ª Prof. Mearsheimer¹ political & Strategic assessment on Iran War
In today’s video I’ll explain² why I believe a US victory is not possible and why the longer Trump waits to cut a deal with Iran, the worse the outcome for the US.
I’ll argue that Trump would have been wise to settle the war months ago, after the initial bombing campaign failed. Instead, he kept looking for some way to win the war or at least find an off ramp that would allow him to make the case that the US achieved some of its goals and did not walk away from the fight empty-handed. But that search is a futile enterprise. There is no war-winning strategy available to him.
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CHAPTERS
0:00 Introduction
0:33 The Current Situation in Iran
0:44 Overview of the Episode
2:47 The Four Goals of the US
6:17 The June 17 Memorandum of Understanding: A Surrender Document
9:18 Why Did our Strategies Fail?
9:51 The Five Possible Military Strategies
10:30 Strategy 1: The Discriminate Air Campaign
11:51 Strategy 2: The Indiscriminate Air Campaign
12:35 Strategy 3: Tit-for-Tat
13:07 Strategy 4: The Naval Blockade
13:26 Strategy 5: The Land Option
13:57 What the US Actually Did: The Timeline
18:35 Signing the MoU, Then Violating It
22:46 Why the Three Strategies Failed
36:20 Where We Are: America Has Lost
38:46 What Trump Must Do Now
40:31 The Iranians Hold the Cards
41:13 Summary & Conclusions
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¹John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982. He graduated from West Point in 1970 and then served five years as an officer in the U.S. Air Force. He then started graduate school in political science at Cornell University in 1975. He received his PhD in 1980. He spent the 1979-1980 academic year as a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, and was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs from 1980 to 1982. During the 1998-1999 academic year, he was the Whitney H. Shepardson Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Professor Mearsheimer has written extensively about security issues and international politics more generally. He has published six books: Conventional Deterrence (1983), which won the Edgar S. Furniss, Jr., Book Award; Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (1988); The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001, 2014), which won the Joseph Lepgold Book Prize and has been translated into nine different languages; The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (with Stephen M. Walt, 2007), which made the New York Times best seller list and has been translated into twenty-four different languages; Why Leaders Lie: The Truth about Lying in International Politics (2011), which has been translated into twelve different languages; and The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (2018) which has been translated into five different languages.
He has also written many articles that have appeared in academic journals like International Security, and popular magazines like Foreign Affairs and the London Review of Books. Furthermore he has written op-ed pieces for newspapers like the New York Times and the Financial Times dealing with topics like Bosnia, nuclear proliferation, US policy towards India, the failure of Arab-Israeli peace efforts, the folly of invading Iraq, the causes of the Ukrainian crisis, and the likelihood of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.
Finally, Professor Mearsheimer holds a number of awards and honors. He received the Clark Award for Distinguished Teaching when he was a graduate student at Cornell in 1977, and he won the Quantrell Award for Distinguished Teaching at the University of Chicago in 1985. He was selected as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar for the 1993-1994 academic year. In that capacity, he gave a series of talks at eight colleges and universities. He received honorary doctorates from universities in China, Greece, and Romania; and in 2003, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
²I am the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago, where I have taught since 1982.
Above all else, I am an international relations theorist. More specifically, I am a realist, which means that I believe that the great powers dominate the international system, and they constantly engage in security competition with each other, which sometimes leads to war.
Although I have dedicated my life to scholarship, I have also engaged in the policy debates of the day. For example, I was one of the most outspoken opponents of the 2003 Iraq War before it happened, and I have been deeply involved in the public discourse about the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine. I firmly believe that social science theories are invaluable for making and analyzing foreign policy.
