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Oct. 21, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
23:43
Alastair Crooke : Israel and its Neighbors After Two Years of War
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, October 21st, 2025.
Alistair Crook will be with us in just a moment on Israel and its neighbors after two years of war.
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Alistair, welcome here, my friend, and good day to you.
And thank you for accommodating my schedule.
I can't tell you where my body clock is because I just returned from six days in Moscow.
You are familiar with all that.
You're probably the best in the world at adjusting body clocks when changing time zones.
But to matters more relevant than my biology, how do you account for the new United States belligerency in foreign policy and in threats of war?
Well, it's deliberate.
It isn't something that has happened accidentally.
And I think what it comes to is a sense of feeling the need to be dominating, to be powerful, strength, strong, in order to unfold the plans that the Trump team have to try and, if you like, resurrect the economy.
They know that the war against Ukraine has been a failure, which is a psychological disaster for the United States and for the West, for Europe particularly.
But they know also that the debt crisis and the deficit crisis are creeping up on them.
And they have to address it.
And they have to get resources into the United States as they see this before they are overtaken by deficits.
So it comes out of desperation and the sense that either by rhetorical means, financial means, or military means, they have to push all of their allies and non-allies into this new exercise of resetting the financial order.
Well, I'm convinced from my communications with Russians in the past six days, the most significant of whom was Maria Zakharova.
You know her.
She's the official spokesperson for the foreign ministry.
She lived in Manhattan for three years.
She has a profound understanding of Donald Trump, the person, and of American culture and society today, that this kind of crazy talk from him doesn't bother them.
And for example, just yesterday, he said, Chris, if we can find it, I don't remember the number.
Oh, here it is.
That Ukraine can still win.
Now, I would think that a lot of people in the Kremlin would say, oh, this is crazy, but no, they sort of get it that he needs to stir the base periodically.
Number nine, Chris.
Just a few weeks ago, Anna, you said that Ukraine could possibly win the war and they could still win it.
I don't think they will, but they could still win it.
I never said they would win it.
I said they could win.
Anything could happen.
You know, war is a very strange thing.
So you can't tell me why he says these things because you'd have to get inside his brain.
But you can tell me the geopolitical, your perception of the geopolitical response to these things, he says.
After Zelensky was apparently summarily dismissed from the White House.
And did you notice when he arrived at Dulles, there was no American to greet him, not even a low-level person in the State Department protocol office.
Nobody met him at all.
Anyway, he went to Europe where, according to the Financial Times, a fairly reliable source, they embraced him.
We are in the middle in the West of a huge psychological operation.
I don't know if it's down to Battalion 77 of the UK, the PSYOPS unit in the UK, or whether it comes from the CIA.
But do you notice that all the reporting, everything that we hear, either from Washington Post or the Financial Times, is all about territory.
They talk about Kherson or Zaporizhia.
There may be parts going here, parts going there.
And none of that reflects actually anything of material import to what this war is about.
It is total psyops because the war has always been plain.
It is about neutralizing Ukraine as a threat to Russia, neutralizing NATO as a threat, direct threat on its borders to Russia.
And it is also about protecting many of those people who lived in Donbass and Lunyansk, who are Russian citizens and who are culturally Russian.
And this is what it was about and still is about.
It's not about a little bit of territory.
Why is it projected as that?
Why is it projected as all about territory?
Well, because that makes, you know, it goes back, it fulfills the original European narrative.
I mean, this war started in 22 when Russia, without provocation or legitimacy, invaded a sovereign country.
And it ignores all of the context.
And therefore, it makes it appear as we have just got Putin invading, if you like, a sovereign country to grab more territory, which he shouldn't have anyway.
That's one of the narratives that they're pushing out.
And the second narrative comes from many of these, from commentators who say they follow Russia at close length, who say the anger at Putin being weak and he's liberal and too liberal and too accommodating to Americans and is reaching such a pitch that is becoming a danger to Putin,
of course, is another narrative that is set up by the West to try and divide the Russian people, to make them fear that Putin is about to do something very, very dangerous that's going to affect it.
Whereas in fact, if you want to look at what Putin's mindset is, it's very far from that.
He's a historian.
He knows his history well.
So he will recall what happened in 1917 and 18 when the Bolshevik revolution unsettled and confused Russia.
And it was starting to lose the war against the central powers, against Germany principally.
And what happened was that they were presented with an ultimatum.
They had to give up all their territories or else they would be attacked by Germany.
And they accepted and they lost all of the territories.
They lost Ukraine, they lost parts of Poland, they lost the Baltic territories in this treaty that was signed at the end of the four-day ultimatum.
And Russia has lived this humiliation ever since, long since lived it.
And so I think when I was in Petersburg a little while ago and people were saying, listen, you know, the management of the of the war, you know, how it's managed, you know, is always debating.
But no one is any doubt.
We have given blood to get to where we are now.
And we know if there's another minst accord or a ceasefire such as the one being proposed by the United States by Trump.
Now, this is just an attempt at treachery because we all know then we will be giving more blood in three or four years time when NATO has restored Ukraine and retrained them and put them back into the front lines to attack us.
And so we all support Putin's idea that there has to be a success in the special operation that stops, if you like, the extreme nationalists from, if you like, getting the success of freezing it and then allowing the war to restart in the future, Zaporizhia, which is also what Europe is projecting and what America is projecting.
So when you hear all this about, oh, it's all about territory, it's about a little bit of Zaporizhia, you can know you can put it down and say, I'm listening to a psyop that is being produced either by Britain or America, which is intended to weak, weaken the Russians.
Zaporizhia, which is intended to weak, weaken the Russians, but it's about a little bit of a sudden, but it's about a little bit of a sudden.
Well, how I wish the leaders of the countries in the EU could understand even a fraction of what you've just articulated.
I mean, just over the weekend, and I was still in Moscow when I saw this, what is her name?
Kaya Kalas, the head of the foreign ministry of the EU, said that Vladimir Putin should not come to any NATO country.
And she reminded people that there's an arrest warrant out for him issued by the ICC.
I mean, Europe is just in a different world.
At least the leadership of Europe is in a different world.
What leverage will Trump have in Budapest?
I mean, you and I and almost everybody on this show recognize that Anchorage was a failure.
But what leverage does Trump have so that he doesn't have two failures in a row?
Well, unlike perhaps others, I don't say that Anchorage was a total failure, because what was important that came out of it was that Putin was treated as a serious leader.
He was given esteem by President Trump.
And that was really important, because there's no way of having any discussion or any channels of communications if you're going to demonize the person you want to talk to, to the point at which you blacken them so much that any discussion appears to be a form of heresy or treachery or something against the norms.
So I think it was that leverage.
Well, Trump has virtually none because I've not seen the Russians change their position from that outline by President Putin much earlier at the foreign ministry.
I think in was it February, May 22?
And he said, these are our conditions and And of course, you hear all this about, you know, giving up a bit of Zaporizhia, giving up a bit of Assan.
But don't forget, they are Russia now, according to the Russian constitution.
What is more is the people in those oblasts voted to be Russian as such.
I mean, the people took a vote to be Russian.
I find it very difficult to see, other than in extremely special circumstances, that Putin would have the mandate.
He certainly hasn't the mandate to change the constitution or to give up territory without going back to parliament and changing the constitution, which I don't see as a possibility at this stage.
So I think, really, I don't expect anything to come from this meeting unless Russia can somehow, and now I learn, I'm not sure if it's confirmed or not, that the pre-meeting, which was going to be so important between Lavrov and Rubio, I think, has now been postponed.
So I don't know when that's going to be happening.
But of course, I mean, Lavrov was going to say some home truth.
And it looks to me that actually Putin also spoke home truth to Trump during that two and a half hour conversation the other day, because Trump came out of that, I think, a little bit shocked and chastened.
And he then went on to say to Zelensky, you know, you could lose everything.
You can lose everything.
They could defeat you.
And he then went on to say, and this sounds like he'd got it during that conversation.
He said, you know, it's still only a special operation.
The Russians haven't moved to a war footing yet.
Wait till they do that.
So I think probably Putin laid it out fairly clearly to Trump that conversation, gave it to him quite hard.
And I think also, then we had the tomahawks disappearing from the discussion after that.
No, I'm not going to, well, not going to give tomahawks.
And that is, I think, because also probably Putin gently said to him, I have no evidence for this, but Putin has been talking recently about new weapons.
He's been saying we've got them ready and they are in production.
And he has one which is called the Berevsik, which is a nuclear-powered cruise missile that can stay up for virtually ever, going circling around the globe and calm at a target from any direction that is not expected and attack.
And it wouldn't surprise me if he said, well, look, Mr. Trump, you know, you have this supposed leverage of these tomahawks, which are rather elderly, not very effective missiles.
We have the latest cruise missile, which can reach America with no problem, can stay circling around the globe and finally suddenly come down.
Warhead is capable of being changed in the right direction.
It will be very difficult for you to see it because it is subsonic and it is moving slowly.
It is the first missile with a nuclear part drive to it.
And I think he probably said, look, you know, I think, you know, you ought to calculate really what leverage you have.
And if you want to go down this route, I would advise you strongly against it.
Not because we fear these tomahawks, we don't, but because it ends our relationship.
If you do that, it's the finish of our relations.
I heard the same thing from the foreign policy spokesperson.
We have some limited time, Alistair, so I have to jump to the other topic.
What has Israel accomplished in the two years of war?
Well, this is a very moot question.
I wrote about it at some length, what it did achieve and what it didn't achieve.
But we haven't finished this war yet.
And I would say that, you know, I don't think it's even this, We have a peace agreement coming.
We still have a ceasefire, but ceasefires don't often hold very purposefully.
I would say this is the thing that you have to sort of focus on, which is really going to tell us about what the stage is next.
I mean, no one, I can't say hard and fast what is coming next, but this is important: is the Israelis do not see that they have committed genocide or that they have committed anything for which they need to apologize.
In fact, you can hear Israeli generals saying, well, yeah, they killed a thousand of us and we've killed 50,000.
And maybe it should have been even more.
And therefore, I think that, you know, without that sort of sense of that there was something wrong, we will see Israel moving back to continuing the conflict with Hamas.
And they will find the right trigger.
They will get someone.
I saw a video of one of the Israeli special forces saying, listen, we've got people in Gaza.
They will fire some rounds and then we will fire back and then we're back in the business of the next stage of the war.
So I don't think it's possible, given the sort of sense, still 80%, you know, approve of Israelis approve of what's been happening in Gaza.
80% of them think, you know, if anything, it didn't go far enough because there are still Palestinians and Hamas living there.
And the other thing that is still, you know, very much in play is what I've said before, that the agreement was only a ceasefire.
The other part of it is very complicated because in the second part of it, you know, there was supposed to be ceasefire and you have Witkoff and Kushner talking with the Hamas negotiator face to face, talking about their sons and things.
And then, but phase two, Hamas is supposed to disappear.
Hamas is supposed to give up.
And then no one knows what happens to it.
And that there will be no governments in Gaza.
I mean, how are you going to square this dilemma?
I think it'll be very difficult.
I know you have to go and I don't want to give your heartburn, but here's Witkoff and the president's son-in-law making an absurd statement about genocide.
Chris, cut number 14.
Before the hostages actually come out, you decide to go to Gaza.
And what did you see?
It looked almost like a nuclear bomb had been set off in that area.
And then you see these people moving back.
And I asked the IDF, where are they going?
Like, I'm looking around.
These are all runes.
And they said, well, they're going back to the areas where their destroyed home was onto their plot and they're going to pitch a tent.
And it's very sad because you think to yourself, they really have nowhere else to go.
Would you say now, having been there, that it was genocide?
No.
No, absolutely not.
No.
Well, they're drinking the Kool-Aid.
I would say, just to finish off in one word, Relly, in all my experience of trying to get some sort of political settlement, it is so important for both sides to be able to have the courage, the ability to acknowledge what has happened, to acknowledge the past and their part in it and responsibilities.
This was true, truth and reconciliation in South Africa.
It was true in Ireland too.
It's very important if you block out and you cannot say that anything was wrong with the killing, this massacre of Palestinians.
What we're going to see is this conflict will continue.
How's it crooked thank you very much, my dear friend.
Thank you especially for accommodating my schedule.
I know how hectic your own is.
We'll look forward to seeing you at your usual day and time next week.
All the best.
Thank you very much, Judge.
Bye for now.
Bye-bye.
And coming up later today at 10 o'clock this morning, Ray McGovern at 11 o'clock.
Larry Johnson at 2 o'clock this afternoon.
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