Feb. 27, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
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| Hi, everyone. | |
| Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. | |
| Today is Thursday, February 27th, 2025. | |
| Ian Proud, the member of our team, who was a former British diplomat, joins us. | |
| Now, Ian is also the author of a fascinating piece that appears from time to time, which he calls The Peacemonger. | |
| Now, Ian, I know what a warmonger is, and I know what a fishmonger is, but what's a peacemonger? | |
| Well, a peacemonger is somebody who relentlessly searches for ways to bring peace to this world. | |
| Unfortunately, over the past 10 years, certainly on Ukraine, a topic close to my heart, we've only seen politicians and members of the mainstream media who want to promote warmongering. | |
| So I'm providing a counterpoint to that alongside the very good work that you and others have been doing as well. | |
| Well, I commend... | |
| To the audience reading this, because it's fascinating. | |
| One of those warmongers of whom you speak is in the White House meeting with the President of the United States. | |
| He is, of course, the Prime Minister of Great Britain. | |
| What does he want? | |
| What does he expect to get from President Trump besides a dinner with the king? | |
| Well, I think somewhere he may genuinely believe that he can somehow persuade the President of the United States to change his course on Ukraine, to shift back to the European stance of promoting a never-ending war, which Ukraine is gradually losing on the battlefield. | |
| And I think in that he's deluded. | |
| The President has made his policy stance on Ukraine clear for many months now, practically a year, if not more than... | |
| So the scope for Starmer to actually change President Trump's view on Ukraine in particular is very limited. | |
| I'm sure they'll be talking about many other things besides including tariffs and so forth. | |
| What did President Macron attempt to achieve? | |
| Well, I think likewise. | |
| Actually, McConnell's interesting because he has been more moderate, less of a warmonger than Starmer since the beginning of the war in 2022. | |
| And actually, he's shown a willingness to kind of meet President Trump, to kind of hear his point of view and to flex the... | |
| Was Prime Minister Starmer serious? | |
| When he offered to send British troops to Ukraine, I mean, how would that resonate with Parliament? | |
| How would it resonate with the British people? | |
| How would it resonate with the troops? | |
| Well, I'd like to think there'd be a vote in Parliament about that, but unfortunately, because there's such cross-party consensus on Ukraine, I suspect the Parliament would actually vote in favour of it. | |
| I doubt that we'd give members of the public a choice in the matter. | |
| I think British troops, believe it or not, are remarkably gung-ho about this after the withdrawal from Afghanistan a few years ago. | |
| They haven't really had a significant deployable role. | |
| This seems like a good old jaunt in the minds of many officers. | |
| Despite the fact that Britain's army is ten times smaller than Russia's, I'm not sure how much people have really thought through the risks of this. | |
| How big is the British army? | |
| In total personnel, it's about 130,000 people. | |
| That is literally 10 times smaller than the Russian armed forces, which count to about 1.3 million personnel. | |
| We've increased spending to 2.5% of GDP. | |
| If we're lucky, that will give us 10,000 more people. | |
| So it's still tiny in comparison to Russia. | |
| What leverage, if any, do President Macron and Prime Minister Starmer have with President Trump? | |
| Very limited, because the United States of America has provided the vast majority of funding to this war in Ukraine, the vast majority of the weapons and munitions that have been used on the battlefield. | |
| We simply cannot replace that power with the European economy really in the doldrums right now. | |
| It's just impossible. | |
| So President Trump knows that he's got a much stronger hand of cards. | |
| You know, right now. | |
| And actually, you know, he can really set the agenda and not them. | |
| He can set the agenda and not them. | |
| How did the British elites react when President Trump said Zelensky is a dictator and Ukraine started the war? | |
| It was remarkable, Judge. | |
| I mean, literally everybody jumped on board this massive bandwagon. | |
| Calling Zelensky is the biggest Democrat of this century, possibly of this past millennia and so on, is quite incredible. | |
| From every single political party, there's no Zelensky is a remarkable Democrat, even though he hasn't had an election since last year. | |
| I don't remember the name of the group, but even the party headed by Nigel Farage was critical of Trump's comments about Zelensky. | |
| Well, he wasn't critical about President Trump because he's a very pro-Trump politician, but he did say that actually, you know, Zelensky is indeed a Democrat, like everybody else did. | |
| He was cornered, and actually, well, that shows, you know, just, you know, how sensitive British media is on the war in Ukraine, that even reform, you know, party politicians like Farage have to jump on the bandwagon and call Zelensky out as a Democrat when clearly he isn't. | |
| I was just on a Russian program called The Great Game with Dmitry Symes. | |
| You may be familiar with it. | |
| It's one of their premier early evening talk shows. | |
| And he and his colleagues are convinced that under international law and even under Ukrainian law, as they understand it, Zelensky is no longer the head of state. | |
| And they're baffled as to why all the Europeans think he still is the head of state. | |
| Well, yes, and people often liken Zelensky's situation to the situation in World War II when the UK suspended elections. | |
| But at that time in the United Kingdom, we had genuine power sharing in Parliament. | |
| But that doesn't apply in Ukraine where power has been completely centralised on. | |
| Speaking from a political perspective and not a legal one, I think there's a lot of | |
| evidence that that is true. | |
| If you go back to the death of the Minsk Agreement, that was caused by widespread resistance from the ultranationalist wings. | |
| You know, the Ukrainian body politic, which were determined to prevent that from following through, obviously sponsored by the Americans and the British at that time. | |
| You know, the Azov, all these kind of ultra-nationalist, neo-Nazi-leaning groups, they have no investment in a ceasefire because that would erode their power base within Ukraine as calls for democracy grew, as Ukraine pursued this so-called path, | |
| the European. | |
| I mean, these people have no desire to see a ceasefire which would end the gravy train that they've been living on for the past 11 years. | |
| I know you told me that there was near universal criticism of President Trump when he referred to Vladimir Zelensky as a dictator and said some other negative things about him and said that Ukraine started the war. | |
| But was there this universal criticism of him When he announced that he spent 90 minutes on the phone with Vladimir Putin, something his predecessor refused to do in the last three years of his presidency, and that they planned to meet either in Washington or Riyadh or Moscow. | |
| Did the British elites criticize him for that? | |
| They did, but in much more subtle ways. | |
| They were cautious about criticizing him outright, if you bear in mind that anybody else... | |
| Who said any engagement with Vladimir Putin over the past three years has been called out as a Kremlin puppet, and people were reluctant to do that, even in the UK hard-over propagandistic system that we have here. | |
| What they did was comparing the charts with Zelensky, saying, well, why did Trump call Putin first and not Zelensky? | |
| Why did he speak to Putin for 90 minutes and only 60 minutes to Zelensky? | |
| Is that kind of critical commentary that we saw? | |
| They were picking a party in every way that they could to say that this was an inappropriate thing to do. | |
| President Trump has been critical of the former British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, commonly called Bojo, just a nickname by abbreviating the syllables of his first name and his last name, | |
| because it was he. | |
| Who, at the behest of Joe Biden, persuaded President Zelensky to reject a 126-page detailed agreement that had been negotiated in Istanbul between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators. | |
| Is Bojo perceived as a clown today, or does he have a future, or does he speak sensibly? | |
| Bear in mind, I have a clip I'm going to show you which will answer the question of whether he speaks sensibly, but I want your views. | |
| I personally think he's a clown, as do many people in the UK system, but I think he genuinely believes his ego is so large that he can make a comeback along the lines that President Trump has made a comeback in the United States of America. | |
| What's different is that he doesn't really have the power race that President Trump had through his magnet movement. | |
| So I think he's deluded as well as being a buffoon. | |
| Chris, I think it's number 13, but it's the recent one that we've been playing of Boris Johnson. | |
| Watch this, Ian. | |
| Everybody knows there's a Minerals deal on the table today. | |
| Right? And I think it has every prospect of being signed. | |
| And frankly, I think it should be signed. | |
| Because it commits the United States in black and white to a free, sovereign and secure Ukraine. | |
| So what we need now is everybody to be serious and to get real. | |
| And to listen to what Trump is actually saying and doing and proposing. | |
| He said he doesn't mind UK troops on the ground in Ukraine. | |
| That's great. | |
| Well, then we need to make that real. | |
| The US is committed. | |
| Black and white, to a free, secure, sovereign Ukraine. | |
| You can't have a sovereign country without the ability to decide which clubs you're going to belong to. | |
| A sovereign country can remain committed to joining NATO. | |
| That's sovereignty. | |
| A sovereign country can remain free to allow whatever troops it wants to come on its soil to support it. | |
| That's sovereignty. | |
| Now, Putin could never accept that. | |
| The US has already committed to that. | |
| I think Putin is ultimately going to fail and Ukraine is going to succeed. | |
| He's been living under a rock for the past three years. | |
| I think he has. | |
| And one part of what he says suggests he's desperate to cozy up to President Trump because ultimately, you know, he sees himself on that kind of right sort of center. | |
| Are there European leaders, whether it's a former leader like Boris Johnson or the current Prime Minister like Keir Stormer? | |
| Whether it's Olaf Scholz or Friedrich Merz or whether it's Emmanuel Macron, Gloria Maloney, you know, the people of whom I speak, who still hate and fear Russia and Russians and all things Russian. | |
| Well, all of those names have all mentioned. | |
| I mean, I think the Germans have the most nuanced position on it of all, as actually, indeed, as Macon. | |
| I think between Germany and France, they will probably take the most nuanced position of all. | |
| Maloney's position is kind of bizarre, frankly. | |
| The most sense, actually, spoken in Europe is in Central Europe, so Viktor Orban and so on and so forth. | |
| But even there... | |
| You know, the kind of blob in Brussels is trying to kind of clamp down on their ability to kind of say, well, actually, maybe we do need to get on board with Russia. | |
| Well, if I were permitted to address the House of Parliament and were to say, how many of you go to bed at night fearing a Russian invasion of Great Britain? | |
| Would anybody raise their hand? | |
| I'll ask them if they fear it. | |
| Then I suspect a lot of them would, because they've been fearing non-stop propaganda for years. | |
| What would be the basis of such a fear? | |
| Well, they've been brainwashed into believing it. | |
| I mean, there's no free press in the United Kingdom. | |
| It's not like in the United States, you know, where there is a myriad and spectrum of different views. | |
| You know, we don't have that in the United Kingdom. | |
| There's utter censorship here. | |
| So people would just follow the party line and they're like the green toys in Toy Story kind of waiting to be picked by the big sort of claw from above. | |
| They don't have their own ideas. | |
| They haven't. | |
| What do the British elites, maybe members of parliament and others, think of Donald Trump? | |
| Do they think he's a clown and a cowboy, or do they think that he's dumb like a fox? | |
| Both of those. | |
| We genuinely seem to kind of dislike him and everything that he stands for. | |
| Again, for no real researched kind of reason, just because he's different. | |
| I mean, the UK political establishment is built on foundations of everybody thinking in the same way. | |
| When somebody steps out of and smashes, indeed, the open window, then actually that's hugely challenging for people. | |
| It creates this kind of cognitive dissonance. | |
| They don't really know how to cope. | |
| So the best way to cope is to criticise him because he's very, very different from the... | |
| Bland, grey, flaccid political types that have come before, including the dreadful Joe Biden and other people too. | |
| Does the British public have a hatred, whether it's from government schools or culture or going back to the Stalin era, a hatred of all things Russian? | |
| Or do they yearn for being able to fly from London to Moscow and purchase Russian vodka and whatever else the Russians have for sale? | |
| Well, I do. | |
| I used to fly directly from London to Moscow on a regular basis when I worked there, as you know, Judge. | |
| But I think most people are blissfully unaware. | |
| I think the establishment absolutely is not that they are keen to keep this new... | |
| Iron Curtain, you know, in place. | |
| I think if ordinary people, you know, were given more accurate information about it, they would be keen and interested to find out for themselves. | |
| Unfortunately, our political leaders aren't. | |
| How would you get to Moscow today? | |
| You'd probably have to go through Istanbul or Dubai, right? | |
| From London? | |
| Exactly, yeah. | |
| Or as I did when I finished my time, I drove all the way back from Moscow to England. | |
| Oh, good lord. | |
| How did you do that? | |
| Right, I drove through parts of what are now occupied Ukraine. | |
| But yeah, it's a five-day trip. | |
| Tremendous. I can really, really recommend it, actually. | |
| Maybe when peace breaks out, but not now. | |
| Well, let me switch gears a little bit, and I want to know if I understand this correctly. | |
| The GCHQ, your domestic spying entity, are they now legally permitted? | |
| To hack into everybody's mobile device, including Americans that might be on a visit to London or the countryside? | |
| Well, I mean, they have been for a long time. | |
| When will they not? | |
| I mean, they need to have legal permission for each case, of course. | |
| But yes, of course, they have the legal powers to do that. | |
| They have had for a very, very long time, in fact. | |
| Wow. I mean, it's no different from the NSA, right? | |
| Right, right, right. | |
| The NSA pretends that it gets a warrant when it does that. | |
| We all know that it spies on everybody all the time. | |
| I was under the understanding that Sir Keir had issued an edict, what we would call an executive order in the US, or Parliament had enacted something which made it open and notorious and publicly known. | |
| I'm not aware of that, but it wouldn't necessarily surprise me. | |
| I mean, there have been lots of cyber-related... | |
| What do you expect will happen when Sir Keir returns to Great Britain tomorrow or Saturday empty-handed? | |
| You know, it'll be spun more than a five-year-old at a fairground, you know, on a ride, and they'll make the best that they can of a bad job. | |
| Is his government stable? | |
| Well, it is for now. | |
| I mean, I think people find him bland and boring. | |
| This is Zakir Starmer, but coming off the back of the deeply ineffectual juries. | |
| You know, how do you choose? | |
| So, yeah, I think it is actually, unfortunately, stable. | |
| You know, for now, I see no immediate threats. | |
| Because, you know, on Ukraine, there is complete cross-party support that, you know, somehow we're doing the right thing. | |
| And there's very little debate to that, which actually lends a certain amount of stability. | |
| And the domestic issues, you know, take up far more bandwidth, really, in terms of what the government thinks about on a day-to-day basis. | |
| Back in the 9-11 era of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, Blair was referred to as Bush's poodle. | |
| I guess you couldn't say that about Sir Keir. | |
| No, I'm not entirely sure what sort of dog he would be, apart from, yeah, I don't know, one that's an extremely boring dog. | |
| But no, you certainly can describe him as Trump's. | |
| Trump's a, you know, poodle. | |
| Trump's, yeah, I don't even know. | |
| Maybe, yeah. | |
| Can't think of that one. | |
| Pleasure to chat with you, Peacemonger. | |
| I commend everybody to read those. | |
| Where can you find the Peacemonger? | |
| Is it on Substack? | |
| It's on Substack, Judge. | |
| Okay, okay. | |
| The Peacemonger by Ian Proud. | |
| Wonderful work. | |
| Ian, a pleasure. | |
| We'll hope to see you again soon. | |
| Many thanks, Judge. | |
| Great to talk to you again. | |
| All the best. | |
| All the best. | |
| Bye-bye. | |
| Sure. Coming up at 2 o'clock this afternoon, Colonel Larry Wilkerson at 3 o'clock, the great Professor John Mearsheimer. | |
| And at 4 o'clock, hmm, why do you fire generals and admirals? | |
| Chief Sergeant Major Dennis Fritz. | |
| Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. |
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