YouSaid · the spoken record

John Mearsheimer

lines on the record: 214
first: 2023-11-18
most recent: 2023-11-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You never think that when you're young. I mean, you know, you think you're going to live forever and you're just not going to get all. I never thought this would happen that I would become 75 years old.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As my mother used to say, nothing is forever, and that includes me. And when you're 75 going on 76, you understand that you have a limited number of years left. And I find that depressing because I've been very lucky and I feel like I've won the lottery. And I'm very thankful for that. And I'd like to make it last for as long as possible. But I do understand that, you know, nothing is forever.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Given how horrible the world is today, I hate to say that I'm having too much fun. But do I find what I do interesting and gratifying? I do. I just love what I do and I love studying international politics. I love being intellectually curious about all sorts of subjects. I love talking to you about this and that. I mean, this is really wonderful. And I often tell people, you know, thank goodness I'm only 28 years old because I do try to behave like I'm only 28 years old. But I am well aware of the fact that”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make things better for yourself. You want to take chances. You want to think sometimes that you know better than other people do. Hubris is not a bad thing, but at the same time, you have to have humility. You have to understand that a man or a woman has his or her limits. And you want to listen to other people. You want to be a good listener, right? So always remember the importance of the hubris humility index and the importance of having healthy doses of both hubris and humility.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it's very important to make sure that you do something in life that really interests you. My mother used to use this phrase, floats your boat. You want to do something that floats your boat or to use another one of my mother's phrase. Phrase is you want to get up, you want to do something where you get up out of bed in the morning with a bounce in your step, right? The second thing I would say, and this has to do with your point about humility. You want to think about the humility hubris index. My friend Steve Van Ever, who teaches at MIT, he and I invented this concept. We call it the Ubris Humility Index. And you want to have a healthy dose of humility, but you also want to have a healthy dose of hubris. You want to think you can change the world. You want to think you can...”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Calling me an anti Semite? They haven't met my grandsons, my son in law, nieces that I a niece that I have, nephews that I have? Brother in laws that I have Jewish, right? Come on.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is what you want. You want intermarriage. Now, there are a good number of people in some of those groups, especially among Jews, who don't like intermarriage, right? But they've lost because I haven't looked recently at the data among for intermarriage rates among basically secular Jews, but it used to be around 62%. Large numbers of Jews marry Goyam.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, you want to eliminate difference. It's like, you know, people who say I'm an anti-Semite, right? I have two grandsons who Adolf Hitler would have thrown into a gas chamber, one of whose first name is John and middle name is Mearsheimer, right? This is what you want.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's my view. That's my view. And America, when it works, is a place that is very attractive to immigrants. And immigrants can do very well here. And then the real key moving forward is intermarriage. And you have a huge amount of intermarriage. Somebody was telling me not too long ago that the highest intermarriage rates in the United States were among Asian women, Asian American women, Asian women, and Anglos, right? And I say wonderful.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Americans aren't making enough babies that we can continue to grow population-wise in a robust way. So we need immigration. And we're in immigrant culture. And this is a great virtue. It has been a great virtue over time.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was discrimination against all these groups, right? and the worst discrimination, of course, was against Chinese Americans. But we've gotten much better. And what we should do moving forward is redouble our efforts to integrate immigrants into the American mainstream. Hispanics, Asians of all sorts, because the fact is that America is rapidly reaching the point where it's not going to be an all-white country, right? I have five children and two of my children are, I was a Generation Z, Gen Z. Gen Z is the last majority white. Generat Subsequent generations and not majority white. So for anybody who's bothered by this, I'm not bothered by that. But for anybody who is bothered by this, they better get used to it because”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We open the gates again in 65. Closed him in twenty four, opened him in sixty five, I'm oversimplifying the story here because we didn't completely shut them. We almost completely shut them in 24, opened in 65. And we've had huge numbers of immigrants flowing in. These immigrants who have been flowing in since 65 are not Europeans. They're not mainly Europeans. They're mainly Hispanics and Asians. If you look at those Hispanics and Asians, they're integrating into the American mainstream at a much faster and more effective clip than was the case with those immigrants who came in in the 19th century and early 20th century. The Irish? Oh my God, you know, they were treated horribly. There's a book, a very famous book that's been written called When the Irish Became White. Just think about the title of that book”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Roughly between eighteen thirty five and nineteen twenty four when we shut the gates, this is the only time we've ever really shut the gates in a meaningful way, right? And this is what made America great, right? All these people, and they made lots of babies, right”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Start coming right. And the Germans and Irish keep coming. And this is why Ellis Island is opened. I think it's 1893. Ellis Island is open because Castle Garden in New York, which had handled all the previous immigrants coming across the pond, Castle Garden couldn't handle them all. So they opened up Ellis Island. That's why somebody like me, I can't find my distant relatives records in Ellis Island because they came through Castle Garden, whereas lots of Jews I know, lots of Italians I know, they could find their relatives records in Ellis Island because they came to Ellis Island. The point is you had all these immigrants who came in.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's wrong. All the evidence is that Hispanics are integrating into the American mainstream more quickly and more effectively than the European immigrant groups that came starting around 1835. If you look at immigration from Europe into the United States, leaving aside the original WASPs who came over and founded the place, the immigrants start coming in large numbers in 1835, and we really don't shut the door until 1924, right? Starting, this is a crude overview, starting in 1835 and running up till about 1885, it's mainly Germans and Irish. That's why Germans are the largest ethnic group to ever come to the United States and the Irish are right behind them. These are the European ethnic groups we're talking about. Then starting in 1885, Poles, Jews, and Italians...”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, just very quickly on this. Sam Huntington's book, Who Are We? Which in many ways I love that book, but it has one fundamental flaw and a number of people told him beforehand that that flaw existed and he didn't fix it. But Sam argues in the book that we have large numbers of Hispanics in this country. And we're doing a very poor job of integrating them into the mainstream. And they're not becoming Americans. And because many of them are concentrated in the southwest of the United States, unlike other ethnic groups that were spread out all over God's little green acre, Americans write who we're going to want to break away and the United States is no longer going to be a reasonably coherent nation state.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Russia's going to be much smaller. China is going to be much smaller 100 years from now than both of those countries are, as best we can tell. The United States, American women are not having lots of babies these days. No question about that. But we have immigration. We're an immigrant culture. You're a perfect manifestation of that. You're now an American. That's wonderful. We need more people like you Right, so when I hear Donald Trump and other Arguing that immigration is a terrible thing. This is ridiculous. Immigration is what made us great. It's when my relatives came over in the middle of the 19th century from Germany and Ireland.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's still tough. But actually, you know, I think we're in excellent shape. And here's the reason going back to the beginning of our conversation, you asked me, you know, about power. And I told you the two principal building blocks of power. Population size and wealth. And therefore, you want to look around the world and you want to look at what you think the demographics are of countries like Britain. The United States, Iran, China, Russia, pick your country moving forward. What are the demographics look like and how wealthy of those countries likely to be? What you discover very quickly is that almost every country around the world is depopulating. Over time”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's no question, right? Right, all you have to do is just look at the British and the French in the Seven Years' War, 1756 to 1763. The British win. They get Canada, right? And that's why, you know, Quebec, Montreal, all these big French-speaking areas are now part of Canada, right? So borders change in countries got established, the United States being one. And remember, South American, Central America were once completely dominated by the Spanish. And in the case of Brazil, the Portuguese. But they all in the 19th century got their independence. And what I'm saying to you is in the 19th and in the 20th century, there were two forces that were really driving the train. One is nationalism. And then the other... Is the Industrial Revolution, which changes the cost benefit analysis”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's the first reason nationalism that these empires disappeared. The second reason is that from a cost-benefit analysis, they no longer made any sense. And it was the coming of the Industrial Revolution. Once the Industrial Revolution comes, an empire is basically an albatross around your neck. I would argue that the British Empire was an albatross around Britain's neck in most of the 20th century. Some of my friends disagree with that and think there were all sorts of benefits from the British Empire. But you want to remember that in the 20th century the three countries that really were powerful were the United States, Germany, and the Soviet Union. Those were the big three. Did any of them have an empire? No.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nationalism is the idea that these different nations that were part of the empire, like the Kenyans, wanted their own state, nation-state. This is my point about the Palestinians, right? This is Palestinian nationalism. What is Zionism? Zionism is Jewish nationalism, Jewish nationalism. Think of Theodore Herzl's famous book. It's called The Jewish State, Nation State. Think of the word, nation state. That embodies nationalism, nation-state, Jewish state, Palestinians want their own state, two-state solution, right? Can't beat the Palestinians into submission, right? The Indians wanted their own state. The Pakistanis wanted their own state. The Kenyans wanted their own state. Singapore wanted its own state. Oh, the Americans wanted their own state. This is called the American Revolution.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Now, I want to be clear. The Americans have wielded. Maybe even greater influence than Britain did when it had its empire, but I don't believe we have an empire that bears any resemblance to the British Empire. So the question is what happened to that British Empire? What happened to the French Empire? What happened to the Belgian Empire? What happened to the Dutch Empire? These were countries that had colonies all over the planet, the Dutch East Indies. Right, Vietnam was French Indochina. Where did those empires go? Two factors finished them off. Number one nationalism. Nationalism became a very powerful force in the 19th century. It began to rear its head in the late 18th century and became a very powerful force in the 19th and certainly in the 20th.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After the Spanish American War, for example, with regard to the Philippines and Cuba and Puerto Rico. But we never got serious about it. There's never been an American Empire. This is not to say the United States is not an incredibly powerful country that goes all around the world building military bases and stationing troops here, there, and everywhere, but we're not running an empire the way the British Empire was run or the French Empire. So the question for me is why did those empires go away? Why did the British Empire go away? If you ever look at a map of the world in 1922, after World War I, it's truly amazing how much of that map is controlled by Britain. They had a huge empire. And it's disappeared.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's a country that incorporates different regions or areas around the world into sort of a giant sphere of influence without incorporating those territories actually into the state itself. So you had this thing called the British Empire and it controlled areas like India, North America, and Kenya, just to pick a couple instances at different points, Singapore would be another example. Australia would be another example. So these were all entities that were part of the British Empire, right? And the United States has taken a stab at empire.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It could easily escalate into a nuclear war. You want to understand we both have nuclear weapons. And if either one of us is put into a desperate situation, we may turn to those nuclear weapons. And oh, by the way, Xi Jingping, you want to understand that we're out here in the water and using nuclear weapons in the water? It's not that bad. It's not the same as using war nuclear weapons on land, so we may very well use them. I'm not saying we will. But anyway, a little saber rattling.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it has been very effective Because Joe Biden has paid attention, and Joe Biden wants to make sure we don't end up in a thermonuclear war. And thank goodness he's thinking that way. So all Putin has to do is mention the possibility of nuclear war. Just to go back to Taiwan, switch areas of the world. If you're interested in containing China and you're interested in deterrence, and let's go back to those various scenarios where the Chinese win, we win, Chinese win, but they do it at a costly cost. One could argue that that discussion that I laid out before didn't take into account nuclear weapons. And all President Biden or any of his successors has to do is just very subtly rattle or employ the nuclear threat. And just sort of remind the Chinese that, you know, you start a war over Taiwan.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leaders matter. There's no question about that. No question. But just on rhetoric, you want to remember that Putin has on more than one occasion very subtly rattled the nuclear sword.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that I agree with. I think that, you know, the United States wants to make sure it has a big stick in East Asia for purposes of containing China and avoiding a war, right? Again, I want to be clear. I'm not advocating that we start World War III. But the point is you want to have a big stick. And you want to make sure that you don't overstep your bounds in terms of using that big stick. This is the danger with rollback. right that you get too aggressive and you precipitate a war right and you also just have to be very careful what you say and to go back to your favorite argument you want to be able to have empathy or put yourself in the shoes of the other side because if you do something you want to think smartly about what that other side how that other side is going to see your action and how they're going to react”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yes and no, look, your point is you want to empathize, you want to be able to put yourself in the shoes of the other side. I agree one hundred percent with that right. It's very important if you're a first class strategist to be able to do that. But at the same time, there is this competition for power taking place. And what you want to do is maximize how much power you have relative to the other side. And the other side wants to maximize how much power it has relative to you. So you have this competition for power, right? taking place all the time And that's taking place at the same time you want to have empathy or you want to be able to put yourself in the shoes of the other side. So those two things kind of go together, right?”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I actually think that's right. I think if the United States, just let me talk a little bit about the United States to get at the issue you're raising. If the United States pursues a smart containment strategy, Given what you just said and I said about the Chinese, I think we will avoid war. The problem with the Americans is it's not just the liberalism. It's the possibility that we will pursue a rollback policy In other words, during the Cold War, we pursued containment. Whenever anybody talked about American grand strategy towards the Soviet Union, it was containment, containment, containment. We now know from the historical record that the United States was not only pursuing containment, it was pursuing rollback. We were trying to roll back Soviet power. To put it bluntly, we were trying to wreck the Soviet Union, okay?”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this makes me a little nervous, right, to pick up on your point. I mean, the United States is thinking about the world in ways that are somewhat different than the Chinese, who are realist par excellence.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the United States that is not very realistic. American leaders have a very powerful liberal bent and tend not to see the world in realist terms. I believe, by the way, just going back to our discussion of NATO expansion, I think our inability to understand that NATO expansion was anathemat to the Russians was doing large part to the fact that we just during the unipolar moment didn't think of international politics from a realist perspective and didn't respect anyone who thought about international politics from a realist perspective. If those various American administrations starting with the Clinton administration had put their realist hat on, they would have understood the NATO expansion into Ukraine was not a good idea. But we had this thoroughly liberal view of the world that dominated our thinking. And it's kind of weigh somewhat since we've moved into multipolarity, but not completely.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Days, the Americans were realists, right? A lot of liberal ideology floating around out there, but the Americans were realists. And I think one of the reasons you avoided a shooting match between the United States and the Soviet Union from 1947 to 89 was because both sides, I think, understood basic balance of power logic. U.S.-China competition is somewhat different. First of all, the Chinese a realist to the core. I've spent a lot of time in China. I basically have rock and roll. I'm basically a rock and roll star in China.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an interesting question. I mean, it is sort of an abstract theoretical level. My argument is that great powers act according to realist dictates, and they understand those realistic dictates. And that could lead to cooperation or it can lead to war. It depends. I would say just in the case of the Soviets, a lot of people describe the Cold War as an ideological competition above all else. It was communism versus liberal democracy or communism versus liberal capitalism, whatever. I actually don't believe that. I believe the Soviets were realist to the core. I believe Stalin was a realist par excellence and that ideology did not matter much in Stalin's foreign policy. And I believe if you look at Soviet foreign policy after World War II, you know, throughout the Cold War, they were realists to the core. And I think in those...”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well that, you know, in your scenario, we're China already dominates Asia and we dominate the Western Hemisphere. I think you start talking about where the most likely places that the United States and China go head to head or fight through proxies. I think it is the Gulf or the Middle East. And the scenario that you posit.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that's possible. Yeah, I think that's possible. Yeah. Now that I mean, I hadn't thought about it until you said it, but yeah, I think that that is possible.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Israel gets involved. I think in this scenario, if you're talking about a US-China competition, right, and you're talking about the Middle East, I think it's the Gulf. It's the Saudis, the Iranians, the Iraqis. It's the oil.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, that would assume the United States. But you want to remember, you're hypothesizing a situation where China dominates Asia.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But a war between the United States and China, just like a war between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, that's what you really want to avoid. So I think you'd have an intense security competition, right? You'd have wars involving proxies of each of those two superpowers. And you would probably have some wars where one of the superpowers was involved in a proxy, right? with the other one of the other superpowers proxies.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conflict, let's use the word war. So I distinguish between security competition and war. And what I'm telling you is you'll have an intense security competition where there's no shooting. Or if there's shooting, it's mainly proxies that are doing the fighting. Much like the Vietnam War, right? Or you could have a case where one of those superpowers was involved in a war against a proxy of the other superpower. Korean War, think the Korean War. The United States fought the Chinese who were allied with the Soviets at the time.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I believe there would be a great deal of security competition, intense security competition between those two superpowers.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And as an American, I'm interested in the security of my country, the survival of my country. So I want the United States to be the most powerful state in the world, which means I want the United States to dominate the Western Hemisphere. I want us to be a regional hegemon. And I want to make sure that China does not dominate Asia the way we dominate the Western Hemisphere. It's not because I think we're the good guys and they're the bad guys. If I were Chinese and I were in Beijing and I were Xijingping's national security advisor, I'd tell him what we got to do is make sure we dominate the world or dominate our region and then do everything we can to undermine America's position in the Western Hemisphere. That'd be my view. So I guess you could say, I do view the world in terms of good guys. And bad guys because I'm an American.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't tend to think of the world in terms of good guys and bad guys. As a good realist, I think that states are states, they're all black boxes. You know, I don't discriminate between democracies and autocracies. But having said that, I am an American.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, it's a lose-lose proposition if they go to war over Taiwan or what have you. And if you can't do that, right, you think that they're so powerful that they're ultimately going to win, you want to convince them that victory would be a pyrrhic victory. In other words, they would pay a god-awful price to win the war. You follow what I'm saying? Excuse me, the best strategy for deterrence is you win. China loses. Second best strategy is a stalemate. Nobody wins. Third best strategy is they win, but they pay a god-awful price. And the fourth possibility, which you don't want is they win quickly and decisively, right? If that's the case, then you don't have much deterrence.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not necessarily. It's an interesting question. A lot of people think that to make the torrents work, right, you have to be able to beat the Chinese and therefore you need a much bigger military. And I don't think over time that's possible, right? I think it's probably not even possible now to beat the Chinese in a war over Taiwan or in a war in the South China Sea. I think what you want to do is make it clear to the Chinese either that there will be no winner. In other words, you don't have to win, but you want to make sure they don't win.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On Taiwan, for example, the last thing you want is for the Taiwanese government to declare its independence, because the Chinese have said if Taiwan does that, we'll go to war. And of course, we don't want that. So, my view is you want to smartly build up your military forces and you want to do everything you can to contain China and at the same time not be provocative.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What you want to do is you want to make sure that you deter China from invading Taiwan. You want to avoid a war. You and I are in complete agreement on that. We don't want a war. But we want to contain China. We do not want to let China dominate Asia. That's what the Americans are principally concerned with here. And it's what China's neighbors are principally concerned with. And this includes the Japanese, the South Koreans, the Filipinos, Australians, and the Taiwanese. They don't want, and we don't want China to dominate the region. So we have to contain it. But at the same time, and this should be music to your ears, we not only want to contain it, we want to make sure we don't end up in a shooting match with the Chinese because this could be disastrous. So you have to have a very smart policy. You have to build powerful military forces, and you have to make sure you don't do anything that's provocative.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out into the Pacific. You don't want them dominating the waters of East Asia. You want to bottle them up again inside the first island chain. And you can only do that if you control Taiwan. If you don't control Taiwan, they get out into the Philippine Sea, into the Pacific and the Western Pacific and cause all sorts of...”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Contain China, we need allies. We have an alliance structure. In our allies, Japanese, South Koreans, Filipinos, Australians, they're all counting on us to be there for them. And if we say we're not going to defend Taiwan, the Chinese attack, they're going to say, I bet if the Chinese attack us, the Americans won't be there for us. It would have a damaging effect on our alliance structure, which we cannot afford because containing China is a wicked problem. It's a powerful state. You're getting to this before when you talked about China versus Taiwan. So that's the first reason. Second reason is you want to bottle up the Chinese Navy in the Chinese Air Force inside the first island chain. You don't want to let them get out.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it's an important strategic asset. Many people will say it's because Taiwan's a democracy, but that doesn't matter that much. It's because of two strategic reasons. The first is that if we were to let Taiwan go, It would have hugely negative consequences for our alliance structure in East Asia.”
2023-11-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #401 – John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source