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July 13, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
29:32
COL. Douglas Macgregor :
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, July 14th, 2025.
Colonel Douglas McGregor will be here in just a moment.
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And now is the time.
Colonel McGregor, my friend, thank you very much for coming here.
Before we get into big picture about how volatile and dangerous Ukraine has become and the Middle East has become, President Trump, just about 15 minutes ago, it's now Monday, early Monday afternoon,
announced a seismic shift, a dramatic increase in the amount of arms the United States would be sending to Ukraine through a circuitous route of selling them to allies who will then either sell them or give them to Ukraine.
But the numbers are vastly increased over what they were even in the Biden administration.
How do you read this, Colonel?
I suppose if we look at it from the standpoint of what could have been announced and wasn't announced, it probably is not nearly as dangerous as it could have otherwise been.
Originally, there were discussions of trying to impose a no-fly zone, which didn't make a lot of sense since the Russians very rarely fly manned aircraft over Ukraine.
Virtually everything is unmanned or missiles or drones, whatever you want to call them.
So that didn't make a lot of sense.
Then there was this discussion of monumental tariffs that would be imposed on Russia.
And it looks like President Trump has backed away from that and hunting the whole thing 50 days into the future, which I think is probably the least damaging thing he could do for himself at this point.
So what are these weapons?
I don't know.
I mean, obviously, we're going to try and send them Patriots, Patriot missiles.
I don't know what else we have planned.
I don't see us providing any of the standard missile family, SM2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and so forth.
So I don't know what else we're giving them or selling to our allies.
I don't know what the allies are going to provide.
I was prepared for a stupid comment endorsing the decision of Chancellor Matz to use Taurus missiles against the Russians for the purpose of attacking the manufacturing facilities inside Russia that turn out so many weapons and missiles and rockets and so forth.
Didn't hear that.
So on the one hand, I think the glass is half full.
In other words, it could have been much worse.
And I don't know that what we're sending is really going to have much impact.
I really don't think it will.
What do they think they're accomplishing?
I mean, I don't want to get too political, Colonel, because I want to prevail upon your military expertise.
In the same breath in which he made this announcement, he said, it's Joe Biden's war.
It's not my war.
It is his war if he's going to continue and even increase the rate of military supplies.
So bigger picture.
Have the neocons become triumphant?
Is this Lindsey Graham waging the war?
Well, I don't think Lindsey Graham could be very happy right now because he had hoped to achieve more.
And I think he did the best that he could do in terms of manipulating President Trump.
If you go back and listen to Graham's comments, which I reviewed earlier this morning because I was too busy yesterday to do so.
And he talked about saying, well, Putin has got to learn that you cannot play Trump.
And that really struck me as an interesting statement because that kind of statement would really appeal to President Trump.
Nobody can play me.
I'm Trump.
You know, I'm the tough guy.
I'm the boss.
You can't play me.
Putin's not going to play me.
Of course, that's all irrelevant nonsense.
Has nothing to do with actually what's happening on the ground, never did.
But I'm sure that that appealed in some ways to President Trump.
But then in the subsequent 24 hours, I think President Trump began to look at some grim realities.
We have eight days worth of missiles right now in our inventory.
I'm talking about standard missiles, Patriot missiles.
I don't know how many theater high altitude defense missiles we have.
But the point is, after eight days, we run out.
And my sources inside the Department of Defense say after eight days, the conventional war is over and you have to go to a nuclear weapon.
And I don't think President Trump wants to do that.
So I think what he's Doing is pretty typical for what most politicians do, judge.
He wants to be a little bit pregnant.
Well, how do you get a little bit pregnant?
By you give some things, but not everything.
So, in the final analysis, what has he changed?
Nothing.
Nothing fundamentally has changed at this point.
And the interesting part is that my sources, and I do have some inside the administration, tell me that behind the scenes, there are talks between Moscow and Washington at very high levels, and they seem to be going well.
So, you know, this is more of the same.
It's politicians don't like to be decisive.
They don't like to take firm positions unless they're absolutely confident that everything will go their way.
So I think what you're getting from President Trump is half a loaf, which in the final analysis on the battlefield will be no loaf at all.
Here's the clip to which I think you're referring from Senator Graham, Chris Cut number two.
I expect in the coming days you will see weapons flowing at a record level to help Ukraine defend themselves.
I expect in the coming days that there will be tariffs and sanctions available to President Trump he's never had before.
I expect in the coming days more support from Europe regarding their efforts to help Ukraine.
Putin made a miscalculation here.
For six months, President Trump tried to entice Putin to the table.
The attacks have gone up, not down.
One of the biggest miscalculations Putin has made is to play Trump.
And you just watch, in the coming days and weeks, there's going to be a massive effort to get Putin to the table.
And to those who are helping him, China, buying cheap Russian oil and having no accountability, those days are about over.
How naive is he if he thinks that President Putin would come to the table, using his phrase, before his military objectives, which he's on the cusp of reaching, have been achieved?
Well, it's absurd.
And again, President Putin has always made his position, the position of Russia, very, very clear.
That's never changed.
The real question here is why should the Russians believe anything we say?
This goes all the way back to the coup in 2014, the subsequent Minsk Accords, the arms control arrangements that we unilaterally dismissed out of hand as unnecessary.
Why believe anything we say?
And I think President Putin has been very straightforward and honest with President Trump.
And people keep telling President Trump, well, he has to give something.
If he doesn't give up his position in some way, you lose.
You have to be a winner.
This is the confusing aspect of the whole thing because President Trump was far more rational eight or nine months ago when he recognized there was nothing happening in this area called eastern Ukraine that justified the expenditure of American blood and treasure, nothing to be won, and that he really wanted to end the war.
But every time he's tried to end the war, he's got people like Lindsey Graham saying, now come on there, President.
You've been played.
Don't you understand?
You've been played.
And that kind of thing, I think, sadly resonates with President Trump.
You listen to him on the golf course and he says, you've been played.
You can't allow this to happen.
It's a lot of nonsense.
We don't have any interest whatsoever in what happens in eastern Ukraine.
We never did.
And Trump has always had it within his power to end this thing by simply declaring that and pulling out.
But we want to be seen or President Trump wants to be seen as the heroic figure that brought about peace.
Well, that's not going to happen.
Right.
Right.
I wonder if Senator Graham and his colleagues that agree with him still think they can use the war in Ukraine as a battering rim with which to drive President Putin from office.
We haven't heard that articulated recently at all.
No, look, they still live in a fantasy world, as we've said repeatedly from the beginning.
They continue to believe the nonsense that Russia is weak, that Russian society is fragile, that Putin is a quote-unquote hated dictator.
We are the good liberal democrats that want to bring peace and happiness everywhere, which in reality means we want to bring in a bunch of some of the lowest forms of human life in the private sector to rape Russia, steal everything they can from it while we put a puppet in Moscow.
Well, that's failed.
That's not going to happen.
Now people are really turning their attention to try and repeat that process against Iran.
But as far as Russia is concerned, that's over.
And this is not going to affect anything the Russians do.
They're going to proceed as scheduled.
And, you know, 50 days is an interesting selection.
In 50 days, the Russians could be standing on the Polish border.
Right, right.
You mentioned Iran, Colonel.
Did Trump's bombing of Iran make the Middle East more stable or more volatile?
Not only is it more volatile, we are at war with Iran, and people don't seem to understand it.
Simply because President Trump dropped bombs and then said, well, that's it.
Now we want peace.
I'm sending over coffee and sandwiches this afternoon and we're going to get along and work together is irrelevant.
We are a co-belligerent with Israel at war in the region.
And effectively, we're at war with everybody because Israel's at war with everyone at this stage.
So, you know, I think people don't understand.
There was an Israeli named Yanon who back in the 1980s set forth a plan for the region.
And it didn't work out quite as anticipated, but 40 years later, it now rings true.
And he simply said, our first goal in the region is fragmentation, division.
In other words, break up the region into smaller packets that are more easily managed by us.
In addition to that, once they're fragmented, we want to pit them against each other.
Then we want to subjugate, clean up, and ultimately resettle areas with Jews, replacing the populations who are there.
That's what Bibi Netanyahu is all about.
That's what he's doing.
It's kind of interesting to go back and look at Sharon and Gaza.
We had problems with what Sharon was doing in Gaza in about 2001 through 2003.
And ultimately, President Bush at the time told Sharon to get out of Gaza.
And ultimately, they got out.
He wanted to go in there and bulldoze houses and level places.
And we said, we're not going to support that.
Get out of Gaza.
So he got out of Gaza, came up with this new arrangement.
It turned Gaza into a larger concentration camp, but at least it ended the intrusive measures by the Israelis on the ground.
They got out.
And the idea was that they would focus on securing Israel.
Well, the roles have changed.
You know, it's no longer a question of the president telling the prime minister of Israel what to do.
Right now, it is Bibi Netanyahu who tells Donald Trump what he wants him to do.
And that's the true change that's happened over the last 20 plus years.
What do you think they talked about last week?
And do you think there's any connection between Netanyahu's presence in the White House for three meetings in two days and the announcement that there is no Epstein clientless, Epstein, a notorious Mossad asset?
Oh, I think it's priceless.
You can't make this sort of thing up.
Now on the internet is an audio tape of Epstein talking about Trump, who he's known for 20 years.
It's terribly damaging.
The truth of the matter is that if anything is going to drag President Trump down and destroy his administration at this point, it's Epstein.
There's no question about it.
And pretending that Epstein doesn't exist, or that's old news, or the file magically disappeared, all of those things are not going to work.
Coming clean about the whole thing was always the best idea.
But clearly, coming clean about it would expose President Trump to very, very severe criticism.
Nevertheless, I still think it would be better to risk that than not.
But then again, you know, I'm not in the White House.
I'm not advising it.
But normally, you know, somebody once said, a businessman said to his son, believe me, son, honesty is the best policy in business.
I know.
I've tried both.
And I think that applies to politics.
So I think President Trump would be better off standing up, taking the medicine, however painful it might be, and being honest and doing what he's doing.
This is just going to metastasize.
Epstein is going to get worse and worse and worse.
Colonel, I'm going to play a clip, which you may have seen.
It's not a new one.
It's President Putin in 2017, basically in his own words, saying, no matter who you vote for, you get John McCain.
American foreign policy doesn't change.
I think you'll probably agree with this.
Chris, cut number seven.
I have a certain perspective.
You see, I've already spoken with one U.S. president and another and a third.
Presidents come and go, but the policy doesn't change.
Do you know why?
Because the power of the bureaucracy is very strong.
So someone gets elected, comes in with their own ideas, and then people show up with briefcases, well-dressed, wearing dark suits like mine, but not with a red tie, more like a black or dark blue one.
And they start explaining how things should be done.
And everything changes right away.
You see what I mean?
This happens from one administration to the next.
Is he right?
Does Trump his own man or does the deep state tell him what to do?
Well, what is the deep state?
The Israel lobby?
The war lobby?
The people in the pharmaceutical industries?
The intelligence community.
Yeah, the intelligence community, obviously.
So I think, you know, he simplified it.
It's a very Russian simplification.
Men in dark suits show up and tell you what to do.
Not with red ties, but with black or navy ties.
Yeah.
But, you know, Stalin was famous because he had suggested to the leader, the man who ran the NKVD in the 1930s, black trucks would have painted on the side meat.
And these black trucks would show up in the middle of the night in front of a building.
People would be pulled out, dragged in, go into the black truck, and they would disappear.
They would end up in the gulag or just be executed out of hand.
But the joke was they painted meat on the side of it.
So everybody that was visiting Russia, who was a foreigner, said, oh, look at this.
Stalin is doing such a marvelous job.
He's providing meat to everyone.
People didn't know what the hell was going on.
So that's very Russian for him to sort of characterize it that way.
But it's a little more subtle, but it's real.
But on the other hand, there's something else happening that I don't even think Putin understands.
And this is very important.
If you go back to 1914, at the time that Franz Josef was assassinated in July, and everybody went through their in June, and then all the month of July, people went through these discussions, what happens next?
What should we do?
We end up in this terrible war.
In Britain, the British were looking at a very serious problem.
The British Empire was already declining in strength and power.
Its industries could no longer keep pace with Germany's or with the United States' industries.
It wasn't producing steel in the quantity that was required.
Its manufacturing base was already old.
It was no longer infused with new technology because new technology tends to reduce production costs.
Production costs were actually rising in Britain, not declining.
Germany was marching well ahead.
And so the British decided, since they had an unemployment problem and serious problems with their industries and they were in decline, that they had a choice.
They could do one of two things.
They could say, no, we're not going to go to war.
What we're going to do is we're going to recognize that we have to reform our economic structure.
We have to pull back.
We have to re-examine the way we govern.
In other words, go through this whole process of re-examination.
They didn't do that.
It was far easier in their minds at the time to declare war.
And so they went to war with a nation they had never fought.
No German-speaking soldier had ever fought an English-speaking soldier.
Never.
And it was a catastrophe for Great Britain.
And they come out of the war even worse off than they were when they went in.
And the rest is history.
World War II simply finished Britain as a great power.
We face a similar situation today.
We've fallen behind.
We don't have much of a manufacturing base as we've discussed before.
We have this sovereign national debt.
We can't deal with it effectively.
Are we going to raise taxes?
No.
Are we going to repudiate it?
Well, not yet.
Then what are we going to do with it?
Do we debase the currency to try and inflate our way out?
What do we do?
No real decision is being made.
So we're in a position similar to the British Empire in 1914.
I don't think President Trump wants to go to war, but he is being pulled in that direction by numbers of people who think that this is a way out of the conundrum.
And one of those is B.B. Netanyahu, because this war in the region is not over by any stretch of the imagination.
He knows that.
His goals are not achieved.
And Israel is in a position where it either establishes unchallenged Jewish supremacy in the region, or in his mind, Israel can't exist.
So he has to fight.
That means we have to fight.
And if we do, we'll end up like Britain did after the First World War.
So I am hearing you say, Colonel, that we are co-belligerents with NATO and Ukraine against Russia.
We are co-belligerents with Netanyahu and Israel against Iran.
Are we slouching toward World War III?
Well, we're also continuing to try and argue that we are confronting this thing called aggressive China over Taiwan.
In other words, we're still committed to the crazy, insane notion that we're going to wage war against the largest country in the world whose missile arsenal makes Iran's look small and insignificant by comparison, and that somehow or another we're going to prevent the Chinese from establishing control over Taiwan.
At the same time that we do that, the Chinese are ramping up because they see this as a threat to them.
This is analogous to Cuba, an island offshore of the United States that has turned into an attack dog against us.
So it's not just the two that you mentioned, it's all three.
And we are really, really, really in over our heads.
We're overwhelmed with logistical requirements that we can't meet.
We can't sustain ourselves around the world in all three theaters.
But no one wants to make the hard decision, which is what I talked about in the beginning.
Do we back off?
Do we recognize the problems we have at home?
Do we deal with those problems, reform the economy, reform the way we govern, and move down a different road?
In other words, do we willingly yield, yield our political, military hegemony over the globe?
Because that's really what this is all about.
You know, Putin spoke earlier within the last 12 to 14 hours in an interview, and he said something that everyone in Washington should listen to.
He said, either Russia is independent and sovereign, or it does not exist.
So when you threaten Russia, you threaten it over the issues in Ukraine because those are existential for the Russians.
They can't allow a hostile state to emerge there and threaten their existence.
If you say you're going to sanction them beyond anything they've ever seen with the goal of destroying their economy, they're saying we will fight.
He's being polite about it.
He's not bloviating the way President Trump would do.
He's not saying, I'm going to crush them.
I'm going to break.
He doesn't talk that way.
These people are professionals in Moscow and Beijing.
They're even professional in Tehran.
They don't engage in this kind of rhetoric.
But we need to understand something.
He's serious.
Either they are sovereign and independent or they don't exist.
Here's just how serious he is.
Cut number six.
Russia will either be independent and sovereign or will not exist at all.
I wanted to convey this to our partners in the hope that they would hear and somehow adjust their attitude towards Russia, considering that, for instance, since the 1990s they promised us not to expand NATO to the east.
They lied at every step, constantly deceiving and pretending that nothing of the kind happened.
The same was true on many other issues.
Therefore, it seemed to me that it was about time to tell our colleagues, we need to live peacefully.
Let's somehow treat each other with respect, without imposing our will, without attempting to suppress another will, considering the interests of all participants in international communication.
I don't know how effective it was, but since it's often remembered, it seems it was timely, that's what I want to say.
But unfortunately, it was not heard.
We constantly, I want to emphasize, constantly made attempts to establish relations to not lead to the situation we are in today and to develop some common rules.
As soon as Ivan IV Ivan the Terrible said, no, we remain orthodox, a legend immediately arose that he was cruel, a tyrant, that he was insane, and so on.
Although no one recalls in such a context what was done by Oliver Cromwell, what happened in England, in France, the Western history is silent about this.
In any case, it does not give such evaluations as that it was barbarism, that civilization is absent.
But they tried to subordinate Russia even then.
A very, very smart and astute and articulately presented analysis, as you point out.
How close are we to World War III?
I think the Russians, the Chinese, even the Iranians would still like to do business with us.
I don't think they have yet reached the position where they Understand that it is impossible to do business with us given our attitudes and our behavior.
I still think they think something better can be devised.
Now, how much longer will that last?
I don't know.
I mean, at some point, everyone becomes frustrated and fed up and says we've had enough.
You know, just as I was pointing out, Cuba lies in the Caribbean.
What happens on the island of Cuba is of consequence to us.
Now, how they govern themselves internally, that really doesn't make any difference.
But how they connect with other countries, what kinds of technology other countries introduce into Cuba, particularly countries that are hostile to us, well, then that becomes a national security matter.
That's the same thing with Taiwan and China.
There's no difference whatsoever.
When you go to Ukraine, Ukraine lies on Russia's border.
Eastern Ukraine presents a real existential threat to Russia, given what we've done to build up that part of the world and attack Russia.
So these things are hard to avoid.
The same thing is true in Iran.
The Iranians are not virulently, incurably anti-American.
They would like to do business with us.
But how do you do business with a country that says they're backing an Israeli strategy, which is designed to utterly fragment, disintegrate, destroy Iran?
And now we've widened the war because we've extended it to Azerbaijan.
So now we have Azerbaijan in the mix, which is designed to break up this BRICS transportation network that would run from southern Iran all the way up into Russia and Europe and vice versa.
That is sort of an added bonus of encouraging Azerbaijan to invade northern Iran with the hope of once again dividing and fragmenting and destroying Iran as a state.
We are all over the map, Judge.
I'm not even sure that President Trump understands the extent to which the CIA working with MI6 and the Mossad operates independently.
I don't think anybody's been in to brief him on the subversive activities they engage in, and no one has made clear what the implications are strategically, because I think if he understood it, he would not be comfortable.
But I don't think he knows.
I don't think he fully grasps it.
Maybe it is because he doesn't read anything.
He won't sit still for any lengthy discussions.
He tries to oversimplify too much.
And then when you're surrounded by people like Lindsey Graham and the Israeli influencers and others inside the White House, I guess it's very hard to penetrate the veil of deception and reach the truth, which I guess is where he is.
Thank you for an extraordinary analysis, Colonel McGregor.
Deeply appreciated, my dear friend.
Thank you for accommodating my schedule, and we'll look forward to seeing you again soon.
It's always good to see you, and I hope you have a terrible time in Italy.
Just let's get that straight.
No, but if things do fall apart, as many of us anticipate, maybe we'll talk while you're there.
Well, maybe we will.
The last time I was there in one week, Donald Trump got shot and Joe Biden withdrew from the race.
So don't let me pick the right week to take off for you.
Right.
Well, consult with your astrologer.
That's the only thing that makes sense anymore.
Nothing else makes sense.
Thank you, Colonel.
All the best.
Bye.
Bye.
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