John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with John Mearsheimer, a professor at University of Chicago

00:00:05.520 | and one of the most influential and controversial thinkers in the world. He teaches, speaks, and

00:00:11.920 | writes about the nature of power and war on the global stage in history and today.

00:00:18.320 | Please allow me to say once again my hope for this little journey I'm on. I will speak to everyone

00:00:28.080 | on all sides with compassion, with empathy, and with backbone. I will speak with Vladimir Putin

00:00:36.560 | and with Volodymyr Zelensky, with Russians and with Ukrainians, with Israelis and with Palestinians,

00:00:43.920 | with everyone. My goal is to do whatever small part I can to decrease the amount of suffering

00:00:50.960 | in the world by trying to reveal our common humanity. I believe that in the end truth and love

00:00:59.920 | wins. I will get attacked for being naive, for being a shill, for being weak. I am none of those

00:01:10.480 | things. But I do make mistakes and I will get better. I love you all. This is Alex Friedman

00:01:20.560 | podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends,

00:01:26.080 | here's John Mearsheimer. Can you explain your view on power in international politics as outlined in

00:01:33.760 | your book "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics" and in your writing since then? Yeah, I make two

00:01:39.680 | sets of points there. First of all, I believe that power is the currency of international relations.

00:01:46.160 | And by that, I mean that states are deeply interested in the balance of power and they're

00:01:51.040 | interested in maximizing how much power they control. And the question is why states care

00:01:58.160 | so much about power. In the international system, there's no higher authority. So if you get into

00:02:05.840 | trouble and you dial 911, there's nobody at the other end. In a system like that, you have no

00:02:14.320 | choice but to figure out for yourself how best to protect yourself. And the best way to protect

00:02:22.160 | yourself is to be powerful, to have as much power as you can possibly gain over all the other states

00:02:29.440 | in the system. Therefore, states care about power because it enhances or maximizes their prospects

00:02:37.760 | for survival. Second point I would make is that in the realist story or in my story, power is largely

00:02:45.920 | a function of material factors. The two key building blocks of power are population size

00:02:54.960 | and wealth. You want to have a lot of people and you want to be really wealthy. Of course,

00:02:59.840 | this is why the United States is so powerful. It has lots of people and it has lots of wealth.

00:03:06.720 | China was not considered a great power until recently because it didn't have a lot of wealth.

00:03:14.000 | It certainly had population size, but it didn't have wealth. And without both a large population

00:03:20.400 | and much wealth, you're usually not considered a great power. So I think power matters,

00:03:27.760 | but when we talk about power, it's important to understand that it's population size and wealth

00:03:35.360 | that are underpinning it. - So there's a lot of interesting things there. First, you said nations

00:03:42.320 | in relation to each other is essentially in a state of anarchism.

00:03:48.240 | - Yeah, well, anarchy basically means the opposite of hierarchy. Sometimes people think

00:03:55.120 | when you're talking about anarchy, you're talking about murder and mayhem, but that's not what

00:03:59.200 | anarchy means in the realist context. Anarchy simply means that you don't have hierarchy.

00:04:05.360 | There's no higher authority that sits above states. States are like pool balls on a table,

00:04:12.240 | right? And in an anarchic world, there's no higher authority that you can turn to

00:04:20.000 | if you get into trouble. And of course, the political philosopher who laid this all out

00:04:27.040 | was Thomas Hobbes. And Hobbes talked about life in the state of nature. And in the state of nature,

00:04:33.920 | you have individuals and those individuals compete with each other for power. And the reason that

00:04:40.240 | they do is because in the state of nature, by definition, you have no higher authority.

00:04:45.200 | And Hobbes' view is that the way to get out of this terrible situation where individuals are

00:04:52.640 | competing with each other and even killing each other is to create a state. It's what he calls

00:04:58.000 | the Leviathan. And that, of course, is the title of his famous book. So the idea is to escape

00:05:06.160 | anarchy, you create a state. And that means you go from anarchy to hierarchy. The problem in

00:05:14.240 | international politics is that there is no world state, there is no hierarchy. And if you have

00:05:21.040 | no hierarchy and you're in an anarchic system, you have no choice but to try to maximize your

00:05:28.960 | relative power to make sure you are, as we used to say, when I was a kid on New York City playgrounds,

00:05:35.280 | the biggest and baddest dude on the block. Not because you necessarily want to beat up on

00:05:41.200 | other kids or on other states, but because again, that's the best way to survive.

00:05:47.520 | And as I like to point out to people, the best example of what happens when you're weak in

00:05:53.360 | international politics is what the Chinese call the century of national humiliation.

00:05:59.280 | From the late 1840s to the late 1940s, the Chinese were remarkably weak and the great powers in the

00:06:06.800 | system preyed upon them. And that sends a very important message to not only the Chinese,

00:06:13.280 | but to other states in the system. Don't be weak, be as powerful as you can.

00:06:17.920 | And we'll talk about it, but humiliation can lead to resentment, resentment leads to

00:06:21.840 | something you've also studied, which is Nazi Germany in the 1930s. We'll talk about it.

00:06:28.160 | - But staying to the psychology and philosophy picture,

00:06:34.560 | what's the connection between the will to power in the individual,

00:06:39.360 | as you mentioned, and the will to power in a nation?

00:06:42.320 | - The will to power in an individual has a lot to do with individual psychology.

00:06:48.000 | The story that I tell about the pursuit of power is a structural argument. It's an argument that

00:06:54.480 | says when you are in a particular structure, when you're in a system that has a specific

00:07:02.320 | architecture, which is anarchy, the states have no choice but to compete for power. So structure

00:07:14.080 | is really driving the story here. Will to power has a lot more to do with an individual.

00:07:22.000 | In the Nietzschean story where that concept comes from. So it's very important to understand that

00:07:28.560 | I'm not arguing that states are inherently aggressive. My point is that as long as states

00:07:36.720 | are in anarchy, they have no choice but to behave in an aggressive fashion. But if you went to a

00:07:45.680 | hierarchic system, there's no reason for those states to worry about the balance of power,

00:07:52.640 | because if they get into trouble, there is a higher authority that they can turn to.

00:07:57.040 | There is, in effect, a leviathan.

00:07:58.880 | - So what is the role of military might in this will to power on the national level?

00:08:06.000 | - Well, military might's what ultimately matters. As I said to you before, the two building blocks

00:08:11.280 | of power are population size and wealth. - You didn't mention military might.

00:08:17.120 | - I did not. No, that's right. And it's good that you caught that, because if you have a large

00:08:22.000 | population and you're a wealthy country, what you do is you build a large military. And it's

00:08:30.080 | ultimately the size of your military that matters, because militaries fight wars. And if states are

00:08:37.360 | concerned about survival, which I argue is the principal goal of every state in the international

00:08:43.680 | system, for what I think are obvious reasons, then they're gonna care about having a powerful

00:08:50.800 | military that can protect them if another state comes after them.

00:08:55.040 | - Well, it's not obvious that a large nation with a lot of people and a lot of money

00:09:00.400 | should necessarily build a gigantic army and seek to attain superpower, like dominant

00:09:08.560 | sole superpower status to military might. But you're saying, as you see the world today,

00:09:14.960 | it has to be that way. - Yeah, I'm arguing it is obvious.

00:09:18.000 | If you're a state in the international system, do you wanna be weak? If you live next door to Nazi

00:09:26.320 | Germany or Imperial Germany or Napoleonic France, or even the United States, the United States is a

00:09:32.800 | ruthless great power. You surely recognize that. And if you're dealing with the United States of

00:09:37.680 | America and you're Vladimir Putin, you wanna make sure you're as powerful as possible so that the

00:09:42.320 | United States doesn't put its gun sights on you and come after you. Same thing is true with China.

00:09:47.600 | You wanna be powerful in the international system. States understand that, and they go to great

00:09:52.240 | lengths to become powerful. Just take the United States of America. When it started in 1783,

00:09:59.040 | it was comprised of 13 measly colonies strung out along the Atlantic seaboard. Over time,

00:10:05.520 | the various leaders of the United States went to great lengths to turn that country into the

00:10:14.160 | dominant power in the Western Hemisphere. And then once that was achieved in 1900,

00:10:20.880 | we've gone to great lengths to make sure that there's no peer competitor in the system.

00:10:27.280 | We just wanna make sure that we're number one. And my argument is that this is not peculiar

00:10:36.400 | to the United States. If I'm China, for example, today, I would want to dominate Asia the way the

00:10:46.640 | United States dominates the Western Hemisphere. They'd be fools not to. If I were Imperial

00:10:52.320 | Germany, I'd wanna dominate all of Europe the way the United States dominates the Western Hemisphere.

00:10:58.240 | Why? Because if you dominate all of Europe, assume you're Imperial Germany or Napoleonic France,

00:11:04.640 | then no other state in the area or in the region can threaten you because you're simply so powerful.

00:11:11.760 | And again, what I'm saying here is that the structure of the international system really

00:11:16.400 | matters. It's the fact that you're in this anarchic system where survival is your principal

00:11:21.920 | goal and where I can't know your intentions. You're another state. I can't know that at some

00:11:28.880 | point you might not come after me. You might. And if you're really powerful and I'm not,

00:11:35.040 | I'm in deep trouble. - Yeah, so some of the ideas underlying

00:11:40.880 | what you've said, offensive realism, which I would love to talk to you about sort of the history of

00:11:47.040 | realism versus liberalism, but some of the ideas you already mentioned,

00:11:50.320 | anarchy between states, everybody's trying to develop a military capabilities, uncertainty,

00:11:59.040 | such an interesting concept. States cannot be sure that other states will not use military

00:12:04.320 | capabilities against them, which is one- - That's of enormous importance.

00:12:08.080 | - Really important. - It's a good story.

00:12:09.040 | - And so interesting because you also say that this makes realists more cautious and more peaceful.

00:12:14.960 | The uncertainty, because of all the uncertainty involved here, it's better to approach

00:12:23.920 | international politics with caution, which is really interesting to think about. Again, survival,

00:12:30.960 | most states are interested in survival. And the other interesting thing is you assume all the

00:12:35.600 | states are rational, which- - Most of the time.

00:12:41.520 | - Most of the time. You call this framework offensive realism. Can you just give an

00:12:48.160 | overview of the history of the realism versus liberalism debate as world views?

00:12:55.280 | - Well, I think for many centuries now, the big divide within the world of international relations

00:13:05.520 | theory is between realism and liberalism. These are time-honored bodies of theory. And before I

00:13:16.000 | tell you what I think the differences are between those two bodies of theory, it is important to

00:13:20.720 | emphasize that there are differences among realists and differences among liberals.

00:13:27.920 | And so when you talk about me as an offensive realist, you should understand that there are

00:13:35.120 | also defensive realists out there, and there are a panoply of liberal theories as well.

00:13:41.680 | But basically, realists believe that power matters, that states compete for power,

00:13:49.360 | and that war is an instrument of statecraft. And liberals, on the other hand, have what I would say

00:14:00.160 | is a more idealistic view of the world. This is not to say that they're naive or foolish,

00:14:08.720 | but they believe there are aspects of international politics that lead to a less

00:14:16.880 | competitive and more peaceful world than most realists see. And I'll lay out for you very

00:14:25.600 | quickly what are the three major liberal theories today that I think will give you a sense of the

00:14:34.080 | more optimistic perspective that is inherent in the liberal enterprise. The first and most

00:14:41.440 | important of the liberal theories is democratic peace theory. And this is a theory that says

00:14:48.640 | democracies do not fight against other democracies. So the more the world is populated with democracies,

00:14:58.080 | the less likely it is that we will have wars. And this basic argument is inherent in Francis

00:15:05.920 | Fukuyama's "The End of History." He argues that democracy triumphed first over fascism in the

00:15:13.920 | 20th century. It then triumphed over communism. And that means that in the future, we're going to

00:15:21.280 | have more and more liberal democracies on the planet. And if you have more and more liberal

00:15:27.520 | democracies and those democracies don't fight each other, then you have a more peaceful world.

00:15:33.200 | That was his argument. It's a very liberal argument. A realist like me would say that

00:15:39.680 | it doesn't matter whether a state is a democracy or not. All states behave the same way because

00:15:48.480 | the structure of the system, getting back to our earlier discussion about international anarchy,

00:15:53.520 | the structure of the system leaves those states no choice, whether they're democracies

00:15:59.360 | or autocracies. And again, the liberal view, this first liberal theory is that democracies don't

00:16:06.960 | fight other democracies. And therefore, the more democracies you have, the more peaceful the world.

00:16:12.000 | - Can I just sort of try to unpack that a little bit? So on the democratic peace theory,

00:16:18.720 | I guess would say that in democracies, leaders are elected, and the underlying assumption is

00:16:24.880 | most people want peace. And so they will elect peacemakers. So the more democracies you have,

00:16:31.760 | the more likely you have peace. And then the realist perspective, what says that it doesn't

00:16:37.760 | matter if the majority of people want peace. The structure of international politics is such

00:16:44.400 | that superpowers want to become more super and powerful, and they do that through war.

00:16:50.960 | - You can't make that argument that you're making about democracies, because if you're saying that

00:16:56.880 | democracies are inclined toward peace, and that the electorate picks leaders who are inclined

00:17:05.360 | towards peace, then you have to show that democracies are in general more peaceful than

00:17:13.280 | non-democracies, and you can't support that argument. You can find lots of evidence to

00:17:19.920 | support the argument that democracies don't fight other democracies. So the argument I believe that

00:17:28.000 | you have to make if you're gonna support democratic peace theory, the main argument you have to make

00:17:33.040 | is that liberal democracies have a healthy respect for each other, and they can assess each other's

00:17:44.880 | intentions. If you're a liberal democracy and I'm a liberal democracy, we know we have value systems

00:17:51.600 | that argue against aggression and argue for peaceful resolution of crises, and therefore,

00:18:00.160 | given these norms, we can trust each other. We can know each other's intentions. Remember,

00:18:07.040 | for realists like me, uncertainty about intentions really helps drive the train.

00:18:12.400 | But if you're talking about two democracies, the argument there is that they know each other's

00:18:18.720 | intentions. And for you, sure, maybe democracies reduce uncertainty a little bit, but not enough

00:18:25.200 | to stop the train. I think that's right. Yeah, that's right. So that's democratic peace theory.

00:18:30.880 | Yes. The second theory is economic interdependence theory, and that's the argument that in a

00:18:36.000 | globalized world like the one that we live in and have lived in for a long time, there's a great

00:18:42.080 | deal of economic interdependence. And if you and I are two countries, or if you and me are two

00:18:47.760 | countries and we're economically interdependent and we're both getting prosperous as a result of

00:18:54.240 | this economic intercourse, the last thing that we're going to do is start a war, either one of us,

00:18:59.600 | because who would kill the goose that lays the golden eggs? It's that kind of argument.

00:19:04.400 | So there you have an argument that economic interdependence leads to peace.

00:19:09.120 | And then the third liberal argument has to do with institutions, sometimes referred to as

00:19:15.120 | liberal institutionalism. And this is the argument that if you can get states into institutions

00:19:21.680 | where they become rule-abiding actors, they will obey the rules that dictate that war is

00:19:31.600 | not acceptable. So if you get them to accept the UN rules on when you can and cannot initiate a war,

00:19:43.680 | then you'll have a more peaceful world. So those are the liberal theories. And as you can tell,

00:19:51.280 | they're very different from realism as articulated by somebody like me.

00:19:56.880 | Can you maybe argue against the economic interdependence and in the institutions,

00:20:03.360 | that institutions follow rules a little bit? So the golden goose with the golden egg,

00:20:09.920 | you're saying that nations are happy to kill the goose because, again, they want power.

00:20:19.520 | If they think it's necessary to kill the golden goose because of security concerns,

00:20:26.640 | they will do it. The point is that economic interdependence at its root has prosperity

00:20:36.480 | as the core variable. In the realist story, the core variable is survival. And survival always

00:20:46.240 | trumps prosperity. So if you go back to the period before World War I, we're in Europe, it's 1913,

00:20:57.120 | or early 1914. What you see is that you have an intense security competition between all of the

00:21:05.520 | great powers. On one side, you have the Triple Alliance, and on the other side, you have the

00:21:10.800 | Triple Entente. You have these two alliances, and you have an intense security competition

00:21:16.000 | between them. At the same time, you have a great deal of economic interdependence. It's amazing

00:21:22.400 | how much economic intercourse is taking place in Europe among all the actors. And people are

00:21:29.200 | getting prosperous, or countries are getting prosperous as a result. But nevertheless,

00:21:34.080 | in the famous July crisis of 1914, this economic prosperity is unable to prevent World War I

00:21:43.200 | because security concerns or survival is more important. So there are going to be lots of

00:21:50.960 | situations where prosperity and survival come into conflict, and in those cases, survival will win.

00:21:58.480 | And maybe you can speak to the different camps of realists. You said offensive and defensive.

00:22:06.800 | Can you draw a distinction between those two? Yeah. Let me just back up a bit on that one.

00:22:12.080 | And you were talking about will to power before. The first big divide between realists

00:22:21.120 | is structural realists and human nature realists. Nice.

00:22:26.640 | And Hans Morgenthau, who was influenced by nature and therefore had that will to power logic

00:22:37.040 | embedded in his thinking about how the world works, he was a human nature realist. I'm a

00:22:45.280 | structural realist, and I believe it's not human nature, it's not individuals and some will to

00:22:53.600 | power that drives competition and war. What drives competition and war is the structure of the

00:23:01.360 | system. It's anarchy. So you're not as romantic as the human nature realists?

00:23:06.320 | Yeah. There's just a world of difference between the two. It's just important to understand that.

00:23:12.240 | So within that, from the structural, there's a subdivision also of offensive and defensive.

00:23:17.680 | Yes. Inside the structural realist world. And you have a handful of realists who believe that

00:23:29.120 | the structure of the system fosters competition for sure, security competition, but it really

00:23:37.760 | rules out great power war almost all the time. So it makes sense to care about the balance of power,

00:23:48.640 | but to focus on maintaining how much power you have. That's the defensive realism,

00:23:55.600 | maintaining how much power you have, not trying to gain more power. Because the argument the

00:24:01.600 | defensive realists make is that if you try to gain more power, the system will punish you.

00:24:07.840 | The structure will punish you. I'm not a defensive realist. I'm an offensive realist.

00:24:15.440 | And my argument is that states look for opportunities to gain more power. And every

00:24:22.800 | time they see, or almost every time they see an opportunity to gain more power,

00:24:28.880 | and they think the likelihood of success is high and the cost will not be great,

00:24:35.280 | they'll jump at that opportunity.

00:24:37.680 | Just to linger on the human nature perspective, how do you explain Hitler and Nazi Germany?

00:24:50.320 | Just one of the more recent aggressive expansions through military might,

00:24:57.600 | how do you explain that in the framework of offensive realism?

00:25:03.200 | Well, I think that Nazi Germany was driven in large part by structural considerations.

00:25:10.800 | And I think if you look at Imperial Germany, which was largely responsible for starting World War I,

00:25:17.840 | and of course, Nazi Germany is largely responsible for starting World War II,

00:25:21.680 | what that tells you is you didn't need Adolf Hitler to start World War I. And I believe that

00:25:28.240 | there is a good chance you would have had World War II in the absence of Hitler. I believe that

00:25:35.520 | Germany was very powerful, it was deeply worried about the balance of power in Europe, and it had

00:25:42.640 | strong incentives to behave aggressively in the late 1930s, early 1940s. So I believe that

00:25:52.400 | structure mattered. However, I want to qualify that in the case of Adolf Hitler, because I do

00:25:59.360 | think he had what you would call a will to power. I've never used that word to describe him before,

00:26:05.680 | but it's consistent with my point that I often make, that there are two leaders, or there have

00:26:11.920 | been two leaders in modern history who are congenital aggressors, and one was Napoleon,

00:26:20.720 | and the other was Hitler. Now, if you want to call that a will to power, you can do that. I'm more

00:26:26.560 | comfortable referring to Hitler as a congenital aggressor, and referring to Napoleon as a

00:26:31.840 | congenital aggressor, although there were important differences between the two, because Hitler was

00:26:38.320 | probably the most murderous leader in recorded history, and Napoleon was not in that category

00:26:45.520 | at all. But both of them were driven by what you would call a will to power, and that has to be

00:26:55.760 | married to the structural argument in Hitler's case, and also in Napoleon's case.

00:27:02.240 | - Is there some degree on the human psychology side that resentment, because of what happened

00:27:09.920 | after World War I, led to Hitler wielding so much power, and then Hitler starting World War II? So

00:27:17.440 | this is the human side. Perhaps the reason I ask that question is also because you mentioned the

00:27:22.800 | century of humiliation on the China side. So to which degree did humiliation lead to Hitler,

00:27:31.360 | and lead to World War II? - Well, the question of what led to Hitler

00:27:35.440 | is a very different question than the question of what led to World War II, once Hitler was in power.

00:27:41.520 | I mean, after January 30th, 1933, he's in power, and then the question of what is driving him comes

00:27:48.560 | racing to the fore. Is there resentment over the Versailles Treaty, and what happened to Germany?

00:27:56.880 | Yes. Did that matter? Yes. But my argument is that structure was the principal factor

00:28:04.560 | driving the train in Hitler's case. But what I'm saying here is that there were other factors

00:28:12.320 | as well, resentment being one of them, will to power, or the fact that he was a congenital

00:28:18.400 | aggressor in my lexicon certainly mattered as well. So I don't wanna dismiss

00:28:26.080 | your point about resentment. - So Hitler in particular, the way he wielded,

00:28:31.760 | the way he gained so much power might have been the general resentment of the populace,

00:28:39.840 | of the German populace. - I think that as a result of

00:28:44.480 | defeat in World War I, and all the trials and tribulations associated with Weimar Germany,

00:28:51.360 | and then the coming of the Great Depression, all of those factors definitely account for his coming

00:28:59.280 | to power. I think that one of the reasons that he was so successful at winning over the German people

00:29:10.800 | once he came to power was because there was a great deal of resentment in the German body politic,

00:29:20.880 | and he played on that resentment. That surely helped him get elected too. But I think,

00:29:25.920 | having studied the case, it was even more important once he took over. I also believe

00:29:34.080 | that one of the principal reasons that he was so popular, and he was wildly popular inside Nazi

00:29:41.040 | Germany, is because he was the only leader of an industrialized country who pulled his country out

00:29:46.240 | of the Depression, and that really mattered. And it made him very effective. It's also worth noting

00:29:56.000 | that he was a remarkably charismatic individual. I find that hard to believe, 'cause every time I

00:30:01.840 | look at him or listen to his speeches, he does not appear to be charismatic to me. But I've

00:30:08.960 | talked to a number of people who are experts on this subject who assure me that he was very

00:30:14.960 | charismatic. And I would note to you, if you look at public opinion polls in Germany, West Germany,

00:30:20.880 | in the late 1940s, this is the late 1940s, after the Third Reich is destroyed in 1945,

00:30:28.400 | he is still remarkably popular in the polls. - Stalin is still popular in many parts of

00:30:34.800 | Eastern Europe. - Yeah, yeah. And Stalin's popular in many quarters inside Russia.

00:30:43.120 | And Stalin murdered more of his own people than he murdered people outside of the Soviet Union.

00:30:49.440 | - And still to you, the ties of history turn not on individuals, but on

00:30:55.360 | structural considerations. So Hitler may be a surface layer characteristics of how

00:31:06.000 | Germany started war, but not really the reason. - Well, history is a multi-dimensional phenomenon.

00:31:14.400 | - So I hear. - And we're talking about

00:31:16.880 | interstate relations. - Yes.

00:31:18.720 | - And realism is a theory about how states interact with each other. And there are many

00:31:24.400 | other dimensions to international politics. And if you're talking about someone like Adolf Hitler,

00:31:29.760 | right, why did he start World War II is a very different question than why did he start the

00:31:38.640 | Holocaust or why did he push forward a Holocaust? I mean, that's a different question. And realism

00:31:46.560 | doesn't answer that question. So I wanna be very clear that I'm not someone who argues that realism

00:31:53.680 | answers every question about international politics, but it does answer what is one of the

00:32:01.280 | big, if not the biggest questions that IR scholars care about, which is what causes security

00:32:07.280 | competition and what causes great power war. - Does offensive realism answer the question

00:32:13.120 | why Hitler attacked the Soviet Union? - Yes.

00:32:17.120 | - Because from a military strategy perspective, there's pros and cons to that decision.

00:32:24.800 | - Pros and cons to every decision. The question is, did he think that he could win a quick and

00:32:29.760 | decisive victory? And he did, I mean, as did his generals. It's very interesting. I've spent a lot

00:32:37.200 | of time studying German decision-making in World War II. If you look at the German decision

00:32:45.440 | to invade Poland on September 1st, 1939, and you look at the German decision to invade France on

00:32:52.800 | May 10th, 1940, and then the Soviet Union on June 22nd, 1941, what you see is there was actually

00:33:00.080 | quite a bit of resistance to Hitler in 1938 at the time of Czechoslovakia, Munich. And there was

00:33:08.480 | also quite a bit of resistance in September 1939. - Internally or... - Internally, internally,

00:33:16.320 | for sure. Yeah. People had doubts. They didn't think the Wehrmacht was ready. And given the

00:33:22.480 | fact that World War I had just ended about 20 years before, the thought of starting another

00:33:29.200 | European war was not especially attractive to lots of German policymakers, including military leaders.

00:33:37.040 | And then came France, 1940. In the run-up to May 10th, 1940, there was huge resistance

00:33:45.200 | in the German army to attacking France. But that was eventually eliminated because they came up

00:33:55.440 | with a clever plan, the Manstein Plan. If you look at the decision to invade the Soviet Union

00:34:03.040 | on June 22nd, 1941, which is the only case where they fail, they succeeded in France,

00:34:09.520 | they succeeded in Poland, they succeeded at Munich in 1938. Soviet Union is where they fail.

00:34:17.200 | There's hardly any resistance at all, right? - Yeah. Well, and to say that they failed the

00:34:22.480 | Soviet Union, I mean, my grandfather, I mean, from the Soviet Union, there was a lot of successes

00:34:28.320 | early on. So there's poor military, I would say, strategic decisions along the way, but it was,

00:34:38.400 | it caught Stalin off guard. Maybe you can correct me, but from my perspective,

00:34:44.560 | terrifyingly so, they could have been successful if certain different decisions were made from a

00:34:52.640 | military perspective. - Yeah. I've always had the sense they came terrifyingly close to winning.

00:34:59.680 | You can make the opposite argument that they were doomed, but I'm not terribly comfortable

00:35:07.360 | making that argument. I think the Wehrmacht by the summer of 1941 was a finely tuned instrument

00:35:17.040 | for war. And the Red Army was in quite terrible shape. Stalin had purged the officer corps,

00:35:25.120 | they had performed poorly in Finland, and there were all sorts of reasons to think that they were

00:35:34.240 | no match for the Wehrmacht. And if you look at what happened in the initial stages of the conflict,

00:35:40.560 | that proved to be the case. The Germans won a lot of significant tactical victories early on.

00:35:49.200 | - And if they focused and went to Moscow as quickly as possible, it's, again, terrifyingly

00:35:55.760 | so, could have been a, basically topple Stalin. And one thing that's-

00:36:03.120 | - That's possible. - That's possible.

00:36:05.200 | Fortunately, we're not going to run the experiment again, but one could argue that had they

00:36:11.600 | concentrated as the generals wanted to do in going straight for Moscow, that they would have won. I

00:36:18.160 | mean, what Hitler wanted to do is he wanted to go into the Ukraine. I mean, Hitler thought that the

00:36:23.520 | main axis, there were three axes, the Northern axis went towards Leningrad, the Central axis,

00:36:30.080 | of course, went to Moscow. And then the Southern axis, Army Group South, headed towards Ukraine and

00:36:37.120 | deep into the Caucasus. And Hitler believed that that should have been the main axis. And in fact,

00:36:45.920 | in 1942, the Soviets, excuse me, the Germans go back on the offensive in 1942. This is Operation

00:36:53.760 | Blue. And the main axis in '42 is deep into the Ukraine and into the Caucasus. And that fails.

00:37:00.880 | But one could argue that had they done that in '41, had they not gone to Moscow, had they gone,

00:37:07.920 | you know, had they concentrated on going deep into Ukraine and into the Caucasus,

00:37:12.800 | they could have knocked the Soviets out that way. I'm not sure that in the end, I believe that. I

00:37:20.800 | think in the end, the Soviets would have won no matter what, but I'm not 100% sure of that.

00:37:27.680 | So sometimes, maybe you can educate me. But sometimes, you know, they say, just like when

00:37:36.320 | Napoleon Winter defeated Hitler in Russia, I think not often enough people tell the story of the

00:37:43.920 | soldiers and the motivation and how hard they fight. So it turns out that Ukrainians and Russians

00:37:53.280 | are not easy to conquer. They're the kinds of people that don't roll over and fight bravely.

00:38:00.320 | There seems to be a difference in certain people, peoples in how they see war, how they approach war,

00:38:07.120 | how proud they are to fight for their country, to die for their country, these kinds of things.

00:38:11.760 | So I think Battle of Stalingrad tells, at least to me, a story of extremely brave fighting

00:38:17.520 | on the Soviet side. And that's a component of war too. It's not just structural. It's not just

00:38:26.240 | military strategy. It's also the humans involved. But maybe that's a romantic notion of war.

00:38:32.880 | No, I think there's a great deal of truth in that. But let's just unpack it a bit in the case of

00:38:40.000 | the Soviet Union in World War II. The counter argument to that is that in World War I,

00:38:48.240 | the Russian army disintegrated. And if you look at what happened when Napoleon invaded in 1812,

00:38:59.200 | and you look at what happened in 1917, and then you look at what happened between '41 and '45,

00:39:08.080 | the Napoleon case looks a lot like the Hitler case, and it fits neatly with your argument.

00:39:14.240 | But World War I does not fit neatly with your argument because the Russians lost and surrendered.

00:39:20.960 | Yeah.

00:39:21.440 | And you had the infamous Treaty of Brest-Litovsk where the Soviet Union then,

00:39:26.960 | 'cause it went from Russia to the Soviet Union in October 1917, the Soviet Union

00:39:31.840 | surrendered large amounts of Soviet territory because it had suffered a humiliating defeat.

00:39:38.160 | My argument for why the Russians, let me take that back, why the Soviets fought like wild dogs

00:39:45.200 | in World War II is that they were up against a genocidal adversary. You want to understand

00:39:52.640 | the Germans murdered huge numbers of Soviet POWs. The overall total was 3.7 million.

00:40:01.840 | And by December of 1941, remember the invasion is June '41, by December of 1941,

00:40:10.160 | the Germans have murdered 2 million Soviet POWs. At that point in time, they had murdered many more

00:40:17.120 | POWs than they had murdered Jews. And this is not to deny for one second that they were on a

00:40:23.280 | murderous rampage when it came to Jews, but they were also on a murderous rampage when it came to

00:40:29.840 | Soviet citizens and Soviet soldiers, right? So those Soviet soldiers quickly came to understand

00:40:38.480 | they were fighting for their lives. If they were taken prisoner, they would die. So they fought

00:40:46.240 | like wild dogs. - Yeah, you know, the story of the Holocaust of the 6 million Jews is often told

00:40:52.720 | extensively. If Hitler won, conquered the Soviet Union, it's terrifying to think

00:41:00.720 | on a much grander scale than the Holocaust, what would have happened to the Slavic people,

00:41:06.400 | to the Soviet people? - Absolutely. All you have to do is read "The Hunger Plan," right? And they

00:41:12.720 | also had a plan, what is it called? "Grand Planned East," I forget the exact name of it,

00:41:19.520 | which made it clear that they were gonna murder many tens of millions of people. And by the way,

00:41:27.200 | I believe that they would have murdered all the Poles and all the Roma. I mean, my view is that

00:41:33.360 | the Jews were number one on the genocidal hit list, the Roma or the Gypsies were number two,

00:41:39.920 | and the Poles were number three. And of course, I just explained to you how many POWs they had

00:41:46.160 | killed. So they would have ended up murdering huge numbers of Soviet citizens as well.

00:41:52.320 | But people quickly figured out that this was happening. That's my point to you. And that

00:41:59.120 | gave them, needless to say, very powerful incentives to fight hard against the Germans

00:42:06.240 | and to make sure that they did not win. - To fast forward in time, but not in space.

00:42:13.680 | Let me ask you about the war in Ukraine.

00:42:19.280 | Why did Russia invade Ukraine on February 24th, 2022? What are some of the explanations given,

00:42:29.520 | and which do you find the most convincing? - Well, clearly the conventional wisdom is

00:42:35.440 | that Putin is principally responsible. Putin is an imperialist. He's an expansionist.

00:42:42.720 | - That's the conventional thinking. - Yeah, yeah. And the idea is that he

00:42:47.280 | is bent on creating a greater Russia, and even more so, he's interested in dominating

00:42:56.560 | Eastern Europe, if not all of Europe. And that Ukraine was the first stop on the train line,

00:43:05.120 | and what he wanted to do was to conquer all of Ukraine, incorporate it into a greater Russia,

00:43:12.240 | and then he would move on and conquer other countries. This is the conventional wisdom.

00:43:17.760 | My view is there is no evidence, let me emphasize, zero evidence to support that argument.

00:43:25.520 | - Which part does he would, the imperialist part, the sense that he would, he sought to

00:43:32.400 | conquer all of Ukraine and move on and conquer-- - There's no evidence he was interested in

00:43:38.400 | conquering all of Ukraine. There was no evidence beforehand that he was interested in conquering

00:43:45.760 | any of Ukraine. And there's no way that an army that had 190,000 troops at the most,

00:43:54.400 | right, could have conquered all of Ukraine. Just impossible. As I like to emphasize,

00:44:01.040 | when the Germans went into Poland in 1939, and the Germans, you wanna remember, were only intent

00:44:08.240 | on conquering the western half of Poland, because the Soviets who came in later that month were

00:44:15.280 | gonna conquer the eastern half of Poland. So the western half of Poland is much smaller than

00:44:21.840 | Ukraine. And the Germans went in with 1.5 million troops. If Vladimir Putin were bent on conquering

00:44:32.720 | all of Ukraine, he would have needed at least two million troops. I would argue he'd need three

00:44:38.240 | million troops, because not only do you need to conquer the country, you then have to occupy it.

00:44:43.360 | But the idea that 190,000 troops was sufficient for conquering all of Ukraine is not a serious

00:44:50.880 | argument. Furthermore, he was not interested in conquering Ukraine. And that's why in March 2022,

00:44:57.520 | this is immediately after the war starts, he is negotiating with Zelensky to end the war.

00:45:05.200 | There are serious negotiations taking place in Istanbul involving the Turks. And Naftali Bennett,

00:45:13.120 | who was the Israeli prime minister at the time, was deeply involved in negotiating with both Putin

00:45:19.440 | and Zelensky to end the war. Well, if he was interested, Putin, in conquering all of Ukraine,

00:45:26.800 | why in God's name would he be negotiating with Zelensky to end the war? And of course,

00:45:32.800 | what they were negotiating about was NATO expansion into Ukraine, which was the principal

00:45:39.200 | cause of the war. People in the West don't wanna hear that argument, because if it is true,

00:45:46.000 | which it is, then the West is principally responsible for this bloodbath that's now

00:45:51.440 | taking place. And of course, the West doesn't want to be principally responsible. It wants to blame

00:45:57.840 | Vladimir Putin. So we've invented this story out of whole cloth that he is an aggressor, that he's

00:46:04.800 | the second coming of Adolf Hitler, and that what he did in Ukraine was try to conquer all of it.

00:46:12.160 | And he failed, but with a little bit of luck, he probably would've conquered all of it, and

00:46:18.400 | he'd now be in the Baltic states, and eventually end up dominating all of Eastern Europe. As I

00:46:25.680 | said, I think there's no evidence to support this. - So maybe there's a lot of things to ask there.

00:46:31.440 | Maybe just to linger on NATO expansion. What is NATO expansion? What is the threat of NATO

00:46:39.120 | expansion, and why is it such a concern for Russia? - NATO was a mortal enemy of the Soviet Union

00:46:47.840 | during the Cold War. It's a military alliance which has at its heart the United States of America,

00:46:54.320 | which is the most powerful state on the planet. It is perfectly understandable that Russia is not

00:47:03.040 | going to want that military alliance on its doorstep. Here in the United States, we have,

00:47:09.600 | as you well know, what's called the Monroe Doctrine, and that basically says no great

00:47:14.880 | powers from Europe or Asia are allowed to come into our neighborhood and form a military alliance

00:47:21.120 | with anybody in this neighborhood. When I was young, there was this thing called the Cuban

00:47:26.880 | Missile Crisis. The Soviets had the audacity to put nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba. We told them

00:47:32.720 | in no uncertain terms that that was not acceptable and that those missiles had to be removed. This is

00:47:39.440 | our backyard, and we do not tolerate distant great powers coming into our neighborhood. Well, what's

00:47:46.320 | good for the goose is good for the gander, and if we don't like great powers coming into our

00:47:52.960 | neighborhood, it's hardly surprising that the Russians did not want NATO on their doorstep.

00:47:59.520 | They made that manifestly clear when the Cold War ended, and they exacted a promise from us

00:48:09.440 | that we would not expand NATO. Then when we started expanding NATO, they made it clear

00:48:15.280 | after the first tranche in 1999 that they were profoundly unhappy with that. They made it clear

00:48:22.400 | in 2004 after the second tranche that they were profoundly unhappy with that expansion.

00:48:29.200 | And then in April 2008, when NATO announced that Ukraine and Georgia would become part of NATO,

00:48:37.920 | they made it unequivocally clear, not just Putin, that that was not going to happen. They were

00:48:44.320 | drawing a red line in the sand. It is no accident that in August 2008—remember, the Bucharest

00:48:51.920 | summit is April 2008—in August 2008, you had a war between Georgia and Russia, and that involved

00:48:59.520 | at its core NATO expansion. So the Americans and their allies should have understood by at least

00:49:09.440 | August 2008 that continuing to push to bring Ukraine into NATO was going to lead to disaster.

00:49:17.200 | And I would note that there were all sorts of people in the 1990s, like George Kennan,

00:49:22.960 | William Perry, who was Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of

00:49:28.000 | Staff, Paul Nitze, and so forth and so on, who argued that NATO expansion would end up producing

00:49:35.360 | a disaster, which it has. I would note that at the famous April 2008 Bucharest summit,

00:49:45.120 | where NATO said that Ukraine would be brought into the alliance, Angela Merkel and Nicolas

00:49:53.200 | Sarkozy, the German and French leaders respectively, opposed that decision. Angela Merkel later said

00:50:01.120 | that the reason she opposed it was because she understood that Putin would interpret it as a

00:50:07.520 | declaration of war. Just think about that. Merkel is telling you that she opposed NATO expansion

00:50:15.520 | into Ukraine because she understood correctly that Putin would see it as a declaration of war.

00:50:22.240 | What did the United States and its friends in Europe do? They continued to push and push,

00:50:28.160 | because we thought that we could push NATO expansion down their throat after 2008,

00:50:34.160 | the same way we did in 1999 and 2004. But we were wrong, and it all blew up in our face in 2014.

00:50:42.800 | And when it blew up in our face in 2014, what did we do? Did we back off and say, "Well, maybe the

00:50:49.680 | Russians have some legitimate security interests"? No, that's not the way we operate.

00:50:54.880 | We continued to double down, and the end result is that in 2022, you got a war. And as I've argued

00:51:04.880 | for a long time now, we, the West, are principally responsible for that, not Vladimir Putin.

00:51:10.880 | So the expansion of NATO is primarily responsible for that.

00:51:15.200 | Yeah. To put it in more general terms, what we were trying to do was turn Ukraine into a Western

00:51:22.080 | bulwark on Russia's border. And it really wasn't NATO expansion alone. NATO expansion was the most

00:51:29.280 | important element of our strategy, but the strategy had two other dimensions. One was EU expansion,

00:51:36.640 | and the third was the color revolution. We were trying to force orange revolution in Ukraine,

00:51:44.560 | and the basic goal there was to turn Ukraine into a pro-Western liberal democracy. And that

00:51:53.760 | meant that you'd have Ukraine, if it worked, as a pro-Western liberal democracy that was in the EU

00:51:59.840 | and that was in NATO. This was our goal. And the Russians made it unequivocally clear Ukraine was

00:52:08.240 | not going to become a Western bulwark on their border. And most importantly, they made it clear

00:52:14.720 | that Ukraine in NATO was unacceptable. Can we talk about the mind of Vladimir Putin?

00:52:21.680 | You've mentioned that this idea that he has aspirations for

00:52:26.800 | imperialist conquest, that he dreams of empire is not grounded in reality. He wrote an essay in 2021

00:52:39.040 | about one people. Do you think there is some degree to which he still dreams of the former

00:52:47.280 | Soviet Union reuniting? No. He's made it clear that anybody with a triple digit IQ understands

00:52:57.760 | that it's nuts to think about recreating the Soviet Union. He thinks it's a tragedy that the Soviet

00:53:04.640 | Union fell apart. But as he made clear in that essay, the July 12th, 2021 essay, and as he made

00:53:12.400 | clear in speeches immediately before he invaded Ukraine, he accepted the breakup of the Soviet

00:53:22.720 | Union and he accepted the status quo in Europe, save for the fact he did not accept the idea that

00:53:30.720 | Ukraine would become part of NATO. He's been in power for over two decades. Is there a degree

00:53:37.520 | that power can affect a leader's ability to see the world clearly? As they say, corrupt.

00:53:45.120 | Do you think power has corrupted Vladimir Putin to a degree? It's very hard for me to answer that

00:53:54.560 | question because I don't know him and I've not studied him carefully in terms of his overall

00:54:03.840 | performance over the course of the 23 years that he's been in power. I've studied him as a

00:54:12.160 | strategist and I've studied how he deals with the West and deals with the international system more

00:54:22.560 | generally since 2014. I think he is a first-class strategist. This is not to say he doesn't make

00:54:33.440 | mistakes and he admits he's made some mistakes. But I think that the West is dealing with a

00:54:43.520 | formidable adversary here. I don't see any evidence that he's either lost speed off his

00:54:51.600 | fastball or that power has corrupted his thinking about strategic affairs.

00:54:58.400 | So he has consistently put as a primary concern security. As does the United States,

00:55:07.840 | he's put for Russia security, making sure that NATO doesn't get close to its borders.

00:55:12.480 | I think that's clear, yeah. I think, as I emphasized early on in our conversation,

00:55:19.680 | that leaders privilege security or survival over everything else. And by the way, he gave a number

00:55:27.520 | of talks and press conferences in addition to writing that famous article that you referred

00:55:36.320 | to on July 12, 2021. So we have a pretty clear record of what he was saying, and I would argue

00:55:45.360 | what he was thinking in the run-up to the war in February 2022. And if you read what he said,

00:55:53.680 | it's quite clear that he privileged security or survival. He was deeply concerned about

00:56:00.480 | the security of Russia. And Russia is a quite vulnerable state in a lot of ways,

00:56:06.960 | especially if you think back to what it looked like in the 1990s, as you know better than I do.

00:56:12.880 | It was in terrible shape. The Chinese talk about the century of national humiliation.

00:56:19.040 | One could argue that for the Russians, that was the decade of national humiliation.

00:56:23.200 | And it took Putin, I think, quite a bit of time to bring the Russians back from the dead.

00:56:29.920 | I think he eventually succeeded, but it took a considerable amount of time. And I think he

00:56:36.640 | understood that he was not playing a particularly strong hand. He was playing something of a weak

00:56:41.760 | hand, and he had to be very careful, very cautious. And I think he was. And I think that's

00:56:49.200 | very different than the United States. The United States was the unipole. It was the most powerful

00:56:54.800 | state in the history of the world, most powerful state relative to all its possible competitors

00:57:00.560 | from roughly 1989, certainly after December 1991, when the Soviet Union fell apart,

00:57:08.400 | up until I would argue about 2017. We were incredibly powerful. And even after 2017,

00:57:14.800 | up to today, the United States remains the most powerful state in the system.

00:57:19.040 | And because of our geographical location, we are in a terrific situation to survive in any

00:57:29.600 | great power competition. So you have a situation involving the United States that's different than

00:57:37.200 | the situation involving Russia. They're just much more vulnerable than we are. And therefore,

00:57:44.640 | I think Putin tends to be more sensitive about security than any American president in recent

00:57:50.800 | times. - Europe on one side, China on the other side. It's a complicated situation.

00:57:56.400 | - Yeah, and we talked before about 1812 when Napoleon invaded and Moscow got burned to the

00:58:03.040 | ground. We talked about World War I where the Russians were actually defeated and surrendered.

00:58:09.600 | And then we talked about 1941 to 1945, where although, thankfully, the Soviets prevailed,

00:58:18.480 | it was a close call. And I mean, the casualties, the destruction that the Soviet Union

00:58:29.760 | had inflicted on it by the Germans is just almost hard to believe.

00:58:34.480 | So they are sensitive. You can understand full well, or at least you should be able to understand

00:58:43.360 | full well, why the idea of bringing Ukraine up to their border really spooked them.

00:58:48.480 | I don't understand why more Americans don't understand that. It befuddles me. I think it

00:58:55.840 | has to do with the fact that Americans are not very good at putting themselves in the shoes of

00:58:59.760 | other countries. And you really, if you're gonna be a first-class strategist in international

00:59:06.400 | politics, you have to be able to do that. You have to put yourself in the shoes of the other side

00:59:11.040 | and think about how they think so you don't make foolish mistakes. - And as a starting point,

00:59:17.520 | Americans tend to see themselves as the good guys and a set of others as the bad guys. And

00:59:24.240 | you have to be able to empathize that Russians think of themselves as the good guys, the Chinese

00:59:30.960 | think of themselves as the good guys, and just be able to empathize if they are the good guys.

00:59:36.960 | It's like that funny skit, are we the baddies? Consider the United States could be the bad guys.

00:59:44.720 | First of all, see the world, if the United States is the bad guys and China is the good guys,

00:59:51.840 | what does that world look like? Be able to just exist with that thought because that is what

00:59:56.960 | the Chinese leadership and many Chinese citizens, if not now, maybe in the future will believe.

01:00:03.200 | And you have to kind of do the calculation, the simulation forward from that. And same with Russia,

01:00:10.080 | same with other nations. - Yeah, I agree with you 100%. And just, you know, I always think of

01:00:16.400 | Michael McFaul at Stanford who was the American ambassador to Russia, I think between 2012 and

01:00:22.800 | 2014. And he told me that he told Putin that Putin didn't have to worry about NATO expansion

01:00:33.440 | because the United States was a benign hegemon. And I asked Mike what Putin's response was to that.

01:00:43.120 | And Mike said that Putin didn't believe it. But Mike believed that he should believe it and that

01:00:53.120 | we could move NATO eastward to include Ukraine. And in the end, we'd get away with it because we

01:01:00.720 | are a benign hegemon. But the fact is that's not what Putin saw. Putin saw us as a malign hegemon.

01:01:09.200 | And what Mike thinks or any American thinks doesn't matter. What matters is what Putin thinks.

01:01:15.600 | - But also the drums of war have been beating for some reason. NATO expansion has been threatened

01:01:22.960 | for some reason. So you've talked about NATO expansion being dead.

01:01:26.640 | So like, it doesn't make sense from a geopolitical perspective on the Europe side to expand NATO.

01:01:35.360 | But nevertheless, that threat has been echoed. So why has NATO expansion been pushed

01:01:44.000 | from your perspective? - There are two reasons. One is,

01:01:47.440 | first of all, we thought it was a wonderful thing to bring more and more countries into NATO. We

01:01:55.760 | thought that it facilitated peace and prosperity. It was ultimately all for the good. And

01:02:04.800 | we also thought that countries like Ukraine had a right to join NATO. These are sovereign countries

01:02:14.160 | that can decide for themselves and the Russians have no say in what Ukraine wants to do.

01:02:20.880 | And then finally, and this is a point I emphasized before, we were very powerful and we thought we

01:02:27.120 | could shove it down their throat. So it's a combination of those factors that led us to

01:02:34.080 | pursue what I think was ultimately a foolish policy. - We've talked about how wars get started.

01:02:42.080 | How do you hope the war in Ukraine ends? What are the ways to end this war? What are the

01:02:47.280 | ways to achieve peace there? And the, I would say, senseless death of young men,

01:03:00.000 | as always happens in war. - I'm sad to say I don't have a good answer to that. I don't think

01:03:09.360 | there's any real prospect of a meaningful peace agreement. I think it's almost impossible.

01:03:17.040 | I think the best you can hope for at this point is at some point the shooting stops,

01:03:26.880 | you have a ceasefire, and then you have a frozen conflict. And that frozen conflict

01:03:33.200 | will not be highly stable. And the Ukrainians in the West will do everything they can to weaken

01:03:42.080 | Russia's position. And the Russians will go to great lengths to not only damage that dysfunctional

01:03:50.560 | rump state that Ukraine becomes, but the Russians will go to great lengths to sow dissension

01:03:56.880 | within the alliance. And that includes in terms of transatlantic relations. So you'll have this

01:04:04.000 | continuing security competition between Russia on one side and Ukraine and the West on the other,

01:04:10.880 | even when you get a frozen peace. Or you get a frozen conflict. And the potential for escalation

01:04:20.160 | there will be great. So I think this is a disaster. - That's a very realist perspective.

01:04:29.200 | Let me ask you sort of the human side of it. Do you think there's some power to

01:04:37.760 | leader sitting down, having a conversation, man to man, leader to leader about this? There is just

01:04:46.320 | a lot of death happening. It seems that from an economic perspective, from a human perspective,

01:04:53.840 | both nations are losing. Is it possible for Vladimir Zelensky and Vladimir Putin to sit down

01:05:00.960 | and talk and to figure out a way where the security concerns are addressed and both nations can

01:05:12.000 | minimize the amount of suffering that's happening and create a path towards future flourishing?

01:05:19.520 | - I think the answer is no. - Even with the United States involved?

01:05:26.560 | Three people in the room. - Well, I think if the United States

01:05:30.320 | is involved, the answer is definitely no. You have to get the Americans out. And then I think if you

01:05:37.440 | have Zelensky and Putin talking, you have a sliver of a chance there. The Americans are a real problem.

01:05:46.080 | Look, let's go back to what happens right after the war starts. As I said before, we're talking

01:05:52.720 | March, early April of 2022. The war starts on February 24th, 2022. And as I said to you,

01:06:01.040 | the two sides were negotiating in Istanbul and they were also negotiating through Naftali Bennett.

01:06:09.920 | And the Bennett track and the Turkish track were operating together. I mean, they were not at

01:06:16.000 | cross purposes at all. What happened? Bennett tells the story very clearly that they had made

01:06:26.160 | significant progress in reaching an agreement. This is Zelensky on one side and Putin on the

01:06:33.760 | other. Bennett is talking in person to both Putin and Zelensky. And what happens to produce failure?

01:06:45.440 | The answer is the United States and Britain get involved and tell Zelensky to walk. They tell

01:06:51.680 | Zelensky to walk. If they had come in and encouraged Zelensky to try to figure out a way with Putin

01:06:59.040 | to shut this one down and worked with Bennett and worked with Erdogan, we might've been able to shut

01:07:05.360 | the war down then, but it was the United States. - Well, let me sort of push back on that. You're

01:07:12.560 | correct, but sort of United States paints this like picture that everybody's aligned. So I,

01:07:19.200 | maybe you can correct me, but I believe in the power of individuals, especially individual leaders,

01:07:23.920 | again, whether it's Biden or Trump or whoever, goes into a room and says in a way that's convincing

01:07:33.120 | that no more NATO expansion. And actually just on a basic human level,

01:07:41.760 | ask the question of why are we doing all this senseless killing?

01:07:47.440 | And look at the interest of one, Russia, look at the interest of the other, Ukraine.

01:07:53.600 | Their interests are pretty simple and say, the United States is going to stay out of this.

01:07:59.120 | We're not going to expand NATO and say all that in a way that's convincing, which is NATO expansion

01:08:06.080 | is silly at this point. China is the big threat. We're not going to do this kind of conflict

01:08:12.720 | escalation with Russia. The Cold War is over. Let's normalize relations. - Let me just embellish

01:08:22.080 | your argument. - Thank you. I need it. - If we say there's a sliver of a chance that you can do this,

01:08:30.160 | and I do think there is a sliver of a chance. Let me just embellish your point. - Thank you.

01:08:34.880 | - I need all the help I can get. - Two things have to be done here, in my opinion. One is

01:08:40.640 | Ukraine has to become neutral and it has to completely sever all security ties with the West.

01:08:52.160 | Right? It's not like you can say we're not going to expand NATO to include Ukraine,

01:09:01.040 | but we're going to continue to have some loose security arrangement with Ukraine.

01:09:06.800 | None of that. It has to be completely severed. Ukraine has to be on its own. Okay? And number

01:09:14.560 | two, Ukraine has to accept the fact that the Russians are going to keep the four oblasts that

01:09:21.360 | they've now annexed and Crimea. Right? The Russians are not going to give them back.

01:09:28.080 | And what you really want to do if you're Zelensky or who's ever running Ukraine in this scenario

01:09:34.960 | that we're positing is you want to make sure the Russians don't take another four oblasts to include

01:09:40.880 | Kharkiv and Odessa. Right? If I'm playing Putin's hand and this war goes on, I'm thinking about

01:09:49.280 | taking four more oblasts. I want to take about 43% of Ukraine and annex it to Russia. Right? And I

01:09:58.560 | certainly want Odessa and I certainly want Kharkiv and I want the two oblasts in between as well.

01:10:05.120 | Literally or as a leverage in negotiation for Ukraine neutrality?

01:10:12.160 | I want them literally. I want to conquer them literally. But my point to you is if we can begin

01:10:21.200 | to talk about cutting a deal now, you may be able to head that kind of aggression off at the pass.

01:10:28.880 | In other words, you may be able to limit Putin and Russia to annexing the four oblasts that they've

01:10:36.560 | now annexed plus Crimea. That's the best I think you can hope for. But the point is you have to get

01:10:42.240 | the Ukrainians to accept that. You have to get the Ukrainians to accept becoming a truly neutral

01:10:48.800 | state and conceding that the Russians keep a big chunk of territory. It's about 23% of Ukrainian

01:10:55.600 | territory that they've annexed. And I find it hard to imagine any Ukrainian leader agreeing to that.

01:11:03.360 | Well, there could be more nuanced things like no military involvement between the United States

01:11:09.760 | and Ukraine, but economic involvement, sort of financial support, normalizing economic

01:11:17.360 | relationships with Ukraine, with Russia. I think you could probably get away with that. I think

01:11:23.040 | that the tricky question there that you would have to answer is what about EU expansion? Right? And

01:11:29.120 | I think EU expansion is probably a no-no for the Russians because most people don't recognize this,

01:11:35.760 | but there is a military dimension built into EU expansion. It's not purely an economic

01:11:43.120 | alliance or relationship or institution, whatever word you want to use. There's a military dimension

01:11:51.520 | to that. And in the run-up to the war, actually in the run-up to the 2014 crisis when it first broke

01:12:00.240 | out, the Russians made it clear they saw EU expansion as a stalking horse for NATO expansion.

01:12:10.400 | So EU expansion is tricky. But I think your point of close economic relations between

01:12:20.240 | or healthy economic relations, to use a better term, between Ukraine and the West is possible.

01:12:26.800 | I think the Russians have a vested interest in, if it's a neutral Ukraine, they have a vested

01:12:32.960 | interest in that Ukraine flourishing. But that then brings us back to the territorial issue.

01:12:38.640 | Well, so do you believe it's possible for individual human relations to counteract the

01:12:46.080 | structural forces that you talk about? So meaning the leaders being able to pick up the phone and

01:12:53.520 | make agreements that are good for humanity as a whole and for their individual nations in the long

01:12:58.640 | term. I think leadership matters here. I mean, one of the real problems here is that there's no trust

01:13:08.480 | on the Russian side. And that has to do with the Minsk agreements.

01:13:12.480 | The Minsk agreements, which were designed to shut down the civil war in eastern Ukraine,

01:13:25.200 | in the Donbass, really mattered to the Russians. And there were four players involved in the

01:13:34.080 | Minsk process, four main players, Russia and Ukraine, of course, and then Germany and France.

01:13:39.920 | And I believe the Russians took the Minsk Accords seriously. I believe Putin took them very

01:13:48.000 | seriously. He wanted to shut down that conflict. And Angela Merkel, Francois Hollande, he was the

01:13:57.760 | French leader, and Poroshenko, who was the Ukrainian leader, those were the three key

01:14:03.760 | players besides Putin. Again, Hollande from France, Merkel from Germany, and Poroshenko

01:14:09.920 | from Ukraine have all explicitly said they were not seriously interested in reaching an agreement

01:14:19.520 | in all of the discussions with Putin. They were bamboozling him. They were trying to trick him

01:14:26.880 | so that they would buy time to build up Ukraine's military. Putin is profoundly upset about these

01:14:37.280 | admissions by these three leaders. He believes he was fooled into thinking that Minsk could work.

01:14:44.960 | He believes that he negotiated in good faith and they did not. And he believes that the level of

01:14:52.640 | trust now between Russia and the West is virtually zero as a result of this experience over Minsk.

01:15:00.880 | I only bring this up because it cuts against your argument that leaders could pick up the phone

01:15:09.040 | and talk to each other and trust each other at least somewhat to work out a meaningful deal.

01:15:17.920 | If you're Putin at this point in time, trusting the West is not an idea that's going to be very

01:15:25.920 | attractive at all. In fact, you're going to distrust anything they say.

01:15:29.840 | Yeah, distrust anything the West say, but there is individual humans.

01:15:33.920 | The way human nature works is when you sit in a cross with a person, you can trust a human

01:15:39.920 | being while still distrusting the West. I mean, I believe in the power of that. I think with the

01:15:45.760 | right leaders, you can sit down and talk, like override the general structural distrust of the

01:15:53.680 | West and say, you know what, I like this guy or gal, whatever. I do hope Zelensky and Putin sit

01:16:03.440 | down together and talk, have multiple talks. Just remember they were doing that in March

01:16:10.800 | and the Americans came in and the British came in and they scotched a potential deal.

01:16:16.320 | Well, the other beautiful thing about human nature, there's forgiveness and there's

01:16:23.120 | trying again.

01:16:25.600 | When you're the leader of a country in an anarchic system, you have to be very careful not to let

01:16:35.520 | your trust in a foreign leader take you too far because if that foreign leader betrays you

01:16:43.200 | or betrays your trust and stabbed you in the back, you could die. Again, you want to remember that

01:16:48.960 | the principal responsibility of any leader, I don't care what country it is, is to ensure the

01:16:55.360 | survival of their state. That means that trust is only going to buy you so much. When you've already

01:17:04.000 | betrayed the trust of a leader, you really are not going to be able to rely on trust very much

01:17:13.200 | to help you moving forward. Now, you disagree with that. I hope you're right. And if they can

01:17:18.560 | shut down the Ukraine-Russia war, it would be wonderful. If I'm proved dead wrong, that would

01:17:27.040 | be wonderful news. My prediction that this war is going to go on for a long time and end in an

01:17:38.800 | ugly way is a prediction that I don't like at all. So I hope I'm wrong.

01:17:44.480 | You wrote that many in the West believe that the best hope for ending the Ukraine war is to remove

01:17:49.600 | Vladimir Putin from power. But you argue that this isn't the case. Can you explain?

01:17:58.400 | Well, a lot of people thought when they were having all that trouble, the Russians were having

01:18:07.040 | all that trouble with Purgosian and the Wagner group, that Putin was vulnerable and was likely

01:18:14.080 | to be overthrown. And what would happen is a peace-loving leader would replace Putin. I made

01:18:24.240 | two points at the time, and I would make those same two points now. Number one, he's not likely

01:18:31.040 | to be overthrown. He was not likely then to be overthrown. And I think as long as his health

01:18:41.520 | holds up, I think he will remain in power. My second point is if he doesn't remain in power

01:18:48.960 | and he's replaced, I would bet a lot of money that his replacement will be more hawkish and

01:18:55.200 | more hardline than Putin is. I actually think one could argue that Putin was too trusting of the

01:19:03.360 | West before the war started. And number two, I think one could argue that he has not waged the

01:19:11.840 | war against Ukraine as vigorously as one might have expected. He was slow to mobilize the nation

01:19:22.080 | for war, and he has pursued a limited war in all sorts of ways. The Israelis, for example,

01:19:32.640 | have killed more civilians in Gaza in one month than the Russians have killed over 18 months

01:19:40.240 | in Ukraine. The idea that Vladimir Putin is waging a punishment campaign and killing on purpose large

01:19:49.600 | numbers of civilians is simply not true. All this is to say that I would imagine that if Putin

01:19:58.080 | leaves office and someone else comes in to replace him, that someone else will be at least,

01:20:04.480 | if not more hardline than him in terms of waging the war and certainly will not trust the West

01:20:11.200 | any more than he has. - By way of advice, let me ask you, if I were to have a conversation,

01:20:19.360 | interview Vladimir Putin and Zelensky individually, what should I ask them? If you, me,

01:20:28.480 | and Vladimir Putin are having a chat, what are good ideas to explore? What are good questions

01:20:36.880 | to ask? What are good things to say on or off the mic once again that could potentially,

01:20:45.120 | even slightly, lessen the amount of suffering in the world caused by this war? - Oh, I think if you

01:20:51.600 | get an interview with Vladimir Putin, there's just all sorts of questions you could ask him.

01:20:57.840 | And my sense is that Putin is a straight shooter. He's also very knowledgeable about history,

01:21:04.000 | and he has simple theories in his head about how the world works. And I think he would level with

01:21:09.200 | you, and all you would have to do is just figure out what all the right questions are. And that

01:21:14.400 | would not be hard to do, right? You could ask him, why was he so foolish? For example, why was he so

01:21:24.080 | foolish as to trust Poroshenko, Hollande, and Merkel in the Minsk Accords? Why, after his famous

01:21:39.760 | talk at Munich in 2007, where he made it clear that he was so unhappy with the West,

01:21:44.880 | did he continue to, in a very important way, trust the West? Why didn't he mobilize

01:21:53.520 | the Russian military before late September 2022? Once the negotiations that we were talking about

01:22:02.240 | before involving Istanbul and Naftali Benin, once they broke down, why didn't he immediately

01:22:11.280 | mobilize more of the Russian population to fight the war? Just all sorts of questions like that.

01:22:17.360 | And then you could ask him questions about where he sees this one headed. What's the best

01:22:25.680 | strategy for Russia if the Ukrainians will not agree to neutrality, right? People like John

01:22:36.400 | Mearsheimer say, you'll probably take close to half of Ukraine. Is that true? Does it make sense

01:22:44.720 | to take Odessa? - And John Mearsheimer also has questions about China, your future relationships

01:22:52.160 | with China. - Yeah. I mean, one really important question that I would ask him is if the United

01:22:57.920 | States had basically not driven you into the arms of the Chinese, if there had been no war over

01:23:03.360 | Ukraine and the United States and its European allies had gone to considerable lengths to create

01:23:10.080 | some sort of security architecture in Europe that resulted in you, Vladimir Putin, having good

01:23:18.400 | relations with Ukraine, what would your relations with China be? And how would you think about that?

01:23:27.040 | So there are just plenty of questions you could ask him. - Well, hope burns eternal in my heart,

01:23:37.280 | I think probably in Putin's heart and Zelensky's heart, I hope. Because hope is,

01:23:45.040 | the leap of trust that we've talked about, I think is necessary for de-escalation and for peace.

01:23:49.280 | - Well, you realize I have from the beginning argued for different policies that were all

01:23:57.040 | designed to prevent this war from ever happening. I don't know if you know this, but in 1993,

01:24:02.720 | I argued that Ukraine should keep its nuclear weapons. I was probably the only person in the

01:24:08.160 | West who made that argument. And my argument in 1993, this is in foreign affairs, was that there

01:24:15.920 | may come the day when Russia thinks about invading Ukraine. And should that day come,

01:24:22.400 | it would be very helpful for preventing war if Ukraine had nuclear weapons.

01:24:27.200 | - So military might is essential for maintaining a balance of power and peace.

01:24:33.120 | - Well, if you're interested in deterring an adversary, if I'm worried about you coming

01:24:37.440 | after me, the best way to deter you is to have military might. And if you're Russia and I'm

01:24:43.600 | Ukraine, I'm far weaker than you. And having a nuclear deterrent would be very effective at

01:24:51.600 | convincing you not to attack me. Because if you attack me, you're threatening my survival. And

01:24:57.520 | that's the one circumstance where it is likely that I would use nuclear weapons to defend myself.

01:25:05.040 | And given the consequences of nuclear use, you would be reluctant in the extreme to attack me.

01:25:11.280 | So that's why I argued in '93 that if Ukraine kept its nuclear weapons, that made war down the road

01:25:19.200 | much less likely. And I believe I was correct. And in fact, Bill Clinton, who played the key role

01:25:24.960 | in forcing Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons, now says, he has said it publicly,

01:25:31.360 | you can find it on YouTube, that he made a mistake doing that. Furthermore, I argued in 2014

01:25:39.600 | that it made eminently good sense not to continue to push to bring Ukraine into NATO,

01:25:45.680 | because the end result is that Ukraine would be destroyed. And Ukraine is being destroyed.

01:25:50.960 | So I was deeply interested at the time in making sure that that didn't happen for the good of the

01:25:56.880 | Ukrainians, not to mention, because stability in Europe is a net positive for almost everybody

01:26:04.720 | involved. But people did not listen to me then either. How do nuclear weapons change the calculus

01:26:10.880 | of offensive realism? Because of mutually assured destruction. I mean, it's not just military might,

01:26:16.800 | it's just so destructive that you basically can't use nuclear weapons unless you want

01:26:26.400 | complete destruction. There's no question that the presence of nuclear weapons

01:26:31.200 | makes it much less likely, I'm choosing my words carefully here, much less likely that a great

01:26:38.000 | power would aggress against another great power. It doesn't take that possibility off the table,

01:26:44.000 | but it makes it much less likely because of the reasons that you articulated.

01:26:51.120 | But with regard to nuclear use, it's an interesting question how you think about

01:26:57.040 | nuclear use in a mad world. I mean, your point that we're in a mad world is,

01:27:01.040 | that's mad, capital M-A-D as well as M-A-D, small letters. But let's stick to the capital letters.

01:27:08.720 | We're in a world of mutually assured destruction. There's no question that in that world,

01:27:17.040 | it's unlikely that nuclear weapons would be used. But the way you use nuclear weapons in that world

01:27:25.200 | is you use them for manipulation or risk purposes, demonstration effect. You put both sides out on

01:27:34.480 | the slippery slope. Now, what exactly am I saying here? Let me talk about NATO doctrine during the

01:27:40.320 | Cold War. We lived in a mad world. United States and Soviet Union, or the Warsaw Pact and NATO.

01:27:47.200 | Both had an assured destruction capability. So you had mutually assured destruction.

01:27:51.840 | If the Warsaw Pact were to invade Western Europe, and here we're talking about West Germany,

01:28:00.080 | and NATO was losing the war, we said that we would use nuclear weapons. How would we use nuclear

01:28:09.680 | weapons given that we were in a mad world? The argument was that we would use a handful of

01:28:16.720 | nuclear weapons against the Warsaw Pact. Not necessarily against their military forces,

01:28:24.160 | could be in a remote area. We would use a small number of nuclear weapons to signal to the Soviets

01:28:32.960 | that we were deadly serious about putting an end to their offensive, and that we were

01:28:41.360 | throwing both sides out on the slippery slope to oblivion. In other words, we were manipulating

01:28:49.760 | risk. And the last clear chance to avoid Armageddon rested with them. And then we would

01:28:58.240 | tell them that if you retaliated with a handful of nuclear weapons and you didn't cease your

01:29:03.600 | offensive against West Germany, we would launch a small, another nuclear attack. We would

01:29:11.360 | explode a handful more of nuclear weapons. All for the purposes of showing you our resolve.

01:29:19.920 | So this is the manipulation of risk strategy. And a lot of the language I just used in describing it

01:29:27.040 | to you is language that Thomas Shelley invented. Now, fast forward to the present. If Russia were

01:29:36.160 | losing in Ukraine, that's the one scenario where I think where Russia would have used nuclear

01:29:41.760 | weapons. And the question is, how would Russia have used nuclear weapons? Again, we're assuming

01:29:47.520 | that the Russians are losing to the Ukrainians. I believe they would have pursued a manipulation

01:29:54.400 | of risk strategy. They would have used four or five, three or four, who knows, nuclear weapons.

01:29:59.440 | Maybe just one in a rural area that kills very few people.

01:30:03.520 | Yes, exactly. And basically, that would spook everybody. The Americans-

01:30:08.480 | Just the mushroom cloud.

01:30:09.520 | Yeah. It's because of the threat of escalation. Again, your point is we're in a mad world. I

01:30:16.480 | accept that. And if you have limited nuclear use, we understand hardly anything about nuclear

01:30:26.160 | escalation because thank goodness we've never had a nuclear war. So once you throw both sides out on

01:30:32.720 | the slippery slope, even if you only use one nuclear weapon in your scenario, you don't know

01:30:38.480 | what the escalation dynamics look like. So everybody has a powerful incentive to put an end

01:30:46.080 | to the conflict right away. I might add to you that there were people who believed that we would

01:30:52.800 | not even initiate a manipulation of risk strategy in Europe if we were losing to the Warsaw Pact

01:31:02.800 | during the Cold War. Both Henry Kissinger and Robert McNamara said after leaving office that

01:31:12.080 | they would not have done it. They would have not initiated nuclear use, even limited nuclear use.

01:31:18.000 | That's what we're talking about here. They would rather be red than dead. That was the argument.

01:31:24.560 | Too risky.

01:31:25.440 | Too risky. That's exactly right. But if they had used one nuclear weapon in your story or three or

01:31:32.800 | four in my story, everybody would have said, "Oh my God, we've got to shut this one down immediately."

01:31:40.960 | I only tell you this story or lay out this scenario as an answer to your question of how

01:31:46.400 | you use nuclear weapons in a mad world, and this is the answer.

01:31:51.040 | This is all very terrifying. Perhaps in part it's terrifying to me because I can see in the

01:31:57.280 | 21st century China, Russia, Israel, United States using a nuclear weapon in this way.

01:32:08.560 | Blowing it up somewhere in the middle of nowhere that kills maybe nobody. But I'm terrified of

01:32:17.280 | seeing the mushroom cloud and not knowing what, given social media, given how fast news travels,

01:32:25.520 | what the escalation looks like there. Just in a matter of minutes how the news travels

01:32:33.520 | and how the leaders react. It's terrifying that this little demonstration of power,

01:32:42.000 | the ripple effects of it in a matter of minutes, seconds, what that leads to.

01:32:48.960 | Because it's human emotions. You see the landscape of human emotions, the leaders and the populace

01:32:56.960 | and the way news are reported, and then the landscape of risk, as you mentioned,

01:33:01.040 | shifting like the world's most intense nonlinear dynamical system.

01:33:06.640 | And it's just terrifying because the entirety of human civilization hangs in the balance there.

01:33:15.440 | And it's like this, like hundreds of millions of people could be dead.

01:33:20.960 | Let's just talk about this in the context of the Ukraine war.

01:33:24.880 | If the Russians were losing, as I said before, which is not the case anymore, but in 2022 it

01:33:36.000 | did look like that. If the Russians are losing and they turn to nuclear weapons,

01:33:44.000 | the question is how do they use them? And they would use them in Ukraine.

01:33:49.360 | And because Ukraine has no nuclear weapons of its own, Ukraine cannot retaliate. It's not a mutual

01:33:59.760 | assured destruction world. It's a case where one side has nuclear weapons and the other doesn't.

01:34:04.720 | That means that the Russians are likely to think that they can get away with using nuclear weapons

01:34:13.360 | in ways that would not be the case if they were attacking NATO. And therefore it makes

01:34:18.160 | nuclear use more likely. Okay, that's point one. Point two is let's assume that the Russians use

01:34:25.120 | two or three nuclear weapons in a remote area. My palms are sweating, by the way.

01:34:28.880 | Just as a commentary. It's terrifying. Yeah. The question then is what does the West do?

01:34:36.960 | Now, Macron has said, and Biden has also, I think, implicitly made this clear, we would not

01:34:42.880 | retaliate with nuclear weapons if the Russians were to attack with a handful of nuclear weapons

01:34:48.320 | in Western Ukraine. But then the question is what would we do? And if you listen to David Petraeus,

01:34:56.560 | what David Petraeus says is that we should attack the Russian naval assets in the Black Sea

01:35:06.320 | and attack Russian forces in Ukraine. Well, once you do that, you have a great power war. You have

01:35:15.200 | NATO versus Russia, which is another way of saying you have the United States versus Russia. We're

01:35:21.040 | now at a great power war. They have nuclear weapons. We have nuclear weapons. They've used

01:35:26.320 | nuclear weapons. What is the happy ending here? And just to take it a step further and go back

01:35:33.520 | to our earlier discussion about moving NATO up to Russia's borders, the point I made,

01:35:40.160 | which you surely agree with, is that the Russians are very fearful when they see NATO coming up to

01:35:46.640 | their border. Well, here's a case where not only has NATO come up to their border, but they're in

01:35:52.640 | a war with NATO right on their border. What do the escalation dynamics look like there?

01:36:00.080 | You know what the answer is? Who knows? That should scare the living bejesus out of you, right?

01:36:05.680 | And some of it could be, like you mentioned, unintended. There could be unintended

01:36:10.560 | consequences. There could be a Russian missile misses and hits Poland. These kinds of things

01:36:17.760 | that just escalate misunderstandings, miscommunications, even a nuclear weapon could

01:36:24.320 | be, boy, it could have been planned to go location X and it went to a location Y that ended up

01:36:31.600 | actually killing a very large number of people. I mean, just the escalation that happens there

01:36:40.560 | just happens in a matter of minutes. And the only way to stop that is communication between leaders.

01:36:46.320 | And that to me is a big argument for ongoing communication.

01:36:51.920 | You know, there's a story that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy put out the word,

01:36:56.800 | no aircraft under any circumstances are to penetrate Soviet airspace. And he then found

01:37:07.440 | out a few days later that some guy hadn't gotten the message and had penetrated in an aircraft

01:37:16.960 | deep into Soviet airspace. And this supports your basic point that bad things happen. And again,

01:37:27.520 | the overarching point here is we've never done this before, thankfully. Therefore,

01:37:32.880 | we don't have a lot of experience as to how it plays itself out. It's really a theoretical

01:37:39.120 | enterprise because there's no empirical basis for talking about escalation in a nuclear crisis. And

01:37:47.760 | that of course is a wonderful thing. - Well, and in general, the human species as a whole

01:37:54.480 | is a one-off, is a theoretical enterprise. The survival of the human species. We've seen

01:38:01.520 | empires rise and fall, but we haven't seen the human species rise and fall. So far it's been

01:38:06.720 | rising, but it's not obvious that it doesn't end. In fact, I think about aliens a lot and

01:38:12.960 | the fact that we don't see aliens makes me suspect it's not so easy to survive

01:38:18.800 | in this complicated world of ours. Switching gears a little bit and going to a different

01:38:24.560 | part of the world, also engulfed in war. Let me ask you about the situation in Israel.

01:38:34.400 | Why did Hamas attack Israel on October 7th, 2023? As you understand the situation,

01:38:41.280 | what was the reason that attack happened? - Well, I think the main reason was that you had this

01:38:52.320 | suffocating occupation. I think as long as the occupation persists, the Palestinians are going

01:39:02.560 | to resist. As you well know, this is not the first time there has been a Palestinian uprising.

01:39:10.560 | There was the first Intifada, there was the second Intifada, now there's October 7th,

01:39:15.840 | and there are uprisings besides those three. So this is not terribly surprising. A lot of people

01:39:25.920 | hypothesize that this attack was due to the fact that the Israelis, the Saudis, and the Americans

01:39:35.280 | were working together to foster another Abraham Accord and that the Palestinians would in effect

01:39:43.040 | be sold down the river. I think given the fact that this was in the planning stages for probably

01:39:51.440 | about two years and the Abraham Accords with regard to Saudi Arabia are relatively new phenomenon,

01:39:59.440 | I don't think that's the main driving force here. I think the main driving force is that the

01:40:06.560 | Palestinians feel oppressed as they should and that this was a resistance move. They were resisting

01:40:16.640 | the Israeli occupation. - So that resistance, the attack involved killing a large number of

01:40:25.280 | Israeli civilians. There's many questions to ask there, but one is do you think Hamas fully

01:40:33.200 | understood what the retaliation will involve from Israel into Gaza? - They had to understand. I mean

01:40:43.600 | you had Operation Cast Lead in 2008, 2009. It started I think right after Christmas 2008,

01:40:53.760 | and it ended right before President Obama took office in January 2009. And

01:41:00.400 | the Israelis periodically do what they call mowing the lawn, where they go into Gaza and they pound

01:41:10.240 | the Palestinians to remind them that they're not supposed to rise up and cause any problem.

01:41:17.840 | So there's no question in my mind that the Hamas forces understood full well that the Israelis

01:41:30.000 | would retaliate and they would retaliate in force as they have done. - Yeah, even the metaphor of

01:41:37.040 | mowing the lawn is disturbing to me in many ways. I actually saw Norman Philcistine, I think,

01:41:47.120 | say that well, then if you use that metaphor then you could say that Hamas was also mowing the lawn.

01:41:53.760 | And it's such a horrific image because the result on either side is just the death of civilians.

01:42:03.040 | - I mean let me ask you about the death of civilians. So during the attack, 1400 Israelis

01:42:08.000 | were killed, over 240 were taken hostage, and then in response, as we sit today,

01:42:14.800 | Israel's military response has killed over 10,000 people in Gaza. And given the nature of the

01:42:23.920 | demographics, it's a very heavily young population, over 40% of them are under the age of 18,

01:42:30.400 | of those killed. That's, of course, according to Ministry of Health of Palestinian Authority.

01:42:36.480 | So what do you think is the long-term effect on the prospect of peace when so many civilians die?

01:42:44.800 | - I mean, I think it's disastrous. I mean,

01:42:54.240 | the only way you're gonna get peace here is if you have a two-state solution,

01:43:00.160 | where the Palestinians have a sovereign state of their own and there is a sovereign Jewish state,

01:43:08.080 | and these two states live side by side. American presidents since Jimmy Carter have understood this

01:43:15.360 | full well, and this is why we have pushed very hard for a two-state solution. Indeed,

01:43:20.080 | many American Jews and many Israelis have pushed for a two-state solution,

01:43:25.440 | because they think that that is the only way you're gonna get peace between the two sides.

01:43:33.360 | But what's happened here is that in recent years, the Israelis have lost all interest in a two-state

01:43:41.600 | solution, and it's in large part because the political center of gravity in Israel has steadily

01:43:47.360 | moved to the right. When I was a young boy, the political center of gravity in Israel was much

01:43:55.200 | further to the left than it is today. And it is in a position now, the political center of gravity,

01:44:05.120 | where there's hardly any support for a two-state solution. And Netanyahu and the rest of the people

01:44:12.240 | in his government were in favor or are in favor of a greater Israel. There's just no question about

01:44:18.000 | that. Well, on top of that, you now have had a war where, as you described, huge numbers of civilians

01:44:30.160 | have been killed, and you already had bad blood between the Palestinians and the Israelis before

01:44:38.560 | this conflict. And you could imagine how people on each side now feel about people on the other side.

01:44:47.040 | So even if you didn't have this opposition inside Israel to a two-state solution,

01:44:52.640 | how could you possibly get the Israelis now to agree to a two-state solution? I think for the

01:45:01.520 | foreseeable future, the animosity inside Israel towards the Palestinians is so great that it is

01:45:08.720 | impossible to move the Israelis in that direction. And the Israelis here are the key players,

01:45:14.400 | more so than the Palestinians, because it's the Israelis who control greater Israel. It's the

01:45:20.800 | Israelis who you have to convince. Now, I want to be clear here. You also ultimately have to

01:45:25.840 | get around the fact that Hamas is not committed to a two-state solution. But I think that problem

01:45:34.000 | could be dealt with. It's important to understand that Arafat and the PLO was once adamantly

01:45:40.080 | opposed to a two-state solution, but Arafat came around to understand that that was really the only

01:45:47.200 | hope for settling this, and he became a proponent of a two-state solution. And that's true of

01:45:53.520 | Mahmoud Abbas, who runs the PA in the West Bank. It's not true of Hamas at this point in time.

01:45:59.760 | They want a one-state solution. They want a Palestinian state. And of course, the Israelis

01:46:05.360 | want a one-state solution too, which is a Jewish state that controls all of greater Israel.

01:46:12.880 | So the question is, can you get some sort of agreement? And I think to get to the nub of

01:46:20.000 | your question, given what's just happened, it's almost impossible to imagine that happening

01:46:25.680 | anytime soon. - The cynical perspective here is that those in power benefit from conflict,

01:46:33.760 | while the people on both sides suffer. Is there a degree of truth to that? Or for the people in

01:46:40.000 | power to maintain power, conflict needs to continue? - No, I don't believe that. I mean,

01:46:45.680 | just to take the Netanyahu government or any Israeli government that maintains the occupation,

01:46:52.720 | what you want is you want a Palestinian population that submits to Israeli domination of greater

01:47:01.840 | Israel. You don't want resistance. You don't want an intifada. You don't want what happened

01:47:06.880 | on October 7th. In fact, I think one of the principal reasons that the Israelis are

01:47:12.960 | pounding Gaza and killing huge numbers of civilians, punishing the civilian population

01:47:19.920 | in ways that clearly violate the laws of war is because they want the Palestinians to understand

01:47:27.040 | that they are not allowed to rise up and resist the occupation. That's their goal. So I think

01:47:33.520 | the Israelis would prefer that the Palestinians roll over and accept submission. In terms of

01:47:41.600 | the people who live in Gaza to include the elites and the people who live in the West Bank to

01:47:47.360 | include the elites, they would much prefer to move to some sort of situation where the Palestinians

01:47:55.920 | have a state of their own. I think in the case of the PA under Abbas, they would accept a two-state

01:48:02.960 | solution. I think what at this point in time Hamas wants is a one-state solution, but they want

01:48:08.640 | peace. All of them want peace. You know, the two different sets of leadership in Palestine and the

01:48:16.080 | Israelis. - So you think Hamas wants peace? - Sure, but on its own terms. That's the point. - What does peace

01:48:22.480 | look like for Hamas? - At this point in time, I think peace basically means a greater Israel

01:48:28.000 | controlled by Palestine or Palestinians. - Okay. So essentially, I mean, it's the whole land is

01:48:35.760 | called Palestine and there's no Israel. - I think at this point in time, that's their principal goal. I

01:48:41.440 | do believe, and there have been hints over time, Jimmy Carter has said this, that Hamas can be

01:48:47.840 | convinced that a two-state solution, assuming that the Palestinians get a viable state of their own,

01:48:54.800 | that Hamas would buy into that. Can we say that with a high degree of certainty? No, but I think

01:49:01.680 | the Israelis should have pursued that possibility. They should have worked with Abbas. They should

01:49:06.880 | have worked with Hamas to do everything they can to facilitate a two-state solution, because I think

01:49:12.880 | ultimately that's in Israel's interest. Now, the Israeli government and most Israelis at this point

01:49:18.960 | in time, I believe, don't agree with that. - What do you think of Israel starting the ground invasion

01:49:26.560 | of Gaza recently on October 27th? - The question is, should they continue

01:49:36.320 | until they have finally defeated Hamas? There are all sorts of reports in the media, including in

01:49:46.080 | the Israeli media, that they're not gonna be allowed by the United States to continue this

01:49:52.720 | offensive for much more than a few weeks. The Israelis have been saying it's gonna take,

01:50:01.840 | in the best of all possible worlds, a number of months, if not a year, to finish off

01:50:09.360 | Hamas. Well, it doesn't look like they're gonna have enough time to do that. I doubt whether they

01:50:16.480 | can finish off Hamas even if they're given the time. I think they're gonna run into fierce

01:50:22.160 | resistance, and when they run into fierce resistance and large numbers of Israelis gonna

01:50:28.000 | start to die, they'll lose their appetite for this. And they, the Israelis, surely know at

01:50:36.880 | this point in time that even if they finish off Hamas, even if I'm wrong and they're able to

01:50:41.520 | finish off Hamas, another group is gonna rise up to resist the occupation. The idea that you can

01:50:50.080 | use what Ziv Yabotinsky called the "iron wall" to beat the Palestinians into submission is

01:50:58.640 | delusional. It's just not gonna happen. The Palestinians want a state of their own. They

01:51:04.400 | don't wanna live under occupation. And there's no military solution for Israel here. There has

01:51:12.320 | to be a political solution. And the only viable political solution is a two-state solution.

01:51:18.880 | I mean, you can't go to democracy, you can't go to a situation where you give the Palestinians

01:51:24.400 | equal rights inside of greater Israel in large part because there are now as many Palestinians

01:51:32.480 | as there are Israeli Jews. And over time, the balance, the demographic balance, shifts against

01:51:38.640 | the Israeli Jews and in favor of the Palestinians, in which case you'll end up with a Palestinian

01:51:44.240 | state in greater Israel. So, you know, democracy for all doesn't work. The Israelis, I believe,

01:51:53.600 | are quite interested in ethnic cleansing. I think they saw this recent set of events as an

01:52:01.920 | opportunity to cleanse Gaza, but that's not gonna happen. The Jordanians and the Egyptians have made

01:52:08.240 | it clear that that's not happening. The United States has now made it clear that that's not

01:52:13.520 | happening. And the Palestinians will not leave, they'll die in place. So, ethnic cleansing doesn't

01:52:22.880 | work. So, you're really left with two alternatives, a two-state solution or a greater Israel that is

01:52:29.120 | effectively an apartheid state. I mean, that's what the occupation has led to. And all sorts of

01:52:35.120 | people have been predicting this for a long, long time. And you've now reached the point, you know,

01:52:41.120 | here in the United States, if you say that Israel is an apartheid state, that's gonna get you into

01:52:46.400 | all sorts of trouble. But the fact is that Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and B'Tselem,

01:52:53.760 | which is the leading Israeli human rights group, all three of those institutions or organizations

01:53:00.720 | have issued detailed reports making the case that Israel is an apartheid state. Furthermore,

01:53:07.520 | if you read the Israeli media, right, all sorts of Israelis, including Israeli leaders,

01:53:14.240 | refer to Israel as an apartheid state. It's not that unusual to hear that term used in Israel.

01:53:21.360 | This is disastrous for Israel, in my opinion. And Steve Walt and I said this, by the way,

01:53:26.240 | when we wrote the Israel lobby, that Israel is an apartheid state, which is equivalent to Israel

01:53:32.800 | as an occupier, is not good for Israel. And that brings us back to the two-state solution. But as

01:53:40.720 | you and I were talking about a few minutes ago, it's hard to see how you get a two-state solution.

01:53:46.960 | And the end result of this conversation is utter despair.

01:53:52.080 | Because the path to a two-state solution is blocked by the amount of

01:53:59.120 | hate that's created by civilian deaths.

01:54:01.040 | - Well, that plus the fact that the Israeli government is filled with people who have no

01:54:07.840 | interest in a two-state solution. They're ideologically deeply committed to a greater

01:54:14.080 | Israel. They want all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea to be

01:54:22.320 | part of a Jewish state. They're just ideologically committed to that.

01:54:27.200 | And of course, as we were talking about before with regard to Hamas, Hamas wants everything

01:54:34.480 | between the river and the sea to be a Palestinian state. And when you have two sides with those

01:54:41.680 | kinds of views, you're in deep trouble because there's little room for compromise. So what you

01:54:52.000 | have to do to get this to work is you have to convince the Israelis that it's in their interest

01:54:56.960 | to have a two-state solution. And you've already taken care of the PA on this front, the Palestinian

01:55:03.760 | Authority, but you've got to convince Hamas that its maximalist goals are not going to work. And

01:55:10.720 | it's in its interest to follow in the footsteps of Arafat and accept a two-state solution.

01:55:16.960 | But even if you do that at this point, let's say that there's a lot of willingness

01:55:22.800 | intellectually on both sides to do that. The problem is that the hatred that has been fueled

01:55:31.520 | by this recent, this ongoing conflict is so great that it's just hard to imagine how you can make a

01:55:39.360 | two-state solution work at this juncture. That's why I've sort of taken to saying, and I hope I'm

01:55:45.600 | wrong here, that on the two-state solution, that boat has sailed. It's no longer possible.

01:55:53.440 | Well, again, I believe in leadership and there's other parties at play here, other nations, Jordan,

01:55:58.800 | Saudi Arabia, other players in the Middle East that could help through a normalization of

01:56:05.600 | relationships and these kinds of things. There's always hope, like you said, slither of hope.

01:56:10.800 | Slither of hope.

01:56:11.840 | I think human civilization progresses forward by taking advantage of all the slithers it can get.

01:56:18.160 | Let me ask you about, you mentioned the Israel lobby, you wrote a book,

01:56:21.840 | probably your most controversial book on the topic.

01:56:26.080 | Not probably. Clearly the most controversial book I ever wrote.

01:56:30.640 | So you've criticized the Israel lobby in the United States for influencing US policy

01:56:36.640 | in the Middle East. Can you explain what the Israel lobby is, their influence, and your criticism

01:56:42.960 | over the past, let's say, a couple of decades?

01:56:46.800 | Well, the argument that Steve Walt and I made, actually we wrote an article first,

01:56:52.240 | which appeared in the London Review of Books, and then we wrote the book itself.

01:57:01.440 | Our argument is that the lobby is a loose coalition of individuals and organizations

01:57:09.200 | that push American policy in a pro-Israel direction.

01:57:15.760 | Basically, the lobby is interested in getting the United States, and here we're talking mainly

01:57:25.120 | about the American government, to support Israel no matter what Israel does. And our argument is

01:57:32.400 | that if you look at the relationship between the United States and Israel,

01:57:36.240 | it's unprecedented in modern history. This is the closest relationship that you can find between

01:57:46.880 | any two countries in recorded history. It's truly amazing the extent to which Israel and the United

01:57:55.360 | States are joined at the hip. And we support Israel no matter what, almost all the time.

01:58:02.640 | And our argument is that that is largely due to the influence of the lobby. The lobby is

01:58:12.480 | an extremely powerful interest group. Now, it's very important to understand that the American

01:58:19.440 | political system is set up in ways that allow interest groups of all sorts to wield great

01:58:28.320 | influence. So in the United States, you have an interest group or a lobby like the National Rifle

01:58:34.960 | Association that makes it well-nigh impossible to get gun control. And so with the Israel lobby,

01:58:44.640 | you have this group of individuals and organizations that wield enormous influence

01:58:52.800 | on U.S. policy toward the Middle East. And this is not surprising given the nature of

01:59:01.440 | the American political system. So our argument is that the lobby is not doing anything that's

01:59:08.400 | illegal or illicit or immoral or unethical. It's just a good old-fashioned American interest group.

01:59:18.080 | And it just happens to be extremely powerful. And our argument is that this is not good for

01:59:26.640 | the United States because no two countries have the same interests all the time. And when our

01:59:34.400 | interests conflict with Israel's interests, we should be able to do what we think is in our

01:59:39.760 | national interest and America's national interest. But the lobby tends to conflate America's national

01:59:45.920 | interest with Israel's national interest and wants the United States to support Israel no matter what.

01:59:53.120 | We also argue—and I cannot emphasize this enough given what's going on in the world today—that

01:59:59.040 | the lobby's effects, the lobby has not been pushing policies that are in Israel's interest.

02:00:08.560 | So our argument is that the lobby pushes policies that are not in America's interest or not in

02:00:16.960 | Israel's interest. Now, you're saying to yourself, "What exactly does he mean by that?"

02:00:22.640 | What every president since Jimmy Carter has tried to do, as I said before, is to foster a

02:00:28.880 | two-state solution, to push Israel, which is the dominant player in greater Israel,

02:00:36.160 | push Israel to accept the two-state solution. And we have run into huge resistance from the

02:00:45.360 | lobby whenever we tried to—let's be blunt about it—coerce Israel, right? In a perfect world where

02:00:52.160 | there was no lobby and an American president was free to put pressure on Israel, to coerce Israel,

02:00:59.120 | I believe we would have gone a long way towards getting a two-state solution. And I believe

02:01:05.520 | this would have been in Israel's interest. But we couldn't get a two-state solution because

02:01:11.440 | it was almost impossible to put meaningful pressure on Israel because of the lobby.

02:01:17.360 | So this was not in Israel's interest, and it was not in America's interest. And that was the

02:01:22.560 | argument that we made. And we, of course, got huge pushback for making that argument.

02:01:28.640 | What's the underlying motivation of the lobby? Is it religious in nature? Is it similar to the way

02:01:35.520 | Warhawks are sort of militaristic in nature? Is it nationalistic in nature? If you were to

02:01:42.800 | describe this loose coalition of people, what would you say is their motivation?

02:01:47.120 | Well, first of all, I think you have to distinguish between Jews and Christians. You

02:01:51.440 | want to remember that there are a huge number of Christian Zionists who are deeply committed to

02:01:57.120 | Israel no matter what, right? And then there are a large number of Jews. The Jews are obviously the

02:02:03.360 | most important of those two groups in the Israel lobby. But one of the arguments that we made in

02:02:10.080 | the book is that you should not call it the Jewish lobby because it's not populated just by Jews,

02:02:17.440 | and Christian Zionists are an important part of that lobby. But furthermore, there are a good

02:02:24.560 | number of Jews who are opposed to the lobby and the policies that the lobby pervades. And there

02:02:33.440 | are a number of Jews who are prominent anti-Zionists, right? And they're obviously not

02:02:40.960 | in the lobby. Or if you take a group like Jewish Voice for Peace, right? Jewish Voice for Peace is

02:02:46.960 | not in the lobby. So it's wrong to call it a Jewish lobby. But with regard to the American

02:02:55.520 | Jews who are in that lobby, I think that really this is all about nationalism. It's not so much

02:03:03.440 | religion. Many of those Jews who are influential in the lobby are not religious in any meaningful

02:03:09.760 | sense of that term, but they self-identify as Jewish in the sense that they feel they're part

02:03:16.000 | of a Jewish nation. And that in addition to being an American, right, they are part of this tribe,

02:03:23.520 | this nation called Jews, and that they have a responsibility to push the United States in ways

02:03:32.080 | that support the Jewish state. So I think that's what drives most, if not almost all the Jews.

02:03:40.880 | This is not to say there's not a religious dimension for some of them, but I think that

02:03:45.280 | the main connection is much more tribal in nature. - So I had a conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu,

02:03:52.480 | and he said fundamentally if you're anti-Zionist, you're anti-Semitic. So the Zionist project is

02:04:02.560 | tied at the hip to the Jewish project. What do you have to say to that?

02:04:07.520 | - Look, you can define anti-Semitism any way you want, right? And you can define anti-Semitism

02:04:19.840 | to incorporate anti-Zionism. And I think we have reached the point where anti-Semitism

02:04:29.280 | is identified today not just with anti-Zionism, but with criticism of Israel. If you criticize

02:04:38.400 | Israel, people will say, some people will say, you're an anti-Semite. And if that's your definition

02:04:45.120 | of anti-Semitism, it's taken an important term and stretched it to the point where it's meaningless.

02:04:55.520 | So when Steve and I wrote the book, wrote the article and then wrote the book, all sorts of

02:05:03.200 | people said that we were anti-Semites. This is a ludicrous charge, but what they meant was you're

02:05:10.880 | criticizing the lobby, you're criticizing Israel, and therefore you're an anti-Semite. Okay,

02:05:17.360 | if that's what an anti-Semite is, somebody who criticizes Israel, probably half the Jewish

02:05:23.760 | community, if not more in the United States is anti-Semitic. And of course, you get into all

02:05:28.240 | these crazy games where people are calling Jews, self-hating Jews and anti-Semites because they're

02:05:33.440 | critical of Israel. But even people who are anti-Zionist, I don't think they're anti-Semitic

02:05:39.280 | at all. You can argue they're misguided, that's fine. But many of these people are Jewish and

02:05:46.400 | proud of the fact that they're Jewish. They just don't believe that nationalism and Jewish

02:05:53.200 | nationalism is a force that should be applauded. And you want to understand that in the American

02:06:00.000 | context, there is a rich tradition of anti-Zionism, right? And these were not people who were

02:06:06.880 | anti-Semites, if you go back to the '30s, '40s, '50s. And the same thing was even true in Europe.

02:06:12.880 | There were all sorts of European Jews who were opposed to Zionism. Were they anti-Semites? I

02:06:18.800 | don't think so. But we've gotten to the point now where people are so interested in stopping

02:06:25.600 | any criticism of Israel that they wield this weapon of calling people anti-Semites so loosely

02:06:37.760 | that the term has kind of lost meaning. So I think Netanyahu is wrongheaded to equate

02:06:46.080 | anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Alan Dershowitz was one of the people that called you specifically

02:06:53.280 | anti-Semitic. So just looking at the space of discourse, where's the slither of hope

02:07:04.880 | for healthy discourse about U.S. relationships with Israel between you and Alan Dershowitz

02:07:14.160 | and others like him? - Well, I think until there is a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian

02:07:21.200 | conflict, there's no hope of putting an end to this nonsense, right? - So these are just

02:07:28.640 | uses of terms to kind of cheat your way through the discourse, shortcut. - No, it's to silence

02:07:36.800 | people. It's very important to understand that one of the lobby's principal goals is to make

02:07:42.480 | sure we don't have an open discourse, a freewheeling discourse about Israel. Because

02:07:48.160 | they understand, people in the lobby understand that if you have an open discourse, Israel will

02:07:53.120 | end up looking very bad, right? You don't wanna talk about the occupation. You don't wanna talk

02:07:58.240 | about how Israel was created, right? All these subjects are ones that will cause problems for

02:08:08.320 | Israel. See, just to go to the present crisis, okay? When you have a disaster, and what happened

02:08:17.840 | on October 7th is a disaster, one of the first things that happens is that people begin to ask

02:08:26.160 | the question, "How did this happen?" Right? "What's the root cause of this problem? This is a

02:08:33.280 | disaster." We have to understand what caused it so that we can work to make sure it doesn't happen

02:08:42.160 | again. So we can work to shut it down and then make sure it doesn't happen again. But once you

02:08:47.360 | start talking about the root causes, right, you end up talking about how Israel was created,

02:08:52.720 | right? And that means telling a story that is not pretty about how the Zionists conquered Palestine

02:09:03.200 | and number two, it means talking about the occupation, right? It's not like Hamas attacked

02:09:11.600 | on October 7th because there were just a bunch of anti-Semites who hated Jews and wanted to kill

02:09:17.920 | Jews. This is not Nazi Germany, right? This is directly related to the occupation and to what

02:09:24.720 | was going on inside of Gaza. And it's not in Israel's interest or the lobby's interest to

02:09:30.800 | have an open discourse about what the Israelis have been doing to the Palestinians since, I would

02:09:36.800 | say, roughly 1903 when the second Aliyah came to Israel or came to what was then Palestine, right?

02:09:44.240 | We want to talk about that. And we don't want to talk about, from the lobby's point of view,

02:09:50.240 | the influence that the lobby has, right? It's better from the lobby's point of view if most

02:09:56.720 | Americans think that American support of Israel is just done for all the right moral and strategic

02:10:03.760 | reasons, not because of the lobby. And when John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt come along and say,

02:10:08.880 | "You have to understand that this special relationship is due in large part to the

02:10:13.840 | lobby's influence," that is not an argument that people in the lobby want to hear.

02:10:19.680 | So the point is you have to go to great lengths for all these reasons. You have to go to great

02:10:24.560 | lengths to silence people like me and Steve Walt. And one of the ways to do that is to call us

02:10:31.920 | anti-Semites. I think the chapter or the section of the book where we talk about this charge of

02:10:37.600 | anti-Semitism is called "The Great Silencer." That's what we call the charge of anti-Semitism,

02:10:44.480 | "The Great Silencer." Who wants to be called an anti-Semite, especially in the wake of the

02:10:49.520 | Holocaust? Do I want to be called an anti-Semite? Oh my God, no. And so it's very effective.

02:10:58.080 | But it is important to talk about these issues, in my humble opinion. And I think if we had talked

02:11:07.120 | about these issues way back when, it would have gone a long way towards maybe getting a two-state

02:11:17.680 | solution, which I think was the best alternative here. It's complicated. And I wonder if you can

02:11:23.600 | comment on the complexity of this, because criticizing Israel and criticizing the lobby

02:11:30.720 | can, for a lot of people, be a dog whistle for sort of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories,

02:11:42.960 | that this idea that Jews run everything, run the world, or this kind of cabal. And it's

02:11:52.000 | also very true that people who are legitimately anti-Semitic

02:11:56.960 | are also critics of Israel in the same kind of way. And so it's such a complicated

02:12:03.040 | landscape in which to have discussions, because even people like David Duke

02:12:12.560 | who are racist, don't sound racist on the surface. I haven't listened to him enough,

02:12:19.360 | but there's dog whistles. It's a complicated space in which to have discussions,

02:12:24.320 | because it, I mean, I wonder if you can sort of speak to that, because there's this silencing

02:12:33.760 | effect of calling everybody anti-Semitic. But it's also true that there is anti-Semitism

02:12:41.840 | in the world. There is a sizable population of people that hate Jews. There's probably a

02:12:47.520 | sizable population of people who hate Muslims too. - A lot of hate out there.

02:12:52.960 | - A lot of hate out there. But the hatred of Jews has a long history. And so you have,

02:12:59.680 | Rolling Stones have a set of great hits, and there's just a set of great hits of the ways

02:13:05.600 | conspiracy theories that you can make up about the Jews that are used as part of the hatred.

02:13:11.600 | So there's nice templates for that. And I just wonder if you can comment on

02:13:16.800 | operating as a historian, as an analyst, as a strategic thinker in this kind of space.

02:13:23.040 | - Yeah, we obviously, when we wrote the article, which we did before the book, gave the subject

02:13:30.560 | a great deal of thought. I mean, what you say just now is music to our ears, and I'm talking

02:13:36.880 | about me and Steve. I mean, I think that your point about dog whistles is correct.

02:13:42.720 | Look, we went to great lengths to make it clear that this is not a cabal, it's not a conspiracy.

02:13:54.880 | And in fact, in a very important way, the lobby operates out in the open, right?

02:14:03.360 | They brag about their power, right? And this was true before we wrote the article, right?

02:14:10.080 | And we said in the article and the book, and you heard me say it here, first of all,

02:14:19.280 | it's not a Jewish lobby, right? Secondly, it's not a cabal, right? It's an American interest group.

02:14:29.600 | - And the American system is designed such that interest groups are perfectly legal, and

02:14:34.720 | some of them are super effective. - Exactly. I mean, you hit the nail right on the head. That's

02:14:40.400 | exactly right. And it was nothing that we said that was anti-Semitic by any reasonable definition

02:14:51.280 | of that term. And huge numbers of Jews have known me and Steve over the years, and nobody ever

02:14:59.920 | ever said that we were anti-Semitic before March 2006 when the article appeared, because we're not

02:15:06.880 | anti-Semitic. But look, you've got this interest group, right, that has a significant influence

02:15:15.920 | on American policy and on Israeli policy, and you want to talk about it. It's just important to talk

02:15:26.240 | about it. It's important for Jews, right, in the United States, for Jews in Israel to talk about

02:15:32.800 | this. The idea that you want to silence critics is not a smart way to go about doing business,

02:15:40.640 | in my opinion. If we were wrong, if Steve and I were so wrong and our arguments were so foul,

02:15:47.360 | they could have easily exposed those arguments. They could have gone

02:15:54.480 | into combat with us in terms of the marketplace of ideas and easily knocked us down. The problem

02:16:01.920 | was that our arguments were quite powerful. And instead of engaging us and defeating our arguments,

02:16:08.880 | they wanted to silence us. And this is not good, right? It's not good for Israel. It's not good

02:16:16.720 | for the United States. And I would argue in the end, if anything, it's going to foster anti-Semitism.

02:16:22.400 | I think you don't want to run around telling people that they can't talk about Israel without

02:16:29.200 | being called an anti-Semite. It's just not healthy in terms of the issue that you're raising, right?

02:16:36.640 | But I still agree with you that it is a tricky issue. I don't want to make light of that.

02:16:43.920 | I know that there's this piece of literature out there called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,

02:16:50.960 | and I fully understand that if you're not careful, you can come close to writing

02:16:57.200 | volume two of the Protocol. But I don't believe that we wrote anything that was even close to

02:17:04.320 | that. And again, I think that a healthy debate on the issues that we were raising would have been

02:17:11.040 | not only in America's interest, but it would have been in Israel's interest.

02:17:15.760 | Yeah. I mean, underneath it all is just, I wonder why there's so much hate against groups.

02:17:24.240 | Why it's such a sticky way of thinking. Not just tribalism, like proud of your country and kind of

02:17:32.080 | hating another country, but really deeply hating. Like hating in a way where it's part of your

02:17:37.440 | identity kind of hate. Well, just to make a general point on this issue, in our conversation here,

02:17:45.840 | today, you often talk about individual leaders and the word individual often pops up in your

02:17:52.960 | vocabulary. I believe that we are ultimately social animals before we are individuals. I believe we're

02:18:00.720 | born into tribes, we're heavily socialized, and that we carve out space for our individualism.

02:18:08.720 | But we are part of tribes or social groups or nations, call them what you want, ethnic groups,

02:18:16.000 | religious groups. But the fact is that these tribes often crash into each other. And when

02:18:22.880 | they crash into each other, they end up hating each other. If you go to a place like Bosnia,

02:18:29.440 | right, the Croats and the Serbs, oh my God, and then throw in the Bosniaks,

02:18:36.800 | which is the term for Bosnian Muslims, and Muslims, Croats, Serbs, oh, and the tribes hate

02:18:47.680 | each other. And in a funny way, that hatred almost never goes away. And I guess there are some

02:18:57.600 | exceptions to that. If you look at the Germans after World War II, they've gone a long way

02:19:02.880 | towards reducing, I wouldn't want to say completely eliminating, but reducing a lot of

02:19:09.360 | the hatred that existed between Germans and their neighbors. But that's really kind of an anomalous

02:19:17.600 | case. I mean, you go around East Asia today and the hatred of Japan in a place like China,

02:19:25.920 | the hatred of Japan in a place like Korea, just not to be underestimated.

02:19:30.240 | But I think a lot of it just has to do with the fact that you're dealing with social groups that

02:19:36.560 | have crashed into each other at one point or another, and there are those lingering effects.

02:19:42.800 | And by the way, this gets back to our discussion a few minutes ago about trying to get a two-state

02:19:47.680 | solution between the Palestinians and the Israeli Jews now that you have had this horrible war,

02:19:56.480 | which is ongoing. - It's interesting to ask, to go back to World War II. Now, you said you studied

02:20:05.520 | Nazi Germany in the '30s from a perspective of maybe offensive realism. But just to look at the

02:20:13.760 | Holocaust, it's sometimes popular in public discourse today to compare certain things to

02:20:21.280 | the Holocaust. People have compared the Hamas attack on Israel to the Holocaust, saying things

02:20:27.680 | like it's the biggest attack on Jews since the Holocaust, which kind of implies that there's a

02:20:39.520 | comparison. People have made that same comparison in the other direction. What do you make of this

02:20:46.560 | comparison? Is it comparable? Does the use of the Holocaust have any accuracy in comparisons

02:20:56.400 | of modern-day international politics? - Is it possible that you could have another genocide?

02:21:06.480 | Yes, and I would argue that what you had in Rwanda was a genocide. The Holocaust is not the

02:21:13.520 | only genocide. I believe the word genocide is used too loosely today. And as you know, lots of people,

02:21:23.760 | and I mean lots of people who are pro-Palestinian, accuse the Israelis of engaging in genocide in

02:21:31.200 | Gaza. I think what the Israelis are doing in Gaza represents a massacre. I would use that term,

02:21:40.960 | given the number of civilians that they've killed and the fact that they've been indiscriminate in

02:21:45.760 | terms of how they've been bombing Gaza. But I would not use the word genocide. For me, a genocide is

02:21:54.640 | where one side attempts to eliminate another group from the planet. I think that what happened with

02:22:03.440 | the Holocaust was clearly a genocide and that the Germans were bent on destroying all of European

02:22:12.240 | Jewry. And if they could have gotten their hands on Jews outside of Europe, they would have murdered

02:22:19.040 | them as well. That's a genocide. And I think with the Hutus and the Tutsis, you had a similar

02:22:24.880 | situation. I think with the Turks and the Armenians during World War I, that was a genocide.

02:22:31.920 | But I have a rather narrow definition of what a genocide is, and I don't think there are many

02:22:36.720 | cases that qualify as a genocide. The Holocaust certainly does. Okay? Now, what Hamas did doesn't

02:22:46.720 | even come close to what happened to European Jewry between, let's say, 1939 and 1945, although I date

02:22:58.720 | the start of the Holocaust to 1941 if we were looking at it closely. But let's just say 1939

02:23:05.840 | when they invaded Poland. From 1939 to 1945, what Hamas did pales in comparison. It's hard to believe

02:23:14.640 | anybody would make that argument, right? Yes, a lot of Jews died, but hardly any compared to the

02:23:26.880 | number that died at the hands of the Germans. I mean, it's just no parallel at all. And furthermore,

02:23:34.800 | Hamas was in no position to kill all of the Jews in the Middle East. Just not gonna happen.

02:23:42.480 | Yeah, but there's also levels of things, you know, using,

02:23:45.600 | Germans using human skin for lamps. There's just levels of evil in this world.

02:23:53.840 | Yes, but you don't see that with, I mean, that's not what Hamas is doing. I mean,

02:23:57.680 | I want to be very clear here. I am not justifying Hamas's killing of civilians, okay? Not for one

02:24:04.960 | second. But I'm just saying, and by the way, just to go to the Israelis and what they're doing in

02:24:11.920 | Gaza, right? As I said to you before, I do believe that is a massacre. And I believe that's to be

02:24:18.080 | condemned, the killing of civilians. This is not legitimate collateral damage. They're directly

02:24:25.040 | punishing the population. But I would not call that a genocide, right? And I would not compare

02:24:31.760 | that to the Holocaust for one second. I just want to be very clear on that.

02:24:37.600 | Do you think if Israel could, they would avoid the death of any civilians?

02:24:43.360 | So you're saying there's some degree of punishment of collective anger?

02:24:47.920 | No, they're purposely killing civilians. This is the iron wall. They're trying to

02:24:51.760 | beat the Palestinians in the submission, right? There's no way you kill this many civilians

02:25:03.600 | if you're trying to precisely take out Hamas fighters. And by the way, the Israeli spokesman,

02:25:10.480 | the IDF spokesman has explicitly said that we are not pursuing precision bombing and that what we

02:25:17.680 | are doing is trying to maximize the amount of destruction and damage that we can inflict on

02:25:24.480 | the Palestinians. And I think this is a major mistake on the part of Israel. First of all,

02:25:32.640 | it ends up being a moral stain on your reputation, number one. And number two, it doesn't work.

02:25:38.800 | It doesn't work. The Palestinians are not going to roll over and submit to Israeli domination

02:25:48.080 | of their life. So the whole concept of the iron wall, Jabotinsky's term, was misguided.

02:25:58.960 | And by the way, if you look at what the Israelis are doing, they're trying to do two things. One

02:26:03.760 | is the iron wall, and that's where you punish the civilian population in Gaza and get them to submit.

02:26:09.280 | The other thing that they're trying to do is get Hamas. They want to destroy Hamas.

02:26:13.520 | And the belief there is that if they destroy Hamas, they've solved the problem. But as many

02:26:19.440 | Israelis know, including people on the hard right, even if you destroy Hamas, they are going to be

02:26:27.280 | replaced by another group, another resistance group. And that resistance group will employ terror.

02:26:35.280 | Yeah, I think you've said that other terrorist organizations have used the situation in

02:26:40.880 | Palestine as a kind of a recruitment mechanism for a long time.

02:26:46.720 | Osama bin Laden made it clear that this was one of the principal reasons for attacking the United

02:26:54.560 | States, right? And the United States attacked back and got us into a 20-year war that cost

02:27:04.240 | the lives of millions of people, not American, but human beings.

02:27:10.720 | And engaged in torture.

02:27:13.760 | Torture. Yeah.

02:27:16.640 | No, I think if you look at how we reacted to 9/11 and how the Israelis are reacting to what

02:27:25.440 | happened on October 7th, there's quite a bit of similarity in that both sides, the Israeli side

02:27:34.560 | and the American side, are enraged, right? And they lash out and they go on a rampage.

02:27:41.440 | And the end result is not good.

02:27:45.360 | Is there a capacity within Israel or within the United States after 9/11 to do something

02:27:53.040 | approximating turn the other cheek of understanding the root of terror is hate and fighting that hate

02:28:04.080 | with not the sound naive, but compassion?

02:28:10.400 | Well, I don't think in either case you're going to turn the other cheek. I think the-

02:28:16.240 | Well, what I mean by that is some limited, powerful military response, but very limited.

02:28:25.440 | Yeah, coupled with a smart political strategy.

02:28:27.680 | Political strategy, diplomacy.

02:28:29.440 | That's what they should have done.

02:28:30.880 | Yeah.

02:28:31.200 | Right.

02:28:31.600 | But is there a capacity for that? Or from your offensive realism perspective,

02:28:36.960 | it's just the odds are really low.

02:28:40.320 | No, from my offensive realist perspective or my realist perspective, that's what you should do.

02:28:45.840 | Right?

02:28:46.080 | Okay.

02:28:46.560 | My view is states are rational actors. They should be cunning, right? They should think about

02:28:51.920 | the strategic situation they're in and choose the appropriate response. And

02:28:57.680 | what happens, and this is why my theory is not always correct, is that sometimes states are

02:29:04.480 | not rational and they misbehave. I would argue in the Israeli case that it would have been good

02:29:14.720 | after October 7th or starting on October 7th if the United States had tried to hold the Israelis

02:29:24.000 | back and countenanced a more moderate response, take some time just to think about how to deal

02:29:36.000 | with this problem instead of lashing out. I think given what happened to the Israelis,

02:29:41.840 | given how shocked they were, given the level of fear, given the level of rage,

02:29:47.120 | they were going to lash out. And I don't believe that was in their interest. I think it would have

02:29:52.400 | been made, would have made sense to think about it and to think about a smarter strategy than

02:29:59.280 | they're now employing. And I think the Americans blew it. The Americans gave them a bear hug and

02:30:05.600 | a green light and said, "We'll give you all the weaponry you need and go out and do it." And

02:30:11.440 | I don't think that was the smart thing to do. Look, in the wake of October 7th,

02:30:18.400 | the Israelis had no good strategy. It's not like there's a magic formula that they just didn't see

02:30:24.720 | and we should have told them what the magic formula was. That's not true. They were, in a

02:30:30.400 | sense, caught between a rock and a hard place in terms of what to do. But there are smarter things

02:30:35.520 | and dumber things. And I think the Israelis lashed out in ways that are counterproductive. I think

02:30:46.720 | going on a rampage and killing huge numbers of civilians is not, it's obviously morally wrong,

02:30:54.960 | but it's also just not in their strategic interest. I mean, because it's not going to buy

02:31:02.000 | them anything. And in fact, it's going to cost them because people all over the planet are

02:31:08.960 | turning against Israel. I saw an Israeli think tank today that has been tracking protests around

02:31:20.800 | the world, gave some figures for what it looked like between October 7th and October 13th in terms

02:31:30.240 | of the number of protests around the world that were pro-Israel versus pro-Palestine. And then

02:31:37.840 | it looked at the numbers from October 13th up to the present. And I think the numbers were 69%

02:31:46.560 | were pro-Palestinian in the first six days after October 7th, 69%. And I think 31%, take these

02:31:55.440 | numbers with a grain of salt, 31% were pro-Israel. So I think it was 69 and 31. And since then,

02:32:06.800 | since October 13th, if you look at the number of protests around the world, 95% have been

02:32:12.720 | pro-Palestinian and 5% have been pro-Israel. And what this tells you is that public opinion

02:32:20.480 | around the world has shifted against Israel. And if you look at some of the demonstrations in places

02:32:26.320 | like London and Washington DC, it's truly amazing the number of people who are coming out in support

02:32:32.800 | of the Palestinians. And all of this again is just to support my point that it was just not smart for

02:32:40.640 | Israel to launch this bombing campaign. You can make an argument for going after Hamas and doing

02:32:48.960 | it in a surgical way or as surgical a way as possible, but that's not what they did.

02:32:55.840 | And again, my point to you is, I think that this punishment campaign is not going to work

02:33:02.240 | strategically. In other words, they're not going to beat the Palestinians into submission. They're

02:33:06.560 | not going to finish off Hamas. And at the same time, by pursuing this strategy, they're doing

02:33:12.560 | huge damage to their reputation around the world. - Well, I just,

02:33:17.840 | yeah, in the wake of October 7th,

02:33:20.560 | given the geopolitical context, I think there's a lot of leverage to be the great

02:33:30.960 | ethical superpower that demonstrate power without killing any civilians and use that leverage,

02:33:39.040 | diplomatic leverage, to push forward something like Abrahamic Accords with more nations,

02:33:45.040 | with Saudi Arabia, push for peace aggressively, peace agreements, this kind of stuff,

02:33:51.040 | economic relationships, all of this kind of stuff. And thereby pressure the Palestinian authority

02:33:57.040 | towards perhaps a two-state solution. - I think what you're missing here just in the Israeli

02:34:06.480 | case is that the Israeli government is not interested in two-state solution. And you want

02:34:11.040 | to remember that Benjamin Netanyahu, who looks very hawkish when you look at him in isolation,

02:34:19.440 | doesn't look so hawkish when you look at him compared to the rest of the people in his cabinet.

02:34:26.080 | Right? He almost looks like a moderate. He's got a lot of people who are way out to the right of him.

02:34:35.200 | And these people, and this of course includes Netanyahu, are not interested in a two-state

02:34:41.440 | solution. So the question you have to ask yourself is if you're Benjamin Netanyahu,

02:34:47.200 | and it's July 7th, late in the, excuse me, October 7th, late in the day, what do you do?

02:34:54.320 | You're not thinking about a two-state solution. You're thinking about an occupation that's not

02:34:59.120 | going to end. And the question is, how do you deal with the Palestinians, given what's just happened?

02:35:05.200 | Well, there's people in the cabinet and then there's history. And history remembers great

02:35:09.760 | leaders. And so Benjamin Netanyahu can look in the streets of Israel and see the protests and think

02:35:17.680 | of how history will remember him. And I think a two-state solution is on the table for a great

02:35:22.960 | leader. Well, it was there. Was he the person who was going to take advantage of it? I don't

02:35:30.160 | think so, but we'll see. - Well, he's a student of history. Well, at this point,

02:35:34.080 | or the we'll see, I mean, at this point, it's very difficult. Like you said, 95%

02:35:40.160 | now or whatever the number is of protests. I think the window in which Israel has the ears of the

02:35:50.080 | world, they can do the big ethical action towards peace is, I think, has closed. Or maybe there's

02:35:59.200 | still a sliver, but it's just the slippery slope of hate has taken off. It's quite depressing to

02:36:09.520 | watch what's going on. - I agree 100%. Unequivocally depressing. - But, of course, as you talk about

02:36:15.680 | the role of US involvement is of critical importance here for the United States. And

02:36:23.200 | the argument you make is that we should not be involved in Ukraine, at least to the degree we are,

02:36:29.840 | we being the United States, and we should not be involved in Israel to the degree we are,

02:36:36.240 | because it's stretching us too thin when the big geopolitical contender in the 21st century

02:36:44.480 | with the United States is China. Is that a correct summary? - Yeah, I think just on Ukraine,

02:36:51.840 | we should not have pushed Ukraine to join NATO. And once the war started, we should have worked

02:37:00.640 | overtime to shut it down immediately. - March. - March, right. And you remember, by the way,

02:37:07.120 | not to go back to Ukraine in great detail. In the fall, early fall of 2022, the war starts February

02:37:15.680 | 2022, there's March 2022, which we've talked about, which is the negotiations. In the fall of 2022,

02:37:22.640 | I think it was in September, the Ukrainians had won two major tactical victories, one in Kherson

02:37:30.720 | and the other in Kharkiv. And at that point in time, General Milley, who was the chairman of

02:37:35.360 | the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, "Now is the time to negotiate because this is the high watermark

02:37:42.320 | for the Ukrainians." Milley understood that things were only going to get worse.

02:37:46.960 | And the White House shut Milley down and said, "We're not negotiating." So we have blown a number

02:37:54.560 | of opportunities here to head this problem off at the pass. But that's my view there. And with

02:38:03.280 | regard to the Israelis, my only point about Israel is that it would be better for Israel and better

02:38:09.760 | for the United States if we, the United States, was in a position, the United States was in a

02:38:15.920 | position to put pressure on Israel from time to time. As Steve and I say in the book, we should

02:38:22.240 | be able to treat Israel like a normal country, right? The fact is that countries sometimes do

02:38:28.160 | stupid things. This includes the United States and Israel. And if Israel is pursuing a policy that we

02:38:34.880 | think is unwise, we should be in a position where we could put pressure on Israel. That's our

02:38:40.160 | argument, right? But anyway, we goofed both with regard to Ukraine and with regard to the Middle

02:38:49.280 | East, and we're now up to our eyeballs in alligators in both of those regions. And as you

02:38:57.040 | described my view, this is not good because the area of the most strategic importance for the

02:39:04.080 | United States today is East Asia. And that's because China is there, and China is the most

02:39:11.360 | serious threat the United States faces. Do you think there will be a war with China in the 21st

02:39:18.160 | century? I don't know. My argument is there will be. There is right now a serious security

02:39:25.440 | competition. And at the same time, there is a real possibility of war. Whether or not we avoid it is

02:39:33.360 | very hard to say. I mean, we did during the Cold War. We had a serious security competition from

02:39:39.840 | roughly 1947 to 1989. And we thankfully avoided war. Probably came the closest in 1962 with the

02:39:50.240 | Cuban Missile Crisis. But we avoided it. And I think we can avoid it here. Is it for sure? No.

02:39:59.840 | You've said that China won't move on Taiwan militarily, in part because it's, as you said,

02:40:06.400 | amphibious operations are difficult. Why will China not move on Taiwan is in your sense,

02:40:12.800 | in the near future? Well, it's because there's this body of water called the Taiwan Strait,

02:40:20.320 | which is a big body of water. And getting across water is very difficult,

02:40:27.680 | unless you can walk on water. So geography still has a role to play in the 21st century?

02:40:32.400 | Oh yeah. I think geography is very important. Big bodies of water really matter. In an ideal world,

02:40:38.960 | you'd like to have the Pacific Ocean between you and any potential adversary. 6,000 miles.

02:40:44.560 | 6,000 miles of water, hard to get across. If you're a country and I'm a country, and there's

02:40:51.520 | land between us, I can take my panzer divisions and I can go right across the land and get into

02:40:57.840 | your country or attack your country. And you of course can take your panzer divisions and come

02:41:02.640 | across that same piece of land. But if there's a big body of water between us, your panzer divisions

02:41:09.360 | can't go across the water. And then the question is, how do you get them across the water?

02:41:13.520 | And that's very tricky. And in a world where you have lots of submarines and you have lots of

02:41:20.000 | aircraft and you have missiles that are land-based that can hit those surface ships, it is very,

02:41:27.920 | very hard to attack across a body of water. And all you have to do is think about

02:41:34.000 | Normandy, the American invasion of Normandy, June 6th, 1944, coming in on Omaha Beach.

02:41:41.840 | Oh boy, that was really difficult. But there is a growing asymmetry of military power.

02:41:50.080 | There. That even though it's difficult.

02:41:52.560 | That is correct.

02:41:54.640 | So I guess-

02:41:55.680 | That is correct.

02:41:57.520 | So I was just in a conversation with Elon Musk and he says that, you know, China is quite serious

02:42:07.440 | about the one China policy. And it seems inevitable that Taiwan will have to be, if you look at this

02:42:15.760 | pragmatically in the 21st century, it seems inevitable that Taiwan will have to be a part

02:42:20.000 | of China. And so we can get there either diplomatically or militarily. What do you

02:42:28.480 | think about the inevitability of that kind of idea? When a nation says this is a top priority for us,

02:42:35.680 | what do you think about them meaning it? And what do we do about that?

02:42:45.040 | There's no question it's a top priority for them and there's no question they mean it. But it's

02:42:50.640 | also a top priority for us not to let them take Taiwan.

02:42:53.680 | Why exactly?

02:42:54.720 | Because it's an important strategic asset. Many people will say it's because Taiwan's a democracy,

02:43:00.960 | but that doesn't matter that much. It's because of two strategic reasons. The first is that if we

02:43:11.760 | were to let Taiwan go, it would have hugely negative consequences for our alliance structure

02:43:19.680 | in East Asia. To contain China, we need allies. We have an alliance structure. And our allies,

02:43:26.480 | Japanese, South Koreans, Filipinos, Australians, they're all counting on us to be there for them.

02:43:34.080 | And if we say we're not going to defend Taiwan, the Chinese attack, they're going to say,

02:43:41.120 | they're going to say, I bet if the Chinese attack us, the Americans won't be there for us.

02:43:46.480 | So it would have a damaging effect on our alliance structure, which we cannot afford

02:43:55.840 | because containing China is a wicked problem. It's a powerful state. You were getting to this

02:44:01.680 | before when you talked about China versus Taiwan. So that's the first reason. Second reason is you

02:44:08.560 | want to bottle up the Chinese Navy and the Chinese Air Force inside the first island chain. You don't

02:44:15.520 | want to let them get out into the Pacific. You don't want them dominating the waters of East Asia.

02:44:23.680 | You want to bottle them up again inside the first island chain. And you can only do that if you

02:44:27.920 | control Taiwan. You don't control Taiwan, they get out into the Philippine Sea, into the Pacific

02:44:34.080 | and the Western Pacific and cause all sorts of problems. - Well, you saying all that, you've

02:44:40.480 | also said the century of humiliation, Japan and the United States are a source of that humiliation

02:44:46.160 | for China. Don't you think they see the other side of that? - Absolutely. - And in the interest of

02:44:55.840 | avoiding a world war, I guess the question is how do we avoid a world war? It doesn't seem like the

02:45:07.200 | military involvement in the conflict between China and Taiwan is the way. - Well, I don't want-

02:45:14.800 | - There's no good answers here. I'm just saying- - There are no good. - Which is the less bad

02:45:19.760 | option. - Well, what you want to do is you want to make sure that you deter China from invading

02:45:27.280 | Taiwan. You want to avoid a war. You and I are in complete agreement on that. We don't want a war,

02:45:32.000 | but we want to contain China. We do not want to let China dominate Asia. That's what the Americans

02:45:38.320 | are principally concerned with here. And it's what China's neighbors are principally concerned with.

02:45:43.360 | This includes the Japanese, the South Koreans, the Filipinos, Australians, and the Taiwanese.

02:45:49.600 | They don't want, and we don't want, China to dominate the region. So we have to contain it.

02:45:56.080 | But at the same time, and this should be music to your ears, we not only want to contain it,

02:46:01.760 | we want to make sure we don't end up in a shooting match with the Chinese, because this could be

02:46:05.920 | disastrous. So you have to have a very smart policy. You have to build powerful military

02:46:11.360 | forces, and you have to make sure you don't do anything that's provocative. On Taiwan, for

02:46:16.960 | example, the last thing you want is for the Taiwanese government to declare its independence,

02:46:22.480 | because the Chinese have said, "If Taiwan does that, we'll go to war." And of course, we don't

02:46:27.600 | want that. So my view is you want to smartly build up your military forces, and you want to do

02:46:34.480 | everything you can to contain China, and at the same time, not be provocative. - So a big component

02:46:43.200 | of that is making sure your military, the US military, is bigger than the Chinese military?

02:46:49.280 | - Not necessarily. It's an interesting question. A lot of people think that to make deterrence work,

02:47:01.440 | right, you have to be able to beat the Chinese, and therefore, you need a much bigger military.

02:47:09.600 | And I don't think over time that's possible, right? I think it's probably not even possible

02:47:14.640 | now to beat the Chinese in a war over Taiwan or in a war in the South China Sea. I think what

02:47:22.320 | you want to do is make it clear to the Chinese either that there will be no winner. In other

02:47:28.560 | words, you don't have to win, but you want to make sure they don't win, okay? It's a lose-lose

02:47:36.320 | proposition if they go to war over Taiwan or what have you. And if you can't do that, right,

02:47:42.480 | you think that they're so powerful that they're ultimately going to win, you want to convince

02:47:47.440 | them that victory would be a Pyrrhic victory. In other words, they would pay a god-awful price

02:47:53.840 | to win the war. You follow what I'm saying? So, excuse me, the best strategy for deterrence is

02:48:01.440 | you win, China loses. Second best strategy is a stalemate, nobody wins. Third best strategy is

02:48:10.800 | they win, but they pay a god-awful price. And the fourth possibility, which you don't want,

02:48:18.240 | is they win quickly and decisively, right? If that's the case, then you don't have much deterrence.

02:48:28.720 | What does a world with China as the sole dominant superpower look like? I mean,

02:48:34.480 | a little bit underlying our discussion is this kind of idea that US is the good guys and China

02:48:39.360 | is the bad guys. First of all, you know, dividing the world into good guys and bad guys seems to

02:48:46.480 | somehow miss the nuance of this whole human civilization project we're undertaking. But

02:48:54.960 | what does the world look like where China is the dominant sole superpower in a unipolar world?

02:49:00.000 | Well, I don't tend to think of the world in terms of good guys and bad guys. As a good realist,

02:49:07.920 | I think that states are states, they're all black boxes. I don't discriminate between democracies

02:49:14.800 | and autocracies. But having said that, I am an American, and as an American, I'm interested in

02:49:22.640 | the security of my country, the survival of my country. So I want the United States to be the

02:49:30.160 | most powerful state in the world, which means I want the United States to dominate the Western

02:49:35.840 | Hemisphere. I want us to be a regional hegemon. And I want to make sure that China does not

02:49:41.200 | dominate Asia the way we dominate the Western Hemisphere. It's not because I think we're the

02:49:46.960 | good guys and they're the bad guys. If I were Chinese, and I were in Beijing, and I was Xi Jinping's

02:49:55.840 | national security advisor, I'd tell him what we got to do is make sure we dominate the world

02:50:01.440 | or dominate our region and then do everything we can to undermine America's position

02:50:06.240 | in the Western Hemisphere, right? That'd be my view. So I guess you could say I do view the world

02:50:13.680 | in terms of good guys and bad guys 'cause I'm an American. - More like us and them. - Yeah,

02:50:18.480 | it's us and them. That's a nice way to put it. Yeah, it's us versus them. Not so much good guys

02:50:23.280 | versus bad guys. - Is it possible to have a stable, peaceful world with a good balance of power

02:50:29.200 | where it's China and US as superpowers? It's a bipolar world, no longer unipolar. - Yeah,

02:50:37.920 | okay, so you're hypothesizing a world where they dominate Asia and we dominate the Western

02:50:42.960 | Hemisphere. I believe there would be a great deal of security competition, intense security

02:50:50.480 | competition between those two superpowers. - The definition of intense matters here. So it could

02:50:56.320 | be small, small military conflicts, or it could be extremely large, unstable military conflicts.

02:51:04.480 | - Well, conflict, let's use the word war. So I distinguish between security competition and war.

02:51:11.920 | And what I'm telling you is you'll have an intense security competition where there's no shooting,

02:51:17.520 | where if there's shooting, it's mainly proxies that are doing the fighting,

02:51:20.960 | much like the Vietnam War, right? Or you could have a case where one of those superpowers

02:51:27.760 | was involved in a war against a proxy of the other superpower. Korean War, think the Korean War,

02:51:34.960 | the United States fought the Chinese who were allied with the Soviets at the time.

02:51:40.320 | But a war between the United States and China, just like a war between the United States

02:51:46.000 | and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, that's what you really want to avoid. So I think you'd

02:51:51.920 | have an intense security competition, right? You'd have wars involving proxies of each of those two

02:52:00.160 | superpowers. And you would probably have some wars where one of the superpowers was involved in a

02:52:05.680 | proxy, right? With one of the other superpowers proxies. - So it seems likely then if that's the

02:52:14.160 | case, then it would be Taiwan is the proxy and US fighting China through the proxy of Taiwan.

02:52:21.040 | - Yeah, well, that would assume the United States, but you want to remember you're

02:52:25.440 | hypothesizing a situation where China dominates Asia. - Oh, already has dominated.

02:52:30.960 | - Yeah, it's already dominated Taiwan. - I see.

02:52:34.400 | - Where do you find the proxies? Australia? - Well, the Middle East could be a good case.

02:52:40.560 | - Oh, wow. - Persian Gulf.

02:52:42.320 | - Oh boy. And then our discussion of Israel becomes even more dramatically.

02:52:47.360 | - Yeah, well, Israel gets involved. I think in this scenario, if you're talking about a US-China

02:52:53.520 | competition, right? And you're talking about the Middle East, I think it's the Gulf. It's the

02:52:59.600 | Saudis, the Iranians, the Iraqis, it's the oil. - Don't you think it could be Israel versus Iran

02:53:04.880 | with some very 1984 kind of dramatic partnership of Iran, Russia, and China versus United States,

02:53:15.520 | Europe, and Israel? - I think that's possible, yeah.

02:53:19.760 | - Oh boy. - I think that's possible, yeah.

02:53:22.320 | Now that I, I mean, I hadn't thought about it until you said it, but yeah, I think that that

02:53:27.840 | is possible. - Isn't that terrifying?

02:53:30.000 | - Yeah, well, that, you know, in your scenario where China already dominates Asia and we dominate

02:53:37.520 | the Western Hemisphere, I think you start talking about where the most likely places

02:53:43.200 | that the United States and China go head to head or fight through proxies. I think it is the Gulf

02:53:51.600 | or the Middle East. And the scenario that you posit. - I mean, one question I have,

02:53:58.240 | I don't know about you, but for me, unlike with the Soviet Union, and I know I was born there,

02:54:06.320 | but even outside of that, the cultural gap, the loss in translation, the communication gap between

02:54:15.120 | China and the United States seems to be much greater than that of what was the former Soviet

02:54:22.240 | Union and the United States. I see two cultures intermingling and communicating as one of the

02:54:30.000 | ways to deescalate future conflict. - It's an interesting question. I mean,

02:54:37.840 | at a sort of an abstract theoretical level, my argument is that great powers act according to

02:54:45.120 | realist dictates and they understand those realist dictates and that could lead to cooperation or it

02:54:53.680 | can lead to war. It depends. I would say just in the case of the Soviets, a lot of people describe

02:55:04.560 | the Cold War as an ideological competition above all else. It was communism versus liberal

02:55:13.840 | democracy or communism versus liberal capitalism, whatever. I actually don't believe that. I believe

02:55:21.440 | the Soviets were realist to the core. I believe Stalin was a realist par excellence and that

02:55:30.160 | ideology did not matter much in Stalin's foreign policy. I believe if you look at Soviet foreign

02:55:36.560 | policy after World War II, throughout the Cold War, they were realist to the core.

02:55:41.920 | I think in those days, the Americans were realists, right? A lot of liberal ideology floating around

02:55:51.200 | out there, but the Americans were realists. I think one of the reasons you avoided a shooting

02:55:56.720 | match between the United States and the Soviet Union from '47 to '89 was because both sides,

02:56:04.800 | I think, understood basic balance of power logic. US-China competition is somewhat different.

02:56:13.200 | First of all, the Chinese are realist to the core. I've spent a lot of time in China. I basically

02:56:20.400 | have rock and roll. I'm basically a rock and roll star in China. The Chinese- You're kind of a big

02:56:27.760 | deal in China. I love it. The Chinese are my kind of people. They're realists, right? They speak my

02:56:33.440 | language. It's the United States that is not very realist. American leaders have a very powerful

02:56:42.080 | liberal bent and tend not to see the world in realist terms. I believe, by the way, just going

02:56:47.120 | back to our discussion of NATO expansion, I think our inability to understand that NATO expansion

02:56:53.920 | was anathema to the Russians was due in large part to the fact that we just, during the unipolar

02:57:01.280 | moment, didn't think of international politics from a realist perspective and didn't respect

02:57:06.960 | anyone who thought about international politics from a realist perspective.

02:57:10.560 | Those various American administrations, starting with the Clinton administration,

02:57:16.560 | had put their realist hat on. They would have understood that NATO expansion into Ukraine was

02:57:21.520 | not a good idea. But we had this thoroughly liberal view of the world that dominated our

02:57:26.960 | thinking. It's gone away somewhat since we've moved into multipolarity, but not completely.

02:57:33.600 | This makes me a little nervous, right, to pick up on your point. I mean, the United States is

02:57:40.480 | thinking about the world in ways that are somewhat different than the Chinese,

02:57:45.120 | who are realist par excellence. - That's fascinating. So the Chinese are pragmatic

02:57:51.120 | about thinking of the world as a competition of military powers, all the ways in which you

02:57:59.600 | describe the realist perspective. So that's a hopeful thing, right? If

02:58:04.480 | we can achieve stability and a balance of powers through that military competition.

02:58:11.040 | - Yeah, I actually think that's right. I think if the United States, just let me talk a little

02:58:16.000 | bit about the United States to get at the issue you're raising. If the United States pursues a

02:58:21.840 | smart containment strategy, given what you just said and I said about the Chinese, I think we

02:58:28.800 | will avoid war. The problem with the Americans is it's not just the liberalism. It's the possibility

02:58:37.280 | that we will pursue a rollback policy. In other words, during the Cold War, we pursued containment.

02:58:46.400 | It was whenever anybody talked about American grand strategy towards the Soviet Union, it's

02:58:50.720 | containment, containment, containment. We now know from the historical record that the United States

02:58:55.760 | was not only pursuing containment, it was pursuing rollback. We were trying to roll back Soviet power.

02:59:02.560 | To put it bluntly, we were trying to wreck the Soviet Union, okay? And I would not be surprised

02:59:09.360 | moving forward with regard to China if the United States pursues a serious rollback policy.

02:59:15.680 | - So you're saying throughout history, United States was always doing that, always.

02:59:20.640 | Where's that from? Why can't we respect the power of other nations?

02:59:25.600 | - Because they may be a threat to us.

02:59:28.080 | - Well, I mean...

02:59:30.000 | - Look, you don't respect the power of other nations. You fear the power of other nations.

02:59:37.360 | - Well, fear and respect are next door neighbors, depending on the neighborhood you're living in.

02:59:40.880 | But I just mean it could be very counterproductive to try, because if you can empathize with their,

02:59:48.480 | if you assume they're rational actors, you try to roll back will create,

02:59:54.960 | would lean into the uncertainty of potential conflicts. You want to avoid the uncertainty

03:00:00.640 | of potential conflict. Caution, right? - Well, yes and no. Look, your point is you

03:00:06.240 | want to empathize. You want to be able to put yourself in the shoes of the other side.

03:00:09.920 | - Yes. - I agree 100% with that, right?

03:00:13.440 | It's very important if you're a first-class strategist to be able to do that. But at the

03:00:18.080 | same time, there is this competition for power taking place. And what you want to do is maximize

03:00:24.400 | how much power you have relative to the other side. And the other side wants to maximize how

03:00:29.520 | much power it has relative to you. So you have this competition for power, right, that's taking

03:00:37.920 | place all the time. And that's taking place at the same time you want to have empathy, or you want to

03:00:43.680 | be able to put yourself in the shoes of the other side. So those two things kind of go together,

03:00:48.880 | right? - It just feels less

03:00:50.560 | threatening to build up your thing versus try to hurt the other person's thing, the other group's

03:00:59.200 | thing. - Right, but if you build up your own

03:01:01.600 | power, you are building up your capability to hurt the other side.

03:01:06.240 | - Right. But I guess you don't ride all the saber. Just work on manufacturing sabers.

03:01:12.320 | - Well, that I agree with. I think that the United States wants to make sure it has a big stick in

03:01:22.160 | East Asia for purposes of containing China and avoiding a war, right? Again, I want to be clear,

03:01:28.560 | I'm not advocating that we start World War III. But the point is you want to have a big stick,

03:01:35.120 | and you want to make sure that you don't overstep your bounds in terms of using that big stick. This

03:01:41.600 | is the danger with rollback, right? That you get too aggressive and you precipitate a war, right?

03:01:48.400 | And you also just have to be very careful what you say. And to go back to your favorite argument,

03:01:54.320 | you want to be able to have empathy or put yourself in the shoes of the other side. Because

03:02:00.320 | if you do something, you want to think smartly about how that other side is going to see your

03:02:06.720 | action and how they're going to react, right? - And mostly focus on the character.

03:02:11.520 | - On the character. Have a giant stick laying around, but never mention it. Just focus on

03:02:16.240 | the characters. - Well, occasionally you have to

03:02:17.920 | mention the stick. - No, everyone knows the stick is there.

03:02:20.320 | - There is some truth in that, right? - I mean, yeah. But, you know,

03:02:25.600 | and words matter a lot. It feels, you know, this current President Biden's meeting with Xi Jinping,

03:02:33.440 | and I think the words exchanged there are really important. I have a notion that leaders can stop

03:02:38.400 | wars just as much as they can start wars. - Well, leaders matter. There's no question

03:02:44.000 | about that. No question. But just on rhetoric, you want to remember that Putin has, on more than one

03:02:52.560 | occasion, very subtly rattled the nuclear sword. - Oh, yeah.

03:02:57.120 | - And it has been very effective. - Yeah.

03:02:59.680 | - Because Joe Biden has paid attention, and Joe Biden wants to make sure we don't end up in a

03:03:05.120 | thermonuclear war, and thank goodness he's thinking that way. So all Putin has to do is mention the

03:03:12.480 | possibility of nuclear war. Just to go back to Taiwan, you know, I switch areas of the world.

03:03:17.680 | If you're interested in containing China, and you're interested in deterrence,

03:03:23.920 | and let's go back to those various scenarios where the Chinese win, we win, Chinese win,

03:03:31.040 | but they do it at a costly, at great cost, one could argue that that discussion that I laid out

03:03:39.360 | before didn't take into account nuclear weapons. And all President Biden or any of his successors

03:03:47.360 | has to do is just very subtly rattle or employ the nuclear threat, you know,

03:04:00.080 | and just sort of remind the Chinese that, you know, you start a war over Taiwan,

03:04:04.640 | it could easily escalate into a nuclear war. You want to understand we both have

03:04:09.040 | nuclear weapons, and if either one of us is put into a desperate situation,

03:04:14.080 | we may turn to those nuclear weapons. And oh, by the way, Xi Jinping, you want to understand

03:04:19.600 | that we're out here in the water, and using nuclear weapons in the water, it's not that,

03:04:25.840 | it's not the same as using war, nuclear weapons on land. So we may very well use them.

03:04:31.760 | I'm not saying we will. But anyway, a little saber rattling, right?

03:04:36.000 | Let me just zoom out on human history. What makes empires collapse, and what makes them last when

03:04:42.960 | they do? When you look at human history in your sense, thinking about the United States perhaps

03:04:50.560 | as an empire. I don't view the United States as an empire.

03:04:55.680 | What's the, what's the definition? So to you, empire is a thing that seeks expansion constantly?

03:05:02.240 | Yeah, I think it's a country that incorporates different regions or areas around the world

03:05:13.360 | into sort of a giant sphere of influence, without incorporating those territories

03:05:23.840 | actually into the state itself. So you had this thing called the British Empire, and it

03:05:29.520 | controlled areas like India, North America, and Kenya, just to pick a couple instances,

03:05:42.320 | at different points. Singapore would be another example. Australia would be another example.

03:05:48.400 | So these were all entities that were part of the British Empire, right? And the United States

03:05:56.800 | has taken a stab at empire after the Spanish-American War, for example,

03:06:02.480 | with regard to the Philippines and Cuba and Puerto Rico, but we never got serious about it.

03:06:11.120 | There's never been an American empire. This is not to say the United States is not an incredibly

03:06:15.920 | powerful country that goes all around the world, building military bases and stationing troops

03:06:22.080 | here, there, and everywhere, but we're not running an empire the way the British

03:06:26.720 | Empire was run or the French Empire. So the question for me is, why did those empires go away?

03:06:35.840 | Why did the British Empire go away? If you ever look at a map of the world in 1922,

03:06:43.120 | after World War I, it's truly amazing how much of that map is controlled by Britain, right? They had

03:06:50.080 | a huge empire, and it disappeared. Probably by far the biggest in terms of area empire in human

03:06:56.960 | history, I think so. I think that's right. It almost has to be. Yeah, right. It's crazy.

03:07:04.080 | Crazy, yeah. And then no longer is the case. Yeah. Now, I wanna be clear, the Americans have wielded

03:07:12.640 | maybe even greater influence than Britain did when it had its empire, but I don't believe we

03:07:17.120 | have an empire that bears any resemblance to the British Empire. So the question is,

03:07:23.040 | what happened to that British Empire? What happened to the French Empire? What happened

03:07:27.440 | to the Belgian Empire? What happened to the Dutch Empire? These were countries that had

03:07:32.480 | colonies all over the planet, the Dutch East Indies, right? Vietnam was French Indochina.

03:07:41.200 | Where did those empires go? Two factors finish them off. Number one, nationalism. Nationalism

03:07:48.160 | became a very powerful force in the 19th century. It began to rear its head in the late 18th century

03:07:53.440 | and became a very powerful force in the 19th and certainly in the 20th.

03:07:57.680 | Can you explain nationalism here?

03:07:59.040 | Nationalism is the idea that these different nations that were part of the empire, like the

03:08:05.360 | Kenyans, wanted their own state, nation state. This is my point about the Palestinians, right?

03:08:11.200 | This is Palestinian nationalism. What is Zionism? Zionism is Jewish nationalism,

03:08:17.360 | Jewish nationalism. Think of Theodor Herzl's famous book. It's called "The Jewish State."

03:08:24.160 | Nation state, think of the word, nation state. That embodies nationalism, nation state,

03:08:29.120 | Jewish state. Palestinians want their own state, two-state solution, right? Can't beat the

03:08:35.440 | Palestinians into submission, right? The Indians wanted their own state. The Pakistanis wanted

03:08:41.520 | their own state. The Kenyans wanted their own state. Singapore wanted its own state. Oh, the

03:08:46.160 | Americans wanted their own state. This is called the American Revolution, right?

03:08:50.320 | So that's the first reason, nationalism, that these empires disappeared. The second reason is

03:08:58.000 | that from a cost-benefit analysis, they no longer made any sense. And it was the coming of the

03:09:04.480 | Industrial Revolution. Once the Industrial Revolution comes, an empire is basically an

03:09:10.000 | albatross around your neck. I would argue that the British Empire was an albatross around Britain's

03:09:14.960 | neck in most of the 20th century. Some of my friends disagree with that and think there were

03:09:19.680 | all sorts of benefits from the British Empire. But you want to remember that in the 20th century,

03:09:26.480 | the three countries that really were powerful were the United States, Germany, and the Soviet Union.

03:09:34.080 | Those were the big three. Did any of them have an empire? No.

03:09:37.840 | That's a good card.

03:09:40.720 | In the industrial world, you don't need an empire, right? What you need is a powerful

03:09:48.640 | manufacturing base.

03:09:49.840 | Well, the cost-benefit analysis is different before the Industrial Revolution. There's been

03:09:54.480 | many empires.

03:09:55.840 | There's no question that empires came and went, right?

03:09:59.760 | Yes.

03:10:00.260 | Right. And all you have to do is just look at the British and the French in the Seven Years'

03:10:06.720 | War, 1756 to 1763. The British win, they get Canada, right? And that's why Quebec, Montreal,

03:10:17.040 | all these big French-speaking areas are now part of Canada, right? So borders change.

03:10:25.680 | And countries got established, the United States being one. And remember, South America

03:10:32.640 | and Central America were once completely dominated by the Spanish and, in the case of Brazil,

03:10:38.560 | the Portuguese. But they all, in the 19th century, got their independence, right?

03:10:45.360 | And what I'm saying to you is in the 19th and in the 20th century, there were two forces that

03:10:52.000 | were really driving the train. One is nationalism, and then the other is the Industrial Revolution,

03:10:57.760 | which changes the cost-benefit analysis.

03:11:00.160 | Almost too crazy of a question, but if you look, let me calculate. Let's say 500 years

03:11:07.120 | from now, and you, John Muir, Sherman, somehow travel through time and are at a bookstore

03:11:14.000 | looking at the entire history of human civilization in a single book, what role does the US play?

03:11:21.440 | What's the story of US over the next 100, 200, 300 years? Is it a big role, small role?

03:11:29.600 | Well, that's a long time. If you ask me, let's just say the next 100 years.

03:11:39.120 | Yeah, that's still tough.

03:11:40.960 | That's still tough. But actually, I think we're in excellent shape.

03:11:48.000 | And here's the reason. Going back to the beginning of our conversation, you asked me

03:11:53.920 | about power, and I told you the two principal building blocks of power are population size

03:12:01.600 | and wealth, okay? And therefore, you wanna look around the world, and you wanna look at

03:12:08.880 | what you think the demographics are of countries like Britain, the United States,

03:12:17.600 | Iran, China, Russia, pick your country, moving forward, right? What do the demographics look

03:12:26.400 | like, and how wealthy are those countries likely to be? What you discover very quickly is that

03:12:34.080 | almost every country around the world is depopulating over time, right? Russia's gonna

03:12:40.800 | be much smaller, China's gonna be much smaller 100 years from now than both of those countries

03:12:47.440 | are, as best we can tell. United States, American women are not having lots of babies these days,

03:12:55.120 | no question about that. But we have immigration, we're an immigrant culture. You're a perfect

03:13:01.680 | manifestation of that. You're perfect. You're now an American. That's wonderful. We need more

03:13:07.120 | people like you, right? So when I hear Donald Trump and others arguing that immigration's a

03:13:13.840 | terrible thing, this is ridiculous. Immigration is what made us great, right? It's when my

03:13:20.560 | relatives came over in the middle of the 19th century from Germany and Ireland, right?

03:13:26.000 | That's fascinating, 'cause there's been a huge concern, America and other developed nations are

03:13:33.440 | not having enough children. But you just made me realize, in the long arc of history, the United

03:13:40.880 | States has gotten really damn good at integrating immigrants and helping them flourish. The whole

03:13:48.320 | diversity that makes up America. You're absolutely right.

03:13:51.760 | There's a machinery of integrating other cultures.

03:13:56.080 | Yeah. Just very quickly on this, Sam Huntington's book, Who Are We?

03:14:00.560 | Which in many ways, I love that book, but it has one fundamental flaw. And a number of people told

03:14:09.760 | him beforehand that that flaw existed and he didn't fix it. But Sam argues in the book that

03:14:16.240 | we have large numbers of Hispanics in this country, and we're doing a very poor job of

03:14:23.280 | integrating them into the mainstream. And they're not becoming Americans. And because many of them

03:14:29.360 | are concentrated in the Southwest of the United States, unlike other ethnic groups that were

03:14:34.080 | spread out all over God's little green acre, we're gonna have this cohesive group of Spanish-speaking

03:14:42.000 | Americans who are gonna want to break away. And the United States is no longer gonna be

03:14:50.800 | a reasonably coherent nation state. He's wrong. All the evidence is that Hispanics are integrating

03:15:00.400 | into the American mainstream more quickly and more effectively than the European immigrant groups

03:15:09.840 | that came starting around 1835. If you look at immigration from Europe into the United States,

03:15:15.840 | leaving aside the original WASPs who came over and founded the place, the immigrants start coming

03:15:21.520 | in large numbers in 1835. And we really don't shut the door until 1924. This is a crude overview.

03:15:29.920 | Starting in 1835 and running up till about 1885, it's mainly Germans and Irish. That's why Germans

03:15:37.440 | are the largest ethnic group to ever come to the United States and the Irish are right behind them.

03:15:42.480 | These are the European ethnic groups we're talking about. Then starting in 1885,

03:15:47.040 | Poles, Jews, and Italians start coming, right? And the Germans and Irish keep coming.

03:15:54.880 | And this is why Ellis Island is opened. I think it's 1893. Ellis Island is opened because Castle

03:16:00.960 | Garden in New York, which had handled all the previous immigrants coming across the pond,

03:16:07.680 | Castle Garden couldn't handle them all. So they opened up Ellis Island. That's why somebody like

03:16:12.800 | me, I can't find my distant relatives' records in Ellis Island because they came through Castle

03:16:19.600 | Garden, right? Whereas lots of Jews I know, lots of Italians I know, they can find their relatives'

03:16:26.080 | records in Ellis Island because they came through Ellis Island. The point is you had all these

03:16:30.720 | immigrants who came in roughly between 1835 and 1924 when we shut the gates. That's the only time

03:16:37.280 | we've ever really shut the gates in a meaningful way, right? And this is what made America great,

03:16:42.640 | right? All these people and they made lots of babies, right?

03:16:47.040 | So in some sense, make America great again means getting more immigrants in.

03:16:52.080 | Well, we opened the gates again in '65. Closed them in '24, opened them in '65. I'm oversimplifying

03:16:58.800 | the story here because we didn't completely shut them. We almost completely shut them in '24,

03:17:03.840 | opened in '65. And we've had huge numbers of immigrants flowing in. These immigrants who have

03:17:10.080 | been flowing in since '65 are not Europeans. They're not mainly Europeans. They're mainly

03:17:16.400 | Hispanics and Asians. If you look at those Hispanics and Asians, they're integrating

03:17:23.520 | into the American mainstream at a much faster and more effective clip than was the case with those

03:17:31.760 | immigrants who came in in the 19th century and early 20th century. The Irish, oh my God,

03:17:38.080 | they were treated horribly. There's a book, a very famous book that's been written called

03:17:44.080 | When the Irish Became White. Just think about the title of that book.

03:17:48.480 | Yeah.

03:17:48.880 | There was discrimination against all these groups, right? And the worst discrimination,

03:17:53.680 | of course, was against Chinese Americans, right? But we've gotten much better. And what we should

03:18:01.760 | do moving forward is redouble our efforts to integrate immigrants into the American mainstream,

03:18:09.440 | Hispanics, Asians of all sorts. Because the fact is that America is rapidly reaching the point

03:18:19.680 | where it's not gonna be an all-white country, right? I have five children, and two of my children

03:18:27.680 | are, I believe it's Generation Z, Gen Z. Gen Z is the last majority white

03:18:34.800 | generation, right? Subsequent generations are not majority white.

03:18:41.840 | So for anybody who's bothered by this, I'm not bothered by that, but for anybody who is bothered

03:18:48.800 | by this, they better get used to it. Because Americans aren't making enough babies that we

03:18:57.280 | can continue to grow population-wise in a robust way. So we need immigration, and we're an immigrant

03:19:04.960 | culture. And this is a great virtue. It has been a great virtue over time.

03:19:10.320 | It should be a source of hope, not worry.

03:19:13.040 | That's my view. That's my view. And America, when it works, is a place that is very attractive

03:19:21.200 | to immigrants, and immigrants can do very well here. And then the real key moving forward is

03:19:28.000 | intermarriage, right? And you have a huge amount of intermarriage, right? Somebody was telling me

03:19:34.320 | not too long ago that the highest intermarriage rates in the United States are among Asian women,

03:19:39.520 | Asian American women, Asian women, and Anglos, right? And I say, "Wonderful."

03:19:45.440 | Great.

03:19:47.840 | No, the more...

03:19:49.280 | Love is the fastest way to integrate.

03:19:52.720 | Yeah, well, what you wanna do is you wanna eliminate difference, right? You wanna eliminate

03:19:59.280 | difference, right? It's like people who say, "I'm an anti-semi," right? I have two grandsons

03:20:07.200 | who Adolf Hitler would have thrown into a gas chamber, one of whose first name is John and

03:20:13.040 | middle name is Mearsheimer, right?

03:20:15.120 | [Chuckling]

03:20:15.600 | Yeah.

03:20:16.160 | This is what you want, right?

03:20:17.920 | Yeah.

03:20:18.420 | Steve Waltz's wife and his two children would have been thrown into a gas chamber by Adolf

03:20:24.880 | Hitler, right? This is what you want. You want intermarriage. Now, there are a good number of

03:20:29.760 | people in some of those groups, especially among Jews, who don't like intermarriage, right?

03:20:34.800 | Yeah.

03:20:35.200 | But they've lost, because I haven't looked recently at the data among... For intermarriage

03:20:42.720 | rates among basically secular Jews, but it used to be around 62% large numbers of Jews marry

03:20:50.080 | Goyim.

03:20:50.880 | And they've lost because of intermarriage. Intermarriage helps fight tribalism,

03:20:56.960 | destructive kind of tribalism.

03:20:58.160 | Exactly.

03:20:58.720 | It's nice.

03:20:59.360 | Calling me an anti-Semite? They haven't met my grandsons, my son-in-law, nieces that I...

03:21:06.640 | A niece that I have, nephews that I have, brother-in-laws that I have, Jewish, right?

03:21:12.960 | Come on.

03:21:13.440 | And this gives a really nice hopeful view of America is the integration of different cultures,

03:21:21.440 | different kinds of peoples. That is a unique property of America.

03:21:24.800 | Yes. But just to go back to where we started, it was not smooth in the beginning.

03:21:29.520 | All things are rough in the beginning.

03:21:31.200 | All things are rough in the beginning.

03:21:32.880 | What advice would you give to a young person today about how to have a career they can be

03:21:39.680 | proud of or a life they can be proud of?

03:21:42.080 | Well, I think it's very important to make sure that you do something in life that really

03:21:50.880 | interests you. My mother used to use this phrase, "Floats your boat." You want to do

03:21:55.040 | something that floats your boat, or to use another one of my mother's phrases, "You want

03:22:00.480 | to do something where you get up out of bed in the morning with a bounce in your step."

03:22:05.120 | So I think that if your mother and father want you to be a lawyer and they're pushing you to

03:22:11.040 | be a lawyer and you don't want to be a lawyer, you want to be a policeman, be a policeman.

03:22:16.320 | Don't do what other people want you to do. Because it's very important to find a job,

03:22:22.320 | an occupation that you really love. The second thing I would say, and this has to do with

03:22:28.880 | your point about humility, you want to think about the humility hubris index. My friend

03:22:38.400 | Steve Van Ever, who teaches at MIT, he and I invented this concept. We call it the hubris

03:22:43.440 | humility index. And you want to have a healthy dose of humility, but you also want to have

03:22:50.160 | a healthy dose of hubris. You want to think you can change the world. You want to think you can

03:22:56.800 | make things better for yourself. You want to take chances. You want to think sometimes that

03:23:02.480 | you know better than other people do. Hubris is not a bad thing, but at the same time,

03:23:07.680 | you have to have humility. You have to understand that a man or a woman has his or her limits.

03:23:14.800 | And you want to listen to other people. You want to be a good lister. So always remember the

03:23:21.280 | importance of the hubris humility index and the importance of having healthy doses of both hubris

03:23:29.040 | and humility. - Speaking of humility, you're mortal, like all humans are. Do you ponder your mortality?

03:23:37.600 | Are you afraid of it? Are you afraid of death? - I'm not sure I'm afraid of death.

03:23:44.320 | I don't want to die because I enjoy life so much. - Having too much fun? - Yeah. I, you know, given how

03:23:53.840 | horrible the world is today, I hate to it. I hate to say that I'm having too much fun,

03:23:59.760 | but do I find what I do interesting and gratifying? I do. I just love what I do.

03:24:11.440 | And I love studying, you know, international politics. And I love being intellectually

03:24:17.120 | curious about all sorts of subjects. I love talking to you about this and that. I mean,

03:24:22.160 | this is really wonderful. And I often tell people, you know, thank goodness I'm only 28 years old

03:24:28.000 | because I do try to behave like I'm only 28 years old. But I am well aware of the fact that,

03:24:35.600 | as my mother used to say, nothing is forever, and that includes me. And when you're 75 going on 76,

03:24:42.560 | you understand that you have a limited number of years left. And I find that depressing because

03:24:49.200 | I've been very lucky and I feel like I've won the lottery. And I'm very thankful for that. And

03:24:57.920 | I'd like to, you know, make it last for as long as possible. But I do understand that, you know,

03:25:04.720 | nothing is forever. - Yeah, the finiteness of things.

03:25:08.400 | - Yeah. You never think that when you're young. I mean, you know, you think you're gonna live

03:25:15.440 | forever and you're just not gonna get old. I never thought this would happen, that I would

03:25:20.960 | become 75 years old. - Well, you got so much energy and boldness and fearlessness and excitement to

03:25:28.800 | you that I'm really grateful to see that, especially given how much I'm sure you've been attacked

03:25:34.560 | for having bold ideas and presenting them. And not losing, yeah, not losing that youthful energy

03:25:44.800 | is beautiful to see. - Thank you.

03:25:46.560 | - Not becoming cynical. John, it's a huge honor to speak with you, that you give me so much time

03:25:52.080 | and so much respect and so much love. This was a really incredible conversation. Thank you so much

03:25:58.240 | for everything you do in the world, for looking out into worlds and trying to understand it and

03:26:03.680 | teach us. And thank you so much for talking with a silly kid like me.

03:26:07.600 | - It was my pleasure. Thank you very much. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

03:26:11.200 | - Awesome. Thanks for listening to this conversation with John Mearsheimer.

03:26:16.080 | To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.

03:26:19.440 | And now let me leave you with some words from Plato. "Only the dead have seen the end of war."

03:26:28.240 | Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

03:26:32.560 | (upbeat music)

03:26:35.220 | (upbeat music)

03:26:37.800 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 | Lex Fridman Podcast #401

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