April 29, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
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| Hi, everyone. | |
| Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. | |
| Today is Tuesday, April 29th, 2025. | |
| Ambassador Charles Freeman will be here with us in just a moment. | |
| Will President Zelensky concede Crimea? | |
| Might there be a breakthrough? | |
| Does he even have the legal authority to do so? | |
| But first this. | |
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| Paper currencies. | |
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| Ambassador Freeman, welcome here, my dear friend. | |
| Before we get to the subject at hand, a couple of other questions that I want to put to you. | |
| Were you surprised that there were no officials from the Israeli government at the funeral for Pope Francis? | |
| Not really. | |
| Pope Francis was a very kind person. | |
| He called the Palestinians in Gaza, the Palestinian Christians in Gaza, once a week, very regularly. | |
| He spoke out against Israeli apartheid. | |
| He spoke out against the genocide. | |
| And Israel found this unacceptable. | |
| So they basically pronounced anathema on him. | |
| And for that reason, they avoided a major international event from which nearly every corner of the globe sent representatives. | |
| You have to wonder whether they didn't anticipate some embarrassment. | |
| I just read a story about a hotel in Japan that now has a policy of asking Israeli tourists. | |
| To sign an affidavit that they have not committed war crimes. | |
| The image of Israelis internationally could hardly be worse. | |
| And as they discovered when they went to the international football championships in Qatar, their own self-image is absolutely not shared outside Israel. | |
| Serious are the domestic Israeli political problems. | |
| Yair Lapid, who's the leader of the opposition in the Knesset, has said regrettably and regretfully that he wouldn't be surprised if later this year Jews will be killing Jews. | |
| The Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has accused the head of Shin Bet, who announced yesterday he's going to resign. | |
| And the head of Shin Bet has accused the prime minister. | |
| Each accusation was under oath and each accused the other of lying under oath. | |
| All of this must resonate amongst the Israeli public. | |
| I'm not talking about the Itamar Ben-Gavir fanatics. | |
| I'm talking about your typical, hardworking, secular Jewish person. | |
| Well, obviously the divisions are huge. | |
| There's great resentment among secular Israelis at the exemption from military service of the ultra-Orthodox. | |
| The ultra-Orthodox are anxious about being conscripted. | |
| The intelligence services, as illustrated by the testimony of the outgoing Shin Bet chief, do not accept the honesty or the... | |
| Or the views of the Prime Minister. | |
| The Prime Minister is in a fight for his life, his political life at any rate. | |
| As you indicated, he's in and out of court as various trials for fraud and corruption continue. | |
| His immediate associates are also under legal pressure. | |
| We saw something the other day which I hadn't seen before, namely... | |
| A big turnout by Israelis with a Jewish conscience demonstrating against the slaughter of Palestinian children in Gaza. | |
| Apparently, although the polls show that only about 3% of Israelis oppose genocide in Gaza, apparently that 3% is gaining a voice. | |
| So we have an economy in free fall. | |
| We have reservists failing to report for duty when called out. | |
| We have a new law extending the period of military service. | |
| We have many more conscientious objectors to military service. | |
| But in the midst of all this, the Israeli public is denied. | |
| The first-hand knowledge that many people around the world have of what their own forces are doing in Gaza and of the pogroms in the West Bank which are intensifying in violence with the full support of the Israeli military. | |
| This is a very unhappy society and I think the opposition leader speaks for many when he voices fears that this could end in violence. | |
| Switching gears, the tariffs imposed by the president, in my view, and I suspect in yours, of dubious lawfulness and of dubious constitutionality. | |
| In fact, I don't think it's dubious. | |
| I think there's no legal basis or constitutional basis for it whatsoever. | |
| Nevertheless, he's imposed them. | |
| They're extraordinary in the case of China. | |
| Have the Chinese come calling? | |
| As President Trump predicted, President Xi would. | |
| He almost said crawling, but I think he said calling. | |
| No, I think the Chinese see this correctly, not as an economic measure, although it is economic warfare against them. | |
| They see it as a game of dominance. | |
| They see it as designed to gratify the president's ego and show everyone domestically and internationally. | |
| Who's boss? | |
| And they're not responding to that. | |
| People very rarely respond to bullying, especially when the bully is weakening himself by doing things that are making mistakes. | |
| I think the Chinese agree with Napoleon. | |
| You should never interrupt an adversary when the adversary is making a mistake. | |
| Let him do it. | |
| And what I'm hearing from people in China... | |
| Is very hardline intransigent. | |
| The Chinese are saying we can do without importing anything from the United States much and the few things we need we will exempt from our tariffs. | |
| Otherwise, we're just not going to buy. | |
| So no more agricultural products. | |
| No more energy. | |
| There have been no LNG exports to China for quite some time. | |
| And we're in a really hard hardening You have to assume that that's the Chinese calculation. | |
| But I think at this point, they found the United States under Mr. Trump in his first term and now in his second. | |
| So unreliable a supplier of things that they can't afford to have interrupted. | |
| Chinese history is full of periods of starvation and famine, and food security is probably the primary objective of the Chinese state. | |
| So when we threaten that, we basically undercut any possibility of a normal relationship. | |
| Donald Trump is paying for three wars in Gaza and Ukraine and in Yemen. | |
| Is he really a man of peace? | |
| That's a hard question. | |
| He clearly aspires to be a peacemaker. | |
| But what we've seen in those efforts is a collision between delusional views of reality. | |
| And the negotiating position of the other side. | |
| So, for example, there is no peace in Ukraine in no small measure because the president came into office believing the media narrative that Russia was on the ropes, said he'd do Vladimir Putin a great favor by arranging a ceasefire. | |
| But that was a complete misreading of the situation. | |
| Russia is not on the ropes, either militarily or economically. | |
| Vladimir Putin is not politically beleaguered in Russia. | |
| There are people who oppose him, of course, on the grounds of the war and other grounds, but his overall popularity is high. | |
| So that was a misjudgment. | |
| I think the question of whether we can have a peace with Iran is also... | |
| Indicative of a problem because we have an administration in which the president's advisors don't agree. | |
| You have the vice president and a few others who are genuine America firsters, and then you have a lot of neoconservatives who are basically Israel firsters, and the president is whipsawed between their advice, and they don't perceive the Iranian position very accurately. | |
| I would say that his private envoy, Not any position constitutionally, sort of like Harry Hopkins in the Roosevelt era, FDR era, after he was no longer the Secretary of Commerce, | |
| or Colonel House in the Wilson administration. | |
| Anyway, I think the private envoy, Whitcoff, is doing a pretty good job. | |
| But he himself is whipsawed by the pro-Israel forces that demand the complete surrender of Iran, which is not going to happen. | |
| So the president is shying, I think, but he's also apparently, he likes the use of force. | |
| Remember, he assassinated General Soleimani in his first administration, a blatant act of aggression against Iran, right in the middle of Soleimani carrying a peace proposal, apparently, | |
| to Baghdad. | |
| So he doesn't seem to shrink from the use of force. | |
| He rather revels in it. | |
| And, of course, he's got a secretary of defense who many believe to be of dubious competence. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Is it true, in your view, that... | |
| Well, is it your view that the Gaza war and the Ukraine war would stop in a week if he cut off the spigots of arms? | |
| Of course. | |
| Well, in the case of Ukraine, the Europeans would try to continue the war, apparently. | |
| If Israel were cut off, the war would stop because no one else will support it. | |
| Had words of praise for Steve Whitcoff. | |
| I'm going to guess you do not have words of praise for General Kellogg. | |
| One wonders why General Kellogg is still around. | |
| One wonders why, for example, in the peace talks in London last week, he was the senior American there, even though he holds no legal portfolio, much like the historical figures you mentioned and Mr. Whitcoff today. | |
| And he offered a truly absurd, dead-in-the-water plan of partitioning Ukraine, much as Germany was partitioned, amongst European allies after World War II in 1945. | |
| I can't imagine that that plan was run past Trump, and Trump agreed to it, but nevertheless, it's the Kellogg plan, and it was dead on arrival. | |
| Why is he still around? | |
| Beats me. | |
| I have no idea. | |
| I guess the president likes to pursue negotiations in a confusing, self-contradictory manner. | |
| The idea of dividing Ukraine, perpetuating the confrontation between Russia and the rest of Europe, building a sort of demilitarized zone like Korea and Ukraine. | |
| It is an appalling idea. | |
| That's not peace. | |
| That's the perpetuation of confrontation, and it does not end the war. | |
| Can Vladimir Zelensky concede Crimea, or does he do so at the peril of his own tenure in office, even though he's technically not in office, | |
| or even at the peril of his own life? | |
| I think he may do it at the peril of his own life. | |
| There's some very tough nationalist, ultra-nationalist forces in Ukraine who, as you will recall, when Zelensky was first elected, he was elected as a peace candidate. | |
| He was elected as someone who would accommodate Russia by reinvigorating the Minsk Accords, which would have given... | |
| Autonomy, linguistic and cultural autonomy, to the oblasts in the Donbass region, which are primarily Russian-speaking. | |
| He reversed all that in short order, I think, under severe pressure from the ultra-nationalist elements in what used to be called Galicia, Western Ukraine. | |
| And, in fact, he embraced a national hero. | |
| Who is guilty of killing 150,000 Poles and 250,000 Jews, himself is Jewish, and yet he doesn't seem to have any qualms at all about embracing Stepan Bandera. | |
| So one has to assume that he is a gifted actor, someone else is giving him his lines, that he has limited freedom of maneuver. | |
| And that would be true on Ukraine. | |
| And that is presumably why he basically has said, reiterated, that he will never accept the legality of the separation of Crimea from the rest of Ukraine. | |
| The United States, for our part, apparently, under the Trump administration, does accept that and is somewhat more ambiguous on the question of the four oblasts. | |
| Donetsk, Zaporizhia, and I've forgotten the other one. | |
| In the east of Ukraine, whether they would be de facto separate from Ukraine or not just de facto, but de jure separate. | |
| So this is all very confusing. | |
| One gets the sense that Mr. Zelensky is indeed up against a wall and has very limited freedom to maneuver. | |
| What would you advise Steve Witkoff to push for? | |
| Because to me, this is insoluble. | |
| If he would be killed, if he's conceded to the basic demands of the Russians, and if he doesn't concede to basic demands of the Russians, and Trump turns off the spigot, he'll be killed anyway. | |
| Well, I think this is bigger than Mr. Zelensky, frankly. | |
| Admirable as many people find him. | |
| And the question really has been put by the Russians. | |
| They had earlier said that they would demand an election. | |
| They could only deal with a constitutionally valid leader in Kyiv, and Zelensky is no longer such a constitutionally valid leader. | |
| More recently, the Russians have conceded that they can talk to him. | |
| Mr. Zelensky, now it's Mr. Zelensky, who once again refuses to engage in negotiations. | |
| He insists on a ceasefire. | |
| That is an immediate ceasefire. | |
| When the Russian president, Mr. Putin, announced a unilateral ceasefire for the celebration of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in World War II, Zelensky said, | |
| well, why not? | |
| That's a three-day armistice. | |
| Why not 30 days? | |
| He said, I won. | |
| Well, there are several comments to be made about that. | |
| One is it's obvious he understands he's losing the war and people who are losing like ceasefires because that slows down the losing or allows you to regroup and reverse it. | |
| And the second issue I would say here is that I think one of the reasons Vladimir Putin announced a ceasefire over the course of the parades in Moscow is that the Ukrainians have a history of assassination and terrorist acts in Moscow during such events. | |
| And so I think he was hoping that both sides would basically call it off for three days. | |
| But a ceasefire isn't the issue here. | |
| The issue is peace. | |
| A lasting peace, some lasting arrangement that allows Europeans to be in one geopolitical area and cooperative with each other rather than confrontational. | |
| And Ukraine has to be neutral for that to happen. | |
| And I think when General Kellogg and others talk about some kind of resiliency force, meaning a peacekeeping force from European members of NATO, In Ukraine, they are entirely ignoring the fact that the Russians would find that unacceptable and probably slaughter that force in short order. | |
| Thank you, Ambassador. | |
| Very interesting conversation. | |
| Thanks for allowing me to go across the board from China to Gaza to Ukraine. | |
| Let me ask you another question. | |
| Are you hopeful? | |
| For an amicable resolution of the Ukraine war, or do you think this is just going to go on until the Ukraine military cries uncle? | |
| I take the threats from Vice President Vance and Marco Rubio seriously, that the United States might just walk away from this. | |
| After all, we're in a very anomalous position. | |
| This is an American proxy war. | |
| We've been heavily engaged. | |
| We've been using the Ukrainians to, quote, weaken and isolate Russia or an attempt to do so. | |
| It hasn't worked, but that was the intent. | |
| We're very much behind this war in every respect, starting with the coup in 2014 that launched a civil war between Ukrainians, where we sided very much with the ultra-nationalists. | |
| In Western Ukraine against the Eastern Ukrainians who are Russian-speaking. | |
| Now we are claiming to be an intermediary, a mediator. | |
| So we've switched positions. | |
| We were backing Ukraine to the hill. | |
| And now we're claiming neutrality. | |
| So we have not sided with Russia, but we've ceased to side with Ukraine. | |
| And I think it's entirely possible that we will end up walking away, and that may not be a bad thing. | |
| Because in the end, peace in Europe and the fate of Ukraine really depends mostly on Europeans. | |
| Ukraine is part of Europe. | |
| It's not part of North America. | |
| And if we are going to attenuate our relationships with our NATO allies in Europe, as they believe we are going to do, and they are busily building their own defenses, To compensate for that, they're also going to have to take on the diplomatic lead of finding some means of reconciling Russia and Europe and the rest of Europe to each other, | |
| including in Ukraine. | |
| Ambassador, thank you very much. | |
| Thanks for such a thoughtful conversation. | |
| Deeply appreciated. | |
| Have a fine day, a good week. | |
| We'll look forward to seeing you next week. | |
| You have a great week, too. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Coming up later today at 2 o 'clock this afternoon, Colonel Douglas McGregor. | |
| At 3 o 'clock this afternoon, Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski. | |
| At 4 o 'clock this afternoon, from Moscow, Professor Jeffrey Sachs. |
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