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April 9, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
25:33
Prof. Glenn Diesen : Ukraine, Tariffs, and Europe.
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Thursday, April 10th, 2025.
Professor Glenn Deason joins us now.
Professor Deason, a professor at the University of South Norway, thank you very much for joining us.
Much appreciated.
We love your able to inform us on...
The attitude of things happening in America as perceived through the European eye.
You and our mutual friend and colleague, Max Blumenthal, recently had a fascinating conversation on your podcast about the suppression of free speech in the United States,
particularly on college campuses and particularly amongst those who are here.
On visas, whether they're permanent resident visas or whether they're student visas, this freedom, this attack on freedom of speech is sudden, though American history, as you know, has periods in which free speech has been attacked.
We're in one of those periods now.
Is there a similar antipathy to the freedom of speech in Europe as we speak?
Well, it depends where you are in Europe.
In Germany, any criticism of Israel is not tolerated.
Indeed, we've seen this with the visit of, for example, the previous finance minister of Greece, who wasn't allowed entry.
They didn't allow him to even participate on Zoom calls.
They take a very strong position against any criticism of Israel.
In the Scandinavian countries, they're permitted to a larger extent.
I think what's the more commonality of censorship now has been more around the Ukraine war, I think.
But it's also promoting a lot of self-censorship.
It's very hard to even argue anything, argue some of the key points, such as being unprovoked war, full-scale invasion, all of these terms which have been used.
It's very difficult to say anything really without anyone
And we're also discussing here laws, actually, about not disseminating propaganda on behalf of foreign governments.
But any criticism of NATO here now is considered more or less to be Kremlin propaganda.
So it's very difficult.
All they want to know is, you know, they have two narratives, NATO or Russia, and how You as a professor have articulated the view that the war in Ukraine began in 2014 with an American propagated coup.
I mean, is that view?
Capable of official suppression by the government because it's not consistent with the government's narrative.
It happens to be historically accurate, even though there's a lot of obtuse people that don't see it that way, and many of those people are in the government.
So are you, as a college professor, a victim of government suppression because they don't like when you express that opinion?
Yeah, well, yes, and this is the funny part, because in the United States, they actually do report on this.
That is, the New York Times had a piece about two years ago, no, sorry, one year ago, in which it pointed out that on the day after the coup in Ukraine in 2014, the new intelligence chief, which had been installed...
Then the first thing he did was to walk into the offices and called CIA and MI6 to start a covert war against Russia.
Again, this was before Russia did anything, before it took back Crimea, before there were any hostilities in Donbass.
This was the Ukrainian intelligence services, which only a few days earlier had Russia as its main partner, which now partnered up with the US and the British for a covert war.
So all of this has been already exposed, but there's no discussion.
This is George Kennan.
This was not a controversial thing to say in Washington in the 1990s.
What would happen if I, as an American, were to go to Berlin and either run my podcast from there or stand on a street corner and say the government of Prime Minister Netanyahu is engaged in genocide?
And the Palestinian people are entitled to their own state.
Is that language articulated publicly in Germany susceptible of criminal prosecution?
I'm not sure to what extent there will be a criminal prosecution, but the way it will go is they would get you by referring to this as maybe support for terrorism.
And this is something I discussed with Max Blumenthal as well.
This is what you do in every single war.
If you criticize the war, then you're accused of taking the side of the opponent.
This is why people are apologists for Slobodan Milosevic, for Gaddafi, for Saddam Hussein.
Now, one is a Putinist.
Whatever it is, it's always accused of taking the opponent's side.
And given that Hamas is the opponent in Gaza...
Then criticism of Israel can be seen as then picking the side of Hamas.
And if we label them a terrorist organization, then you're backing terrorists.
So this is a way, as we saw in the United States as well, a way of revoking human visas, for example, by expressing support for terrorism.
But this is very simplification and dumbing down because...
Reality isn't simply to pick camp A or camp B. It shouldn't be dumbed down to this level.
Does the government in Europe threaten private universities?
Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about.
Maybe the government owns all of them.
I don't know.
In America, we have private universities.
The university from which I have my undergraduate degree, a well-known A place called Princeton University is privately owned.
It receives a lot of government money.
And the federal government is saying if you don't crack down on anti-Semitism, we're going to stop the flow of that money for research.
It doesn't say if you don't crack down on hatred of Palestinians.
It just says if you don't crack down on anti-Semitism, you'll suffer financially.
And Princeton's not the only one that did it to Columbia.
They did it to Harvard.
And many of these schools do whatever the government wants them to do so they can keep the money flowing.
Does that happen in Europe?
I don't think to the same extent.
Again, at least in this country, we have very strong academic freedoms, but the government can use intermediaries.
So we have, for example, human rights NGOs, which are financed by the National Endowment for Democracy and also by, of course, our government.
And I have one of them.
It's called the Helsinki Committee.
They keep calling the university.
They're sending letters to the university.
If I want to go speak somewhere, they do what they can to cancel it.
They post pictures of my house on the internet.
I mean, it's government-funded, but it's technically not the government.
It's one of these government-financed, non-governmental organizations.
I remember a case in Great Britain, Britain I guess is different.
Where a woman was prosecuted for reciting the Hail Mary, a very traditional Catholic prayer, outside of an abortion facility.
They eventually withdrew the prosecution, but she was actually arrested and put on trial, and then the judge sort of looked at the prosecutor and said, where are you going with this?
I would hope that that would be inconceivable in America.
I mean, is that conceivable in the rest of Europe?
Can you be prosecuted for saying a prayer outside of an abortion clinic?
Well, apparently they got pretty close there.
But I guess this is my main concern.
We often say that in the West we have long democratic and liberal traditions, but that's not really true.
I think the English and Americans do.
So when you see these things falling apart in the United States, I think that's a reason for a grave concern in the rest of Europe, because we don't have the same long traditions of these rights.
Okay. But in Norway, you can be critical of the Netanyahu government without fear of reprisal from a government in Norway.
Am I correct on that?
Yeah. No, this is interesting in Norway, because usually we tend to follow...
Whatever our foreign policy outsource to the United States and the EU, we do what they do.
But when it comes to Israel, the government here tends to be much more critical than in other parts of Europe.
Indeed, at times the government is accused of being anti-Semitic because it's been critical of Israel.
But nonetheless, this kind of suspending cooperation, for example, the kind of sanctions we put on Russia, we wouldn't have anything even similar to anything like this against Israel, of course.
Do EU leaders continue to manifest a warlike attitude toward Russia, as Ursula von der Leyen has articulated, and to a lesser extent,
Sir Keir Starmer and President Macron?
Very much so, indeed.
There was an article in Politico recently which confirmed that some European diplomats are getting concerned that the EU foreign policy chief, Kaya Callas, seems to be overstepping it a bit, what was being agreed upon language,
because...
Well, she's speaking more or less as if we are in war with Russia.
She sits on stage arguing that it would be ideal to defeat Russia because if it would be broken into many smaller states, that would be a good thing.
Also being the chief diplomat of the EU, she also says that she doesn't believe in diplomacy with Russia either because in her mind, Putin is a war criminal and she doesn't talk to war criminals.
So I think this is a wider problem, though, beyond the EU.
In the West, I think after the Cold War, we had this idea that diplomacy was no longer about mutual understanding and compromise.
Instead, under this liberal hegemony, the idea was we took on a pedagogic role.
That is, the purpose of diplomacy is to train others to be more like us.
So it's between the teacher and the student, between the...
Subject and object.
So the purpose of diplomacy is to punish or reward based on behavior.
So this is kind of how diplomacy has been.
So this is what we usually see also with NATO.
Once we have some problems, such as the 2008 war in Georgia, the first thing the NATO-Russia Council did was to suspend all talks and cooperation because we have to punish those we don't agree with.
So it's...
This is the Joe Biden, Antony Blinken school of diplomacy.
Instead of talking to your adversary, you try and isolate the adversary.
And of course, that makes things worse.
I mean, do the EU leaders, whether it's von der Leyen, Starmer, of course, they're not in the EU anymore, but the European elites, do they actually not want the war to end?
Well, seemingly no.
We had some European leaders who tried to start diplomacy.
Viktor Orban, for example, of Hungary, he did.
But he traveled to Kiev to speak with Zelensky, then he went to Moscow to speak with Putin to chart out the possibility of negotiations.
when it comes back to Europe, is openly punished by the EU and
And when our media reports on it, across Europe, they leave out the part that he also went to Ukraine.
So he just went to Russia because then he can be presented as a stooge of Putin.
And yeah, this is how it's more or less covered.
And indeed, this has kind of been the consensus in the EU that over the past three years, as we stood on the sideline watching hundreds of thousands of young men die, and they did not even engage in any basic diplomacy to try to mitigate some of the excesses, at least, of
the war.
And this has been interpreted as something moral that we stood our ground, we didn't talk, we isolated Russia,
So I think the whole concept of diplomacy has been badly damaged over the past 30 years.
And this was indeed one of my recommendations for Trump as well and his administration when they engaged with Russia.
Listen to what Sergei Lavrov has said now for the past 20 years.
He's complained one thing, that is after...
The Cold War, we abandoned all diplomacy and replaced it with the language of ultimatums and threats.
And this is usually what we do.
And this is what they don't accept anymore.
So I think it's important to have the point of departure.
The starting point has to be to chart out competing interests.
Where can they be harmonized?
I think this is the...
Yeah, the direction to go.
And on a quick note, this is what Henry Kissinger argued back in 2014 as well.
He said, why are we talking about trying to defeat or destroy the Russians?
If we recognize that the Russians are a great power, and he agreed with this, then we have to look at what are our main key interests.
Can we accommodate the Russian key interests?
This is the realism preached most prominently today by your colleague and our colleague, Professor John Mearsheimer, who's actually going to be on with us in two hours.
If the United States withdraws from NATO, or if the United States stops the flow of arms to Kyiv, do the European countries have the money and the military equipment to replace what the United States has been supplying?
No, this has been the ambition, that idea that we can fill the shoes of the Americans.
But this is absurd.
We couldn't defeat the Russians in three years with the United States.
NATO is pretty much United States.
So the idea that we take United States out of this group and then the Europeans can do it on their own, it's nonsense.
Also, we already emptied our weapon depots.
So it doesn't really make any sense.
But what really makes sense now?
What are we winning?
We're winning a war against Russia, the largest nuclear power in the world, who considers this to be an existential threat.
How is this going to play out?
Are we going to spend money we don't have?
...on weapons which you can't produce for many years.
We don't want peace negotiations in a war which has effectively only been lost and more men and territories will be lost every day.
We even refuse to reconsider sanctions that everyone recognizes don't work.
We're stealing the sovereign funds of Russia.
The rest of the world is not looking at us as if we're immoral people standing up for Ukraine.
They see that all trust has gone away from our financial system.
So nothing really kind of makes sense.
I think this is a bit of a, we're back really at some knee-jerk reactions.
I don't think there's a political imagination anymore because the whole political class grew up over the past 30 years that we were going to live under a liberal hegemony.
The collective hegemony of the West would ensure that the liberal democratic values would be elevated and would create a vastly different international system.
Now that this is falling apart, they don't.
Well, this post-World War II generation that runs the governments in Europe, they probably can't even imagine life Without the Russians as an enemy, can they?
No, I think this is a key problem because what's going to create unity?
And this is a huge problem because the history of Europe has not been one of solidarity.
I think after World War II, in the bipolar distribution of power, it was easy to find solidarity.
In the unipolar order, after the Cold War, it was possible under the foundation that this was going to lay the...
But in a multipolar world where Russia is not an enemy, what's going to bring Europe together?
There's not really that much there anymore.
So I think this is why there's a concern.
Without peacetime alliances, which is, by the way, a massive cancer in the political, in the international system, because it perpetuates conflicts.
Without these peacetime alliances, It's not going to be an external threat.
There's not going to be much solidarity.
And especially the United States leaving, I think this is also problematic.
I mean, I'm all for Europe standing on its own feet and moving out of the basement of the United States.
But the US is also a massive pacifier on the continent.
And the US has better priorities in the multipolar world.
They want to go back to the Western Hemisphere.
They want to go to Asia.
Europe is not a priority.
So what are we going to do when the United States deprioritizes Europe and pulls out to some extent of this?
That's a fascinating question.
Let me ask you a few questions about President Trump.
What was the reaction in Europe by the elites and by the average people to this crazy five-day experiment with tariffs?
Well, it's a little bit the same as with the Ukraine war or, you know, pulling out of Europe.
They never really discussed to that great extent the rationale behind it.
And it's more about, you know, Trump being crazy and a bad guy.
Now, don't get me wrong, I think these tariffs were not a great idea.
But again, there couldn't be rational discussions around this.
That is, I think the United States, one has to recognize that it has overstretched itself.
It has problems with debt.
It can't simply continue the status quo.
I've always been a huge fan of the American system, of Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay.
So I recognize the idea, at least what Trump is thinking of, that if you have temporary and targeted tariffs to protect domestic industries, that this is a way to buy time so they can mature and become competitive internationally.
But the discussion there could be had instead.
It's a bit like Russia, Putin, Trump.
It's all about being bad men who do bad things.
The motivations aren't really discussed.
There's a famous one-liner from Richard Nixon.
I'm paraphrasing.
I don't have the exact quote.
In a conversation with Henry Kissinger, let them think I'm crazy.
Does the European...
Do the European elites think that Trump is crazy?
Or do they think he's dumb like a fox, as we say?
Well, again, I think this would be a very good discussion to have.
This is Richard Nixon's madman theory.
That is, if all his adversaries would think that he's a bit mad and unpredictable, then they wouldn't try to poke and...
And provoke.
Because they would be too concerned about the irrational responses.
And I think that Trump is leaning very heavily into this.
He said this when he was in opposition.
You don't let your opponents know what you're thinking.
If they do fear that you're a bit irrational, this can be a good thing.
Now, you can have some short-term and medium-term gains playing the madman strategy, making people think that you might be crazy.
But in the more longer term, it diminishes a lot of trust because you do, much like in economics, you need predictability.
But the Madman theory, we should have been familiar with it.
I'm very convinced that the North Koreans might be playing the same thing because this is why we're cautious how much we probe and poke them because if we don't know exactly how they're going to respond, then we're not really comfortable to climb up the escalation ladder.
So I think Trump is playing the Madman, but that's the brilliance of the role.
You're not sure if they're playing it or if they're...
You're mad for real.
If there is such a thing as the average European voter, a big if, what does the average European think of Donald Trump?
Well, I think, again, it depends, yeah, which...
Which country?
Yeah, which country in European.
I mean, we have, I think across Europe, there's hundreds and hundreds of newspapers and TV channels, but they're all more or less saying the exact same thing.
It didn't used to be like this.
There used to be more diversity of opinion, market of ideas, but there's become a lot of conformity around this.
I think it's a consequence of the European integration.
That is, if you're going to have all these countries with a common policy,
Usually the way they go is they frame everything as being either good or evil and use this as a way of pushing for a common position.
I think it's the same with the way Trump is presented.
It has to be all bad.
But I do see, though, beyond the media headlines, when you talk to actual people, especially in Eastern Europe for some reason, around Hungary, Slovakia, all these countries you see, even Czech Republic for that sake, you see some empathy and support for Trump.
Because it's not that...
Well, it probably declined a bit over Yemen, Gaza, all of these problems, but I do recognize that...
Very globalist policies of Biden that this was not a sustainable path.
So I think if you only read the newspapers in Europe, I don't think you would get a good sense of necessarily what people feel.
Got it.
I appreciate that.
Thank you, Professor Deason.
Great conversation.
Much appreciated.
I hope you'll come back and visit with us again soon.
Anytime, Judge.
Sure. All the best to you.
And coming up later today at 2 o'clock Eastern on all of these topics, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, and at 3 o'clock Eastern, the aforementioned Professor John Mearsheimer.
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