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Whatever else one might want to say about the first two-and-a-half months of the Trump administration, there's no denying that there is no such thing as a slow news day. Virtually every day brings some major new event, often multiple ones, in the realms of foreign policy, wars, economic policy, free speech, constitutional and civil liberties issues. Even for a show like ours that is on every night — or everynightish — it is impossible to cover everything that deserves coverage.
With that difficulty in mind, we are thrilled to have one of the most knowledgeable and clear-thinking voices anywhere in our political discourse. He is a professor of International Relations and Political Science at the University of Chicago, John Mearsheimer.
Friday, however, is Mailbag Day and we have answered some of your questions. Keep sending them.
The Interview: John Mearsheimer
Professor Mearsheimer doesn't need an introduction – especially for viewers of our show, who have seen him on many times over the past several years and is always one of our most popular, and I would say, enlightening guests as well. We have a whole range of topics to cover this evening, including the ongoing Israeli destruction of Gaza, the decision by President Trump to restart President Biden's bombing campaign in Yemen, the broader threats of Middle East war, what is going on in the war in Ukraine, remember that as well as the terror policies that President Trump has announced and what it might mean specifically geopolitically for the U.S.-China relations.
Professor Mearsheimer is also the author of the groundbreaking book, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” as well as the highly influential 2014 article in the Journal of Foreign Affairs entitled "The Crisis in Ukraine is the fault of the West.".
G. Greenwald: Professor Mearsheimer, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. It's always great to see you.
John Mearsheimer: Great to be here, Glenn.
G. Greenwald: I actually thought about this morning and this afternoon, starting by talking to you about the free speech crisis and the assaults on academic freedom taking place in American academia. I want to get to that with you, of course, but I realized afterward, that it's almost impossible not to begin with the ongoing atrocities in Gaza because of the horror of it. The fact that the United States is directly responsible for it, I think really requires that it be the first topic that we talk about.
So, I guess my question to you is, and we've talked about it before, what do you think the Israeli motives might be in essentially destroying all of Gaza, destroying civilian life in all of Gaza? To me, it seems like there's no doubt any longer what their intentions are. They're saying it. There's really one possibility. I'm just interested in your view of what that is.
John Mearsheimer: Yeah, I think there is only one possible goal here, given what they're doing, and that is to ethically cleanse Gaza. And what they are trying to do is make Gaza unlivable, and their story will force the Palestinians to leave. But other than that, I can't see what possible motive they would have for continuing this offensive.
G. Greenwald: I've seen the sentiment around a lot. I heard it from people I like and trust and am colleagues with and friends. And I certainly feel the same way. It's like, at some point, you just almost feel like you're out of words, out of horror and disgust and rage to express the more you see. And I do think it's gotten worse in terms of the resumption. You could probably compare it to the early couple of months when there was this indiscriminate bombing and huge numbers of people killed. We're kind of back to that, but on some level, even worse when you add in the purposeful blockading of any food getting in, the use of mass starvation as a form of collective punishment and driving people out, forcing them to side between starving to death or leaving and giving that land of theirs to the Israelis. How do you compare what we're seeing in Gaza to other atrocities and war crimes that we've seen over the last several decades?
John Mearsheimer: Well, I think this is a genocide, and I would put it in the same category as what happened in Rwanda, what happened in Cambodia, and what happened in World War II with the Nazi Holocaust. I mean, the basic goal here is to kill a huge number of people in the Palestinian population, and that, I think, easily qualifies as genocide. In fact, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have both done lengthy reports that lay out the case for genocide, and I find those cases compelling. So, I think this is a lot like those other cases.
G. Greenwald: Even people who might be uneasy, or even critical of what the Israelis are doing in Gaza, nonetheless, have a very visceral, almost primal opposition to applying the word genocide to what the Israelis are doing in Gaza. They may say things like, oh, look, if their goal were to just wipe them all out and eradicate them, they have the weaponry to do so and they have not done that yet. And I guess some people at the same time say, “Does it matter if this is called a genocide?” I know you've used that word before; you just used it again. What is your understanding of exactly what genocide is? How do we recognize that and why does it apply? I guess why is it important to use that term for this case?
John Mearsheimer: Well, there's a clear-cut definition in international law, which was by and large established as a result of the Nazi genocide in World War II. It involves, focusing on killing a large portion of a particular population. That population could be based on ethnicity or religion or what have you but the point is that what you're aiming to do is kill a huge chunk of a particular population. Now, that can happen rapidly, it can happen slowly, but does that really matter? If you were to kill three million people in a particular group over five years, would that be any different than killing those people over five months? I think the answer is no. And I think you therefore really can't compare genocides with one another. In the same way, you can't compare apartheid in one system with apartheid in another system.
Over the years, many Israelis have argued to me that Israel is not an apartheid state because it's different than South Africa. But the point is comparing Israel to South Africa doesn't deal with the question of whether or not Israel is an apartheid state. You have a general definition of what an apartheid state is, and then you have to ask yourself the question, does South Africa and does Israel fit into that category of apartheid? And the same thing is true with genocide. There's no question that there are fundamental differences – and I would note fundamental similarities between the Nazi Holocaust and what's going on in Gaza. But the fact is that there are also fundamental differences but if you look at the definition of genocide you can categorize what's happening in Gaza as a genocide. As I said, if you look at what Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have done on this count, they lay out that this is genocide.
G. Greenwald: What would so ironic, I guess you can use a sort of lighter word than is merited, about what is happening is that so much of the international law and the conventions that emerge, including the Geneva Conventions, the new Geneva Conventions that emerged after World War II were specifically designed to prevent things like the Holocaust from happening again.
One of the prohibitions that the world agreed to was a prohibition on collective punishment. The Nazis would go to France and if there was somebody in the resistance in a certain town, they would say, “Turn them all over, we're going to kill 20,000 of the people in the town without respect to whether they actually did anything.” It's collective punishment, “We are going to punish this town if it produces somebody who was working against us or has in some way taken up arms against us.”
There's a war crime prohibition on collective punishment among others, using food as a weapon of war, mass starvation and the like, all the things the Israelis are doing. I kind of get the sense – and maybe this is actually a pervasive propagandistic success – that when people talk about saying the Nuremberg trials or war crimes or even the phrase “Never again,” they seem to think that what it means is these are principles to protect Jews and only Jews and not the rest of humanity, and therefore, you cannot have a genocide perpetrated by Jews, only against them, or you can't have collective punishment and war crimes perpetrated by Jews, only against them. Do you think that is a kind of common ethos in the West?
John Mearsheimer: I think deep down inside most Jews do believe that, that the word genocide cannot be applied to anyone other than the Nazis and what happened between 1941 and 1945.
But Glenn, let me say a word about collective punishment and use my discussion of that term, to distinguish between how I think the genocide against the Jews evolved and how this genocide in Gaza evolved. I don't think collective punishment…
G. Greenwald: Just to be clear, when I was talking about collective punishment, I wasn't necessarily using it as how the Holocaust evolved, although there was a lot of collective punishment there. But even, like I said, in places like Nazi-occupied France, against the French Resistance and the like, it was used there. But I'm definitely interested. I just wanted to be clearer about what I was saying, but definitely, I'd like to hear what you have to say with this distinction.
John Mearsheimer: Okay, but I think with regard to the Nazi holocaust, from the get-go, the aim of collective punishment was not at play. The aim was to annihilate all of European Jewry, or at least that portion of European Jewry that the Nazis could capture. So, it wasn't collective punishment at all.
I think the way the genocide in Gaza has evolved is different. I think after October 7, the Israelis concluded that if they really punished the civilian population in Gaza, that would cause that population to leave. So, I don't think the initial goal was to murder huge numbers of Palestinians. It was definitely to inflict massive punishment on the Palestinian population and to make the place unlivable.
But what happened is that the Palestinians didn't leave. The Israelis therefore had to constantly up the ante, which is another way of saying they had to consistently up the bombing campaign and the end result is that over time, I believe it morphed into genocide. As I said at the time, I didn't think in the fall of 2023 that it was a genocide, but by late 2023, given that the Israelis had been unable to drive the Palestinians out and were continuing to punish the population, and were increasingly frustrated, and therefore increasingly ramping up the punishment, it morphed into a genocide. And of course, it's just gotten worse and worse over time.
One would have thought that once the cease-fire was in place, this was the day before President Trump was inaugurated, January 19 of this year, we had put an end to the genocide. We would then just have to deal with the suffering in Gaza and hopefully ameliorate that to the point where fewer people would die than we thought would happen if the genocide continued.
But then, Trump began to talk about what his view was of Gaza and he basically gave the Israelis the green light to start the campaign of genocide all over again. That, of course, is what's happened, and the Trump administration has said hardly anything about what the Israelis are doing. The media and leading politicians in the West have said hardly anything.
So, the Israelis, they're pretty much free to do anything they want to the Palestinians and hardly anyone except for a handful of people like you and I will stand up and say that this is fundamentally wrong and has to stop.
G. Greenwald: We talked several times during 2024 about what you thought might be the likely impact of Trump's election on these wars in the Middle East and I think there was a sense that we know for sure what will happen if Joe Biden wins or Kamala Harris wins, which is a continuation of the status quo. They made no efforts to, for a cease-fire, occasionally made some noises about concerns for humanitarian ends, but really never used their leverage in any real way to back that up.
But the issue of Trump was always – well, you really don't know what you're going to get, I mean, he talks a lot about how he prides himself on being the first American president not to involve the U.S. in a new war. He obviously was the one who facilitated that cease-fire and seemed to take a lot of pride in it. Yet, now he's in office and he restarts Joe Biden's bombing campaign in Yemen, which I want to talk about, which you could count as a new war or an escalated war. And then, clearly, he gave the green light to the Israelis, not just to unravel his cease-fire, but to go all in on whatever they wanted to do.
What do you make of the expectations that you had of the Trump administration throughout 2024 versus the reality that we're now seeing?
John Mearsheimer: I thought there was some chance that he would try to shut down the war. This is before he came into office. I thought that in large part because he made much of the fact that he intended to be the president for peace, that he was not a warmonger, and that he was going to shut the war in Europe, shut down the war in the Middle East. And then, of course, he forced Netanyahu to accept the cease-fire, which was initiated the day before Trump was inaugurated, January 20 of this year. And that gave one hope because the cease-fire had three stages. But the second stage looked like it would really put an end to the conflict, that the Israelis would leave Gaza, and you'd have a cease-fire that would last for a long time.
But of course, the Israelis refused to go to the second stage of the cease-fire, the Trump administration put no pressure on the Israelis, and indeed, the Trump administration blamed Hamas for the fact that you had not gone into the second stage, and that of course was not true. But anyway, Trump has disappointed us, and he's no different than genocide Joe was.
G. Greenwald: I think that, and again, we saw this several times in the first term starting in 2017, obviously, Trump's not a pacifist, I mean, he escalated bombing campaigns, which he inherited from Obama in the way he said he would against ISIS and Syria and Iraq, etc. But you really didn't see this kind of militarism expressed.
Now he's back in, he's utterly unconstrained, at least in his mind – I was just reading today, in fact, some Republicans in the White House saying basically in response to all this uproar about the collapsing stock market or the declining stock market that he just doesn't care. He doesn't care about negative reactions from the public, doesn't care about negative reactions in the media, he feels like he got a mandate, he's going to do what he wants and that's what he's setting out to do.
And so, I guess, on one level, he seems to be in charge. It seems like he is determined to make sure that his will is carried out a lot more so than in the first term, where I think there was a lot of sabotage, kind of undermining, around him. This time he seems to really have had a plan, or people with him did, to make sure that everything that happens is because he wants it to happen.
So, what do you think accounts for that change? Why did he get into office right away and start bombing Yemen and giving the Israelis the green light to go wild, even wilder than they were before, and now threatening Iran with some sort of annihilation if they don't give the kind of deal that he wants on nuclear weapons?
John Mearsheimer: Let me answer that, Glenn, by making a general point about Trump and then specifically answering your question. I think that in his first term, he was not a radical president. I think that he pursued one radical policy, and that was that he drastically altered our policy toward China. He abandoned engagement with China and he pursued containment. That was the one, I think, radical shift and policy, both foreign and domestic, that took place in his first term.
As many people have said and Trump himself has acknowledged, the deep state basically boxed him in, much the way it boxed Obama in. When he came into office this time, I think because he had had four years to really think about it and think about how to deal with this issue, he came in with the thought in mind that he was going to get his way. And I think you see this, by the way, in the people that he has relied on to execute his policies.
Elon Musk, for example, and Steve Witkoff. I think Musk is the key person, the key right-hand person for Trump on domestic policy and Witkoff is the right-hand person on foreign policy. Neither one of these individuals is part of the deep state, neither one of these individuals is part of the Washington establishment. They're outsiders, they're Trump's buddies, they're the kind of people he can trust. He doesn't trust Marco Rubio and people of that sort.
So, what he did was he brought in his own team and he set out to pursue a radical policy, both at the foreign level, foreign policy level, and at the domestic level. And if you just laundry list a lot of the policies, it becomes manifestly clear that that's the case. First of all, with regard to tariffs; second, with regard to the whole notion of conquering territory, like Greenland, the Panama Canal; third, with regard to transatlantic relations; fourth, with regard to relations with Russia.
Then, if you switch down to the domestic level, his approach towards dealing with the judiciary, his approach toward dealing with a deep state, his approach toward dealing with immigration, and his interest in wrecking universities. These are truly radical policies across the board. You didn't see this the first time around but this time he's unleashed the dogs and he has lieutenants, again, Witkoff and Musk, who are working with him in this regard.
So, at a very general level, I would say you do not want to underestimate what a transformational president he intends to be and, given that he's just in the beginning of a four-year term, one can only wonder what this is all going to look like four years from now. So that's my general point.
My specific point is I don't understand what he's doing in the Middle East. I understand what he's doing with regard to Ukraine. I understand what he's doing with regard to the genocide. I don't understand what's he doing with regard to the Houthis and I don’t understand what he is doing regarding Iran, because these are all losing policies.
He would have been much smarter to force Netanyahu to stick to the cease-fire which would have been no fight with the Houthis, and he would have been much smarter to work out a deal with the Iranians. But getting involved in a shooting match with the Iranians and with the Houthis at the same time you're supporting a genocide, does not make sense to me.
G. Greenwald: Well, I suppose one might say that for it to make sense, one might go and read your 2007 book called “The Israel Lobby” because I do think, at least for me, my big concern throughout the 2024 campaign and then the election, was and I had a very similar idea toward that they knew that as you did, which is I thought the ceiling for Trump could be higher, but the kind of floor could be lower whereas I just thought was going to be a disastrous continuation of how things were.
My concern was that one of his biggest donors was Miriam Adelson. He said openly in the campaign, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson were the people who came most to the White House, other than the people who worked there. They were there the most. And every time they were there, they would ask for things for Israel, and I would always give them to them and he kind of joked and said, that they would come back two weeks later and asked for more. And I would say, “Come on guys, give me like a few weeks of breathing room.” He boasted that he gave them the Golan Heights which was more than they even asked for. He said during the campaign, “We're going to make Israel great again, and we're going to make America great again”. He also, as diverse as the cabinet is in many respects, the one litmus test that everybody had to pass to be appointed to any significant position was kind of indisputable, unbreakable support for Israel. I'm just wondering, what do you think, this is coming from him himself or it comes from influences around him?
John Mearsheimer: Well, I think obviously the influences around him matter. You and I both know how powerful the lobby is, so there's no question that he's getting pressure there. I don't think Trump cares very much about the future of Israel. I think Trump is an America-First president.
I personally think what's going on here, I can't prove this, but my sense is that Trump is pursuing a radical agenda as I described, and there are a lot of very controversial issues at play on that agenda. And it does not make sense, given that agenda, for him to pick a fight with the lobby over Israel. It's just much easier to let the Israelis do what they want, make the lobby happy, don't get any flak from people in the lobby, and if anything, create a situation where the lobby supports you, and it doesn't get in the way of pursuing your radical agenda. So, I think that by and large, that explains what Trump is doing.
G. Greenwald: Yeah, and it was interesting the dynamic in the Republican primary, the hardcore people in the Israeli lobby, the sort of neocons who never trusted Trump, who didn't think he was reliable, they were almost entirely aligned behind Ron DeSantis. I mean, you can go back and just look at who those people are and you'll see that they really thought Ron DeSantis does care about Israel a lot more than Trump does.
Then, it was only once it became apparent that DeSantis had no chance of winning, that they kind of started their way into Trump's world to make sure that he was on their side with those things and I guess that is the calculation – maybe this is a little naive but, you know, everyone sees what we're seeing, everyone sees the same videos we're seeing, everyone understands exactly what the Israelis are doing in Gaza, it's not just the United States has been paying for an army that war, there's also a lot of countries in Europe doing the same, providing logistical support as well in the case of the U.K. throughout the EU, lots of countries have given money and military aid to Israel.
Is there any prospect at all that whatever you might call the international community outside of the United States, could ever look at this and through some kind of desire not to have this on their legacy and conscience that they just sat through this and kind of gave tacit approval to it or said nothing, might finally say enough is enough?
John Mearsheimer: Well, I don't think you're going to see that in the West. If you look at the situation in Europe, it's every bit as depressing as the situation here in the United States. I mean, everybody talks about Western values, and we often get up on our moral high horse and talk about how wonderful we are in the West compared to everybody else, if anything, this support of the genocide across the West shows that that claim is a bankrupt one.
I think there's much more criticism of Israel outside of the West, but that really doesn't resonate in any meaningful way. I think the one country that has gone to the greatest lengths to try and rein Israel in is South Africa and South Africa has paid a price for that. The United States has been giving South Africa, especially since Trump came to office all sorts of problems because the lobby and Israel have been putting pressure on Trump to make it clear to South Africa that it made a fundamental mistake pushing the case of genocide in Gaza in the International Court of Justice.
I think other countries look at what's happened to South Africa and it has a deterrent effect. They just say to themselves, “Do I really want to get out front on this issue and criticize Israel?” And here we're talking about countries outside the West because as I said, countries inside the West are a hopeless cause.
So, you have this situation where the only people who are today helping the Palestinians in Gaza are the Houthis. The only reason the Houthis are attacking shipping in the Red Sea is because the Israelis started the genocide up again. So, if there is anybody who deserves credit for helping the Palestinians in Gaza, it's the Houthis.
G. Greenwald: And look what they're getting as well, a massive bombing campaign aimed at them precisely for that reason.
Let me just say, on that question of South Africa, I meant to say this earlier when you were talking about the differences with South African apartheid, but the similarities as well.
I took my kids to South Africa last year, we spent a couple of weeks there, we met with some officials. There are a lot of amazing museums and with all this, like, residual signage and mementos of apartheid, and you go and you look at it and you immediately recognize a lot of similarities between how apartheid was carried out in South Africa, and how it's being carried out in the West Bank – and by the way, there are a lot of senior Israeli officials who have long said it's apartheid, including the former head of the Mossad, just a month before October 7, and lots of other Israeli officials too.
It's interesting because South Africa, even going back to Mandela and Bishop Tutu, were among the most local supporters of the Palestinians and critics of Israel because they identify so much with that cause. And of course, that is the reason why they've taken the lead in filing these war crimes charges against Israel.
Let me ask you about the Houthis. Did you want to say something about that?
John Mearsheimer: Yeah.
G. Greenwald: Good.
John Mearsheimer: I just want to say that it's very important to understand that a number of South African Jews who were involved in the anti-apartheid movement before apartheid collapsed have said that the apartheid system in Israel is worse than the apartheid system in South Africa was. Second – and this is a very important point – it's important to emphasize that Jews in the West, and this includes the United States, of course, have been incredibly vocal in their opposition to the genocide. And that's true in Europe as well. So, it's important that we don't come away from this discussion thinking that it's Jews who are supporting the genocide because many Jews are opposed to the genocide and, of course, the point I'm making here is if you go back to South Africa, many Jews were opposed to apartheid in South Africa.
G. Greenwald: Yeah. I mean, if you look at police arrests of pro-Palestinian protesters in Germany or protesters against the Israeli destruction of Gaza, so often they're German Jews. And you see the police coming and arresting German Jews because they protest against Israel, dragging them away, all in the name of fighting antisemitism or protecting the Jews, it's incredibly perverse.
Let me ask you about when we get to the academia discussion, we're going to talk about that a little more and I obviously always emphasize how many Jewish students participated in these protests, because that's deliberately obscured. Let me ask about Yemen and the bombing campaign there, the United States has been bombing Yemen pretty much for 20 years now without stopping. The Obama administration worked for the Saudis for an all-out war against the Houthis and then Trump, in his first term, bombed the Houthis, Biden bombed them all throughout 2024.
They seemed to be very resilient. It's amazing how you can watch a political movement like Trump supporters say, “No more wars in the Middle East,” and the minute he posted a video today of about 20 people in Yemen standing around a huge bomb went off and they were all killed. And there were all these Trump supporters saying, “Yeah, get the terrorists, get the terrorists.” It is amazing how you get people to sign onto a war instantly just by saying we're killing the terrorists.
What do you think are the dangers and geopolitical implications of what the Trump administration says is going to be a sustained ongoing bombing campaign?
John Mearsheimer; It's very important to emphasize, Glenn, that there was a big piece in The New York Times today that said that individuals from the Pentagon have been briefing Congress that the policy against the Houthis has not been succeeding, and we have been eating up huge amounts of ammunition, and this is undermining our position in East Asia where we're determined to contain the Chinese. So, Trump can say that we're on the verge of winning a decisive victory against the Houthis. He can say in public and he'll convince his supporters of that, I'm sure. But the fact is, that's not what's happening, and that's what people in the Pentagon are telling people in Congress behind closed doors. So, we in the past were unable to defeat the Houthis. We are unable to defeat them now. Trump can bomb them from now to kingdom come and the end result is going to be the same. The Houthis are going to remain standing.
G. Greenwald: Before we get to some of the domestic issues, I want to ask you about what you alluded to just a minute ago, which is the transatlantic relationship, NATO, the way in which the Trump officials are being quite open about their contempt for the Europeans. And even when we got a glimpse of what they were saying in private with that Signal Chat, JD Vance in particular, but a lot of other people as well, were just spewing overt contempt of the Europeans. Trump has obviously harbored that for quite a long time, not just because he perceives – I think justly – that they don't pay their share, the United States fights their wars and protects them while they have a healthy welfare state, but also because the people in the European capitals tend to look down on Trump, look down on the people around him, and I think that's part of it.
Do you think the last couple of months have ushered in a lasting, permanent and fundamental transformation of the relationship between the U.S. and Europe?
John Mearsheimer: Yes. I think that Trump is determined to significantly reduce the American commitment to NATO or the American commitment to Europe. I don't think he's going to eliminate it completely, but he wants to greatly reduce our presence in Europe and he wants the Europeans to take care of their own security or be principally responsible for taking care of their own security, and he wants the Europeans to deal with the Ukraine problem.
There are a variety of reasons for this, one of which he wants to pivot to Asia, as do most people in the national security establishment because they understand China is a bigger threat than Russia is. In fact, Russia is not much of a threat at all. When you marry that strategic logic with the fact that Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, have contempt for the Europeans and then you marry that with the tariffs that we've now put on the Europeans, it's hard to see how the NATO alliance is going to be anything more than a hollow shell four years from now.
G. Greenwald: But do you think that is a valid premise, namely that NATO was important when it was necessary to contain the Soviet Union, to protect Western Europe against incursions by Moscow – obviously, the Soviet Union has not been around for several decades now and, therefore, the rationale for NATO and especially the need for the United States to pay far more than the Europeans do for their defense, the moment has come to stop this kind of handout to the Europeans and force them to defend themselves? I mean, do you find that convincing or valid?
John Mearsheimer: Yes. The fact is, Glenn, I was in favor of pulling it out of NATO and pulling out of Europe after the Cold War ended, and certainly after the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991. The purpose of the NATO alliance was to contain the Soviet Union. I thought that made eminently good sense during the Cold War, I fully supported it, but once the Soviet Union went away, what was the purpose of staying in Europe?
I would have brought the forces home and I would've concentrated on what Barack Obama called nation-building at home. I think that was much more important. I think presidents have the principal responsibility to the American people, and the idea that American leadership involves us policing the entire world, having forces in every nook and cranny of the planet, and trying to run everybody's politics, I think is a prescription for disaster. So, I would have gotten out of here.
G. Greenwald: Yeah, it is ironic, too, that the National Security establishment has been saying we need to pivot away from the Middle East to Europe that goes all the way back to Obama and even before. That was Obama's foreign policy, we needed to get out of the Middle East and so we could focus on Asia. And obviously, the more wars you finance in the Middle East, and the more wars you start in the Middle East, the more that goal is going to get impeded and it was true for Obama as well.
John Mearsheimer: Yeah, that's exactly right. And I don't know if I already said this to you, Glenn, but if you look at the piece in The New York Times today that talks about the bombing campaign against the Houthis and how much ammunition we're expending against the Houthis, the point was made in the article that it is hindering our efforts in the Pacific. It's hindering our efforts to deal with China. And this just tells you that from an American point of view, if you think that containing China is important – and the Biden administration and now the Trump administration both believe that is the case – then what you want to do is you want to reduce your footprint in the Middle East. You want to greatly reduce your footprint in Ukraine so that you can pivot fully to Asia. But, in fact, what's happened is we've gotten deeper and deeper into the Middle East.
Go back to our earlier conversation about starting a war with the Houthis and thinking about starting a war with Iran and backing the Israelis, that's not getting out and diminishing our footprint in that region. In fact, if anything, it's just the opposite. In Europe, I mean, Trump does want to get out, but he's not been very successful so far, and there's not a lot of evidence he's going to be successful anytime soon. And all of this is making it more difficult to deal with the Chinese.
G. Greenwald: You mentioned earlier, this kind of massive attack by the Trump administration on colleges and universities. You obviously care a great deal about academia, you have worked in academia pretty much your entire adult life. It's something that I know you value. You've spent a lot of time here before talking about your ardent belief in free speech and how the attacks on protests are eroding it on campus.
However, now, we have something in a different universe than what we saw in 2024: not only these deportations of law-abiding, legal immigrants in the United States for the crime of criticizing or protesting Israel, but also, demands now that colleges and universities adopt this radically expansive definition of hate speech and antisemitism to include all sorts of criticism of Israel, including now outlawing something you said earlier, which was comparing and contrasting Israeli actions with the acts of the Nazis.
That is something that wherever this expanded definition of antisemitism is adopted, what essentially could get you expelled if you're a student, potentially fired if you are an academic.
But then on top of that, you have this whole climate where speakers are being disinvited if they're going to talk about Gaza; you have Middle East studies programs at Columbia being put under receivership at the demands of the Trump administration. At Harvard, you have the Middle East Studies Director and Associate Director forced out because they're not pro-Israel enough.
What do you make of all of this in terms of the future of free speech and academic freedom in American academia?
John Mearsheimer: It's a disaster. There's just no question about it. Not only is free speech being attacked here, but I think that the Trump administration is bent on badly damaging universities. It's bent on wrecking them. When you come into a university from the outside, the way the administration is doing, and you dictate how that university is run in all sorts of ways that are completely antithetical to the way our great universities have been run for a long, long time, you are threatening the existence of some of the most important institutions, not only in the United States but on the planet.
I have a number of friends who are not Americans, who come from foreign countries, who can't believe what we're doing because they think that American universities are the most wonderful institutions in the world. This is not to say that our universities don't have problems. They do have problems, and those problems need to be addressed. But nevertheless, to bring a wrecking ball in and take places like Harvard and Columbia and Princeton and Penn and now they've added Brown to the list and take the wrecking ball to them, in my mind is really just crazy. Why would anybody do this? But again, as I said to you before Glenn, you do not want to underestimate how radical Trump is.
G. Greenwald: Yeah, well, I mean, just to make the argument that I hear often from Trump supporters and defenders of all of this, which is, yeah, universities used to be an epicenter of innovation and research, and produce cures; they created the internet – Mark Andreessen, a prominent Trump supporter who obviously was instrumental in the creation of the internet with Netscape told The New York Times that it was basically Al Gore, despite all the mockery he got, who really did lead the way in getting funding for key institutions to do the research that ultimately led to browsers and to the Internet. That's been the history of American academia.
The argument now is look, now they're just hotbeds of left-wing ideology, and gender studies, and sociology and beyond that, they can do whatever they want, but not if they're getting federal funding. If they get federal funding, they have to align themselves with the ideology of the federal government or they don't have to get federal funding and they can't do what they want. What do you make of those?
John Mearsheimer: Look, I think there's no question that the political center of gravity in universities is too far to the left and needs to be pushed back towards the center. It's not as dire a situation by any means as critics on the right make out. But I would come at this whole issue from a different perspective. I wouldn't focus simply on the inventions that come out of universities. I would focus on the phenomenon of critical thinking.
What universities do is they teach young people to think critically. Most young people have not figured out by the time they graduate from High School how to think critically, how to read a book and pick it apart and figure out what the author's argument is and how to counter that argument. What universities are really good at is teaching young people, whether you're in the hard sciences, the humanities, or in the social sciences, to think critically.
And free speech, of course, is inextricably bound up with critical thinking. You want people to be free to ask any questions that pop into their minds, you want them to be free to make arguments that disagree with the arguments that you, the professor, are making, this is what the enterprise is all about. It's what makes it such a wonderful enterprise. It's why people from all around the world are so interested in coming to our universities.
And what the Trump administration is doing, and of course, the Israel lobby is playing a key role here, is undermining this process by undermining critical thinking, by making it impossible to state your views on particular issues for fear that you'll be thrown in jail, or you'll be dismissed from the position that you're in. So, this is really a huge mistake on the part of the Trump administration, and it is a huge mistake on the part of the Israel lobby. They should absolutely not be doing this. It is not in the interest of Israel supporters to pursue these kinds of policies on university and college campuses.
G. Greenwald: I still remember the excitement I felt when I got to college and started exploring things and getting exposed to ideas I had never known existed. Not only that, but being encouraged, not just allowed, but encouraged to question every piety, every orthodoxy, I got into a lot of debates with professors who had been studying these issues for a long time, and they encouraged you to challenge them, and you have these exchanges of ideas. And what amazed me about it is that you have all these people who talk about preserving our nation and its kind of founding values and you go back to the Enlightenment, which is essentially what gave birth to the American founding, the Enlightenment ideals and values.
There was all this kind of, not just discussion about the supreme importance of free speech and free discourse but also a place where all taboos and all pieties get picked in question, which was, is academia. And this has been central to the American founding and the American way of life for centuries. And it's amazing to me to watch people who say that they are devoted to preserving American life and American values be so supportive of this full-frontal attack on this all for the benefit of a foreign country.
John Mearsheimer: I agree with you. Just to come in from another perspective, Glenn, the fact is that we live in a remarkably complicated world and it's hard to figure out what's going on. As you pointed out at the top of the show, it's harder to keep up with the news because there's a new issue every day on a new subject. And so, we collectively are having lots of trouble just trying to make sense of the world that we operate in.
What I think we do at universities is we teach critical thinking, which is what allows students who then become adults, young adults and older adults, we teach them to think critically about the world. We teach them how to try to make sense of the world so that they can navigate the world and make them better citizens. And I think this is just a very important function that we serve, and I think it, again, just is foolish in the extreme for the Trump administration and the Israel lobby to take the wrecking ball to that enterprise.
G. Greenwald: Obviously, what's on everybody's mind are these quite aggressive tariffs that Trump has imposed. But the two countries with the greatest economic power, who are now close to a full-scale trade war, are the United States and China. We saw some of this in the first Trump term, a kind of you could call it a trade war or retaliatory tariffs, but nowhere near to this extent.
What do you think are the implications, not necessarily economically, if you don't want to talk about that, but more geopolitically in terms of the U.S.-China relationship?
John Mearsheimer: I don't know what the economic implications are, to be honest. I'm not an economist…
G. Greenwald: Right, that's why I brought that out.
John Mearsheimer: Yeah. I really don't what to make of it. I think geopolitically, it will exacerbate tensions with China. I think we have a security competition here, and we have a competition that involves sophisticated or cutting-edge technologies. So, there's this military competition that's been set in play and this sophisticated technology competition that has been set in play.
And then you add to that the tariff war, the trade war, and it's just going to make relations worse. I think with regard to the Europeans; it's going to make our relations with the Europeans worse. There's no question about that. And I think from Trump's point of view, that's not a bad thing, because it will help him to work out a divorce with the Europeans, which I think he's interested in facilitating. But I don't think these tariffs are going to improve or help relations with the Europeans in any way.
I think the most interesting question from my point of view, and here we're talking about the geopolitical dimension, is what effect these tariffs have on the countries in East Asia that we would like to be on our side against China. If you look at the tariffs on Vietnam, for example, one would think that Vietnam is a country that the United States would want to rule away from China and have good relations with but I think the tariffs are up around the 45% level with Vietnam.
There are all sorts of other countries, of course, in Asia, like the South Koreans, the Japanese, and the Taiwanese, who are going to field these tariffs as well. I worry that relations with our East Asian allies will be negatively affected by the tariffs.
G. Greenwald: Our last question: I think every time you've been on in the last three years, the war in Ukraine has taken up, certainly, a good part of our discussion, if not the bulk of it. Now it's kind of reduced to a footnote at the very end. I almost thought about letting you leave without asking you, but I would feel bad if we didn't talk about Ukraine at all, because it is, despite people not paying attention to it, an ongoing major war still.
President Trump has seemed to have taken some meaningful steps to try to forge a kind of framework for a deal that could wind down that war, but so far there's not really much evidence that it's happening. I think he made some progress but, obviously, the war is still ongoing. The Russians just had a new conscription order to, I think, call up another 130,000 or 140,000 new troops. Where do you think things are with Ukraine and the possibility of Trump being able to facilitate an end to it?
John Mearsheimer: Doesn't look good. I mean, it may be the case that there's movement behind closed doors, and we just don't know about it. But out in public, it does not look hopeful. The real problem here is that the Trump administration desperately wants a comprehensive cease-fire. We want to stop the shooting right now and then we tell the Russians what we will do once we get the cease-fire: we will begin negotiations on the final peace settlement.
The Russians have exactly the opposite view. Their view is, “We don't want to cease-fire now because we're in the driver's seat on the battlefield and indeed we expect to win big victories in the spring and in the summer and further improve our situation on the battlefield. So, a cease-fire now makes no sense to us. What we want is we want negotiations on what the final settlement looks like and once you, the Americans, sign on to what the final settlement looks like.” That's another way of saying, “Once you the Americans agree to our principle demands, Moscow's principle demands, we will then agree to a cease-fire.”
So, you have two fundamentally different approaches to how to move forward. And the question you have to ask yourself is, who's going to win in this tug of war? And the answer is the Russians are going to win because they're in the driver's seat. They're simply not going to agree to a comprehensive cease-fire and they're going to continue militarily fighting on the battlefield and they are going to continue marching forward.
I believe, Glenn, that at some point the Ukrainians and the Europeans, who are a huge obstacle to getting any kind of a peace agreement, at this point will come to their senses and realize that prolonging this war makes no sense from Ukraine's point of view, because they're just going to lose more territory and more Ukrainians are going to die. Hopefully, then Trump will be able to move in and get some sort of negotiations going where we can finally put an end to this war, either through a final peace agreement or by causing a frozen conflict.
G. Greenwald: Alright Professor Mearsheimer, it was great to see you I appreciate talking to you and it's always good to be able to cover so many topics like we did tonight, and I hope to see you again and shortly.
John Mearsheimer: Likewise, and thank you for having me on, Glenn. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
G. Greenwald: Absolutely. Have a great evening.
All right, every Friday night, we have a Q&A session where we take questions exclusively from our Locals members. We weren't sure if we were going to be able to get to it tonight. I usually like to talk to Professor Mearsheimer for as long as possible. We'll get to as many as we can.
The first one is from @iculus333, and he writes:
Yeah, so I'm not sure I identified as a Democrat or a liberal like in the early 2000s. I talked about before how I used to pay a lot of attention to politics in the '80s when I was going to college and then into the '90s going to law school. And then once I got into law school, I started working at a big law firm, a big Wall Street firm, for a couple of years and started my own firm. And I was really focused on my work and my law firm trying to build a practice of constitutional law. And I really kind of stayed out of partisan politics, especially in the nineties. It was a very small issue stuff with the Clinton administration dominated by things like the Lewinsky scandal and school uniforms. I mean, there was a war, of course, in Yugoslavia bombing Serbia, advocating for the independence of Kosovo, which we're now saying is outrageous when the Russians want to do that.
So, I mean, there were some things going on, I don’t mean to completely diminish it, but it was the fall of the Soviet Union, the peace dividend, etc. There was a lot of focus on domestic issues. Really didn't care much about partisan politics. And it was really only after 9/11 that I started getting very interested, primarily because of this radical change in the climate where I thought there was an attack on dissent, institutions had been capitulating but more so it was this idea that we were imprisoning people without any due process in Guantánamo, but also American citizens – there was a U.S. citizen named Jose Padilla who is arrested at the Chicago International Airport when he arrived in January 2002, they accused him of being the dirty bomber and didn't charge him with any crime. They just arrested him: no charges, no access to lawyers, no access to the outside world for the next three and a half years until the case made it to the Supreme Court. They were worried the Supreme Court was going to say he's an American citizen you have to give him charges in a trial and they kind of then brought charges finally and argued to the Supreme Court that that question was moot.
All those civil liberties and obviously NSA spying on American citizens were the motivations that I had to start writing and paying a lot more attention to politics and doing journalism and I never considered those values left or right. I really didn't. I really didn’t.
Obviously, I was criticizing sharply the Bush & Cheney administration and the neocons that surrounded them. And so, because that was the first thing I did in my journalism career, that's the way people got to know me, they assumed I must be a liberal or a Democrat or whatever since I was constantly condemning the Bush and Cheney administration. But I never perceived values like due process or the rights of citizens and the Fourth Amendment to be particularly left-wing or Democratic Party values.
I was often criticized by the Democrats because people don't remember that the Democrats endorsed most of what Bush and Cheney were doing. Half of the Democratic Senate caucus voted to invade Iraq. Nancy Pelosi was, at the time, the ranking member on the Intelligence Committee in the House of Representatives and she was briefed on all this stuff, on torture in Guantánamo, on warrantless NSA spying, and she endorsed it all.
And then, once President Obama got in and began applying the same exact policies and even expanding a lot of the ones that he had vowed to uproot, I continued those criticisms that people think lost the sense of Democrat or Republican. I would say I was raised as a Democrat. My political influences were my grandparents. They were just very standard kind of pro-FDR, post-depression, Jewish Americans who identified with the Democratic Party, with American liberalism. I remember my earliest memory was them cheering for George McGovern against Richard Nixon.
So, it was kind of the ethos that I absorbed. Like the big debates in the ‘80s were often around social issues and identified more with the democratic view on those, like the idea that people should be free to do what they want. But all that has changed, it constantly changes. I think particularly once Trump emerged, so much of partisan politics or left v. right, radically changed how they manifest. So, I just don't think it's remotely helpful. I honestly never think about what is the position that I should take if I want to be on the left, what is the position I want to take when I'm if I want to be on the right.”
When I did a lot of investigative reporting in Brazil in 2019 and 2020 that dominated the headlines about the corruption probe that led to the former president Lula da Silva being arrested and our reporting led to him being released from jail, obviously the Brazilian left loved me and assumed I was a leftist, the Brazilian right hated me and assume I was a leftist, and I kept saying this is not my cause here. My cause is journalism and having an uncorrupted and unpoliticized legal process, especially when you're talking about putting people in jail.
And nobody believed me when I was saying, it has nothing to do with left-wing ideology for me. The right hated me because they thought I was on the left and the left loved me because they thought it was one of them too. And now I've done a lot of reporting that Bolsonaro supporters like a lot and the left is enraged by it. So, it always shifts, especially if you don't look at things through that metric and I really try not to. I'm not saying I'm perfect, I'm as subjective as anybody else is, where all the byproducts are experiences and beliefs. But I honestly don't look at politics that way.
That's why, from the beginning, I've always had a readership that couldn't be defined ideologically as left v. right. I always had libertarians, a lot of kind of partisan Democrats, people on the left and it changed over the years. I have a lot of Trump supporters now as well, but it's a very diverse audience. It always has been. That's the way I want it.
When I released my first book in 2006 about the Bush-Cheney attack on civil liberties called “How Would a Patriot Act?” the first place that I spoke about my book was the ACLU and the second place was the Cato Institute. And even though I was perceived as a liberal then, the first magazine that ever hired me to write an article to pay me was the American Conservative founded by Pat Buchanan, paleoconservatives who very much were in accord with me when it came to the Bush-Cheney powers, they were claiming and contempt for neocons and the like. So, it has always had this kind of mixed political spirit, and I still think that's the way I see things.
Especially now, with Trump and these radical realignments and transformations, I think trying to figure out what is left or what is right or what is Republican and what is Democrat in terms of the belief system that defines them is really unhelpful like it just obfuscates things more than it eliminates.
All right, next question, from @adoe:
That’s some ironic mockery. But anyway, and it ends with thank you, I'll assume it's intended in the nicest way possible. I think this is the important thing to think about. I know instinctively, intuitively, you would think, "Oh, it's the American Constitution. That's for citizens. It's the Bill of Rights. It's only for citizens."
Just imagine what it would mean if non-citizens had no constitutional rights. It would have meant that during the Biden administration, Joe Biden could have ordered, let's say, Jordan Peterson, who's not an American citizen but is in the U.S. legally, he could have just said, “I want him in prison for life because he's been criticizing my policies. I think he's too disruptive. He's disrupting and destabilizing America. I don't want to give him a trial, I don' want to charge him with anything, I don't want to have to convince a court that he's done anything wrong. Just throw him into prison. Or let's send him to El Salvador. Let them put him in prison and we'll pay El Salvador to do it.”
Would anybody have trouble understanding why that's tyrannical? Why that's completely contrary to the letter in the spirit of the Constitution? It's a lot harder to think about that if you're demonizing somebody. Oh, this is an Islamic radical who loves Hamas as a terrorist. And then people are like, “Yeah, throw them into prison, get them out of here. I don't really care.” A lot of time, most of the time, that's a lie. That's not true of any of those students being deported.
But the bigger issue is the Bill of Rights is conceived of not as a Christmas tree of presents and rights and benefits that are assigned only to a certain select group of people called American citizens. The Bill of Rights is a constraint on what the U.S. government can do to anyone under its power, including people who are in the country on a legal visa or green card, or even people in the U.S. illegally.
That's why the government can't just order the execution of say a green card holder because he criticizes the government. It's why they can't order the life in prison of someone whose only crime was crossing the border illegally and especially not without a trial. And it's not hard to understand why that's important to make sure the government can't. Even in 2008, Guantánamo detainees who were effectively in prison for life indefinitely with no charges, no trial, nothing, they weren't even allowed to go into a court hearing to argue that they had been wrongfully detained. It got up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said that the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, applies to anyone, non-citizen or citizen under the control on sovereign territory of the United States.
And all nine justices of the Supreme Court agreed with the principle that non-citizens have constitutional rights. The only thing at question in that case was whether Guantánamo counted as a sovereign American territory because the Americans had taken over Guantánamo. The Supreme Court, by a 5-4 decision said, “Guantánamo is also American land.”
It was never a dispute that noncitizens have the protection of the Bill of Rights. So that's one way of looking at it. Just imagine what would be possible if they didn't. But the reason, textually and constitutionally, courts have said this for 150 years. The first case I'm aware of, and I think there are ones before this, is in the 1880s, just so you don't think this is some invention of a, like, the war in court or some left-wing judges or whatever. It was back in the1880s. A Chinese national who was working inside the United States was suspected in California of having committed a crime and they basically just arrested him and put him in prison with almost no due process rights that citizens would get. He appealed his conviction to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, I think we've read this case to you before, that the right of due process applies to everyone in the United States, not just citizens.
The reason is, if you look at the wording that the founders purposely chose, or even the framers of the 14th Amendment purposely chose, it does not say that the government shall not have the right to deprive citizens of property or rights or life without the due process of law. It says all persons. The 14th Amendment says all persons in the United States shall be guaranteed the right of equal protection of law and due process. And it's not like they didn't understand the word citizen because there are a few constitutional provisions that apply only to citizens including the right to vote.
They know how to say citizens if that's what they meant. They didn't. They purposely said persons. It's a universal protection for anyone under the control of the United States. You see it actually if you go read the 14th Amendment or the 5th Amendment. And if you just think about what would be the consequences, the very perverse consequences of allowing the U.S. government to do anything to non-citizens, including people here legally. You could have a green card holder who's married to an American citizen and has three American kids and is here for 30 years and the government could just come to your house one day and say, “We don't like what you say, so we're putting you in prison for the rest of your life with no trial.” If you believe the Bill of Rights doesn't apply to non-citizens, you have no objections to that, you have no constitutional objections to them. But of course, that would be unconstitutional for the textual and prudential reasons I just said. You just can read the Constitution, you can read these cases, and it'll become very clear why.
All right, next question, we'll make it the last one Brian R. Duffy @brdduffy who says:
And he says:
I understand it's a leverage tool for negotiations as well. Most of the coverage I have seen is pessimistic about the chances of it working. Is there a guest that Glenn could have on that we could trust to shed some light on the subject? (Brian R. Duffy @brduffy. April 4, 2025.)
Now, obviously, this is something we've been thinking about and have been discussing because the terror policies that President Trump unveiled are indescribably consequential, causing consequences all throughout the world, not just economically, but geopolitically, and they're affecting every country in transformative ways.
One of the things I hope you listened to when I asked Professor Mearsheimer about tariffs, I specifically said, “Look, I'm not really asking you to describe what you think the economic outcome will be. Will it bring back the manufacturing base? Is it just a negotiating ploy? Will it drive up inflation or unemployment? Is it a tax?”
And the reason I didn't ask him that is because I know that he's not an economist. He didn't study economics. He's not an expert on tariffs or economic policy. And so, I just wanted to give him that out, to say, “Look, I'm not asking you to comment on the tariffs themselves, just how they affect the relationship between the U.S. and China” and I expected and I really appreciated the fact that he said, “Look, I can't talk about the economics of tariffs because I'm not an expert in this. I really don't know.”
And so one of the things that I've always tried hard to do since the beginning of my journalism career, since I had that blog back in 2005 and 2006, even when I was writing every day, you can go back and see, I don't write about topics where I don't feel like I have any specialized knowledge, or expertise, or particularly valuable insight. I just don't. I don't know much about economic theory. I don’t have the credibility or the competence in my view to sit here and opine on what the outcome of tariffs would be. I could if I wanted to. I've been reading all the things that you've been reading, I've been listening to all the people debate tariffs, not just now, but back in the first Trump administration – that was something he was advocating back then and did to some extent nowhere near the extent to now.
But I really talk about economic policy because I feel like I have a decent understanding of it, the kind of understanding that you get if you read and listen to the news or to experts. I talk to people whose views I respect on this issue. But I would be a fraud, I feel, if I sat here and said, “OK, I'm going to explain to you now the implications economically of tariffs.” I don't know. And I just don't want to talk about it.
Now, the one thing I do know about that I think is interesting and that I can talk about is the political evolution of this issue, by which I mean specifically that for as long as I've been watching the American left, they have hated free trade. Hated it. One of the biggest criticism on the left of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and one of the things that people hate about the Clintons is NAFTA and those other free trade agreements that ended up, I think in the view of a lot of people, certainly a lot people on the left, hollowing out the manufacturing base, deindustrializing the middle of the country, causing massive unemployment and the shuttering of factories, the downward mobility of the middle class and the shipping of jobs overseas.
I remember watching the 1992 presidential debate, where Ross Perot said, “Do you hear that sucking sound? That's the sound of jobs being sucked out of the United States, immediately heading to Mexico.” And he proved to be totally prescient on this.
There's a really interesting video that we'll put in the show notes next week – I actually promoted it on X when I watched it: Pat Buchanan wrote his 2011 book, I think it's called Suicide of a Superpower – he went on a C-SPAN show that was hosted by Ralph Nader. So, you had Ralph Nader well on the left, in fact, so on the left that he ran to the Democratic Party's left in 2000. A lot of people think he cost Al Gore the election. I don't. But so, you have Ralph Nader on the left here, you have Pat Buchanan obviously on the right, the populist right, and they both completely agreed on the evils of free trade.
In fact, both of them were at the 1999 very famous, notorious protest outside the World Trade Organization in Seattle that turned violent, because a lot of kind of Antifa types – I mean, there was no Antifa in that, but same kind of strain – but there were huge numbers of people there, from the left and the right, who didn't engage in violence, but were there to protest world trade, global trade, free trade.
And I think the idea that free trade and globalism are evils socially, economically and politically, is as close to what consensus on the American left, maybe in the Western left, as I think you can get. So, I have to say it's a little odd now to watch finally a politician who promised this during the election – it's not like he unveiled this out of nowhere: he promised he was going to do this during this election. Most of what Trump's doing is stuff he talked about in the election, not trying to get Greenland or the Panama Canal, not bombing Yemen, but a lot of the most controversial stuff, including invoking the L.A. and enemies act to have full discretion to deport not just illegal people here illegally, but also legally all the stuff you talked about in the campaign trail, the terrorists was one of them, and people voted for them. They were convinced that that would help.
So, it's very odd for me to see people on the left just, I'm not saying they have to support exactly how Trump is doing the tariffs, they do seem a bit haphazard to me, again, I'm not going to opine on that, but it seems odd for people on the left to reflexively say, “Oh my God, these tariffs are terrible” and to even cite the fact that Wall Street is angry about them, that the stock market is declining because of it, as though that's some terrible thing. Now the left is afraid of alienating Wall Street.
I thought the whole point was that we're tired of policies that only benefit a tiny sliver of the country. This concentrated corporate power that is globalist in nature, Wall Street barons, tycoons, and the like. So, because it's Trump, now, a lot of people are saying, “Wait a minute, we don't want tariffs. We want to keep the regime of global trade, of free trade.” Really? That's not what I've ever heard previously. And then there are a lot of people, I think the smarter, more thoughtful people, who don't have this reflexive reaction to Trump saying, “Tariffs can actually do important and beneficial things. We need them, we have to start undermining the regime of free trade, it's just not this way that he's doing it is not the correct way,” which seems to me to be a middle ground. It's kind of like immigration, where opposition to open borders when I started writing about politics was a very left-wing position. Bernie Sanders in 2016 when he ran was asked about open borders and he was horrified. Bernie Sanders said, “Open borders? That's what you favor? That's a Koch brothers’ proposal.”
And back then it was George Bush and Dick Cheney and the Chamber of Commerce and John McCain, people who were very corporatist in their interests and orientations who wanted immigration reform, wanted to open up the borders much more because that's beneficial to large American corporations. If you flood the labor market with cheap labor, you drive down the cost of doing business, you increase the bottom line, you gut out the unions and the protections that American labor has. That's exactly what happened and that's why the left was opposed to it. Cesar Chavez, the Mexican American union leader, hated immigration.
There's an article in 2011 by Jameel Bowie in the American Prospect, who's now like the supposed left-wing columnist for The New York Times, he's really just a partisan Democrat, but he wrote an article when he was at the American Prospect, I think it was in 2010, warning Democrats not to be too aggressive about or permissive about immigration because, he said, the people who will lose their jobs and suffer the most are Black and Latino Americans. Those are the ones who lose their job first, who will have to compete with undocumented immigrants.
Opposing immigration was really a left-wing view. The establishment Republican Part –, you have those populists, but the Establishment Republican Party wanted open borders. So now you just have this complete mix now. It's in a lot of ways the same with tariffs. I'm just amazed at how many people are so horrified that Wall Street doesn't like Trump's plan, that they're throwing a tantrum that I guess they want to preserve now the system of free trade.
So again, I'm not commenting on the merits of the tariffs and how they're done because I can't, I just see that political aspect to it. We talked about having somebody on this week.
The problem is that if I just have an economist on, who's vehemently opposed to, or vocally in support of Trump's tariff regime, I really won't be able to push back on it the way I need to. And they'll just be here to state one opinion. I won't really have the chops, especially if they're experts in tariffs and trade, to be able to push back. We talked about maybe having two people on who have some different views that I can kind of mediate so you can hear the clash of ideas, which I think is probably the best way to do it but it is true that, in general, I've often not covered very important topics, simply, if I think I lack the expertise or the competence to do so.
I cannot be an expert in everything. I think one of the downfalls, in fact, of American journalism and American punditry is that people feel compelled to just pontificate on everything, including things they know virtually nothing about. And that's something I really try to avoid. I was glad that Professor Mearsheimer obviously abstained as well from talking about a topic on which he wasn't an expert either.
All right, so we did have some more excellent questions that I wanted to get to, but we're short of time to do that. We'll try to get to some questions next week. And continue to submit your questions, if you're members of our Locals community, we really enjoy doing these Friday night Q&As.
