John Mearsheimer: Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and WW3 | Lex Fridman Podcast #401

There is something oddly nostalgic about foreign policy pre-smartphone. People could hide in the shadows, spies didn't sit in offices all day, deals were made in cigar smoke without the fear of out-of-context leaks to twitter. People from that era are still giving interviews though: [VIDEO]

At the level of nation-states, there is an anarchistic relationship between one another. There's no real concept of legality at an international level when you peel away all the bureaucratic nonsense. John J. Mearsheimer touches on this briefly in his interview with Lex Fridman: [VIDEO] The permanent members of the UN's Security Council do not abide by laws they force other members to abide by. This is because there really are great powers in the world, which, despite being difficult for people in the West to understand, is very obvious in the rest of the world.

>> So it's sad to see anyone falling for Putin's lies so easily. (See also Mearshimer.) Mearsheimer can be a bit too convincing for his own good, surely. What he has argued that is certainly convincing is that Russia was ready to negotiate a peace at the start of the war, when Russians and Ukrainians met in Belarus and then in Istanbul. If Putin wanted to recreate Imperial Russia, or the Soviet Union, then why would he negotiate for peace? That's Mearsh's argument, which he articulates, e.g. here in Lex Friedman's show (sorry, I couldn't find a better source): [VIDEO] Full transcript here: [LINK]