{"id":57408,"date":"2026-01-30T07:06:12","date_gmt":"2026-01-30T15:06:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=57408"},"modified":"2026-01-30T07:06:12","modified_gmt":"2026-01-30T15:06:12","slug":"john-mearsheimer-iran-will-strike-back-hard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/30\/john-mearsheimer-iran-will-strike-back-hard\/","title":{"rendered":"John Mearsheimer: Iran Will Strike Back Hard"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Reprinted from <a href=\"https:\/\/mearsheimer.substack.com\/p\/iran-will-strike-back-hard\">John&#8217;s Substack<\/a>:\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p>On 29 January 2026, I was on \u201cJudging Freedom\u201d talking with the Judge about the ongoing peace negotiations over Ukraine, which I believe are nothing more than Kabuki theater. This war is going to be settled on the battlefield. We also talked about the likelihood of the US attacking Iran. While Trump is certainly making lots of threats and giving the impression it\u2019s only a question of time before he turns the US military loose on Iran, there are good reasons to think he will not attack: no apparent way of achieving regime change with military force; and Iran can retaliate in ways that might be enormously costly to Israel, the US, and the world economy. In the final analysis, who knows what Trump will do? Finally, we talked about whether or not the US is in Cold War 2.0 with China and Russia.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/l-V7pWiEEvs?si=4YhdAT1Z8sRqTGe5\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Reprinted from John&#8217;s Substack:\u00a0 On 29 January 2026, I was on \u201cJudging Freedom\u201d talking with the Judge about the ongoing peace negotiations over Ukraine, which I believe are nothing more than Kabuki theater. This war is going to be settled on the battlefield. We also talked about the likelihood of the US attacking Iran. While [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":308,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1054],"class_list":["post-57408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"0","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/308"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57408"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57414,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57408\/revisions\/57414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57408"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=57408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}