May 14, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
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| Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. | |
| Today is Wednesday, May 14th, 2025. | |
| Professor Gilbert Doctorow joins us now. | |
| Professor Doctorow, excuse me, always a pleasure. | |
| Before I ask you about Trump in the Middle East and Trump attempting to resolve the special military operation and the European elites wanting to continue it, I have to ask you about your general impressions. | |
| From your recent time in Russia. | |
| Now, I've been the beneficiary of many of your notes about it, but I thought maybe you want to offer general impressions. | |
| Life in Russia, culture in Russia, economy in Russia, happiness in Russia. | |
| I'll start with the last point, happiness. | |
| What I feel and see around me is generalized prosperity. | |
| And in case people are wondering whom I associate with, My friends are, many of them, are intellectuals who never were big earners, but they feel comfortable. | |
| When I see the stores which are fully stocked and very fresh, very fresh produce, which is coming from what we would consider exotic places, I mean, did you buy iceberg lettuce or celery from Iran? | |
| I don't think so. | |
| But the average Russian going to a supermarket does. | |
| And I can tell you it's of fine quality and prices are low. | |
| Some things that I've seen, inflation, I've made remarks in my travel notes that I've observed this time, perhaps a 10% across-the-board inflation in food products and some consumables since my last visit five months ago. | |
| But there are reasons for everything. | |
| And the main reason driving inflation is people have a lot more money in their pockets. | |
| And that is the scarcity of labor. | |
| Labor is paid more now, which is high time because Russian salaries were disgracefully low going back just a few years. | |
| So they are playing catch-up, but production does not rise as fast as demand does. | |
| And then there are other things that are going on. | |
| The Russians had, they go back six months, eight months, and they had fresh salmon in the fish section, the supermarkets. | |
| Initially, before the sanctions, it came from Scandinavia. | |
| Then it came from the Faroe Islands in some kind of little game that was going on, said to be harvested by Russians. | |
| Now, I don't have any imported salmon. | |
| The price has shut up to the same price that we have in Western Europe, about 30 euros a kilogram. | |
| But it's all grown in Murmansk. | |
| This is Russian homegrown salmon, which never existed before. | |
| So that is part of the general substitution. | |
| Initially, the production. | |
| Quantities are not up to demand, and so there's inflation. | |
| But putting that aside, contentment with cultural life, with the remarkably creative things that are staged in a city like St. Petersburg every day of the year, because they have many theaters and some have several different stages in which they perform concerts. | |
| The cultural life is very rich. | |
| People around me take advantage of it, though the prices for admission have gone up substantially. | |
| Pensioners no longer have the privileges they once did, and so people do complain about prices. | |
| But they don't complain about quality. | |
| Also, this question of the impact of the war on the average fellow. | |
| Look, back in October 2022, when a Mobilization of reservists, partial mobilization was put in force. | |
| Most Russians were very fearful that this meant that their sons, husbands, fathers would be going off to war, that mobilization would be generalized and would become more severe. | |
| That's all gone. | |
| As we know, mobilization was replaced by paid recruitment, contract soldiers. | |
| For the special military operation, who were offered increasingly high premiums to sign up and to serve for six months or more in the area of conflict, the area of fighting the battlefields. | |
| They were the last offers. | |
| It started out at something like 6,000 euros if you signed up. | |
| Going back several months, oh, five, six months, my last visit, the premium was up to 35,000 euros to sign up. | |
| Which, considering the level of salaries in the country, was an enormous amount of money. | |
| Not to mention all the privileges of the fast track in higher education, the military service, in government administrative posts, if you were a veteran. | |
| All of these things were very attractive. | |
| In one of our chats about three, four weeks ago, I mentioned that I was surprised that all of the advertisements Which were plastered on every bus stop, which were in all public administration buildings, and in supermarkets, calling for recruitment and noting the high premiums paid disappeared. | |
| Now somebody questioned this in the comments section on this talk show, and they said, "Oh, it can't be. | |
| Maybe it's just a temporary..." No, it's not temporary. | |
| In the three weeks that I was there, I didn't see one recruitment poster. | |
| I didn't see any advertisements on television. | |
| So the Russians are expecting the war to wind down. | |
| I have a few more questions about this, but on conscripts versus volunteers. | |
| Here's President Putin yesterday on this very topic, 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 Kupwa 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, 50,000 to 60,000 guys come forward on their own every month, including from your 50,000 to 60,000 volunteers a month. | |
| That would explain the absence of these posters. | |
| Yes. | |
| They don't need to call people because they're doing it. | |
| It's now word of mouth. | |
| It's people who see their friends go off and can actually come back from the battlefield with many compensation and honors and promotion and career paths. | |
| And so they also sign up. | |
| Has Russia... | |
| I don't know if you can answer this with a yes or no. | |
| Has Russia prospered economically under the Western sanctions? | |
| Thanks. | |
| Russia has done what Donald Trump would love to do. | |
| And I think this may explain his particular admiration for Putin and for Russia in general. | |
| They've re-industrialized. | |
| Western Europe is de-industrializing. | |
| They're losing their industry. | |
| Germany at the head of the line for leaving. | |
| Manufacturing without any real replacement. | |
| England did this maybe 10, 50, 20 years ago when they turned into a service economy. | |
| Europe doesn't have it. | |
| The United States has de-industrialized for the last 20, 30 years. | |
| This is what Donald Trump would like to reverse. | |
| It is possible to reverse it. | |
| And the most outstanding example of such reversal is what the Russians have been doing since 2008. | |
| They have reaped results. | |
| Very interesting. | |
| Trump is in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. | |
| What is he trying to accomplish there that would be of interest or concern, if at all, to the Russians? | |
| The Russian discussion of what Trump is doing is a certain admiration for his success, for example, in mediating between They are looking closely at what he is trying to achieve by visiting the Gulf states, | |
| trying to achieve by business diplomacy, by looking for deals and looking for economic advantage from foreign policy. | |
| This was a complaint that Russian patriots made going back the last 20 years. | |
| This was one major point made by the now The deceased leader of the Russian Liberal Democratic Party, the Sharanovsky, that the Soviet Union had a foreign policy that was all giveaway, and the Americans had a foreign policy that was all bringing in cash. | |
| So the Russians are following closely what he is doing in the Gulf states, precisely with that in mind, how he manages to bring in investment. | |
| In his discussions, one factor that's mentioned in passing is that nobody wants to buy treasury notes. | |
| So it is possible that part of what we're seeing is a diversion of Saudi and other Gulf state holdings, asset holdings in the states, not necessarily an increase in their holdings, but a diversion away from treasury notes to solid assets. | |
| Interesting. | |
| What is your take on Trump's announcement actually just a few minutes ago that the United States would be dropping its sanctions on Syria? | |
| I mean, they could have done this 20 years ago and saved a million deaths in the Civil War. | |
| I think it's a wonderful step forward. | |
| Mr. Trump, he monopolizes global news. | |
| There's no question about it. | |
| I'm sure that he personally He takes great pride in that and pleasure in that. | |
| But whatever he thinks about it, whatever his personality quirks are, are irrelevant. | |
| The fact of the matter is that he's making news, and this is important news, and very positive news, as you're suggesting. | |
| The follow-up and the real acid test of his intentions would be if the next step is to remove American soldiers who are supervising, facilitating the draining of Syria's Natural assets, | |
| that is to say in the eastern province where the Americans are situated, ostensibly to prevent terrorism returning, but in fact supervising the expropriation of the most valuable asset, the production asset of Syria, its oil. | |
| So if he removes those forces from the east of Syria... | |
| And allows the Syrian government to reap the benefits of its own mineral wealth, that will be an enormous benefit to Syria, quite apart from whatever foreign aid the country now gets. | |
| Interesting. | |
| I know you're in Brussels, so maybe you don't have a finger on this as to how it is greeted by elites. | |
| That Trump is kowtowing with Mohammed bin Salman, who famously was found by American intel to have butchered, while still alive, a reporter from the Washington Post. | |
| And Al Jelani, who until two months ago had a $10 million bounty on his head by the Rubio State Department. | |
| Now Trump is sitting down. | |
| There he is with the two of them. | |
| How is that received in Europe? | |
| All past sins are forgiven? | |
| I think Europeans, like Russians, like most anybody else, is stunned at Trump's ability to break with the recent past, and even with the distant past, his disruption. | |
| Most any institution and policy you can name. | |
| So I don't think anyone's particularly surprised that he would sit down with a man whom the United States denounced not so long ago as a brutal murderer. | |
| The gentleman, the reporter whom we've mentioned as having been murdered, was of course a politically very active person. | |
| This was not just a fellow taking down minutes at government meetings in the public space. | |
| No, no. | |
| He was active politically against the regime, and so they took their revenge on him. | |
| But as to the prince and the other rulers in the Gulf states, the Russians are in good terms with all of them. | |
| So nobody... | |
| In Russia would be surprised that an American looking after national interests and not after ideological interests would find common cause with those very same rulers. | |
| If you look at the headlines in the American papers this morning, of course there are pictures of the president with Mohammed bin Salman, and of course there are chronicles of the deals that he is cutting. | |
| Mohammed bin Salman supposedly offered to invest $600 billion in the United States. | |
| I don't think he has that much cash. | |
| Their gross domestic product in 2024 was only $100 billion, so I don't know how he's going to get $600 billion to invest, but whatever. | |
| What is the feeling in Europe? | |
| Because the second most important story here is this Qatari jet. | |
| What is the feeling in Europe about the Qataris giving a $400 million jet to the Defense Department? | |
| Do the Qataris give these things away for free, or do they expect a quid pro quo? | |
| I can't comment on what Europeans are saying, because frankly I haven't seen any comment in Euronews this morning or in paper print. | |
| The real objections are in the states where, of course, it's a highly political issue. | |
| And there are those who are saying, with good reason, both Republicans and Democrats, that it's inappropriate to accept such gifts. | |
| After all, Mr. Trump is going after American universities for receiving donations from abroad. | |
| So he's not the right person to turn around and say that he's going to take it. | |
| The problem doesn't seem to be a gift to the Defense Department. | |
| I mean, the United States and Qatar have a longstanding financial and security relationship. | |
| We have a huge base there that we built at our expense from which... | |
| Oh, I agree with you. | |
| I agree. | |
| All right. | |
| Does Trump seem to manifest an understanding sufficient to produce an amicable resolution of the special military operation in Ukraine? | |
| I'm very skeptical. | |
| His negotiating methods are peculiar. | |
| I don't see them as coming from the business world. | |
| I never saw anything. | |
| Any top businessman behave as he does. | |
| This is not a corporate business manner. | |
| It is very much an individual entrepreneur's manner. | |
| I've witnessed Elon Musk's equally mercurial, unpredictable behavior on the world stage. | |
| These are not typical of businessmen. | |
| So that is laid at his door, but I think it's a false. | |
| Identification. | |
| This is his own personality. | |
| And what he is doing in spreading confusion is difficult to predict that he'll have a positive outcome. | |
| The most peculiar thing is, in all of this, is that a country that is a co-belligerent, and the United States is a co-belligerent with Ukraine in the war against Russia, should pretend to be a mediator, should pretend To tell Mr. Putin what he can and cannot expect as the endgame of this war. | |
| It's most illogical, shall we say. | |
| Interesting. | |
| I don't know if you saw the scene on the train with Chancellor Mertz, Prime Minister Starmer, and President Macron. | |
| They were so giddy that social media was suggesting they were drunk or were taking drugs. | |
| There's obviously no evidence for that whatsoever. | |
| But I wonder what you think they are up to, this ostentatious train ride to Kiev on the same day or within 24 hours of the victory in Europe celebration in Russia. | |
| What kind of a message are they trying to send? | |
| Do they really want Kiev and the Russians to believe that if Donald Trump closes the spigot of arms to Kiev, that they, the three of them, can replace it? | |
| Well, this giddiness that you mentioned actually was identified as all of them sniffing cocaine, identified on Russian television on the Celebi up show last night. | |
| So it's hard to say whether this was fake news, whether the film itself was altered to produce this result, but it was presented on Russian television as if they were in fact sniffing cocaine. | |
| That is almost inconceivable that they would do something like that knowing that a camera was there, that they would do it to begin with. | |
| It's criminal everywhere. | |
| Yes, it is. | |
| They supposedly were not aware that they were being filmed. | |
| In any case, the Russian television viewer last night had every reason to believe that they were sniffing cocaine, all of them, and that would explain their behavior. | |
| Mr. Macron's... | |
| When I say that Donald Trump flip-flops, Macron flip-flops daily also. | |
| But whereas Mr. Trump makes news and is a very important person on the world stage, Mr. Macron is a bit player. | |
| And his flip-flops are all harder to understand because they don't bring any... | |
| Credibility to him as a leader of France. | |
| The other two, look, Tusk also speaks out of both sides of his mouth. | |
| All right, so I forgot about Tusk. | |
| This is the president of Poland who was not in the clip on the train, but was on the train, maybe later, and was in Kiev with them. | |
| Go ahead, please. | |
| Well, all four of them. | |
| have behaved very irresponsibly and by pretending to pressure Mr. Putin to accept the 30-day ceasefire that Zelenskyy called for, they set themselves up to look like utter fools because the Russians rejected it out of hand. | |
| At the same time, I want to point out, when I mentioned that Trump He has peculiar negotiating tactics. | |
| I find it incredible that he is maintaining up to today two completely separate positions on the end of this war. | |
| That is Witkoff, who is Russia sympathetic, and Kellogg, who is Zelensky sympathetic. | |
| If there is a meeting in Istanbul... | |
| To which Trump will be present. | |
| And if Trump comes, then Putin has to come. | |
| If all of them are in Istanbul, I don't see how this can be reconciled. | |
| That Trump is backing two conflicting positions, giving hope to each of the sides that their position will win. | |
| I don't see the sense of it. | |
| I don't know how Zelensky... | |
| Could possibly consent to Putin's demands, as rational as they are, as clear as they've been, and as consistent as they've been going back to before the special military operation, without exposing himself to assassination once he gets back to Kyiv. | |
| Do you? | |
| I don't. | |
| Well, if he sees which way it's going, that it's going against him, I wonder if he'll go back to Kyiv. | |
| Because nothing but hanging is what awaits him. | |
| I don't see how he can agree to this and survive. | |
| And so it would be senseless for him either to remain as president. | |
| The smartest thing he could do would be to resign on the spot and move to one of his foreign residences. | |
| If Donald Trump turns off the spigot, how much of it can be replaced by Mertz, Macron, and Starmer? | |
| Or is it such a small amount as to be useless? | |
| Well, there's a second step here. | |
| You mentioned the first step, that he cuts off American direct assistance to Ukraine. | |
| But what does he do when the European powers come to Washington and say, sell this to us so we can give it to Zelensky? | |
| If he is consistent, he will say no to them and the war is over. | |
| If he is inconsistent, then this play acting is hideous, actually. | |
| The Russians are ready for everything. | |
| But when you look at the commentary, you mentioned the giddiness of these people on the train. | |
| I look at the giddiness of the authorities, supposed authorities, pretending authorities in the States, like former Ambassador McFowl and others around him who have been the cheerleaders for Zelensky, as they're quoted in today's Financial Times. | |
| They are saying the most absurd things. | |
| That Trump has changed position. | |
| Oh yes, there's an article, the front page of today's Financial Times, that Trump has changed his position and is now leaning towards Zelensky, because according to J.D. Vance yesterday, the yesterday quotation, the Russian politicians are asking for too much. | |
| And so they're leaning towards Zelensky. | |
| And McFowl, I think, was quoted as saying, gee, Trump has actually finally realized that Russia is not a friend. | |
| You wonder what mental gymnastics these people do each day. | |
| Right. | |
| Professor Dr. Rowe, thank you very much. | |
| Thanks for all of this. | |
| Thanks for your candid impressions about Russia. | |
| I'm glad and happy that you are safely home. | |
| Thanks for your analysis about Europe and your observations about the president. | |
| Much appreciated. | |
| Personally enjoyed. | |
| Look forward to seeing you next week. | |
| Well, thank you for inviting me. | |
| I really enjoy these sessions. | |
| They're stimulating. | |
| All the best to you. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Coming up later today at 11 this morning, Scott Horton of Antiwar.com and his book, Provoked, at 11 o 'clock. | |
| At 1 o 'clock this afternoon, Professor Glenn Deason. | |
| At 3 this afternoon, our old pal, Phil Giraldi. |
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