"the following is a conversation with John mimer a professor at University of Chicago and one of the most influential and controversial thinkers in the world he teaches speaks and writes about the natu..."

"all this is Alex Freedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's John mammer can you explain explain your view on power in international Pol..."

"nations in relation to each other are is essentially in a state of anarchism yeah well Anarchy basically means the opposite of hierarchy sometimes people think when you're talking about Anarchy you're..."

"is what the Chinese call the century of national humiliation from the late 1840s to the late 1940s the Chinese were remarkably weak and the great powers in the system prayed upon them and uh that send..."

"status to military might but you're saying as you see the world today it has to be that way yeah I'm arguing it is obvious if you're a state in the International System uh do you want to be weak uh if..."

"International System really matters it's the fact that you're in this anarchic system where survival is your principal goal and where I can't know your intentions right you're another state I can't kn..."

"big divide uh within the world of international relations theory is between realism and liberalism these are Tim honored bodies of theory and before I tell you what I think the differences are between..."

"wars uh and this basic argument is inherent in Francis fukiyama the end of History he argues that democracy Triumph first over fascism in the 20th century it then triumphed over communism and that mea..."

"intentions remember for realists like me uncertainty about intentions really helps Drive the train but if you're talking about two democracies right the argument there is that they know each other's i..."

"period before World War I we're in Europe it's 1913 or early 1914 what you see is that you have an intense security competition between all of the great powers on one side you have the Triple Alliance..."

"argument the defensive realists make is that if you try to gain more power the system will punish you the structure will punish you I'm not a defensive realist I'm an offensive realist and my argument..."

"there some degree on the human psychology side that resentment because of how because of what happened after World War I led to Hitler wielding so much power and then Hitler starting World War II so t..."

"every time I look at him or listen to his speeches uh he does not appear to be charismatic to me but uh I've talked to a number of people who are experts on this subject who assure me that he was very..."

"War does offensive realism answer the question why Hitler attacked the Soviet Union Yes because from a military strategy perspective you know there's pros and cons to that decision pros and cons to ev..."

"uh but I I'm not terribly comfortable making that argument I think the ver mock by the summer of 1941 was a finally tuned instrument for War and the Red Army was in quite terrible shape uh Stalin had ..."

"Battle of staling gr tells at least to me a story of extremely Brave fighting on the Soviet side and that it's a component of War I it's not just structural it's not just military strategy it's also t..."

"to think on a much grander scam than the Holocaust what what would have happened to the Slavic people to the to the Soviet people absolutely all you have to do is read The Hunger plan right and they a..."

"of whole cloth that he is an aggressor that he's the second coming of Adolf Hitler and that what he did in Ukraine was try to uh to conquer all of it and he failed but uh with a little bit of luck he ..."

"manifestly clear um when the Cold War ended and they exacted a promise from us that we would not expand NATO and then when we started expanding NATO they made it clear after the first trunch in 1999 t..."

"face in 2014 and when it blew up in our face in 2014 what did we do did we back off and say well maybe the Russians have some legitimate security interest no that's not the way we operate we continue ..."

"most importantly they made it clear that Ukraine in NATO was unacceptable can we talk about the mind of Vladimir Putin you've mentioned that this idea that he has aspirations for uh imperialist Conque..."

"Affairs so he has consistently put as a primary concern security as does the United States he's put for Russia security making sure that NATO doesn't get close to its borders I think that's clear yeah..."

"and therefore I think Putin tends to be more sensitive about security uh than any American president in recent Times Europe on one side China on the other side it's a complicated situation yeah and we..."

"hegemon and uh I asked Mike what Putin's response was to that and uh Mike said that Putin didn't believe it uh and uh but Mike believed it he should believe it and that we could move NATO Eastward to ..."

"policy we've talked about how Wars get started how do you hope the war in Ukraine ends what are the ways to end this war what are the ways to achieve peace there to uh end the the I would say senseles..."

"potential for escalation there will be great uh so I think this is a disaster that's a a very realist perspective let me ask you sort of a the The Human Side of it do you think there's some power to l..."

"shut this one down and worked with Bennett and worked with erdogan we might have been able to shut the war down then but it was the United States well let me sort of uh push back on that you're you're..."

"all security ties with the West right it's not like uh you can say we're not going to expand NATO to include Ukraine but we're going to continue to have some loose security arrangement with Ukraine no..."

"hope for but the point is you have to get the ukrainians to accept that you have to get the ukrainians to accept becoming a truly neutral State and conceding that the Russians keep a big chunk of terr..."

"Russians have a vested interest in if if it's a neutral Ukraine they have a vested interest in that Ukraine flourishing but that then brings us back to the territorial issue right well so do you belie..."

"experience over Minsk I only bring this up because it cuts against your argument that leaders could pick up the phone and talk to each other and trust each other at least somewhat uh to work out a mea..."

"principal responsibility of any leader I don't care what country it is is to to ensure the survival of their state and that means that you know trust is only going to buy you so much and when you've a..."

"actually think one could argue that Putin was too trusting of the West before the war started uh and number two I think one could argue that he has not waged the war against Ukraine as vigorously as o..."

"ask him and my sense is that Putin is a straight shooter uh he's also very knowledgeable about history and he has simple theories in his head about how the world works and I think he would level with ..."

"you into the arms of the Chinese if there had been no war over Ukraine and the United States had and its European allies had gone to considerable length to create some sort of security architecture in..."

"and I believe I was correct and in fact Bill Clinton who played the key role in forcing Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons now says he has said it publicly you can find it on YouTube that he made ..."

"because I can see in the 21st century China Russia Israel United States using a nuclear weapon in this way blowing it up somewhere in the middle of nowhere that kills maybe nobody but I'm terrified of..."

"that's point one point two is let's assume that the Russians use two or three nuclear weapons in a remote area sweating by the way just just as a commentary the question terrifying yeah the question t..."

"some of it could be like you mentioned unintended there could be unintended consequences there could be a Russian missile misses and hits Poland these kinds of things that just escalate misunderstandi..."

"think about aliens a lot and the fact that we don't see aliens makes me suspect it's not so easy to survive in this complicated world of ours Switching gears a little bit and going to a different part..."

"uh I think given the fact that this was in the planning stages for probably about two years uh and the Abraham Accords with regard to Saudi Arabia are relatively new phenomenon I don't think that's uh..."

"they have done yeah even the metaphor of Mo the lawn is disturbing to me in many ways I actually saw uh Norman filastine I think say that well then if you use that metaphor then you could say that Ham..."

"two-state solution indeed many American Jews and many Israelis have pushed for a two-state solution because they think that that is the only way you're going to get uh peace uh between the two sides u..."

"direction and the Israelis here are the key players more so than the Palestinians because it's the Israelis who control greater Israel it's the Israelis who you have to convince now I want to be clear..."

"submission in terms of the people who live in Gaza to include the elites and the people who live in the West Bank to include the elites they would much prefer to move to some sort of situation where u..."

"occupation the idea that you can use what Z Yaba insky called the Iron Wall to beat the Palestinians into submission is delusional it's just not going to happen the Palestinians want a state of their ..."

"effectively an apartheid state I mean that's what the occupation has led to and all sorts of people have been predicting this for a long long time and you've now reached the point you know here in the..."

"that plus the fact that the Israeli government uh is filled with people uh who have no interest in a two-state solution they're ideologically deeply committed to a greater Israel they want all the lan..."

"uh to follow in the footsteps of Arafat and accept a two-state solution but uh even if you do that at this point let's say that you know there's a lot of willing inness uh intellectually on both sides..."

"the extent to which Israel and the United States are joined at the Hep and we support Israel no matter what almost all the time uh and uh our argument is that that is largely due to the influence of t..."

"argument that we made and uh we of course got huge push back for making that argument what's the underlying motivation of the lobby is it religious in nature is it um similar to the way warhawks are s..."

"all the Jews this is not to say there's not a religious dimension for some of them but I think that the the main connection is much more tribal in nature so I had a conversation with Benjamin Yahoo an..."

"an anti-semite okay if that's what an anti-semite is somebody who criticizes Israel you know probably half the Jewish Community if not more in the United States is anti-Semitic and of course you get i..."

"your way through the through the discourse it's shortcut no it's the silence people right it's very very important to understand that one of the lobb's principal goals is to make sure we don't have an..."

"to have discussions because it um I mean I wonder if you can sort of speak to that um because there's this silencing effect of calling everybody into Semitic but it's also true that there is anti-Semi..."

"templates for that and I I just wonder if you can comment on operating as a historian as an analyst as a strategic thinker in this kind of space yeah we obviously when we wrote the article which we di..."

"I mean you hit the nail right on the head that's exactly right and you know and there was nothing that we said that was anti-semitic by any reasonable definition of that term and you know huge numbers..."

"marketplace of ideas and easily knocked us down the problem was that our arguments were quite powerful and instead of engaging us and defeating our arguments they wanted to silence us and this is not ..."

"that a healthy debate on the issues that we were raising would have been in not only in America's interest but it would have been in Israel's interest yeah I mean um Underneath It All is just I wonder..."

"hate each other uh and uh in a funny way that hatred almost never goes away uh and uh I guess there are some exceptions to that uh if you look at the Germans after World War II they've gone a long way..."

"interesting to ask to go back to World War II now you said uh you studied Nazi Germany in in the 30s from a perspective of maybe offensive realism uh but just to look at the Holocaust it's sometimes p..."

"they've been bombing Gaza but I would not not use the word genocide uh for me a genocide is where one side attempts to eliminate another group from the planet uh I think that what happened with the Ho..."

"yeah but there's also levels of things you know using uh Germans using uh human skin for lamps there's just levels of evil in this world yes but you don't see that with I mean that's not what Hamas is..."

"out Hamas Fighters and by the way the Israeli spokesman the IDF spokesman has explicitly said that we are not pursuing Precision bombing and that what we are doing is trying to you know maximize the a..."

"beings and uh engaged in torture and torture yeah no I think if you look at how we reacted to 9/11 and how the Israelis are reacting to what happened on October 7th uh there's uh quite a bit of simila..."

"and they misbehave I would argue in the Israeli case uh that it would have been good after October 7th or starting on October 7th if the United States had uh tried to hold the Israelis back and counte..."

"going to buy them anything right and in fact it's going to cost them right because people all over the planet are turning against Israel uh I saw you know an Israeli think tank today uh that has been ..."

"an argument for going after Hamas and doing it in a c surgical way or as surgical a way as possible uh but uh that's not what they did and again my point to you is I think that this punishment campaig..."

"the question is how do you deal with the Palestinians given what's just happened well there's people in the cabinet and then there's history and history remembers great leaders and so uh Benjamin nyah..."

"just um uh the slippery slope of of hate is has taken off it's quite depressing to watch what's going I I agree 100% unequivocally depressing but you know of course as you talk about the the role of y..."

"down immediately March Yeah March right and and you remember by the way not to go back to Ukraine in great detail in the fall early fall of 2022 the war starts February 2022 there's March 2022 which w..."

"uh but that's my view there and uh with regard to the Israelis my only point about Israel is that it would be better for Israel and better for the United States if we the United States were in was in ..."

"strategic importance for the United States Today Is East Asia and that's because China is there and China is the most serious threat the United States faces do you think there will be a war with China..."

"Taiwan militarily in part because it's uh as you said amphibious operations are difficult why will China not move on Taiwan is in your sense uh in the near future well it's because there's this body o..."

"to do is think about uh Normandy you know the American invasion of Normandy June 6th 1944 coming in on Omaha Beach right uh oh boy that was really difficult but there is a growing asymmetry of militar..."

"priority for us um what do you think about them meaning it and what do we do about that there's no question it's a top priority for them and there's no question they mean it but it's also a top priori..."

"Chinese attack us the Americans won't be there for us uh so the it have uh a damaging effect on our alliance structure which we cannot afford cuz because containing China is a wicked problem it's a po..."

"of avoiding a World War I guess the question is uh how do we avoid a World War it doesn't um seem like the military invol involvement in the conflict between China and Taiwan is the way well I I don't..."

"smart policy you have to build powerful military forces and you have to make sure you don't do anything that's provocative on Taiwan for example the last thing you want want is for the Taiwanese gover..."

"completely and uh this makes me a little nervous right to pick up on your point I mean the United States is thinking about the world in ways that are somewhat different than the Chinese who are real i..."

"potential conflict caution right well yes and no look your point is you want to empathize you want to be able to put yourself in the shoes of the other side yes I agree 100% but with that right it's v..."

"and you want to make sure that you don't overstep your bounds in terms of using that big stick this is the danger with rollback right that you get too aggressive and you precipitate a war right and yo..."

"possibility of nuclear war just to go back to Taiwan you know a switch areas of the world if you're interested in containing China and you're interested in deterrence and let's go back to those variou..."

"well use them I'm not saying we will but anyway a little saber rattling yeah right let me just zoom out on human history what makes Empires collapse and what makes them last when they do when you look..."

"run or the French Empire uh so the question for me is why did those Empires go away the why did the British Empire go away if you ever look at a map of the world in 1922 after World War I it's truly a..."

"overview starting in 1835 and running up till about 1885 it's mainly Germans and Irish that's why Germans are the largest ethnic group to ever come to the United States and the Irish are right behind ..."

"and we've had huge numbers of immigrants flowing in these immigrants who have been flowing in since 65 are not Europeans they're not mainly Europeans they're mainly Hispanic anics and Asians if you lo..."

"grow uh population wise in a robust way so we need immigration and we're an immigrant culture and this is a great virtue it has been a great virtue over time it should be a source of hope not worry th..."

"calling me an anti-semite they haven't met my grandsons my son-in-law nieces that I a niece that I have nephews that I have brother-in-laws that I have Jewish right come on and this this gives a reall..."

"humility speaking of humility you're mortal like all humans are do you Ponder your mortality are you afraid of it are you afraid of death I'm not sure I'm afraid of death uh I I don't want to die beca..."

"forever yeah the finiteness of things yeah you never think that when you're young I mean you know you think uh you're going to live forever and you're just not going to get old I never thought this wo..."