Prof. Mearsheimer REVEALS: Why Ukraine Attacked Kursk. Turkey May Join the Fight in Lebanon

it makes no sense to me at all I don't understand what the military objective is and in fact if anything what this is going to do is detract from their effort uh in the eastern part of Ukraine to sty the Russian Steam Roller which is consistently moving forward every day and at trting the fighting units that the ukrainians have a raid uh on that Eastern Front I mean what the Ukrainian should be doing with those forces that they sent into Russia in the kskk area is those forces should have been sent to the front lines uh in the eastern part of Ukraine to butress the forces that are buckling underneath the Russian Steamroller it makes no sense to attack into kers what are they going to gain from doing this uh are they gonna you know Help win the war not at all so this is a foolish last minute gamble on my from my perspective on the part of the ukrainians to try and turn things around this is being done for PR purposes as I said in my initial comment I can't see what the military value of this is I can't see how it shifts the military balance in any meaningful way and as I said I think if you're really interested in stying the Russians it would have made much more sense uh and this is what Gilbert was saying to take those forces and send them uh to the east you would think an elite fighting unit would be the ideal unit to send to the front lines uh in the eastern part of Ukraine and not to send heading towards kers it it just it doesn't make any strategic sense and as all sorts of people have commented uh the Ukrainian uh leadership is taking a beating uh in the Ukrainian blogosphere from all of the UK Ukrainian uh individuals who follow this war closely and comment on what Ukraine is doing and how it's fairing on the battlefield so it's not like you have westerners like us uh or the Russians criticizing this operation uh many ukrainians who you know follow Ukrainian strategy closely and are rooting hard for Ukraine think that it makes no sense at all my good friend Steve Walt uh has advised me not to make the argument that there is no evidence to support the conventional wisdom about Ukraine and I understand Steve's point because what he's saying is you don't want to use extreme language and use words like no evidence and he says you should say there's little evidence my response to Steve is I would say there is little evidence if there was any evidence but there is no evidence to support the conventional wisdom this is one big lie I think it's very important to understand this question of who is responsible for causing the Ukraine war matters enorm matters matters enormously because it is directly related to the question of who has blood on his hands that's the issue here in other words is it Joe Biden and his lieutenants is it the West that has blood on its hands for causing this dis or is it Vladimir Putin and the reason that we invented this story that it was Putin and that he was interested in conquering Ukraine and making it part of a greater Russia and then he was going to go into Eastern Europe and recreate the Soviet Empire the reason we invented this story is that we want to make the argument he is responsible for the war and he has blood on his hands so this is a really high stakes issue and it's not going to go away because what's going to happen here is that ultimately this war is going to end people are going to understand it's a total disaster for Ukraine which of course it is and the question is then going to come front and center who has blood on his hands and is it Biden and company or is it Putin and Company in 2025 this war will come to an end or at least the shooting will come to an end uh I think that will be a consequence of events on the battlefield number one and two the damage that the Russians are doing to the electric grid inside of Ukraine I think given the egregious damage that the Russians are inflicting on that grid and the fact that winter is coming and given the fact that the ukrainians are suffering enormous casualties on the battlefield I think it'll be sometime in 2025 that uh you have a ceasefire it's very important to understand that when the decision was made to expand NATO Eastward to include Ukraine uh that uh Angela Merkel and Nicholas sarosi who were present at the meeting both were opposed uh they were both adamantly opposed to Bringing Ukraine into NATO because they knew it would have disastrous consequences it was the United States that forced burkel and forced sarosi to go along with issuing a communic at the end of the meeting this is in April 2008 that UK ukine would become part of NATO and that's when the ball got rolling and the Americans have continued to push hard on that theme uh since uh April 2008 and the Europeans of course fell in line at Bucharest and have remained in line but the Europeans and here we're talking mainly about the West Europeans not the poles and the Baltic states but the West European States understood from the get-go that this was a bad idea and they are now paying the price for following uh the uh pip Piper there's no question that almost everybody in Israel has come to the conclusion rightly or wrongly that they're doomed to be in a permanent state of emergency and the threat of war from their neighbors and from the Palestinians is not going away anytime soon nevertheless there are significant disagreements inside of Israel on how to deal with that threat environment and you see it today with regard to the question of a ceasefire in Gaza uh there just lots of people who believe that the Israelis should accept the ceasefire and of course prime minister Netanyahu disagrees with that at least so far uh so there are you know real differences in that regard the same thing is true with regard to Gaza there are a lot of Israelis who tend to be in the center who do not want to remain in Gaza they think that it's a hornet's nest and Israel should get out but then you have all sorts of people on the right who would like to kill all the Palestinians in Gaza ethnically cleanse it and uh build settlements in Gaza because they think Gaza is part of the Holy Land I think you have to separate uh what's going on inside Israel from how Israel deals with its external environment and to start by talking about what's happening in inside Israel uh as I've long argued Israel is an apartheid state and to run an apartheid state you have to turn the Palestinians into subhumans or you have to treat the Palestinians like they're subhumans they're animals and when you run an apartheid state you end up brutalizing in the most horrible ways uh the victims uh the second class or third class people who live in your Society and this has been happening inside of Israel for a long time the Israelis have been torturing prisoners doing terrible things to the Palestinians for a long long time and what happened on October 7th is that those terrible practices that the Israelis employ against the Palestinians were ramped up and uh what you see today is that the Palestinians are being treated in the most horrendous ways uh and most people in the west cannot believe that the Israelis are doing this because it's so out of line with what you would expect from a liberal democracy but if you look at how the Israelis themselves think about it it's quite remarkable how much support there is for this Behavior Channel 12 in Israel recently ran a survey asking Israelis whether they thought it was okay uh for uh an Israeli person to rape uh a terrorist okay is it okay for an Israeli to rape a terrorist 47% of Israelis according to channel 12 in Israel 47% of Israelis said it's okay and 42% said it's not okay what does this say about Israeli Society this is horrible but that's what you're dealing with and by the way there's a new report out from Bellum the Israeli human Rights group called Welcome to Hell which lays out in deep uh detail what uh has been happening in Israeli prisons to Palestinians since October 7th and that report by the way makes it clear that what has been happening since October 7th may be an ramped up version of what was happening before October 7th survey said that 47% of Israelis think it is legitimate for someone in the IDF to rape a terrorist and since all Palestinians are effectively terrorists in the minds of many Israelis uh this is hardly surprising that they're doing things like this what's remarkable is how little condemnation there is of this behavior in the west if we do tell them to stop or we do criticize them we do it with very vague language because we never really get too want to get too tough of on them uh and uh it's just the way it operates I mean the Israelis can do pretty much anything they want uh especially when it comes to the Palestinians uh I think if you're talking about Israel dealing with China you're outside the region then the United States has a bit of Leverage uh but if you're talking about inside the region and you're talking about the Israeli Palestinian issue Israel can do pretty much anything it wants and by the way with regard to Iran just to talk about the external environment and how the Israelis de with their external environment it's quite clear that the United States does not want to get involved in a war with Iran and now on two occasions the Israelis have taken military measures that were designed to drag us into a war with Iran uh and we were unable to prevent that from happening and once it did happen once you know the attack on April 1 took place you remember that's when they hit the uh Iranian Embassy in Damascus and then on July 31st when they took out ishma hania in uh Tran in both of those cases we did not condemn Israel for what they did and this is just you know normal behavior on our part the Iranians have said there's going to be a significant response and I will take them at their word uh it is possible that they will change their mind there's no question that the the Americans have been going to enormous lengths to get them to limit the attack uh and it may be that they've figured out that there are good reasons uh to limit the attack in significant ways uh I don't know what those are but they have said that they're going to come full force they're really gonna slam Israel and uh I would think that that's true and by the way you want to remember that they're not the only actor that's coming after Israel Hezbollah is coming after Israel too they've promised that you want to remember that there were twin assassinations here right the Israelis assassinated uh a Hezbollah leader in southern Beirut on July 30th then the next day July 31st they assassinated uh Ishmael Hanah in tran right and by the way the next day on August 1st they announced that Muhammad who uh was the military leader that they had claimed to assassinate on July 13th they announced on August 1 that he was dead so if you think about it what they've done here is on July 30th assassinated one leader in southern Beirut on July 31 they assassinated another leader uh in tran and then on August 1 they announced uh that the earlier killing had been successful and what the Israelis are doing and you don't see much discussion of this in the uh Media or at least in the mainstream media what the Israelis are doing is they're pursuing a decapitation strategy they're basically betting that they can kill the leadership uh of these various opposing organizations and that that will produce some sort of meaningful military victory for that this is a delusion we have a whole literature on decapit strategies you kill one leader and they just bring in another leader uh and the idea that that new leader is going to make peace with Israel is not a serious argument but why are they pursuing a decapitation strategy why are they doing this it's because they really don't have an alternative they have no way out of the mess that they're in that's true in Gaza and it's true with regard to Hezbollah Iran and Hamas more generally very important to understand that turkey is probably the one country in the region except for maybe Iran where the leadership is as critical of Israel as the public is as we've talked about before in most Arab countries and this is certainly true in Egypt and Jordan uh there is not significant criticism from the top uh regarding Israeli behavior and if you go to the street there is huge anger towards Israel and the Elites in countries like Jordan and uh Egypt are doing everything they can to make sure that the volcano doesn't explode and they don't get pushed out of office turkey on the other hand is a case where the elites this is erdogan and his foreign minister as we just heard are as enraged and as angry about what's going on with regard to Israel and also with regard to the United States you do not want to underestimate the anti-americanism inside of Turkey today it is off the charts because of what's happening in Gaza but anyway the Turkish government and erdogan in particular has said that if Israelis go to war in Lebanon that turkey will come in and turkey will join the fight uh now the question is will they actually do that back to the question you were asking me about Iran will Iran actually attack Israel and as I said there it's hard to believe they won't after they said they would and I sort of come to the same conclusion with regard to Turkey the Turkish government has said that if the Israelis go into Lebanon uh that uh turkey will come in to help the Lebanese you can tell all sorts of nightmare scenarios about how this escalates and uh I don't know you know exactly what Iran will do I don't know exactly what Hezbollah will do and then we have to ask ourselves the question let's assume that Hezbollah and Iran both attack Israel and let's assume that those attacks are reasonably limited right not massive attacks question then is what will the Israelis do will the Israelis limit their retaliation I doubt that I think the Israelis place a very high premium on escalation dominance they've always thought that the best way to deter their adversaries was to make sure that as you went up the escalation ladder they dominated the other side so one could argue that even if Iran and Lebanon launch rather selective attacks at Israel that the Israelis will go back at them really hard and if that happens then the question is what will Hezbollah do what will Iran do and to go to the subject we're talking about what Will turkey do what will the Russians do and these are all open questions because none of us you know can say for sure you know exactly what's going on here and how will this play itself out I I don't think the Chinese will get involved I I think the Russians are already involved in the ways that you describe they're giving you know groundbased air defense systems they're giving Radars they're giving jamming equipment uh to the Iranians how much we don't know there are some people who posit that given how late in the game the Iranians are getting this equipment uh it's likely that the Russians will be Manning the equip equipment uh that you couldn't train the Iranians up quick enough to use this new equipment I don't know whether that's true but it would not be surprising if the Russians actually helped the Iranians I mean you want to remember we're helping the Israelis uh in this expected fight and we helped them in the big fight on April 14th uh when Iran attacked the last time so the Russians could be very well involved in the fighting in a very sort of subtle way uh who knows uh but they're already committed to helping Iran I mean what we're doing here with the Israelis is that we're driving the Chinese the Russians the Iranians and the North Koreans closer and closer together it's the axis of resistance uh on a global scale and uh there's no evidence that this is going to change anytime soon and this is certainly not their interest and as I've said to you before you want to remember that if the Israelis slam Iran they are going to give Iran very powerful incentives to acquire nuclear weapons the Iranians are not far from the point where they have nuclear weapons and we should be doing everything we can and the and the Israelis should be doing everything they can to make sure they don't cross the nuclear threshold but given our actions and especially given Israel's actions we're giving Iran very powerful incentives to acquire nuclear weapons and the question is will the Russians help us prevent that I wouldn't bet a lot of money on it we worry about the Saudis getting nuclear weapons from the pakistanis we believe the Saudis gave the pakistanis uh monetary assistance to acquire the bomb and at the quidd pro quo is that uh China will give nuclear weapons to Saudi Arabia if Saudi Arabia needs those weapons you want to remember that Saudi Arabia has said that if Iran gets nuclear weapons they will get nuclear weapons and that's where the Pakistani connection comes in I'm not saying that would happen that Pakistan would give them a nuclear weapon but the case of Iran Iran has a very sophisticated nuclear infrastructure and they're um enriching uranium up to 60% and that's just a hop skip and Away hop skip and a jump away from enriching Ukrainian up to 90% which is weapons grade uranium so the Iranians are not far from the point where they would have sufficient weapons grade uranium to develop at least one maybe two or three bombs uh and it would not take them that long to do it and it would be extremely difficult for us and for the Israelis to prevent that so what we want to do is we don't want to give the Iranians an incentive to cross the nuclear threshold to become a weapon state a nuclear weapon state and the best way to do that is not to attack them because if you attack a state with your military forces you give that state a very powerful incentive to acquire what we call the ultimate deterrent I.E nuclear weapons uh so all I'm saying here is that as this plays out now everybody should keep in mind that it has consequences for whether or not Iran goes nuclear