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May 7, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
28:23
Prof. John Mearsheimer : Can Netanyahu Conquer Gaza?
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Thursday, May 8th, 2025.
Professor John Mearsheimer will join us in just a moment on Can Netanyahu Conquer Gaza?
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Professor Mearsham, we're always a pleasure.
I would be remiss if I did not mention that Pope Leo XIV is from Chicago, where you are.
I don't know if they'll be rejoicing in the streets.
I don't know if you know him.
I think he left Chicago as a boy.
But this is rather startling, at least to me, that we have an American pope.
Quite amazing.
I thought popes were always supposed to be Italian.
I was raised thinking they were always supposed to be Italian, and then along came Carol Wojtyla, and he, of course, captivated the world with his charisma and fidelity to first principles.
But I just thought I would mention that.
I'm still trying to process it.
I don't mean to demean it, but I think he's cut very much in the Francis mold.
We'll see where it goes.
Before we get to Gaza, which is really where I want to spend some time with you, what is your take on President Trump's understanding of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict?
And before you answer that, I want you to watch this little clip.
Chris, cut number nine.
The fact is that Putin is a war criminal.
He's killed thousands and thousands of people.
And he has made one thing clear.
He wants to reestablish what was part of the Soviet empire, not just a peace.
He wants all of Ukraine.
That's what he wants.
And then you think he'll stop there?
Do you think he'll stop if he takes Ukraine?
What do you think happens to Poland?
What do you think of Belarus?
What do you think happens to those NATO countries?
Chris, I'm looking now for the one where he says Russia wants all of Ukraine.
I don't have the right number.
Forgive me.
Forgive me.
Chris, where President Trump says Russia wants all of Ukraine, that's the one that I want to play for Professor Mearsheimer.
Yeah, right.
We don't have it.
But in an interview with Meet the Press, he made this rather startling statement that Russia is interested in taking all of Ukraine, just as President Biden.
Yeah, I saw that clip.
And he also says in the clip, President Trump, that it's only because of him that they haven't taken all of Ukraine.
I mean, this is delusional on both counts.
First of all, there is zero evidence that the Russians have been interested in conquering all of Ukraine.
Just zero evidence.
They don't have the capability to do that.
And furthermore, the idea that they were bent on it and Donald Trump stopped them is kind of a laughable argument.
The guy has been in office only since January 20th, and he certainly has not stopped them in that.
What does this tell you about either his understanding?
Of the relationship between Ukraine and Russia or his listening to neocons, whispering in his ear or his political chicanery with the rest of us.
Maybe he wants us to think that Putin wants all of Ukraine and when he ends up with just Crimea and the four oblasts, Trump will take credit for having saved the rest of Ukraine.
Who knows what's going through his mind?
But there is no evidence whatsoever from anywhere on the planet.
That Putin wants all of Ukraine.
Exactly.
And this gets back to his claim the other day that we won both World War I and World War II.
When you hear those kind of comments, you say, what planet is this guy living on?
This just makes no sense at all.
How does this play in the Kremlin, Professor Mearshamer, when he makes a statement like this?
Well, I think that it basically means that you don't know what Trump is really thinking because he changes his tune from day to day.
So you really can't trust anything he says.
And furthermore, even if you get a deal, let's say we work at a deal, how much faith can you put in him to keep that deal and to not walk away from it at some point?
So this is a huge problem.
For us, in terms of dealing with the Russians, and by the way, it's also a huge problem for us in terms of dealing with the Iranians.
You know, the Iranians remember very well that he walked away from the JCPOA, which they thought was an agreement that was going to be kept by the United States, but Trump walked away.
And if the Russians cut a deal with Trump, and they make concessions to Trump to get that deal...
Can they trust that he won't welch on the deal shortly thereafter?
And the answer is no.
And this really gets in the way of negotiating the settlement.
So in the past 10 days, Trump has claimed that the United States was largely responsible for defeating Nazi Germany and not the Russians.
He has claimed that Russia has lost over a million men in the Ukraine conflict.
And he has dispatched General Kellogg yet again, and I'll play a clip for you from him just yesterday, to offer a peace plan that he knows is dead in the water.
What does this tell the Kremlin?
Again, it tells the Kremlin that his policy is incoherent.
You know, no clear policy objective and no strategy for achieving that objective.
I mean, what else can the Kremlin conclude?
I mean, the Kremlin has a vested interest in playing nice with Trump and not picking a fight with him and pretending that they're still willing to work out a deal.
But I would imagine that behind closed doors the Russians are thinking that we can't place much faith in Trump.
And even if we get a deal, we can't place much faith in that deal.
What we have to do is we have to position ourselves on the battlefield in ways that ensure our security once the shooting stops and you get a frozen conflict.
Turkey and Egypt allow Netanyahu to invade Gaza.
Well, he's already invaded Gaza.
Well, I mean invaded in a way that he announces publicly, as he did earlier this week.
He intends to occupy the entire place and remove all the Palestinians.
Will this finally provoke the ire of somebody with a military?
I think that he will attempt to occupy all of Gaza.
Whether he can do it is another matter.
The Israelis are having great problems raising the necessary forces to do that.
And you want to understand that once they go in, they have to keep those forces there.
So it's not like they go in for one week, then they pull the forces out, and that's the end of the story.
To occupy a piece of real estate as big as Gaza, you need a lot of troops.
Occupy all of it.
And they're talking about defeating Hamas.
And that's going to require lots of troops as well.
And I don't think they have the troops.
And I think there's enough dissatisfaction inside of Israel at this point in time that this is going to cause all sorts of problems for Netanyahu.
The other thing you want to remember is he tries to root out Hamas.
He ratchets up the war.
He's going to end up killing more hostages.
And this is not going to sit well with a huge chunk of the Israeli population.
So that's one part of the story.
The other part of the story is the ethnic cleansing.
And I think the ethnic cleansing is where you may get some intervention if Netanyahu tries to push the Palestinians out.
Because the obvious place that he will push them is Egypt and maybe Jordan.
And I think the Egyptians will resist this greatly.
And I think there's a serious possibility that will lead to war.
And you want to also remember that there will be great resistance from the Palestinians.
This is not going to be like 1948, where there was hardly any resistance.
The Palestinians will put up...
Great resistance.
Lots of Hamas fighters will still be around.
So if the Israelis try to ethically cleanse Gaza, it will involve a huge amount of murder and mayhem.
And whether Israel can get away with that remains to be seen.
Right now he's committing murder and mayhem by starvation.
Yes, he has.
But the number of people who have actually died...
Thankfully, it's not that great.
It's a small number so far.
I think there is a great danger that he will end up starving hundreds of thousands of people.
But even there, I think the international community will make enough noise that it'll be very difficult for him to do that.
I mean, maybe it's wishful thinking on my part, but I actually do believe that there's just limits to what he can do, which is not to say that what he is doing now It isn't absolutely horrible.
It is.
It makes me sick to my stomach to watch what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians.
But fortunately, the number of people who have died from this starvation campaign so far is not that great.
Does it also sicken you that nobody is lifting a finger to resist it and that United States taxpayers are funding it?
Absolutely.
I mean, I don't understand what Trump is thinking here.
He's in the same category as Genocide Joe.
We're going to start calling him Genocide Dog.
I mean, he is encouraging the Israelis to pursue this policy.
Indeed.
He is encouraging the Israelis to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
He's basically saying that would be a good thing, because we can then turn Gaza into the Riviera on the Mediterranean.
It's just hard to believe that this is happening.
It was hard to believe when it was happening under Biden.
And it's hard to believe how much silence there is all across the West.
We have all these human rights mavens, all these people who...
Stand up and talk about the importance of liberal values who criticize military action here, there, and everywhere.
And what are they doing in this particular case?
Virtually nothing.
And this is the principal reason that the Israelis are able to get away with this.
Does Hamas, which of course has no air force and no effective air defenses, have the ability to resist a full-scale, boots-on-the-ground invasion by the IDF?
Yes.
I mean, you had almost a full-scale invasion between, I think it was mid-October is when the IDF went into Gaza.
Up until recently, they had huge numbers of forces in Gaza.
The Israelis can flood.
Once again, Gaza with troops.
But the idea that they're going to finish off Hamas once and for all is not a serious argument.
The only way they could militarily defeat Hamas is to ethically cleanse all of Gaza, drive every last Palestinian out.
And if they do that, they will have defeated Hamas.
But they have already, again, tried with massive military forces on the ground and in the air to destroy Hamas.
And they failed and they will fail again unless they can go in and cleanse.
What is the status of the United States bombing Yemen?
Donald Trump claimed that there was some sort of a ceasefire with the Houthis.
Our man on the ground, Pepe Escobar, says no such thing at all.
You know, I don't know what to say other than it appears from the media and from what the Trump administration is saying that a deal was cut and that we basically have admitted defeat, that we want to end the bombing of the Houthis.
And in return, they're not going to shoot at American ships in the Red Sea.
Yeah, but they're not going to shoot at American ships because they won't be there.
There won't be any American ships to shoot at.
I don't know.
I think they're talking about ships that are carrying cargo, not necessarily naval ships.
I don't know if the naval ships are leaving or not.
I mean, one of the problems here is trying to get hard information on exactly what's going on here.
You know, if this deal was reached, what ships are they actually not shooting at?
They say they're only shooting at Israeli ships.
They're only shooting at ships or cargo ships that are headed towards Israel.
How can they know that?
And so forth and so on.
It's just not clear to me.
But the one thing I think that is clear is that we want to put an end to our fight with the Houthis.
And the reason is Trump thought that he could...
He thought that Joe Biden was a pussycat, and if he, Donald Trump, just turned the dogs loose, we'd go in there, finish the Houthis off, and that would be the end of the story.
But he found out, Trump did, just like Biden did, and just like the Saudis did before that, that the Houthis are very difficult to beat.
We were also, as I've said on a number of occasions, expending huge amounts of ammunition in our fight against the Houthis that was needed for East Asia.
And also, we were deploying lots of naval assets in the Mediterranean area and in the Red Sea area that needed to be out in East Asia.
So this was not a good situation for us, and it's not.
It's surprising that Trump is trying to walk away from the war with the Houthis.
But again, we don't know exactly what that means.
Larry Johnson, who is one of our go-to military people and was a fan of yours and was on the show twice a week, has estimated on the basis of research that the United States has spent a billion dollars bombing the Houthis.
That includes two...
I never heard of this.
Two jet fighters that fell off of the USS Harry Truman, an aircraft carrier in the ocean there.
They're worth between $78 and $80 million each.
First, have you ever heard of jet fighters falling off of aircraft carriers?
And secondly, I guess we just wasted a billion dollars.
Well, Larry's done some very fine work in this regard, for sure.
I would note to you that there was a third F-18 that was lost in a crash.
So we've lost three F-18s.
And we've lost a lot of very expensive Reaper drones.
And what happened, I think, with regard to the F-18 that fell off the carrier, or at least one of them, it was making a sharp turn.
To avoid a Houthi missile that was coming at the carrier.
And in the process of making that sharp turn, the F-18 fell off the carrier.
I would imagine that in World War II, given the large number of carriers we had and all the carrier battles we fought, that there were more than a few instances where aircraft rolled off the carriers.
I would imagine the captain of the ship is now swabbing the deck, losing an F-18.
I want to ask you about India and Pakistan.
But first, Sonia, cut number two.
This is a lieutenant general in the Indian military talking about how vulnerable Pakistan is.
Cut number two.
If you look at Pakistan from northeast to southwest, their east-west depth, they do not have the strategic depth to absorb a strike.
All their major cities, population centers.
They're all within this small little strip of land.
Our depth is so much, when Pakistan strikes, we'll be able to absorb that strike.
Of course, there will be damage.
But when we go back with a massive strike, which is our declared policy, and unacceptable damage, Pakistan will cease to exist.
Pakistan will cease to exist.
Is this over?
Or is this the beginning of something serious?
The back and forth between Pakistan and India.
Well, it's not 100% clear where this one is headed.
I think he's overstating the case.
My take on this is that you have to think about it in terms of the escalation ladder involving the two sides.
And what's happening here is that you're on the lower rungs, the very low rungs of the escalation ladder.
And on the lower rungs, and actually the middle range rungs, the Indians actually don't have an advantage over the Pakistanis.
The Pakistanis have substantial conventional capability.
And on the lower rungs, as you go back and forth with each side retaliating, I don't believe the Indians can do more damage than the Pakistanis can.
The question is what happens when you get up top on the escalation ladder.
And up there...
The fact that India has conventional superiority over the Pakistanis means that if a war breaks out, even a limited war, certainly a major war, what will happen is the Indians will defeat the Pakistanis at the conventional level.
However, Pakistan has nuclear weapons, and if India is invading...
Pakistan, which is the likely scenario once you're up at the top of the escalation ladder, you're on sacred territory for Pakistan.
You're on Pakistani homeland, and you're losing because the Indians have conventional superiority.
That's the scenario where we worry that the Pakistanis will turn to nuclear weapons.
And by the way, the Indians worry about this scenario as well.
They understand full...
Well, that they have conventional superiority, but that just means that if they're really clobbering the Pakistanis, the temptation to go to nuclear weapons will be very great.
Are there any CIA or MI6 fingerprints on this terrorist attack in Kashmir?
No.
I mean, the Indians actually claim that the Pakistani government is responsible for this.
But there's no evidence in the public record that that's the case.
The Pakistanis vehemently deny that they're behind this terrorist attack, that it was some terrorist group that they have had no contact with.
The Indians don't believe that.
But if the Indians have the evidence that...
If Pakistan's government was linked to this terrorist attack, they have not put it out in the public yet.
So we can't say for sure whether they were involved, the Pakistanis or the Pakistani government.
And we certainly have no evidence that the CIA or MI6 or any other intelligence organization was involved.
Does the United States have an interest in the outcome?
Yes, the United States has an interest in making sure that this one doesn't escalate.
We have an interest in making sure that we cap the volcano, that we keep both sides on the lower rungs of the escalation ladder, and then we do as much as we can to convince them to take an off-ramp.
Are Pakistan's nuclear weapons legally possessed nuclear?
And internationally inspected, unlike the Israelis.
No, the Israelis, the Indians, and the Pakistanis are the three countries that refused to sign the NPT and that we were.
Interested in getting to give up nuclear weapons or not pursue nuclear weapons and sign the NPT.
So there's hardly any difference between Pakistan and India on one hand and Israel on the other.
Except that Pakistan and India acknowledge that they have the nuclear weapons.
Yeah.
It's this bizarre situation that you and I have talked about before.
Israelis insist on...
Pretending that they don't have nuclear weapons.
And nobody seems to ask the right questions at the right time on international television of Israeli officials or even American officials.
I wonder what Trump would say if in one of those continuous time-a-day pressers he holds in the Oval Office these days, somebody asked him about the Israeli nuclear weapons.
He'd probably say, I don't know, you're asking the wrong people.
You're asking the wrong person.
Actually, he'd probably say everybody knows that the Israelis have nuclear weapons.
Well, that would be eye-opening if he were to say that, and it would be a true statement.
Absolutely.
It would be interesting to see what he would say if somebody asked him that question.
I mean, Trump is not somebody who's good at controlling himself.
He often just blurts out things that he should keep to himself.
And on this issue, I wouldn't be surprised if he spoke the truth.
But you may be right that he would...
I'm sort of speculating.
Here's the clip I wanted to show you earlier, where he says all of Ukraine...
Sonia, 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?
No, no.
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.
Is this Lana C?
Yes.
It's just hard to believe.
I mean, as we said before, there's no evidence that Russia wants all of Ukraine.
And the argument that except for him, Russia would now control all of Ukraine is simply a crazy argument.
I wonder what people whisper into his ear.
People like Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, Sebastian Gorka, Tulsi Gabbard, the people around him with whom he confers every day after he says things like that.
But, you know, that's just my own speculation, wondering what their internal conversations are like.
Is this planned and calculated to create a misimpression on the part of the American public, or is this what the man truly thinks?
We don't know that.
Well, I mean, there's sort of two issues here.
One is what they tell him beforehand.
In other words, are they putting crazy ideas in his head?
And then second is, how do they react when he makes statements that are foolish and bound to get him into trouble or undermine the negotiations that are taking place with Russia or Iran?
And I would imagine that a lot of these crazy arguments that he makes are not the result of somebody whispering in his ear.
Right.
He's been able to get away with this for years now.
Right.
So he feels free to go out and say outrageous things because he knows there's no accountability.
And I would guess with regard to the second issue of what his close advisors, his colleagues, His team says to him after the fact, I would imagine they've reached the point where they've given up trying to, you know, get him on the straight and narrow and to prevent him from saying these foolish things.
I think they probably say, he is what he is.
There's not much we can do about it.
You know, can't do much damage limitation.
And therefore, this is just going to go on.
Professor Mearsheimer, thank you for your time.
Thank you for letting me.
Go from topic to topic.
Much appreciated.
We look forward to seeing you next week.
Likewise.
Be well, Judge.
Thank you.
You as well.
And coming up still today at 4 o 'clock, Colonel Larry Wilkerson in from Moscow, from Tehran to Moscow at 4.30, Pepe Escobar.
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