I was fortunate to speak to John J. Mearsheimer not long after my detention by Counter-Terrorist police at Heathrow Airport on 2 October. Having also been detained for four and a half hours at Vnukovo Airport by the FSB, I remarked that it is perhaps a parable of the diplomat that one is destined to be disliked by both sides.
In this interview, we discussed the collapse of western superiority in the face of failing wars in Ukraine and in Iran and against the backdrop of a genocide in Gaza.
John Mearsheimer has been saying for some time that the war in Ukraine will end with an ugly victory for Russia. In this conversation he reinforced his assessment.
Neither side, he argued, is in a position to deliver a decisive victory. Ukraine is not going to drive Russian forces out of the territory they hold, and Russia is not going to occupy the whole of the country and install a compliant government in Kyiv. What is more likely is an armistice at some point, after which Russia will keep a large slice of Ukrainian land, incorporate the four oblasts it has already claimed plus Crimea, and do what it can to leave whatever remains of Ukraine weak and dysfunctional.
The problem is that this is not the outcome Western governments have been promising their publics in 2022; that Ukraine would win and that Russia would suffer a strategic defeat.
The gap between what was promised and the likely end result in Ukraine grows larger with every passing day. Western leaders invested heavily in the idea that Ukraine could be restored to its 1991 borders - an ambition then UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss articulated in her 27 April 2022 Mansion House speech.
Four and a half years down the track, NATO’s credibility, the reputation of the European Union, and the broader claim that the West still sets the rules of the international system have all suffered a devastating blow.
And when the war ends, as it surely will at some point, the political cost will be high. I have been making this point for some time now.
John Mearsheimer’s view is that this is why governments in Washington, London, Berlin and Brussels continue to describe a deteriorating position as something that can still be salvaged. They are, in his words, polishing failures. The alternative—admitting that the war has been lost in any practical sense—would require them to explain to voters why so much money, equipment and political capital was spent for a result that leaves Russia stronger on the ground than it was at the start.
He places this in a longer story about the period after the Cold War. For a time it was possible to believe that liberal democracy had won the argument and that its spread was both inevitable and desirable. Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” captured that mood.
The material conditions of life in Western countries were better than those on the other side of the old Iron Curtain, and ordinary people could perceive that difference in every day life. That comparison no longer holds.
Large numbers of people in Europe and the United States now feel that the economic gains of the last thirty years have gone mainly to those at the top, while the costs of wars and financial crises have been shuffled down to those at the bottom.
With western governments increasingly asking regular working class people to accept higher energy prices, longer military commitments and restrictions on speech in the name of supporting Ukraine or containing Russia, the old ‘we will win’ story, rooted in a now misplaced sense of Western superiority, is becoming harder to sell.
Gaza has made the problem even more difficult.
John does not treat the destruction there as a regrettable side-effect of a legitimate campaign against Hamas. He describes it as a deliberate effort to make life in Gaza so unlivable that Palestinians will leave, and he notes that the same logic of demographic control operates, more slowly, in the West Bank.
Once it became clear that large numbers of civilians were being killed and that the stated aim included emptying the territory, the Western response was not to restrain Israel but to continue supplying weapons and diplomatic support.
The United States under both Biden and Trump has done this; European governments have largely gone along for the ride.
The result, in John’s view, is that the West can no longer claim with any credibility that it stands for a rules-based order or for basic restraints on the use of force against civilians. The images of starvation, brutalisation and death are public and freely available for anyone to see online. The refusal to place any limitations on Israeli policy is public.
This is done lasting damage to the idea that Western governments are the “good guys” in international affairs.
John is equally direct about the two recent rounds of fighting with Iran. In neither case, he argues, did Iran attack another country first. The strikes in 2025 and again in early 2026 were initiated by Israel and the United States. The second round involved the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, members of his family, and other senior figures. He calls this murder rather than legitimate self-defence, and he notes that the United States has achieved none of the objectives it set for itself.
Iranian capabilities have not been eliminated, the Strait of Hormuz has been disrupted, American bases in the region have been hit, and the United States has been forced to pull forces out of the Gulf.
A memorandum of understanding signed in June amounted, in his reading, to an American recognition that there was no workable military path to the outcome Washington wanted. Trump walked away from that document, but the underlying problem remains: the United States does not have a strategy that can compel Iran to accept American terms, and further bombing is unlikely to change that.
The practical consequence is that the United States is tied down in two places—Ukraine and the Persian Gulf—while the region it has long identified as its highest priority, East Asia, receives less attention.
John points out that Chinese interests are served by both conflicts continuing. Every month the United States spends munitions and political capital against Russia and Iran is a month in which Beijing can continue its own military modernisation without the added complication of an active American challenge in the Western Pacific.
European governments, he notes, at least had the sense to stay out of the Iran fighting. They have shown no equivalent restraint over Ukraine.
Despite this, John doesn’t predict a sudden collapse of Western institutions. What he expects instead is a long period of poisonous politics. Even after the shooting stops in Ukraine, Russia will try to keep the remaining Ukrainian state weak, and Ukraine’s Western backers will try to keep Russia under pressure. The same pattern of unresolved grievance is likely in the Middle East.
Public opinion in Europe and the United States has already moved further from official policy on Gaza than most governments acknowledge. The upcoming NAZA documentary on Israel’s genocide in Gaza may have devastating conesquences for Israel’s image in America and in the rest of the world.
John’s experience of the Vietnam years leads him to think that a fuller reckoning will face western leaders when the fighting is over. While the wars continue, governments have an incentive to treat criticism as unhelpful or disloyal. Once the costs are clear and the results are in, the questions about how the decisions were made become harder to avoid.
He is not optimistic that Western leaders will draw the obvious lessons quickly. The same elites who promoted the expansion of NATO, the isolation of Russia, and unconditional support for Israel are still largely in place.
They have every reason to argue that the problems were caused by insufficient resolve rather than by flawed strategy. Mearsheimer’s counter is simply that the results are now visible: Russia holds more Ukrainian territory than it did in 2022, Iran has not been brought to heel, and the claim that the West represents a superior moral and political model is now discredited in much of the world.
Whether that assessment provokes a change in western policy is another matter. For the moment, the evidence he sees points to continued difficulty rather than any sudden cessation of western mis-adventurism. That suggests more turbulence ahead, rather than any outbreak of much-needed peace and stability in the world.
You can watch the full interview here:
Wherever you are in the world, whatever your nationality and religion, I wish you much peace.