Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano - Pepe Escobar: What is Sultan Erdogan Up To?
Aired: 2025-01-30
Duration: 22:08


=== Israel And Jordan Questions (03:52) ===

[00:00:31]  Hi, everyone.
[00:00:32]  Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
[00:00:35]  Today is Thursday, January 30th, 2025.
[00:00:40]  Pepe Escobar joins us from Moscow, where it is midnight local time.
[00:00:46]  Pepe, thank you very much, my dear friend.
[00:00:48]  My pleasure.
[00:00:49]  You have a terrific peace out this morning.
[00:00:52]  On what is Sultan Erdogan up to?
[00:00:56]  And I want to explore it with you.
[00:00:58]  But first, one or two questions about Israel and one or two questions about Ukraine.
[00:01:06]  Is Trump going to get General al-Sisi and King Abdullah to each take a quarter of a million Palestinians, as he indicated he would attempt to do the other day?
[00:01:16]  And would the Palestinians, a million and a half of them, Well, assuming Sissi and the Little King would accept, they would have two civil wars at their doorstep.
[00:01:35]  They already said no, directly and indirectly.
[00:01:38]  But there's not much of a margin of maneuver in those cases, right?
[00:01:43]  These are vassals.
[00:01:44]  These are ultra-vassals.
[00:01:45]  Trump can force them to accept it.
[00:01:49]  And you know, damn the domestic consequences.
[00:01:52]  But the most extraordinary fact in all that is that Trump is trying to repackage a genocide as an extermination and an expulsion operation, as ethnic cleansing.
[00:02:10]  This is extremely serious in itself.
[00:02:13]  And this is how it's seen by the Arab street.
[00:02:16]  If you go to a souk in Cairo, if you go to the souk of Aleppo, for that matter, and you ask people, everybody's going to say this is beyond inadmissible.
[00:02:28]  Do you think that both General al-Sisi's government in Egypt and King Abdullah in Jordan would be overthrown by a massive movement?
[00:02:39]  If this Trump idea were to come to pass, no matter how he sweetened it with cash.
[00:02:47]  Absolutely. $10 billion, $15 billion, $20 billion, which in terms of the U.S. is a peanuts, but it's an enormous amount in both Egypt and Jordan.
[00:03:01]  Artificial government, especially Jordan, is a completely artificial setup.
[00:03:06]  And the king is viewed by most of the population, which, by the way, is Palestinian in Jordan, as a traitor, as a traitor of the Arab cause and a traitor of Palestine.
[00:03:17]  Do you think that Donald Trump has the same contempt for the personal freedom of the Palestinians as Joe Biden?
[00:03:27]  That's a very complicated question, Judge.
[00:03:30]  We don't know what Trump really thinks about First of all, because he really speaks about the Palestinians and he never mentioned the word genocide.
[00:03:41]  It's not a word.
[00:03:42]  It's a fact, in fact.
[00:03:44]  So we really don't know.
[00:03:46]  He only sees, apparently, if we take at face value what he said so far, he only sees Gaza as a tremendous real estate opportunity by the sea in his own words, phenomenal location.
[00:04:03]  Well, I think that spells it out, doesn't it?
[00:04:06]  Wow. Wow.

=== They've Been Told Defeated (03:41) ===

[00:04:08]  Are we in danger of his having a nickname similar to Biden?
[00:04:14]  Genocide Donald made in America?
[00:04:17]  If he proceeds like these first 10, 12 days, unfortunately, yes.
[00:04:24]  What do you think Prime Minister Netanyahu will ask of him when he visits the White House next week?
[00:04:33]  A green card to proceed with the second stage, his and Netanyahu's own way, which means he will continue to do what he was doing before the first ceasefire.
[00:04:47]  And in fact, nothing changed in terms of expelling the Palestinians from Gaza, from Netanyahu and from his cabinet.
[00:04:58]  Nothing has changed.
[00:04:59]  This is a pause.
[00:05:00]  They are regrouping, rearming, and they'll continue to do what they were doing.
[00:05:05]  I want to play for you a clip from Daniel Levy, the British born and educated, you may know him, former Israeli negotiator.
[00:05:16]  This is dynamite, what he said.
[00:05:19]  Sonia, cut number one.
[00:05:20]  One cannot underestimate the impact on the Israeli public psyche of the release.
[00:05:28]  The initial three who were released.
[00:05:31]  And, of course, everyone, therefore, saw those images.
[00:05:35]  They've been told Al-Qassam defeated.
[00:05:40]  They've been told the public has turned against them.
[00:05:43]  They've been told so many things.
[00:05:46]  And then they saw those images.
[00:05:48]  An occupying army, armed and aided by the most powerful military in the world, the US.
[00:05:58]  A nuclear armed state?
[00:06:01]  Israel. In a struggle between that and a resistance movement, we saw a very powerful display, and Israelis saw that.
[00:06:15]  we're being told by Israeli analysts, talking heads, political leaders, and their backers in the West, that the next phase has to be to move forward.
[00:06:25]  We have to have the demilitarization of our Al-Qassam emerges from this with a very strong narrative.
[00:06:41]  Israel's narrative doesn't look so good at all.
[00:06:45]  Has Netanyahu failed?
[00:06:47]  Is Daniel Levy essentially correct?
[00:06:50]  Daniel is essentially correct, even if he doesn't mention genocide.
[00:06:56]  He was very diplomatic trying to cover it, right?
[00:07:00]  But his argument is absolutely correct.
[00:07:03]  And Al Qassam is much more powerful now than they were 15, 16 months ago.
[00:07:09]  What is Al Qassam?
[00:07:11]  Brigades. The brigades.
[00:07:13]  The brigades that we see exactly in this video.
[00:07:16]  And this proves that what Yahya Sinwar was correct from the beginning, what he was doing.
[00:07:23]  Correct in terms of building a resistance-fighting force capable of withstanding absolutely everything that Israel threw at them.
[00:07:34]  And that was massive, as we all know.

=== Turkey's Oil Operation in Syria (13:37) ===

[00:07:37]  Okay. To Russia.
[00:07:40]  Does the Kremlin believe that the war is effectively over?
[00:07:46]  Not over.
[00:07:48]  Very important context.
[00:07:50]  I arrived here four days ago, Judge, so I haven't had time yet to have in-depth conversations and to have answers to, I have a list of questions like, you know, gigantic.
[00:08:01]  Tomorrow night, it's the first big night.
[00:08:04]  I have a dinner with a very good source.
[00:08:06]  He will answer probably 80% of my questions, including your question.
[00:08:10]  Not that it's over, but it's proceeding the way they want it.
[00:08:14]  And it's fascinating to see on the American side this, I called it the disco inferno, this enormous bombast by Trump 24-7, cameras clicking, breathless headlines, you name it.
[00:08:30]  And the Russians are like Taoist monks observing all that without barely a smirk.
[00:08:35]  And Peskov, He said this week, look, we still haven't got even a phone call to set up the famous Trump-Putin phone call.
[00:08:48]  For the moment, it's only bombast.
[00:08:50]  There's nothing substantial.
[00:08:52]  Do you think that Trump and Putin will have, perhaps with President Xi and maybe with the Prime Minister of India, a Yalta-like meeting?
[00:09:08]  Resolving the huge long-term problems of the security of America, of Europe, of Russia, of China, and who has hegemony over what?
[00:09:19]  Is that too optimistic to hope for?
[00:09:24]  Realistically, if this was a reality and not an environment set up by fantasy overlapping over fantasy, we are living in a completely Artificial.
[00:09:39]  And the word of those postmodern theoreticians of the 80s called simulacra.
[00:09:45]  Yes, it's a perpetual simulation.
[00:09:48]  If we had a new Yalta, you have to be Putin, Trump, Xi, perhaps Modi, and perhaps a fifth component, certainly not from Europe, because Europe is absolutely irrelevant.
[00:10:02]  It would be certainly from somewhere around Eurasia.
[00:10:05]  And considering Trump will be on the table, he will probably call Saudi Arabia, for instance.
[00:10:10]  If we have these five players deciding, especially in terms of West Asia and parts of Eurasia, and the relation between the Atlanticist sphere and Eurasia, the post-Soviet space, etc., this will be a realistic new Yalta.
[00:10:27]  We know it's not going to happen, realistically.
[00:10:31]  Let me ask you some questions about Turkey.
[00:10:34]  Can Turkey be a member of BRICS and NATO simultaneously?
[00:10:42]  You actually asked the question.
[00:10:46]  I'm mouthing your own question.
[00:10:50]  This is what I ask my fabulous interlocutors, you know, academics, scholars, very well-connected people.
[00:10:59]  We usually have one of these like once a year when I go to Istanbul.
[00:11:04]  We get together and at the end of the dinner, I launch my questions and they go on.
[00:11:11]  It's really fascinating.
[00:11:14]  The great thing is that they are not Islamists.
[00:11:18]  They are not affiliated with the AKP party.
[00:11:21]  They are not pro-Erdogan.
[00:11:23]  They are secular.
[00:11:24]  Very, very important.
[00:11:26]  They are, let's say, different brands of Kemalism.
[00:11:29]  They are pro-Turkish Republic.
[00:11:32]  Nationalist Turks, of course, but not out of control.
[00:11:37]  And one of the first things that they actually answered is that no, it's impossible.
[00:11:41]  Because Erdogan, once again, he's always hedging.
[00:11:45]  This is something that I learned three years ago when I spent the first part of the year, 2022, including the start of the Special Military Operation, I was living in Istanbul.
[00:11:56]  And this is something that I didn't know and I learned over there, that 90% or even more of the Turkish elites are in fact totally Atlanticists.
[00:12:07]  They are pro-US, pro-Europe and pro-NATO.
[00:12:11]  I didn't know that.
[00:12:12]  I thought it was like 50-50.
[00:12:13]  No way.
[00:12:14]  It's the absolute majority of the ruling elites and the ruling classes.
[00:12:19]  So they look at Eurasia, they look at Russia, China, they don't really understand Russia and China, especially.
[00:12:26]  India, on a more folklore vein, all right?
[00:12:31]  But they still don't understand.
[00:12:32]  and they think that their destiny will be linked to the West.
[00:12:34]  It's not going to happen because we all know that the EU...
[00:12:45]  But that's the mindset of the people around Erdogan and behind Erdogan and the people who follow the money crowd in Istanbul and Ankara especially.
[00:12:54]  You refer to Erdogan as the sultan, and that, of course...
[00:13:04]  Well, of course.
[00:13:05]  I mean, you have the best sense of humor, Pepe.
[00:13:08]  But who and what are the neo-Ottomans?
[00:13:12]  And is Erdogan one of them?
[00:13:16]  In other words, do these people want an empire of Turkey?
[00:13:22]  Or reconstituting parts of the Ottoman Empire.
[00:13:28]  That's why we call them neo-Ottomans.
[00:13:30]  The number one neo-Ottoman, in fact, the guy who conceptualized this in a few books, Was the former foreign minister Davutoglu, which now he is in a very small political party.
[00:13:45]  He's practically a sideline from politics.
[00:13:49]  And he influenced Erdogan a lot.
[00:13:52]  Another thing that I learned in Istanbul, Erdogan doesn't read.
[00:13:57]  Erdogan doesn't know in detail.
[00:14:03]  He has that in common with the current President of the United States.
[00:14:11]  Well, on a different level, yes.
[00:14:14]  I'm sorry to interrupt you.
[00:14:15]  How does he gather information and who influences Erdogan?
[00:14:21]  The people who have his ears, and at the moment there are two.
[00:14:28]  His chief of Intel, Kalin, and his former chief of Intel, MIT, which is the current foreign minister, Hakan Fidan.
[00:14:39]  Fidan is a very, very smart character.
[00:14:42]  He has presidential ambitions or prime ministerial ambitions or whatever.
[00:14:47]  He wants to be on top later on.
[00:14:50]  And so Erdogan listens to these two, especially.
[00:14:56]  No question.
[00:14:57]  What does Erdogan want?
[00:15:01]  Exactly. And this is something, part of their answer, answer my question.
[00:15:07]  He wanted Aleppo, Judge.
[00:15:10]  He was not expecting the thing going all the way to Damascus.
[00:15:15]  And that's why one of my interlocutors said, now Turkey was waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, but in the end they got something that they didn't want.
[00:15:24]  They don't have the resources, financial resources or the military resources to take over Syria and to manage the western part of Syria, the Syria that really works, right?
[00:15:35]  That corridor from Aleppo in the north to Damascus in the south.
[00:15:38]  They can't.
[00:15:40]  At best, they could try to have a proxy government in Aleppo.
[00:15:44]  That's it.
[00:15:45]  But now they have practically the whole thing.
[00:15:48]  Will Erdogan allow the Israelis?
[00:15:52]  To conquer Aleppo and Damascus?
[00:15:54]  Never. No, never, never, never, never.
[00:15:58]  From a Turkish and MIT point of view, Israel stops far away from the southern suburbs of Damascus.
[00:16:07]  That's it.
[00:16:09]  That's where they are at the moment.
[00:16:11]  We don't know if they're going to proceed.
[00:16:13]  the north, they went to the left, to the right, but not to the north.
[00:16:16]  So the problem is that Right. The new president of Syria is one of the world's great terrorists.
[00:16:33]  He proclaimed himself president on Wednesday.
[00:16:37]  This is completely nuts and not a word from the NATO stand space.
[00:16:44]  You have a former cat shopper, a former Al-Qaeda in Syria, who's now running the government.
[00:16:53]  Did the United States, against which he fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, utter a peep over this?
[00:17:03]  Nothing.
[00:17:03]  Absolutely nothing.
[00:17:05]  It reminds me...
[00:17:18]  Yes. You may have quoted it, or it may have been Aaron Maté.
[00:17:24]  There's a very famous email from Jake Sullivan.
[00:17:30]  From Jake Sullivan to Hillary, you're right.
[00:17:32]  Correct, correct, saying they're on our side.
[00:17:35]  They tried to hide that email, and of course she was humiliated when WikiLeaks exposed it.
[00:17:41]  She couldn't justify it.
[00:17:44]  And this was the confirmation.
[00:17:45]  Okay, all of us who were following the war, even from the outside or from around, from Lebanon or from Iraq, we knew that.
[00:17:56]  But we didn't have an official confirmation by an American official.
[00:18:01]  There you go.
[00:18:02]  So nothing changed, in fact.
[00:18:04]  So the Americans got what they wanted, which is what they wanted for 13 years at least.
[00:18:10]  The Turks didn't get what they wanted.
[00:18:13]  What would the Americans want besides Assad gone?
[00:18:19]  A totally destabilized Syria because that profits Israel.
[00:18:23]  Wow. That's the short answer.
[00:18:25]  Supposedly Donald Trump has ordered American troops out of Syria.
[00:18:28]  I don't know if that's true.
[00:18:29]  If it is, it'll be the second time he did so.
[00:18:32]  First time it didn't happen.
[00:18:34]  Will it happen this time?
[00:18:35]  And if so, what will be the consequences?
[00:18:38]  We don't know if it's going to happen, Judge, because the deep state doesn't want it to happen.
[00:18:44]  Right. And on top of it, there is a very profitable operation going on with the oil in the Northeast, where the Americans are protecting the Kurds, who are stealing Syrian oil, crossing the border to northern Iraq.
[00:19:01]  And this oil stolen is sold to Israel at the discount.
[00:19:06]  Why? Because it's stolen.
[00:19:08]  For them, it's free.
[00:19:09]  So they can charge anything to Israel.
[00:19:10]  It's already a profit.
[00:19:12]  So this oil rat line, let's put it this way, to quote our friend Sy Hirsch, it will continue.
[00:19:20]  It profits the Kurds, it profits the Americans, and it profits Israel.
[00:19:27]  If the Turks had not sold oil to Israel, would it have been able to commit genocide in Gaza?
[00:19:35]  That's a really good one.
[00:19:38]  It will be much more difficult.
[00:19:40]  But we have to look at the sources of oil.
[00:19:45]  And the main source, if I'm not mistaken, 40% of Israel's oil comes from Turkey.
[00:19:55]  The BTC pipeline, Baku, Tbilisi, Cheyhan.
[00:19:59]  So the oil is Azeri.
[00:20:02]  Comes from Baku.
[00:20:03]  Then it travels through the pipeline, which was set up by our good old friend, Grand Chessboard, Zbigniew Brzezinski.
[00:20:11]  Arrives in Cheyhan in Turkey.
[00:20:13]  And from Cheyhan is transported to Israel.
[00:20:16]  40% of Israel's oil.
[00:20:18]  Wow. I asked my friends why he didn't just, you know, turn off the speaker.
[00:20:25]  No, he can't.
[00:20:26]  He can't.
[00:20:27]  He can't.
[00:20:28]  It's too much money and Turkey Absolutely. But this is taboo in Turkey, Judge.
[00:20:49]  Forget about seeing this on Turkish media.
[00:20:53]  Out of the question.
[00:20:54]  This is discussed among independents, of course.

=== God Loves You (01:11) ===

[00:20:58]  And let's say, even in the bazaar, it's fascinating to compare all that to the bazaar.
[00:21:05]  I always go to the bazaar.
[00:21:06]  I have very good friends in the bazaar.
[00:21:08]  And we were joking that we should bring Donald Trump here.
[00:21:12]  So the real art of the deal...
[00:21:19]  Then this is the real shit.
[00:21:21]  I would love to see Trump negotiating for a carpet out of Bazaar.
[00:21:26]  That'd be worth the price of admission alone.
[00:21:28]  I'll let you go, but what do you do now?
[00:21:31]  What is Moscow like at 12.30 in the morning on a Friday morning?
[00:21:35]  Lively or quiet?
[00:21:38]  Everybody's asleep except this little studio.
[00:21:42]  All right.
[00:21:43]  God love you.
[00:21:44]  Thank you for staying up.
[00:21:45]  We much appreciate your analysis.
[00:21:48]  It's brilliant and gifted, as always.
[00:21:49]  I hope we can see you again next week.
[00:21:51]  Have a nice evening.
[00:21:53]  You too, Judge.
[00:21:54]  Thank you so much.
[00:21:55]  Thank you.
[00:21:55]  God bless you.
[00:21:56]  What a wonderful, wonderful human being.
[00:21:59]  Tomorrow, Friday, at the end of the day, for the end of the week, 4.30 in the afternoon, as is our custom, the Intelligence Community Roundtable.