John J. Mearsheimer

And that allows all of these people in the deep state and in the foreign policy establishment who want to continue to have good relations with the Europeans and Ukrainians and antagonistic relations towards the Russians to dominate the diplomacy, uh, in Europe, uh,

So for that reason, we're basically back to square one with regard to Ukraine.

Let me make two points.

Yes.

One is, if you think about the Russian bombing campaign against Ukraine.

Yes.

Although the Russians have not killed many Ukrainians, as I said before, it was not a punishment campaign.

They have done a huge amount of damage to infrastructure inside of Ukraine.

The Russian bombing campaign against Ukraine has been much more extensive than the Ukrainian bombing campaign against Russia.

But we have seen no evidence that the Ukrainians are willing to throw their hands up and surrender.

smart therefore why would you expect the russians to throw their hands up and surrender and in fact given our previous discussion five minutes ago what the russians are talking about doing now in response is attacking into eastern europe it just seems like there is this misperception and you see this in a lot of other theaters and countries

He's very moderate.

Yeah, I know.

People who argue that we should get rid of him and we'll get, you know, a real peacenik in his place are living in a dream world.

As I said before, he's being criticized far and wide inside of Russia for not having waged the war vigorously enough.

In fact, going back to when the war started in 2022, I've argued on a number of occasions that if I were playing his hand, I would have mobilized the Russian military much more quickly than he did, and I would have played hardball in ways that he has not played.

So he has been, I don't want to say he's been a pussycat, but the idea that he's been this ruthless leader on the same scale as someone like Adolf Hitler is a laughable argument.

What's happened in the West is that we've created this caricature of him, and we've created this Russian threat that bears no resemblance to reality.

I mean, you see this when people talk about the danger of Russia

conquering eastern europe in other words a lot of people are saying we've got to stand up to the russians now because they're on the verge of conquering all of ukraine and once they're done with ukraine they're going to move into eastern europe and putin's ultimate goal is to recreate the soviet empire and of course he has the wherewithal to do that that's one set of arguments that you hear