May 7, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
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| Hi, everyone. | |
| Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. | |
| Today is Wednesday, May 7th, 2025. | |
| Ian Proud, the former British diplomat, posted for a while in Moscow, joins us now. | |
| Ian, it's always a pleasure, my dear friend. | |
| Thank you very much for coming back to the show. | |
| Thank you for your great articles that you send me, which always piqued my interest. | |
| Language from Prime Minister Starmer, from President Macron, and I expect to come soon from Chancellor Mertz. | |
| And add to that the universal mail draft, I'm not sure of the ages, in Poland. | |
| What's going on? | |
| What is the impression that mainstream European leaders are trying to press upon? | |
| I think leaders are terrified that Trump is now in town and he's taking policy towards Ukraine in a completely different direction, not the direction that European leaders wanted to go in the direction they've been clinging on to for the past 11 years since the Ukraine crisis started. | |
| That's to support Ukraine right to last. | |
| Ukrainian whipping up threats that... | |
| The Russian army will attack next week, possibly tomorrow, but these are nothing new. | |
| The pitch has gone up simply because the pressure has also gone up from Washington, D.C. to actually settle this senseless war and bring it to a close in circumstances where neither the European leaders nor actually Zelensky himself want to do that. | |
| Do the European leaders who are using this apocalyptic behavior Really and truly fear the Russian invasion? | |
| Or is there something else that they fear? | |
| And this stated fear is a pretext. | |
| Well, they fear failure and being seen to fail. | |
| Right, right, right. | |
| They fear, I'm going to ask you, you're the expert on Europe, far more attuned to it than I am, don't they fear that they'll be ousted from office, that they won't have any usefulness, that their people don't want to spend money on the military, they'd rather spend it on social services? | |
| Well, Mert's only just scraped through the election in the Bundestag. | |
| You know, he failed at the first round of voting. | |
| The AFT, the Alternative for Deutschland, has actually gone up in popularity since the general elections in Germany. | |
| And actually, the Reform Party seems to be surging in Britain as well. | |
| These parties are anti-war, anti-massive military spending, and that is really putting the frighteners up. | |
| You know, leaders like Mertz, obviously Kier, Starmer, you know, and so on. | |
| And, of course, the other factor is if war stops now, the great fear is how do you actually then, in an accelerated way, include this dysfunctional failed state like Ukraine within the European Union and all the problems that that will unleash? | |
| You know, European leaders are in a perfect storm of their own making and not really sure what to do with Trump barking in their ear to actually bring matters to a close. | |
| Really febrile political moments in Europe right now. | |
| Is there a scintilla of evidence of which you are aware that the Kremlin has its eyes on Berlin or Paris or London? | |
| There's not. | |
| I mean, obviously, I was across all of the intelligence while I worked for the Foreign Office, you know, focusing on Russia. | |
| There's never been any evidence that that was the case. | |
| This has always been a bit of a scare story to whip up. | |
| You know, the military industrial complex to produce ever more weapons to maintain an antagonistic posture towards Russia. | |
| You know, Russian tanks aren't about to vote into Riga or Poland and definitely not into Germany, frankly, or France. | |
| That's always been a ridiculous proposition and continues to be today. | |
| I mean, Germany is a peculiar situation. | |
| The AFD is the second most popular party there. | |
| It may soon be the most popular party. | |
| I forget if it's either law enforcement or intelligence, you can tell me which has characterized it as a terrorist organization. | |
| I mean, could you imagine the Joe Biden CIA characterizing the Republican Party as a terrorist organization when the Republican Party was more popular? | |
| That's almost what just happened in Germany. | |
| Well, with the greatest of respect, Judge Warren could make a strong case that the war failed, the law failed. | |
| It arguably started during President Trump's first in office with the Russiagate probe and that sort of thing. | |
| And what we're seeing happening in Germany is really just another variant of that. | |
| Of that same lawfare, you know, approach, you know, using the law to cancel opinion that goes against what the blob wants to do. | |
| We've also seen that, of course, in Romania as well with what's happening there, the cancellation of one presidential candidate at the end of last year and now the same panic and fear about another sort of a presidential candidate who also wants to have anti-blob policies. | |
| One of our guests has referred to Chancellor Mertz. | |
| Now, he wasn't the chancellor. | |
| I don't even know if he's the chancellor yet, but he's about to be. | |
| He finally won the balloting the second time. | |
| By the way, how embarrassing was it to lose that kind of a ballot? | |
| I mean, can't they count noses? | |
| Well, it's never happened before, I believe, in 79 years since Germany sort of gained democracy after the end of World War II. | |
| So it's a shocking event. | |
| Obviously, Germany has coalition governments, but nevertheless, it was a complete surprise, you know, and possibly signals a desire among some within his party to kind of maintain the status quo of the previous so-called Rainbow Coalition. | |
| One of our guests who... | |
| Studies geopolitics has characterized Chancellor Mertz as the most dangerous chancellor in Germany in the post-World War II era. | |
| He's talking about bellicosity. | |
| Is that a view that you share? | |
| It's hard, frankly, to see that he's any more... | |
| Bellicose and Annalena Baerbock, for example, or Pistorius, who's actually going to continue to defence their minister, I believe, in Germany under the new government. | |
| So, I mean, he just seems to be a continuation of what came before him. | |
| He's possibly more bellicose than Olaf Scholz. | |
| He tried but failed most of the time to have a more moderate line on Russia against a coalition that very much was against the line that he wanted to take. | |
| I think what is different about Mertz is that he's coming on board with what the kind of mainstream within the political elites, that is, you know, within Germany, you know, want to do on Ukraine policy in particular. | |
| Do the public... | |
| Does the public in Germany, we'll continue with Berlin, Paris, and London. | |
| Does the public in Germany, France, and England embrace Russophobia, or is this just the myth of the elites and the governing class? | |
| Well, Russophobia is very much driven by the elites and the governing. | |
| And I think the rise of AFD, but also of a foreign party, Marine Le Pen, against whom lawfare has also been used, as you very well know, Judge. | |
| You know, these political movements are actually... | |
| Reaching out to people who are starting to question the direction of travel on Ukraine policy. | |
| So I think actually gradually there's a greater awareness amongst ordinary working class people, the people who have to fight a war if we had a war with Russia, that actually maybe the whole thing has been a complete disaster for the last 11 years and these new so-called nationalists, ultra-nationalists or whatever the elite tries to call them actually have a better idea on how to embrace Russia. | |
| Is Nigel Farage going to one day be the Prime Minister of Great Britain? | |
| You know, if you'd asked me that last year, George, I've said absolutely never, but after the recent elections, I mean, you have to say there's been a real groundswell of support, you know, for him. | |
| The Conservative Party seems to be imploding, you know, quite frankly. | |
| So it may well be that actually reform replaces Conservatives. | |
| What is the election that his people prevailed in? | |
| Our understanding in the U.S. was that it was local governing bodies. | |
| It was not an election for Parliament. | |
| Well, there was one election for a parliamentary seat. | |
| There are some mayoral elections and some local government elections. | |
| But nevertheless, the scale of the change in terms of the votes that they gathered was so huge that both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party view that as a massive blow to their standing. | |
| Right, right. | |
| Does the British public... | |
| Understand that the British military is a fraction of its former self, both Navy and Army, not much of an Air Force to speak of, and Sir Keir's bellicosity is toothless. | |
| Well, it's completely toothless. | |
| I mean, I wrote an article just a couple of days ago about the ridiculously small size of our Navy, where we can only put to sea nine ships, not including our four nuclear deterrent submarines, four of which we sent off on a publicity tour to Asia. | |
| And actually, the head of the British Navy has just been forced out of office today. | |
| I believe the First Sea Lord has suddenly and unexpectedly stepped down. | |
| So the whole navy is in a terrible state, hardly any ships. | |
| The army is tiny, 74,000 soldiers. | |
| And we're throwing billions and billions of pounds at this problem that's not really giving us any more soldiers or any more equipment, frankly, while still spending $4.5 billion every year on Ukraine. | |
| What is the... | |
| What is your belief about Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania? | |
| Are they on Putin's radar screen, or is this also part of the, oh, we've got to beef up NATO because Trump might pull the U.S. out of NATO? | |
| Is it part of that? | |
| No, I mean, they've got historical grievances going back to the Second World War, going back to them being incorporated within the Soviet Union. | |
| Kaya Kalas, the lead so-called diplomat. | |
| She's frankly not a diplomat at all. | |
| She's a disgrace. | |
| Who is she? | |
| So she is the European high-representative foreign policy. | |
| It's like the foreign minister for Europe, even though she's not actually elected. | |
| She's a former prime minister of a state. | |
| His Face the Nation interview, I heard Foreign Minister Lavrov mention her, and I didn't know who she was. | |
| What is she stating publicly about all of this? | |
| That Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania better bulk up the tanks on the border because the bear is coming? | |
| Well, she's saying exactly those things. | |
| And Estonia has an absolutely minuscule army. | |
| I mean, really, you know, it'd be like a brigade of the United States Marine Corps in terms of its size. | |
| It's really tiny. | |
| It's a very small country. | |
| I mean, she just hates Russia. | |
| She has stated publicly she wants to see the breakup of Russia into separate states. | |
| She also wants to take on China after apparently, you know, the European Union has defeated Russia. | |
| So she's completely... | |
| Mad as a box of frogs, as we might say, in the UK, driven by this kind of intense, very Baltic-specific vasofobia that you also see in Latvia and Lithuania. | |
| But actually, there's no credibility to this. | |
| I mean, there's just, you know, Putin has no stated aim to kind of go into the Baltics. | |
| It would be insanity for him to do so than NATO and European Union members. | |
| What is the attitude amongst British intelligence? | |
| With which you've dealt, MI6, when they hear Sir Keir Starmer warning of the Russian bear and they know damn well from their intel that such a warning is baseless. | |
| Well, for them, it's ka-ching, ka-ching. | |
| They get more resourcing for their activity. | |
| So, I mean, you know, if you look at it through a rational lens, well... | |
| Maybe your thesis stands, but for them, they need a global threat to justify their resources, and that's Russia. | |
| What is your view of the Whitcoff, that's the president's emissary, not General Kellogg, I'll ask about him later, but Steve Whitcoff. | |
| What is your view of the Whitcoff negotiations? | |
| Face to face with President Putin and whether or not they're likely to succeed. | |
| I mean, we have a Ukrainian government that the Russians don't even recognize as legitimate. | |
| And in fact, under international law, it's not legitimate. | |
| We have a Ukrainian president who probably fears for his life if he goes along with the Russian demands. | |
| And we have a Russian government that has consistently articulated its demands from day one. | |
| It hasn't. | |
| It's expanded them and it hasn't reduced them. | |
| They've been intellectually honest and consistent to the core. | |
| Well, I welcome and have welcomed several times Steve Witkoff's engagement. | |
| He's actually talking to Russia. | |
| And in fact, it's a sign of how important this engagement is to President Putin, that he's meeting President Putin personally. | |
| Witkoff has no real standing in the United States government. | |
| He's just a messenger from President Trump. | |
| But nevertheless, the president of the Russian Federation, a country with a... | |
| More nuclear weapons than anybody else is meeting him personally. | |
| That on its own should tell you a lot about the importance that is attached to this engagement. | |
| Biden had practically no engagement with President Trump in the period when he was ramping up the move towards all that war in 2020 on and then into 2022. | |
| I think the US and Russia are able to kind of... | |
| Come to an understanding of what's needed to broker peace. | |
| But can then President Trump actually encourage the Europeans to come on board with this? | |
| Because at the moment, it seems to me the Europeans are doing everything possible to resist. | |
| So Wyckoff, good. | |
| Excellent signs. | |
| But actually, with the Europeans digging trenches, it's still going to be a tough task to bring the war to an end. | |
| What is your view as a career diplomat to this irregular arrangement? | |
| The president's buddy, his friend from New York, a former business partner, not vetted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and not confirmed by the U.S. Senate, receiving no salaries. | |
| Well, I applaud any effort to reach out in a diplomatic way to Russia in circumstances where there's been a complete... | |
| Diplomatic vacuum for a decade and more. | |
| So I applaud it. | |
| The fact that actually he doesn't have any status is in some respects a good thing. | |
| If you relied on the officials in the State Department to do it, the chances are that nothing actually would happen. | |
| And no disrespect to them, I'd say exactly the same thing about the UK Foreign Office too. | |
| So actually what President Trump wants as the head of state of the United States of America is somebody who he trusts. | |
| To deliver the messages that he wants to deliver to President Putin. | |
| And that's Wyckoff. | |
| If he doesn't have any status, well, who cares? | |
| I mean, he's actually fulfilling an incredibly important role. | |
| I accept your analysis. | |
| Here's Vice President Vance in Europe earlier today. | |
| He doesn't really give a reason for it, but he says twice in this clip. | |
| We think the Russians are asking for too much. | |
| Cut number 25, Chris. | |
| Our view is it's absurd that you've had this war go on for so long, and the two sides aren't even talking constructively about what would be necessary for them to end the conflict. | |
| You don't have to agree with the Russian justification for the war, and certainly both the president and I have criticized the full-scale invasion, but you have to try to understand where the other side is coming from. | |
| I think that's what President Trump has been very deliberate about, is actually forcing the Russians to say, here is what we would like in order to end the conflict. | |
| And again, you don't have to agree with it. | |
| You can think that the request is too significant, and certainly the first peace offer that the Russians put on the table, our reaction to it was, you're asking for too much, but this is how negotiations unfold. | |
| And I wouldn't say, I'm not yet that pessimistic on this, I wouldn't say that the Russians are uninterested in bringing this thing to a resolution. | |
| What I would say is, right now, the Russians are asking for a certain set of requirements, a certain set of concessions, in order to end the conflict. | |
| We think they're asking for too much. | |
| I don't know what, and I don't imagine you don't either, President Putin. | |
| But as we said earlier, Ian, what the Russians are asking for today in May of 2025 is the same thing they were asking for in February of 2023. | |
| They haven't changed. | |
| And they are within inches. | |
| When I asked Foreign Minister Lavrov off camera, he went like this, holding his forefinger and his thumb about an inch and a half apart. | |
| Why would we agree to a ceasefire when we are this close? | |
| They are within inches, metaphorically, of achieving their goal, are they not? | |
| Their military goal. | |
| Or are these drones, which are now being made, I understand, one a minute in Ukraine, going to force Putin to use stronger missiles or be more patient? | |
| Well, Russia still has the upper hand on the battlefield, as you see, with the small incremental movements happening on a day-to-day. | |
| I think the controversial issue, the sticking point in negotiations is around the territorial issue of the four oblasts and how the line is drawn around that. | |
| I mean, I think the NATO issue has very evidently been taken off the table and people understand that. | |
| But how do you draw the line when the fighting stops? | |
| You know, Russia still wants to evidently conquer the whole of the Donbass. | |
| The United States has been making noises about recognising Crimea. | |
| I think that is the sticking point that's holding things up right now. | |
| But the really important thing for me that Vice President France said at the top of that was the need actually to bring both sides together to sort it out, because there's only something that the United States can do. | |
| And actually, the Russian side has said that they're willing to have direct negotiations with Ukraine. | |
| Clearly, Ukraine doesn't want to do that too. | |
| So actually, there needs to be more pressure on the Ukrainian side to... | |
| get to a position where both Russia and Ukraine are talking directly to each other and finding some sort of compromise on this? | |
| Two weeks ago, Secretary of State Rubio said, we're getting sick and tired of this. | |
| We're going to give both sides a week, and then we may very well close up shop. | |
| I'm paraphrasing him with respect to Ukraine. | |
| Not only have we not closed up shop, the president has authorized another proposal, 500 million, half a billion dollars worth of military gear to be sent to Ukraine. | |
| Do the European elites still fear that Donald Trump will leave Ukraine in the lurch? | |
| Absolutely. | |
| They're terrified. | |
| And they're terrified about that because they'll have to pick up the bill. | |
| Can they afford the bill? | |
| No, they can't afford the bill. | |
| They absolutely cannot afford the bill. | |
| I mean, I've written extensively on how this rearmament plan already isn't affordable. | |
| How do you even keep the Ukrainian government to float into 2026 if the fighting keeps happening? | |
| There's one massive bill there. | |
| That isn't even considering the cost of fighting the war itself. | |
| You know, Europe just doesn't have the money for this. | |
| Europe and the USA don't have the money to keep doing this, you know, forever. | |
| That's why, you know, we need to kind of turn off this big and say, well, make it end. | |
| I mean, that is the only way. | |
| Because even if the war ends today, Europe is still going to face a massive bill going into next year and the year after. | |
| Just keep Ukrainian lights on. | |
| Before I let you go, I have to ask you what you think. | |
| Of this, it's President Trump on Meet the Press on Sunday. | |
| Chris, cut number 10. Ukraine, there's been discussions they will have to give up some of the land. | |
| Russia will have to give up all of Ukraine because that's what they want. | |
| All of Ukraine, meaning they wouldn't keep any of the land that they've claimed? | |
| Russia would have to give up all of Ukraine. | |
| Because what Russia wants is all of Ukraine. | |
| And if I didn't get involved, they would be fighting right now for all of Ukraine. | |
| Russia doesn't want the strip that they have now. | |
| Russia wants all of Ukraine. | |
| And if it weren't me, they would keep going. | |
| Does anybody take that seriously? | |
| Is there a scintilla of evidence that the Kremlin wants all of Ukraine? | |
| No, I mean, I've got a lot of time for President Trump, but I think there he's just been very President Trump-ish about it. | |
| I mean, that just suits his narrative that things would be a whole lot worse if he wasn't in charge. | |
| That's fine. | |
| I respect what he's been trying to do in Ukraine. | |
| It's much needed. | |
| The Europeans have been doing absolutely nothing, so I welcome his efforts. | |
| But there I think he's just playing to the crowd, I'm afraid. | |
| Okay. | |
| I think you're probably right. | |
| If you're wrong, if he really believes that, he's getting terrible, terrible intel and he's believing what those neocons are whispering into his ears. | |
| Well, yeah, I mean, there are still strong voices in his own party that still believe that. | |
| So, I mean, he has a tough job just within the beltway to kind of shift things, right? | |
| I mean, it's not just he's got to tackle the blob in... | |
| He's got to get these rest of European leaders on board. | |
| He's got to deal with Zelensky, who just wants to fight to the last Ukrainian and deal with the Russians. | |
| So, I mean, it's a massively difficult task he's got, and I admire what he's been trying to do so far. | |
| Right. | |
| Ian Proud, a pleasure to chat with you. | |
| Thank you, my friend. | |
| Keep those weekly columns coming. | |
| They're very informative. | |
| I hope you can come back and join us again soon. | |
| And I met him many, many times in my days at Fox. | |
| If you come across Nigel Farage, tell him I love him. | |
| I will do. | |
| Thank you, Ian. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Very enlightening conversation that I deeply appreciate, and I hope you all do as well. | |
| Coming up later today, 2 o 'clock, Aaron Maté on the same subject. | |
| 3 o 'clock, Phil... | |
| Phil Giraldi, how deep into the US government is the Israeli government? |
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