By John J. Mearsheimer
John's Substack
August 4, 2026
On 30 July 2026, I was on Glenn Diesen's popular podcast. Amazingly, we hardly talked about Iran, despite the fact it looked at the time like President Trump was about to launch a massive attack against Iranian infrastructure, to include its oil facilities. We talked instead about Ukraine and the disconnect between what is actually happening in that war and the stories being told about the course of that conflict in both Ukraine and the West. Glenn and I had a rather lengthy discussion about propaganda toward the end of the podcast, which I think listeners might find interesting.
This article was originally published on John's Substack.
John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982.