John Mearsheimer: No Winning in Iran for the U.S.

We clearly don't have a coherent strategy, Danny. And what we're doing is we're in a very important way moving up the escalation ladder to see if we can find that coherent strategy. Just let's go back to the start. You remember when we first moved that giant armada into the region, uh, President Trump thought according to uh, Steve Witoff that that massive armada would coers the Iranians into surrendering. Remember Witoff said that >> capitulation is the word he used. Yeah. >> Yeah. That President Trump was actually surprised that the coercive strategy, the threat of military force didn't do the trick. Okay. So that fails. Then we attack and we decapitate and it's clearly a successful decapitation. But that doesn't work. U now we're continuing to pound Iran and we're looking for regime change still. Even though decapitation didn't work, we think we can push hard and get regime change. But as President Trump's comments yesterday make clear, we really don't think that that's going to work, at least given present circumstances. So then we start to search for other options. And then you begin to think about fostering insurrection with the Kurds or the Azeraijanes and putting some boots on the ground and so forth and so on. And the question you always want to ask yourself in these situations is when you fail, do you double down or do you back off? Right? Just think about the Houthies. Remember the Houthies when we >> Oh yeah. >> When President Trump went to war against the Houthies, this was last March. Uh and the campaign lasted until May. And when President Trump first started blasting the Houthies, he said Joe Biden was a pussycat. He didn't really uh attack the Houthies in a vigorous way. He Donald Trump was going to do that. We were going to beat the Houthies under President Trump where we didn't beat him under uh President Biden. Well, by May, you know, uh two months later, he realized he couldn't beat the Houthies. So, he backed off. He went down the escalation ladder. It's very rare that you see that. I was quite amazed at the time that he backed off. But Trump understood wisely he couldn't beat the Houthies. So he cut a deal or a semide deal with them and that was the end of it. But in most cases what happens and I believe this will happen in the Iran case is when you take a major step forward and it doesn't work you double down and you escalate up the ladder. And I think this is what you see happening here. And the question you have to ask yourself is there uh is there a magic solution somewhere up on the ladder as you go up the different rungs of the escalation ladder? Are you going to reach a point where you finally find the magic solution? This is what we went through in Vietnam. I remember when the first combat forces landed March 8th, 1965. And then we slowly but steadily went up the escalation ladder both in terms of the use of air power and the deployment of ground forces. And we thought that we would reach a certain point on the ladder where we would finally have uh finished off the Vietkong and the North Vietnamese. Well, that didn't work and we suffered a catastrophic defeat. And as I said at the start of the show and as I say all the time, people who are in favor of this war and think it was a good idea cannot tell a story about how we end up winning. Uh I I've yet to hear anybody lay out in any detail what the strategy is for solving all these problems that we face with Iran. And you get >> and in fact let me let me just say you talk about the escalation. There's a couple things I'm already concerned about. Uh not only the talk about ground forces in but also we have uh the many of the Gulf Arab regimes are now we're trying to get them to go more inactively militarily instead of staying on the sidelines after they've been hit. And then last night we had Manuel Macron from France saying they're sending an aircraft carrier along with a lot of their aircraft to defend their their uh regional allies. He said I've ordered the aircraft carriers Charles the Gaul to head to the Middle East. We have deployed Raphael aircraft uh air defense systems and radars in the past few hours. We will defend our agreements with Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE. We must stand with them. Now, he didn't say they're going to get involved in combat actions, but I mean, he's sent in air power. What does this tell you? >> It tells you that uh President Mcronone is not very smart. >> I mean, what else? >> Well, I mean, something besides the obvious. I mean, we're I I assume he's going to put that aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf. Uh, and he's going to take that massive amount of air power on that aircraft carrier and he's going to finish off Iran. He's going to do what we couldn't do. I mean, this is, you know, who cares about a French aircraft carrier, right? He's going to have to park that aircraft carrier far away from uh Iran. uh otherwise the Iranians will sink it to the bottom of the Jolly Roger. Uh and furthermore that aircraft carrier can't generate more many more sorties uh than or enough sorties to make a difference. I mean it just who who cares? >> And and uh by the way you you talk about some of the the the sorties they they said during that briefing this morning we've had we averaging around 2,000 sorties per day. So that's a whole lot and not another squadron is not going to add a whole lot to that uh in terms of the bombing. But I guess I don't know. He wants to get involved. He was so eager to send his troops into to Ukraine to be part of a coalition of the willing and that never happened. So I guess he's like saying, "Oh, here we go. We'll send some out here and we'll see how that's going to work out." Uh but here's one of the other things that was said during that briefing. Uh is that uh we have a potential problem with math with interceptor math. I'm going to get to that in a second because here's what Secretary Hegs said that prompted the question. We can sustain this fight easily for as long as we need to. Iran cannot outlast us. Uh we're going to ensure through violence of action and our offensive capabilities and our defensive capabilities as I said that we set the tone and the tempo of this fight. uh as we are going into ammunitions that we have have tens of thousands of and can drop unlimited supplies on with even more effects than the standoff emissions we have now which is why when we say the throttle's going up the throttle's going up and it's going to stay on high. Now I think he's talking about JDAMs and some other categories which if they indeed have air supremacy they can now get closer in and fire a lot of those but the offensive missiles and the defensive missiles especially the interceptors we just don't have as many of those. We had the UAE, according to Bloomberg, said, "Hey, we can go about another week with the current level of offensive missiles coming in and drones, and then we're going to run out of the run out." So, what do you think to that? Do do you buy this claim that President Trump himself made from the White House the previous day that we can go on, we can do a forever war? I don't know why he would choose that language, but that's what he said yesterday. Well, the key question to me is how many missiles, ballistic missiles and cruise missiles, but mainly ballistic missiles and drones do the Iranians have? And how good are we at destroying those ballistic missiles and those drones? And it is very hard to get clear answers uh to those questions from reading the mainstream media. And I don't know whether people on the inside have the data or not, but that is the key issue here. Uh there's all sorts of reasons to think that the Iranians have massive numbers of drones and ballistic missiles. Uh that they haven't come close to using them up. Uh that they're either hidden uh in tunnels or they're mobile and therefore very difficult for us to destroy. so that the Iranians can go on and on just as we can go on and on uh fighting this war. In other words, I think what Hexath is basically saying is that some point the Iranians are going to run out of drones and they're going to run out of missiles. Uh I don't think that's going to happen. And I think they have too many missiles, too many drones, and I think they're going to be very strategic in terms of employing those missiles and drones. >> And and by the way, John, one one other thing I want to point out uh because I think it's really important to this part of the discussion. One of the other things that was discussed in there both by uh uh chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Kaine, as well as heth is they said, "Listen, uh we have our offensive uh capacity has so slowed down that they have dropped like 80 something% from the opening day rounds of of fire. they've had because we're hitting all their missile sites. Well, this video that Gary showed a second ago, we'll pull it back up here. This is something that was just released today that shows a new capability that we didn't know that Iran had before. Whereas a lot of these fixed sites, some that out of silos, we actually don't know where they are because you can't even see them. Load. It'll roll up here, reload in a second, but you'll see just out of the sand. There's no mobile launcher here. There's no uh visible ground. This is the best one here. You see, literally, it just comes out of the sand. And there's another one here. So, you don't know where those are. You can't knock those out. And how many do they have? That's the big question. >> Yeah. There's no question about that. And uh but you know, let me just ask you another question, Danny. Let's assume that uh we destroy all the missiles and we destroy all the Iranian ballistic and cruise missiles and we destroy all of their drones completely. Where are we then? Have do we win at that point? Is that victory? We don't have regime change. Uh and regime change is the goal here. So I think even if you knock out all of their navy, all of their missiles, all of their air force, where does that leave you? Uh aren't they just going to rebuild? Aren't they going to rebuild their missile force? And and you see on the screen here, I I mean, you're not going to get rid of I mean, it would take months to get rid of all of these, especially if they can fire out of nowhere. So, uh if if when Secretary Hexis boasts that you can't outlast us, I I I don't know. Is that accurate? Maybe they can. Well, a lot depends on how the war continues. uh what happens if the oil refineries in the various countries in the Gulf become targets and virtually all of the oil installations in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the other Gulf states are destroyed. Uh and of course Iran's equivalent installations are destroyed as well. Let's just assume that happens. That would be disastrous uh for the world economy. uh and uh the long-term consequences for the Gulf uh of that scenario are just hard to fathom. Uh so this war can play itself out in all sorts of different ways. You know, we are going up the escalation ladder as we were talking about a few minutes ago, but uh there are some very potent steps further up that escalation. >> And in fact, let me show you another one here. Now, there has been a couple of unconfirmed reports that a couple of our ships have been hit with cruise missiles. I haven't seen anything confirmed, so it could just be misinformation, but apparently Trump is so concerned about the issue that you just raised about, forget about if they knock out the the actual refinement capabilities, but just the fact that the straight of Hormuz is effectively closed right now and it has been for like several days now. Yesterday, Trump said effective immediately, I have ordered the United States uh Development Finance Corporation to provide uh political risk insurance and guarantees for financial security. But then the bigger one is this will be available all shipping. The United States Navy will begin escorting tankers through the straight of Hormuz as soon as possible. That seems to me to my eyes to be a very high risk uh lowreward kind of situation because I don't think you'll succeed and and keep it all of a sudden open it up and get the traffic back flowing again and you will take the risk of Yeah. Just look at this kind of situation here. Uh you see a lot of them kind of stacked up. You don't see much going through. In fact, I think right now you see none going through the straight. Uh just a couple of bleeders here and there, but you see a lot of traffic parked up on either side here. Apparently, that's the normal. Uh, but what do you take of the fact that we may send our ships into that tiny straight, which is at like 30 miles at its most narrow point. Uh, that that seems like Putin is at a big risk. What do you think? >> Oh, I think it is a big risk because the Iranians have lots of missiles that are designed to take out ships. Uh, we moved uh uh the Abraham Lincoln away from the Gulf. It wasn't in the Gulf, but it was reasonably close to the Gulf, we moved it away for fear that an Iranian cruise missile would take it out. Uh, and once you start using naval ships in the Persian Gulf, uh, you're providing a targetrich environment for the Iranians. Now, I think the Americans are betting that they can protect those ships and they can so thoroughly deplete Iran's uh cruise missile capability that uh it won't be a great danger to the ships that do the escorting. But uh it remains to be seen whether that's the case. Again, it's very hard to determine what exactly the Iranians have. If you think about it, Danny, if you're playing Iran's hand and you have a fixed number of ballistic missiles and cruise missiles and drones and you know that you're in a long war, the question is how do you allocate the use of those missiles and it would seem to me what you don't want to do is use all of your missiles and all of your drones up front. You want to preserve a large chunk of the inventory for this protracted war. So, you know, if somebody says there's been a decrease in the use of ballistic missiles by Iran, that doesn't mean they're running out of ballistic missiles. >> They may be, >> but who knows for sure. >> And the other thing is I think if you're the Iranians, you want to preserve a large chunk of your uh missile and drone capability for what I call the Gddard Damarang moment. uh if you think you're going down, if you think the country is going to be destroyed, you want to take everybody down with you and you want to have missiles that can do that. Uh so you want to maintain a robust uh missile force in reserve uh just in case uh that moment comes where you think uh your survival is truly at risk. Uh so I'm just saying I I don't know what the capability is on the Iranian side. Uh but uh I see no evidence that they have run out of missiles that we have been so successful at targeting their mobile missiles and their missiles that are hidden in tunnels that they have basically been left naked. I don't think that's the case. couldn't agree with you more here and you know that's why I was you said at the outset you know say you're like it's look this is the beginning I think of day five of this war it's a little early to be talking to any kind of conclusions at all and yet that was the strong implication from the opening moments of this press conference which basically sound like this basically over just waiting for you know them to final you know they're they're almost going to fall apart already and we're just waiting for that final that's the implication that he gave uh not sure that's going to work out that way for many of the reasons you did. Listen, before I let you go here, the the last bit of time, I want to kind of pull the the window back a little bit and not look so much at the tactical, but look at the implications strategically and especially um where do you think China and Russia are right now on this? Do you think that they would literally stand by and do nothing? If it looked like that we were starting to to get with Iran was was starting to wobble and they were maybe going to fall, would they do nothing or do you think they're doing anything behind the scenes to keep them propped up? Well, I think there's nothing they can do militarily. Uh, I'm talking about direct intervention here to rectify the situation. I find it hard to imagine either the Russians or the Chinese. I >> I'm sorry. Yeah, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to imply that, but I meant like what we're doing for Ukraine to keep them in the war with Russia. Would they do the same thing for the Iranian side? >> I think they were doing it before the war started. They will continue to do it. uh and at some point the shooting will stop and then I think the Iranians and the chi the Russians and the Chinese will go to even greater lengths uh to keep Iran uh intact. They have no interest in having the United States uh and Israel win this war. They have a deep-seated interest in seeing Iran win the war and they'll do everything feasible uh to make sure that that happens. >> And what would be the consequences? look first at China. Uh if if they were effectively and this is one of the things that Rubio specifically said we went into and basically took control of Venezuela uh that we wanted to get China out of our hemisphere and what would be the implication for China if they had suffered a setback there and then in the event that uh Iran eventually falls here uh what will be the impact of China especially with the issue of oil. Well, my view on China is that it's now in the process of beginning to build the blue water navy. Uh, and that blue water navy is mainly concerned uh with securing the sealanes into the Persian Gulf. Uh, and I think that not only will the Chinese be able to project more military power into the Gulf over time, but their presence and their interest in the Persian Gulf will only increase with time. And I think once the Russians uh shut down the Ukraine war, they will be more involved in the Persian Gulf as well. So I think from an American and Israeli point of view now uh represents a window of opportunity to deal with the Iran problem. And when I say a window of opportunity I mean a window of opportunity visa be the Chinese and the Russians because with the passage of time China will be more involved with Ukraine. And I believe that with the passage of time the Ukrain the Iranians will build a more robust uh ballistic missile force and may even go down the nuclear road. Uh but anyway, all of this is to say I think over time the China problem will be much greater from our point of view and the Israelis point of view when it comes to dealing with Iran. >> And I'm sorry, one last question. uh in terms of China and how they view things uh or even China and Russia for that matter militarily. I have some concerns that if if we just muddle through this and and we're not able to bring anything to to conclusion, we're not able to knock them out and we do spend enormous amounts of precision guided munitions, especially these long-range cruise missiles and the air interceptor missiles and we we don't have any result on the ground. It's going to make both China and Russia think you guys are not that great actually. You're not the greatest military power in the history of the world like you say and you might not even be as good as we thought before. Do you see any concerns with that? Well, I think there's no question that from the Russian point of view and from the Chinese point of view that seeing us pinned down in Iran, especially if it turns into a protracted war and it we expend all of the ammunition uh that uh is anticipated in that sort of conflict. This is mana from heaven uh for the Chinese. Uh if you're the Chinese and you're thinking about capturing Taiwan with military force, uh really all you have to do is wait a year or so uh if that war if this war lasts that long and you'll be in much better shape visa v the Taiwan scenario uh than you are today. Uh so this is you know not good news for the United States when it comes to thinking about how to deal with China with regard to Ukraine. If you listen to Trump talk these days about Ukraine, he's fully aware that giving weaponry to Ukraine uh and giving weaponry uh to this war in Iran at the same time is drawing down our stocks in dangerous ways. And uh he's very angry at the Ukrainians for the fact that they demand so much ammunition and so much weaponry from us. So you can see the problems that we face here. Uh you know the United States ran down its manufacturing base during the unipolar moment. Everybody recognizes that. And we're now in a situation where we have to prepare uh for conflict in East Asia. We're deeply involved in the Ukraine war. And even though we're not selling weapons directly to the Ukrainians, the Europeans are buying those weapons from us. and giving him giving them to the Ukrainians. So, the weapons are still going to Ukraine now. Now, we're fighting a major war in the Middle East. And furthermore, President Trump is interested in uh instituting old-fashioned colonialism in the uh Western Hemisphere. You want to remember before this big armada was uh in the Middle East, it was in the Caribbean. >> We were threatening the Venezuelans. So, you know, we really have four theaters going here. The Western Hemisphere, the Middle East, uh, Europe, and East Asia. And there are real limits to what we can do. And again, you want to remember that this is all taking place in the context of a situation where we ran down the industrial base. And we don't have the capability, you know, to pump out artillery tubes and artillery shells at a rapid pace like we did in World War II. Uh, so you know, when Pete Hexith is talking about how we can fight this war forever and we're never going to run out of ammunition or armaments of this sort or that sort, you really have to scratch your head and say it doesn't sound plausible when you think about the overall strategic situation we're in. >> Yeah. Yeah. That that may work in a briefing room and may work on a domestic audience. It sure ain't having any effect in Beijing or in Moscow or anywhere else where we may have an adversary. Listen, I really appreciate you coming on today, especially, you know, I'm sure you've been so uh in such high demand and we're very grateful to have you come on the show today here. Uh we also sent everybody to John Substack. Uh he's uh he's got information there. Big trouble ahead in Iran. He said you can go and get more details on John. You don't have to wait for him to come back here. Thank you very much for coming on today. We really appreciate it. >> My pleasure, Danny. It was wonderful talking through these problems with you. >> It just sounds wrong to say it that way, but I get what you mean. Thank you very much. And also to let you know, we've got we're packed up today. We've got another show uh in in just uh just just a few minutes with Dan Mcny talking about US strikes deeper into Iran and what does that mean for our troops. He is uh very much uh keen on that. We're going to talk to him shortly. And then we got Larry Johnson at 2 PM today. Some great shows back toback. Don't want to miss any of these. We'll see you shortly on the Daniel Davis deep dive.

** NEW MERCH ** Jackets & Sweatshirts, Thermo Mugs!! Daniel Davis Deep Dive Merch: Etsy store https://www.etsy.com/shop/DanielDavisDeepDive?ref=seller-platform-mcnav John Mearsheimer argues: Ethnic groups in Iran: Azerbaijanis make up roughly 16–24% of Iran’s population and Kurds about 10%, meaning around 30% of Iranians are non-Persian groups concentrated in the northwest. Some policymakers speculate about arming these groups to spark an uprising against the Iranian government. Regional risks: Supporting Kurdish or Azerbaijani separatism would be extremely dangerous regionally. Turkey strongly opposes any Kurdish independence, because it could encourage separatism among Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, potentially destabilizing the region. Possible U.S. strategy: If bombing and political pressure fail to force Iran to surrender, the U.S. and Israel might look for alternative strategies, such as: Supporting insurrections among Kurds or Azerbaijanis Deploying small numbers of U.S. troops, CIA personnel, or special forces inside Iran to assist them. Military feasibility problems: Iran’s mountainous terrain and geography make invasion difficult. Turkey likely wouldn’t allow U.S. forces to stage from its territory. Small numbers of troops would likely not be enough to trigger a successful uprising, but sending more would lead to a larger ground war, which leaders want to avoid. Strategic incoherence: Critics argue the U.S. does not have a clear strategy. Initial steps—military pressure, leadership “decapitation,” and ongoing bombing—have not produced regime collapse, so policymakers keep escalating and searching for new options. Pattern of escalation: Historically, when strategies fail, governments often double down rather than withdraw, climbing the “escalation ladder.” The speaker compares this to the Vietnam War, where gradual escalation never produced victory. International involvement: France has announced it will send the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle and aircraft to the region to support Gulf allies, though critics argue this will not significantly change the military balance. Overall point: The discussion concludes that there is no clear plan for how the U.S. could actually “win” against Iran, and escalating military steps without a coherent strategy risks repeating past conflicts where escalation led to prolonged war without success.