Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Welcome back to Going Underground broadcasting all around the world from the UAE amidst heightened conflict here in this region and reports of a new Pentagon doctrine for tactical nuclear weapons against China and Russia. It's 81 years today since Japan accepted the Potsdam Declaration after the USA killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. And in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the first and only time nuclear weapons have been used against cities. And in the past few days, Donald Trump invoked humanity's deadliest conflict, telling reporters that a strike on Tehran that he ultimately canceled would have been the biggest attack since World War II. This while NATO countries are may continuing genocide here in West Asia, in Palestine of a kind not seen since the Holocaust. Trump has repeatedly emphasized threats of Washington terror as his defeat against Iran becomes clearer to the world. But apart from threats to destroy Iran's civilization, he's also ramping up support for the dictator. Trump's word in Kiev Zelensky Remarkably few in the NATO nations coordinating drone attacks to kill civilians in the Russian Federation appear that worried as they escalate against Moscow. Joining me again is Professor John Mersheimer of the University of Chicago. He believes the principal threat to freedom of speech in the USA is Israel. And he's the multi award winning co author of of the Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy and the upcoming the Two Leviathan Problem why Rival Hegemons Cannot Coexist. Thank you so much, Professor Mearsheimer for coming back on Going Underground. You've said Trump is flailing around after like his predecessors launching this war in West Asia. But what does this actually say about governance in your country? How do you explain the inability of anyone in his cabinet, in the military, the Congress to explain to Trump what has been going on these past few months?
[00:02:03] Speaker A: Well, the fact is that Trump doesn't really listen to anyone else.
Trump is a genius in his estimation and he thinks that he knows what's best. So he has set up this system inside the White House where he does have some advisors, but they're basically people who live in fear of him. And if they tell him something he doesn't like, he's free to ignore them.
With regard to Congress, Congress has remarkably little power in the foreign policy realm. So President Trump is pretty much free to do whatever he wants. And this is how we got into this war in the beginning. You want to remember that almost all of his principal advisors were opposed to the war. This includes the head of the CIA, General Kaine, who's the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Vice president and the Secretary of State. They all thought that Going to war against Iran in the fashion that we planned to do on February 28th was foolish. And, of course, they proved right. But Trump refused to listen to them, paid hardly any attention, and instead listened to Benjamin Netanyahu and David Barnea, who is the head of Mossad. But this is just the way things work in the United States at this point in time.
[00:03:20] Speaker B: Yeah, in the past few days, there were all those reports of the depletion of US Military capacity. Do you think that was General Kaine surreptitiously trying to feed things to the press because they're too frightened to talk to Trump directly? Or do you think this was a tactical attempt at trying to say to Iran, we're running out and then trying to attack again?
What was behind all these leaks to the press that the United States was running out of military capacity?
[00:03:51] Speaker A: Well, the first point I would make to you is that before the war started, General Kaine was warning Trump that we had limited stocks of munitions for purposes of waging a war against Iran. And we certainly could not fight a protracted war.
But what's happened is we're engaged in a protracted war, and it's amazing the extent to which we have depleted our stockpile of sophisticated weaponry. And these weapons are not going to be easy to place. If you just look at air defense missiles, there are two kinds. One are the Thads, and then the other are the Patriots. We have used up 80% of our THAAD missiles and 65% of our Patriots with regard to, you know, our attack missiles, our smart missiles that you can use for offensive purposes, We've used up 50% of the Tomahawks, and according to press reports, virtually all of the ATACMs in prison.
So the United States has really seriously damaged its inventory of sophisticated weapons that it really needs in places like East Asia, in places like Ukraine and so forth and so on. And I think that someone who knows who it is has leaked this information in large part to send out a clear message that the Iran war has to end.
And certainly we cannot escalate in that war without even doing more damage to our weapons inventory.
[00:05:29] Speaker B: I mean, you said Congress doesn't have that much power in the American system as it is now. The Cabinet don't have either. What has been the role of Rupert Murdoch's Fox News in helping to continue the wars and continue the malign? I don't know what you would call the intel being distributed within the White House and the Pentagon. What is the role of Murdoch's Fox News?
[00:05:58] Speaker A: Well, putting aside Fox News for a second. And just talking about Rupert Murdoch, it's very clear that there are a significant number of billionaires who have enormous influence with President Trump. And it's clear that Rupert Murdoch is one of them and that Murdoch talks to Trump all the time.
So independent of Fox News, there's no question that Murdoch has a great deal of influence. But if you talk about Fox News and then talk about the Wall Street Journal, he owns the Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal is about as hawkish as you can get on Iran, on supporting the genocide in Gaza, on supporting the war in Ukraine, and of course, Fox News fits the same description. So Murdoch has huge influence in that regard. We all know that Trump loves to watch Fox News and that he gets lots of his information from Fox News. So I'm sure that's helped him to think that there is a way to win this war. Although I would imagine at this point in time that President Trump has come to recognize that there's no way he can win this war. And that's why I like to argue that he's flailing around.
[00:07:16] Speaker B: But the idea that a country where millions are employed by the military industrial complex, not one of them has any way to exert any important power over the United States government as regards the war, and that an Australian billionaire can have more power than all of that,
[00:07:39] Speaker A: it's the way it works in the United States. I don't know what else to say.
We know that even before President Trump took office that Congress had remarkably little power in terms of controlling the executive branch. It was true when Joe Biden was president.
And then along comes Trump, and Trump has a Republican majority in the Senate and the House, and those Republican senators and congresspeople are beholden to him, and. And they're scared stiff, except for a few exceptions, to challenge him. So he could pretty much do anything he wants without having to worry about Congress challenging him.
And in terms of the media, the media does complain here and there, but the media is actually remarkably hawkish when it comes to American foreign policy. And I think until things went south in Iran, the media, the mainstream media, that is, was generally supportive of what Trump was doing. Trump was not taking a lot of heat from the mainstream media.
So there are really no institutions in the United States except for alternative media platforms that challenge him. And those alternative media platforms are important because they have played a key role in shifting public opinion against President Trump on a number of key foreign policy issues.
But that opposition from inside the public doesn't matter much either, because Trump just disregards it.
[00:09:16] Speaker B: And one side effect, though, of all of this is ironically, do you think it will the whole conflict have sped up the withdrawal of U.S. troops and bases from this region in West Asia and from the Gulf, something that the MAGA base I know, Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massie would want it to. Do you think the Trump policy is going to succeed in ending the US Presence here in the Gulf? Military presence?
[00:09:45] Speaker A: There is at the very least going to be a great reduction in the U.S. military presence in the Gulf.
I mean, as you know, what's been happening here is that the United States has been moving assets out of the Gulf region to Jordan. And now there's evidence, given that the Iranians are attacking US Military sites inside of Jordan that were moving assets to Israel and back to Europe.
The fact is that these Iranian ballistic missiles are deadly effective against American military bases in the region, and they have either badly damaged or destroyed almost all of them.
And it's hard to imagine how once this war ends, number one, the United States is willing to rebuild these bases and put the assets, the American assets back in the region. And number two, it's hard to believe that the Gulf states themselves are going to want those assets on their territory because, in effect, what happens is those Gulf states become a giant magnet for these deadly effective Iranian ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones, which, by the way, will only become a more formidable threat with the passage of time because the Iranians have figured out exactly what they have here. And there are not good ways for the Americans or the Gulf states to defend against those missiles and drones.
So I think moving forward, there is no question there's going to be at least a great reduction of American military assets in the Gulf region.
[00:11:24] Speaker B: And that's, of course, where dictator Zelensky dictator being Trump's word for Zelensky in a memorable tweet.
That's where he wants it, because he wants some of those weapons. What did you make when you first heard about, presumably, Zelenskyy's attempt to widen the war by attacking Iranian vessels in the Caspian in southern Russia?
[00:11:48] Speaker A: I didn't think he'd get very far with it, simply because the Ukrainians have no interest in widening the war.
The Ukrainians are on the verge of losing their war against Russia. They're suffering enormously on the battlefield and in the air war. And it would be crazy for them to start a war with a country like Iran in the Middle East. And furthermore, from Iran's point of view, the last thing Iran wants to do is get into a fight with Ukraine, it makes more sense, much more sense for Iran to concentrate on winning the war in the Gulf against the United States and Israel. So neither side, and here I'm talking about the Iranians and the Ukrainians, had any interest in escalating. And of course, what happened is that the Ukrainians apologized to the Iranians and the Iranians called off their planned counterattack. The Iranians had planned to hit three sites inside of Ukraine and they called off that attack because Zelensky apologized.
[00:12:59] Speaker B: Professor JOHN Mershammer, I'll stop you there. More from the University of Chicago Scholar after this break.
Welcome back to GOING underground. I'm still here with the professor of political science at the University of Chicago, Professor John Mersheimer. Professor Mersheimer, you were talking about the apology of Zelensky when he attacked famously Iranian vessels in the Caspian Sea.
Since this conflict has not begun because arguably began in 2014. But you've been constantly explaining that Russia would win. And that voice has obviously been censored in NATO nation media. But even so, have you been surprised by Ukrainians domestic drone program of late, the deeper attacks within Russia?
What do you think? They've just they're hastening the end of the war, ironically, because Russia will react to them. Or what have you made of this massive domestic drone program much larger than perhaps any country in the world?
[00:14:11] Speaker A: Well, I think there are two dimensions to the Ukrainian drone capability.
One is how those drones affect events on the battlefield.
And I think the drones, the Ukrainian drones have been Ukraine's great savior on the battlefield. I believe that this war would have ended a year or two if the Ukrainians didn't have drones because the Ukrainians have a significant shortage of manpower, a significant shortage of artillery.
And in a war that was heavily dependent on just manpower and artillery, I think the Ukrainians would have collapsed a while ago. But the drones have really helped keep them in the fight in an important way.
So that's one dimension to the drone issue. Then there's the whole question of using drones in long range attacks into mother Russia. And this, of course, is what the Ukrainians have been doing big time in recent months.
And I don't think that those attacks have had any meaningful attack on the course of the war.
And of course, as you were alluding to, if anything, it speeded up the end of the war because there is good reason to think that the Russian response to these long range drone attacks by the Ukrainians is that the Russians have decided to retaliate by attacking Odessa and other Ukrainian sites on the Black Sea. And this has had a devastating effect on Ukraine because so much of Ukraine's agricultural product, as well as its industrial product moves out of Ukraine via the Black Sea sea, Black Sea ports. And of course, the most prominent one is Odessa. But what's happened here, and it's very important to emphasize this, is that the Russians have basically closed the Odessa ports. And the end result is that today Ukraine is effectively a landlocked country. And given the percentage of exports, Ukrainian exports that go out of those ports through the Black Sea, this is going to have devastating effects on the Ukrainian economy. So if anything, the long range drone attacks on the part of the Ukrainians against Mother Russia are backfiring.
[00:16:47] Speaker B: And where do you think in international relations theory in Western Europe, they get the idea that sanctions, they make the populations of the countries that are being targeted by sanctions less nationalistic and somehow less in favor of more determined action. Because we can see parallels between the ideas of sanctioning Iran or bombing Iran and making the Iranian population somehow against their government similar to those in Russia, when in fact, are we seeing actually the populations of Russia and Iran more militant than their leadership?
[00:17:26] Speaker A: Yeah, I don't understand why people in the west are enamored with this idea that you can punish the civilian population in a country and that will cause the civilian population to rise up and overthrow the government or get the government to surrender to US demands. This is what many people believe. All we have to do is really slam Russia with sanctions or get the Ukrainians to hit their population centers or bomb Iran and the end result is instant victory. In fact, the exact opposite happens. What you get is a rally around the flag effect.
There's hardly any evidence in the historical record that inflicting serious punishment on a civilian population in an adversary in wartime leads that adversary to surrender or leads the population to rise up and overthrow the government and then the new government surrenders. This just doesn't happen. But for some reason, we have this belief in the west that this is the way the world works. And by the way, if you think about it, this was the thinking that informed President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu's decision to enter the war against Iran on February 28th. We were going to launch a shock and awe campaign against Iran. What we were going to do is decapitate the regime and inflict massive punishment in a short period of time on Iran itself. And supposedly that was going to lead to regime change.
It was a cockamamie idea. And it's no, by the way, it's not at all surprising that Trump's advisors understood that it was a cockamamie idea. But Trump himself, for some reason, and Netanyahu, of course, believed this.
[00:19:24] Speaker B: Yeah. On Saturdays, going underground, we spoke to Professor Hassan Unal, a Turkish scholar, who said that NATO member Turkey tipped off Iran about the funding of the Kurdish militants that Trump himself announced to the world they were arming them in those fake demonstrations in January to kill Iranian police officers. What does he make of a NATO country tipping off Iran to fight CIA or American backed militants trying to create an insurrection in Tehran?
[00:19:57] Speaker A: Well, Turkey is not just any normal NATO country. It's not physically located in Central Europe or in Western Europe or even in Eastern Europe. It's in a very important way located in the Middle east as well as in Southern Europe.
And the Turks have all sorts of interests aside from those that apply to Europe itself. And if you look at the Middle east, the Turks understand full well that at this point in time, they're right behind Iran on the Israeli hit list. And they fully understand that if Iran goes down, the Israelis will put their gun sights on Turkey. Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has made this unequivocally clear. So the Turks have a deep seated interest in making sure that Iran survives this war. I think one could make an argument that the Turks have a vested interest in seeing Iran defeat the United States, because in defeating the United States, they're defeating Israel as well. And that is in Turkey's interest. So I find it hardly surprising that the Turks tipped off the Kurds, excuse me, the Iranians, about this situation regarding the Kurds.
[00:21:20] Speaker B: Yeah. Maybe someone from our audience can show how Article 5 works in that kind of situation.
I wouldn't normally ask a scholar this question, but such are the times we live in. Laura Loomer is apparently someone who has the ear of President Trump. And we were talking about the importance of analyzing policy in terms of these individualistic small cabals in Washington. She's an influencer who was recently interviewing Zelensky.
Do you see her interview with Zelensky and her interview support for the Israel Lobby, symptomatic of the end of these conflicts and the end a last gasp of the neocon power in Washington. What do you see as the significance of a person like that who has the ear of the president?
Speaking of her wholehearted support for both Netanyahu and Zelenskyy, I'd make a number of points.
[00:22:18] Speaker A: First of all, I find it hard to believe that Laura Looma has all the influence that she does in Washington. She has absolutely no credentials. She knows nothing about international politics. She's the last person that Trump should be listening to.
But for some reason he is listening to her. Second point I'd make is that she has Israel lobby written all over her, there's no question about that. And she's gone to great lengths to push forward with Trump policy moves that favor Israel.
And for a long time now, and this would be my third point, it's quite clear that she was very sympathetic to Israel and pushing Israel's agenda, but she was not in support of Zelensky.
But what's happened is that she's been convinced, probably by people inside the Trump administration that it makes good sense for her to play nice with Zelensky as well as with the Israelis and of course the Americans. And I think that what we have seen is that she's done this 180 degree turn on Ukraine. But does this really matter? I don't think so. The war in Ukraine is going to be settled on the battlefield. It's really between the Russians on one side and the Ukrainians and the Europeans on the other side. The Americans just don't matter that much. Trump doesn't matter, really care.
And plus he's up to his eyeballs and alligators, as you know, in Iran.
So the question of what happens in the Ukraine war doesn't matter. In terms of Laura Loomer and in terms of the Middle East, I don't think she matters much there either because I think the Israel lobby has been exposed. People like Laura Loomer have been exposed and their influence has been greatly diminished
[00:24:16] Speaker B: and you helped greatly to expose that Israel lobby. But just finally, of course, there may be a Democrat administration around the corner. Midterms are coming up. These so called Marxists and Communists that Trump talks of are winning seats in Michigan.
Interesting that while they do have views about Gaza and the genocide, that reflects your concerns. Since the time of your publication of the Israel Lobby, they still wholeheartedly support Zelensky and the backing of sending us money and weapons and I don't know, maybe soldiers to help Ukraine.
A problem within the left in your country that they don't seem to understand. The Ukraine war because. I don't know, because you haven't published a book on the Ukraine lobby. I'm not sure what's going on there.
[00:25:12] Speaker A: Well, I think the Russophobia in the west in general is off the charts.
It's worse, I think in Europe, especially in Britain, than it is in the United States, but it is intense here in the United States.
And from the very beginning of the conflict in 2014, anybody who said anything that was at all sympathetic to the Russian position was going to be pilloried. And this includes me because I wrote a famous article in 2014 that said that the crisis, the Ukraine crisis, was the West's fault. It was all due to NATO expansion or more generally, to the West's move to try and make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia's border. I thought this was ridiculously foolish and that it was going to lead to big trouble, which it did. But if you made that argument as I did, you going to end up with many bullet holes in your body. And I could take my shirt off and show you that there are many bullet holes in my body from making that argument. And the truth is that very little has changed since then. And this means that lots of people on the left as well as the right are super pro Ukrainian. And that, I think is what explains the phenomenon that you're talking about.
[00:26:34] Speaker B: You never know, it might be worse on the left and the right. Just finally, why do you think Trump no longer listens to those who supported him so much? What were the forces at play that stopped him listening to Marjorie Taylor Greene, to Tucker Carlson, to Thomas Massie, to Joe Kent, even?
[00:26:55] Speaker A: Well, I think that for a long time President Trump believed that he had the right formula for executing foreign policy and that people like Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene were simply wrong headed. And a lot of this had to do with Israel, by the way, as you know, Trump supports Israel's positions at almost every turn. It's quite remarkable. I don't think we've ever seen a president who sort of followed in lockstep what Israel wanted.
Joe Biden, he was close. He was close, there's no doubt about that. But Trump has been quite remarkable and in that regard. And, and because Massie, Thomas Massie and Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene and so forth and so on, were willing to challenge Israel and thought that Israel was basically a strategic liability, not a strategic asset.
Trump, given his support for Israel and given his support for the lobby, was willing to divorce himself from then.
[00:28:03] Speaker B: We're out of time. Professor John Mohammed, thank you.
[00:28:06] Speaker A: You're more than welcome.
[00:28:08] Speaker B: And that's it for the show. Our condolences to all those of you bereaved or affected by Washington's wars of aggression. We'll be back on Saturday with a brand new show. Until then, keep in touch via all our social media if it's not censored in your country, and head to our channel. GoingUnderGroundTV on rumble.com to watch new and old episodes of Going Underground. See you.
