John Mearsheimer, the University of Chicago professor, spoke about his recent debate in Toronto, where he was joined by Stephen Walt, the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of international relations at the Harvard Kennedy School, and took on Victoria‘Fuck the EU’Nuland and Mike‘Fire Point’Pompeo.
Mearsheimer appeared onJudge Andrew Napolitano’s Judging Freedomand was asked about the part of the Munk Debates (which took place on 20 May) where he noted that there was no evidence that Iran knew that Hamas was going to carry out the attack on 7 October 2023, “much less planned it.”
Nuland mocked him during the conversation and said it must be “nice to live where you live.”
Mearsheimer said you would have expected Pompeo, the former secretary of state, to provide evidence to back up the claim, but he “didn’t provide any evidence, he just laughed at me and they pretended that we were two fools, you know, who lived in an Ivory Tower and didn’t know much about the real world. But, as you know…that’s not the way you’re supposed to argue in those debates. You have a bunch of sophisticated and well-educated people getting together to discuss important issues, and if there’s disagreement, you want to show that the other side is wrong, because that side has the facts wrong. But, of course, we did not have the facts wrong. And the facts that Steve presented to Mike Pompeo were very powerful facts.”
Pompeo said during the discussion that he believes Iran is a good “monster” to pursue because of its aggression in the Strait of Hormuz, but Walt reminded him that it was the U.S. that invaded.
“They weren't firing those missiles until Israel and the United States attacked Iran. You do understand that,” Walt said.
Pompeo responded, “Welcome to 1979, when the revolutionary regime began to kill Europeans.”
Walt responded: “You do know that we overthrew the democratically elected government in 1954. Just for the record, you were talking about this. You don't think Iran has forgotten about that?”
Source: Trends in the News
