John Mearsheimer on The Art of Losing Wars

by | Jun 14, 2026 | News | 0 comments

Reprinted from John’s Substack

On 11 June 2026, I was on the “Deep Dive” with Lt. Col. (ret.) Danny Davis talking about Ukraine and Iran. Danny and I laid out the case that although neither the Iran war nor the Ukraine war is over, it is clear that Iran and Russia are going to be the winners and the US and its allies are going to suffer a pair of humiliating defeats. Save for the 1991 Gulf War, the US has been on a serious losing streak since at least the Vietnam war. Think Afghanistan and Iraq. There seems to be little doubt that the Iran and Ukraine wars are going to scramble the international landscape in significant ways, which is a subject for another day.

John J. Mearsheimer, PhD, is an American professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. More recently Mearsheimer has attracted attention for co-authoring and publishing the article The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which was subsequently published as a book.

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