Prof. John Mearsheimer on Why Foreign Involvement in Iran Would Fail, U.S. Aggression Toward Venezuela, Trump's Foreign Policy, and More
System Update with Glenn Greenwald
Rumble
4.7 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 14 January 2026
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Prof. John Mearsheimer joins System Update to discuss the protests in Iran, Trump's removal of Maduro, U.S. aggression toward Venezuela, the war in Ukraine, and more.
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| 0:00.0 | Professor Mearsheimer, always great to see you. |
| 0:18.5 | And fortunately, there's always a lot of military conflicts. |
| 0:24.7 | The U.S. is involved in to talk to you about. And that's certainly the case for tonight. So we're looking forward to to hearing from you. I'm glad to be here, Glenn. All right. Hard to know |
| 0:33.1 | which region of the world or conflict that is either ongoing or imminent to start with. |
| 0:41.4 | But why don't we talk about Venezuela since, at least for the moment, we can talk about |
| 0:46.1 | things that have happened already in the past and the prospect that things will happen more. |
| 0:51.4 | So far what has happened is that the United States spent |
| 0:54.8 | several months having a massive military buildup in the area of Venezuela. We were bombing |
| 1:01.4 | ships that we were claiming with absolutely no evidence, were filled with drugs coming to the United |
| 1:06.0 | States. There was a covert CIA destabilization campaign that was there for at least month that |
| 1:12.8 | President Trump authorized. And of course, then the military operation that abducted Nicholas |
| 1:20.1 | Maduro, the longtime leader of Venezuela and took him back to the United States to stand trial. |
| 1:24.0 | What do you make of all that in terms of what the United States did and what the consequences |
| 1:28.3 | are likely to be? Well, first of all, I think what's very interesting from my perspective is that |
| 1:35.3 | there was no reason for us to do this. There was no threat from Venezuela. I mean, for a while, |
| 1:43.8 | they tried to argue that there was a narco-terrorist |
| 1:47.1 | threat, but that argument is foolish. And then they occasionally argued that this is all about |
| 1:55.2 | the Monroe Doctrine. We're worried about Chinese and Russian influence in the Western Hemisphere, but there was no |
| 2:03.5 | military influence in the Western Hemisphere. There was no threat that China or Russia was going |
| 2:11.3 | to form an alliance with Venezuela. So the Monroe Doctrine wasn't operative. And then we went in, and the end result is that it appears after listening to President Trump talk that this is really all about oil. |
| 2:28.3 | And that he basically thinks that we own Venezuelan oil |
| 2:34.8 | and that it's in our national interest to control Venezuela |
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