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May 13, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
26:05
COL. Douglas Macgregor : Is US Generous or Murderous?
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, May 13th, 2025.
Colonel Douglas McGregor will be here in a moment on war and peace before Trump and during Trump.
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Colonel McGregor, welcome here, sir.
Before we get to broader issues of war and peace and what the United States seems to be spending and has spent most of its time propagating, I want to address some very contemporary issues.
President Trump is in Saudi Arabia as we speak.
Why is he there?
I think that's an important question.
I think, first of all, he wants to repair relations with the Saudis.
As you know, we have a long, long relationship with Saudi Arabia.
It goes back decades.
And it's been a rough time lately.
The Biden administration certainly did no favors for us with Saudi Arabia.
And I think President Trump respects them and wants their goodwill.
Now, I don't know how that's going to work, but I think that's his ultimate goal.
It's not so much, well, I'm here to sell you more military equipment, although I'm sure that will come up.
And I suspect the Saudis will probably buy some.
But I think it's more along the lines of, let's recognize that the last years have been difficult, the last few months have been hard, and that's over.
I think that's what he wants to tell the Saudis.
How they will receive that, who knows.
And at the same time, is it, since he's not going to Israel, a slap in the face to Prime Minister Netanyahu?
Yeah, I think you have to see it in those terms, but let's be frank.
And no one, and I mean no one in the international community, and that may also be true for many people in Israel, who've had to deal with Mr. Netanyahu have liked the man.
Most of them regard him as an arrogant sociopath.
And given what's happened in Gaza, he may well deserve the title of psychopath.
So at this point, I don't think it costs President Trump very much at home.
With his enormous followers in the Jewish community and donors to make it clear that he's unhappy with the behavior of Mr. Netanyahu.
Now, beyond that, I don't think we should reach any conclusions.
So I think he's just simply said to the Saudis, and I think he'll say the same thing in the Emirates, let's let bygones be bygones.
Whether or not that works, I don't know.
It appears that Trump is getting so sick and tired of Netanyahu, whether it's personality or whether it's the destruction in Gaza and the advancement of the Greater Israel Project, that the prime minister had to take to the airwaves to deny it.
This is a very emotional moment.
Eden Alexander has returned home.
We embrace him and we embrace his family.
This was achieved thanks to our military pressure and the diplomatic pressure applied by President Trump.
This is a winning combination.
I spoke with President Trump today.
He told me, "I am committed to Israel.
I am committed to continuing to work with you in close cooperation in order to achieve all of our war objectives, releasing all of the hostages and defeating Hamas.
This goes together.
They are combined with each other." Hard for me to believe that Trump said that and used those words, but Netanyahu obviously felt the need.
I've been disturbed ever since I learned that Mr. Alexander was an Israeli from New Jersey.
I thought everybody from New Jersey was an American.
I thought it was very strange.
And clearly it was a slight.
And Mr. Netanyahu, despite his arrogance, is very, very sensitive, much like Mr. Trump.
Yeah.
The young man was born...
Not far from where I live, in New Jersey, but somehow, I guess, can you join the IDF without becoming an Israeli citizen?
I don't know what the Israeli law is, but he was in the IDF when he was captured.
Well, for many years, we had laws in the books that said that if you served in the armed forces of another state, you lost your citizenship.
If you voted in an election in a foreign state, you lost your citizenship.
Then there was a Supreme Court ruling in 1965, with which you may be more familiar than I am, that overturned that.
I'm someone who's never been comfortable with the idea of multiple citizenships.
Either you are an American or you are not.
And that was the view of the founders, and I tend to subscribe to that view.
How does the American military...
I feel about Congressman Mast, M-A-S-T of Florida, who wears an IDF uniform on the floor of the House of Representatives.
I don't know what people think today inside the United States Armed Forces.
I know what I thought, and I think most of us, at least when I was serving, and that's up until 2004, and even in the years that followed, were very uncomfortable with people who were loyal to something other than the United States.
Right.
So I'd be surprised if people welcome that kind of thing.
But obviously, if you have a lot of Jewish constituents and you're looking for donors from that community, that's a very good trick to play.
Right.
Last issue before we get to bigger pictures.
This plane from Qatar, Qatar.
I mean, do they give away $400 million and expect nothing in return?
Oh, of course not.
There's no such thing in politics as you know, Judge.
If you give up something, you expect reciprocity.
There's no doubt.
And listen, we've had lots of evidence, and this is what I kind of regard as legalized corruption.
Lots of evidence for the Kushners and the Trumps and Witkoff and so forth, all doing business on the side with Cutter and profiting from it enormously.
It's the sort of thing that the right complained about with Hunter Biden.
Well, we see some of the same sort of thing going on right now.
I find it distasteful.
And I think it's in bad form.
And I think it's probably illegal.
But I don't see any evidence that anywhere is going to do anything about it.
Does Trump have a realistic grasp of the slaughter in Gaza and the efforts by Prime Minister Netanyahu to expand the borders of Israel?
If he doesn't, then he's a co-conspirator in what is obviously mass murder.
If he hasn't figured out that the Greater Israel Project is a suicidal path for the Israeli people and their state, then he's missing the boat completely.
You know, this notion that somehow or another you can arbitrarily Maybe he's waking up to that.
But why he would have ever supported any of it to begin with is the real question.
I just wonder where You think all of this is going?
The slaps at Netanyahu, the negotiating directly with Hamas, the statements by the uber-Zionist Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, that we're going to supply, this is the opposite of what he said two weeks ago, we're going to supply humanitarian aid and we don't need Israel's permission.
The sending of the B-52s home, the cessation of the bombing of Yemen.
What is the message from Trump to Netanyahu?
Well, remember that President Trump has this habit of flipping back and forth between different polls and different points of view.
We've discussed that in the past.
On the one hand, he recognizes Russia's legitimate security interests.
He recognizes that they are not responsible for this terrible war, that we, in fact, push this forward.
Sheem and Keefe to fight this war.
So then he takes a 180-degree turn and starts repeating the popular neocon slogans that Russia wants all of Ukraine and threatens Eastern Europe, and we get this sort of stupid warmed-over domino theory, which has literally no application.
So when you turn to the Middle East, I think we have to be very careful.
This is what he's saying now.
Since there is no long-term strategic framework that we can follow, no coherent strategy, then I think we have to be careful and scale back our expectations.
What he's saying and doing at this point could, in fact, within a week or two weeks change.
Right.
It's very frustrating, the continual moving back and forth.
Here's what his present...
This is a little funny.
Here's what his present Secretary of State...
Said about Donald Trump and his views on Palestine when they were competing for the Republican nomination for president in 2016.
Number 10. He's not going down.
He thinks the Palestinian is a real estate deal.
And these people may even be tougher than Chris Christie.
The Palestinians are not a real estate deal, Donald.
No, no, no.
A deal is a deal.
A deal is not a deal when you're dealing with terrorists.
You are not a negotiator.
You are not a negotiator.
And with your thinking, you will never bring peace.
Donald might be able to bring condos in the Palestinian areas, but this is not a real estate deal.
Well, he's been saying he wants to be able to bring peace since that time, and yet he's funding the slaughter.
Well, if you know absolutely nothing about the region, about the people involved, the culture, the history, The geography.
Then I suppose you could make statements along the lines of what President Trump made.
As much as it disturbs me to say so, I find myself in agreement with current Secretary of State Rubio, who then said this is not a real estate deal.
This, I think, has been the bottom line difficulty for President Trump.
He views everything as transactional.
And views everything as a negotiation with a transactional outcome.
And he tends to fall back on his experience as a real estate mogul in New York City.
And those things do not necessarily transfer easily to the international system.
There's no basis for expecting the rest of the world to see everything through that distorting lens.
So I think in this case, Mr. Rubio is right.
He's still right.
And I hope that President Trump has finally concluded that.
But again, I don't know, Judge.
I mean, you know, like you, I like the man.
And I like many of his views, particularly domestic perspective.
But this is just impossible to follow with any certainty.
Do you think he has a realistic understanding of Iran?
Do you think he recognizes that Iran poses zero, zero national security threat to the United States?
Well, the short answer is no.
But he has an instinct.
And this is something I've said before.
Many of his instincts are good.
And his instinct from the beginning was, we don't need to go to war with Iran, nor do we want to.
Now, in his mind, he thinks there's, quote-unquote, a deal to be made.
Again, if you're an Iranian and you're watching this drama in Washington, D.C. play out, the question that you raise, and I think this is coming up all over the world, and I think it's in Moscow and Beijing, everywhere, what's his position this week?
We sign this today, and this will last till what, midterm elections?
In other words, how long does anything last?
The evidence that we can bet on anything in the near term or the long term of the United States.
What are the United States' real core interests?
Are those core interests in the Persian Gulf?
Are they in Israel?
Are they in Ukraine?
Most people look at this, shake their heads, and say, of course not.
Our core interests are in the Western Hemisphere.
But what do you conclude?
I don't think any of us can say with certainty what the answer to your question is.
But I wonder if he contemplates what Netanyahu might do if Witkoff crafts another real estate developer purporting to be an international diplomat who seems to be the de facto,
not de jure, because he wasn't confirmed by the Senate, the de facto Secretary of State, if they enter into an agreement with Iran that does permit First,
the Iranians have made it very clear that they are not abandoning their nuclear power capability, nor are they prepared to give up enrichment or anything else.
They're certainly not going to give up their missile arsenal and their theater ballistic missile capabilities.
I don't know how you reach an agreement.
That includes those things without deeply offending and alienating Mr. Netanyahu.
So I think you're right to raise that question.
The question is, is that then the trigger for Mr. Netanyahu to launch his Israeli-only attack on Iran?
And perhaps we shouldn't exclude this.
I would not exclude the possibility that the British and the French don't aid the Israelis.
So even if we're not initially involved, they well could support him because they have strange interests in the region.
The British especially, who meddled in the Middle East for centuries, they would like to gain control of Iran's oil and natural gas fields.
And I think the French would eagerly jump into that as well.
So I think there are other dangers, other things in play.
So simply because we say we don't think so, Doesn't mean it can't happen.
You know, the United States intelligence community not only informed the president, but somehow informed the public, if they leaked it or what, of the conclusion that Iran is not, is not developing a nuclear weapon.
Netanyahu to the contrary, notwithstanding.
However, just the other day, my friends and former colleagues at Fox We came up with a rather bizarre report.
Chris, please use your judgment because it gets a little repetitive once we grab what the hell they're saying.
Watch this, Colonel.
Fox News exclusive satellite images revealing the location of a previously unknown Iranian nuclear site.
Now, the facility spans nearly 2,500 acres, and this is a big discovery.
Jillian Turner has more from the State Department.
Good morning, Jillian.
Pretty explosive, Dana.
These satellite images that we have obtained exclusively show the alleged site location and even the layout of the secret, previously unknown nuclear weapons facilities inside Iran.
Is this realistic?
I don't know.
I mean, keep in mind, the Mossad and the CIA are uncomfortably close.
Some people say they're joined at the hip.
Clearly, the Mossad exercises a very pernicious and potentially dangerous influence inside the CIA.
Could this be true?
Well, of course it can be true.
You know, we have an expression in the army, intelligence is always wrong.
And that's not entirely out of character for what we're hearing now.
Could there be something else?
Absolutely.
I mean, during this latest Indo-Pakistani conflict...
We know that the Indians ostensibly or allegedly accidentally struck a nuclear storage site, about which they claim they didn't know.
That's one of the reasons the Pakistanis said, look, let's call a halt to this.
It's possible.
I can't confirm it one way or the other, but it's not impossible.
Well, you wonder if this is Colin Powell at the UN saying Saddam Hussein has WMDs.
Nobody else has come forward on this.
The government hasn't commented on it.
None of the other media picked it up.
Switching gears slightly, but to something that is profound in my view and I suspect in yours.
Does the United States need a budget of its Defense Department in excess of $1 trillion a year?
The easy answer is no.
Absolutely not.
But again, if you define your national interests as inextricably intertwined with other people's wars and conflicts around the world, that there could be no safety in the United States until Iran is destroyed, that unless Russia is beaten to a pulp, there's no safety for U.S. interests in Europe, unless Taiwan is preserved.
in perpetuity and protected against the possibility of reunification with China, then the world as we know it will fall apart.
That's the kind of talk and nonsense, as you know, Judge, that you'll hear from the Joint Chiefs, frequently from the intelligence services, all of which justifies this vastly bloated Defense Department bill.
The other piece of it is it completely ignores the dramatic technological changes and advances That make most of our armed force today not entirely obsolete but certainly less useful than it's ever been before.
So why would you then pump hundreds of billions of dollars into the old force?
It doesn't make any sense.
But there has never been any willingness since 1991 on the Hill under any circumstances to entertain a fundamental change in strategy instead of saying NATO no longer serves its original purpose.
We're backing down from command and control of NATO.
We'll be supportive, but this should be a European-driven alliance with European interests at the forefront.
We've said the opposite.
We have to find new things for our European allies to do in places like the Middle East or, for that matter, anywhere else in the world.
We judge that we want to wage war or pursue a conflict.
All of this is obfuscation.
It needs to go away, but no one will stand up and tell the truth.
Just bring in Senators Graham and Cotton, along with many others, and they'll tell you, that's insane.
We live on a hair trigger of a major global war.
We can't spare a dime.
In the post-World War II era, is the United States more interested in killing people or in advancing peace?
United States government.
I think it's very clear that the latter is not a top priority.
In fact, I think the opposite is the case.
People are looking for reasons to justify this enormous defense expenditure.
That means that you've got to find places to go, places to become involved, and places to fight.
Just look, recently in Africa, we've been largely expelled from the continent by many different governments.
And we thought Africa was this wonderful Well,
I hope that Donald Trump listens to the...
I'll call them America firsters, the non-neocons around him.
I think it's about two-thirds neocon, the Tom Cottons and Lindsey Grahams and Sebastian Gorkas and Marco Rubios.
And then there's Vice President Vance and Director Gabbard.
Unfortunately, to a person.
They are Zionists to the core.
So that's going to bring us back to where we started the conversation and we needn't repeat it.
So I don't know how this is going to end up.
I think you put your finger on it when you say Trump changes his mind all the time.
It sounds like he believes whoever has been whispering into his ear last.
Well, I think there's a great deal of evidence for that.
And I don't know how you fix that one.
Keep in mind that I'm absolutely confident.
That President Trump wants to do what he thinks is in the best interest of the American people.
Figuring out what the best interests are is, for him, very challenging.
He spent his life in New York real estate.
We all understand that.
We've heard about it.
I've read The Art of the Deal.
We all know what he thinks.
The problem is that none of that is relevant to these issues.
In fact, it's not even relevant to many of the things that challenge us inside the country, not the least of which is the potential for a financial meltdown.
And if you listen to the various financial analysts that the mainstream tries to ignore, although it's becoming more and more difficult, because you now have people like Mohamed El-Aryan, who's a very respected and thoughtful financial analyst who runs or has been in charge of the London School of Economics.
You've got many others here, whether it's James Ricards or Luke Roman or Alistair MacLeod or any number of people that are experts in gold and these other things are all warning us categorically.
That we're in trouble.
Even Mr. Bessemit has, I think, confided to the president that we just aren't bringing in any income to fund the government, which puts you in a very difficult state.
He's now pursuing gold arbitrage to try and extract dollars so that we can fund ourselves.
I don't know how much longer this goes on.
So the notion of a trillion-dollar defense budget is not only farcical from the standpoint of threats to the United States.
Because most of the threats that concern us are in our own hemisphere.
It's also dangerous, Judge.
We can't afford it.
It will sink us in our economy.
Colonel McGregor, thank you very much.
Thanks for your insight on all of us.
I, and I think the overwhelming majority of this audience, truly appreciate what you're saying and agree with what you've articulated.
Thanks for joining us.
We look forward to seeing you again next week.
Okay, Judge.
Nice to see you.
Likewise.
Thank you.
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