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June 26, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
24:25
Prof. Gilbert Doctorow : How Weak Is NATO?
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Thursday, June 26th, 2025.
Professor Gilbert Doctorow joins us now.
Professor Doctorow, thank you very much.
Let's start with NATO since they're not far from you and they were meeting this week.
I guess many of them are still there.
Can the NATO membership nations realistically spend 5% of their gross domestic product on defense, as they seem to have promised they will do as recently as yesterday?
Some people, myself included, have described the meeting in The Hague yesterday as political theater.
And I think there's a lot to it.
It's not just watching the Secretary General fawn over Donald Trump that makes this political theater.
It's what they all signed up to.
They signed up to commitments that almost none of them can realize.
And I think that is known, but it is ignored in the same way that the bombing mission in Iran was known by many people to have failed in terms of destroying the nuclear capabilities of Iran.
But that was kept to the side because it gets in the way of the whole purpose of the political theater.
The theater was there not for us to have a good laugh at the expense of the Secretary General.
The theater there was to do business.
And it did it.
It got a commitment from these countries, all member states of NATO, to something that, as I say, most of them can achieve for reasons that we can go into if we have the time.
But that is not the end result.
The end result is that Mr. Trump has created an exit ramp for the United States from NATO.
If these countries all are committed and signed in writing that they're going to raise their contributions by several trillion dollars in the coming decade, the United States correspondingly, it can reduce its commitment and its spending on NATO over that period.
I don't see anybody looking at that fact.
And I think it is the same way as people are missing the real outcome of the political theater in Iran.
It was not to amuse us.
It was to do business.
And the business was to shut up Mr. Netanyahu, to prepare the ceasefire, which she had to gratefully accept, though not graciously, and to save Israel from itself, something which I hope and expect Mr. Trump will use when he goes back to his donors and tells them, I just saved Israel for you.
Now let's get rid of Mr. Netanyahu.
I want to address the latter part about Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu in a minute, but just to circle back to NATO, if we could.
Your colleague on this show, Professor Glenn Deesen, has argued in agreeing with you that some of these NATO countries will use cooking the books to demonstrate to Trump that they've spent 5%.
He gave the example of infrastructure, bridges and highways in Britain that will be suddenly put on the defense budget.
I mean, this is really a joke if Trump and his people fall for it.
Do you share Professor Deason's view that this kind of trickery will be engaged in by these countries?
What you're talking about was in today's Telegraph in England.
What I'm talking about took place six weeks earlier.
Exactly that issue was raised in the pro-Atlanticist Belgian press.
These are all rooting for NATO, but they are looking at the realities of political life in this country, in Belgium.
And the reality is that their government has no wiggle room to sincerely follow through in any commitments it makes.
This country already is the highest taxed in Europe, if not in the world.
They cannot raise taxes and they cannot take loans because the country is not a good standing with creditors.
It has a very high indebtedness.
So where are they going to get the money?
Only one place, by cutting social benefits.
And that is political suicide.
No government will stand when it starts doing that.
We had a general strike yesterday.
They are like wildcat strikes every few days here, national strikes of transport protesting the rather minimal cuts in social benefits that this new government that came into power in January has instituted.
To go from where we are now in Belgium for 1.3% of GDP to sign for military to 3.5%, which is the rock, the hard part of the 5% everyone's talking about, is a bridge too far for Belgium, and not just for Belgium, for many other countries in the EU.
So they have given Mr. Trump an empty promise, which satisfies his needs.
His need is to find a graceful way to take the United States out of NATO.
And they just gave it to him.
But it's not going to be realistic.
I mean, if the United States leaves NATO and there's substantial support over here for that.
And as I can take the pulse, that will result in a significant diminution in spending for NATO.
Let's backtrack a little.
Well, I always doesn't Russia produce more armaments and projectiles than all of NATO combined?
Oh, it does.
This came out, I think was even the Secretary General made his statement within the past week that Russia alone produces four times the projectiles that are so important for ground warfare, for a warfare of attrition that we're seeing now in Ukraine, four times what the United States and Europe combined produce.
But just one step back, I overstated this.
When I said pull back from NATO, I didn't mean leave it.
He can't.
Legally, he can't.
That requires the approval of Congress.
But to reduce the spending on NATO, he can.
And that is what he's now been given.
I may have misspoken also.
I meant reduce spending.
He would love to leave NATO, but it's a treaty and it would require rescission by a two-thirds vote of the Senate.
I don't think he would get that.
No.
Now, you in your wonderful page-long missives that you sent have pointed out something I haven't heard from anybody else.
If NATO does increase its spending, what will the reaction in the Kremlin be?
Well, what I was saying is that if they could do this, which they can't, but for argument's sake, if they could increase their contributions to defense budgets across the EU, across the NATO countries, and raised several trillion dollars in the next decade, then they would be digging their own graves.
Because we have to look at the last 40 years of history to understand that there has been on each side, Russia, Soviet Union as it was, on the east, and Western Europe and the United States and NATO on the other side, they have looked this way and that way as what kind of a military doctrine and strategy they have to have given their appraisal of the other side.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, before Russia started to weaken and collapse or Soviet Union under Gorbachev finally culminating in the December 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, disintegration of it, before all that, when the Soviet Union was still relatively strong, the final period of Brezhnev, the beginning of the 80s, the Russians looked at NATO with alarm.
It had maybe a million men in arms.
It had vast numbers of tanks.
It had all kinds of military hardware in greater abundance and higher quality than they did.
Well, in the 19th century, in the shootouts, you had the equalizer.
The fellow who was the weaker side could be the winner in a duel if he had a better gun.
Well, the equalizer in our age was nuclear weapons.
Russia understood that it could not withstand a full invasion by NATO, and so it built an arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons that are unique in size and in variety to meet every eventuality.
Now, in the 21st century, under Mr. Putin, the situation has reversed itself.
Europe's profiting from the end of the Soviet Union and it cut back its military expenses of funding and its arms production drastically to the point where Germany today has an army that's not worth talking about.
That's not my appraisal of what they're saying among themselves publicly.
They are one-third the number of men at arms that they were in the 1990s.
And we know that their tanks hardly work.
They have zero, no effective air defense.
So Europe is really exposed by its own choice, because until the hyperactive propaganda of the Russian threat came into effect after 2008, Europe rightly understood that there was no threat from the East.
So why would they spend their money on all this hardware and keep so many men at arms?
They didn't.
Now, in this present situation, this situation has flip-flopped from where it was in the 1980s.
The Russians have the best European army, the best equipped, best trained, and best work experienced.
Europe is weak militarily.
Under these circumstances, okay, the Russians really have no intention of doing anything.
We've discussed this on your program in the past.
The notion of a Russian threat is absolutely empty.
They'll be quite happy to solve the problem in Ukraine and then to go back to their knitting.
Do the European leaders make the same domino, nonsensical argument that Joe Biden made?
Vladimir Putin wants to take all of Ukraine and then he's going to go up into Warsaw and then aim for Paris.
Do they actually make this argument with a straight face in order to induce taxpayers to cough up more money or justify borrowing?
I think they can do with a straight face because they're talking to one another.
The broad public doesn't listen to them at all.
The broad public is concerned about the price of fuel for how it's heating.
But I just want to finish the argument that we were on.
If Russia, if Europe should build its muscles and do what the Russians read from the documents coming out of Brussels and Berlin and whatever, and build up their armed forces to pose Again, a threat of a million men against Russia, Russia is going to change its nuclear doctrine yet again and put heavy reliance on nuclear weapons.
And we saw this.
This is not my guessing.
We saw this when Macron and Starmer were planning to put 50,000 soldiers into Ukraine in the coalition of the willing, supposedly, to enforce a ceasefire.
The Russians said loudly, gentlemen, we are not going to fight you in the trenches.
We are not going to lose our soldiers trying to remove 50,000 of yours.
We will bomb you out of existence in a few minutes.
That is the new reality.
And if people in Berlin and London and Brussels aren't watching that, they are asleep at the job.
Chancellor, German Chancellor Mertz has suggested he could spend a trillion dollars in a year.
I mean, that's an astounding amount of money.
That's what the U.S. will be spending if Trump's so-called big, beautiful bill passes.
A, is that realistic?
B, does anybody believe him?
C, where would he get the money?
I'll come to those questions, but I'd like to say, what's a bigger issue?
When we speak about Ukraine and providing them with additional military equipment, people raise a hand and say, but they don't have any men.
And that's my answer to your issue.
He can spend the trillion and he can build more tanks and they can manufacture various types of air defenses, which are useless against hypersonic missiles, as we now know, and as he should know.
Anyway, they can build all this military hardware, but he can't find the soldiers.
They did an advertising campaign in Germany.
They made it attractive for young men and women to enlist.
And I think in a month they got about 500 recruits.
Oh, good.
They dropped the pocket.
They need a few hundred.
They need 100,000, not 500.
And Pistorios, in the last two or three days, Pistorios is a defense minister who was a formerly defense minister under the socialist government of Schultz.
He came out saying that if we cannot get volunteers, we will be obliged to introduce a draft.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, that will be the end of this coalition government.
Mr. Pistorius may be a socialist, but he doesn't speak for his party.
His party said they leave the coalition and the government will fall.
If the government falls, well, that is the end of this military buildup.
As I said, without personnel, the hardware is useless.
Got it.
Got it.
What is the status of things in Ukraine?
Well, the world's eyes and the media's attention has been focused on Israel, Iran, and Trump's bombing.
What is happening on the ground in Ukraine from Europe?
Well, something is happening.
We've commented in the last few weeks that the conflict in the Middle East had certain benefits for Russia in that the United States withdrew various air defense systems, took them to the Middle East to safeguard its own military bases in the Gulf states,
and that the United States stopped, essentially stopped, supplying materiel to Ukraine because it was saving, hoarding it for Israel and any other eventuality in that region.
But there's something else we haven't talked about.
The Russians have become much more aggressive and hard-punching in their ongoing battle in Ukraine.
The strikes on Kiev were much more severe than anything in the last three years, strikes in the last two weeks, I mean.
And the reasons are clear.
Not only do they not have anything resembling an air defense, but the Russians are not getting bad publicity.
Russia and its crimes against humanity in Ukraine is barbarism to take the words out of Mr. Starmer.
Hey, that's gone to page 20 in the newspaper.
On the front page, all we read about is the devastation that each of the parties, Iran and Israel, are visiting on one another.
And Russia is getting a free ride to do what has to be done in Ukraine.
How much longer can Zelensky last?
As long as they let him.
He's not going anywhere until and unless the United States throws him under the bus, which may well happen.
But at present, the people around him, let's make this clear.
He's not a singular madman.
The people who were there in power before him are saying virtually the same thing.
Whether it's Poroshenko, who was immediately before Zelensky came to power.
Sorry, well, not immediately before, but he was in the camp, same camp as Zelensky, before.
Then Tymoshenko.
These are big names.
They're in the Rada.
They're in the parliament.
And they would be, you could look at them as well.
Do we have an alternative to Mr. Zelensky if he's pushed out from among the politicians?
We don't.
The only place where you could possibly find reason would be in the military.
What is your view as to who prevailed in the Israeli, Iran, U.S. 12-day kerfuffle that ended with Trump's bombs?
I think we're all seeing that when we tune on YouTube.
Let's face it, Israel had a very strict military censorship, which prevented the Western journalists, whether they were Reuters or they were BBC or CNN, they were in Israel, but they could not report on Israel.
They could not show images of the destruction around them.
You had some small piddling videos of this apartment having been hit or the glass shattered, Rubbish.
As we now are seeing, just go to YouTube and you will see not fake news, but real images of major residential and business towers in Tel Aviv that are shattered, that will have to be torn down because they're no longer structurally sound.
You see, you're beginning to see the same images coming from Haifa.
We had my own inputs.
I don't have, like Colonel McGregor, I don't have military counterparts who exchange information with me.
But I am on Indian radio, television.
I watch closely a couple of these international broadcasters who are respectable.
There are a lot of fake news outlets in India, but there are several very respectable ones.
And they've been, from their own sources, been providing information.
And then there are the Russians.
And I don't mean Russians who are sitting in Russia.
I mean the Russians who are given the microphone live in Jerusalem.
And they are emigrates from Russia who are interviewed by Russian journalists.
And what do they say?
Well, their apartment has just been knocked out of.
In fact, the 25-year-long lead journalist of Russian state television was showing his apartment where all the glass was knocked out.
You can imagine that the destruction is pretty widespread if even he was hit by it.
And that's not to talk about the real infrastructure.
What electricity generating plants were doomed?
What port facilities in Haifa were utterly destroyed.
And even without destruction, you've got the war risks that made Haifa useless.
No merchant vessel would go near Haifa, given the risks of destruction.
So the damage to the Israeli economy was very severe.
It's only now beginning to come out.
The Israelis have one major international airport, Ben-Guri, and it's still closed.
Yeah, they have suffered enormously.
And you've mentioned this in your programs, latest programs.
The result of all this is, in effect, Israel lost the war.
Now, Donald Trump and the people around him saw and knew that.
And that's why I say that the theater that we saw, that we were exposed to, of empty shell sites in Iran having been hit, that was not just amusement and it was not an empty act.
It was an act with a consequence that surely was planned.
And that is namely to take away from Mr. Netanyahu any reason to continue the war or to deny that Israel has lost it.
What did the United States gain by that bombing?
Well, here I agree with Colonel McGregor.
It's keeping the United States out of deeper involvement.
They bombed bases which were certainly known to have been emptied out.
They did not intend to cause loss of life or casualties.
I believe there was some advance notification that this was coming for the Iranians.
And it's the same thing that Iran did in its attack or counter-attack on the American base in Qatar.
This was a 19th century duel.
When your honor is compromised, as a gentleman, you were obliged to pick up the glove that was thrown at your feet and to arrange with your second for a duel with pistols.
But you were not obliged to kill your opponent.
It was perfectly acceptable to fire in the air.
That way you acquitted your humiliation and nobody was hurt.
And that's what's just happened now.
Professor, a terrific analysis.
Thank you very much for it.
Although I just have images in my head of Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton in Weehawk in New Jersey.
Hamilton must have expected that Burr would shoot in the air.
And of course he didn't.
And Hamilton died on the spot.
Oh, well, we'll see where this goes.
But thank you very much for your analysis.
Thank you for the notes that you keep sending.
Very, very insightful.
And we'll look forward to seeing you again next week, my dear friend.
Yeah, it's my pleasure.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And coming up later today, two more of our heavyweights.
By heavyweights, I mean a lot of you like to watch.
At 11 o'clock this morning, Professor Jeffrey Sachs.
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