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Dec. 4, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
24:39
COL. Lawrence Wilkerson : Trump and Forever Wars.
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Thursday, December 5th, 2024.
My dear friend, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson joins us now.
Colonel Lawrence, pleasure, my dear friend.
Thank you for joining us.
What is your take, Colonel, on the six-hour-in-duration declaration of martial law in South Korea this week?
It didn't surprise me that much.
My experience on the peninsula is deep and long.
I arrived first when Park Chung-hee was the dictator there and watched them go through the process of creating a democracy.
I must say, the gentleman you had on just before this, I agreed with almost every word he said.
The South Koreans are politically astute, politically active, their media is fair and balanced for the most part, and they go after people when they do something that the majority of the people here represented by the majority of the parliament don't like.
Then I want to correct something that another person on your show said, a little bit anyway.
Colin Powell, when he was chairman and then when he was secretary of state, with Dick Cheney's acquiescence, actually, It turned enormous authority over to the Korean military and the Korean government for the defense of the peninsula.
So to say that the Koreans are in some way upset about the U.S. retaining a lot of power over their country is really not accurate.
That's old news.
That's been more or less taken care of.
There are still some wibbles, of course, but we've moved out of Yongsan, basically.
A soldier told me the other day if we put another troop in Pyeongtaek, we may seek it because that's where we've moved to.
The issue is not that with the U.S. Here's the issue with the U.S. and with the South Koreans, and this recent incident reflected this.
The issue is the South Koreans understand that we're not really very interested in defending the peninsula against North Korea.
Of course, we will.
We will because we have 26, 27, 28,000 troops there.
And even more importantly, we have a quarter million plus Americans in the greater Seoul area.
So we will defend it.
There's no question about that.
And Kim Jong-un knows that.
Kim Jong-un knows that.
And the only advantage he has, of course, is his nuclear weapons.
And as long as we're there, we offset that.
But here's our strategic focus.
And the majority of the Koreans know this and don't like it.
It's China.
We want to use Korea as a place to fight from, a lily pad in the war against China.
They're a major trade partner.
They don't like that at all.
And so you get polls showing now, for example, 60% of the Korean people under 40 think the greatest threat to their future is the United States.
They do not like the fact that we are on their peninsula principally now strategically to fight China.
Very interesting.
Isn't South Korea almost like a vassal state to the United States of America with respect to military and intelligence?
Not anymore.
Not really.
They are their own independent actor.
And that's what I liked about your previous speaker.
Rowan, I think his name was.
I've got a couple of people like him in Seoul and one in Taegu, too, where the South Koreans pretty much move their joint apparatus for their military.
They are very, very capable people.
They're very interested in preserving their democracy and their economy, which is most of the time ticking on eight cylinders.
And they are very much interested in what's going on, and they're very much interested in the relationship with the United States.
and they welcome that relationship to a point.
But when it gets to the point where we, like we're doing with Germany, for example, in They get very worried about what their peninsula will absorb, if you will, if we go to war with China, even a conventional war.
Were you surprised that there was not a peep out of the South Korean ambassador, the secretary of state, the national security advisor, or even the general who commands these 28,000 Not really, because it's probably not in their focus right now.
They've got many other problems to focus on.
And secondarily, I suspect they were sympathetic with the president because the president is sympathetic to their geostrategic situation.
Well, he's probably going to be impeached and prosecuted as a result of this stunt, according to Ryan, who's an American that lives in South Korea and says he has his finger on the pulse of politics there.
I was doing a webinar-type, Zoom-type lecture, if you will, with the defense attaché and people he assembled around him.
We were talking about just what you and I discussed, but in greater detail.
And all of a sudden it got cut off.
Well, I know why it got cut off, because the embassy did not want that kind of information coming in.
It was too much factual and too much the truth.
He was speaking from the embassy.
Yes, he would gather a lot of the people in the defense attache's staff arrangement, and in the ambassadorial staff in particular, and we would I'd give a little lecture and then we'd have question and answer and so forth.
And I'm sure that that seeped out and someone told and all of a sudden it didn't happen anymore.
I hope I didn't get him in trouble.
Is the gathering of American troops there, some 26, 7 or 8,000, the largest anywhere in the world outside of the U.S.?
Well, not now with all the troops we have off and on in Europe.
Well, talk about any one country.
I mean, 28,000, what are they there for, waiting for the North to attack?
Oh, I just told you why they're there now.
This was part of my componentry at the Marine Corps War College when we talked about this.
Right, right.
The Marines are significantly interested in the strategy to fight China, and they are in Korea, and they are also in an island chain and going to be even in a much wider island chain, which you may not know we are renovating right now, including Tinian and the old World War II airfield from which Nola Gay took off.
We are now renovating that entire rim of islands that we had in World War II, renovating the airfields, the quarters, the buildings for maintenance and so forth.
And we're doing it right now with mostly National Guard troops on active duty, engineers and such to do it.
And why are we doing this in anticipation of fighting China over Taiwan?
We're in anticipation of fighting China for any reason whatsoever.
Wow.
Switching gears, Colonel, recently the president-elect of the United States said that if Hamas does not return hostages before January 20th, Hamas will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied history of the United States.
Do you have any idea what he was talking about?
Not a bit.
I think that's bluster.
I think it's the kind of bluster we heard about North Korea before he then went and crossed the DMZ and shook hands and met with Kim Jong-un.
It's maybe that kind of rhetoric to set that kind of thing up.
I don't believe you could do any more damage to Gaza than Israel has already done.
You'd have to sink it to do that.
Why do you think Prime Minister Netanyahu acquiesced?
I think it was a deal he made with Blinken and the rest of the Biden administration that he would cease there and divert his attention to what they wanted him to divert his attention to, and that's Syria.
And he's now doing that.
Great question.
Great question.
This morning I have a person on the ground in Aleppo, a woman who is a really dear woman, Syrian, and she told me this is horrible.
This is absolutely horrible, except this morning everything cleared this morning to her.
Everything cleared and Aleppo is reasonably peaceful again.
And I don't know who did it, the Turks, the terrorists or what, but it's, I said, what about the Russians?
And she said, well, we're just waiting for that response.
Don't know.
And I have no idea why we did this other than we are still judged.
We are still operating on the clean break strategy.
And Syria was supposed to follow Iraq.
And it didn't because the insurgency broke out in Iraq.
But we are still intent on getting rid of Bashar al-Assad, period.
Didn't President Trump during his first term?
Did he order American troops, I won't use his language, but order American troops out of Syria?
He did, but he also shot 52 cruise missiles at them, at Syria, remember?
Yes.
It was his only real act of warlike behavior, other than killing Soleimani, in his entire time, really.
I mean, are they there to protect the Conoco oil fields or are they actually stealing oil?
They were stealing oil.
Colorfully articulated.
They were stealing oil.
No question about it.
Illegally.
International law forbids that sort of thing, but we don't care anything about international law.
I don't know at this moment if that oil supply is even functioning because I can't find anyone in the oil industry that can get a grip on it and tell me that it is or it isn't.
Do you know of a side deal reduced to writing in a letter between Israel and the United States over the so-called ceasefire with Hezbollah, which basically allows Israel to do whatever it wants?
I do not, but I wouldn't doubt it a bit, especially with Blinken and the absence from real decision-making of the president.
Though I wouldn't say that if he were there, he would have changed any of that.
I wouldn't doubt it for a minute.
Yeah.
Switching gears to Ukraine, here is a comment made by Secretary Blinken just earlier today.
He's kind of angry because apparently Foreign Minister Lavrov I regret that
our colleague, Mr. Lavrov, has left the room, not giving the courtesy.
To listen to us as we listen to him.
And of course, our Russian colleague is very adept at drowning listeners in a tsunami of misinformation.
So, I won't parse everything that he said, but I will just note two things.
First, he speaks of the indivisibility of security.
That's right, but it cannot be and must not be a one-way street.
Good for Russia, but not Ukraine.
But let's not fool ourselves, and let's not allow him or anyone else to fool us.
This is not about, and has never been about, Russia's security.
This is about Mr. Putin's imperial project to erase Ukraine from the map.
Do you believe that an American Secretary of State is speaking that nonsense?
I believe that Tony Blinken is, because he's the worst Secretary of State since Thomas Jefferson.
That, of course, would make him the worst Secretary of State in history since Jefferson was the first.
The former ambassador to the United States, whom I had met and talked at length with, from Russia, Antonov, has been gone now for about seven months.
And the reason he told me that they will not replace him and put another ambassador in Washington, and they usually put their best person here, is because no one would talk to him.
Period.
No one would talk to him.
So he went home and said, why the hell am I here?
That's the state of U.S.-Russia relations, and Blinken is responsible for that.
That is unconscionable, that a Secretary of State would set up a regime like that.
Joe Biden, or someone in his behalf, announced that they intended to deliver Three and a half billion dollars worth of military equipment to Ukraine before Christmas.
How close is the Ukraine military to collapsing and will such a cache of materials extend it anymore or just result in waste of American assets and Ukrainian lives?
I would say pretty much 90% plus waste of American Assets and Ukrainian lives.
Russia has won.
The war is very much over.
Mopping up is not even the right phrase to use for the operations that will come now.
And Zelensky, most important of all, Judge, Zelensky has outlined both a ceasefire and a peace agreement.
He took some risk in doing that.
And when I say that risk, it doesn't just emanate from his own people.
Who, by and large, in poll after poll now, show that they want a cessation.
I mean, from the United States and from London and from MI6 and from the CIA and others who might eliminate him.
Much the way we eliminated the Vietnamese leader whom we didn't care for.
We had someone else do it for us.
We had the Vietnamese military do it for us.
But we eliminated Jim in Vietnam.
He got in our way.
Well, Zelensky's getting in our way right now.
He's making proposals that Putin can accept, and he's giving indications that he understands things like, "I can never be a member of NATO.
I can get some security guarantees maybe from London, Washington, maybe Berlin, maybe Paris, maybe the whole NATO group.
I can do all manner of things that will assure what I have left is sound and secure and reasonably defended and potentially in the future reasonably defended." But I must make an agreement with the guy on the other side of the line, and he must have de facto, not real, but real, yes, real, but de facto control over all that he is now occupying, that he has annexed, if you will.
And Zelensky recognized this, that Putin won't go any further with that to try to make it in law, as it were.
Because the BRIC nations, plus the ones that have joined recently, I understand it's up to 14 new ones now, they look at borders as sacrosanct.
And so he can't do anything that would look like it was a justification of what he did to the border.
Therefore, Zelensky recognizes the nuances of this situation, and he's trying to tell people he's more than hinting that he wants to stop.
You know, here's a clip we have from President Zelensky, which is November 29th, so that's six days ago.
It's radically different from what you described.
Maybe he has spoken since then.
But tell me what you think of this.
Please, cut number one.
If we want to stop the hot stage of the war, we should take under NATO umbrella the territory of Ukraine that we have under our control.
That's what we need to do fast.
And then Ukraine can get back the other part of its territory diplomatically.
That's delusional, isn't it?
He's got to say that because he wants to go into negotiations with as strong a position as he possibly can because he knows he's going to have to give up things.
So he's expressing these things with the idea that these are the things that they will think I want and I will give them up once we get into negotiations.
This is fascinating.
Do you think Lavrov and company would even talk to Zelensky?
Maybe not.
Maybe Putin will have to put someone else in there, say a third party that he designates as a special envoy for the Ukraine talks.
Or, you know, we could invent something that would work.
And then probably eventually as things proceed and these things like Zelensky just said get negotiated away, then...
But I see, Judge, I see us trying to foul them every step of the way.
Here's your least favorite Secretary of State in history talking about getting money and material out the door.
Cut number 10. We're focused in very practical, concrete ways, really on three things.
Making sure that it has the money, the resources it needs to sustain its economy and to sustain its defense.
We've now managed, on the basis of the frozen sovereign assets, the Russian assets that are frozen, to get $50 billion to Ukraine that will be going out the door in the coming weeks, both from the United States and Europe, and that will carry Ukraine for some time into next year.
Munitions and everything that goes with that, whether it's air defenses, whether it's missiles, whether it's armored vehicles.
We're working in a very determined way, again, to make sure for many months ahead that Ukraine will have what it needs.
The United States is pushing out the door everything that we can.
But beyond that, we have this process long established, Secretary Austin established at Ramstein, to make sure that we're fully coordinated with allies and partners.
And that's exactly what we're doing.
And we spent time, again, talking about what the needs are and how each of us can play a part in filling them.
And then finally, mobilization.
This is critical because even with the money, even with the munitions, there have to be people on the front lines to deal with the Russian aggression.
Ukraine has hard decisions to make about further mobilization.
But these are necessary decisions.
We have a commitment, though, for every person, every soldier that Ukraine mobilizes.
We're committed to making sure that they have the training and the equipment they need to effectively defend the country.
It's like he has been asleep the past year and a half.
I could be kind to him, and I will.
And say he's doing what Zelensky's doing.
He's trying to set up a position of strength from which negotiations can start.
But I don't want to be kind to him.
I think he's nauseous.
I think he's absolutely nauseous.
And what he's talking about.
The American people.
I just read the latest Reagan poll.
52% of the American people.
I think it's higher than that.
I think it's closer to 60 because other polls say it's 60. Don't want this war to continue and think it should stop.
And he's giving $50 billion of their money to this war?
This is nonsense.
These people are defying the American people's verdict in the election that just happened.
And I can't put it past them to be trying to tie Trump's hands even further than they already have.
This is just, it's ignominy is what it is.
It's horrible, horrible leadership.
I know what your answer to this is going to be.
Is there any moral argument, moral, to justify this kind of a giveaway at this stage of this war?
Not from any direction you might look at it, Judge.
The direction of the American taxpayer, the direction of those Ukrainians who've already died and those who are going to die in the future because of this, and the fact that we know where most of that money will go, it will not go to defense of Ukraine.
Is this last subject matter, Colonel, is the CIA fomenting a coup or a civil war in Georgia, the country of Georgia?
It's trying desperately.
The government that's there now, squeakily there, they barely won the elections, but they're there.
They want a balanced foreign and security policy.
They want a balance between the EU and ultimately Washington.
Russia.
They don't want to antagonize either side, and they would like, eventually, EU membership.
The other side wants to do what we want them to do, primarily because we've been there giving the money and convincing.
It's like 1948 in Italy and Harry Truman defeating the communists in the elections.
That's what we're doing, only it's perverse, because we want Georgia to be a second front for Putin, a third front, counting Syria, to have to be concerned with.
Colonel, thank you very much, my dear friend.
You have a great grasp on the geopolitics.
I don't know how you have a stomach for this, but you've had the stomach for it for a long time.
You get used to this bad leadership, I think, but you rue it every day you go through it.
I went through an administration that demonstrated leadership that made public policy out of torture.
Thank you, Colonel.
All the best, my friend.
I hope we can see you next week.
Take care.
Have a good one.
You as well.
Coming up at 3 o 'clock today, Professor John Mearsheimer, please remember to like and subscribe.
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