John Mearsheimer
speaker
1,250 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 3d 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
It wasn't the Iranians who were begging to shut down the 12-day war.
It was the Israelis and the Americans who wanted to shut it down.
So anyway, the Strait of Hormuz, he ignored that issue as if it didn't matter.
He didn't even think about what a contingency plan would be if the Chacanoa campaign did not work as intended, and we ended up in a protracted war where the strait was shut down.
So you just calculate these illusions that...
or these foolish thoughts that he had about Iran having nuclear weapons, about what you could do with a bombing campaign to produce regime change, and about the Strait of Hormuz.
You understand that this was a blunder of the First Order.
And to go back to comparing it to the Iraq War,
At least the Iraq war ended up with us conquering Iraq and getting rid of Saddam Hussein, which was the principal objective of the war.
All of the other objectives we failed at, but we got rid of Saddam Hussein.
We ended up conquering the country.
So you could say it was a quasi-success or there were some successful aspects of the operation, although I think ultimately it was a disaster.
But be that as it may, we achieved none of the objectives in the Iran war.
It's really quite stunning if you think about it.
We went in with four objectives.
Number one was to eliminate Iran's nuclear enrichment capability.
We're now at a point where it looks like we're never even going to get a nuclear deal, much less eliminate their nuclear enrichment capability.
The second goal was to get rid of their long-range ballistic missiles.
That's worked out very well.
Just think about what we were saying a few minutes ago about what a potent threat the Iranians have in their hands and how that's only going to get more potent with the passage of time.
Showing 681–700 of 1,250 · page 35 of 63
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