John Mearsheimer - Offensive Realism

YouTube channel member @KamranRazvan asks: What does the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty actually offer a non-nuclear state if international law has no real enforcement?

My answer starts with a distinction between great powers and minor powers. Great powers create international institutions, write the rules to serve their own interests, and break those rules when they conflict with their national interest. No higher authority can punish them. The UN Security Council veto is the clearest example. Minor powers don’t write the rules, and they almost always have to obey them, because the great powers that built the institutions have the economic and military might to enforce them.

The NPT, created in 1968 by the United States and the Soviet Union, shows the pattern. Washington, Moscow, and today Beijing all have an interest in keeping non-nuclear states from getting the bomb. They enforce the treaty, not the institution itself. North Korea is the glaring exception.

In this episode I answer a question from channel member @hassanakram8328 , who asks whether it was worth it for Britain to fight World War I and World War II, and whether Britain should be helping Ukraine against Russia today. My answer is that Britain had no choice. Both wars were extremely costly, but staying out would have cost more. In 1914 and 1939, Britain had to choose between two bad options, and fighting was the less bad one. I explain why Britain, an island, repeatedly abandoned its policy of “splendid isolation” whenever a potential hegemon threatened to dominate Europe, from Napoleonic France to Imperial Germany to Nazi Germany. I also explain why the same logic led the United States into both world wars. I close with Ukraine. Russia is not Napoleonic France, Imperial Germany, or Nazi Germany, so the logic that brought Britain into the world wars doesn’t apply.

YouTube channel member @BrianPerry-f7basks: Does Israel benefit if the Gulf states are devastated? Iran has threatened to hit Gulf civilian infrastructure if its own sites are struck, and it has the capability: oil and gas facilities, desalination plants, and the seven undersea internet cables running beneath the Persian Gulf.

To answer it, I lay out Israel’s five strategic goals and show where Iran blocks two of them: weak neighbors and no nuclear proliferation. Israel would love to see Iran badly hurt, but a war that wrecks the whole Gulf is a different matter. Israel has valuable relationships with the UAE and Saudi Arabia, a global economic collapse would hit it too, and Iran has made clear Israel is high on its target list.

BUY THE BOOKS:
Israel's Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power by Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick: https://amzn.to/4gMNJey

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer & Steve Walt: https://amzn.to/3SL2M0o

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DESCRIPTION

Why has American opinion on Israel shifted so sharply while U.S. policy has barely moved? The authors of the two major books on the Israel lobby take it on.

In this special collaboration between the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and my YouTube channel, I join Stephen Walt (Harvard Kennedy School), Eli Clifton (Quincy Institute co-founder), and Ian Lustick (University of Pennsylvania) for a roundtable discussion on our book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007) and their new book Israel's Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power. Rashid Khalidi, professor emeritus of history at Columbia University, moderates.

We cover the military-industrial complex and oil lobbies, why the Palestinian issue is where the lobby dominates, the gap between public opinion and policy, campaign money after Citizens United, the antisemitism charge and the use of state power against campuses, why Israel's defenders struggle to argue the facts, and when policy might change.

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CHAPTERS

00:00 Introduction:
00:09 Offensive Realism & the Quincy Institute
02:20 Rashid Khalidi opens the roundtable
04:03 Is the military-industrial complex part of the lobby?
06:46 When defense & oil interests clash with the lobby
09:53 Strategic interests vs. the lobby: Kissinger, Eisenhower, the JCPOA
11:43 Ian Lustick: process tracing & the Chomsky argument
14:41 Startup Nation Central & the NDAA push to fuse U.S.–Israeli defense
18:43 The Palestinians: always left by the wayside
21:38 Why presidents' Palestine initiatives keep failing
23:38 The post-Cold War puzzle: weaker case, deeper relationship
25:14 Public opinion has shifted, but policy hasn't
26:39 The lobby lost the discourse, not the policy
29:20 Citizens United & $200M in pro-Israel super PAC money
32:39 "Smash-mouth politics"
33:06 The domestic fallout: universities, speech & state power
36:01 Rising antisemitism & the "collective Jew" argument
38:00 American Jews are not a monolith
41:12 Why the lobby can no longer defend Israel's policies
44:42 Israel as a "crazy state" & the civilizational-war narrative
48:06 New historians, scholars & the internet
49:48 Smears losing force & the alliance with culture warriors
53:13 The facts on the ground: Gaza & social media
55:42 The NRA parallel: why policy lags opinion
58:09 Washington's Farewell Address & the danger of faction
1:00:35 The bandwidth cost of the special relationship
1:03:18 Israel's new military doctrine & "Sparta among nations"
1:09:04 When will public opinion finally change policy?
1:12:09 Predictions: the Democrats, 2028 & the Iran war
1:18:50 Generational change
1:22:03 A grim note: "cooked" antisemitism statistics
1:26:14 The danger of a backlash & the dual-loyalty trope
1:28:51 Mearsheimer: antisemitism on campus before 2024
1:30:46 Closing remarks

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MUSIC

"The Ice Giants" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Music modified (edited/remixed) from the original.

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YouTube channel member ⁠@JerryMcLaughlin-r8w ⁠ asked whether drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles have made U.S. aircraft carriers obsolete, and whether the Navy saw it coming. Carriers have always been vulnerable near large landmasses, which is why we didn’t use them against Nazi Germany or plan to in a Cold War fight in Europe. The threat is now far greater, and the cost exchange favors cheap missiles and drones over a carrier and its battlegroup. In a fight with China over Taiwan or the South China Sea, I think carriers are basically useless. Against Iran they’d have to operate even farther out as Iranian weapons improve. The Navy knows all this, but carriers are bound up with its identity, so reducing our reliance on them will be hard. Looking at it purely strategically, I think we’d be better off spending much less on carriers and much more on submarines. ————————————————————

CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 0:04 The Question: Are Aircraft Carriers Obsolete? 1:02 Carriers Have Always Been Vulnerable Near Land 2:21 Lessons from the Ukraine and Iran Wars 3:22 Carriers in a War with China 5:06 Carriers in the Middle East 6:47 Does the Navy Know? 7:22 Why the Navy Won't Let Go of Carriers 9:10 The Strategic Case for Fewer Carriers

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PODCASTS

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0Ahf67i2DOoXDmi2HA6Vcj
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id6810828298

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DESCRIPTION

President Trump bears responsibility for three ongoing wars: 1) the Ukraine war, which he inherited from Joe Biden but now owns; 2) the Iran war, which he launched together with Israel on 28 February 2026; and 3) the war between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia, which he encouraged the Saudis to initiate on 13 July 2026. Each of these wars carries a significant risk of dangerous escalation, and together they threaten to inflict serious damage on the international economy. To make matters worse, Trump has no strategy for ending these wars on terms favorable to the United States, much less achieving lasting peace. Even after the fighting stops, all three wars may well turn into frozen conflicts.

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CHAPTERS

0:00 Intro
0:29 Trump and his wars
1:57 Year one: Ukraine, the 12-day war and Venezuela
4:50 Why Ukraine is now Trump's war
6:30 Wars two and three: Iran and the Saudi–Houthi war
8:48 Why these wars are disasters
13:19 The great-power backdrop
15:29 The Iran war: where we are now
21:31 Iran: the danger of escalation
27:10 Iran: the economic damage
29:09 Iran: no way to win
31:21 Iran: a frozen conflict and the nuclear question
35:07 Iran: Russia and China
36:39 The Saudi–Houthi war: how it started
40:08 Saudi–Houthi: horizontal and vertical escalation
42:48 Saudi–Houthi: the economic stakes
45:09 Saudi–Houthi: the Saudis can't win
46:24 Saudi–Houthi: a frozen conflict
49:45 Will Saudi Arabia go nuclear?
51:22 The Ukraine war: where we are now
54:17 Ukraine: escalation in the air war
59:02 The Karaganov argument
1:04:48 Ukraine: the international economy
1:06:45 Ukraine: no winning strategy
1:07:52 Ukraine: the frozen conflict
1:10:54 Great-power politics across all three wars
1:16:23 Summing up: three losing wars
1:19:25 An LBJ/Nixon fate for Trump?
1:20:29 Why Gaza isn't on the list

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MUSIC

"The Ice Giants" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
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Music modified (edited/remixed) from the original.

In this Ask the Professor, YouTube channel member @boresow asks how I separate real insight from propaganda after my visit to Russia, and whether I’m being used to amplify Moscow’s narrative.

I make two points. First, a scholar should talk to people he disagrees with, whether that’s Viktor Orbán, Sergei Lavrov, or Vladimir Putin. Second, my view that NATO expansion caused the Ukraine war came from studying the evidence, not from talking to the Russians. It happens to match their view, but I didn’t adopt it to win their favor.

YouTube channel member ⁠ @GuanWang-n2g ⁠ asks: why did Washington never devote the resources needed to carry out the pivot to Asia that the Obama administration announced in 2011? My answer is that pivoting to Asia means containing China, and in 2011 we were still pursuing engagement, helping China get rich. The pivot only really began in 2017, when China had become a great power and Trump adopted containment. Since then, the wars in Ukraine and Iran have pulled forces out of East Asia. The pivot to Asia has turned into a pivot away from Asia, which is a huge mistake.

YouTube channel member ⁠@sambaker7691 ⁠ asks: how do you explain the shortcomings in U.S. efforts to give Saudi Arabia the air defenses it needs against Houthi missile and drone attacks, despite the close strategic partnership between the two countries? My answer is that this isn’t about the relationship. The Saudis are rich, and we’ve sold them almost all the weaponry they want. The problem is that today, offense beats defense. Even with heavy American help, Israel couldn’t stop Iranian missiles and drones in the 12-Day War or in the 40-day bombing campaign that started the current war. Ukraine has run out of Patriots. Offensive missiles are cheaper than interceptors and can overwhelm them. The United States can’t protect Saudi Arabia, and it won’t be able to defend any bases it might rebuild in the Persian Gulf either.

October 7, 2026, marked the third anniversary of Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel. Considerable attention was devoted to commemorating that event in Israel and throughout the West. The focus was mainly on three questions: 1) What happened that day? 2) Why was Israel caught by surprise? 3) What have been the consequences of that momentous day?

Much less attention was paid to a fundamental question: Why did Hamas launch the attack in the first place? Indeed, this relative neglect of the attack’s root causes has characterized much of the public discussion of October 7 from the beginning.

Israel and its supporters, however, have a straightforward explanation. According to Prime Minister Netanyahu, Hamas and its allies are “the new Nazis,” and October 7 was an unprovoked attack that Israeli leaders and much of the Israeli public have repeatedly compared to the Holocaust. In other words, the attack is understood primarily as an expression of genocidal antisemitism.

In this episode, I examine that explanation and argue that it is fundamentally mistaken. The historical record and a careful examination of Hamas’s motives point toward a very different story, which I believe is why Israel and its supporters have paid little attention to discussing the political and strategic calculations that led Hamas to attack Israel on October 7, 2023.

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CHAPTERS

0:00 Intro
0:26 The question nobody asks: why did Hamas attack?
2:01 The Israeli story: Hamas as "the new Nazis"
5:08 The old story: "a land without people"
8:28 The new historians rewrite the record
9:53 The real Zionist goal: a Greater Israel
11:00 The numbers: a land full of Palestinians
13:57 "They're going to have to steal the land"
15:34 Palestinian resistance, from 1936 to Gaza
17:56 Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion: "We have stolen their country"
20:45 A Palestinian population that never went away
24:21 Option 1: the Iron Wall
26:00 Option 2: ethnic cleansing
28:54 Option 3: Bantustans and ghettos
30:38 The myth of the two-state solution
32:45 Gaza: occupation, settlers and Sharon's pullout
36:30 The blockade: Gaza on a diet
38:34 Assassinating Gaza's leaders
40:22 "Mowing the lawn": Cast Lead and Protective Edge
44:25 October 7th: the inmates break out
46:22 Hamas wants its land back
49:46 Read the history
51:11 Was the attack legal under international law?

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MUSIC

"The Ice Giants" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Music modified (edited/remixed) from the original.

DESCRIPTION
YouTube Channel member @edhodapp6465 asks: should we go to war against the Houthis, and is damaging Iran's proxies a worthwhile strategy? My answer is no. We're at war with Iran, but we're not fighting the Houthis. They're fighting Saudi Arabia. We already failed to beat them in 2025, and after the war with Iran, we have even fewer munitions now. The Houthis can hit Saudi oil infrastructure and control the Bab el-Mandeb strait. And if we started winning, I believe Iran would step in. The U.S. has no winning strategy in the Gulf.

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CHAPTERS
0:00 Intro
0:04 Should we go to war against the Houthis?
0:47 Two separate wars: US vs. Iran, Houthis vs. Saudi Arabia
2:07 Trump's failed 2025 campaign against the Houthis
3:13 Should the US join Saudi Arabia against the Houthis?
3:41 Why the Houthis are a real threat (Bab el-Mandeb)
4:25 Why the answer is no: we can't win, and we're short on munitions
6:29 Houthi retaliation and Saudi oil infrastructure
8:03 What if the US were winning? Iran would step in
9:08 Conclusion: no winning strategy in the Middle East

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YouTube Channel member ⁠@spacecometrue ⁠ asked me to share my analysis of the causes and course of the Korean War. North Korea invaded the South on June 25, 1950, and nearly won before the U.S. stepped in. MacArthur's Inchon landing pushed the North Koreans back to the 38th parallel. When we crossed it and headed for the Yalu River, China entered the war in October 1950, and from that point it was really a war between the U.S. and China. It ended in an armistice in July 1953, not a peace agreement. I also explain why each side fought. North Korea wanted to unify the peninsula. The U.S. came in after Dean Acheson's blunder, because a Soviet ally controlling Korea threatened Japan and Northeast Asia. China found U.S. troops on its border unacceptable, much as Russia saw Ukraine in NATO. I also cover how the war militarized the Cold War, and why I think the Korean Peninsula is stable today despite North Korea's nuclear weapons. ————————————————————

CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro: 0:04 A member's question on Korea 0:41 How the Korean War unfolded 1:36 The U.S. enters and the Inchon landing 2:08 Crossing the 38th parallel 3:15 China enters the war 4:31 Really a U.S.–China war, and the 1953 armistice 5:28 How Korea militarized the Cold War 6:55 Why North Korea invaded 8:27 Why the U.S. came in: Acheson's blunder 10:24 Why China came in 11:16 The Ukraine–NATO parallel 12:41 The Korean Peninsula today 14:01 Why North Korea's nukes are defensive 15:24 Verdict: another war is unlikely ————————————————————

DESCRIPTION

It seems clear that the Trump administration and its allies are working overtime to create the false impression that the United States is well on its way to defeating Iran and that Tehran should therefore submit to American demands sooner rather than later. If it does not, so the argument goes, not only will the economic punishment inflicted on Iran reach crushing levels, but President Trump will launch a devastating military attack that might even include putting U.S. ground forces into Iran. I will argue in this episode that this is largely a propaganda campaign—and that it is unlikely to work because Iran, not the Trump administration, is in the driver’s seat.

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CHAPTERS

0:00 Intro
0:42 The Administration's Propaganda Campaign
3:41 A Two-Pronged Approach
4:12 The Economic Argument: Blockade & Bessent's Strategy
6:21 The Military Argument: More Troops & Carriers
8:48 Why the Story Is Deeply Flawed
9:16 Why a New Air Campaign Won't Work
10:51 The "Three Carriers" Myth
14:28 Striking Oil Infrastructure & Iran's Second Strike
15:35 The Ground Invasion: How Many Combat Troops?
20:23 What Can You Do With 7,500 Troops?
23:05 Body Bags & Getting the Marines Ashore
25:19 Will Economic Pain Make Iran Surrender?
26:28 Lesson of History: Blockades Alone Don't Win Wars
28:38 Facing an Existential Threat
29:23 Iran's Doomsday Option
31:14 Is the West Really Doing Well?
32:01 New Strait Attacks & the Houthi Threat to Saudi Oil
34:30 Oil Is Flowing, but Economies Are Still Hurting
36:01 Bottom Line

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MUSIC

"The Ice Giants" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
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Music modified (edited/remixed) from the original.

I'll explain how the Vietnam War shaped my thinking about international relations, and the lessons it holds for today.

I'll explain why I believe a Chinese invasion of Taiwan in the next decade is unlikely, and the one scenario that could change that.

President Trump and President Xi Jinping just concluded a three-day summit in Washington, DC, that was noteworthy for its lofty rhetoric and almost complete lack of progress in dealing with a host of truly important issues: AI, Iran, Taiwan, trade, and Ukraine. The Economist maintains that the two leaders “squandered a chance to tackle the world’s gravest threats,” which it argues “amounts to a dereliction of duty, and leaves the rest of humanity as the losers.” I disagree. I will review what happened at the summit regarding each of these issues and explain why, with the possible exception of trade, the underlying conflicts of interest between China and the United States leave little room for meaningful agreement.

Iuliia Mendel, who served as President Zelensky’s press secretary from 2019 to 2021, published an article in The Spectator on September 15, 2026, titled “Zelensky’s Strategy Is National Suicide.” In essence, she makes a compelling case that Ukraine is not simply losing its war with Russia but is being so thoroughly wrecked in the process that it is effectively committing national suicide.

Mendel made much the same case the following day, September 16, in a virtual address to an event at the European Parliament. She had intended to deliver the speech in person but was denied entry to the Parliament building and therefore had to appear virtually. Mendel attributes that decision to the sanctions President Zelensky had imposed on her three days earlier, although the European Parliament has not said why she was barred.

Mendel’s article and speech have generated substantial controversy, which is hardly surprising given the severity of her indictment and the fact that she served as Zelensky’s press secretary. My aim in this episode is to examine the arguments she makes in both her article and her European Parliament speech and explain why I think her description of what is happening to Ukraine is fundamentally correct.

I recently spent 8 days in Russia – September 5-12, 2026 – mainly in Moscow and St. Petersburg. I gave a series of talks and interviews and spoke with numerous people in the Russian security community, including senior figures like Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. In this episode, I describe what I learned during my trip.

Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick have just published a terrific new book called Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power. It appears twenty years after Steve Walt and I published “The Israel Lobby” in The London Review of Books (March 2006), which we turned into a book a year later. Much has happened regarding Israel, the Israel lobby, and the US-Israeli relationship in the two decades since Steve and I first addressed those subjects. Clifton and Lustick do a great job explaining those fundamental changes. In this episode, I will discuss their new book and explain how it differs from what Steve and I wrote in our article and book on the lobby.

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BUY THE BOOKS

1. Israel's Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power
by Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick
Purchase Here: https://amzn.to/4gMNJey

2. The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt
Purchase Here: https://amzn.to/3SL2M0o

(As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)

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CHAPTERS

0:00 Intro
0:28 The book: Israel's Lobby by Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick
2:38 The core arguments
5:15 The conceptual framework: discourse vs. policy
7:29 Where the new book breaks from Mearsheimer & Walt
8:01 How the discourse changed: dual loyalty and "Israel Firsters"
12:42 The internet and the collapse of media gatekeeping
15:08 Israeli behavior after October 7th
17:45 Israel as a "crazy state"
22:11 Israeli identity: "a nation that dwells alone"
27:51 Why Americans turned on Israel
29:29 The lobby fights back: redefining antisemitism
32:54 Government crackdowns on campus protests
35:40 Plutocrats, Citizens United, and policy capture
39:11 The bottom line and the big question ahead
41:14 Closing thoughts

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MUSIC

"The Ice Giants" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Music modified (edited/remixed) from the original.

In recent months, Western news coverage of the Ukraine war tells us that Russia is suffering huge casualties on the battlefield while making hardly any progress capturing Ukrainian territory. At the same time, Ukraine’s long-range drone attacks on the Russian homeland are wreaking havoc, which will improve Ukraine’s position at the bargaining table. In short, Russia is in deep trouble and Ukraine’s situation is hardly dire. This episode explains why this perspective is wrong. Russia is winning on the battlefield – albeit slowly – and its ramped-up bombing campaign is doing egregious damage to Ukraine’s economy, which is essential for Kyiv to sustain the war on the front lines. This situation is unsurprising, as this is a war of attrition in which the side with an advantage in manpower and weaponry invariably wins. In that regard, the Russians have an overwhelming advantage. Indeed, were it not for the effect that drones have had on the battlefield, the Ukrainians would have lost a long time ago.

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Chapters
0:00 Intro
0:34 What This Episode Covers
0:50 The Story the Western Media Is Telling
3:25 The Battlefield: A War of Attrition
4:20 The Balance of Manpower
6:41 Force-to-Space Ratio: Gaps in the Line
8:13 The Balance of Firepower: Artillery
10:51 Drones: What's Keeping Ukraine in the Fight
12:02 Russian Casualties: The Numbers Don't Add Up
15:01 Ukrainian Casualties: 30,000 a Month
18:18 Why Russia Takes Territory So Slowly
20:11 The Air War: Russia's Inventory
28:45 Why Punishment Campaigns Don't Work
29:35 Russia Changes Strategy
33:49 Warehouses and the Energy Grid
36:11 Ukraine's Drone Campaign Can't Win the War
37:40 Outside Support for Ukraine
38:12 Trump and the Shifting Burden
42:29 Inside Ukraine: War Weariness
43:51 Zelensky's Political Troubles
45:31 Where the War Stands Today
47:48 The Cost of Rebuilding
49:16 The Best Ukraine Can Hope For
50:34 Conclusion

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Music

"The Ice Giants" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Music modified (edited/remixed) from the original.