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July 15, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
27:27
AMB. Charles Freeman : Is Middle East Peace Possible?
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, January 15th, 2025.
My dear friend, Ambassador Charles Freeman, joins us now, Ambassador Freeman.
A pleasure, sir.
Thank you very much for your time and allowing me to pick your brain.
Yesterday, President Trump announced an arms relationship with Kyiv, which would funnel arms circuitously from the CIA through European partners and eventually to Kyiv.
Do you have a handle on this?
Can you make sense of it?
Do you understand why the Department of Defense has nothing to do with this?
That I don't understand.
I think this is smoke and mirrors.
It's a magic trick.
First of all, we don't have any of the weapons that might continue to enable Kyiv to defend itself as it has.
We're out of Patriots, basically.
That is why the Defense Department originally paused the deliveries.
I don't know that the CIA has patriots in its possession.
Maybe it's able to procure them somehow from third countries.
Obviously, selling weapons to the Europeans to re-transfer to Ukraine is one way of sort of obscuring the American role, but it's not very effective.
I don't think this is going to make any difference at all on the battlefield.
And we hear reports that in the conversation between President Trump and President Putin that angered President Trump, President Putin told him that he was going to step up his offensive and take all of the Donbass region,
that is all of the four oblasts that Russia has formally annexed, which it controls only one of completely, take them all in the next 60 days.
And so now we have deadlines coming out of President Trump that appear to coincide with that.
So some people are suggesting that what he's done is say to President Putin, okay, I understand you got to go after these four oblasts.
You know, you've got 60 days to take them.
Of course, the Russians at the aborted negotiations with Ukraine had demanded that Ukraine and others recognize the incorporation of all four of these oblasts plus Crimea into the Russian Federation.
Now, I guess Mr. Putin's just going to take them by force.
Do you think that President Trump really thinks that his bluster to President Putin and now the imposition of this bizarre secondary tariffs will have an effect on the Russian military activities in Ukraine?
You know, I can't answer that.
It's not clear to me how firm the president's grip on reality is.
He continues to say things and do things which are either factually without foundation or totally ineffectual in terms of producing the agreements that he claims he wants to produce with foreigners, including the Russians.
You know, he's never answered the Russian terms for ending this war.
He keeps talking about a ceasefire, but he doesn't offer anything in return for it.
And now he has threatened Russia with drastic sanctions.
But Russia doesn't export anything to the U.S. anymore.
So this is a threat that probably is being laughed off in the Kremlin.
It's a very strange performance, really.
All right, so talk about strange performances.
Here he is, the President of the United States, yesterday being asked with respect to weapons, how far are you willing to go, Mr. President?
Chris Cut No. 15.
Putin escalates further.
How far are you willing to go in response?
In what?
How far are you willing to go if Putin were to escalate, send more bombs in the coming days?
Ask me a question like that.
How far?
I want to get the war settled.
The not-Americans that are dying in it have a problem, and J.D. has a problem.
It's a stance that he's had for a long time.
They're not Americans dying, but there are a lot of people dying, and something that should be able to be settled.
And we all agree with that.
This group of people want to defend our country.
But ultimately, having a strong Europe is a very good thing.
Do you understand what he said?
Not really.
I think if he said that about Gaza, it might make some sense.
A lot of people are getting killed.
He wants to end the war.
He doesn't seem to want to end the war there.
He's doubling down on supplying the Israelis.
We are full participants in the management of these so-called feeding centers, which are actually mousetraps for Palestinians, hundreds of them killed, trying to get food for themselves and their children.
People being bombed by drones while they stand in line.
We're part of that.
So I think when he talks about Ukraine, I suppose in some quarters this has some credibility, but I don't think internationally it has any at all.
It is bizarre that he's willing to acknowledge the slaughter and killing in Ukraine, which is occurring because the United States is funding Ukraine, but not in Gaza, which is occurring because the United States is funding Israel.
I just want to get back to Ukraine for a minute.
He keeps saying it's Biden's war.
Is it Trump's war now?
Oh, I think for sure.
You know, he said he would end it in 24 hours.
I think he could have done that if he'd simply suspended all of the military assistance to Ukraine and demanded that Zelensky repudiate his ban on negotiating with Mr. Putin, President Putin.
But he didn't do that.
No, instead, he's been all over the map.
And I think the Russians have basically written him off.
So we're down to a bare-knuckle fight, and they have brass knuckles, and we don't.
Right.
Here he is again yesterday now arguing that Europe wants to get involved in the war.
Europe, which doesn't have the wherewithal to do so, although you hear him claiming that Europe does, cut number 13.
If we have one country that has 17 patriots getting ready to be shipped, they're not going to need them for that.
So we're going to work to deal where the 17 will go, or a big portion of the 17 will go to the war side.
I have to tell you, Europe has a lot of spirit for this war.
A lot of people, you know, when I first got involved, I really didn't think they did, but they do.
The level of esprit de corps spirit that they have is amazing.
They really think it's a very, very important thing to do, or they wouldn't be doing it.
Look, they're agreeing to just, you know, We're not paying anywhere.
We have an ocean separating us.
They said, we have a problem.
We make the best stuff, but we can't keep doing this.
Again, I said it before.
This is not Trump's war.
We're here to try and get it finished and settled and whatever.
Because nobody wins with this.
This is a loser from every standpoint.
This was Biden and this was other people.
Again, he's denying that it's his war.
He's trying to end it by funding it.
Right.
Or actually, more accurately, pushing the funding off on the Europeans, who oddly have been more enthusiastic for the continuation of this war than President Trump.
I don't question President Trump's actual desire to end this war.
He's gone about it, however, in a completely inept way, aided by people who are demonstrably incompetent, put into positions for which they are unqualified.
Meanwhile, stripping the State Department, where we do have diplomatic expertise, of that expertise.
There's not a single Russian expert on the national security staff, as far as I can tell at this point.
So we're shadow boxing.
We're putting forward negotiating positions that accord with our own propaganda view of the situation rather than the real one.
The Europeans, you're right, don't have the wherewithal to carry this.
They don't have the production capability.
The sad thing is we don't either.
So I don't know when he talks about 17 Patriots.
Is that 17 missiles?
It can't be 17 batteries.
How much is 17 missiles going to do for Ukraine?
There have been plenty of Patriots in Ukraine, and they haven't managed to stop the onslaught.
In fact, that onslaught is greatly intensified in accordance with the reports that President Putin plans now to step up the offensive and take the territories that he's annexed into his possession.
Are Senator Graham and his allies, his neocon colleagues, now triumphant in the Trump administration?
They're talking that way.
I think if they are, they're mistaken.
I don't think he's on their wavelength.
But, you know, Lindsey Graham, Senator Graham, has got this proposal with Senator Blumenthal to put on some kind of global 500% tariff on anybody who deals with the Russians on oil.
This would throttle the global economy almost instantly.
Not that we're not doing a good job of trying to strangle it otherwise with the profligate promiscuous imposition of sanctions on everybody from the Canadians, the Mexicans, the European Union, the Chinese, the Indonesians, Cambodia, India, so forth and so on.
What are we doing?
I've not heard a clear explanation.
What's the strategy?
How does this produce a result that serves the interests of the United States rather than kindling inflation, disrupting supply chains so that we have empty shelves in the shops, and not rekindling industrial growth because the uncertainties are such that people are unwilling to invest.
Last week, the president was famously asked if he had authorized, pardon me, the Defense Department to pause the delivery of arms to Ukraine.
He said he hadn't.
And then he was asked, well, what does this say for your government?
And then he gave a mumbo-jumbo nonsensical answer.
I know everything that's going on.
He addressed this yesterday in which he now claims that he knew what Secretary Haggs said, notwithstanding what he said last week, what Secretary Hagseth was doing all the time.
So see if you can make sense out of this, Ambassador.
If you can, you're a very, very smart man.
You're already smart.
But let's see what you can do.
Cut number 14.
President, Is there any concern about the U.S. stockpiles?
There was a pause in delivery of weaponry to Ukraine in order to evaluate, apparently, the U.S. stockpiles.
What came out of that?
Evaluation.
I mean, this was a very big, what we're talking about today is a very, very big day.
And what Pete was doing, and me too, I knew what Pete was doing, was evaluation because we knew this was going to happen.
And now we actually announced it.
They voted on it.
It's all been done.
So obviously that has a big impact on, you know, when you say pause, obviously you're not going to be doing things if you don't know what's going to happen here.
But we were pretty sure this was going to happen, so we did a little bit of a pause.
Who voted on it?
Him?
Oh, that's the real question.
Secretary of Defense?
Yeah, no, that is definitely what's called a cover-your-ass answer.
That is trying to claim this is, well, it was an evaluation of our stocks, of course.
The evaluation had been done earlier.
It concluded that we did not have the necessary stocks for our own defense, let alone that of Ukraine or Israel.
And to the extent that we had anything to give, Israel was given priority rather than Ukraine.
All very logical, all very sensible, and indeed a part of an evaluation process.
But to claim now that somehow the pause is over, that somebody voted to do something when, in fact, nothing has been done except a promise to get Europeans to supply patriots and other weapons to Ukraine.
And here again, we have to realize Ukraine has had all these weapons in abundance.
It's shot them off.
It has not stopped the Russian advance.
And it will not, even if there were a large number of patriots to supply, that is not going to do it.
Meanwhile, of course, the Germans who have the Taurus missile, which many had feared they would give to Ukraine to fire deep into Russia, apparently the Russians told them if they did that, that they would take out the factory in Germany that produces these things.
They have now definitively said, that is, the defense minister has definitively said that there will be no transfer of the Taurus to Ukraine.
So, of course, the Europeans, as President Trump indicated, are very seriously concerned about Ukraine.
They should be.
It's on their continent.
But are they doing anything about it effectively?
No.
They have no peace plan.
They have no negotiating position.
They're hardly in contact with the Russians.
And Ukraine continues to refuse to negotiate and to depend on foreign support for its survival.
And it is shrinking as we speak.
This is a very dangerous thing for Ukrainians, and it's not going to end well for us or the Europeans.
One more question before we move on to Israel.
Last week, our friend and colleague, Scott Ritter, characterized Ukraine as a person in hospice waiting to die.
Do you agree with that characterization?
He's talking about the military longevity of Ukraine.
I think it's more accurate to say that it's a person who should be in hospice, but is refusing to go into it, even though he's dying.
Interesting.
Thank you.
We're looking at clips.
I don't know why Trump does this, but we're looking at clips with the most belligerent of his advisors, the most bellicose of his advisors.
Well, maybe Sebastian Gorka is the most, but this is General Keith Kellogg, who came up with the crazy idea of a NATO occupation of Ukraine, as if Putin would even consider such a thing.
But there he is, General Kellogg, alone with President Zielinski and these stylishly videoed clips, which the Kyiv government and the State Department obviously wanted all over the world, and they succeeded in that respect.
I think the issue here is, let's think about how this negotiation has been conducted.
We've had, on the one hand, we've had Stephen Witkoff in Moscow.
We've had General Kelly in Kyiv.
We've had the president saying various things which don't agree with what either of them have said.
This is all very confusing.
The Russians have been saying, muttering under their breath that they can't make any sense of the U.S. position.
And in the middle of all this, there is no real policy coordination process, development process or monitoring of policy.
And we're seeing that in multiple arenas.
So the so-called pause of supplies to Ukraine is a case in point.
The National Security Council, which is supposed to coordinate policy development and which is supposed to monitor its implementation, is headed by Marco Rubio, who's doing other things.
He isn't even in the country.
And he is the Secretary of State.
He's the National Archivist.
He's the head of what remains of USAID.
And he's the National Security Advisor.
Very hard to argue that he's doing any of those jobs.
So this is confusion.
It is ineffectiveness.
And it really raises a question, I'm sorry to say.
We have as a president somebody who drove six businesses into bankruptcy.
Is he doing that for our country?
It's a profound statement, but I have to ask on one on which we would normally end the show so people are thinking about, but I have to ask you a few more Questions about Israel.
Did Trump's bombing of Iran, basically bombing a mountain range under which there were tunnels in which there had been nuclear-enriched materials and the equipment used to enrich them, did that bombing make the Middle East more stable or more volatile?
It may have made it more stable in a strange way in the Iranian retaliation against Israel, which of course, the effects of which have been almost entirely concealed by Israeli military censorship, but they hit five major bases in Israel.
They shut down the two ports that Israel depends on, on the Mediterranean.
They scared the hell out of a lot of Israelis.
There was a huge exodus both to Sinai and by private aviation to Cyprus.
I don't know whether the people are coming back or not.
So Israel, I think, despite its bravado, was chastened.
Iran, too, was chastened, I think, by the American attack on it.
Not so much by the Israeli attack, which killed maybe a thousand people.
Certainly the opening move in that attack, which was drone-borne local use of drones to assassinate key figures in the government, apparently including an attempt on the Iranian president, Pazeshkin.
Certainly that was reminiscent of the decapitation of Hezbollah and was a demonstration of the prowess of the Israeli intelligence services.
But in the end, the Israelis claim they got about half of the Iranian missile launchers.
People who study this carefully say that no, it was more like 5 or 10%.
The Iranians themselves say that the missile forces that they have stored underground in various areas in the country were never even touched.
They didn't have to draw on their reserves.
So maybe a standoff is better than an active war.
In that sense, there's more stability.
Please continue.
My apologies.
I thought you had stopped.
No, I was just going to say that the effect of the Israeli actions, plus the genocide in Gaza, plus the pogroms and the ethnic cleansing that's going on with the vengeance in the West Bank, has been to convince countries in the region that they need to make common cause with Iran.
And so we see a developing Saudi relationship with Iran, which would have been quite unthinkable before all of these Israeli actions brought home to people that it is Israel, not Iran, that is the great threat to stability in the region.
Is Mr. Netanyahu chastened?
He seems to continue to depend on war to stay in office and out of jail.
I'm going to ask you in a minute if peace is possible in the Middle East while Benjamin Netanyahu is in office.
But before I do, I want you to watch a clip, which gets very emotional at the end of it, but it's quite profound, from the actor Mandy Potenkin that we ran yesterday and is very much in demand.
And I think you'll agree with the essence of what he's saying.
Cut number one.
And I ask Jews all over the world to consider what this man, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his right-wing government is doing to the Jewish people all over the world.
They are endangering not only the state of Israel, which I care deeply about and want to exist, but they are endangering the Jewish population all over the world.
He is the most dangerous thing, not just since October 7th.
It has been a deeply troubled situation for the Jewish people to allow this to happen to children and civilians of all ages in Gaza for whatever reason is unconscionable and unthinkable.
And I ask you Jews everywhere all over the world to spend some time alone and think, is this acceptable and sustainable?
How could it be done to you and your ancestors?
And you turn around and you do it to someone else.
Yeah.
Very powerful, very emotional, very passionate, and justifiably so.
You know, it is really almost impossible to understand how any Jew anywhere could support genocide, could support the building of concentration camps, could support what is called transfer, meaning making Palestine free of Palestinians, when all of this was done to Jews in Europe.
And by the way, it wasn't done to Jews in the Middle East or West Asia.
They flocked to Israel only after the establishment of Israel had so angered Arab populations, Muslim populations, with the notable exception of Iran, where there's still a thriving Jewish community.
This has been a total disaster for the world's Jews, and I think Mr. Potinkin is absolutely correct to warn people that it has got to stop in the interest of Jews, well, of course, the interest of humanity as well.
If Netanyahu leaves office by whatever means, will this stop?
Or will he just be replaced by a different person but with the same programs?
All the polling shows that the most egregious crimes against humanity, including genocide, are strongly Supported by a very large supermajority of the Israeli people.
So the idea that the facile idea that you can improve things by removing a leader has a long history of turning out to be wrong.
Think of the assassination by JFK of Nghu Tien Ziem in South Vietnam.
Did that improve things?
Think of the murder of the trial and execution of Saddam Hussein.
Did that cure the problems of Iraq?
Think of the death of Sadat.
Did that make Egyptians and Israelis closer?
You know, if Netanyahu goes, the danger is that one of the fascist zealots he's brought into the government will succeed him.
Ambassador Freeman, thank you very much.
Thank you for your thoughts.
I'll be traveling for a few days.
We'll look forward to seeing you at the end of the month.
All the best to you, my friend.
And to you.
Safe travels.
Thank you.
And coming up later today at 10 o'clock this morning, Professor Gilbert Doctorow at 11.
Aaron Mate at 1 o'clock.
Professor Glenn Deason at 3 o'clock.
Professor John Mearsheimer at 4 o'clock.
We might have to wake him up, but we'll have him here.
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