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May 28, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
30:16
COL. Douglas Macgregor : Can Ukraine Survive?
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Wednesday, May 28, 2025.
Colonel Douglas McGregor is here with us to discuss Can Ukraine Survive?
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Colonel McGregor, welcome here.
Thank you very much for your time as always.
Colonel, I do want to spend some time discussing with you the likely fate of Ukraine as a country.
But before that, a few questions about Israel.
Is the Israeli threat to bomb Iranian nuclear sites while the U.S. And Iran are negotiating in Rome over this enrichment and other, uranium enrichment and other related issues a realistic
threat I'm not hearing you, Colonel.
I would say that the threat is indisputably real.
How realistic is the operation in terms of expectation?
That's another matter.
But I think it's very real.
I think that President Netanyahu says what he means and does what he says.
And what kind of an impact is this going to have on the negotiations?
What kind of a thumbing of the nose is this to President Trump and his negotiators?
I don't think President Trump really figures that dramatically in the whole equation.
I think everything turns on what Mr. Netanyahu decides to do and the enormous support for him that exists in the Senate and the house.
So I think at this stage, uh, I don't know.
He might say, well, I'm disappointed.
But I'm going to support my friend Bibi and Israel.
And I think that's what would happen.
Do you get the impression that Netanyahu is challenging or testing President Trump?
You know, I really don't.
I think he has control.
He knows he has control.
And I think President Trump knows that he has control.
It may periodically irritate or anger President Trump.
And I think he knows that Mr. Netanyahu will have the final say.
And I think thus far, Mr. Netanyahu has made it pretty clear what he wants.
And he wants the application of the Libya model.
And I see no evidence that he's walked away from that.
Here he is yesterday on May 27th.
This is the second time in one week he has equated in his own mind the phrase free Palestine with the phrase Heil Hitler.
He's speaking to some Holocaust remembrance group at the Israeli foreign ministry in Jerusalem yesterday.
Chris, cut number 11. The protesters themselves, many of them don't even know what they're chanting.
When they're chanting Free Palestine, they're saying, really, destroy Israel, destroy the Jews.
It's the modern equivalent of Heil Hitler.
That's what it says.
When they say, from the river to the sea, the sea is a few kilometers here, and the river is a few kilometers there.
It means the end of Israel.
That's what they're chanting.
So they bought the demonization.
They bought the vilification of the one democracy that is fighting a just war with just means.
And here's what happens when this spreads and it goes to the ICC.
The ICC, the court that was supposed to establish really after the Holocaust in order to prevent another Holocaust, and the ICC declares that I, former Defense Minister, effectively the State of Israel.
They'll issue more decrees.
We're the war criminals.
What does it say to democracies?
What does it say to free societies?
It imperils your right of self-defense.
It means that this tactic of implanting yourself in a civilian population while sending rockets and murderers to murder civilians as you hide behind your own civilians, you're given effective immunity.
And once this idea is implanted, it will spread and spread and spread.
Spread to your own societies.
So for the future of civilization, we can't have that.
It almost sounds like he's talking about what he's doing in Gaza.
Is Israel democracy?
Can you be a can an apartheid state be a democracy?
I think Israel is hardly democratic and I don't know that you would get You know, Stalin used to believe in something called prophylactic justice.
It was essentially kill the citizen before the citizen has an opportunity to commit a crime.
And I think that's where Mr. Netanyahu is.
And if anyone is demonizing anything, he is demonizing Israel and himself.
Because that's his view of the Palestinians, that the best solution is the final solution for the Palestinians.
And he doesn't like the fact that this is being rejected by most of the world, certainly not in the Anglosphere.
The Anglosphere is very clearly under his influence, if not outright control and authority in many respects.
But the rest of the world really isn't, and they see it for what it is.
By the way, the ICC was not established to prevent another Holocaust.
It was established to halt war crimes.
And again, this is an attempt to place himself and his supporters at the center of the universe and to immunize them against any possible accusation of impropriety or criminal action.
But that doesn't go down well with the rest of the world.
He may get away with that here in the Anglosphere, but nowhere.
I think everyone wants to separate Judaism from Zionism.
And I'm sure in some cases that's true, but in many cases that certainly isn't true.
And to this you must add millions of evangelical Christians who choose to interpret the Old Testament and passages in it to justify Whatever the Israelis do as essentially blessed by God.
How God in their minds would bless mass murder and expulsion from people's homes and land is beyond my imagination.
I don't see any Christian in it, but nevertheless, they're there.
So we have to accept the fact that, yes, some of what he says truly resonates here in the Anglosphere.
I didn't know this, but apparently Cindy McCain, the wife of the late Senator John McCain, this is no reflection on Senator McCain's political and military views, is very active in the efforts to bring humanitarian relief to the Gazans.
And she was asked about this on one of the talk shows on Sunday.
Here she is saying, There's no evidence of Hamas looting.
These people are so starving, the minute the trucks arrive, they rush to grab whatever they can.
Cut number six, Chris.
Your organization announced at least 15 of your trucks were looted when they entered southern Gaza en route to bakeries.
Israel has consistently said that the looting is being carried out by Hamas.
Have you seen evidence that it is Hamas stealing the food?
No, not at all.
not in this round.
Listen, these people are definitely And they see a World Food Program truck coming in and they run for it.
This doesn't have anything to do with Hamas or any kind of organized crime or anything.
It has simply to do with the fact these people are starving to death.
And so we will continue to go in.
We will continue to go in with food and the kinds of supplies we need to help the bakeries operate and make sure that we can continue to do that and hopefully be able to do more of it.
But again, we can't do this unless the world community puts pressure on this.
We can't be allowed to sit back and watch these people starve to death with no outside diplomatic influence to help us.
Obviously, her humanitarian instincts should be applauded.
But from what you've said and what we've seen, it doesn't appear that any amount of pressure, except a phone call from Donald Trump, will stop the Israelis from their determination to slaughter the Palestinians.
I think he's in a position from which he cannot easily escape, where the power to decide what we will do really rests with the enormous power and influence that Mr. Netanyahu, Exerts inside the United States through the media, through his agents, the donor class, and ultimately in Washington itself with the Senate and the House.
I mean, all one has to do is look over the last few days at photographs of, I think it was the Director of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, praying at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, more recently Governor Abbott from Texas.
And you have to ask yourself, well, these people are obviously not Jewish.
What are they doing there?
And they're not the first ones by any means.
Large numbers of members of this administration have trooped over there.
We've had other governors go there to sign bills into law that essentially transform Jews into a protected class inside the United States.
And again, as I've said before, if I were in that position, I would not want to be transformed into a protected class in America.
No matter what I was.
But nevertheless, these things are real.
You know, you talk about moral authority, and I am glad that she's speaking out, and that's a very good thing.
But there was an example of something similar when Napoleon Bonaparte was approached by one of his staff officers and said, you know, the Pope in Rome is not going to like this, and he won't approve it.
And the answer from Napoleon was, how many battalions has the Pope got?
Well, I think today it's no longer a question of how many battalions anybody has.
It's a question of how much money they have.
And enormous quantities of money are backing this policy and ensuring that it will be carried out in Israel.
And that is the policy of ruthless expulsion and elimination of Palestinians from Israel.
I know we usually don't discuss American domestic politics, but I have to ask you this.
It sounds as though your view is, if Donald Trump called up Netanyahu and said, the gravy train is over, the cargo planes are stopping today, the ones that are in midair are coming back until you stop the slaughter in Gaza.
His hands are tied.
He wouldn't get away with it.
There'd be some catastrophic political response.
Yeah, absolutely.
And look, we've already seen evidence for this in Ukraine.
What did President Trump say before he was elected?
What were the views that he expressed?
What did he say he was determined to do?
What has he done?
What is the outcome?
He's done a 180-degree turn.
And I see no evidence that this is necessarily something that he suddenly decided on.
I think he's frankly given up or capitulated to the powers that reside in what some people like to call the deep state.
I just call it the ruling political.
I'm not happy at all with him.
Something's happened to him.
Something's wrong.
When he publicly attacks President Putin, how does that resonate in the Kremlin?
Well, I can tell you that he's destroyed whatever credibility he had.
And remember that the principal guiding imperative from the very beginning, from the time the Russians intervened in eastern Ukraine, was to avoid a conflict with the United States and NATO.
I don't think most Americans understand that because nobody tells them that, but that's true.
And that's one of the reasons why they moved as quickly as they did to try and establish talks to end this tragic war.
That's why they achieved, I thought, a potential solution in April of 2022 that we then sabotaged.
And ever since then, the Russians have had to come to the realization that it didn't matter what they did.
We were going to work tirelessly to destroy them.
So they've recovered.
They are now the leading, certainly the leading ground to military power in the world today.
I don't think there is an army anywhere that could stand up to them.
And I think they've exerted tremendous control over airspace as a result of their advances in air defense technology and so forth.
My point is that President Trump doesn't have any credibility anymore.
He makes it sound as though...
And he's unhappy because President Putin decided to change something on the putting green.
And he doesn't like it.
And he just doesn't understand it because he thought they were friends.
Well, this is all nonsense.
This has always been the kind of problem that I think President Trump has.
He personalizes everything.
He thinks that the power of his personality is preeminent and all-powerful.
It isn't.
Things in international relations are about interests.
They are not about personal relationships.
And he has utterly refused to listen to whatever President Putin has had to say or his ministers about Russia's legitimate national security interests.
And so you get this ridiculous statement that frankly confirms the worst suspicions in the Kremlin, that we have no strategy except to harm Russia.
If you want to call that a strategy.
And it doesn't make any difference what they do.
And so I think they're going to proceed to do what they think they must to preserve the security of their country.
In the same interview at a Morristown, New Jersey airport at which the president was asked his opinion of President Putin, and he used disparaging words, he was also asked if he was aware President Putin, it was reported by a Russian commander that President Putin narrowly escaped an assassination attempt by a Ukrainian drone.
He said he hadn't heard it.
A, isn't it inconceivable that he wouldn't have heard it?
And B, if such a thing happened, isn't it likely that American intel was involved in knowing which helicopter President Putin was in and where it was at a given moment?
Well, keep in mind that the CIA, MI6, and the Mossad are all joined at the hip.
So any of those particular entities could have provided that intelligence to the Zelensky regime.
So it's not exclusively us.
I mean, those three are heavily involved.
That's the first thing.
Second part of this is more serious.
Could this have happened without him knowing?
And I'm afraid the answer is yes.
And I think it's yes for the following reasons.
If you listen to him, he talks in a very cavalier manner about these things.
And I think he's being honest with you.
I don't think he's lying.
He may not have heard it, or he may have heard something and chosen not to act on it because he didn't think it was credible or it didn't conform to his expectation.
You know, we need to stop and understand what is not happening in this administration.
You're familiar with the national...
That was established under President Eisenhower.
President Eisenhower had been through the Second World War and its aftermath.
He was a big believer in the criticality of having very competent analysts on your staff.
People that could analyze, understand, evaluate, and review material, and then present to the President, for his own consumption, their assessment.
And he was very careful about who ended up on the National Security Council staff and who came in to brief him.
And so, as a result, Eisenhower believed in the staffing process.
So when he got a military operational plan, when he received a plea for money for some aspect of national security, it would be staffed.
It would be thoroughly analyzed, brought back to him.
He would review it, and he would make a decision.
This is not happening inside the Trump administration.
There is no such process.
And as a result, it's hard to tell what the president actually knows and understands because there's not much evidence that he reads and studies what's handed to him.
He doesn't like to.
And he has this habit of listening to his inner circle.
He says, I trust these people.
Well, they may be trustworthy from the standpoint of loyalty to him.
But they may not be knowledgeable enough or insightful enough to providing what he needs to understand what's happening in the world, particularly what's happening today in Eastern Europe, or for that matter, in the Middle East.
Well, right before we came on air, Colonel Reuters reports that Russia has amassed 50,000 troops.
At a particular spot in northeast Ukraine.
Now, 50,000 troops to my lay mind seems like a lot.
Is that a lot?
And if this report is accurate, what does it tell you?
Well, it's interesting because I'd heard that there were more than 100,000 up in the northeast.
Perhaps this is a strike force drawn from that 100,000.
And there's an intention to strike across to Kiev.
I don't know.
I mean, we just don't know.
And again, when you look at military operations that are being conducted, going back to this idea that, first of all, whatever the Russians did, President Putin wanted to make sure that nothing alarmed the West.
Someone asked me recently, why didn't the Russians destroy all the bridges across the Upper River?
And I said, well, they probably wanted to retain some for future offensive operations, potentially.
Didn't want to foreclose that option.
But I think they also didn't want to alarm the West.
They didn't want the West to think that they were now going to isolate Eastern Ukraine completely, kill all of the Ukrainian forces that were there, and then press to the river, because that's not what they wanted to do.
They wanted to find a way out of this morass and end the conflict.
And I think that's the way we have to look at whatever they do.
If they're doing something, it's after quite a lot of deliberation, and it could be what I just described.
Or it could be something else.
If you look at all of the operations they have inevitably involved on the tactical and operational levels, encompassing and circling and then destroying systematically what's inside the circle and then moving further on, but always very incrementally.
This may indicate a desire to send something further west than they have in the past in the hopes of potentially convincing the regime to evacuate Kiev or Us, for instance, to intervene and talk.
Who knows?
But I really think at this stage they're making decisions on the basis of what they believe is in Russia's interests, and I don't think they're listening very much to us anymore because they've seen too much vacillation, too much change.
They don't see the evidence for any coherent strategic framework.
Everything is impulse-driven, and the impulses come straight from the president.
He speaks without a great deal of self-awareness.
He simply says what he wants to.
That may go down well domestically with his supporters, but it doesn't help us at all in the international system.
Colonel, can Ukraine survive as an independent country?
I think that's open to debate.
Let's be frank.
Ukraine, for most of its history, was never an independent country.
it was a region.
And if you look at Ukraine, certainly at the time that the You could look at Ukraine in three parts.
You could see the far eastern part of the country is Russian, fundamentally, culturally, linguistically.
And if you want to attach ethnicity to it, you can attach that to it.
Then in the center, you had some of it on the east side, most of it on the west side of the river.
You have this sort of hybrid area where even the language itself is not really Ukrainian.
It's not pure Russian.
It's something of a mix.
All those cities like Kharkov and Kiev at the beginning of this war were all Russian-speaking places.
And then you have the Far West, which is very different and is probably, in strictest terms, thoroughly Ukrainian.
It does have a regional identity.
But for most of its existence, it's lived under Polish-Lithuanian rule.
Some of it was under Austrian and Swedish rule.
Again, but it's different.
So you have this country that divides into three parts.
Today, the East is gone.
That is now part of Russia.
I suspect more of it will become part of Russia in the days and months ahead.
The question is, what happens in the rest of the country?
Because tens of millions of people have left.
And most of the Ukrainians on their way out were asked, you know, when will you come back?
And virtually all of them that were asked at the border in Poland, where my sources are, said we're not going back.
We have no intention of ever going back.
So under those circumstances, the question is, can Ukraine independently as a sovereign state emerge from this and go on into the future as a viable entity?
I suppose some rump form of it might.
What will it take for the violence to end?
I mean, if the Russians reach the Dnieper River, do they just stop?
Does the State Department say to Zelensky it's time to move to Paris or Miami or Tel Aviv?
I mean, what will it actually take to cause this?
The Russians are not going to agree to anything short of their demands, which have been regular, consistent, and systematic since day one.
The quickest way to end this conflict is for President Trump to end any further aid to the regime in Kiev.
Simply say, until you are willing to negotiate in good faith, no more aid, no more support.
Secondly, to get all U.S. Military, intelligence, and civilian personnel out of Ukraine and make it very clear we're getting out.
We're no longer supporting this.
Now, why would that end it?
The reason it would end is because the Europeans cannot compensate for what we do.
In other words, they can't move in and fill that vacuum.
The Europeans at that stage are probably going to have to say, well, I guess we're going to have to come to terms with the Russians, frankly.
And I think that would happen.
But there's no willingness to do that.
So if you're a Russian looking at this, you say, how do I end this without going to war against the United States?
And I think the answer is that you press to the river and then you look around and see if there's any willingness to reconsider anything in Washington.
And if there isn't, then you gradually cross incrementally at various places and continue your advance because you really have no choice in the matter.
Remember, the worst thing that can happen is...
trying to find ways to re-stimulate the failed war against Russia.
That's the problem.
You know, neutrality would have been a great solution.
But today, can the Russians really believe in any offer of neutrality that we make?
What can they believe from anything that is said to them in Europe?
Remember, we go back to the Minsk Accords.
You remember that?
They learned a hard lesson there.
They believed and they were taken advantage of.
So now they ask, well, how long can we do this?
Now, the good news for the Russians, militarily, is if you control everything up to the Nieper River, you are in a position to devastate anything on the other side.
That looks dangerous to you.
In other words, you don't necessarily have to cross over and occupy anything if you don't want to.
And I don't think they do.
For the reasons I just outlined, I explained the true nature of Ukraine, particularly its western edge.
They want nothing to do with that.
And in fact, there's a lot of evidence that in Moscow, the Russians would welcome the Poles to come back in because they know the Poles and the Ukrainians hate each other and you'd end up having a Polish-Ukrainian war in the West.
This place is a mess.
We don't understand it.
We know nothing about it.
And so we treat it as President Trump has, as, well, this is just a misunderstanding.
And I'm the big man with the big stick.
And if I just beat everyone over the head and say, make peace, they'll have to make peace.
Well, that's childish nonsense.
There are hundreds of years of complexity involved in this whole thing.
Conor McGregor, thank you.
Your last soliloquy was an extraordinary analysis of this problem from your perspective and it's deeply appreciated.
Thank you for your time, my dear friend.
Thanks for joining us today.
Thanks for letting me question you on all of this.
All the best to you.
Thank you, Judge.
Of course.
A great man with a brilliant understanding of the Military necessities of modern life as well as history.
Coming up at 3 o 'clock today on all of this, he's been shouting free Palestine all week.
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