(first 1 hour and 20 mins)
This remarkable interview explores in depth the empirical factual basis for our own theory as to the unique role of Israel as a imperialist power that punches far above it’s weight in world politics.
There is a wealth of analysis here that we will cite in future material as part of our project of drawing on the best available geopolitical thought and using the Marxist method, historical materialism to explain these issues.
For those who need to cite this material, a transcript of the first 1 hour and 20 mins is here (the rest may be included later):
Max Blumenthal: Hey, what’s up, everybody? Welcome to The Gray Zone. It’s Max Blumenthal, and I’m going to be joined momentarily by the esteemed international relations scholar and author of what is now the legendary text, or co-author of what is now the legendary text, The Israel Lobby and U. S. Foreign Policy. I think it’s behind me on my shelf somewhere. Oh, there it is, with Stephen Walt. This book was first introduced to the public in the form of an essay in the London Review of Books almost 20 years ago. It will be 20 years ago next week, so I’m really looking forward to that conversation. He’ll be joined, he’ll be joining us, I think, in about five minutes. And then I’m due to be joined by Aaron Maté, as always.
Aaron and I are going to provide the war report on what is a failing war for Israel, initiated by Donald Trump. I got already a super chat, so yeah, I’ll take that real quick. Is there any truth to a number of Delta Force being taken as POWs from that failed raid? It was reported and then fell off the radar. I don’t know about any failed raid or any Delta Force raid. There’s a lot of AI slop going around on Twitter/X, a lot of fake videos. I wonder if those videos are being introduced to discredit those of us who are critics and opponents of this war. You have to be very careful, and there have been false claims about Itamar Ben-Gvir being assassinated, about Netanyahu’s brother being assassinated.
I don’t know where these are coming from, but I noticed there are certain accounts, including some accounts in Hebrew, that are posing as Israelis who are filtering this out there. And it’s an effort to augment reality when the reality as it is, I guess this is the point I wanted to make and the point I’ll be making throughout this stream before John Mearsheimer joins us. The reality as it is, is very unfavorable to the United States, less so to Israel. But for the United States empire, for Donald Trump, this is a losing war. Donald Trump has already lost the war politically. He has lost the war economically. And while the U. S. military has air power that is unrivaled in human history and can continue to pound Iran, even Trump himself has acknowledged they’re sort of out of targets.
They’re just bombing civilian areas now. It’s gratuitous, and they’re not achieving anything tactically. Israel’s another matter because Israel doesn’t function like an even remotely normal country. And Israel’s objective is actually being achieved not just tactically but strategically by keeping the US in the war, by keeping Donald Trump on an escalation ladder where he is moving towards, as some senators claimed coming out of the Gang of Eight briefing, the secret briefing they have with Marco Rubio and the National Security Council, that the U. S. is edging towards troops on the ground. So maybe there will be a Delta Force raid in the near future. That’s exactly what Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu want. They want US. boots on the ground. They want dead US soldiers, lots of them.
They want the US fully entrenched in the region indefinitely. They love seeing the US Reposition THAAD air defense systems from South Korea to defend Israel. They don’t want to pivot to Asia. They don’t want the US to take on major geopolitical rivals like China as much as they want the US to fall into this trap that has been laid by Israel for decades according to Netanyahu, sort of his 40-year plan. And that’s what I’m going to discuss with John Mearsheimer. Why was this war launched? Why are we even in this war that’s driving oil to over $100 a barrel that may drive oil to $200 a barrel? Who told Trump to initiate this war? It’s the lobby. It’s Israeli influence at its apex.
And it’s all come to a head 20 years after the publication of The Israel Lobby. I was talking to Mario Nafal two days ago, one of the few interviewers who sort of challenges me. And he said, oh, I don’t know how this is a war for Israel. It’s like the US would have done this on its own. And I pointed to a number of things, including statements by Marco Rubio, by Donald Trump himself, by Lindsey Graham. We’ve all seen them saying Israel was going to attack, so we just had to go in and assassinate the Ayatollah. We had to go in and initiate this regime change war, which no longer is a war for regime change. But there’s a deeper story there. And I pointed to leaked audio that I obtained from a private session.
It was a congressional lobbying session by AIPAC, and its new CEO, Elliott Brand, was describing how he had established lifelines, in his own words, inside the administration through the figure of John Ratcliffe, Marco Rubio, Mike Waltz, and Elise Stefanik, who is supposed to be in the administration because AIPAC had groomed them since before they had even entered Congress, when they were no names, and that he had personally gone down to John Ratcliffe’s office when he was a small-time lawyer in suburban Dallas and met with him when he just announced his first run for Congress. And from that point on, he said Israel effectively groomed them through its unregistered lobby known as AIPAC. So now we have these lifelines surrounding Trump, who have helped silo him, keep him in a silo.
So, he didn’t understand that the Strait of Hormuz would be closed and that he would unleash an economic catastrophe on behalf of Israel. And so, to discuss that and his book that really predicted where we are today, I would say this is an intellectual victory lap. We are joined, we will be joined by scholar of international relations, John Mearsheimer. John, welcome to The Gray Zone. It’s your first time on The Gray Zone. It’s great to have you here. It’s a real honor.
John Mearsheimer: Thrilled to be here, Max.
MB: Well, everyone’s thrilled to hear from you. I guess we’ll start by reading, I think this is the first paragraph of Michael Massing’s review of the Israel Lobby in the New York Review of Books. And I’ll just get your response.
“Not since Foreign Affairs magazine published Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations in 1993 has an academic essay detonated with such force as The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by professors John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Published on March 23rd, in the March 23rd, 2006 issue of the London Review of Books and posted as a quote unquote working paper on the Kennedy School’s website, the report has been debated in the coffeehouses of Cairo and in the editorial offices of Haaretz. It’s been called smelly by Christopher Hitchens, nutty by Max Boot, conspiratorial by the Anti-Defamation League, oddly amateurish by The Forward, and brave by Philip Weiss in The Nation. It’s prompted intense speculation over why The New York Times has given it so little attention and why The Atlantic Monthly, which originally commissioned the essay, rejected it.”
What prompted you to write The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy with Stephen Walt? And looking back, what would you say the legacy of this working paper and subsequent book is?
JM: Well, what happened, Max, was after 9/11, the whole question came up of, you know, what caused this fiasco? And it was quite clear that the argument that they hated us because of our values made no sense and that the argument that made sense was that they hated our policies in the Middle East. And our policies in the Middle East were profoundly influenced by Israel. Anybody who spent any time looking at US Policy in the broader Middle East quickly understood that Israel had an outsized influence on that policy process, and it was aided in great part by the Lobby here in the United States. But hardly anybody had written much on that subject. So, we felt, Steve and I, that given the events of 9/11 and given how we were focused laser-like on the Middle East at that point, it made sense to write an article on the Lobby. And we decided to do that. And as you said, we were initially in contact with The Atlantic Monthly, and they were wildly enthusiastic about the idea at first, but they eventually got cold feet. And it then looked like the Lobby article that Steve and I wrote was never going to see the light of day.
But what happened was that somebody at the Atlantic slipped a copy of the article to a very prominent historian who knew Mary Kay Wilmers, who was the editor of the London Review of Books. And once Mary Kay saw the piece, she knew it was pure gold, and she was willing to publish it, thankfully. So, on March 17, 2006, which is almost a year ago, excuse me, 20 years ago, the article hit the internet and spread like wildfire, as we anticipated it would.
MB: Well, the reaction was from my side at the time. I mean, obviously, I wasn’t as well-established as I am now, but I understood. I’d gone through the whole experience of witnessing the Second Intifada, he Iraq War, the whole post-9/11 ‘War on Terror’ and the Israeli second invasion of Lebanon, and the reaction was, I mean, how could the US countenance all this? How could we be engaged in such folly and mass murder? And you had to look to AIPAC to understand at least part of it, because it just, I mean, it didn’t seem to make sense to me. So I felt this sigh of relief that someone of your stature and Stephen Walt’s stature had finally said this. I know Phil Weiss was one of your big cheerleaders who had a foothold in media at the time, but the assault that you faced was so overblown and ridiculous. Jeffrey Goldberg, day after day, calling you an anti-Semite, Max Boot, all these figures. I mean, what were the consequences that you faced? It was a very different time than now. And I remember Phil Weiss saying Stephen Walt could have been Assistant Secretary of State, Undersecretary of State in the Obama administration if he hadn’t written that essay. What kind of price did you pay for stating such obvious truths?
JM: Well, I think that there’s no question that we both paid a significant price. You’re not going to get invited to all sorts of conferences after you write a piece like that. You’re not going to get invited to write op-eds for the New York Times after something like that, and the mainstream in large part is going to try and distance itself from you. Now, with regard to Steve, unlike me, Steve was interested in higher administrative positions in academia. And at the time we wrote the Lobby article, he was the Academic Dean at the Kennedy School, and he was a superb Academic Dean. There was no question about it. He is a superb administrator; he’s a person of great integrity.
And I think there’s no question that he could have been a provost or the president of a university. And I think if you asked Larry Summers, who was the president of Harvard at the time the article came out and who had very high regard for Steve, he would confirm what I just said. But once Steve wrote that article and then the book the following year, remember the book comes out in 2007, the article as you pointed out came out in 2006. But once Steve wrote that article, there was no way he was ever going to get a meaningful academic appointment. And indeed, he’s remained at the Kennedy School over time, but he has never even been the Dean of the Kennedy School, much less the provost or president of the university, and he has never even headed up the Belfer Center inside of the Kennedy School, despite the fact that the Belfer Center deals with security issues. And Steve is one of the most prominent security experts in the entire country. He’s never even been the Director of the Belfer Center. So, he was basically blackballed from administrative positions. And had I been interested in administrative positions; I surely would have been blackballed as well. And I think at our universities, Steve at Harvard and me at Chicago, in very important ways, we’ve become non-persons at the university in terms of how we’re treated, because the university doesn’t want to make a big deal about the fact that we’re on the faculty, because that will hurt donations from the Bill Ackmans of the world.
So, there’s no question that I think we paid a really significant price. But of course, we also got a lot of attention as a result. And we ended up making friends with people like you, and Medea Benjamin, and all sorts of other people. And I think that that was a wonderful experience. And I think it’s fair to say that both of us feel very good about what we did. You know, we were charged with being anti-Semites and leveling a blood libel against the Jewish community and so forth and so on. You know, all those charges. This, of course, is pure nonsense, and what we were doing was telling what we thought was the truth. And I think what we said was truthful, and time has borne that out.
And I think that both Steve and I feel, you know, that we did our duty. We did the right thing; we did the hard right rather than the easy wrong. And I think that’s sort of the bottom line here.
MB: Yeah, and I think that’s the point of real scholarship and critical inquiry. But yeah, obviously, it doesn’t always bring in the funding or get you where Samantha Power has gone, where today she’s called out for basically not doing what she condemned Clinton-era officials for not doing in the face of genocide. So maybe you, maybe Stephen actually saved his reputation in a way by not going into an administration like the Obama administration.
But let me ask you just a more basic question: what is the Israel lobby in your view? And has your view of what the Israel lobby is changed since you first published The Israel Lobby in US Foreign Policy?
JM: Yeah, those are great questions. Let me just start by talking about what the Lobby is. The lobby is a loose coalition of individuals and organizations. You were talking about the influence of AIPAC, and I think there’s no question that AIPAC is usually influential. But there are all sorts of other groups that wield a lot of power, and there are a lot of individuals who wield enormous power. Alan Dershowitz, for example; Bill Ackman, for example, I could go on and on. So, it’s individuals and organizations who work together in a very loose way to push the United States to support Israel unconditionally.
Now, it’s very important to understand that it is not a Jewish lobby, and that there are a significant number of Jews who find what the lobby is doing to be reprehensible. I often point out that almost all of our defenders when we wrote the Lobby article and then wrote the Lobby book were Jews. They weren’t the goys; the goys had their head down in the foxhole. We were defended by Jews. That included people like you, people like Glenn Greenwald, especially Tony Judt, and especially, especially Phil Weiss. So, it’s not a Jewish lobby. But there’s no question that there are a large number of Jews in that lobby who wield enormous influence. Furthermore, there are Christians or non-Jews who are powerful players in the lobby.
And I would include Mike Huckabee in that category or the Reverend John Hagee. These are very influential people who are basically Christian Evangelicals who are profoundly committed to Israel. And in some cases, those Christian evangelicals are more supercharged about supporting Israel than Jews in the lobby are. It’s really quite remarkable. And you see that when you listen to Mike Huckabee talk. So, the lobby is this loose coalition of individuals and organizations that is very effective at influencing US foreign policy. There’s just nothing like it, and that’s why Steve and I like to say that if you look at the historical record, there is simply no other case that even comes close to this one. And what I mean by that is because of the lobby, the United States effectively supports Israel unconditionally.
No matter what Israel does, we support it. This is truly remarkable. This tiny country has this outsized influence in the United States. But moreover, even if it was a big country, we can’t find a big country that’s ever had this kind of influence in the United States. You just don’t see it happen. And then the $64,000 question is, why does it happen? And people in the lobby like to argue it’s because Israel is a strategic asset. The fact is, as you well know, Israel is, if anything, a strategic liability. And then when that argument fails, people will say we’re doing it for moral reasons. That’s an almost impossible argument to make today. And it was an almost impossible argument to make when we made the argument in 2006 and 2007.It’s not for moral reasons or strategic reasons that we have this unparalleled relationship. It is, in large part, because of the power of the Lobby, which is truly remarkable. So that’s the answer to your first question.
The answer to your second question, which is a fascinating question, is how does the situation today compare to the situation when we wrote the book? We made all these arguments, and how have they worn with the passage of time? Well, the first point I would make, Max, is that when we wrote the book, the arguments that we were making were arguments that few people had made and very few people had heard. So, in a very important way, we cut the corridor. We opened this whole subject up to debate. And there was never any question that we were really going to get a lot of mud on us because we were cutting the corridor. And people in the lobby would go to enormous lengths to smear us.
But I think that with the passage of time, I think it’s quite clear that if anything, all we exposed was the tip of the iceberg. I think if we had really had access to how these people operate in the Lobby and how the organizations operate, we would have needed maybe four volumes to tell the story. And I think, by the way, Max, you see this in the Epstein papers because Steve and I come up in the Epstein papers. And what you see is that Alan Dershowitz, who was one of our principal adversaries soon after the article came out in the LRB, was working with Jeffrey Epstein to smear us and to do great damage to our reputation.
We had no idea that was the case. I’m not sure we even knew who Jeffrey Epstein was when the Lobby article came out in 2006. But nevertheless, you see the Lobby at work with regard to our situation and all sorts of other situations inside the Epstein papers. So, I’m just saying that if you look at what we wrote in 2006, 2007, that’s the tip of the iceberg. And I think, at this point in time, our argument is just not that controversial. And we are less controversial because of what we said back then than we were at the time.
MB: I think today it might have passed without notice. You had the Israel Lobby or the Lobby documentary series that was produced for Al Jazeera, which I think proved everything you were saying through a hidden camera investigation by the reporter James Kleinfeld. I actually played a role as a consultant on that, kind of helped conceive the idea, and James Kleinfeld, posing as Tony, just did the rest and inserted himself into the Israel project in Washington, which is folded as a result of this investigation. But the wildest thing about that was that Qatar was under siege by Saudi Arabia at the time, the state parent of Al Jazeera. And so, in order to get themselves out from under this embargo or siege, they started paying people close to Donald Trump. And those people started turning the screws and said, well, you have this Lobby production that’s really upsetting Alan Dershowitz and Morton Klein and other people close to Trump. Why don’t you nuke that film? And so, the Emir declared it a national security threat to publish the film and leak. So in nuking that film and suppressing it, it proved that the power of the Israel lobby and its preponderance of force was so extreme it could actually influence a Gulf Sunni monarchy to suppress a film about it. I mean, they actually had power over Al Jazeera. That’s how powerful it was.
But I would say updating my own perception of what the Israel lobby is from the time when I first picked up your book is that it really is the Zionist movement. It’s an ideological movement that can’t be defined by organizations and is often represented by individuals who obtain influential positions like Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, the presidential son-in-law I mean, key reasons why this war is taking place. Or Tony Blinken in the Biden administration, who comes from sort of the liberal world of the Zionist movement and whose family comes from a line of Israel lobbyists. So, what do you think about that concept, that it’s actually the Zionist movement and not an actual lobby like the National Rifle Association or the AARP?
JM: I would call it the Zionist lobby if you don’t want to call it the Israel lobby. But I don’t think there’s a lot of daylight between you and me. And the best example I can use to illustrate that is if you go back to the Clinton administration, when the Clinton administration was negotiating with the Israelis, Prime Minister Ehud Barak, you remember that at Camp David in Clinton’s last year as president. He had two key advisors, Clinton did, Aaron David Miller and Dennis Ross. And Aaron David Miller, quite remarkably, later described himself and Ross as Israel’s lawyers. And this is when they were involved in the negotiating process. These were Americans who were working for Clinton, who were trying to negotiate a deal between Arafat and Barak. And they were acting, according to one of them, as Israel’s lawyers. This is truly remarkable that Aaron David Miller would say that. And kudos to him for saying it. But I would say to you that if you look at Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, they’re Israel’s lawyers. There’s no difference between them and Miller and Ross. I mean, obviously, they all occupy different positions. Ross and Miller had formal positions in the government, and Kushner and Witkoff don’t. But in effect, there’s just no difference.
So, I think that the situation you’re describing today is the same as the one that we were describing in the book. What I think is different today, Max, is I think the context today is very different, and I can say a few words about that. I think how the Lobby operates today is fundamentally different. And I think the consequences for the United States are different. Indeed, they’re worse. But just a couple of words on context, and then you can tell me what you think. I think that since we wrote the book in 2006, Israel has moved in quite profound ways to the right. It has become a much more racist, much more right-wing government. And furthermore, its foreign policy behavior is much more reprehensible now than it was then. And this obviously is reflected in the genocide in Gaza.
But Israel is a much less attractive place today than it was in 2000, 2007, 2006, 2007, and therefore it’s a harder sell. What’s also happened in the United States is that all sorts of Americans now understand that Israel is not a noble David up against Goliath. And they understand that Israel has been engaged in a genocide, and Israel often does terrible things. So, the US political scene, where support for Israel used to be almost axiomatic in the public, has diminished. And the situation in Israel itself has changed. And then to add to this context, I think the internet today is just a much more powerful tool for all sorts of people than it was in 2006 and 2007 So the Lobby is operating in a world where it has a very difficult client to defend, which is Israel.
And it’s dealing with the fact that public opinion in very important ways has shifted against Israel. And it’s dealing with the fact that it’s much harder to control the discourse today because of the internet than it was back in the day. I mean, the internet was there when we wrote, but it was just coming of age back then. And the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, they held sway in very important ways then in ways that they don’t now. So, it’s just a very different world that the lobby operates in. And when you look at how the lobby actually operates today compared to how it operated back in 2006, 2007, it’s now out in the open in ways that it wasn’t then. Lobbies don’t want to advertise what they do.
They want to work in the back rooms. They want to work quietly, whether you’re the National Rifle Association, the AFL-CIO, or the Israel Lobby. The Israel Lobby has been forced to operate out in the open in large part because we cut the corridor and then people like you have come in behind us and all sorts of other people. And it’s just out in the open so people can see what they’re doing. And very importantly, they’ve been forced to engage in smash-mouth politics. You can see just how ruthless and mean-spirited the Lobby is today. And that really hurts. You have to ask yourself how long can they go on behaving like this, especially since they find it almost impossible to silence people like you and people like me.
We continue to talk. We have access on platforms like this, and this is just a huge problem for them. So, they have to engage in public fights, and again, they have to engage in smash-mouth politics, and that does not work to their advantage. So, it’s just a very different situation today than the one that existed back when we wrote the original article in ’06 and then the book in ’07.
MB: Yeah, I think it’s all too obvious to everyone. When the book came out, there was still a peace process, all this discussion about peace and where will the Israeli state be? And you had all these peace processors going back and forth. And it fueled the false perception that Israel actually sought to establish borders and that it was not this anachronistic settler colonial apartheid state, which Palestinians had always told us it was.
Now it’s very clear. There’s a clownish board of peace, which is focused first on how the Gaza concentration camp will be established and who will profit, like Larry Ellison’s data centers will come in. Where will they be? That’s the discussion, not where Israel’s borders will be. Greater Israel is now out in the open, whether it’s Mike Huckabee saying it or it’s Yair Lapid, the Israeli opposition leader, who just last week called for bombing Iran’s oil infrastructure. He has also said Greater Israel is a biblical area, and while he doesn’t believe in the Bible or God, it’s wherever Israel wants it to be. So that affects the way the Lobby functions in the United States. They’re not relying as much on consent or duping people through Hasbara; liberals no longer support them.
I think support for this war on Iran is below 10% according to a new Drop Site poll that I saw among Democrats. So, it’s all, they’re just operating through pure force and stealth packs, and censorship, and control over Donald Trump. And I think that makes it so much more obvious, yet still there is a perception that the United States is the dog and Israel is the tail. I mean, that was something that was an argument that was pushed by Walter Russell Mead against you, the conservative historian, when he argued that Americans just love Israel. There’s no need for a Lobby; Americans just love Israel. But now we can see they no longer love Israel. But I still hear this sometimes from some more like doctrinaire Marxists on the left that Israel is just an extension of American empire. It’s little more than an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the United States, and that it’s the United States that’s setting the agenda. What do you say to that argument in 2026 as the US wages war with Israel on Iran?
JM: Well, I would note that my good friend Norman Finkelstein did a podcast the other day that I listened to when I was cooking dinner. And Norman was one of those people who believed I was wrong, or Steve and I were wrong in 2006, when we said that Israel was one of the main driving forces behind the war. I’ve argued with him in public about that as well. Yeah. And, but anyway, he was saying, in effect, that we might have been wrong then, but he believes we’re not wrong with regard to Iran and that it’s quite clear that the Lobby and Israel itself played a critically important role in getting us into the war that we’re now in.
It’s very important to emphasize, Max, that when you talk about the factors that drove the United States into the Iraq war back in 2003, or you talk about what factors drove us into this war against Iran, it’s obvious that there are a variety of factors that mattered. The question is, which factors mattered the most? And if you go back just to the Iraq War, the basic argument that Steve and I made was that if there had not been pressure from the Lobby and from Israel itself, and it’s very important to emphasize, there was enormous pressure from Israel to attack Iran, and there was enormous pressure from the Lobby, especially from the neoconservatives, inside and outside of the Lobby. Our argument is that the war would not have happened, and I believe that that’s true.
And lots of people, in effect, said that at the time. But of course, once the war went south, the lobby went to enormous lengths to distance itself and to distance Israel from the causes of the war. And here, in 2026, it’s going to be much more difficult to do that because, again, the Lobby is out in the open. What’s going on with Israel and the United States is out in the open, and it’s so obvious that Israel and the Lobby played a key role in pushing us into this war. And Norman Finkelstein was, in effect, saying exactly that about what’s happening now. Now, I want to directly address the question that you raise, which is how do I deal with people who say that Israel does our bidding? ‘This is not a case of the tail wagging the dog. The dog gets the tail to do what it wants, okay?’
My simple response to that is that if that were true, you would not need a Lobby. You would not need this incredibly powerful group of individuals and organizations working overtime to influence American foreign policy. If Israel was such a strategic and moral asset, the government would just axiomatically support Israel and you wouldn’t need a lobby. The reason that you need the lobby is because Israel is a strategic liability and it is a moral liability. And therefore, the Lobby has to work to get the United States to support Israel. It is the tail that wags the dog.
MB: Yeah, yeah. And places, I mean, address the war on Iran, I mean, I think that’s the current context that I think really vindicates your entire thesis. Here’s Lindsey Graham:
“I’d go back to South Carolina. I’m asking them to send their sons and daughters over to the Mideast. I’d go back to South Carolina.” (on video clip)
I mean, he’s been making comment after comment like that. He was trading places with Netanyahu, advising Netanyahu.
JM: I mean, it’s amazing, Max. He admits that he was advising Netanyahu on how to convince President Trump to attack Iran. This is truly remarkable. And by the way, Lindsey Graham is certainly a member of the lobby, right? It is important to emphasize that. He’s like Mike Huckabee.
MB: Yeah.
JM: He’s profoundly committed to defending Israel, and he’s profoundly committed to Prime Minister Netanyahu, and he helped Prime Minister Netanyahu bamboozle President Trump into launching this remarkably foolish attack on Iran. You know, if you look at this case, what’s really interesting is there’s no evidence that anybody inside the administration was pushing for this war, except maybe Kushner and Witkoff, which of course would support our argument, right? But there’s no evidence that Vance was pushing for it, that even Rubio was pushing for it. He was too busy worrying about colonizing Latin America to get involved in the decision-making process involving Iran. So, there was no pressure from below. And in fact, General Kaine warned him that there was no military option. The National Intelligence Council said in effect, this is not gonna work.
So, there was real resistance coming from inside the administration and no real proponents that I can see. But who were the proponents inside the United States? All you had to do was read the Wall Street Journal, which was a cheerleader for the war. Bret Stephens, who was a cheerleader for the war. Lindsey Graham, who was not only a cheerleader for the war but was working carefully with Netanyahu, right? And then Netanyahu himself, this man has been deeply committed to getting us involved in a war against Iran for decades. The evidence here is just overwhelming. But you know what’s gonna happen, Max? What’s gonna happen is the war is gonna go south or the war has already gone south and it will steadily go further south.
And what will happen is that the lobby will go to enormous lengths to say that Israel and the lobby here in the United States had nothing to do with causing this war. Don’t tell me that Donald Trump is not an independent variable who can make up his own decisions because that’s what happened here. Trump’s responsible, not Israel, not the Lobby. But of course, you and I know better, and the evidence is overwhelming in the other direction. And I think their arguments this time will not convince many people.
MB: Yeah, they’ll home in on Trump’s demented personality, his claims, which are probably accurate, that he’s profiting from high oil prices. His corruption personalized the entire thing. Oh, maybe according to Rachel Maddow, the UAE and Saudi Arabia made him do it. I don’t know, maybe Russia made him do it. It’s anything to muddy the waters, but I think at this point, it’s just too obvious. You have even Joe Rogan saying, why are we doing this? It seems like Israel dragged us into the war. I mean, it’s all just, and actually going back to that Drop Site poll, a vast majority of Democrats stated that they believe Trump is attending to Netanyahu’s interests more than those of the American people and that this is a war for Israel, whereas most Republicans just simply don’t believe that because they’re Trump cultists. Netanyahu made some very revealing comments as well that I think support your thesis in a way that we’ve never seen before:
This coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years, smite the terror regime hip and thigh. This is what I proposed and this is what we shall do.
So, what I’ve pledged to do, attempted to do for 40 years, what is Netanyahu referring to with this 40-year plan which Trump is enacting through what Netanyahu calls a coalition? And is he referencing something like the Clean Break document there?
JM: Oh yeah. I mean, there’s no question that this vision that Netanyahu has is completely consistent with the Clean Break Doctrine of the mid-1990s. I mean, what’s going on here, Max, in my opinion, is that Israel is number one interested in creating a Greater Israel. Exactly where those borders are, we don’t know. But it certainly includes the West Bank and Gaza. I would argue parts of southern Lebanon and parts of southern Syria as well, and maybe even parts of Jordan and the Sinai.
But the Israelis are interested in expanding their borders, number one. And number two, they’re very interested in expelling the Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank and creating an almost purely Jewish state. And then their third objective is to make sure that all of the states in the region are either beholden to the United States, and this would include countries like Jordan and Egypt, as you know well. And then the more powerful, the bigger states, the more threatening states are broken up or destroyed. And what they want to do, the Israelis ultimately in Iran, is do what they did in Syria, which is break Syria apart, wreck Syria. What they’re doing in Lebanon is trying to wreck Lebanon. And I think they’ve sent messages to the Turks that in the final analysis, they’d like to greatly weaken Turkey as well as weaken Iran.
And the idea here is that you will then have a benign threat environment or a benign security environment. So, oftentimes I will say that Israel’s goal and America’s goal in Iran is regime change. And people will sometimes correct me and say that may be America’s goal, but that’s not really Israel’s ultimate goal. Israel’s ultimate goal is to wreck Iran, not simply to get regime change. And they are right, of course. I focus on regime change because we focus, we the United States focus on regime change and the Israelis talk about that. But their ultimate goal is to wreck Iran, to do to Iran what was done to Syria. And I believe they’d ultimately like to do that to Turkey as well. So that’s really what’s going on here. That’s the grand scheme.
And Netanyahu has had that blueprint firmly emblazoned in his brain probably since his father first started educating him when he was a little boy. And there’s nothing that moves him away from that blueprint.
MB: Absolutely. And I’m glad you also brought up Netanyahu’s father, who was sort of a leading light of Zionist intellectuals arguing that simply there is no place for Jews anywhere in the Gentile world, and that Israel had to be established and that there could be no negotiation from that point. It’s almost like there’s, once you establish a state, it’s a point of no return towards perpetual war, according to the views of Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, who focused on the Spanish Inquisition. So, there’s a really, really deep ideological component here to Netanyahu’s 40-year plan, which is it leaves no possibility of peace without total Israeli domination of the region and of Western governments through its Lobby.
I want to bring in Aaron Maté, who’s been backstage and is my co-host here at The Gray Zone. Aaron has a question for you, Professor Mearsheimer.
JM: Hello, Aaron.
Aaron Mate: Hey, John, good to see you. Good to see you. I want to bring in the other major conflict that the US is fueling, which is the proxy war in Ukraine. And I was curious to get your response to these two clips, which I think are very revealing. So just a week or two before Trump launched this regime change war in Iran alongside Israel, the Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, said this about the purpose of NATO:
“…this is exactly why NATO is there. NATO is there to protect us collectively against any adversary, be it Russia or whoever, or terrorism. But also, it is a platform for the United States to project power on the world stage” (Video clip)
So, there’s Mark Rutte, the head of NATO, saying that the goal of NATO, yeah, sure, it’s about defending us. But it’s also for the purpose of helping the US project power on the world stage. So, the goal of NATO, according to Mark Rutte, the NATO Secretary General, is for the US to project power. And then, in hearing from the Trump administration’s rationale for trying to regime change Iran, we’ve heard all these lies that we don’t have to get into, because they’ve been so incoherent. Nuclear weapons, missile threat in the US, everyone knows that’s not true. But finally, just yesterday, I think we got an actual assertion of some truth.
And this comes from Admiral Brad Cooper, who’s the military commander of the war on Iran. And this is what he said about what the purpose of this regime change war is.
“And we remain centered on very clear military objectives in eliminating Iran’s ability to project power against Americans and against its neighbors“. (video clip)
So, I just thought that’s such a revealing contrast. According to Mark Rutte, the goal of NATO, and therefore the Ukraine proxy war, is to help the US project power, and the goal of the war on Iran, according to the commander heading it, is to stop Iran from projecting power in its neighborhood. So, we can have military alliances and proxy wars to project power. Other countries, like Iran, cannot even project power in their own region.And I just am curious about your thoughts on that contrast.
JM: Well, I think that what’s going on here, just with regard to NATO, is that NATO is desperate to find a rationale for its existence. I think that NATO leaders like Mark Rutte fully understand that the United States would like to pivot out of Europe and pivot to East Asia. Furthermore, the United States is really more concerned about Israel and the Middle East than it is about Europe. So what Mark Rutte is saying is, in effect, that Europe is a giant aircraft carrier that the United States can use to project power into the Middle East. And I would note that Israel and its supporters fully understand this.
It’s important to emphasize, and this point is rarely brought up in public discourse about Israel and Lobby, that Israel and Lobby are deeply committed to the United States being militarily involved all over the planet and having a military that is a cocked pistol, because Israel and its supporters want that military to be ready if Israel gets into trouble. The last thing they want is a policy of restraint, where the American military comes back to the Western Hemisphere in large part and is not engaging in wars here, there, and everywhere because then you don’t have the cocked pistol. And if Israel gets in trouble, what are they going to do? So, it’s very important to understand that Israel and the lobby are very aggressive. They are very aggressive in their ambitions, and this includes towards NATO.
So, Israel is perfectly fine with the idea of NATO expansion, perfectly fine with the idea that the United States uses Europe as a platform, as an aircraft carrier. And Mark Rutte understands this; Mark Rutte understands the power of the lobby in the United States. There’s nobody you talk to in any area of the world who doesn’t understand that. In fact, I’ve talked to some people from the Gulf states who say that if you want to have influence in Washington, you go through the lobby. So anyway, that’s what’s going on with Rutte. And with regard to Brad Cooper, who’s the CENTCOM commander, he, of course, understands full well that he has to do Israel’s bidding, that he has to understand that Israel’s interests and America’s interests are synonymous.
And therefore, if Iran is a threat to Israel, it’s a threat to the United States. People like us, like to argue all the time that Iran does not represent a threat to us. It’s not a threat to the American national interest. Our vital interests are not at stake here. But you can’t say that; you have to equate our interests with Israel’s interests. Therefore, we have a vested interest in making sure that Iran is defanged and has no power projection capability whatsoever in the Middle East. This is why the present war is a nightmare for us because it demonstrates that Iran has actually significant power projection capability, and it’s tying us into knots. This is bad news; this is not the way the world is supposed to work.
The way the world is supposed to work is that no country in the Middle East, except for Israel, is allowed to have power projection capability. And any areas of the world like Europe or NATO that have power projection capability can have that as long as that power projection capability supports American and Israeli interests together. And of course, again, for the Lobby and for many Americans at this point in time, there’s no daylight between Israel’s interests and America’s interests. Just my final point on this, if you’re Brad Coop or you’re any American policymaker, and you try to put daylight between Israel’s interests and America’s interests, you’re either gonna be fired immediately or fired in a week. That’s the only interesting question. You just can’t make those kinds of arguments.
You have to toe the line. And toeing the line means saying that Israel’s interests are synonymous with America’s interests, or supersede America’s interests.
MB: Yeah, or supersede America’s interests. This is Bradley Cooper’s predecessor, Michael Carrillo, in the Adelson-owned Israel Hayom. Carrillo forged unbreakable military bonds that proved decisive in Iran confrontation and regional defense operations. ‘
“’My mother always told me that for my support for Israel, God will repay me,’ he once said” (news clipping)
And they called Carrillo Israel’s favorite general. He recently spoke, I think, at the Israel-American Council run by Miriam Adelson. So, it’s like the head of CENTCOM basically bowing before this tiny little apartheid colony 6,000 miles away. Bradley Cooper has to follow in his footsteps.
I wanted to ask you though, about your broader theory before you wrote the Israel lobby that helps inform your understanding of the Ukraine proxy war and so many other conflicts, the US. relations with China, which is sort of great power competition, that the relationships between powerful states define international relations How does that influence your understanding of the actions the U. S. is taking toward Iran right now vis-à-vis Israel?
JM: Well, you know, when Steve and I, who are card-carrying realists, wrote the Israel lobby article and the Israel lobby book, a number of our colleagues in the field said, ‘Do you realize that the thesis in your book on the Israel lobby contradicts your realist theory?’ And they expected us to say, ‘No, it doesn’t.’ And we would say, it absolutely contradicts our theory, right? Our theory is that the United States should behave in strategically smart ways on the world stage and its great power to great power relations that matter the most.
And there’s no way the United States should let a minor power like Israel get in the way of behaving in strategically smart ways. But if you think about it, the argument that Steve and I are making is that our relationship with Israel is not in our strategic interest. Remember I said before, Israel is an albatross around their neck. That contradicts the basic thesis of my book and my writings more generally on great power politics and Steve’s as well. But it just goes to show you how enormously powerful the Lobby is I mean, just Max and Aaron, just think about the fact that the United States recognizes that if it has a peer competitor in the international system that it should worry about, it’s China. Right?
And this is why Hillary Clinton enunciated in 2011 that we were going to pivot to Asia. China is seen as the most important threat to the United States inside of the national security community. Well, if you look at these various wars that we’re fighting in the Middle East, and the first one, of course, was the 12-day war last June, and now you look at this conflict, it is seriously eroding our capability to contain China in East Asia. We’re pulling THAADs and Patriots out of South Korea and Japan. This is truly remarkable. We have been shortchanging East Asia. We have been shortchanging our containment policy in East Asia for quite a while now because of Israel, and the situation is now only getting worse from a strategic point of view, from a realist point of view, which, of course, is what Steve and I purvey in our writings.This makes no sense at all. So our relationship with Israel is a really cockamamie relationship that is not in the American national interest.
MB: Yeah, if I were an imperialist, from a realist perspective, I would be furious right now about what the US is doing because it looks like the US Is on the precipice of losing its foothold in the Persian Gulf and losing all of its forward position bases that encircle Iran.
JM: You know who is the person who reflects this dissatisfaction with what’s going on is Elbridge Colby because Elbridge Colby is someone who wants to contain China. Elbridge Colby has no interest in remaining in Europe and keeping Europe as a giant aircraft carrier, and he certainly has no interest in fighting wars against Iran.
He understands this is counterproductive if you’re interested in containing China. But you notice, a good article could be written on this. The Lobby has gone to great lengths to go after Elbridge Colby, just as they’ve gone to great lengths to go after J.D.Vance, because the lobby understands that Vance and Colby are two people who think that it’s not in the American national interest to support Israel hook, line, and sinker.
AM: And we should mention in this connection that when Tulsi Gabbard tried to bring on Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis, who you know, John, as her top advisor, the lobby essentially blocked his candidacy.
JM: Oh, yeah. I think the best case of this going back to when we wrote the book is Chas Freeman. Yeah. I mean, Barack Obama was going to make Chas Freeman, I think it was head of the National Intelligence Council, if my memory’s correct. Yeah, and they went to enormous lengths to prevent that. And Chas withdrew his name as a result. I mean, Chas is a remarkably smart man, remarkably experienced. He’s a person of great integrity. He and I, by the way, disagree completely on the whole issue of containing China, so it’s not like I agree with him on every issue. But man, when you start talking about the kind of people you would want to have at the highest level positions in any administration, Chas Freeman would be at the top of my list. But the Lobby killed him in the early days of the Obama administration. And, you know, they do this sort of thing all the time.
MB: Well, now they’re sort of trying to retrench their position through Mamdani. And they’re attacking Mamdani’s wife for liking comments around October 7th that were not necessarily celebrating it, but they’re framing it as a celebration of the worst terror attack in history. And what they’re trying to do is get a casualty in the New York Mayor’s office that will demonstrate that no U. S. public official should, even if they win, deign to criticize Israel or harshly condemn Israel because they’re afraid of what’s to come. So, I think they’ve lost a lot of ground, but they’re still fighting this fight to take out anyone associated with any public official who, you know, remotely edges towards our, you know, audience’s position.
And they’re trying to make an example of them. So, it just seems like it seems endless. They will never, ever accept defeat. I guess my question is, how can this? How can we solve this problem of the Israel lobby? Is it simply by registering AIPAC as a foreign agent? Like, what is the remedy?
JM: Well, just very quickly, the two words I would use to describe the lobby, which I think fit nicely with what you were just saying, Max, those two words are relentless and ruthless.
MB: Yeah.
JM: Those are the two words that always pop into my mind.
MB: And rich, endless money.
JM: Yeah, yeah, money really matters here. Look, the truth is that there is going to be a huge battle over the Lobby and over the US-Israeli relationship moving forward.
How it all plays out, I think, is very hard to say, but it’s all out in the open now. And what’s happening in the Iran war, as we described it, is recognized by all sorts of people. And it’s not just the three of us who are out there now exposing what the lobby’s up to and how it’s not in America’s strategic or moral interest; people like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly are now involved. And I like to refer to people who cross the Rubicon. There are a lot of people who will lightly criticize the Lobby or lightly criticize Israel, but they won’t do more than put an ankle in the water. And then there’s that actually quite large body of people who’ve now crossed the Rubicon.
And that includes almost everybody who appears on the Judges’ show weekly [Judge Andrew Napolitano’s YouTube Channel/Show: Judging Freedom]. And of course, that’s the three of us, plus a lot of others. Yeah. But it also includes someone like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly. And I think once you cross the Rubicon, you can’t go back over to the other side. And for example, we’ve all crossed the Rubicon. We’re committed to this issue. And I think more and more people will cross the Rubicon. You know, it’ll be interesting to see what happens with people like Joe Rogan over time.
AM: And the Democratic Party as well, where supporting Israel is becoming increasingly tenable if you want to be an elected politician.
JM: Yeah, I mean, look at Gavin Newsom. It’s kind of hard to believe what he’s been saying.
You know, going back to the top of the show when we were talking about the differences between when Steve and I wrote the article and the book, and now I think you see there’s a world of difference in terms of the context. And I think the Gavin Newsom business is evidence of that. And so, I think this fight’s gonna take place over time, and how it plays out is just very difficult to say. I would note that if the Iran war goes South, this will be terrible news for the Lobby because the Lobby has played a key role in pushing this war forward. It’s been the lobby and Prime Minister Netanyahu, as we said before, who have been the two principal forces driving this war and convincing Trump to do it. And if it turns into a fiasco, that’s gonna be a huge problem for the Lobby
And so, I don’t know how it’s gonna play itself out, but I think it’s imperative that all of us, and others who have crossed the Rubicon, continue to focus on this issue, pay a lot of attention to it, and tell the American people as loudly and clearly as we can what’s going on. You know, I just wanna make one other quick point here that I don’t wanna lose sight of. And that is that we talk about the strategic consequences of this, getting involved in wars like the Iraq War and the Iran War and the genocide and so forth and so on. But it’s also just very important to emphasize that what the lobby is doing threatens to undermine liberal values here in the United States.
Just take the whole issue of free speech. I think a very important argument could be made that the greatest threat to free speech in the United States today, certainly on university and college campuses, is the Israel Lobby. Because the lobby goes to enormous lengths to shut down discourse on Israel. Anybody who is critical of Israel today is likely to be smeared and have his or her career ruined. The Lobby will take great lengths to do that so people self-censor. It’s really quite remarkable. Shibley Telhami at the University of Maryland has done surveys of academics that show that around 80% of academics self-censor; they silence themselves on the issue of Israel. They’re just afraid to speak up. It’s really quite remarkable, and this situation is only likely to get worse because the Lobby has to engage in smash-mouth politics more and more. This is going to undermine liberal values at home.
MB: I’ve always said that the Israel lobby is the greatest threat to free speech in the US. because while there may be Christian conservative forces that want to ban certain books in red states, they always face a very strong challenge when they do so. When the Israel lobby does it, even liberals are afraid to speak up. And the challenge to the deportation of the deportation orders and arrest of Mahmoud Khalil or the woman from Tufts University who co-authored an op-ed criticizing Israel, what’s her name, Rosmia Ozturk. You didn’t see a very strong challenge from the liberal class to this obvious assault on free speech where people were actually being arrested for what they said and ordered out of the country when they had green cards and visas.
Now you’re starting to see attacks on it in the New York Review of Books as Trump weakens, and it’s becoming more of a partisan issue. But they have just run through, they have just shredded the Constitution without a challenge. And so yeah, I think the most important factor now is whether the liberal establishment is willing to recognize this because it’s the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights that has granted them their ability to project power around the world behind the aegis of the US as a shining city on the hill. And Trump has shredded that. You’re going to see the Democrats try to come back and remake America’s image and declare that we have rights again so that we can continue to arm Ukraine. I mean, will that even be possible after what we’re witnessing now?
JM: I just want to make an additional point to what you were saying and talk about the genocide in Gaza. University campuses, college campuses are filled with human rights advocates. Universities and colleges, the political center of gravity in colleges and universities is far to the left of center. And as a realist, I can tell you I have been criticized over the years by all sorts of human rights activists in the academic world. So here you have a genocide in Gaza after October 7. What’s truly remarkable is hardly any of these advocates of human rights, these human rights advocates, speak out against the genocide. And the paramount example of that is Samantha Power, who wrote this very important book on genocide and lamented the fact that Americans had not moved to shut down various genocides or various genocides in the past and how this was unconscionable, unthinkable and should never happen again.
And here she is in the Biden administration, which is complicit in a genocide. And she is, in effect, complicit in the genocide. Truly remarkable. And it’s realists like me and Steve Walt who are actually speaking out about the horrors of the genocide and criticizing the Israelis for what they’re doing and criticising the American government for being complicit. Truly remarkable. What’s going on here is that people are afraid of the lobby They’re afraid to criticize Israel. If Samantha Power were to criticize Israel, say that it’s conducting a genocide, or if she didn’t believe it was a genocide, if she believed that it was close to being a genocide, if she criticized Israel, she’d never be Secretary of State someday. She’d never get promoted; she’d probably be fired from the administration.
And it’s this set of incentives that causes people not to criticize Israel when you would expect them to criticize Israel. Again, I’m truly amazed at how little criticism there was of the genocide. Yeah, the crime of all crimes. Here I am surrounded by all these liberal IR theorists who believe that we should purvey human rights around the world. Fine. But when you see a genocide, you should be first in line to criticize it. Shouldn’t be people like me and Steve Walt who are first in line.
MB: I think Samantha Power’s presence in the institutions discredits them, along with the genocide that they supported. Watching the EU leadership refuse to condemn the bombing of the girls’ school in Minab, Iran, but condemning Iran, it’s just like Kallas and Von Der Leyen. And it’s just too obvious now that they have no credibility left and they never will retain it. And I remember going back to when Samantha Power was vying to become a US ambassador to the UN. She enlisted Shmueli Boteach as her fixer because she had previously criticized Israel a few times, and she needed to get on the good side of the Israel lobby and the Zionist movement. Shmueli was the guy who would appear with her everywhere when she would go meet with senators and say, “I pledge to do whatever. I won’t preach human rights on Israel. I’m going to be Israel’s slave at the UN.” And now here she is again. It should have been so discrediting for her. But you are the one who’s paid the price, along with Stephen Wall, for being out ahead of the pack and stating the obvious fact that the Israel lobby existed, that there even was an Israel lobby, that it was powerful, and that the United States does have interests and the Israel lobby’s own objectives contravened those interests. I know we’ve kept you for about an hour. I said it was going to be a half hour, so I want to be mindful of your time.
Aaron, if you want to ask any last question or final comments,
AM: I wanted to tell a quick anecdote about Samantha Power. She was just recently speaking at the University of Notre Dame, and somebody in the audience asked her about her silence on the Gaza genocide. And she said, well, when you’re serving a president, unfortunately, you don’t make foreign policy. And that was her excuse that she was just following orders, essentially, that there are limits on what she could do as the head of USAID. Then the same answer, though, a few minutes later, she was reflecting on her time in the Obama administration when there were allegations of a chemical attack by the Assad government in Syria, which I think, based on the evidence, was a false flag. But that aside, Samantha Power said that at the time she was lobbying Obama to bomb Syria over that allegation. So I thought that was such a revealing answer. When there’s a genocide going on, Samantha Power’s excuse is, well, I’m not the president, so I can’t do anything. When there’s the possibility of bombing a foreign country, then she’s actively lobbying the president to carry out a strike. So, in fact, when you are in government, you can do something if you want to. You can advocate policy. She just chose to advocate military strikes, not stopping a genocide in Gaza.
JM: You know, Aaron, just to make her case even worse, I bet that she did not even go to Biden and plead with him to stop the genocide. In other words, she didn’t resign. OK, but did she go to Biden and say this is a genocide or it’s approaching a genocide and we have to stop it? And he overruled her. Did that happen? I bet that didn’t happen. And I think that’s even more damning. That’s additional damning evidence about her behavior. Now, I may be wrong. We may find out that she went and protested. But I think if she went and protested, she would tell us that. In fact, she’s not telling us that tells us that she didn’t go and protest. This is, I think, the word I would use to describe it is reprehensible.
AM: Yeah, and we also know that experts at her agency wrote reports saying that Israel was deliberately starving the people of Gaza, blocking aid. And Antony Blinken essentially kept those reports from being made public. I never heard Samantha Power advocating for her own staffers and the evidence that they marshaled.
MB: She’s really a representative of that whole class of liberal IR people, the humanitarian interventionists, and they’re discredited at this point. I don’t know who else there could be who could come into a democratic administration, though, and that’s the issue. But John, I want to be respectful of your time, we’ll let you go unless there’s anything you want to add.
JM: Just make one final point, Max, and that is that a lot of people said, wow, this is terrific research, you really found something that nobody knew about, and so forth and so on. I think in a very important way, we were just stating the obvious facts. There was no great research involved here; it was easy to figure out what the lobby was doing. And what we did was we actually told the story, whereas others had been unwilling to tell the story up until that point, or most others had been unwilling to tell the story. But the story was right there; the facts were right there. You didn’t have to be a genius to figure out what was going on, and it was just a case of being willing to step up to the plate, and we did that. And thankfully, I think it opened a crack, and all sorts of other people, you two included, have poured through that crack, and hopefully more people will pour through that crack or to use the words I used before, cross the Rubicon.
MB: Well, you definitely stepped up to the plate and delivered, and 20 years later, the book is a classic. I think it’s above criticism, while so many other books by your critics, they just fall flat today; they look discredited. So, thank you for your service, Professor John Mearsheimer, and thanks for joining us at The Grayzone. We would love to have you back in the very near future
JM: Thank you for having me, Max and Aaron, and I look forward to talking to you many more times in the years ahead.
MB: All the best. All the best to you. Good seeing you. See you, John. Bye.
