All Episodes
Previous Next
March 13, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
26:40
Prof. Gilbert Doctorow : A Secret Ceasefire?
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Thursday, March 13th, 2025.
Professor Gilbert Doctorow will be here with us in just a moment, but first this.
Markets are at an all-time high.
Euphoria has set in.
The economy seems unstoppable, but...
The last administration has buried us so deep in debt and deficits, it's going to take a lot of digging to get us out of this hole.
Are you prepared?
Lear Capital specializes in helping people like me and you grow and protect our wealth with gold.
Did you know that during Trump's last presidency, gold rose 54% to a record high?
If that happens again, that puts gold at $4,200 an ounce.
In his next term.
Don't wait.
Do what I did.
Call Lear at 800-511-4620 or go to learjudgenap.com for your free gold ownership kit and special report, $4,200 gold ahead.
When you call, ask how you can also get up to $15,000 in bonus gold with a qualifying purchase.
Call 800-511-4620, 800-511-4620 or go to learjudgenap.com and tell them the job.
Professor Doctorow, good day to you, my friend, and welcome here.
I want to speak to you at some length on your views about the so-called ceasefire, the secret and unseen agreement.
Marco Rubio, the American Secretary of State, seems to have extracted from the Ukrainians.
But before we get there, you have some very interesting observations on the attitude of the Belgian public, you living in Belgium now.
Both the sort of blue-collar, hard-working folks and the elites about the war in Ukraine.
What are those attitudes that those folks have manifested?
Well, for some time I was confident that I had an understanding of where the elites are, because I'm a member of an elite, the elite, royal club of French speakers in Brussels.
And they have monarchists, they have people who serve the monarchy, they have simply successful businessmen, and now women, because they're admitting 50-50 women presently.
I attend their meetings, and that's my main contact with society, because when you come into a country, as I did, of middle age, and it's not the time when you make new friends, it's even difficult to acquire acquaintances.
So I judged Belgium by the people I see around me at the gatherings at table talk, because the biggest thing that Belgian men do at a social club is eat.
So we have table talk.
And I heard a big change in thinking, going back to when I joined this club five years ago, when it was really a center of moderation, tolerance for all views.
Backward nostalgia to the days when Peter the Great visited Spa when he traveled around the Low Countries.
That disappeared.
And what I saw in the recent past was very sharp hostility towards Russia among most of my peers, with a few exceptions.
But as the mood had changed dramatically, I remarked that.
But I had no feel or I didn't have any confidence.
I'm saying what ordinary people on the street are thinking because you don't just guess at that.
However, I have an additional side to my life here.
We have family here.
My daughter's here.
My grandchildren are here.
And my daughter is a schoolteacher in secondary school.
So she has a lot of social contacts, both as a professional with her peers and with the parents of students because they meet the parents of students.
As is the custom.
But also with her children.
She has two teenage kids, 14 and 16. And at that age, they have friends and their friends have parents and they get together.
So her social circle in middle class or lower middle class Belgium is quite broad.
And she has been very disturbed, very troubled in the last few months by the clear Feeling of patriotism, cheap patriotism, wanting to go to war,
wanting to send your kids to military training.
I mean, Belgium doesn't have much of a military history.
I think they lasted about a week or ten days in World War II.
They didn't do too much better in World War I. So in a country like this, with no martial history, with no parade culture, To have parents say that they want to see training, paramilitary training, for their kids at the end of secondary school,
and if they do not object to the introduction of a draft or to send their kids to fight against Russia, this is striking.
How do you account for this?
A peace-loving, non-militaristic country suddenly manifesting...
Such a degree of animosity towards the Russians that people would talk about a draft.
I mean, do they go to bed at night expecting an invasion the next morning?
Almost so.
Look, there has been nonstop propaganda of the Atlanticist variety on all of the media.
Not to mention the fact that when you tune in Europe's widest viewed television news, Euronews.
You're getting the voice of Ursula von der Leyen, 24 on 24. He has been a very heavy indoctrination and it has had a result.
The result is what I just described.
There is no parades here, no parades in Belgium, but the attitude has changed and parents are even speaking about sending their sons off to fight against Russia.
How do the young men feel about this?
The human beings that could actually be drafted, sent to the front lines, and as you have written, Professor, in a week, be blown to bits by the Russian military.
Oh, definitely.
I have, as I said, these two teenage sons.
One of them is 16. Well, in a year, he'll be out of secondary school, and he would be facing his draft.
I can assure you that he's not enthusiastic about it.
But that is a personal matter which would be unwise to discuss.
I always say that what the parents are saying may be rather different from their sons are saying.
If I recall back in the 1960s, there was such a division between what my parents' generation was saying about the Vietnam War and what my peers were saying.
Wow. By the way, it's Belgium.
It's not exactly Alabama.
Would they draft women?
Not to my knowledge, no.
So far, the gender issue hasn't gone that extreme in Belgium.
And as to the question of what kind of society this is, let me be perfectly clear about it.
When I walk the streets of downtown Brussels, I see 99% Heterosexual couples.
I see a lot of little kids.
And I see 1% of the, let's sort of call them marginals, who have been raised to a level of iconic level in the States.
So the country, it may have fallen out of love with the church, definitely.
The feeling here is anti-clerical.
But it hasn't gone to the extremes.
And Satanism, which is taking hold of Paris, has not made it in more provincial, shall we say, Belgium.
Okay. What do we...
Switching gears, Professor Doctorow, to Secretary of State Rubio and his announcements.
Actually, before I ask you about it, Chris, I want the clip.
I don't remember what the number is of it, where Secretary Rubio...
The one we were viewing a few minutes ago, Chris, where Secretary Rubio and Mike Walsh are together.
Can you run that please?
Today we made an offer that the Ukrainians have accepted, which is to enter into a ceasefire and into immediate negotiations to end this conflict in a way that's enduring and sustainable.
We'll take this offer now to the Russians, and we hope that they'll say yes, that they'll say yes to peace.
The ball is now in their court.
We also got into substantive details on...
How this war is going to permanently end.
We have a named delegation in terms of next steps from the Russian side.
We have a named delegation in terms of next steps from the Ukrainian side.
I will talk to my Russian counterpart in the coming days.
Secretary Rubio will be with G7 foreign ministers in the next couple of days.
We have the NATO Secretary General in the White House.
What do we not know about this so-called ceasefire agreement?
I mean, have you had an opportunity to read it?
Has anybody, except those two folks, had an opportunity to read it?
Well, I don't blame them for keeping the secret.
It would go nowhere.
Who knows to what extent.
The delegation put together by Zelensky is of the same opinion as Zelensky himself, that the country will cede no territory to Russia.
He said that in the last couple of days.
If that were the view, then this peace negotiation is going absolutely nowhere.
So we don't know.
Maruba has been very diplomatic.
I was admiring his language in the several different times that he came before Canberra's.
The last one, I think, was on his visit to Ireland yesterday.
And he was very careful, saying, oh, but are you going to raise the, punish Russia if they say no?
And he was very wise in saying, look, you don't issue threats before...
Let me play that clip, because my own view is the opposite of yours.
I thought he seemed tentative and insecure, but...
Let's watch him and let you comment and let our viewers comment.
Chris, cut number one.
Are you truly prepared to apply pressure on Russia, should it be recalcitrant and not agree to the terms of this ceasefire?
There's been no concrete action that this administration has taken to punish Russia since it's come to office.
Well, there's a couple points.
To be clear, as far as I am aware, the United States has not provided armaments to Russia.
The United States is not providing assistance to Russia.
Every single sanction that has been imposed on Russia remains in place.
Every single sanction the president inherited has remains in place.
Inherited in the previous administration.
Right. But, well, I mean, they're pretty sanctioned up.
I mean, there's a lot of sanctions on already.
My point being is that there's been no steps taken to relieve any of these things.
These things continue to be in place.
But we don't think it's constructive for me to stand here today and begin to issue threats about what we're going to do if Russia says no.
Let's hope they say yes.
What cards does he have to play with my new friend, Sergei Lavrov?
None. None.
But I admit, I admire his refusal to say what Trump said.
A week ago, oh, I'm going to double down on the sanctions.
We're going to...
No. He was saying what you and I and others have been discussing on this program.
But there's nothing more to sanction.
So he was being honest and upfront and not being propagandistic.
That is a hopeful, hopeful sign.
He knows which end is up.
He's being cautious in not releasing any content of the agreements with the...
What I anticipate is that Putin will say, yes, but, and the but is important.
He will certainly avoid giving the satisfaction to Zelenskyy and to the Russia bashers in the States and Europe that he said no, but he will not say yes.
He will say, First of all, they're not moving one inch on any ceasefire until the last Ukrainian has been killed or driven out of Korsk.
That is 100%.
And the fact that Putin was there yesterday, precisely yesterday, wearing military fatigues and telling the command, telling Gerasimov, finish it up right now.
And they're close to finishing it up right now because of the most extraordinary exploit of the Russian Stormtroopers in the passing 16 kilometers through an underground gas pipeline to emerge in the middle of Suja,
the main settlement or urban conglomeration in the part of Kursk that was occupied initially by the Ukrainians.
And they caught everyone unawares.
It was like a modern version of the Trojan horse.
Only multiplied several times over because these were 800 troops.
This was an exploit of historic nature.
Whether it should have been done is not a story.
Being somewhat claustrophobic, the idea of spending 48 hours in this pipeline, which could be re-flooded with gas at any time, was not my idea.
Right, right, right.
Your comments about saying yes or saying yes, but, Or saying no or no but reminds me of that one-liner from Churchill.
I'm not a fan of Churchill's, but he did have brilliant one-liners.
The art of diplomacy is not saying yes or no.
It's saying yes and no.
But is the U.S. a neutral, morally capable of being the intermediary here, when in reality it's a co-belligerent?
Financing the war on one of the two sides?
No, I agree completely with what you just said.
It is not neutral.
It is not an arms broker in any sense of the word.
So it's a rather peculiar situation.
Yes, financing it and providing what it just demonstrated is of critical importance by withholding for a couple of days the satellite intelligence, the real-time intelligence that guides the Ukrainians on the battlefield.
I want to play a little clip for you from John Bolton, who was, of course, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, but more recently and infamously...
Unlike Trump, who thinks that he and Putin are friends, Putin sees Trump as an easy mark, and using his KGB learning and experience, he has become very successful at manipulating Trump to the point that Trump doesn't even know it's happening.
I think that was evident after the election.
And it's paid off in terms of the Ukraine conflict because Trump has given, even before negotiations begin, given the Kremlin virtually every one of their major...
Share that view, Professor Doctorow?
Not anything that Bolton says has a personal animus towards Trump, and he's using anything he can possibly get his hands on to clobber Trump.
I don't believe what he's saying for a minute.
Trump is not bending to Putin's will.
Trump was simply being a realist without accepting.
These basic conditions of the victor in the war, they will never sit at the table.
So that was not something that Trump was personally persuaded because of the charm of Putin.
That's rubbish.
It was either you want to do this or you don't want to do this.
If you want to do it, then you accept these basic conditions of the Russians or you're wasting everybody's time.
If Foreign Minister Lavrov is looking at clips, As recently as six or eight months old, of then-Senator Rubio speaking about Vladimir Putin, Russia, and Ukraine, may he conclude that Rubio himself,
inwardly, personally, and privately, wants Ukraine to prevail in the war?
I can't judge on what goes through Lavrov's mind.
From my observation of Rubio, he has...
He's been sincere to the mission he's been given.
What his personal views might be about this, I don't know.
They're probably, as you say, that he was sympathetic to Ukraine.
Why not?
He was saying things of that nature for years.
But he was not hired to pursue his personal vision.
He was hired to pursue the vision of his boss.
So I don't...
The question is, is the Trump team trustworthy?
That is essential and concerns all elements of it.
In the ways that are easy to do, Trump has been sending clear signals to Moscow that he wants a big change in relationship.
This extends in all sorts of things that are not reported in the mainstream media.
For example, the American veto on language in a now being prepared collective statement of the G7 at his next gathering.
The veto was on the notion that Russian shadow fleet should be monitored and should be stymied, frustrated.
The United States vetoed that.
The United States has done many of these little things which are sending quiet signals to Moscow.
Hey, we want to get along.
Oh, yes, in Syria.
Okay. I agree that Trump in his heart wants a great reset.
You know, I just spent a week.
Nearly a week in Moscow.
And rubbed shoulders and engaged in small talk as well as video recorded serious talk with Foreign Minister Lavrov himself.
There's no question in my mind that they want a great reset.
They want an amicable, cultural, social, and commercial relationship with Russia to resume.
The reason I ask you about what they really think about Rubio is do they trust Do they trust him?
And of course, that remains to be seen.
Let's look at the other side of this coin.
In your view, is Vladimir Zelensky free to engage in negotiations and sign a ceasefire?
Or does he know he's a dead man, literally a dead man, if he does so?
Well, I think he has been very wise to put...
To stand aside from the actual negotiations.
He's put up his Yermak, the man who everyone says has been running the show from behind the throne.
He's put up these people and they're the ones who will have to accept or reject the real world terms of the peace treaty.
Therefore, he may be saving his neck by passing it along to others.
That's not something to reproach him with.
It's simply a statement of fact.
They have a delegation.
The delegation will either proceed to a peace with the Russians or not.
But if they proceed, they'll have to accept terms which will be quite painful for Ukraine.
And if anyone gets lynched, they'll be the ones who are lynched, not Mr. Zelensky.
He's not that stupid.
What incentive do the Russians have to negotiate?
I mean, five hours after I left a residential neighborhood in Moscow, it was attacked by drones.
Why would the Ukrainian military be doing that at the same time the American Secretary of State is metaphorically on his knee begging the Russians to come to the table?
Well, a lot of things are going on simultaneously.
It was also the day of the gathering of Rammstein under the chairmanship of the Brits, but with Hegseth present.
So in a typical way that Ukraine has used its arms for public relations purposes rather than for actual military purposes, that's what they did with raining down 300 drones on Russia,
100 of them being in the Moscow City and Moscow Oblast area, and creating a kind of havoc that was reported when you were there.
Putin was being put under pressure by hardliners, by real super-patriots, to respond immediately by sending Russian missiles down on Kyiv.
And I don't mean little drones or something.
No, no.
To use the Oresnik and to smash up and probably kill everybody around in the Ukrainian...
Parliament and government offices.
He didn't do that, though I don't think it can be taken off the table if the Russians decide not to proceed with peace talks.
Then they'll be under no obligation to be nice and they may just do what the patriots want as a proper revenge for what happened while you were there in that drone attack on Moscow.
There's a lot that can go on.
As I said, the bottom line is that until the mopping up operation in Korsk is completed, the Russians will stall for time.
Professor Doctorow, it's a pleasure, my dear friend.
Thank you for all of your insight, particularly that from your daughter and her colleagues.
Very, very telling to understand.
The pervasive level of propaganda on the streets in a place like Brussels, but very courageous of you to reveal it and generous of you to share it with us.
We hope you'll come back and join us again next week.
Okay. I'll just tell you that Denmark is even worse.
We have friends in Denmark, and the level of propaganda in the general population is even higher than you.
Well, then, before we go, Whose propaganda and for what?
That they should vote to join the United States or that they should fear a Russian invasion and institute a military draft?
Well, in a sense of their prime minister, who said that for Ukraine now, the peace would be worse than considering the war.
It is viciously anti-Russian.
And she was shaken totally by Trump and his...
His bid to take over Greenland, like it or not, she lost her moorings, and now she's railing out at Russia.
So the general feeling in Denmark, which is a very calm country, much like Belgium, very happily taken care of by social benefits, but the feeling now is very hostile, very warlike.
Very interesting.
Professor Doctorow, thank you, my dear friend.
Have a good day.
We'll see you next week.
Bye-bye.
Sure. Coming up at 11 o'clock this morning on all of this, Colonel Douglas McGregor.
At 3 o'clock this afternoon on all of this, Professor John Mearsheimer.
And at 4 o'clock this afternoon on all of this, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson.
Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
▲
Export Selection