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July 30, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
30:31
Prof. John Mearsheimer : Can Israel Save Itself?
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Thursday, July 31 July 2025.
Professor John Mearsheimer will be here in just a moment on Can Israel be saved from itself?
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Professor Mearsheimer, welcome here, my dear friend.
Thank you for accommodating my schedule during my travels.
I thought of you and missed you and I'm happy to know the audience missed you and I'm happy to be back with you and have you back with us.
Before we get to the Benjamin Netanyahu regime's destruction of Israel, a few questions about some bizarre events.
I don't know if you can call them bizarre because they happen so many times now.
Bizarre events in the news this week.
Threats against President Putin.
President Trump issued a threat.
Senator Lindsey Graham issued a threat.
General Christopher Donahue issued a threat.
We'll start with the president.
I want your thoughts on this and how you think the Kremlin reacts to it.
The president said on Monday, I forget about the 50 day days I gave President Putin to end the war.
I'm giving him 10 to 12 days.
And then on Wednesday, yesterday, said, ah, it's not 10 to 12 days.
It's over Saturday.
Better end the war on Saturday.
Otherwise, I'm going to impose secondary tariffs on whoever buys oil from Russia, namely China and India.
Is this any way to conduct diplomacy?
Is this likely to affect one iota of the Russian military strategy in Ukraine?
Yeah, I don't think it'll have any effect on the Russians in terms of what they do in their war against Ukraine.
I think the big question is whether president...
I mean, with regard to China, he's had to back off with regard to tariffs because the Chinese have a lot of leverage over us.
When it comes to rare earths and rare earth magnets, they really have a lot of coercive leverage on us.
So I don't see how he can possibly get tough with the Chinese with secondary sanctions of the magnitude that he's talking about.
And with regard to India, it's really quite amazing what's happening there.
It looked like the United States was going to have very good relations with India with Modi in the driver's seat in India and Trump in the driver's seat here in the United States.
They have a history of good relations.
But those relations have gone steadily downhill since Trump took over.
If he were to put secondary sanctions on India, that would just wreck our relations with India.
And that is not in America's national interest because the United States and China have a vested interest in working together in terms of dealing with China.
Furthermore, if he puts these sanctions on China and India and they actually go into effect, the end result is going to be disastrous for the international economy.
So I think this is all an empty threat.
And I'm really curious what exactly he's going to do on Saturday that he thinks is going to bring the Russians or these other countries to their knees.
I often wonder if he and his economic advisors view economics 101 the way I do and I think you do.
Who pays these tariffs?
A tariff is a sales tax paid by the ultimate consumer, the ultimate user of the good.
You want to buy a toaster made in China that used to cost $25, now it costs $28.50.
You want to buy a Mercedes-Benz made in Germany that used to cost $100,000.
Now, thanks to Ursula von der Leyen and her caving to Trump.
it costs 115,000.
Who's paying it?
The American purchaser in the United States.
Now we have this issue about whether or not the president can impose a tax because the Congress gives that power exclusively, the constitution gives that power exclusively to the Congress.
Well, that doesn't seem to bother him.
I mean, he thinks that he's a sovereign who can do pretty much anything he wants.
You know, I think what's going on here is that since he launched this tariff campaign, I think it was on April 2nd of this year, he's gone back and forth, but he has definitely levied tariffs on a lot of countries and it has not damaged the American economy.
So I think he believes and his supporters believe.
believe that Trump can levy tariffs and get away with it.
There are no real costs to pay, that the consumer is not going to have to worry about paying higher costs.
But I think most people, and this would include me, believe that at some point the bill is going to come due.
And when it does, he's going to be in serious trouble.
But for the time being, he's operating on the assumption that tariffs are the magic weapon.
They bring everybody to their knees and we're not hurt at all.
I was on a Russian talk show called The Great Game, which is one of Moscow's premier prime time shows and two of the other guests both of whom questioned me one was a Russian general and the other was the it would be like the John Thune the leader of the majority party in the upper house of the Russian legislature and they asked me if I thought
Trump was serious about the sanctions and they asked me why he makes these wild statements.
Now, put aside my answer, but I detected from the tone of their questions which were long long typically russian style questions uh that they think this is just bluster and they and they really it goes in one ear and out the other when he says this uh this kind of stuff and they almost don't care uh if he imposes uh if he imposes tariffs they they believe they're immune uh from his uh blustering but
senator graham uh threatened president putin and said that I'm going to use the phrase the senator used that's a little crude, forgive me.
President Trump will whoop Putin's ass what he said.
Cut number one.
Putin, your turn is coming.
You know, Donald Trump is the Scotty Scheffler of American politics and foreign diplomacy, and he's about to put a whoopin' on your ass.
What's going to happen here is that Trump is going to impose tariffs on people that buy Russian oil.
China, India, and Brazil, those three countries, buy about eighty percent of cheap Russian oil.
That's what keeps Putin's war machine going.
So President Trump is going to put a hundred percent tariff on all those countries, punishing them for helping Putin.
Putin can live through sanctions.
He could give a damn about Russian soldiers.
But China, India, and Brazil.
They're about to face a choice between the American economy or helping Putin.
And I think they're going to come pick the American economy.
Why they would abandon bricks.
Before you respond, I know you have a response.
This is the guy that gets to whisper into Trump's ear every time they play golf and they sit next to each other in the golf cart.
This is a dangerous attitude.
But go ahead, please.
I mean, I think that people like Lindsey Graham and many people in the American foreign policy establishment have no sense of the limits of American power, whether you're talking about military might or economic might.
They think we can just run around the world pushing people around by threatening them and if the threats don't work we can use military force against them maybe you could think that way during the unipolar moment but those days are in the rear view mirror we now live in a multipolar world china's a peer competitor as i said it's not plausible to argue that we can put 100% tariffs on China.
We've gone down this road in the past few months.
We tried to get tough with the Chinese and Trump was forced to back off.
Furthermore, he can't do this with India.
It would be disastrous for American foreign policy.
So I just don't know what these people are talking about.
Maybe Trump is crazy enough that he'll try to do it and we'll see what happens.
But at some point, this is really going to come back and bite him in the honey.
Senator, excuse me, General Christopher Donahue commands more troops than any other American general, all American troops in Europe and in Africa.
And at a recent conference in Germany, speaking to other an international military group, including American General.
general generals who are colleagues of his threatened to put American ground troops on the ground in Russia.
Now you are a graduate of West Point and a veteran of the Air Force.
I'm going to ask you some questions about what generals should be saying, but I want you to hear this first.
It's relatively brief.
It's only about 20 seconds.
Chris cut number 16.
If you look at Kaliningrad, at its There's absolutely no reason why that A2AD bubble.
to deter Russia, we cannot take that down from the ground in a time frame that is unheard of and faster than we've ever been able to do.
We've already planned that.
We've already developed it.
On the ground, planned it, developed it.
Professor Meershammer, could such a statement have been made by a four-star general without approval of the Secretary of Defense and the President of the United States?
It's hard to believe that he didn't get approval to say that.
It's a remarkably provocative and foolish statement.
And I find it hard to imagine that a general would make a statement of that sort without getting it cleared by at least the Pentagon and I would imagine even the President of the United States.
Could you imagine if a Russian general said, we could take the Aleutian Islands off the coast of Alaska in remarkable speed.
We've trained it for it.
We're prepared to do it.
It would be the moral equivalent of that.
And you can imagine how President Trump, Secretary Hagseth, Senator Graham, and that crowd, and then the American public.
But very importantly, It's not the strategic equivalent.
That's the key point.
When you talk about the Aleutian Islands, you're not talking about taking American real estate in the context of a war.
There's no war over Alaska or Canada or anything like that.
We're talking about taking Kaliningrad in the context of an almost war between the United States and Russia.
I wouldn't even call it a proxy war.
I call it an almost war because it's so close to being a war.
We've been very close to being fully at war with the Russians for over three years now, right?
This is serious business.
And we've made it clear to the Russians that we're bent on knocking them out of the ranks of the great powers.
We want to defeat the Russians.
So it's in that context that you have General Donahue talking about American or NATO troops taking Kaliningrad.
Kaliningrad is Russian territory.
That's another way of saying it's sacred territory.
Yes, yes.
The idea that NATO would even threaten to initiate a campaign that involves invading and conquering Kaliningrad is almost unthinkable to me.
Well, what's going on here with these threats?
Trump threatens Putin, Senator Graham threatens Putin.
Now this general comes out of nowhere.
I never heard of him before, although it turns out he was in charge of the disastrous evacuation of Afghanistan.
And then they promoted him and gave him a fourth star, which requires Senate confirmation.
He threatens.
the Russians.
Is the American foreign policy both reckless and depraved?
Yes.
I mean, certainly reckless.
I mean, this is, in my opinion, a reckless statement.
Look, if you're the Russians, right, and you know that Kaliningrad is exposed, the general is correct that it's exposed Russian territory because it's detached from Mother Russia and it's surrounded by a handful of NATO states.
So it's exposed.
This means that in a crisis, the Russians have a powerful incentive to preempt, to prevent that from happening.
If you get into a crisis with the Russians, you do not want them to have an incentive to preempt.
And this is what that does.
We would have never done anything like this in the Cold War.
If you go back and look at American policymaking during the Cold War, we were much more cautious.
Now, you could say Russia is not the Soviet Union.
The problem with that argument is that Russia has thousands of nuclear weapons, just like the Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear weapons.
And yes, Russia is not as powerful as the Soviet Union was, but that probably makes them more scared than the Soviets would have been in an analogous situation.
So you don't want to threaten these people by talking about taking Kaliningrad with great ease.
it just makes no sense at all and i have to have to tell you i never heard of of it where is it and what is it It's a small piece of territory that used to be part of Germany.
It was referred to as East Prussia.
And basically the Baltic states separate.
separated from Belarus and from Russia.
So it is sort of out there by itself.
It's a part of Russia, but it's not contiguous to the mainland.
That's correct.
I mean, under international law, as I understand it, General Donahue has justified.
a Russian military strike on whatever forces he claims he's got are ready to come in and take Kaliningrad.
They don't have to wait for it to happen under the law after that statement.
We don't care about international law.
In fact, if, you know, about what's going on in Gaza, we're basically.
wrecking international law.
Right.
We'll move to Gaza now.
Do you sense, excuse me, excuse me, Professor, do you sense a slow growth of international consensus of what you've been saying for a couple of years and everybody in this program has, that the Israelis are engaged in genocide and a recognition that their more recent behavior is the use?
of starvation as an instrument to produce this genocidal effect.
Do you sense a growing consensus around that view?
I think there's no question that there are increasing numbers of people every week who are saying this is a genocide or if it's not a genocide, it is a war crime and that Israel needs to be punished and everything needs to be done to stop this genocide in Gaza.
There's no question about that.
And you see that.
with regard to countries like Britain, France, Canada, and now Portugal talking about recognizing a Palestinian state and even punishing.
Israel in certain ways.
I think it's so clear at this point in time what the Israelis are up to that it's inevitable that this tide will only grow with the passage of time.
know you were just interviewed by my friend and colleague, my friend and former colleague, still my friend, but formerly my colleague Tucker Carlson.
And of course, I kind of
But shortly after you were interviewed, Tucker Carlson interviewed a retired Lieutenant Colonel by the name of Tony Aguilar, whom we hope to have on the show soon, who made some profound statements about his own observations in Gaza.
Take a listen.
You've spent your life in combat zones.
That's why I think your testimony is so compelling.
because you have a frame of reference.
You've seen a lot of destruction and a lot of killing in your life for 25 years.
How would you compare what you saw in Gaza to what you've seen in, say, Afghanistan or Iraq?
Nothing compares.
Nothing I have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan., in Baghdad, in Mosul, Sadr City, all through Afghanistan, Syria, the southern Philippines, some places where there's dense populations.
I have never witnessed anything as brutal, destructive, violent.
And I would say that that steps far over our international laws of how we persecute wars and how we engage in warfare.
We've we've long been saying this for a long time.
Colonel McGregor's been saying it.
Scott Ritter's been saying it.
Jeff Sachs has been saying it.
Almost everybody in the show has been saying it.
But here you have a hardened military guy telling us all over the world where he has been, where these horrible conflagrations have occurred.
And he's never seen anything worse than what is happening in Gaza now.
And yet.
And yet, I hope I have the right number here, Chris.
Netanyahu denying that there is starvation.
Israel is presented as though we are applying a campaign of starvation in Gaza.
What a bold-face lie.
There is no policy of starvation in Gaza, and there is no starvation in Gaza.
We've enabled the amount required by international law to come in.
Senator Bernie Sanders, a little late to this, referred to what Benjamin Netanyahu said as a dis dis dis disgusting liar.
It's even worse than that.
It's hard to find words to describe Netanyahu and especially what he just said there.
I mean, it's patently obvious that the Israelis are engaged in genocide or if that word is too strong for you, mass murder.
It's patently obvious that they're starving the population.
They're creating a giant concentration camp now.
And it's all just so obvious.
And the lieutenant colonel who just talked to Tucker made this clear.
And by the way, judge, this is one of the reasons the Israelis don't want to let journalists and other observers into Gaza.
They don't want those observers to see what's happening and then report back to people in the West.
But some people get in like this lieutenant colonel and they tell you the truth.
And it's consistent with everything you hear from UN workers, from aid workers, from doctors who are in there and so forth and so on.
This is a genocide.
The Israelis are committing what is the greatest crime against humanity, genocide.
I want you to talk about the damage that the Netanyahu regime is causing to Israeli society.
And I came across a phrase in some of my reading this week that I suspect you're familiar with and have written about.
Israeli victim identity.
What is that?
I'm not sure exactly what it means.
It probably means the famous saying from Elie Wazel that Jews are never the perpetrator, they're always the victim, or to put it in slightly different terms, they're never the victimizer, they're always the victim.
Well, this piece in Ha'aretz claims that they can never again make that claim after what they're doing in Gaza.
Well, the truth is they could never make that claim a long time ago.
because what's going on in Gaza is just a continuation of a long story that started in the early 20th century.
So they have not always been the victim.
If you go to Nazi Germany and what happened during the Holocaust, of course the Jews were the victims.
They were not the victimizers.
Nobody in their right mind would make that argument.
But if you go to the Middle East, if you go to what was once Palestine and is now Israel, it's impossible to make the argument that the Israelis were the victims and not the victimizer.
They were the victimizer.
They went into an area.
where there were hardly any Jews and the land and the villages and the people were Palestinians and they stole their land and they created this state of Israel.
And to do that, you had to commit crimes.
You had to be the victimizer.
There is no way the Zionists could have created the state of Israel without being victimizers.
And the principal victims were the Palestinians.
As I like to say, and this is an argument that will strike most people as being on the extreme side, but it really is not.
What the Zionists and now the Israelis have done to the Palestinians over time is one of the great crimes of modern history.
You have made that case very powerfully.
And Judge, by the way, on empirical evidence.
Exactly.
You took the words right out of my mouth.
People may think John is making this up.
This is just him putting the facts together to suit his own views.
No, I learned this from reading books and reading articles that were written by Israelis and Western Jews.
There is a huge amount of evidence to support the argument that the Israelis have made.
the israelis were the victimizers and the palestinians were the victims in the context of the middle east there's just no question about this and anybody who's interested and wants to study this issue will find plenty of supporting evidence for the point that I'm making.
How much damage has Netanyahu's regime done to Israeli society?
Is it recoverable?
Well, I don't think Israel is going to disappear from the map.
I think the Israeli state is going to remain intact.
But the question you have to ask yourself is what is that Israeli state going to look like when all of this is done?
I think that what Benjamin Netanyahu has done is he has exacerbated serious tensions inside the body politic that were already there that are going to continue well after he leaves office.
He's also gotten Israel involved in conflicts in places like Syria.
Lebanon and with Iran in ways that are going to linger for a long time and cause really serious damage on the Israeli home front.
I'm a firm believer that a thoroughly militarized state that is fighting wars all the time is undermining basic liberal values, basic decency on the home front.
front and you see this in spades inside of israel when you look at the body populace's attitude towards what's going on in gaza right furthermore he's got israel stuck back in Gaza.
The Israelis got out of Gaza in 2005 and they got out of Gaza in 2005 under the leadership of Ariel Sharon, who was no pussy cat.
And Sharon got out because Sharon understood full well that that place is a hornet's nest.
Well, they're back in there and they've been unable to expel the Palestinians.
And the question you have to ask yourself is, how does this.
all end?
And it's very hard to tell a happy story.
The final point I'd make to you is that Israel is in a position where it is extremely dependent on the United States.
Israel and the United States fight these wars together.
They execute the genocide together.
Israel is no longer the independent state that it once thought it was.
So I think for all these different reasons, Israel is a country that is in serious trouble.
And that situation does not improve with time.
If anything, it gets worse.
Does Donald Trump control Benjamin Netanyahu or does Benjamin Netanyahu control Donald Trump?
Well, I think it's quite clear that the balance of power in that relationship clearly favors Benjamin Netanyahu.
And I constantly wonder what's going on with Trump.
Because if you look around the world, almost every leader, and here we're talking mainly about the West, almost every leader in the West is beginning to bend on what's going You see this with the French, you see this with the British, the Canadians, right?
They're all beginning to move in a way that is antagonistic towards Israel.
Not completely.
But Trump doesn't move at all.
It's really quite amazing.
And it's hard to believe that this is in the American national interest, that he thinks it's in our interest to support Israel no matter what.
We are getting, he is getting a huge amount of criticism for this, but he's not bending at all.
And I sometimes wonder why that's the case.
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