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Jan. 1, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
31:32
Scott Ritter : The Bitter Lessons of 2024.
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Thank you, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Thursday, January 2nd, 2025.
Happy New Year to you, to everyone.
Scott Ritter is here with us on the bitter lessons of 2024.
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Scott Ritter, welcome here, my dear friend, and Happy New Year to you and your family, and thank you for all the...
I'm going to ask you questions about Russia and about Israel and what lessons were learned or weren't learned from the way the West treated Russia and the way Israel treats its neighbors.
But let me start with Russia.
What is your take on the status of Russia today, its economy?
Its political stability, its perception of itself, its likely victory in Ukraine.
Well, this year marks the 25th anniversary of Vladimir Putin's rule.
So he's ruled Russia for a quarter of a century.
This is, by any standard, a remarkable achievement.
And that doesn't, you know, that's not a, I'm not, you know, passing on.
It's remarkable that somebody can stay in power for 25 years, especially given the volatility that he inherited.
In the 1990s, during the time of Boris Yeltsin, inflation was at 2,500%, 2,500% annual inflation.
Russia was collapsing.
The Russian people had lost all belief in themselves.
They were looking to the West to save them.
They had abandoned who they were.
You know, their military was in ruins.
There was no democracy.
I mean, this is one of the things, an interesting thing came out late last year.
The National Security Archives published a memorandum that had been suppressed, written in 1994, by A diplomat, Mr. Mary, that is known, you know, within the State Department circles as sort of the modern long telegram,
the modern equivalent of George Kennan's telegram that set the stage for containment in the Cold War.
This telegram said, we're doing everything wrong in Russia.
We're making political choices that, you know, and ignoring the economy, ignoring the society, pretending it's democracy.
It's not.
In 1993, October, Boris Yeltsin put tanks in the streets of Moscow and went to war against the parliament.
And we supported that.
And then we tried to buy off an election that didn't work.
And so we spent years working with Yeltsin to suppress the parliament.
And then we bought an election in 1996.
There was no democracy in Russia.
Horrible situation.
The country was literally falling apart.
And Vladimir Putin took over.
In 25 years, we can take a look.
Russia today has a booming economy.
Yes, there's some inflation problems.
I think they're up to 9.1%.
9.1% and they're calling it a problem as opposed to 2,500%.
It's a problem because the economy is overheated because of the rapid mobilization of defense industry that had to take place in response to what was going on in Ukraine.
But the fact is, Russia was able to rapidly mobilize its defense industry, unlike the West.
Vladimir Putin has created, if not Jeffersonian democracy, at least a Russian version of democracy where Russians go to the polls and their vote is heard.
He went and had an election, won a decisive victory.
There's more Russians supporting him today than ever before.
Russia is a nation transformed compared to what it was in the 1990s.
From Western standards, I guess, you know, we could say, gee, things could be better.
But really, they enjoy greater freedom of speech in many ways than we do.
There's more open discussion about critical issues than here in the United States.
Their crime is nowhere near like ours.
Their cities...
They have modern infrastructure, and they love each other.
I mean, take a look at the United States.
We are literally at each other's throats today, left versus right, red versus blue.
It's never been uglier in my lifetime.
In Russia today, there's problems.
I'm not going to pretend there's not problems.
There's real problems in Russia, but the Russians are proud of who they are.
They are no longer looking to the West to save themselves.
And this is sort of the sources of our greatest miscalculations about Russia, because We have an intellectual class, the so-called Russian experts, who cut their teeth on their Russian expertise in the decade of the 1990s.
And man, they were happy.
Russia was falling apart.
It looked like they were going to achieve their lifetime dream of breaking this vast land apart, taking control of its economic resources.
And they've been bitter ever since of Vladimir Putin for stepping in and turning things around.
These people don't understand Russia, and they continue to make calculations based upon what they want Russia to be, that is, retrograde to the 90s, and not what Russia is today.
And that's the mistake we made.
We thought we could sanction Russia to death.
That backfired.
We thought we could beat Russia militarily.
That backfired.
We thought that Putin didn't have support and he could be brought down politically.
That hasn't happened.
We've gotten Russia wrong because we don't know Russia.
We don't understand Russia.
That's what I was trying to do last year.
I went to Russia in December and January, and then you were supposed to come with me in June.
It was stopped by the United States government.
Why? Because they don't want the American people to know the truth about Russia.
And what scared them was to have people like you and me go to Russia, see it firsthand, and be able to report back and say, hey, what the government's telling you is absolute bunk.
This is the reality of Russia, and we don't need to be at war with these people.
We don't need to be their enemies.
We should be their friends.
That's not the message the U.S. government wants to be heard, and that's one of the great mistakes that's taking place, is that we're making decisions on Russia.
That aren't based on the reality of Russia.
They're based upon a fantasy in our mind that goes back 25 plus years.
Do you think that the elites in Europe and the neocons in the American government, both deep state and state department, and even some of the people Trump says he's going to bring in, have recognized that their experiment in Ukraine has been a colossal failure?
Colossal failure?
You know, Judge, I'm sure anybody who's human knows that when you commit to something, whether it's emotionally, financially, politically, you commit to something, your ability to engage rationally on that subject is diminished because you don't want to acknowledge that a mistake has been made.
You believe so much in what you were trying to achieve that you fail to understand.
You know, the failures that are taking place and the vain hope that something good will come out of this.
I think people are starting to realize that there is failure, but they continue to deceive themselves.
Because if these were rational thinkers who were fact-based, they wouldn't have gotten involved in this policy direction to begin with because it was doomed to fail from the start.
But these are irrational people who have committed, over-committed to something.
And I believe many of these people continue to deceive themselves.
For instance, Even when people think that Ukraine has lost, they are under the perception that Russia is also losing.
Therefore, they can freeze this conflict in a Korean War type situation and create a ceasefire that allows a pause in the hostilities so that Ukraine can be rebuilt and NATO can come in and do all the things they want NATO to do.
That's fantasy.
Things are so bad that that will never happen because Russia isn't losing.
Russia is winning.
Russia will never yield.
Russia will never stop the offensive until the war is actually over.
Russia will not accept a ceasefire.
But these people continue to deceive themselves into believing that this is still possible.
So I don't think people have come to grips with just how bad the West has been defeated in Ukraine.
President Putin has said several times, Scott, that he's looking forward to speaking to President Trump, and President Trump has made similar comments.
Let's assume they have these conversations.
What do you think President Putin expects?
What do you think he wants?
I don't think President Putin wants anything from the United States.
We're at this stage right now.
Remember that even when Trump becomes president, the official policy of the United States is the strategic defeat of Russia.
And strategic defeat doesn't mean a slap on the wrist.
It means the collapse of Russia economically, the collapse of Russia socially.
Now, as a Russian, that means that we want to drive Russia into the Great Depression-type situation where there's no economic growth, people are starving, basically take it back to the 90s.
And to collapse Russia politically, which just doesn't mean the demise of Vladimir Putin, but the physical breakup of Russia.
And so as long as that's the policy direction of the United States, Putin doesn't want anything from the United States.
We're the enemy.
It's not because he wanted us to be the enemy.
We've made ourselves the enemy.
Putin says he's ready to talk, but there's literally no expectations until the United States reverses course on the policy of seeking the strategic defeat of Russia.
I think a great shock was sent through Team Trump when Keith Kellogg's plan, You know, to bring this conflict to an end that Trump said is going to happen on day one was presented to the Russians, and the Russians just swept it off the table and said,
not just no, but hell no.
Don't even come back to us.
We're not even willing to discuss this.
And that's a wake-up call because that's the reality.
Keith Kellogg exists in a fantasy world driven by misperceptions, and Putin deals with reality.
He'll talk to Trump, but what he said, Trump has to take the first step.
And it's not just about Trump reaching out, but Trump has to change fundamentally the approach or else there's literally nothing to talk about.
And the Russians have said that, that right now there's no difference between the Trump agenda and the Biden agenda.
And they don't trust the Trump agenda because the last time Trump was president, he said he wanted to be friends with Russia.
He ended up increasing lethal aid to Ukraine and sanctioning Russia.
The Russians don't expect anything different from Trump until Trump demonstrates that he's willing to do something different.
How do you see the special military operation ending, and what happens when it ends?
I mean, at some point, there'll be no military left, or whatever is left will realize this is fruitless.
We have to put down our arms and go.
You know, there's a narrow window of opportunity here.
I'm loathe to put calendar dates on things because I don't own the calendar.
The Russians do.
And they've never...
There's no calendar date.
Russia has actually geared its defense industry to keep pumping things out until 2027, 2028.
So Russia's ready to go as long as this takes.
But the Ukrainians can't last that long.
And I think what you're going to see this year is The collapse that we've been talking about, I've been talking about for so long now.
I personally thought the collapse would take place by late fall last year.
The Ukrainians have surprised all of us, myself included, but including the Russians.
I've talked to Russian commanders and Russian war correspondents who said the resilience of these Ukrainians, the fighting spirit.
We all see the imagery of the prisoners of war that are captured.
The guys that get picked up off the street after getting thumped in the head.
But the vast majority of Ukrainian forces that are fighting and dying are guys that are fighting for a cause they believe in.
And they're not surrendering.
They're dying.
They're fighting to the death.
They're digging in.
They're making the Russians dig them out.
This is a much more difficult fight than I had anticipated at this stage.
Because, frankly speaking, when you take a military like the Ukrainian military and you destroy it, Three or four times and rebuild it.
You don't expect it to retain the same level of combat efficiency.
But many of these units still are able to fight and fight quite well.
The Russians are winning.
Just look at the battlefield.
They're advancing.
But it's a very, very difficult fight.
But at some point in time, military math does take over.
And we're at that point right now where the Ukrainians literally have run out of manpower.
There's nothing left.
They're talking about pulling in 18-year-olds.
Strategic reserves were committed to a feudal fight in Kursk.
They're talking 50,000 casualties now, dead and severely wounded.
Irreplaceable. Those were the guys that were trained by the West to provide mobile reinforcement capacity on the main line of contact.
They're gone.
Nothing to replace them.
I'm looking at the military collapse.
The question now then is what politically this means.
And this is where, you know, Trump has an opportunity.
The sooner Trump can realize that he has to give Russia everything at once, the better off the situation will be for Ukraine.
And what I mean by that is right now, Putin has not publicly made any claims on Odessa, Kharkov.
Nikolayev, Nepotrovsk, Sumy, five territories that are very much at risk.
There's significant Russian-speaking populations there and a lot of political pressure on Putin from within Russia to just clean this up and take that off.
He right now has said, no, we're limited to the four that we annexed in September and Crimea.
That's it.
And if you can bring this conflict to an end, those...
Obelisk, those provinces remain part of Ukraine, which is essential for Ukraine's long-term economic and political viability.
But if we, and Trump, out of the stupidity of thinking they can beat Russia, try to double down, send in more equipment, drag this war on, Ukrainians will lose.
So will we.
And then they will lose those five territories.
And when that happens, there's really no sense in talking about a Ukraine.
What will be left will be an empty vassal state that will eventually be absorbed in almost all its totality by Russia, maybe the exception being Western Ukraine and some of the Carpathian areas that will go to Hungary, Romania, and then Western Ukraine to Poland.
But that'll be the end of Ukraine.
The bottom line is Ukraine's going to lose.
The question is the scope and scale of that defeat.
And it's not just Ukraine losing.
NATO's losing.
The United States is losing as well.
And we have to accept this defeat.
There's nothing we can do to change it.
What we can do is mitigate against it being an even worse defeat by trying to get out as soon as possible.
But no matter what, Russia is going to get everything that Russia wants from this war.
Russia's not going to yield on any of these points.
What will happen if Donald Trump does what he promised many times during the campaign he would do, which is on day one, cut off all military supplies and cash?
Turn the spigot off on the pipeline to Ukraine.
The war will be over in a matter of weeks.
Ukraine will not be able to prolong this fight.
They'll run out of money.
Zelensky will lose all political credibility.
The society will turn on him and the military will collapse at an even greater rate.
So that's that.
And there's nothing Europe.
There's a lot of talk about Europe stepping up.
But stepping up with what?
The great German economy is going to suddenly be flush with cash that they can send to Ukraine.
The French economy, they're in the midst of their own political collapse.
The European Union is politically and morally and fiscally bankrupt.
NATO has nothing to bring to the table.
They can only succeed if America is backing them, and it doesn't look like the United States is going to back them.
It'll be game, set, match.
That's the quickest way to bring this thing to an end, is tell the Ukrainians, look, we're cutting everything off.
You can decide to die a slow death or, you know, you can have a fast death.
But you're going to die no matter what.
The question is, what's going to be reborn?
We can, if we act now, we can try and retain as much of Ukraine as possible for what a post-conflict Ukraine will look like.
But if you want to go down kicking and screaming, we're cutting our hands of you.
Russia's going to carve you up the way Russia wants to carve you up.
That's the smartest move for Trump to make.
I don't think he's going to make that move because he's all about perception, about posturing, about looking tough.
I'm afraid he's going to try and look strong by threatening to put more resources into Ukraine.
And that will just prolong the suffering of Ukraine.
It won't change the ultimate outcome on the battlefield.
Switching gears.
What is the status of the Israeli government and society as we speak?
Israel economically, its political stability, its regard for Prime Minister Netanyahu, its rejoicing over the demise of the Assad regime.
What's your finger on the pulse of Israel today telling you?
A nation that was facing two or three existential threats coming at it.
One was from a geopolitical military situation, an ongoing debacle in Gaza, a difficult fight with Hezbollah.
And the axis of resistance strangling it.
And the key to the axis of resistance, of course, is Bashar al-Assad's Syria that provided the land bridge between Iran and Hezbollah to keep that loaded pistol on Israel's head.
Economically, again, this conflict had destroyed Israel's economy, isolated it internationally, and there was no viability in terms of Israel turning around this dire situation.
And then politically, domestically, I mean, Netanyahu already had hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating the street against him prior to October 7th, and he is very much an unpopular president.
And that lack of popularity still exists.
But he has cobbled together a very right-wing conservative extremist government that was on the verge of collapse until Assad collapsed first.
And now they have redefined themselves.
in a credible fashion to the Israeli people as the national security government, the government that saved Israel from this military debacle.
There's still problems in Gaza.
Hezbollah is a, you know, a simmering You know, catastrophe waiting to happen.
The Hezbollah said that Israel's in constant violation of the ceasefire.
And when the ceasefire agreement expires in 30 to 60 days, I have to take a look at that again.
They're going to resume their operations against Israel.
And this time they'll be attacking Israel as an occupier of Lebanon, not attacking Israel, which gives them legitimacy.
So there's still problems there.
Syria. Yes, Assad's gone, but Syria has its own problems.
Israel's going to have to manage that, the growing threat from Turkey.
And then, of course, Iran, what to do about Iran's nuclear weapons program.
That's still very much out there bothering Israel.
But the Netanyahu government isn't on the cusp of collapse right now.
He has bought himself time because of the collapse of Bashar al-Assad and his ability now to...
Push back domestically.
The problem for Israel and for Netanyahu is his health.
He just went through prostate cancer surgery, stage three.
We don't know how much longer he's going to be here, but he's a man who isn't as healthy as he once was.
And Israel...
This is a man just like Putin.
He's been around forever, governing, influencing.
And Israel doesn't have anybody waiting in the wings that can come in and take control of Israel.
And so there's a potential for some political chaos and problems for Israel in a post-Netanyahu environment.
The only good news for Israel in all of this is that there's a president coming in in the United States Israel isn't going to let Israel collapse.
And I think you'll see the United States make every effort to shield Israel during a post-Netanyahu transition period to give Israel a chance to figure out what it wants to be, redefine itself politically,
and make sure that nobody on the outside takes advantages of that.
Israel, if you would ask me this question back in August, September, I was saying that Israel was On the way out, Netanyahu politically was in a tailspin that he wasn't going to pull out of.
Well, he pulled out of it because of the collapse of Assad, something nobody saw.
I didn't.
And now it's a different situation today.
They're standing on their feet and they're steady, but there's still some problems that have to be dealt with.
What is Israel like economically today?
Haven't small businesses closed?
Lots of middle class and upper middle class people left and they don't have the cheap Palestinian labor to work their businesses any longer?
No, you're right.
Israel's economic basket case in many ways.
You know, even before October 7th, 2023...
If you remember on September 19th, I think Joe Biden gave his presentation at the G20 Summit in India where he announced the India-Middle East European Economic Corridor.
In the same day, Netanyahu came out and made a similar announcement.
He called it one of the greatest moments in modern Israeli history because this corridor was going to give Israel economic viability that it didn't have.
This conflict that came after October 7th pretty much shut the door on that.
But now that Israel's back on its feet with Trump coming in, I think one of the things you're going to be seeing the Israelis and the Americans trying to do is put pressure on the Gulf Arab states, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and others to breathe life back into the Abrams Accords,
to normalize relations with Israel, to abandon Palestine, which...
I think these Gulf Arab states have every inclination to do and to get this Indian Middle East economic corridor back up and running because this is the one thing that's available that could salvage the Israeli economy to bring it back into the international community and to encourage the kind of investments that are going to have to take place for Israel to survive.
Alistair Crook reported this morning that Iran and Russia will sign a formal defense pact on January 17. That's just two weeks from now.
Will that give the United States and Israel pause before attacking Iran?
Even without a defense pact, there's already pause on the part of the United States and Israel to attack Iran.
And the reason is that Iran is a very advanced modern state with a strong military.
And neither the United States nor Israel has the capacity to guarantee a knockout blow, meaning to strike and just knock Iran right off its feet.
And a failure to inflict a knockout blow opens up.
The global economy to drastic intervention by Iran, the destruction of Saudi oil fields, Kuwaiti oil fields, UAE oil fields, gas fields, pipelines, infrastructure, the whole thing.
And Iran will just take the whole system down with it.
And that will be devastating for the United States and for Israel and for Europe and the Western world.
So I think there's hesitation to To take that kind of strike.
I don't know what this January 17th security pact is going to look like.
I doubt that it's a mutual defense treaty.
Both Russia and Iran have always been hesitant to enter into this kind of relationship.
I do think that it's a security relationship that will have Russia Beefing up Iran's defense capabilities and Iran contributing to Russia's defense capabilities, again, with drone technology, missile technology, things of that nature.
It'll put the Iranians in a good place politically because they'll be more secure, more confident in their security so that they can engage in what I think the United States and indeed Israel really want, which is a negotiated diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear problem.
And I think that's the direction people are going.
More emphasis on diplomacy, less emphasis on military action.
Has the United States, specifically in the West in general, well, let me just ask about the United States, learned any lessons from backing Israel unconditionally and funding Ukraine to the tune of hundreds of billions in 2024?
I can't speak of what we've learned from Ukraine because that's linked to NATO expansion and the whole concept of the strategic defeat of Russia.
And until we recognize that NATO expansion is a destabilizing thing, not something that's good for Europe but bad for Europe, and until we recognize that seeking the strategic defeat of Russia is not sound policy, I don't think we're in a position to actually do.
A hard look at what we've done in Ukraine.
We understand that things haven't gone our way, but like I said, we continue to deceive ourselves into believing there's alternative outcomes to the one that's probably going to happen.
On Israel, the United States has this irrational attachment to Israel politically.
The relationship is symbiotic in nature from a political standpoint.
The Israeli politicians can't live without American.
American politicians apparently can't survive on the big stage without Israel.
And so all we've learned is that we need to back Israel 100%.
No hesitation.
I think many people who are looking at what happened since October 7th are saying that the Biden administration hesitated, didn't give Israel the full support that Israel needed.
And they believe that Trump will give Israel all the support that's necessary.
And that's what they're focused on.
I mean, this is very harsh, but most Americans don't care about dead Palestinians.
They don't care about the dead people in Gaza.
Many of them have adopted the mindset that most of the Israelis appear to have, which is they're not innocents.
They're terrorists.
They're supporters of terrorists.
Therefore, they pay the ultimate price for supporting terrorism.
And that seems to be the mainstream opinion here in the United States.
So if that's your mainstream opinion, then what have you learned?
You haven't learned that we coddled a genocidal state.
You haven't learned that we are co-conspirators in the deaths of tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of innocents.
Many of them are children.
We haven't learned that our policies are the same as war crimes, and that goes against the grain of everything we stand for.
These aren't the lessons we're learning.
What we're learning is we should have backed Israel harder.
We should have supported Israel going in stronger.
We shouldn't have held Israel back.
And I think, unfortunately, that's the lessons that are coming out of this.
Scott Ritter, a pleasure, my dear friend, no matter what we're talking about.
Thank you for everything in 2024.
And I hope we can continue to work together again on a weekly basis in the new year.
All my best to you.
Thank you, Judge.
Thanks for having me.
Sure, sure.
Coming up later today at 3 o'clock this afternoon, Professor John Mearsheimer and at 5 o'clock, Max Blumenthal.
Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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