Mearsheimer: Trump Is Screwed, Unless He Shows Max Political Courage

As we approach Trump’s inauguration I’ve been trying to sort a few things out, geopolitically—what we can reasonably expect. I find myself not in full agreement with some of my usual go to geopolitical guys—John Mearsheimer and Doug Macgregor, for example. Yesterday I critiqued Macgregor’s views on Trump. These geopolitical issues are fraught with significance for America’s future and for Trump’s presidency, which is why I’m devoting a lot of space to them.

Now I’m going to present a terrific discussion with Mearsheimer on Danny Davis’ show. As usual, I’ve edited the transcript for readability—literal transcripts of lengthy oral discussions typically are much harder to read than to listen to and nuances and emphases in the oral version tend to disappear in the transcripts. With that proviso, here we go. The discussion starts out in the Middle East and ends up in Ukraine, but the common denominator is Russia—which, of course, makes perfect sense. The Anglo-Zionists have chosen war on Russia as their priority for America, without consulting Americans. Instead, they’ve bought off the political class to get their war. That’s how empires, rather than republics, work. Mearsheimer’s overall argument—which I largely agree with—is that Trump is entering a minefield that he will only be able to get through if he embraces the politically courageous decisions. Which, as all Yes, Minister! fans will readily appreciate, usually involve extreme political danger. But …

John Mearsheimer: Russia & Iran a NEW Nuclear Alliance

DD: Russia and Iran have signed a new agreement a 20-year agreement. We we've talked a lot about some of the unintended consequences of our actions supporting the Ukraine side and its war with Russia, rejecting every opportunity to have any kind of either a diplomatic settlement or a negotiated end to the war. Here we are on the eve of transferring power to the incoming Trump Administration and I just wonder if you think Russia chose this moment to to sign this deal with Iran on nuclear power intentionally, or whether it’s pure coincidence?

What follows in this next paragraph, seems to me to be a very acute analysis of what’s going on with Iran. It explains a lot of what has—and hasn’t—happened.

JM: I think they might have chosen this moment but it doesn't matter very much. They could have done it a week ago or they could do it a week from now. I think what's going on here is that the Russians have two goals. The first is to make sure that Iran does not acquire nuclear weapons. The Russians are well aware that the Iranians have a powerful incentive to acquire a nuclear deterrent. That's point one. And point two, the Iranians are susceptible to an American and an Israeli attack and I think the Russians want to do everything they can to help the Iranians protect themselves and therefore deter such an attack. The Russians don't want to see the United States gain a significant advantage in terms of global influence by doing great damage to Iran, so I think what's happening here is that the Russians are moving closer to the Iranians and I think the Russians are going to give the Iranians economic assistance and conventional military assistance. I think the Russians want to see Iran develop the capability to protect its nuclear installations and other installations across the country with conventional weapons so that they don't go down the nuclear road, and at the same time the Americans are deterred.

DD: We haven't heard any reports to this effect, but I just wonder whether there might have been some discussions behind the scenes between the United States and Russia, because I think that the US does not want to get into a war with Iran, and certainly I think a lot of evidence indicates that Netanyahu would have loved nothing more than to get the US sucked into a war to try and take out Iran. But Russia may have said, 'Hey, it's in no one's interest for this to go anywhere. We're going to deepen our cooperation here so don't attack it,’ and then in perhaps in a quid pro quo we'll keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. Do you think anything like that may be part of it?

JM: Absolutely--I think I think you're right on the money. I think the Russians, the Iranians, and the Americans all have an interest in no war--none of those three countries. It's the Israelis who want war, and the great danger is that the Israelis will drag the Americans in. This worries the Russians greatly and, as a result, the Russians are not only sending a clear signal to the Americans but they're helping the Iranians to defend themselves with conventional weapons--which, as I said, has the added benefit of greatly discouraging the Iranians from going down the nuclear road.

[Discussion of significance of North South Transport Corridor which runs through Iran]

I’ll jump in ahead of the discussion of “maximum pressure.” Trump’s clown envoys are insisting on “maximum pressure” against Iran, as in Trump 1.0. Mearsheimer thinks that’s likely to happen, and yet he also says it failed the first time and is likely to fail again. Now, my caveat is not that Trump would never do anything stupid—he has done that in the past, usually under intense Anglo-Zionist pressure. My caveat is that Trump has shown the ability to learn from experience. During the campaign he openly stated his desire to have good relations with Iran, and just this week he spoke with Xi Jinping and again vowed his devotion to the cause of peace everywhere. For these reasons I would be cautious about predicting that Trump will make the same mistake twice. Resisting the pressure will take courage, but Trump has shown courage already in the Gaza ceasefire. We’ll have to wait and see. Mearsheimer argues strongly that the Anglo-Zionist proposals are insane and absurd, yet he seems to think that Trump will fall for them. Maybe. But maybe not—he has learned from experience before.

JM: I think what Trump will actually try to do when he comes into power is use a strategy that's called maximum pressure to wreck the Iranian economy. Of course the Russians understand this, because they've been victims of American sanctions. The United States is not only trying to wreck the Iranian economy, it's trying to wreck the Russian economy. The Russians are trying to figure out ways to combat this economic pressure.

DD: Trump's envoy General Kellogg's already saying that we have to reinstate maximum pressure. Was the original iteration of maximum pressure really effective and useful for United States interest in its exchange with the Iranian regime?

JM: No. It failed. I mean here's basically what happened. In 2015 the Obama Administration came up with the JCPOA. This is the nuclear agreement that greatly limited Iran's nuclear capability and made it virtually impossible for it to develop nuclear weapons. The Israelis were deeply unhappy with the agreement and the Trump Administration, after significant pressure was put on it by the Israelis, walked away from the JCPOA in 2018.

DD: Why would Israel be so against the JCPOA when it curtailed the Iranian potential drive towards a nuclear weapon.

JM: It's very simple, Danny. The JCPOA did not eliminate Iran's capability to either enrich uranium or recycle plutonium and turn them into weapons grade material. If the Trump Administration could get a new JCPOA that got rid of Iran's capability to produce fissile material the Israelis would be reasonably happy--they're never too happy with anything, but they would be reasonably happy. It was the failure to get that that pushed the Israelis to put pressure on the Americans to walk away from the JCPOA.

DD: [What if Israel had struck Iran before Trump was inaugurated, to lock Trump into a war?]

JM: First of all, Israel does not have the capability to take down Iran's nuclear infrastructure--the United States is needed. Second point, it's not clear that the United States can do it--there's a reasonable chance we could take down **almost** all of the nuclear infrastructure that Iran has, but it's not certain. And the third point which addresses your question is that, even if we take down that nuclear infrastructure almost everybody I know--and this includes some very hawkish people--believes that eventually Iran would reconstitute the program and they would end up with nuclear weapons. If Iran is determined to get nuclear weapons there's no way that the United States can prevent that over time.

DD: Short of an outright Iraq style invasion.

JM: [Laughs] But we're not going to invade Iran! That would really be crazy! [Laughs again]

DD: [Laughs, too] Right. I say that with an uncomfortable chuckle because on the surface--actually, even beneath the surface!--it would be insane and absurd but, wow! How many things have we done in the last couple of decades that didn't make any sense? [Both yucking it up]

JM: Once the Trump Administration pulled out of the JCPOA they put in place a policy of maximum pressure, which was economic coercion based on sanctions--and it failed. Pulling out of the JCPOA was actually a colossal mistake.

DD: What would even be the intention of going back to maximum pressure? What do they think it will accomplish in a new iteration that it didn't accomplish in the last?

JM: I don't know. I mean they probably are telling themselves a story that we just weren't tough enough at the time, the Biden Administration wasn't tough enough, so if we redouble our efforts it will work. But the problem there is that the Russians have just consummated this deal with the Iranians that is designed to deal with maximum pressure. So if it didn't work the last time, why should we expect it to work this time? The answer is, we shouldn't, and what makes me nervous about that is that will give the Trump Administration and the Israelis something of an incentive to attack Iran.

And here we come up against Macgregor’s caveat—which Macgregor himself fails to heed. Macgregor believes the Pentagon has warned Trump against big wars that we’re not prepared for. As you saw above, Davis and Mearsheimer appear to agree with that. So why do they think Trump will ignore that advice? The only answer I see is that, like Macgregor, Mearsheimer believes Trump is being led by the clown advisers.

DD: Yeah, that's the last thing that we need.

DD: One of the other big things about the incoming Trump administration of course is what they're going to do with the Ukraine war and Russia.

[Reviews battlefield situation, which strongly favors Russia]

DD: What is Trump's objective going to be?

[Points out the schizophrenia in Rubio's testimony--on the one hand Ukraine is simply running out of manpower, on the other hand Rubio wants to talk Russia into a ceasefire or to stablize the Ukrainian lines so that "both sides of leverage".]

DD: There's a couple things in there I want to zero in on. First, Rubio said there needs to be some sort of a ceasefire. Sergey Lavrov, a week or so ago, said: 'Nyet, no ceasefire, no pause, no tactical [pause]. We're looking for a [definitive] solution to the war or we're going to keep on fighting.' What do you think's going to happen?

JM: First of all, if Trump comes in and says, 'We want a ceasefire,' and that's one of his initial negotiating positions and the Russians just say, 'No', well, they're not going to get a ceasefire. The Russians would be nuts to agree to a ceasefire. They're on a roll—why would they agree to a ceasefire which would give the Ukrainians and the West time to reconstitute the forces and get ready to fight against the Russians in much better shape than they are in now? So there's not going to be a ceasefire. I think there are two ways this can play out. One is that the Trump Administration agrees to Putin's demands and you get an agreement, and the two main demands here are, number one, that Ukraine never becomes a part of NATO and that Ukraine is a neutral state. Demand number two is that the West recognizes that the four oblasts that Russia has annexed and Crimea are now Russian territory and will be Russian territory forever. Putin has made it clear that those two conditions have to be accepted to get a peace agreement. I find it hard to believe that Trump would accept those two terms and, if he did, that he could get support for that agreement in Ukraine and in the West, especially in the United States. So I don't think you're going to get a peace agreement.

Put more bluntly, Mearsheimer believes Trump lacks the political courage to pull this off. And even if he did do it, he would be defeated by the Ruling Class. Instead, as we’ll see, Mearsheimer believes that Trump will embrace disaster.

The alternative is that the war will go on and, at some point, the Ukrainians will collapse and you'll end up with a frozen conflict. This will be a disaster for Trump, because it will look like he lost the war. Joe Biden has done a brilliant job of kicking the can down the road so that when Ukraine finally collapses Trump will be blamed--not Biden, who should be blamed. But these are the two choices Trump has. Either he agrees to Putin's terms and you get a real peace agreement, or the war goes on, Ukraine loses, the West loses, and Trump is in real political trouble as a result.

[Discussion: Would Macgregor's proposal to simply pull the plug quickly be preferable?]

JM: It would absolutely be preferable. The problem is that it's politically almost impossible for Trump to do this.

I’m simply not persuaded that this is politically impossible. There is a lot of unhappiness in the House and across the country with the war on Russia. So now DD invokes Tucker’s view—and then refers to the comments that Patrushev made, which we’ve discussed here.

DD: I was actually on Tucker Carlson show a couple of days ago--they haven't actually aired it yet--but one of the things that really stuck with me was what Tucker suggested. We were talking about this issue of how things would be perceived, and he said, "I think Trump should just say, 'I don't care what anybody says,’ because his political opponents are not going to like him, so he should just do what makes sense for his people, and the people that voted for him, one of the big reasons was because he was going to bring this to an end.” He said those people would be happy and the other ones are never going to be happy anyway, so I truly hope that Trump takes that course of action.

JM: Yeah, I agree with you completely. My only point is it will not be easy to do.

DD: Oh yeah, I think it would be enormously difficult but, to your point about what happens if he's not willing to do the hard leadership stuff and take the heat that for sure will come from a number of different quarters, not least from some European capitals, I think what may happen on the ground could be problematic. There was a comment--little remarked upon in the West--from Nikolai Patrushev, a senior adviser to Putin. He came out and said that, as far as Russia is concerned, there will be no deal done until all the tasks of what they call the Special Military Operation are accomplished. And a couple things that were really noteworthy to me were, he said 'We are particularly concerned that the violent coercion of the Neo-Nazi ideology along with the ardent Russophobia are destroying Ukraine's once prosperous cities, including Kharkov, Odessa, Nikolayev, and Dniepropetrovsk. It is not excluded that in the coming year Ukraine will cease to exist at all.

I remember one of the first times we had you on our channel you said you thought they would take eight oblasts--not just the four.

JM: And it may even be nine or 10--it remains to be seen. They may not, but I think it is likely. You want to remember that, as long as NATO continues to insist that Ukraine will be brought into the alliance, the Russians have great incentives to take more territory rather than less. This is why you and I have argued for a long time that some sort of agreement should be reached now before the Russians take any more territory or have an incentive to take more territory, but nobody of course has listened to that and we continue to talk about bringing Ukraine into NATO.

DD: What do you think Trump will try to do when he comes into office next Monday? Do you think that he will try to reach some kind of an agreement or do you think that he'll just try to say, 'Hey, we're going to go for something big to make us look good,' but knowing, presumably, that it's not going to succeed. How do you see that playing out?

JM: What can he do to make us look good? Joe Biden would have done that if that was a serious option. It's not a serious option. Trump can't up the ante militarily against Russia because we just don't have the weaponry that we can give to the Ukrainians to make a meaningful difference in this conflict. The $64,000 question is whether Trump can get a deal. You know, they're talking about 'let's have a ceasefire'--this is a non-starter as you pointed out, and then you come back to the question of whether or not they're going to agree to the terms that Putin has put on the table. Maybe they will, but I think it's unlikely that they will, and that means that the war will go on. All of this is a way of saying Trump is screwed.

The Trump team, when you listen to them talk, and you saw this with Rubio with his constant use of the term 'balance' [smiles broadly], believes that we have leverage, the Russians have leverage, therefore there's bargaining space. We're going to work out a deal and live happily ever after. I'm sorry, this is not the reality that we're facing. The fact is the Russians hold almost all the cards. They're winning and we have no way of rectifying the situation. They're in the driver's seat. They're driving a hard bargain. And, because they believe they're facing an existential threat, they're not screwing around in Ukraine. They want to get a deal that secures their prospects for survival over the long term, so they're going to play hard ball and Trump is going to have to make serious concessions because of the imbalance of power that exists with regard to this particular war. The question, again, is whether Trump is willing to make those concessions.

Or, put it this way. The Russians are serious. We’re not. So it comes down to Trump. Is he serious? I tend to think that he is, for the reason I keep coming back to. If he allows foreign matters in Russia and the Middle East—and even in China-to consume his presidency right from the start, he can kiss MAGA goodbye. I think he understands that. I further believe that if Trump communicates that choice to the American people, they’ll choose MAGA. But that’s not a guarantee. The Anglo-Zionists still control much of the discourse and most of the political money, and they don’t actually give a rat’s ass about We The People—or, You The Peons, from their perspective. But Trump has one helluva lot more leverage this time around.