John Mearsheimer
speaker
1,250 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 2d ago
John Mearsheimer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
That's why we ended it.
And when we went into this war on February 28th, you want to remember that General Kane, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made it very clear to President Trump that we had a munitions problem.
And he was telling him in good part that we didn't have a sufficient number of defensive missiles to deal with all of the offensive missiles that the Iranians would be throwing at us and Israel.
And we would eventually run out of defensive missiles, much the way we were doing during the June 2025 war.
But of course, Trump thought he was going to win a quick and easy victory.
He didn't win a quick and easy victory.
It turned into a protracted war.
And once again, we were running out of defensive missiles.
And that's why we ended the air war after 40 days.
So what I'm saying to you, Chris, is that just moving forward,
the Iranian ballistic missile, cruise missile and drone force is going to become increasingly formidable and our ability to deal with it is not going to keep up with those improvements.
So the idea that you're going to put bases back in the region and then defend those bases makes no sense at all.
So we have no meaningful military presence
in the Persian Gulf, which is actually quite shocking when you think about how we thought about our military presence in that region on February 27th.
On February 27th, hardly anyone, including me, imagined
that those bases, those radars would be so thoroughly destroyed and that we would not be able to go into the Gulf.
I think almost everybody with a triple digit IQ understood that the Strait of Hormuz was likely to be shut down and that Trump was foolish for ignoring that.
This is before the war started.
But with regard to the bases, I don't think most people, and again, I put myself in this category, anticipated the extent to which the Iranians would be able to just basically wreck all those bases and radar sites and force us to abandon the region.
Yeah.
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