have now annexed. They fully control one of those oblasts, Luhansk, the one that gets the most attention in the media today, Duhansk. They control 85% of that, Donetsk. And they control about 75% of Zaporozhye and about 75% of Kherson. I think they will continue the war until they fully control all the territory in those
1:37:51 Speaker 03 four oblasts, which again, they've annexed along with Crimea. I would not be surprised if they actually end up taking more territory. I wouldn't be surprised if they take Odessa and Kharkiv as well. But that remains to be seen. I think it's quite clear that their progress on the battlefield has been relatively slow. And it's in large part, not because the Ukrainian ground forces are formidable troops, but because of drones. I think drones have made it very difficult for either side to move. But I think the Russians will end up conquering a huge slice of eastern Ukraine.
1:38:34 Speaker 03 And at some point, the Ukrainians and the Russians will stop firing at each other. There will be an armistice. This will be the frozen conflict. Ukraine will be a dysfunctional rump state, which it already is. And it will not join NATO. So the Russians will have achieved their major objective of preventing Ukraine from joining NATO. But the problem is, Tucker, that you will end up with a frozen conflict. And the Ukrainians will never accept the fact that Russia has annexed this territory. They will not see it as Russian territory. They will believe that this is sacred Ukrainian territory that has been illegally
1:39:19 Speaker 03 taken away from them and that they need to get back. So what this tells you is you will have poisonous relations between Russia on one hand and Ukraine on the other. And given that the Ukrainians are joined at the hip with the Europeans, this will mean that you are likely to have poisonous relations between Russia and Ukraine and the Europeans for the foreseeable future. This is a disastrous situation because it's easy to imagine how that frozen conflict turns into a hot conflict once again. I'm not saying that's likely, but there's one other very important dimension to this
1:40:04 Speaker 03 that we don't want to lose sight of. And that is that superimposed on the Ukraine-Russia conflict are six other potential flashpoints. One is Belarus. Two is Kaliningrad. Three is the Baltic Sea. Four is the melting Arctic. Five is Moldova. And six is the Black Sea. These are all potential flashpoints where you could get conflict between Russia on one side and the Europeans on the other side, or the Ukrainians on the other side. So Eastern Europe is going to be a very dangerous place for the foreseeable future.
1:40:52 Tucker Carlson? The amount of armaments moved into that region by the rest of the world is just beyond comprehension too. So it's incredibly well armed. People are still using Alban, you know, Enver Hodge's weapons stockpiles to fight wars around the world. So like when you move a lot of weapons into a region, the the tail on that is very long.
1:41:13 Speaker 03 Absolutely. And the Ukrainians will go to great lengths over time to get more and more weaponry. I mean, you have to understand that from Ukraine's point of view, Russia is an existential threat. You and I have paid a lot of attention in the previous conversation to the fact that from Russia's point of view, what's happening in Ukraine is an existential threat, which it certainly is. But if you're a Ukrainian leader and you see what's just happened, and the Russians are closer than ever to you, and they've taken territory of yours that you want back, you're going to see the Russians as an existential threat. And the Ukrainians will therefore go to great lengths to do everything they can to work with the Europeans and hopefully, from their point of view, with the United States, to solidify
1:41:58 Speaker 03 their position, to get armaments to protect themselves, which you can just marry to the point you were making.
1:42:05 Tucker Carlson? No, that's right. And and all of Eastern Europe, if you're the Romanians, the Hungarians, the Poles, I mean, they're all completely afraid of the Russians. And I get it.
1:42:14 Speaker 03 Take this a step further. What about nuclear weapons? Right? As we were saying before, this conflict has done enormous damage to NATO. And the American military footprint in Europe is shrinking. And one could argue that we're going to have remarkably few troops in Europe in the foreseeable future. Okay, who knows for sure how that will play out. But the importance of pivoting to Asia, the problems that we have in the Middle East, Europe is really number three on the list. And getting out of there will be a high priority, or getting large numbers of troops out of there will be a high priority, shifting the burden to the Europeans.
1:42:56 Speaker 03 But the problem is, the Germans don't have nuclear weapons. The Poles don't have nuclear weapons. And if you believe the Russians are 10 feet tall, and of course, the Poles, you know, it's in their mother's milk to believe that the Russians are 10 feet.
1:43:13 Tucker Carlson? And they're excitable.
1:43:14 Speaker 03 Yes. So, and, and, and the incentives for Poland to get nuclear weapons are very great.
1:43:20 Tucker Carlson? Oh, for sure. They'll get nuclear weapons, don't you think?
1:43:23 Speaker 03 I don't know.
1:43:24 Tucker Carlson? If Pakistan has some Poland, Poland's getting them. Poland, the industrial power of Europe now? Yeah, they're gonna have nuclear weapons, I would think.
1:43:31 Speaker 03 And the Germans, right? They're gonna have an incentive to get nuclear weapons, right? And then the question you have to ask yourself is if you're the Russians and you're watching the Germans, remember, these are the Germans, World War I, World War II. You're watching the Germans get nuclear weapons. How do you think about that? And if you see the Poles getting nuclear weapons, how do you think about that? Right? So, the potential for danger here is just not to be underestimated. I mean, we were talking before about the Sergey Karagunov scenario where the Russians use nuclear weapons in Eastern Europe because the Ukrainians are attacking Mother Russia with drones and missiles.
1:44:16 Speaker 03 Here, we're talking about a situation where Poland and Germany might go down the nuclear road and asking ourselves the question, what would be the Russian reaction?
1:44:29 Tucker Carlson? Before I ask you about what's happening in Iran, a mystery that I, I'd love to hear explained. Why is it that the very same people who pushed Donald Trump to war, regime change war against Iran, are literally the same people who pushed him to continue the regime change war against Russia, the war against Putin?
1:44:50 Speaker 03 Well, I think there are two reasons. Number one is that the influence of Israel on the American foreign policy establishment cannot be underestimated, in large part because of the lobby.
1:45:06 Speaker 03 And Israel and the lobby have a deep seated interest in making sure that the United States is militarily involved all over the world. Because they want an American military that's at the ready if Israel gets into trouble. So whenever you talk about restraint, like the Quincy Institute in Washington talks about restraint, this raises the hackles of the lobby. You notice there was this big-
1:45:39 Tucker Carlson? I think it's America's on the verge of being invaded, but because, which it's not, but because Israel might need the fire department to show up in an emergency and we've got to pay for that?
1:45:49 Speaker 03 Yes, you want a big fire department that is fighting wars and is honed to win those wars. And this is in Israel's interest. I'll show you a good piece of evidence that supports this point. There's a recent article in the New York Times about Israeli intelligence going into overdrive and tracking the activities of particular individuals. And in the New York Times-
1:46:19 Tucker Carlson? In the United States?
1:46:20 Speaker 03 In the United States, yes. And in the New York Times article, it was pointed out that the two people who have apparently have attracted the most attention are Steve Witkoff, because they want to know what he's up to, and Elbridge Colby. And since Elbridge Colby works mainly on China issues, the Times speculated on why Israel would be so interested in keeping a careful eye on Elbridge Colby. And the Times actually said at the end of the piece, it's probably because he's a restrainer. Right? He's interested in a restrained foreign policy. Colby does not want to be fighting wars everywhere.
1:47:02 Speaker 03 He once told me that he was opposed to the Iraq War back in 2003. He wants to concentrate on containing China, but he's not interested in fighting in Ukraine. He's a restrainer. And of course, the Israelis do not like restrainers. They do not like the Quincy Institute, right?
1:47:20 Tucker Carlson? So they're allowed to just spy on American citizens, but then continue to receive our tax dollars in order to fund spying on us?
1:47:26 Speaker 03 That's a, well, the answer is yes to that, or at least it's been yes to that in the past. But in answer to your question, the first reason here that we are, that our engagement in Ukraine is pushed by the same people who are pushing the Iran war is because of Israel and the Israel lobby and the influence that the lobby and Israel have and seeing the United States involved in places like Ukraine. The second reason is you have lots of Americans, Jews and non-Jews, who have roots in Ukraine.
1:48:07 Speaker 03 And those people believe strongly that Ukraine should be a sovereign state and that the Russians are the bad guys. And they believe that we should support the Ukrainians, hook, line and sinker. And the journalist Steve Kinzer has written a book on this that I believe is coming out later this year that explains this phenomenon in great detail. Steve, in his new book, shows how many Americans inside of the foreign policy establishment who have roots, family roots, in Eastern Europe, or in Ukraine, or in Russia, are deeply committed
1:48:51 Speaker 03 to supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia, which they see as the bad guy.
1:48:57 Tucker Carlson? Yeah, it was right around 1905 that there were quite a few loud voices in America saying, let's not have mass immigration from Eastern Europe because it's going to cause us massive problems down the line. When they were dismissed, it's crazy. Just want to say that out loud.
1:49:10 Speaker 03 Well, anytime you have immigration, you run into the problem. I was recently in Miami, Florida, and it's quite clear that one of the principal reasons that we now have our gun sites on Cuba, which I think is ridiculous.
1:49:24 Tucker Carlson? Insane.
1:49:25 Speaker 03 Is because of the Cuban-American community, which wields significant influence inside the United States, much like the Israel lobby.
1:49:35 Tucker Carlson? Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't, I've spent a lot of time, I mean, I lived in Washington most of my life, spent a lot of time at the White House and in Congress. I never once lobbied for Swedish interests. It just never occurred to me, though my name is Carlson. I have blue eyes. But, uh, yeah, I didn't, I just, I felt like that would be wrong. Do you know what I mean? It's disgusting. Come here and then lobby on behalf of a foreign country, whatever that country is. It's disgusting.
1:49:59 Speaker 03 I agree completely. I'm, I'm against dual citizenship.
1:50:03 Tucker Carlson? Of course.
1:50:04 Speaker 03 I think if you come to the United States, you become an American. You should have American citizenship.
1:50:08 Tucker Carlson? You have a German last name. Have you ever lobbied on behalf of Germany?
1:50:11 Speaker 03 No. I, I don't consider myself German-American or Irish-American, because I'm also partly Irish-American. I consider myself American.
1:50:19 Tucker Carlson? I do too, yeah.
1:50:20 Speaker 03 I think when you come to the United States and you become a citizen, there's a social contract involved. And that social contract involves becoming an American and becoming an American firster by definition. Otherwise, don't come to the United States or, you know, get a temporary visa, which is fine. But if you become an American, I believe that you should not be lobbying on the, on the part of other countries, whether it's for Cuba, or China, or, or, or, or India, or Israel.
1:50:56 Tucker Carlson? Yeah. And I think it's within bounds just to say that. As an American, I think I have a right to say that.
1:51:02 Speaker 03 Yeah. And I say that, by the way, as somebody who's been a big proponent of immigration over time.
1:51:07 Tucker Carlson? Yep.
1:51:07 Speaker 03 I'm glad they let all those Russian Jews into the United States, or East European Jews into the United States. I think immigration is what made the United States great. If you go back and read about what happened in this country, you know, after we got our independence in 1783, and certainly in the 19th and early 20th century, all the immigrants...
1:51:30 Speaker 03 Is what turned us into the superpower that we are today.
1:51:36 Tucker Carlson? Yeah, I don't.
1:51:37 Speaker 03 Immigration is a good thing, but it has to be done in a very careful way.
1:51:40 Tucker Carlson? Well, sex is a good thing. Eating is a good thing, but you know, you keep them within certain boundaries so they remain good things. And if you're going to have immigration, particularly at scale, you have to have rules. And the number one rule has to be transfer your allegiance from the country of origin to the country you live in now. It's just got to be rule one. And if you can't hold to that rule, you can't have immigration. It seems to me, right?
1:52:05 Speaker 03 I think that illegal immigration is an absolutely terrible thing. And I think it's damaged many Americans' views towards immigration in general.
1:52:14 Tucker Carlson? I agree, me too.
1:52:15 Speaker 03 Number one. And number two, although I'm in favor of immigration, I do think if you come to the United States, you become an American and only an American. You give up, you know, your German citizenship or your Russian citizenship or whatever. And I think.
1:52:30 Tucker Carlson? What about working as a, as a guard at a prison camp in Israel on a volunteer basis like Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic did as an American? Is it, is it okay if you're a leading American foreign policy thinker to volunteer as a prison camp guard in a foreign country? Or is that there's something kind of maybe disloyal about that?
1:52:51 Speaker 03 Well, this is a particularly egregious situation.
1:52:54 Tucker Carlson? Sir, I can't help bring that up.
1:52:56 Speaker 03 Here, here's a guy who is fully in favor of using the American military to fight wars on Israel's behalf. But when it came for, came time for him to serve in the military, he served in the Israeli military, not the American.
1:53:12 Tucker Carlson? As a prison camp guard.
1:53:14 Speaker 03 Something deeply wrong about.
1:53:16 Tucker Carlson? It's sick.
1:53:17 Speaker 03 Yeah. And of course, he is the editor of one of the most influential magazines in the United States, where he's in a position where he can control the content of that magazine in ways that support Israel. And you can rest assured that anybody who's, who criticizes Israel in a meaningful way is not going to appear on the pages of The Atlantic.
1:53:39 Tucker Carlson? How have you been treated in The Atlantic?
1:53:46 Speaker 03 Well, there is the period before Jeffrey Goldberg and since Jeffrey Goldberg. I certainly have not appeared in the pages of The Atlantic since Jeffrey Goldberg. But beforehand, you want to remember, as I think you do, that our lobby piece, the piece that Steve Walton and I wrote on the Israel lobby, which appeared in 2006 in the London Review of Books, was originally supposed to appear in The Atlantic Monthly, but it did not because The Atlantic got cold feet and refused to publish it. But they did run a very nice piece on me by Bob Kaplan after that experience. So I can't say that I've always been treated badly by law.
1:54:29 Tucker Carlson? Kaplan was a very reasonable guy at one point, actually, I thought. Of course, the, you know, the, the, the previous editor, who, Michael Kelly, who I have no question would have run that piece because he was brave and honest, was killed covering the Iraq War.
1:54:44 Speaker 03 Yes, I remember.
1:54:45 Tucker Carlson? Waged on behalf of Israel, so it all kind of comes together.
1:54:48 Speaker 03 But Jeff Goldberg is another one of those people who thinks he's doing good for Israel. He, he, he thinks that behaving the way he does in terms of supporting Israel at every turn and suppressing criticism of Israel as best he can is in Israel's interest. I just want to make it clear, I think he's fundamentally wrong. And I think it's people like him and the Bill Ackmans of the world who are doing enormous damage to Israel.
1:55:11 Tucker Carlson? Again, you're a parent, if you treated your children whom you love as much as Jeffrey Goldberg loves Israel, you love your kids, if you treated them like he treats Israel, your kids would all be in rehab, correct?
1:55:22 Speaker 03 I agree.
1:55:23 Tucker Carlson? Excuse every fault, attack anyone who points out their shortcomings, like that you would, you would wreck those kids. Where does the Iran war go?
1:55:35 Speaker 03 I think at this point in time, where we are, is that President Trump is desperate to get a settlement. He understands the economic consequences of this war going on for a few more months with the straits closed would be disastrous. He's got to get a deal. And not just simply for economic reasons, but for political reasons as well. The midterm elections are coming up, and he runs the great danger that if the economy is tanked by November, that both the House and the Senate will be run by
1:56:12 Speaker 03 The Democrats and he will get impeached and found to be guilty. So he wants to avoid that. And of course, he wants to avoid crashing the international economy for obvious reasons. So he's desperate. You can see it in his face. You can see it in his actions. The problem that he faces is that he can't get the Iranians to accept what is from an American and an Israeli point of view, a favorable deal. The Iranians are now in the driver's seat. The Iranians started this war on February 28th of this year in a much weaker position than they are in now.
1:56:55 Speaker 03 They've actually done quite well in the war, as we saw when they attacked Israel a few days ago. Here you have a situation where Israel did not attack Iran. Iran felt that it was free to attack Israel. And Iran has made it clear, it's more than willing to go up the escalation ladder with us and with Israel. They feel like they're in the driver's seat. So the Iranians won't cut President Trump any slack. They won't give him a deal that'll allow him to walk away from this. And again, he's under ever-present pressure on the economic front to shut this one down.
1:57:35 Speaker 03 At the same time, the Israelis will not cooperate with him either. What Trump really wants to do is cut a deal that basically accepts the fact that Iran won. He can't change Iran's position. And he's got to accept the fact that Iran has won and cut a sweetheart deal for Iran. But the Israelis, under no circumstances, want him to do this. And Bibi is resisting. So what's happening here is Trump is being pushed from one side by Bibi and he's being pushed on the other side by the inexorable forces of the international economy as it reacts to the shutdown straits. Okay?
1:58:19 Speaker 03 So what's happening is that desperate Donald Trump is beginning to put pressure on the Israelis, because he can't put pressure on the Iranians. He's putting pressure on the Israelis in ways that he's never done before. So he had this conversation where he said really terrible things about Prime Minister Netanyahu last Monday, this was on June 1st, right? And he's been really playing hardball with the Israelis in ways that we've not seen before. And you can tell that Bibi Netanyahu understands this. He understands that Trump is desperate and that Trump is putting real pressure on him.
1:59:01 Speaker 03 Now Netanyahu has resisted to a large extent, not completely, but to a large extent up to now. But I would maintain that what's likely to happen as we move forward is that that international economy is going to continue to put pressure on Trump. And because he can't put pressure on the Iranians who are in the driver's seat, he's going to put pressure on the Israelis in ways that he has never done before. So the question you have to ask yourself is what is this growing conflict between the United States, and in particular Donald Trump, and Benjamin Netanyahu going to look like moving forward?
1:59:40 Tucker Carlson? You saw yesterday Mark Levin, who's a longtime Trump hater, then became Trump's closest political ally, start to attack Trump for wavering on the question of backing Israel. The second Trump criticized Bibi, Mark Levin attacks Trump. Can Trump realistically, do you think, fight a battle, a rhetorical battle against Netanyahu and win, given that his support now in the United States politically is only Zionist, so kind of the only people who still support Trump?
2:00:17 Speaker 03 Let me ask you a question. What's the alternative?
2:00:25 Tucker Carlson? Take this to a really, really crazy place. You know, where all of a sudden the war comes home. I mean, there's some attack on the homeland and all of a sudden you have to, you know, you go full post 9/11 where the whole country is like, you know, mobilized against Iran. I mean, that seems more likely to me, but you know.
2:00:46 Speaker 03 But even there, what are you gonna do? Let's just assume that there's some incident somewhere that incentivizes us to really crush Iran. How do we do that? You want to understand that we cannot do it with boots on the ground.
2:01:01 Tucker Carlson? Right.
2:01:02 Speaker 03 That's out, number one. Number two, in terms of restarting the air war, been there, tried that, did not work out very well. Furthermore, we used up huge amounts of our precious weaponry, right? That's another one of the reasons Trump doesn't want to go back to the air war, right? So what are we gonna do? Use nuclear weapons against Iran? I don't think so, right? Trump has no option. That's the point here. This is what I'm saying to you. If you think about the situation he's in, he's been unable to coerce the Iranians and the Iranians are feeling their oats. They're feeling powerful and they're not willing to compromise and they understand
2:01:46 Speaker 03 that the longer this war goes on, the more leverage they have. So they're tough to coerce. And the Israelis, Trump just has to do something with them as he's crushed by these international economic considerations. And if he doesn't, we're all gonna go off a cliff economically. The economic and political consequences are gonna be disastrous. There's just all sorts of evidence of that. And if the Israelis really have an in-your-face attitude towards Trump and they start to bomb Iran, what are the Iranians gonna do? They'll shut down the Red Sea, they'll go after UAE, they'll go after Saudi Arabia,
2:02:31 Speaker 03 they'll play hardball and that'll just make the economic situation even worse. So what, what can Trump do? I, I think, you know, who knows for sure, but my surmise is looking at this is that Trump has really no choice but to play hardball with Netanyahu in ways that he has never done and in ways that no American president has ever done with an Israeli prime minister.
2:02:59 Tucker Carlson? Trump's devotion to Israel is so slavish that it's just, it's just hard to imagine, it's hard to picture that. I mean, I pray for that. I pray for sovereignty. We should have a country whose leaders make decisions based on what's best for America. I just can't picture that. I can't picture Trump actually threatening to defund Israel, which is what it would take. You'd have to say that. We're not, no more money for you if you, if you keep hitting Beirut. I mean, what are you doing?
2:03:24 Speaker 03 Yeah, he would have to play hardball in ways that you're just saying you find unimaginable and which I find in a certain sense unimaginable as well. But what you want to understand, and you understood this before February 28th, and you told Trump that he would be remarkably foolish to start a war against Iran. He didn't listen to you. He didn't listen to his advisors. He didn't listen.
2:03:52 Tucker Carlson? His advisors didn't tell him that.
2:03:54 Speaker 03 Okay.
2:03:55 Tucker Carlson? They're cowards. But yeah.
2:03:56 Speaker 03 But anyway, he started this war.
2:03:59 Tucker Carlson? He knew. Yeah.
2:04:00 Speaker 03 And he is in deep, deep trouble, as is Bibi Netanyahu, by the way, right? He's in deep, deep trouble too, just like Trump is. He's in a no win situation. If he bucks Trump, he's in real trouble. And if he doesn't buck Trump, he's going to be clobbered inside Israel because his critics, the opposition, is going after him for being a pussycat, for not being willing to say no to Trump. So if he doesn't say no to Trump, right, he'll get clobbered.
2:04:32 Tucker Carlson? Who are these Israelis who are like the most flagrant welfare case in world history? I mean, way more dependent on our government than any like welfare queen in Detroit has ever been. Like without us, they're done, literally done. What world are they living in where they're like, well, don't take that from Trump?
2:04:56 Speaker 03 Well.
2:04:57 Tucker Carlson? You don't have a job, son.
2:04:59 Speaker 03 Look, the argument you can make, just building on what you said, is that the Israeli body politic, and you were talking mainly about the Israeli elites, will understand what you just said, which is they can't survive in a meaningful way without American support. And that they are running the risk of losing American support if they don't cooperate with Trump. If they don't cooperate with Trump, they run the risk. And the threat of losing American support will be sufficient to convince the Israelis to play ball with Trump. So the argument there is that Trump can play hardball with the Israelis
2:05:44 Speaker 03 in ways that no other president, including Trump himself, have ever played hardball with the Israelis. And that it'll work because of the logic that you just spun out.
2:05:53 Tucker Carlson? I talked to someone in Israel yesterday who's smart, and very smart, who said there's no sense of that at all. Israel, the average Israeli, support for the war was over 90% in Israel, it was 93%. And the average Israeli thinks that they're running the world, that they have total control, and that they need nobody. And that if the US pulls, you know, we don't need the US, actually, there are too many strings attached. In fact, there are no strings attached. But they're just so high on their own supply that they don't see at all their vulnerabilities. They're really at peak hubris, as this person told me.
2:06:29 Speaker 03 Well, there is some of that for sure. And there's good reason for them to think that they own us, because they have owned us.
2:06:36 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
2:06:38 Speaker 03 But I do think we are at a very special point in history here. I think, again, you cannot underestimate what a colossal blunder.
2:06:50 Speaker 03 President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu made on February 28th. And the chickens are coming home to roost now. And I believe that Netanyahu's, who's had a handful of conversations with Trump, fully understands the pressure that Trump is under. Right? And I believe other people in the administration are talking to the Israelis and telling them that. And it's easy for the opposition to Netanyahu or on the outside and who would like to run Netanyahu out of office so they can move into his seat, to criticize Netanyahu. But I think even with regard to them, they will eventually get the message.
2:07:33 Speaker 03 And if they don't, Trump then has two choices. He can basically cut off aid to Israel and distance ourselves, distance the United States from Israel in ways that was unimaginable, you know, a month ago.
2:07:48 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
2:07:48 Speaker 03 Or we can go off the cliff economically. That's the choice here.
2:07:54 Tucker Carlson? But either way, we're going to emerge from this with Iran, the government of Iran, controlling the flow of commodities out of the Persian Gulf.
2:08:04 Speaker 03 Yeah.
2:08:05 Tucker Carlson? I mean, that's crazy. That was not true on February 27th, but it's going to be true going forward, period.
2:08:13 Speaker 03 Yeah. First of all, we had four demands, you know, regarding Iran's missiles, support for Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas, regard to their nuclear program, and with regard to regime change. Those were the four goals that we started with. None of them have been achieved. That's the first point. Second point is your point that they now control the Strait of Hormuz, right? Third point I would make to you is they're going to come out of this in better economic shape, in part because they control the Strait of Hormuz, but also because a lot of sanctions are going to be lifted off them, right? And
2:09:00 Speaker 03 That's good news for them. So economically, they're going to be in a superior position after February 28th than before February 28th. Finally, you want to remember that on February 27th, we had a basing structure in the Gulf, and we had an alliance structure in the Gulf that looked quite formidable. All those bases have either been destroyed or badly damaged. And that alliance structure that we had with the six Gulf states has been wrecked in very important ways. And it's not clear that we can stay in the Gulf. So if you think about
2:09:35 Tucker Carlson? I told Trump this going in, this is going to result in us leaving the Middle East. We're going to have less influence in the Middle East by the end.
2:09:43 Speaker 03 It was so obvious. Yeah, well, you and I agree on that, that so many of these things are so obvious, but yet so many really smart people, you know, people who went to fancy universities, have fancy degrees, worked for fancy law firms, or what have you, were successful in business, you name it, don't see obvious things that people like us see in the foreign policy realm. I, again, getting back to your question before, I can't explain it.
2:10:13 Tucker Carlson? Not to get sidetracked, but since you've seen more of it than I have, do you think that, well, I know the answer, to what extent has the caliber of public policy, public intellectual declined over the past 50 years?
2:10:28 Speaker 03 Oh, drastically. There's just no question about that. If you think about the discourse, right?
2:10:40 Speaker 03 We live in a world.
2:10:42 Tucker Carlson? I'm sorry to interrupt. I had, this is from the President for the White House. I've just been informed by our great military that last night, the Iranians shot down one of our highly sophisticated Apache helicopters while patrolling the Strait of Hormuz. There were two pilots involved, both are safe and uninjured. Nevertheless, the United States must of necessity respond to this attack.
2:11:02 Speaker 03 I'm sure that he's going to respond, and I would bet a lot of money that the Iranians will respond. The Iranians have made it clear that every time either Israel or the United States, or a country like the UAE attacks Iran, Iran will not just simply retaliate in kind, but it will retaliate. More forcefully than the attacker did when it hit Iran to start with.
2:11:32 Tucker Carlson? As a graduate of West Point and a former Air Force officer, what is your assessment of the US military's capabilities? You know, four months into this war with Iran?
2:11:46 Speaker 03 Well, the United States military is an incredibly formidable fighting force. But that doesn't mean that it can win a war against Iran. We certainly can't decisively defeat Iran. And in terms of going up the escalation ladder, which is what we're talking about here, the United States cannot trump Iran as we go up the escalation ladder. Iran has a huge inventory of missiles and drones. It operates in a target-rich environment. And if we go after targets inside of Iran, you can rest assured that the Iranians will find targets to go after
2:12:30 Speaker 03 inside of, you know, American-controlled areas. And we don't end up coming out on top. I mean, let's watch what happens with President Trump. Is this going to improve our situation? No, not at all.
2:12:45 Tucker Carlson? I don't understand how four years into the Ukraine war, the United States can be this far behind in drone technology and why we'd have all these aircraft carriers under construction when it's obvious that aircraft carriers cannot be the main means by which we project force in the world. It's just, I mean, we can't even use them in this conflict meaningfully. So why does it seem impossible for our military to respond to technological changes in a quick way?
2:13:15 Speaker 03 Uh, I think you wanna remember that the Iran war, I should be that the Ukraine war started in 2022, and really for the first two years, it was not clear that drones mattered too much. So that takes you up to, let's say, 2024.
2:13:33 Tucker Carlson? Fair.
2:13:34 Speaker 03 Uh, and I remember I argued that the key weapon on the battlefield was artillery. Uh, it was the king of battle and what really mattered was in Ukraine, this is, uh, was the balance of artillery on the two sides. And I paid hardly any attention to drones. Uh, if I were writing about the balance of power, uh, between Ukraine and Russia now, artillery would get, uh, second place on the list of important weapons. And I think drones would be the most important weapon, uh, affecting events on the battlefield. And so that's 2024. Here we are in 2026. So it's only recently that we've become aware, uh, that
2:14:17 Speaker 03 drones matter as much as they do. And I would imagine that the US military is now scrambling like crazy, uh, to deal with the drone issue.
2:14:27 Tucker Carlson? You would think so.
2:14:28 Speaker 03 Yeah. So I, I, I think that it's, it's explainable, uh, in rational legal terms, why we did not pay that much attention, uh, to drones up until about 2024. But I think we are now paying attention, as is everybody else.
2:14:44 Tucker Carlson? Right.
2:14:44 Speaker 03 Because we understand, uh, you know, that this really matters.
2:14:49 Tucker Carlson? How do you think this conflict is resolved? And how quickly?
2:14:54 Speaker 03 I think that basically you'll end up with something like a frozen conflict. Um, I think that, uh, you want to understand that what President Trump is trying to do here is he's trying to get a ceasefire, right? And the idea is that if you can get a ceasefire for 30 or 60 days, the number changes. That after you get this ceasefire in place, you can then move to negotiations on things like the nuclear issue.
2:15:22 Speaker 03 reparations, the future of the overall package of sanctions and so forth and so on. You want to understand here that we're not talking about settling the nuclear issue in these initial negotiations. The initial negotiations that are going on now are designed to set up a real ceasefire. In other words, we want to stop the shooting completely. And this includes in Lebanon, right? Stop the shooting completely. We want to open the strait and the American blockade and the Iranian blockade. Open the strait.
2:16:01 Speaker 03 The Iranians want $24 billion in frozen assets given back to them. Their money. Their money. That's three. That's number three. And number four is the Iranians want sanctions taken off their sale of their oil on global markets. Okay? So those are the four things that have to happen to get a real ceasefire. But you notice in those four elements, you see no evidence of the nuclear issue or the question of overall sanctions or reparations or control of the strait moving forward. All these issues will be settled in the second round.
2:16:44 Speaker 03 Now, my view is that you're probably gonna get a real ceasefire at some point because that will open the straits and opening the straits matters immensely to President Trump because of what the consequences are for the international economy. Now, when it comes to violating that ceasefire, the country that will violate it is Israel. But if Israel violates the ceasefire and the Iranians react by shutting down the straits again, oh, my God, we're back to the economic threat resurrecting itself.
2:17:24 Speaker 03 So I don't think Trump will allow the Israelis to wreck the ceasefire. They may try anyway, but I don't think so. Then the $64,000 question is what will happen in the negotiations over the nuclear issue, control of the strait, reparations, overall sanctions package and so forth and so on.
2:17:48 Speaker 03 And there I find it hard to believe that you're gonna get a meaningful deal. Trump likes to say that, remember, this is Trump speaking, it took many years to negotiate the JCPOA. That was the original nuclear deal.
2:18:02 Tucker Carlson? The one he ran against and hated?
2:18:04 Speaker 03 Yeah, and by the way, the one he walked away from in 2018. And he now says, you know, when people say, why don't you have a nuclear deal now? He says, you have to understand it takes many years to negotiate a nuclear deal. Of course, he's correct, but what you want to ask yourself is, what?
2:18:21 Tucker Carlson? Boy, that's foot spa.
2:18:23 Speaker 03 Exactly. So, and by the way, this is a nightmare for the Israelis. I mean, if you want to think about what this war means for the Israelis, right? They were, they were so much better off with the JCPOA. They were so much better off with the deal that they would have gotten on February 27th. Now they're in a situation where I don't think they're gonna get a nuclear deal. I may be wrong. I don't think they're gonna get a nuclear deal. And the Iranians, as we both know, have a lot of highly enriched uranium, up to 60%. They can easily turn into weapons-grade material and build the bomb. And the Israelis have just demonstrated that they don't have the capability.
2:19:05 Speaker 03 And we have just demonstrated that we don't have the capability to go in there and get that weapons-grade material and shut down their nuclear enrichment capability forever. So it is possible that the Iranians may get a bomb.
2:19:21 Tucker Carlson? Well, they're certainly gonna get a more robust economy and they certainly have cemented their place as like a legit regional power, which they sort of weren't fully before. I also think this changes their relationship with the GCC. I think some of the Gulf states at least were kind of shocked by the unwillingness or inability of the United States to protect them from nuclear, from Iranian attacks.
2:19:44 Speaker 03 Actually act as a man. Magnet for Iranian attacks.
2:19:47 Tucker Carlson? Totally. And the whole deal was like, we'll send trillions to the United States in foreign direct investment, but like, you got to protect us.
2:19:54 Speaker 03 Yeah.
2:19:55 Tucker Carlson? We'll align with Israel, we'll sign the Abraham Accords, we'll do whatever you want, but you got to protect us. And we didn't. And so you can imagine a world where some of those six countries in any way, become closer to Iran, like in 20 years than they were before.
2:20:11 Tucker Carlson? But certainly, the world sees Iran as like a real country now, and they control the aperture at the end of the Persian Gulf. So like, how are they not way more powerful than they have been in our lifetimes?
2:20:23 Speaker 03 Yeah. Well, as you know, we like to portray other countries as irrational and crazy, second coming of Adolf Hitler.
2:20:31 Tucker Carlson? Completely. Some crazy theocracy where they throw gays off buildings or something.
2:20:37 Speaker 03 But the truth is, if you look at Iran today, and you look at the United States and Israel today, which of those three countries looks like the responsible stakeholder in the international system?
2:20:51 Tucker Carlson? Yeah. Of those three countries, which, you know, which seems the least unreasonable? Which, this country seems like it has more blasphemy laws than Iran sometimes. I mean, it's crazy, the number of things you can't say in the United States because you can't, certain words are literally verboten, certain interpretations of history are crimes. Those aren't blasphemy laws? Yes, they are. That's, I mean, this is true.
2:21:18 Speaker 03 But there's much truth in that. But the point is, if you're another country on the planet, and you're looking at those three countries, Israel, the most hated country in the world, by the way, according to recent polls, and the United States, which is not far from the bottom, and Iran, which country, right, looks like it is the most responsible in terms of its foreign policy, right? And it's the Iranian. Right? And it's the Americans and the Israelis who both basically look like they're rogue states,
2:21:55 Speaker 03 just running around the world, you know, invading countries, causing genocide and so forth and so on. The damage that has been done to Israel's reputation is just off the charts. It's very hard for me to believe how much damage Israel has done to itself. With help from the lobbyists, I've emphasized in our conversation here. But also the United States, the damage that we've done to ourselves, right? And a lot of people will say this is due to Trump. Trump has contributed to this for sure, but look at the Biden administration. It was the Biden administration that supported the genocide in Gaza from the get go.
2:22:36 Speaker 03 It was the Biden administration that's principally responsible for what's happened in Ukraine. The Biden administration could have prevented the war in Ukraine.
2:22:45 Tucker Carlson? Of course they wanted it.
2:22:46 Speaker 03 It wanted it, exactly. So the Biden administration, one could argue, is almost as bad, if not worse, than the Trump administration.
2:22:54 Tucker Carlson? May I ask you, so over the past six years, there have been a bunch of different moments where the United States has been accused of using negotiations as a ruse in order to lure its opponents into vulnerability and then assassinate them. And I've been hesitant to believe that that could be true because I'm American and I love this country and that's so dishonorable that you would never want to live in a country that would do something like that. That that's truly out of bounds. Starting with the killing, the assassination of General Soleimani about six years ago in Iraq. He flew in commercial for negotiations, he was killed, which was shocking to me, but everyone else loved it. And then a bunch of times in the past several months.
2:23:40 Tucker Carlson? The bombing of Doha by the Israelis on September 9th of last year. Again and again and again, it seems like the United States has been party to or aware of traps in which diplomacy was used as the lure. Is that real? Do you think we actually did that?
2:23:59 Speaker 03 Well, there's no question that our closest ally in the world, who we support at every turn, which is the Israelis, is obsessed with assassination. They're constantly murdering, and I think murdering is the right word.
2:24:17 Tucker Carlson? That's absolutely right.
2:24:18 Speaker 03 Leaders in countries and in organizations all over the Middle East. There's no question about that. And there's also no question, as the Soleimani case makes clear, that we've moved in that same direction. We're not as bad as them, although we do support what they do. We never criticize them, but we are deeply involved.
2:24:43 Tucker Carlson? But to pretend that you want to have a negotiation with someone, get them to drop their guard and then kill them, that's like something Western countries have never done. That's totally out of bounds. That's what we used to criticize the American Indians for doing, right? Or the Japanese or some other primitive Eastern culture, right? We don't do that.
2:25:01 Speaker 03 Well, if you remember, we attacked Iran last June.
2:25:08 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
2:25:09 Speaker 03 The 12-day war, June 13th to June 25th. And that attack, which was initiated by the Israelis, came out of the blue, and it's when the Iranians were in the middle of negotiations with.
2:25:23 Tucker Carlson? Oh, I remember.
2:25:24 Speaker 03 Yeah.
2:25:25 Tucker Carlson? But I remember thinking, this can't be really happening. We couldn't have known. We would never sign off on that.
2:25:32 Speaker 03 That's the level we've sunk to. I mean, there's just no getting around this. And you see this, I think, with the General Soleimani case. I think that was a colossal mistake on our part. But this is where we're at. And by the way, you know, I think this whole business of assassination is very important because I think it has a blowback effect into the United States. I don't think you want to be sending a signal to people in the United States. Certainly President Trump should not want to be doing this, given that he was the victim of an assassination attempt.
2:26:04 Tucker Carlson? I agree with that.
2:26:05 Speaker 03 Not be sending the message that assassination is a legitimate way of doing business.
2:26:10 Tucker Carlson? Yes, I agree with that.
2:26:12 Speaker 03 You just don't want to do this. It's not only morally wrong, it just doesn't make any sense for how we conduct politics inside the United States or around the world. Assassination should just be, for very exceptional circumstances. If you could have assassinated Adolf Hitler, of course, you would have done that. But these are, you know, the extreme cases. Otherwise, we should be out of the business of assassination and actually condemning it when it happens.
2:26:47 Tucker Carlson? Last question. Do you ever get calls from people who say, 20 years ago, I attacked you as a crank and a bigot, but now I got to admit you were 100% right about everything?
2:27:01 Speaker 03 Yes.
2:27:02 Tucker Carlson? Really?
2:27:02 Speaker 03 Yes. Well, I don't get phone calls because we don't do phone calls anymore.
2:27:08 Tucker Carlson? Do you ever get texts?
2:27:09 Speaker 03 I get text messages and I get lots of emails because my email is available. So lots of people send me very nice emails. And a good number of those people say that they once thought that I was out to lunch, that I was all wrong.
2:27:28 Tucker Carlson? Really? They did it?
2:27:30 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah, yeah. It's only in the elite that people never admit they're wrong and never change their views. I think in the broader public. And by the way, lots of people write to me who disagree with me on different issues, but agree with me on other issues. I actually find that my discourse with the greater public is quite variegated. There are some people who agree completely with me on the Middle East and on Israel in particular, and agree with me completely on Ukraine, who are deeply offended by my views on China, because I believe that we should contain China, right?
2:28:15 Speaker 03 And there are other people who write, who like my views on the Middle East and on Israel, but dislike my views on Ukraine. So, you know, when you engage the public, and when I talk about the public here, I engage with people all over the planet. I get huge numbers of emails from the global south, from Europe, from Russia. But when you engage with people, what you discover is that no group of people have the same views on every issue. That's right. That people tend to disagree. And I actually think that's a wonderful thing. And this gets back to our whole discussion of the media, of the mainstream media, and
2:28:56 Speaker 03 the fact that we have so few views that challenge the conventional wisdom represented in the mainstream media. This is not a healthy phenomenon. What you want is you want lots of people with different views to contend with each other, and for them to fight it out. And I don't mean fight it out in a nasty way, fight it out in a professional way, for lack of a better phrase. And, but anyway, I find that, you know, when I go talk to groups, or when my podcasts appear on the internet, that I get lots and lots of people who applaud me, and nevertheless,
2:29:37 Speaker 03 at the same time, will, I won't say often, but will sometimes criticize my views on particular issues at the same time they're applauding me. And I do not feel bad about that at all. I think that's the way the business should work. I'm not a proselytizer, you know, I'm not going on your show, or going on any other show, to tell people the truth, and tell them that they should accept the truth from John Mearsheimer. What I'm trying to do is talk in a very intelligent way, as you are, about how we think about particular issues. And of course, people are sometimes going to agree with us and sometimes disagree with us.
2:30:19 Speaker 03 That's wonderful. And what's happening here is that in the vast majority of cases, I think people take their bearing from what we have to say. If they listen to Tucker Carlson talk about issue X, and they're trying to figure out what they think on issue X, they'll use your framework, they'll use your answers to help inform how they think. And hopefully you'll have a positive influence. Hopefully I'll have a positive influence. But I think this may sound idealistic, but I do think this is the way it should work. And this is why you, this is why you want to have an open discourse.
2:30:55 Tucker Carlson? Of course.
2:30:59 Tucker Carlson? I think now is like, I said, this is the outset, and I really believe it, though I don't fully understand it. I think this is like a pivot point in history. And it, it's important to understand at least some of what's going on. I think it's impossible to understand all of it and how it interconnects and, and what it will mean down the road. But I don't think that we should just see these as like isolated, bubbling up of turmoil in this or that region. Like, I think the whole world is changing. And it's important to try to know what is happening.
2:31:32 Speaker 03 I would say, Tucker, in the best of times, the world is incredibly complicated.
2:31:40 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
2:31:40 Speaker 03 Right? And I sometimes like to say, we live in a world of radical uncertainty.
2:31:46 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
2:31:47 Speaker 03 Right? That's in the best of times. Today, oh my God, it's so hard to figure out what's going on. Right? We're all, in a very important way, kind of flying blind. And what we're trying to do is make sense of the world. And what we try to do in exchanges like this is go further down that road. And both of us trying to refine our thinking about these important issues and inform lots of people in the process, so that everybody is less blind moving forward.
2:32:16 Tucker Carlson? Yeah. And, and really, the only sin from my perspective is lying. And anyone who's trying as hard as to tell the truth, right or wrong, is an ally of mine. That's how I feel about it.
2:32:27 Speaker 03 Amen.
2:32:28 Tucker Carlson? John Mearsheimer, Professor, thank you very much.
2:32:30 Speaker 03 Thank you for having me.
2:32:31 Tucker Carlson? Oh, my gosh, such a joy every time.
Previous The Attempts on Trump’s Life, Why He Shut Down the Investigations & How It Altered History Forever Next MAJOR SHIFT: Will Trump Split From Israel? Israeli Journalist on the Critical Situation in Iran. Page updated October 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
