On 26 August 2026, John Mearsheimer, professor of international relations at the University of Chicago, appeared on retired US Army colonel Daniel Davis’s Deep Dive podcast, which focuses on geopolitical affairs. Their discussion centred on the familiar issues dominating current international debate: Iran, Ukraine and Donald Trump’s foreign policy.
Davis, who returned from Afghanistan and in 2012 exposed how civilian and military officials had misled the American public about the course of the war, found himself, as often happens in such discussions, attempting alongside his guest to make sense of American and European policies that appear strategically irrational.
The two agreed that the United States was heading towards failure in both Iran and Ukraine, attributing this largely to Washington’s tendency to pursue reckless and aggressive policies.
Mearsheimer also argued that America’s standing around the world had deteriorated so severely that people across different countries were now hoping to see the United States and Israel lose their war against Iran.
The Threat of an Unrestrained America
For Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington, the issue is not fundamentally about Iran. It is about the threat posed to other countries by an America that is increasingly unconstrained.
Parsi said he had been struck by the number of officials from different countries who, despite showing little support for Iran or sympathy towards the Islamic Republic, privately expressed considerable relief that Tehran had succeeded in frustrating the US-Israeli aggression.
Given that many of these officials represent countries traditionally aligned with the United States, and in some cases have their own disputes with the Islamic Republic, this quiet support for Iran says something deeper about the current state of international relations.
The relief, according to this view, comes from seeing aggression and violations of international law fail to deliver the desired outcome for the United States and Israel in Iran.
For many governments, Venezuela had already provided a disturbing precedent.
Whatever one’s view of Nicolás Maduro, the idea of a superpower abducting the president of another country and his wife, installing its preferred leader, leaving that leader effectively dependent on the approval of the US secretary of state even for her social media statements, and then watching Trump boast that Venezuela had effectively become American territory was alarming to many states.
Equally disturbing, in this interpretation, was the way European leaders praised the regime-change operation and brushed aside concerns over its legitimacy.
Europe, which broadly opposed the George W. Bush administration’s illegal invasion of Iraq, had now become an enthusiastic supporter of regime change in Venezuela while simultaneously insisting on the sanctity of international law in Ukraine and Greenland.
The absence of serious resistance made the cost of this new American colonial intervention easier for Washington to absorb.
Given Trump’s tendencies, both America’s allies and its adversaries began wondering whether they might be next.
A Losing War With No End in Sight
The speed of the US military success in Venezuela was one reason for Trump’s enthusiasm for war with Iran.
If Venezuela could be dealt with in a matter of hours, Trump appeared to believe Iran would require no more than four days.
According to an Arab official, Trump assured sceptical regional leaders that the entire ordeal “would not take more than 100 hours”.
Six months later, however, Trump finds himself trapped in a losing war with no clear end in sight.
Officials around the world, according to Parsi, are privately relieved that successful Iranian resistance has effectively prevented Trump from moving on to his next targets.
One official from a traditional US ally put it bluntly: “Had the Iranians not held out, Trump would probably have attacked Cuba by now, and perhaps annexed Greenland as well.”
This sympathy towards Iran, however, is not really about Iran.
There has been little visible governmental sympathy for the Islamic Republic, even if public sentiment in some countries appears different.
Rather, the calculations are rooted largely in self-interest.
An openly neo-colonial American foreign policy represents, for many governments, a greater threat than Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
There is no doubt that the closure harms countries that played no role in encouraging Trump’s disastrous war. But for many, that economic pain is seen as relatively manageable.
Few countries other than Iran have designed their militaries specifically to withstand American or Israeli aggression should they find themselves on Trump’s list of future targets.
There is even concern in some quarters that Iran could reopen the Strait of Hormuz too soon, before Trump commits himself to abandoning neoconservative policies.
Just as Iran helped create a quagmire for the United States in Iraq in order to discourage the Bush administration from later invading Iran, many countries may now privately hope that Trump remains bogged down in the Gulf for the foreseeable future.
For them, that may be the most effective guarantee against another American rush towards regime change or territorial annexation.
America as the Most Immediate Threat
What is emerging is a world increasingly seeking balance.
From the perspective of many countries, not only in the Global South, the power that most urgently needs to be balanced and constrained is the United States.
Not Russia, Iran or North Korea. Certainly not China.
From this perspective, that conclusion is not ideological but an assessment of which state currently represents the most immediate threat.
A similar pattern appeared in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine.
Many governments sympathised with Ukraine, even while assigning part of the blame to NATO, but they did not necessarily view Russia as a direct threat to themselves.
Then Washington severed Russia’s links to the international financial system within five days.
Alarm bells rang across capitals around the world.
The concern was not necessarily sympathy for Russia, nor a belief that sanctions were unjustified. Rather, the episode demonstrated Washington’s capacity to devastate economies within days because of the global dependence on the US dollar in international trade.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine revealed no comparable vulnerability among Global South countries to Russian economic power.
Washington’s rapid financial retaliation, however, exposed just how vulnerable other states were to American decisions and capabilities.
In 2022, that American threat may still have appeared largely theoretical, particularly because Joe Biden showed little inclination to use such power indiscriminately.
Today, according to this argument, it has become considerably more tangible.
Friendship With Washington Offers No Guarantee
Friendship with the United States no longer necessarily protects a country from Trump’s changing political priorities.
One Western diplomat recently said she had tried to persuade her country’s leadership not to seek a state visit to Washington.
“Nothing good will come of it,” she said. “It is simply better not to enter his field of attention.”
The calculation resembles survival in the wild: sometimes the safest strategy is not to attract the attention of a stronger predator.
This reality once again illustrates how damaging the war against Iran, and neoconservative foreign policy more broadly, may ultimately prove for the United States itself.
Every state seeks to strengthen its power. But sound governance and effective diplomacy require ensuring that this power is not unnecessarily perceived as a threat by other countries.
When it is, those countries are left with little choice but to seek ways of balancing it.
What is happening now may amount to balancing by proxy, with countries that have little sympathy for Iran nevertheless quietly welcoming its ability to restrain American power.
Iran and much of the world may not necessarily want to see America defeated or humiliated.
What they may want instead is an America that is balanced, constrained and less aggressive.
