University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer argues the threat of an “economic catastrophe” is causing President Trump to play hardball with Israel. Mearsheimer told “Breaking Points” that Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance believe they “have to get a deal” with Iran to avoid a depression. “For the first time in any recent president’s experience, we are seeing a president really bring down the hammer on the Israelis,” Mearsheimer said. “And I would imagine that as we move forward and it becomes clearer and clearer that this one has to be shut down for economic reasons, President Trump and Vice President Vance will go to even greater lengths to be tough on the Israelis. So this is an anomalous situation and it’s caused by extraordinary circumstances, in particular, the threat of a Great Depression.”

KRYSTAL BALL, CO-HOST: Professor, what are the indications that you’re looking at to determine how likely it is that we actually are able to come to some sort of an agreement here after the 60-day period? JOHN MEARSHEIMER, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO POLITICAL SCIENCE PROFESSOR: Well, all you have to do is look at the state of the international economy and you have to look at what’s happening to our petroleum reserves in the United States. The president has made this clear himself. He has said that we are facing, quote unquote, an economic catastrophe if we don’t shut this war down. He’s explicitly said that he doesn’t want to be Herbert Hoover the second. He fully understands that this war just has to be shut down. There’s a set of economic imperatives at play here. You want to ask yourself, why is it that President Trump is willing to sign on to an agreement where we lose on almost every count and the Iranians win on almost every count? They come out of this agreement much better off than they were going into the war. Why did this happen? And the answer is the international economy. And to take it a step further, if you look at the conflict that’s now taking place between the United States and Israel, mainly over southern Lebanon, it’s quite clear that what has caused President Trump for the first time in his presidency to play real hardball with the Israelis is the fact that he’s staring an economic catastrophe in the face and he wants to avoid that at all costs. And in those circumstances, he’s willing to be really tough with the Israelis. SAAGAR ENJETI, CO-HOST: Right. And, sir, one of the interesting things is that the vice president and the United States is taking an extraordinary amount, really, of pushback from the Iranians. Here’s the vice president speaking yesterday on the tarmac in Geneva about the Iranians supposedly walking out and then coming back and a lot of symbology. Let’s take a listen. VICE PRESIDENT J.D. VANCE: I’ve spent a lot of time dealing with the Iranians over the last few months. Sometimes I find them extremely confusing as negotiators. But look, we had a little press conference. They obviously don’t quite have the same First Amendment protections in Iran that we have in the United States of America. We talked to you guys and then had a series of really good meetings. What I did find kind of funny is that after that initial meeting, there was this, you know, sort of social media firestorm where everybody said the Iranians are going to leave. And then we proceeded to talk to them for like the next nine hours. So I would just encourage the media, mistrust a little bit what you see coming out of Iranian social media. They can be confusing negotiators, but we feel like we’re making progress. ENJETI: There seems to be this just consistent downplaying of any Iranian, you know, pushback or any Iranian snub intended towards the United States, which is just extraordinary and part of what’s sending many of these neoconservatives into a full blown freakout here, sir. MEARSHEIMER: Well, Vance understands, much like Trump, that we just have to get a deal. And Vance is the point man here. And I think that we should all hope that Vance succeeds and that Trump succeeds. I mean, we’ve all been extremely critical, and I’m choosing my words carefully here. We’ve been extremely critical of the decision to launch this war and wage it the way we did up to now. It was a huge mistake. But the president and the vice president fully recognized the error of their ways, and they’re trying to repair the problem and fix this before the international economy goes off a cliff. And I applaud them for that. And I just hope that they solve the problem. If they don’t solve the problem and we enter into a Great Depression like the one we had in the 1930s, the economic consequences of this will be huge, especially around the world in poor countries. Lots of people will die and it’ll have devastating consequences for the American economy. And none of us want that. So we should hope, in my opinion, that Trump and Vance, who have now reversed direction, are able to shut this one down. It’s obviously going to be a messy process. How could it be otherwise when you’re involved with President Trump, who’s shooting off all these tweets that say outrageous things from time to time? He’ll make it as messy as he possibly can. But I think in the end, we have an imperative to shut this one down. And I think the Iranians also have an imperative to shut this one down. And I think there’s a good chance. One wouldn’t want to say it’s 100 percent guaranteed by any means, but I think we do have a good chance of coming up with some sort of meaningful settlement to this war. BALL: Professor, Israel is very, very, very unhappy that there are talks going on at all, that there’s even a possibility of a negotiated settlement along the lines of what is being contemplated. What is your response to people who would say to you and to me and to Sagar, you people say that the Israel lobby controls everything and we’re just their puppets. And here you have Trump going directly against what the Israelis want over their vociferous objections, creating a complete political crisis for Netanyahu and an existential crisis for the Israeli state as a whole. Weren’t you wrong about your assessment of how much influence the Israel lobby has in the United States? MEARSHEIMER: Up until very recently, there’s no question that the lobby had a lock hold on U.S. Middle East policy. There’s no question about that. But what has changed here is that we got into this war and it’s quite clear that as a result of the war and what Iran has done in terms of shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, that they have the ability to wreck the international economy. And that is a threat that is so great that for the first time in President Trump’s second and first term in office, and for the first time in any recent president’s experience, we are seeing a president really bring down the hammer on the Israelis. And I would imagine that as we move forward and it becomes clearer and clearer that this one has to be shut down for economic reasons, President Trump and Vice President Vance will go to even greater lengths to be tough on the Israelis. So this is an anomalous situation and it’s caused by extraordinary circumstances, in particular, the threat of a Great Depression. ENJETI: Something that we think is absolutely fascinating, sir, was throughout the war, it became very clear about the role of the U.S. dollar throughout this. The petrodollar, of course, has always been a long subject of analysis and of explanation. However, we also saw that China and Iran, you know, by use of crypto or denominating these tolls that they were charging in the middle of the war, were able to bring them some revenue. The recent clues in the U.S. Treasury sanctions, let’s put A3 up here on the screen, seem like a clawback at trying to have at least some of the dominance that we previously had before the war, where the most recent interesting part of the primary sanctions relief actually allows Iran not only to sell its oil, but to actually allow those settlement of transactions in dollars. It means that Chinese buyers could pay Iran in dollars. It also even means that American refineries could buy any Iranian petrochemical products. What do you make here of the U.S. attempt to try and to reverse some of the damage to the global oil market and what Iran revealed about U.S. sanctions throughout this entire war? MEARSHEIMER: Well, first of all, you want to remember that at the start of this war, when the bombing campaign was taking place, we were allowing Iranian tankers to come out of the Gulf and sell their oil on global markets. And the reason is quite straightforward. We needed all the oil we could get on global markets. And it wasn’t until President Trump put the blockade on the strait that we cut off in large part the flow of Iranian oil into global markets. Now, what’s different here is that they can sell those barrels of oil in dollars, and that’s different. And the question you want to ask yourself is, why is President Trump doing this? And the answer is in large part because Iran won the war, and this is one of their demands. We simply have no choice if we want to shut this war down. The Iranians have made a number of demands. It’s quite amazing how many demands they’ve made that we have agreed to, and this is one of them. But furthermore, this works to our advantage because it gets more oil out into global markets and it keeps the price of oil down. So that’s a good thing.

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