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June 24, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
25:58
Prof. Glenn Diesen : European Complicity in Israeli Killings.
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Wednesday, June 25th, 2025.
Professor Glenn Deason joins us now.
Professor Deason, thank you very much.
Not too far from where you are now, the heads of state of the NATO countries, or nearly all of them, are meeting.
What are they trying to accomplish?
Well, if I think that's the problem, there's not a clear agreement.
The Europeans would like to focus more on Ukraine, but reportedly Trump has attempted to reduce the focus on Ukraine and preferably avoid any strong language against Russia as well, given that Trump's objective is to improve relations now with Russia and find some way of addressing common interests.
For the Europeans, this is very problematic because the anti-Russian posture has become the main reason for NATO to exist.
And it's also what will keep the United States in Europe.
So there's a bit of a strategic vacuum around this, exactly what the purpose is.
And I think it reflects a deeper existential crisis within NATO.
That is, what is the purpose of this military block from the Cold War?
Are the NATO nations going to increase their budgets defense budgets, pursuant to pressure from President Trump?
Well, most of them have said that they would.
But of course, there's also some indication that there's some, well, I guess, creative accounting or fixing the numbers a bit.
For example, from Britain, there's some reports suggesting that they're putting different infrastructure projects into this budget, which is assigned to the military, to make it seem as if they're spending more than they actually are.
But the problem is you're not actually providing any more capabilities.
It's just, again, fixing the numbers a bit to make Trump happy.
They're building a bridge or a highway in London, but they're doing it in the defense budget.
So it looks like they're spending money on military equipment.
Yeah, so it's almost like a win-win situation.
Then the Europeans can be seen to begin to carry their own weight.
And Trump can then do his victory laps, say, look, I got the Europeans to stop their free riding.
Now they're paying more.
Of course, there's a lot of self-delusion at the end of it.
It's not that much happening, being done.
But at least this is one area where they seem to come in agreement.
But we also saw the messages coming from the NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte arguing that he was able to pressure all the Europeans to accept this 5% and using very flattering language.
So thank you for letting, for being able to push us to spend this much money.
So yeah, effectively celebrating vassalage.
But again, this goes back to the strategic vacuum in Europe.
Europe has been under American leadership since World War II.
After the Cold War, more and more strategic thinking has been outsourced to Washington.
So now that the United States is looking at this multipolar world and they're looking at limited relative resources, different priorities, and effectively looking to reduce its presence in Europe, there's an interest in Europe to show its value to the United States, to more or less increase the stock value of Europe by doing as they're told.
So you see the Europeans in a somewhat, let's use the word pathetic display of obedience, do whatever they're told to do.
But it limits what they can do, of course, because the economies are not in good shape.
They're not in a position to push 5% of the budgets into military spending.
So they do have to be a bit creative with the numbers.
Has German Chancellor Mertz indicated a desire to spend the equivalent of a trillion dollars in the next year on the German military budget?
And if the answer to that is yes, where are they going to get that money from?
Well, the Germans are also mixing a bit military budget and infrastructure, it seems.
But this is the German eagerness to spend money is, of course, problematic, given that Germany's heavy industry is suffering greatly.
That is, the heavy industry of Germany is very energy intensive, which means they're very much reliant on cheap, reliable energy.
This meant energy from Russia.
After Nordstrom is gone, we see now that these industries are no longer competitive.
So there's a huge deindustrialization in Germany.
There's a goal now, instead of building cars, they will build tanks.
That is this military Keynesianism.
So let's just all start building weapons.
We'll all have jobs.
And this is going to be the path to prosperity.
This is, you know, Germany has a bad history with this.
And also, it can work to an extent.
But what happens when all the military warehouses are filled?
Then you have to start using these weapons.
So it's a dangerous path to go down.
And it's not just a problem for Russia, which now considers Germany to be among the most aggressive anti-Russian country in Europe, but it's also something that could potentially fuel some concern among other European countries who also have some bad experience with German militarism.
Why is President Zelensky at this NATO meeting?
It's a great question.
Again, Ukraine is not part of NATO, but since 2014, there's been an effort to make Ukraine a de facto member of NATO.
That is in 2008 when Ukraine was offered future NATO membership.
The Europeans at that time recognized that it will be seen as, as Angela Merkel said, a declaration of war against Moscow.
So they went against giving Ukraine a clear membership action plan.
But instead, we saw the efforts of doing these incremental steps to make it, again, gradually a de facto member of NATO.
And of course, for the past 10 years, we've been fighting a proxy war against Russia through Ukraine.
So it's yeah, it's all it's become the main reasons for NATO's existence now, it seems, to support Ukraine in this war against Russia.
That's why it's also problematic if Trump decides to end the war.
He's not just ending a proxy war, he's also then possibly ending the reason for NATO to exist.
Here's what Victor Orban had to say about all that when he was questioned.
Not sure where it is, if it's in a hallway or if it's in an auditorium earlier today.
You know, NATO has no business in Ukraine.
Ukraine is not a member of NATO, neither Russia.
My job is to keep it as it is.
Thank you very much.
My job is to keep it as it is.
Thank you very much.
I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, Professor Deeson, that membership in NATO requires a unanimous approval of the current members, does it not?
Yes, that's correct.
And they also, by the way, need control over their own territory.
And this is effectively something that gives Russian incentive to have some frozen conflicts in potential member states as a way of preventing NATO expansionism.
But the sentiments of Orban is also shared by others, such as Slovakia, which is a question about the direction of NATO, because when they joined NATO after the Cold War, they wanted to join what they saw NATO having been through the Cold War.
That is, it was a status quo power focused on collective defense, again, a defensive alliance.
But after the Cold War, NATO began to take on a more revisionist posture.
It began to expand.
It also began to go on out-of-area missions, which is a nice way of saying, yeah, attacking countries which hasn't attacked NATO.
So this is something that Henry Kissinger noted actually in 1999, because less than two weeks after the first round of expansion of NATO, NATO attacked Yugoslavia.
And then he made correctly the observation that we can't tell the Russians anymore that it's a defensive alliance.
So I think this is the main problem.
Orban and others would like to be in a stable defensive alliance, something that promotes stability in Europe.
But NATO now has become an organization which largely exists to deal with the security concerns or threats that are caused by its own existence.
So this war in Ukraine was completely unnecessary.
It was back in 2014.
I always make the point.
It was merely 20% of Ukrainians who wanted to join NATO.
And everyone knew that it would likely create a war if we would try to pull Ukraine into NATO.
We did it nonetheless.
So it's very hard to disagree with Orban.
NATO has nothing to do in Ukraine.
Ukraine is not a part of NATO.
So why are we continuing to destabilize Europe?
Well, the world and the media seem to be focused on Israel and Iran and the United States' involvement with both.
What's happening in Ukraine?
I mean, the military is surely not getting stronger.
They're not pushing the Russians back.
No, well, the war in the Middle East has had, of course, an impact on the war in Ukraine.
That is, Ukraine was already suffering greatly from manpower shortages and military equipment.
And what we saw now, given that the Israelis were running out of ammunition, especially interceptive missiles for the air defenses, a lot of the weapons were redirected to Israel.
Some was even pulled out of Ukraine.
So all the problems Ukraine had has been made so much worse.
This is something now that Zelensky is beginning to recognize openly as well, that there's a huge struggle or problem now with the air defenses of Ukraine, which means that the drones and missiles of Russia, more or less unimpeded now, and most of them seem to be reaching their targets, which is causing even more destruction.
So if you look across the front line, Russia is moving forward all across the front line and its territorial gains is only intensifying.
This is something you can expect towards the end of a war of attrition.
That is, when one side has been completely exhausted, it can't hold its defenses anymore.
This is when it's an opportune moment to make territorial advances because you won't pay the same price in blood and military equipment.
So things are falling apart very, very quickly in Ukraine.
Especially if you look at big cities like Pukrovsk or Kostanivka, they are now almost semi-encircled.
And things are just going from bad to worse.
And the Ukrainians don't seem able to stabilize the front line.
So if you think you're going to be in a worse position tomorrow than you are today, you would want to negotiate.
But still, the Europeans and Zelensky do not seem ready to start negotiations.
How much longer can Ukraine last?
I mean, Putin seems to be pushing closer and closer to Kyiv.
Yeah, no, and if Sumy City would fall as well, and they're moving that direction, they would have an open path towards Kiev.
And this is part of the problem.
And there was an interesting remark by Putin at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, where he made the point that, well, you know, Russians and Ukrainians are all the same people, so more or less all of Ukraine is ours.
He hadn't used this kind of language before.
So you can see that they're starting to prepare the narrative, if you will, for larger demands in a political settlement.
And it's largely because they feel that they're not getting anywhere in negotiations with the Ukrainians.
And for this reason, they're looking for just a victory on the battlefield, essentially.
So if they can't get their four regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Saporoshi and Kherson, then they will expand and take a few more regions.
And so you see already that the language is becoming a bit more aggressive from the Russian side.
You all see that as all ICE war on Israel and Iran, the Russians began to pound Ukraine a bit harder as well.
And so no, I think we're entering an increasingly uglier stage of the Ukraine war.
As we often see in wars of attrition and last stages, the casualty rates by the losing side intensifies dramatically.
Here's what Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said about this yesterday, which is precisely the argument you've just articulated, Professor.
Chris, cut number one.
The fiasco of Western strategy and tactics is obvious, but Europe is still trying to inflict maximum damage on Russia, or as they say, to contain Russia.
But now, however, they say not to contain Russia, but to defeat it, otherwise it will destroy Europe in three to four years.
The position of the UN Secretary General Mr. Guterres, a citizen of Portugal, a member state of the European Union and NATO, is very regrettable.
Not only does he regularly and blatantly abuse his powers, he refuses, despite our numerous demands, to call things by their proper names and even to assist in obtaining basic information.
Germany's position is also very worrying.
Since sometime now, together with Italy and Japan, it has voted at the United Nations General Assembly against our annual resolution on the inadmissibility of the glorification of Nazism and in addition, has taken on the role of leader in supporting the Nazi regime in Kiev, pumping it with finance and weapons.
Now they have come up with such a scheme, according to which supposedly they will produce weapons on the territory of Ukraine.
Many objective observers have already cited facts according to which nothing of the sort will happen.
This is just a cover for supplying weapons from Germany, from other European countries to the Ukrainian armed forces, referring to the fact that this is not support, it is not pumping weapons, but it is assistance in setting up their own production.
There you have it.
They're not only not backing down, they see right through what the West is attempting to accomplish.
I mean, the question I would ask, I don't think you have an answer for it, is how much longer will American aid continue?
You've already told us that once American aid stops or dwindles down to nothing, the Europeans are not in a position to compensate for it.
Do you still feel that way?
No, definitely.
Well, if we couldn't defeat the Russians with the Americans, there's no chance of defeating Russia without the Americans.
I agree with Lavrov because this is largely a war.
The war in Ukraine is about, to a large extent, redefining the boundaries of what's acceptable in a proxy war.
Now, obviously, if the Germans begin to launch their terrorist missiles into Moscow, the Russians will see this as a direct attack yet again by Germany against Russia, and they will then retaliate against the Germans.
It's an ideal target, by the way, to retaliate against.
But if the Germans say, well, they made it themselves in Ukraine, then it's okay.
It's a way of some plausible deniability to reduce the chances of direct Russian retaliation.
But no one's really buying this because if there's any large-scale production in Ukraine, the Russians can see it and they can destroy it, as we've seen.
It's becoming increasingly easy as well without Ukrainian air defenses.
How much longer do you think Ukraine can last?
It's hard to say.
I thought they have outperformed what I had expected.
They do fight on even after more or less everyone recognizes that the war has been lost.
So it all depends to what extent they're able to mobilize new men, the weaponry they can get from the West.
So it's hard to say, but you do see gradually now that the intensity of Russia's march forward increases.
And as it's marching faster forward, there's this cascading effect.
Now you see the Russians being able to surround larger groups of Ukrainian soldiers just south of Konstanivka.
Now you have what seems to be a few thousand Ukrainian soldiers captured in a large cauldron.
And you see more and more of this happening as the faster the Russians can move forward, the more troops they can encircle, the more communication they can disrupt.
And they're being able to take out more of the drones of the Ukrainians.
And this was really the one strength the Ukrainians had, which was drone warfare.
Now this is starting to fall a bit apart as well.
So once one thing falls apart, the rest do as well.
So there's not that much Ukraine can do now.
Again, they're mobilizing, but the more aggressive they are with the forced mobilization, the more societal disruptions and anger among the population increases.
So you do see that there's a limit to everything it can do.
We should really take this into account in Europe because you get the sense that for us, there's no cost of fighting Russia because we're fighting with Ukrainians and it's not our soldiers dying.
If there were our soldiers, we would be at the negotiation table.
But the Ukrainians are also now increasingly expressing dissatisfaction, even higher pro-Western officials recognizing that the Europeans are just willing to dispense of all Ukrainians if they can buy some time for Europe and also to use Ukrainians to bleed Russia.
So I think we're reaching a breaking point now.
But again, they can hold on for several more months, possibly.
Switching gears, what is the EU and or NATO attitude about Netanyahu's slaughter and genocide in Gaza?
Well, the EU doesn't seem to have any problem in supporting the genocide in Gaza.
They keep framing it always as Israel's right to defend itself.
And yeah, so the EU stands with Israel.
Of course, the EU consists of many states.
They have very different positions.
Not everyone is as supportive of this.
So from Belgium to Spain, you see more dissent.
But again, the EU is not that much of a democratic club.
You have the EU institutions and they are very much behind Netanyahu on all of this.
And you saw the same now with the...
Why?
Why?
Does the Israeli donor class have an iron grip on European governments the way it does on the American government?
Well, if the Americans weren't supporting Israel to this extent, it's possible, likely the Europeans wouldn't either.
Again, there's a strategic vacuum in Europe.
We're kind of just more or less doing the same we've done before, and we always gave unconditional support for Israel.
So a lot of it's just alliance politics.
If it's important for the US, it has to be important for Europe.
But also Israel is seen often as a key partner for economics, arms trade, intelligence sharing.
And there's also very little debate around it in terms of what is, you know, we tend to narrow the scope of acceptable debate by framing it either as supporting Israel's right to defend itself, Israel's right to exist, or the alternative position is that you're supporting terrorists, jihadists, you know, so you're being anti-Semitic.
So they've been very good at narrowing down the debate.
Either you're supporting the good side or the bad side.
The problem is, of course, is that a lot of Israel's policies now are, to a large extent, suicidal.
They are not even in Israel's interest.
But this is how we talk about politics in Europe.
Everything is, you know, either pro-Israel or pro-Hamas.
It's either pro-Russia or it's pro-Ukraine.
But again, this is a very false way of presenting conflicts.
Usually the dividing lines are between what is a workable peace versus unnecessary wars.
But this is not how our politicians or our media frame things.
It's always this tribal.
You have to pick one side or the other.
And then the media and political class does everything they can to label one side as good and the other as evil.
And by doing so, you essentially shut down any illegitimate debates.
How is the I don't know if you could put your finger on this.
How is the Trump bombing of Iran over the weekend being played in Europe?
Was this the creative, courageous act of a person trying to bring about peace between two nations?
Or was this an exercise of PR by bombing tunnels that they should have known were empty?
Well, the EU leadership has said that Iran is not allowed to have a nuclear weapon, which suggests that they were pursuing a nuclear weapon.
It also is Israel allowed to have a nuclear weapon in their view?
Yeah, this is not discussed.
That falls outside the acceptable discourse.
But no, it is, well, it is a bit ridiculous that you have a non-signatory to the non-proliferation treaty, that is, Israel, who has nuclear weapons, who is now complaining about Iran, possible ambitions for nuclear weapons, even though we recognize they don't have one and they don't even have a nuclear weapons program.
But again, this is based on the assumption that our debates are based on, yeah, that they're rational and also that they actually include proper counter-arguments.
But no, well, the NATO Secretary General, Mark Rutte, he made the argument that this was within international law, the American bombing of Iran.
And when he was confronted, you know, what's the difference between what the United States and Israel did compared to what Russia has done, he just rejected it altogether.
There's no comparison.
The attack on Iran was within international law.
Russia was not.
So it's, again, it's just a line solidarity.
That's all.
Got it.
Professor Deezen, thank you very much.
Very interesting conversation.
A nice break for us and for our audience from the continued analysis of what happened in and around the bombing of Iran, although I couldn't resist the last series of questions.
But thank you for your time, my dear friend.
We'll look forward to seeing you next week.
Thank you, Judge.
I look forward to it.
Thank you.
And coming up later today at 2 o'clock this afternoon, former Ambassador Craig Murray.
At 3 o'clock this afternoon, former CIA agent extraordinaire who told George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein does not have weapons of mass destruction, Phil Giraldi.
And at 4 o'clock this afternoon, former Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwatkowski.
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