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May 13, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
24:30
Scott Horton : Can Trump Bring Peace to Ukraine?
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Wednesday, May 14, 2025.
Scott Horton from antiwar.com, and he, the author of the number one best-selling book on the origins of the special military operation in Ukraine called Provoked.
Look at that smile, is with us now.
Scotty, welcome back.
It's been a long time since you've been here.
I have so many things.
To talk to you about, we'll get started with the events happening as we speak.
Does it trouble you that Trump is cozying up to butchers in the Middle East in the presence of Mohammed bin Salman and al-Jolani of Syria?
Well, it's really a sight to see him hanging around with Jolani and giving him so much respect, praising him as a very tough guy with a very tough past.
What he is referring to, whether he knows it or not, is that this guy was a high-level member of Al-Qaeda in Iraq during Iraq War II, where he fought Americans by his own admission judge in his interview with Frontline from a few years ago.
He fought Americans in Mosul and Ramadi.
And then he was sent by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was the successor to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq in Iraq War II.
He was sent then for Obama's dirty war in Syria and led what was called al-Nusra, which as even Victoria Nuland admitted when she was a spokeswoman for the State Department, was just an alias for al-Qaeda in Iraq.
And they were the suicide bomber brigades, the head chopper brigades.
Long story short, they had been relegated to the Idlib province in northwest Syria for really the end of Obama and all through Trump and Biden until the very end of Joe Biden's administration.
The Turks essentially activated them and they launched their own October 7th type, you know, breakout from their pen in Idlib.
And they ended up sacking the capital city.
They took over all of western Syria, the major populated parts of Syria.
And now it's true, Judge, as the war party would say that, or they would argue that this guy's been reformed now, right?
Like he's been to Turkish and American public relations school and they told him, please stop chopping off so many heads.
And, you know, they don't really need to do suicide attacks anymore for their strategy.
So now that they've won, but...
They're trying to, you know, they dress him up in a monkey suit and pretend like he's just a Western statesman of some kind.
His people are still out there butchering innocent people.
According to Max Blumenthal, they are slaughtering Alawites and Christians in Syria.
This is the guy that Trump embraced.
This is the guy that Trump praised.
And this is the guy, the head of the government, theoretically, from which Trump removed...
This is a guy who, until a month ago, Trump's own State Department had a $10 million bounty on his head.
Yep.
And look...
The thing is, I wrote my book called Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
And I don't argue in there that there's no enemies out there.
There are bin Ladenites out there.
And I would never recommend in a million years that Trump lead another war against this new bin Ladenite state in Syria.
Somebody else is going to have to work that out.
But for God's sake, we shouldn't be backing them.
So lift the sanctions, yes.
But officially normalized relations with them?
I don't know why.
Why can't we lean on the Turks to put somebody who's not a former, supposedly sworn blood oath member of Al-Qaeda in charge of Damascus?
It's crazy.
And clearly it's up to the Turks to decide.
You know, they have a thousand times, a hundred thousand times the state power that this new Syrian regime has.
They can go in there and change things.
Why does this have to be the status quo?
It's crazy.
I guess with respect to Mohammed bin Salman, Trump has to cozy up to him.
Trump's boys are building high-rises in Saudi Arabia.
What's he going to do?
Say, I'm not going to talk to you because you butchered, I forget the fellow's name, the reporter for the Washington Post while he was still alive?
Yeah.
Yeah, Khashoggi, Crown Prince Bonesaw, we used to call him there.
I think I might have got Kennedy in trouble on Fox Business Channel for calling him that.
But, yeah, he is a murderer, and he's, of course, a butcher of the Yemenis from 2015 through 22 as well.
Mohammed bin Salman is a terrible guy.
And I don't know the intricacies of Trump's son's business relations over there.
They ought to be able to keep that separate, even if they are doing that.
And they should not be doing that while he is in power.
But even if they are, they ought to be able to keep that separate.
And he ought to be able to say, just like Joe Biden ought to be able to say, I'm sorry, your business interests don't mean anything compared to the foreign policy interests of the United States of America.
And if we have to play hardball with these countries, we're going to.
But yeah, clearly it's a major disincentive for doing that.
What is your opinion of this $400 million plane as a gift that the Qataris want to give to the Defense Department and then to Trump's library?
I mean, do the Qataris give these things not expecting a quid pro quo?
I can't imagine.
It's really a shame.
I mean, the whole idea is just crazy.
Trump ought to obviously just turn them down and say thank you, but no thank you.
It's a massive conflict of interest, just that they're any foreign state.
If it was the English or the French or anybody else, the Germans, we shouldn't be doing this kind of deal with any foreign country.
And clearly when it's a monarchy, a royal monarchy in the Middle East, it's crazy.
That we would have that kind of relationship with there.
And then, yes, of course, just like with every foreign expenditure in this country, there's a massive conflict of interest with all of these states.
And you've got to take responsibility.
It's quote-unquote our, and I mean this loosely defined, but it's our society that has allowed our government to get away.
Yes, you're right in this situation where it matters very much to every foreign government what America is going to do So of course they have to corrupt our system as best as they can to protect themselves So there's the emoluments clause in the Constitution, which prohibits a foreign country from giving a gift to the president He and his attorney general and his White House counsel are getting around that by saying well The gift is going to the Board of Trustees of his presidential election
Of course, he will control the Board of Trustees of his not yet formed library.
It seems to me the whole purpose of the emoluments clause is to prevent this very thing from happening.
But I couldn't imagine that when Madison wrote the Constitution with the emoluments clause in it, the clause prohibits the gifts from a foreign head of state.
He had the faintest, he had the wildest imaginings that it would be 400 I think on the surface
he does.
He knows that America...
You know, essentially pushed the West's luck overall there.
I don't know, you know, I'm sure he hasn't read the book.
I don't know if he's ever read any books about any of this stuff.
But, you know, Judge, it's a sad case, right, of him just being inaugurated at the wrong time for all of this.
If it hadn't been for the Russiagate hoax and all that, he probably could have solved this problem back in his first term.
He just was inaugurated here in early 25 at a time where no one else's interests line up for ending the war the way he wants to end it.
So the Russians have the advantage now.
They seem to want to continue.
The Ukrainians, I'm not sure exactly what they're thinking, but they seem to think that they can wrest more aid out of Europe and even the United States if a deal is...
Too difficult to reach.
And there's a lot of reasons on the ground considering, just for example, the gap between what the Russians claim and what they actually hold.
And of course, where the Ukrainians don't want to...
And the Germans and the French and the British still promise that they're going to send more aid.
And Trump still might.
He's still sending some while all this is going on.
And if talks break down, he might still at least trickle in some.
Hopefully it would be somewhat reduced.
But the Ukrainians seem to still want a deal.
And Putin, of course, has pressure from his right to not just take the 4-0 blast that he's got, but to keep going.
And take everything east of the river and then maybe march on the coast all the way through Odessa to Transnistria and take the whole southern coast.
I don't know if that's what Putin wants, but there are clearly people in Russian politics who are demanding that of him.
We've gone this far.
What are we going to do?
Stop now?
This kind of thing.
So Trump, I think, is sincere judge in wanting to end the war.
And even if he read the book on it, I don't know if that really would put him in a much better position to try to end it.
You know, he does have some competent advisors.
I know Tulsi Gabbard certainly understands the situation in great detail.
But I'm just not sure that even like deep wise insight would really give him the ability to end the situation at his end.
Yeah, but one day he seems to say Crimea is part of Russia, and the next day he says, Putin wants all of Ukraine.
There isn't a scintilla of evidence that Putin wants all of Ukraine.
Putin couldn't afford to run all of Ukraine, particularly if the Ukrainians were waging a guerilla war against his regime there.
I agree with that.
He certainly has not demonstrated that intention at all.
Although I do fear, Judge, that just for the reason you exactly cited there, that by the logic of government programs, he has sort of gotten himself into this trap where he's already taken anyone who's pro-Russia out of the country and made them...
So now he has a much more anti-Russian Ukraine than he had before.
Remember, the Eastern parties used to win elections.
That's why America had to overthrow the government there twice because the wrong guy kept winning, right?
So now anyone who leans pro-Russia is never going to win again, right?
That's all over because all those Donbass voters are gone.
Tell me what you think of this interview with Meet the Press.
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.
Sounds like he was talking to Sebastian Gorka right before he went on air.
There is an essential of evidence that Russia wants all of Ukraine.
Right.
It's funny the way he kept saying it that way over and over again and whatever, too.
It's kind of absurd.
I agree with you.
Although what I was just going to say was, I think he may have actually, Putin may have walked himself into that trap, essentially, where let's say he takes all the Donbass in the South.
Well, now I've got still a lot of Russian speakers, if not ethnic Russians, east of the river who they can say are at threat now that they're a much more severe minority compared to the ethnic Ukrainians west of the river.
Well, now maybe they'll be persecuted.
And so now they need protecting, right?
That would be the argument.
But then let's say that they take everything east of the river.
Now they left a rump Ukraine.
That's run by hardcore right-wing nationalists with no balance against them.
Many of them, quite frankly, are real Nazis, you know, in power, in the military, and in the national police services and so forth.
They're going to certainly dominate politics after the war, right?
They're going to be the war heroes.
Andrew Beletsky, who's leading the 3rd Separate Infantry Division right now, he could be the next president, maybe.
So then you're Russia, then you're Putin.
What do you do about that?
Now you've got to keep going.
And then as you said, they could wage an insurgency even if the Russians stop east of the river.
The Nazi types and other militias, they could wage an insurgency from the forests and the swamps west of the river.
And so if you're Putin now, you've essentially dug yourself into this pit.
Now what's the solution to that?
Talk to me about Zelensky's dilemma.
He can't concede.
Crimea and the 4-0 blasts and no NATO and expect to go back to his living in Kiev and wake up the next morning alive, can he?
No, speaking of the neo-Nazis and Judge, I mean, they have, I have them cited in the book, Beletsky and Dmitry Yarosh and others have threatened to murder him and his predecessor Poroshenko numerous times.
You know, the way they look at it.
People might remember from the Iraq war, the sunk cause fallacy that said, if we leave now, then our men will have died in vain, right?
That's the way they look at it.
All the Ukrainians who died and have been maimed in this horrible thing, they haven't died in vain yet.
They haven't been casualties in vain yet.
But if Ukraine makes peace with Russia now and they lose things rather than saving everything, then they've died in vain.
Then, now the leaders have sacrificed all of those lives for nothing.
Now that's treason, and now they get hanged from the lamppost.
Here's one of Trump's over-the-top boasts in one of the debates.
It's either 2020 or 20—it must be 2024, but here it is.
Chris?
It should have never happened.
I will have that war settled between Putin and Zelensky.
As president-elect, before I take office on January 20th, I'll have that war settled.
People being killed so needlessly, so stupidly, and I will get it settled, and I'll get it settled fast before I take office.
Apologies, because Joe Biden looked like he was in another world.
That's amazing, right?
But that boast was apparently bought by the American people.
Now, it is Trump's war, I would argue, and you're the expert on the war.
Your knowledge and extraordinary research in this fabulous book provoked.
He could stop the war by turning off the spigot just by saying to Pete Hegseth, nothing else is going over there after yesterday.
Yep.
That's true.
You know, the problem is he really doesn't have that many cards to play, right?
When he took office, America's on Ukraine's side and Ukraine's losing.
Joe Biden already poured in every conventional missile system that he can get away with giving them.
So those lines have all been crossed.
There's really nowhere else to go there.
No more room to move there.
And they've already levied every sanction in the world in an attempt to boycott Russia, which just pushed them east.
They're still fine trading with the rest of Asia.
Trump, really, the only cards he has to play, he has no sticks, just carrots, and the only carrot he has is, hey, you could normalize relations with America.
We'll lift the sanctions and be friends again, which is great, and to me is the most important thing in the entire world, and nothing else should matter at all.
I don't care about any other thing.
I happen to agree with you, and I wish that there would be a grand reset, because that's the only card that Trump has, because, as you know...
Russia has prospered under American sanctions.
Would they like to be a part of SWIFT?
Yes.
Would they like Amex cards to work in Moscow?
Of course.
But they've learned to live without it.
Yep.
And in fact, you know, Judge, there's this guy named The War Nerd.
His real name is John Dolan, and he's a really great military officer.
You were The War Nerd.
Oh, I'm sorry, you know him?
You were The War Nerd.
Yeah, I might be.
That's his official name, though.
And he wrote back in 2014 that, oh, guess what, everybody?
Russia's just opened a new natural gas pipeline to China.
Game over.
That's it.
Europe can never threaten to boycott Russia again because the pipeline is open for business.
And that's it.
They can just sell all their natural resources to the east.
They don't need you at all anymore.
And so whatever leverage Europe just had to boss the Russians around is canceled.
And that was back, you know, in 14. Was when he wrote that.
And then so by 22, the proof was in the pudding that the West said, oh, yeah, well, if you do this, we're going to kick you out of the West.
And Putin said, you don't scare me.
I'm already ready to trade with India and China and everybody else but you.
He's clearly made good on that.
You have a great grasp on these things, Scott.
Tell me what you think of this.
This is President Putin yesterday talking about Ukrainian conscripts versus Russian.
Volunteers.
Chris, cut number six.
I want to draw your attention to the following.
While the Kiev authorities are carrying out forced mobilization, catching people on the streets like stray dogs, our guys are joining up voluntarily.
They go of their own accord.
So, as you know, our recruitment, well, they're managing to round up about 30,000 people now, right?
But with us, 50...
To 60,000 guys come forward on their own every month, including from your workplaces.
50,000 to 60,000 volunteers a month.
Hegseth would drool over that.
Well, it's because they know they're winning, right?
So it makes sense to go ahead and get in on that and win your badge and all that stuff and hopefully not get blown up.
Whereas on the Ukrainian side, even though they are on the defensive...
To a great degree, although obviously a lot of this land is in dispute and is very complicated and all that.
But in the scheme of things, they're fighting a defensive war.
But they don't want to go out there because they know they're just going to die for nothing.
They're going to get blown up and lose anyway.
They're ill-trained, ill-equipped, ill-prepared.
In many cases, they're untrained, and they're just, you're right, being frog-marched to their death.
How much longer do you think the war could go on, even if Trump doesn't dial back the spigot?
I mean, at some point, they won't have the human beings to use the equipment.
That the American Defense Department is sending there, right?
Yes, although, you know, that's a great question.
I'm glad you brought that up because it's different than the situation in Saigon or in Kabul, right?
I mean, when America packed up and left Afghanistan, the regime just completely crumbled and ceased to exist.
I don't think that's likely to happen here.
I think if Trump called off all support, the Ukrainian army is still an army.
It's not like the Afghan National Army, which was always nothing but a...
Potemkin village full of ghost soldiers on the payroll, but who don't really exist and this kind of thing.
It was a joke in the way that the Ukrainian army's not.
So even if Trump packed up and left entirely, they still have at least months of fight left in them, I guess.
Obviously, they'd be in a much tougher position.
I'm not exactly sure how much tougher.
Can the Europeans give them anything substantial if Trump really turns this bigot off?
I can't imagine so.
Judge?
No.
They said all along, we need America to backstop all this and, you know, to, you know, essentially fund and do the logistics and everything for the effort.
They just can't do it.
They'd have to cancel their welfare states.
They're going to make that big of an investment in Ukraine.
And they have shown no willingness to do that.
Or capability.
Even if they had, you know, the tax monitor, they wanted to print the money now and pay later.
I still don't know if they could get their resources together enough.
Certainly to make a difference.
And what would it take?
It would take the full land armies of Western Europe to go there and intervene.
And nobody's willing to mess with that because that means atom bombs start flying around.
Everybody knows that.
No one's willing to cross.
And this has always been the case, as we've talked about on your show all this time, that no one is willing to cross the lines necessary to actually help Ukraine win because that would mean direct war between NATO and the Russian Federation.
So instead, what do we do?
We pay them and barely sort of arm them enough to keep the war going.
I wonder what Victoria Nuland and those people involved in the first impeachment of Trump and Hillary Clinton and everybody that was involved in the 2014 coup, I wonder what they think now of the abject failure of their plan and plot that resulted in probably close to a million Ukrainian deaths.
Yeah.
Oh, no, it's all the other guys' fault.
That's how they know they did the right thing.
Look how bad the bad guys are.
You know, and this is, I really lament this, too.
You know, it's easy to imagine Biden, or maybe not Biden, he's too out of it, but you could imagine a scene, maybe a Saturday Night Live skit or something, where you have Sullivan and Blinken and Newland, and they're sitting around at night, and they're having a little bit of whiskey, and one of them says, like, geez, you know, we did kind of push too far.
We thought we were going to glue it and stick it and midwife this thing and make it sail before Putin could torpedo it.
And look what happened.
And, you know, oops.
And then maybe they could recognize, Judge, that, hey, you know what?
Since this is a little bit our fault, maybe we could find room to compromise.
We wouldn't have to admit it, but we could climb down a little from our high horse, maybe.
No way.
Not these people.
Scotty, I almost forgot how much fun it is to spend some time discussing these things with you because you're so bright.
You have the knowledge of the facts like very few people do, but that same wonderful sense of humor.
God bless you, my dear friend.
Thank you for coming on the show.
Thank you for your time.
Chris, put up the full screen once more.
Now, I didn't read the whole thing.
I perused it.
I read a couple of chapters, and there's a nice blurb from me somewhere in the back.
But this is the standard against which all other histories will be measured for how this mess in Ukraine came about, that the Russians were provoked by the Americans.
Scotty, congratulations on the book.
I'm glad it was a bestseller.
All the best to you.
We hope you'll come back again soon.
Thank you very much, Your Honor.
Appreciate it.
Of course.
All my best.
Coming up tomorrow, Thursday, a very happy and full day for you.
At 8 o 'clock in the morning, Tony Schaefer.
At 11 in the morning, if we can wake him up and find him.
I'm only kidding.
Max Blumenthal.
Max at 11 in the morning.
Aaron Maté at 2 in the afternoon.
At 3 in the afternoon, the great Professor John Mearsheimer.
And at 4 in the afternoon, the always worth waiting for, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson.
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