{"id":59704,"date":"2026-06-13T13:15:14","date_gmt":"2026-06-13T21:15:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=59704"},"modified":"2026-06-13T13:20:20","modified_gmt":"2026-06-13T21:20:20","slug":"john-mearsheimer-asks-what-nuclear-taboo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/13\/john-mearsheimer-asks-what-nuclear-taboo\/","title":{"rendered":"John Mearsheimer asks What Nuclear Taboo?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Reprinted from <a href=\"https:\/\/mearsheimer.substack.com\/p\/what-nuclear-taboo\">John&#8217;s Substack<\/a>:\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p>We discussed his view that the West does not respect Russian red lines and feels that it can use Ukraine as a proxy to attack the Russian homeland and not have to worry about Russia striking back at the West. He believes that the time has come for Russia to reestablish deterrence, first by attacking targets in Europe with conventional weapons. And if that does not work, Russia should launch limited nuclear strikes into Europe, as that will surely get the Europeans to call off Ukraine\u2019s increasingly lethal attacks on mother Russia.<\/p>\n<p>Karaganov\u2019s views, which are widely shared in Russia, are cause for great concern, as should be clear to anyone who views the discussion in this video.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Q8PT0jiemKc?si=jtbdu2aMTQ3yQKjw\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Reprinted from John&#8217;s Substack:\u00a0 We discussed his view that the West does not respect Russian red lines and feels that it can use Ukraine as a proxy to attack the Russian homeland and not have to worry about Russia striking back at the West. He believes that the time has come for Russia to reestablish [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":308,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_seopress_news_disabled":"","_seopress_video_disabled":"","_seopress_video":[],"_seopress_pro_schemas_manual":[],"_seopress_pro_rich_snippets_disable_all":"","_seopress_pro_rich_snippets_disable":[],"_seopress_pro_schemas":[],"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_social_image_id":59708,"_social_image_url":"","_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1054],"class_list":["post-59704","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":"","_social_image_id":"59708","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59704","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=59704"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59704\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59707,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59704\/revisions\/59707"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59704"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=59704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}