In this wide-ranging discussion with Chris Hedges, political scientist John J Mearsheimer argues the US and Israel have entered a war of attrition with Iran that risks global economic shock and a strategic defeat for Washington.

Chris Hedges Information in war is weaponised. This is true for the United States. It is true for Israel. And it is true for Iran. But reading through the fog of war, the conflict with Iran does not appear to be going well for Israel and its US ally. Iran’s closing the Strait of Hormuz, and threats to mine the waterway, is triggering the largest energy supply shock in decades. This energy crisis will only get worse.

Iran has degraded the region’s military infrastructure, taking out sophisticated US radar stations in the Gulf and in Israel. This has left the US and Israel increasingly unable to track incoming missiles and drones. Iran has carried out successful strikes on US bases and ports, as well as energy infrastructure, desalination plants and diplomatic compounds. The longer the war continues, and Iran shows no signs that it is interested in negotiations, the more it erodes the security arrangements in the Gulf, ones built on the premise that America will protect the Gulf countries from Iran in the event of a conflict.

The Trump administration has no clear goals for the war, other than unrealistic calls for unconditional surrender and bombastic threats. It has clearly made a terrible miscalculation about what the US could achieve by killing the top leaders in Iran, including the supreme leader. This war, as it drags on with no discernable exit strategy, has the potential to see the US forced, as the global economy goes into crisis, to meet Iranian demands.

This humiliating defeat would potentially mean the end of US hegemony in the region. Joining me to discuss the war in Iran is Professor John Mearsheimer. He is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Professor Mearsheimer, who graduated from West Point and was a Captain in the US Air Force, is the author of numerous books, including Conventional Deterrence (1983), Nuclear Deterrence: Ethics and Strategy, Liddell Hart and the Weight of History, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy and Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics.

Let’s begin with this fact that the Pentagon for three decades has vigorously fought back against Israeli pressure to go to war with Iran, whether that was [Barack] Obama, [George W.] Bush, [Joe] Biden, and for some reason, for all of the reasons, of course, that are now evident, the Pentagon didn’t want this conflict. How was that reticence or resistance overcome?

John Mearsheimer Yeah, it’s quite remarkable, Chris, that none of Trump’s predecessors took the bait when the Israelis tried to trap us into going to war against Iran. And you want to remember in 2024, Joe Biden’s last year as president, the Israelis twice, once in April and then second in October of that year, tried to trap Biden into going to war against Iran and he refused to do it.

And Trump is the first president who fell into the trap and of course he did it last June during the Twelve Day War. You want to remember in the Twelve Day War, the Israelis by themselves started that conflict on 13 June and it ended on 25 June. But on 22 June, we bombed three nuclear targets in Iran, but it was a one-day bombing. We talked about one and done at the time. And you remember that when the evening came on 22 June, the bombing was finished, President Trump declared victory.

So although he got involved for the first time, it only looked like he was putting his ankle in the water, that he wasn’t becoming deeply committed to fighting a war in Iran. But that all changed on 28 February. The United States and Israel together, what I like to refer to as the tag team, decided to attack Iran and we are now in a war of attrition with the Iranians, in which case it’s hard to see how this war ends.

So Trump took the bait. And I think to put it in more specific terms, I think basically that Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has been working overtime for decades now, literally decades, to get the United States to attack Iran for Israel, finally succeeded with Trump. As I said, there was a tiny step taken forward in that regard last June, but now Trump has jumped full body into the water.

Chris Hedges And yet you see even with this sycophantic head of the Joint Chiefs [Dan] Caine, every time he’s trotted out in front of the cameras, he doesn’t look very happy. I think the military foresaw, the Pentagon foresaw, what is coming and is quite perplexed about how to deal with it.

John Mearsheimer I think that General Caine has actually behaved quite well here. You want to remember that when Trump came into office in January of last year, January 2025, he fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General [Charles Q.] Brown [Jr.] and he brought General Caine out of retirement.

Caine was only a three-star general. He wasn’t even a four-star general, but Trump liked him. And Trump made him a four-star general, and he made him the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Now, given that he was in effect Trump’s general, that he owed his position to Donald Trump, you would think that he would tell Donald Trump what he wanted to hear about going to war against Iran, but on the contrary, what Caine did before the war, this is before 28 February, was he made it very clear to President Trump that we did not have a viable military option.

So when you say that General Caine, every time he’s trotted out, looks very uncomfortable, I think that’s true. And I think there’s a simple explanation for why he looks so uncomfortable. He knew from the get-go that this one was not going to work out the way Trump and Netanyahu thought that it was going to work out. And he understands that he is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and he was the chairman when we entered this foolish war on 28 February, despite the fact that he had warned against it.

Chris Hedges Is it too simplistic to say that Trump and Netanyahu naively believed that by taking out the Supreme Leader and some of the hierarchy there would be regime change and the war would be over?

John Mearsheimer I think that’s clearly the case with Trump. I think that that was the argument that Netanyahu sold to Trump. And Trump liked the argument. I think given what happened in Venezuela, he thought that we had the ability to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. And when Bibi told him that the regime in Iran is weak and all we have to do is decapitate it and really hit hard on that first day or two that the regime would crumble and we would end up with a pro-American, pro-Israeli regime in its place.

I think Netanyahu was very successful at telling Trump that story. And Trump is not exactly surrounded by wise advisors, save for General Caine, who would tell him otherwise. So he fell into the trap. Now, Netanyahu’s a more complicated case. One could argue that Netanyahu understood that a decapitation strike wouldn’t work, that this would not be a quick and decisive victory, and that instead what he was trying to do was trap Trump into a long war, in which case Iran would be destroyed.

In other words, Netanyahu understood that the regime would not fall quickly, but once we committed to fighting the war, we would have no choice but to see it through. And that’s the situation that we’re in now. So that’s a possible argument. It’s hard to know for sure whether it’s true, but it’s also possible, just having watched Netanyahu over time, that he too bamboozled himself into believing that the Iranian regime was fragile and that we could easily affect regime change.

You know, he’s been saying that for a long time, as you well know, Chris. And sometimes when people repeat particular arguments, after a while, they even begin to believe their own arguments, although they initially did not. So it’s possible that Bibi fooled himself, or it’s possible that he was just tricking Trump into getting into this war.

Well, the Israeli goal is different from the American goal. The Americans want regime change. The Israelis want to create a failed state. They want to fragment Iran the same way they fragmented and destroyed Iraq, the same way they turned Libya into a failed state. Those are very different goals.

John Mearsheimer I agree with that. I agree with that. But the Israelis don’t advertise that fact. I think the Israeli view is if they got regime change and they got a pro-American/pro-Israel regime in place, then they wouldn’t have to worry that much about destroying the country. But I think that they probably understand that that’s not going to happen, that Iran’s not going away. And given that Iran is not going away, let’s wreck it. Let’s do to Iran what we did to Syria. And then we’re done with Iran, we can turn to Turkey and break Turkey apart as well.

Chris Hedges Well, let’s talk about a country that does have a strategy, which isn’t the United States, and that’s Iran. And what I found interesting is that rather than confront the American military might, i.e. the ships, they have decided quite astutely and quite methodically to destroy the economic machinery, not only in the Gulf, but globally.

John Mearsheimer Yeah, the Iranians are pursuing a smart strategy. And to go back to General Caine, General Caine has made a number of comments about the Iranians that make clear that he respects their ability to strategise in this war. He is not contemptuous of the Iranians. When you listen to [Pete] Hegseth and Trump talk, they talk about the Iranians like they’re a bunch of country bumpkins and we’re the strategic geniuses and not only do we have an advantage in material power, we Americans have an advantage in how to think strategically.

I think that’s not the case. And I think if you listen carefully to General Caine, he’s making that point. We are up against a formidable adversary, given what you said, given what General Caine said. They have a lot of cards to play. The key here, Chris, is that Iran has a huge arsenal of short-range ballistic missiles and drones that it can use against the Gulf states. And the Gulf states present a target-rich environment. It’s easy to use those drones and those short-range ballistic missiles to do great damage to all of the countries in the Gulf, including Saudi Arabia.

The Iranians also have a lot of long range missiles and also long range drones that can hit Israel. Now they’ve not done much of that up to now. It’s very important to understand that in the Twelve Day War last June, the Iranians fought almost exclusively against Israel. They did not target American military bases in the........

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