Talking about Gaza War with Glenn Greenwald
I was interviewed by Glenn Greenwald on his show “System Update” on 5 January 2024.
We talked about my article on “Genocide in Gaza,” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more generally, and the Ukraine war.
Our conversation starts at about the 33-minute, 40-second mark and goes for an hour.
https://rumble.com/v45bnb2-system-update-show-207.html
I just listend to it. Excellent segment! Thank you, professor. Keep up the good fight in an age of mass delusion.
Glenn: “…Why should someone who looks at the world, in a realist way, care whether or not the US ends up alienating or isolating much of the world because of this obsession with standing with Israel?”
John: “Diplomacy matters. A realist like me places enormous amount of attention in the balance of power. I wouldn’t argue that diplomacy doesn’t matter. If you’re interested in acting on the world stage, you don’t want to be diplomatically isolated. And one of the consequences in the fact that [the US] is joined at the hip with Israel, is that it causes us diplomatic problems and that’s certainly the case since October 7th… international legal institutions do not have the ability to coerce great powers like the US, China, or Russia, they can ignore the dictates of those institutions — in a highly interdependent world that we live in, there’s no way you can conduct business without institutions. Therefore the US is a big proponent of institutions. If you were to laundry list all of the powerful institutions in the world, you would see [the US] created most of them — [the US] wrote the rules, with regard to the genocide convention. This is the way the world works. Powerful states write the rules, and support institutions more generally because it’s in their interest. We have an interest in maintaining the United Nations and ICJ, this doesn’t mean we’re gunna be happy with what that court or institution proposes as a solution to a problem, in some cases we ignore the dictates of the institution but the fact is, institutions matter to us and therefore we have a vested interest in making sure we are in sync with what those institutions are doing as much as possible”.