All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 23, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
27:18
COL. Douglas Macgregor : NATO Collapsing.
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Ajudging Freedom.
Today is Thursday, October 23rd, 2025.
Colonel Douglas McGregor will be with us here in just a moment on NATO collapsing and the other breaking news of the day.
But first, this.
History tells us every market eventually falls.
Currencies collapse.
And look at where we are now.
37 trillion in national debt.
Stocks have record highs defying gravity.
So what happens next?
Groceries, gas, housing, everything's going up.
And this dollar, it buys less every day.
When the system breaks, your stocks won't save you and your dollars won't either.
But one thing will, gold.
I've said it on my show for years.
Gold survives collapse.
Central bankers know this and billionaires know it.
That's why they're buying more.
Is it too late to buy or is it just the right time?
Call my friends at Lear Capital to find out.
Ask questions.
Get the free information.
There's no pressure.
And that's why I buy my gold and silver from Lear.
And right now, you can get up to $20,000 in bonus metals with a qualified purchase.
Call 800-511-4620 or go to LearjudgeNap.com today.
Colonel McGregor, welcome here, my dear friend.
Thank you so much, as you always do for accommodating my schedule.
Before we get to NATO collapsing and the latest on Russia and Ukraine, do you think this Gaza peace plan was a scam?
Oh, I think it's absolutely a scam.
How else could you characterize it?
Gaza is doomed.
You know, people keep saying, well, the war is over, obviously.
No, it's not.
None of the objectives that the Israelis have established have been achieved.
They control roughly half of Gaza.
At least that's been largely demolished.
And I suppose Kushner, Witkoff, and others are making plans to build luxury apartments or something there.
But I wouldn't be so hasty in predicting that outcome.
I think there's going to be more trouble ahead.
So I don't see how you can characterize it in any other sense.
The Vice President of the United States is standing with the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his good buddy and envoy Steve Witkoff in Israel just two days ago talked about the redevelopment of Gaza.
And you know how he referred to Kushner?
The investor.
No surprise, Colonel.
No surprise at all.
Well, that's the, I don't want to call it a shadow government, but I think Kushner and Witkoff and others constitute the real government.
That's the sad part.
Yeah, it surely is.
The Knesset yesterday voted overwhelmingly to apply Israeli domestic law to the West Bank, which is the functional equivalent of annexing it.
And to my surprise, both Secretary of State Rubio and Vice President Vance used some strong language condemning it.
Were you surprised?
Oh, I don't pay attention to what anybody says anymore.
I simply look at what they do.
So I wouldn't pay any attention to any of those statements.
Let's see what actually happens.
And I suspect the Israelis will have their way with the West Bank unless someone externally militarily challenges them.
Do we know, I'm transitioning now into Russia and Ukraine, Colonel, if it was the Kremlin or the White House that called off the conference in Budapest between Presidents Trump and Putin?
My impression is it was very definitely the White House.
And why would a president seeking peace do these things in one week, announce or allow the wall street journal to publish and then he claims he didn't the use of long-range uh russian missiles uh impose additional sanctions on russian oil giants and mock the russian economy and none of these is based in fact but
did all of it.
Well, I think the peace president has become the president of perpetual contradictions and confusion.
I'm not sure what President Trump really thinks.
And again, you have to look at what he does.
Everything that you've stated is absolutely factual.
The other point, though, that I would add to this is that he is now campaigning strongly for the re-election of Lindsey Graham to the Senate.
At the same time, he and the people around him seem to be determined to do everything in their power to destroy Senator Rand and Mr. Massey from Kentucky.
So if you look at those things, you juxtapose what I said with what you just outlined.
The only impression you can come away with is that he's perhaps confused, but ultimately has settled on extending the Biden policies.
Do you think it's fair to challenge President Trump when he says it's still Biden's war?
I believe it's Donald Trump's war now in October of 2025.
You know from past experience for any president who comes into office within 60 to 90 days, he frankly owns it.
His ability to stand there and blame whatever is wrong on his predecessor, is largely gone.
I think that's evaporated for President Trump.
So the notion that this is anybody's war but his is ridiculous.
He had an opportunity to do many things differently.
He could have gone to Budapest.
He could have sat down and put a map on the table and began discussing where a line would be drawn, what the conditions that resulted from that line would look like, and firmly establish him, you know, his support for neutrality of Ukraine.
Had he done those things, we'd be on our way to an end in this conflict.
Instead, he didn't go at all because I don't think he felt that he could do those things.
I don't think President Trump is a free agent.
I still think that the powerful figures, you can call them financial oligarchs, whatever you want to, donors, they continue to shape policy and they very much exert control over him.
The statements made by Foreign Minister Lavrov after his telephone call with Marco Rubio lead me to believe that Rubio raised again something he knows the Russians have rejected from the beginning, the concept of a ceasefire as a condition precedent to serious peace negotiations.
But let's listen to Sergey Lavrov.
Maybe you'll have a different view.
Chris, cut number 16.
Let me reiterate.
An immediate ceasefire, suddenly back on the agenda, as opposed to addressing the root causes of the conflict, would mean only one thing: that a vast portion of Ukraine remains under Nazi rule.
It would be the only place on earth where an entire language is banned by law, a language that incidentally is one of the UN's official tongues and the native language of Ukraine's majority population.
Those now lobbying our American colleagues to abandon their stance on long-term sustainable settlement, to simply stop and let history judge, are the same forces behind this push.
We know who is handling this, Zelensky's European patrons and masters.
But such an approach runs entirely counter to what Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump agreed upon in Anchorage, focusing on root causes, rejecting Ukraine's NATO integration and fully securing the lawful rights of Russian and Russian-speaking populations.
We remain ready to continue this work.
thought he was very very astute by separating the demand for the ceasefire from donald trump that statement that we just watched was made by him within minutes of having concluded his call with secretary rubio and the key phrase is an immediate ceasefire suddenly back on the agenda gee how did it suddenly get back on the agenda you just hung up with rubio Well,
this, I think, the Russians thought was settled in Anchorage, because in Anchorage, they made it abundantly clear that there could be no ceasefire of any kind until these core issues were resolved.
Suddenly, he gets, and I think he thought, and perhaps President Putin thought, particularly after his two and a half hour conversation with President Trump, that President Trump understood that.
Now they've discovered after Secretary of State Rubio's discussion that that's not the case.
Let's be frank.
Rubio, excuse me, represents the same camp that Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, and a host of other people are part of.
Rubio has no interest in ending this conflict.
And he's gone back to President Trump and the people around President Trump have joined him in persuading Donald Trump that let this drag on.
This is all in our interest.
This keeps Russia tied down and out of our trouble in the Middle East.
In other words, if the Russians are still fighting in Ukraine, they can't do anything else.
They can't interfere with us and with Israel and the long-term goals of the Middle East.
And simultaneously, this makes the Europeans happy in their view, especially London, Paris, Berlin, and Warsaw.
And let's just let this pot boil.
And I think President Trump was happy to do that.
Remember, President Trump ran on this platform of I'm a decisive businessman.
I make decisions.
I get things done.
What we're discovering is that he's very much a politician.
And politicians like being a little bit pregnant.
They don't like bringing the child to fruition or to term.
If they bring the child to term, then they're responsible for the baby, however ugly it may be.
So it's easier to just let the baby sit in the womb.
And I think that's what President Trump has decided to do in Ukraine.
Now, that's a very dumb idea.
And I think the Russians have gotten the message.
And that's why within the last 24 hours, their actions of crossing the Dnieper River in Kherson, establishing and widening a bridgehead, are clear signals that the Russians are going to press ahead now because they know they have no alternative but to press ahead and end this war militarily on their terms.
The summary that you just gave of the thinking in the White House, concluding with the very McGregor-like phrase of letting the pot boil.
Colonel, that could have been articulated by Jake Sullivan or Tony Blinken a year and a half ago.
Sure, absolutely.
And the people that are shaping deciding U.S. foreign and defense policy are very much the same in this administration as they were under the last.
Now, you can debate fine points, but the bottom line is what is the ultimate outcome?
The outcome is the same.
So this is Administration Biden number two, right?
I have President Trump.
This is no surprise because he often contradicts himself saying, this is just August, so three months ago, I don't think you need a ceasefire.
Chris.
Last week, you warned of what you called severe consequences.
If a 30-day ceasefire or any type of ceasefire were not agreed to by Russia, will there be severe consequences?
Does that change because he's not going to be able to do that?
I don't think you need a ceasefire.
You know, if you look at the six deals that I settled this year, they were all at war.
I didn't do any ceasefires.
I don't know that he settled those wars.
He claims to do it, but there he is to have done it.
There he is sitting next to his frenemy, President Selinsky.
I never thought I'd use that word, if it is a word, saying I don't think you need a ceasefire.
So, you know, whenever I'm on Russian television, they say to me, how do you explain this?
How do you explain that?
The guy says whatever he thinks at the moment.
Well, I think there's a lot of truth in that.
He's very impulsive, as you know, and he's easily swept away by emotion.
Unfortunately, that's the last thing we need right now.
We need hard-based calculations, you know, do the math.
Somebody got to him on the Tomahawk missiles and hopefully on the rest of the missile arsenal and gave him some cold, hard facts.
We only have so many.
We really can't afford to ship any more out of the country.
We'll be lucky to sustain ourselves with what we have.
And oh, by the way, you can't surge production.
You know, you take a missile like the Javelin, it has 450 different components in it.
These have to be very carefully assembled over a long period of time.
And these components come from different subunits.
In other words, different subsidiaries of larger organizations like Raytheon.
Maybe somebody has gotten to him and explained that.
So he understands that.
That hasn't deterred him from making bad decisions and prolonging the war.
But from his vantage point, I still think he runs this political calculus that says, well, what difference does it make?
It doesn't make any difference to us.
We have our own agenda.
And so we let more people die in Ukraine.
And that doesn't really make any difference to the American voter.
And to be frank, he's got a point.
Most Americans are not interested and they're not paying attention.
Here's the latest on tomahawks.
If there is a latest, it's from Vice President Vance.
I think he might have been in Israel when he said this.
We'll find out when we look at a crisp cut number one.
We're going to keep on walking down the pathway of peace.
Whether it takes us another few months, another few weeks, or God forbid, longer than that, we're going to keep on working at it.
How confident am I that this is going to get wrapped up?
I feel optimistic.
I would say that, but the timeline is anybody's guess.
Would you like to give Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine?
Well, I mean, the president right now is certainly hearing that request from the Ukrainians.
We know that it's something that they want.
That's something the president's going to ultimately decide, but he has not yet made the decision to give Tomahawks to Ukraine.
What was the calculation in not providing those Tomahawks to Ukraine at this time?
Well, look, the President of the United States is trying to ensure that America's security is taken care of first.
And obviously, that means that we need to have the critical weapon system for our own military, for our own troops.
So that's what the president is focused on.
And as with all the decisions that he's made related to Russia-Ukraine, he's trying to bring peace because he thinks that's what's in America's best interest.
If he thinks that it's in America's best interest to sell additional weapons to Europe, he will do that.
But right now, he hasn't made that decision with regards to Tom Hawks.
The president focuses on anything.
I think J.D. Vance would make an excellent briefer on a daily basis.
He's mastered the art of saying as little as possible.
The only thing he said, though, that is worth noting, and I think this is true, that the president is now acutely sensitive to our own arsenal.
What have we got?
What can we use?
What can we give away?
I think that's true.
I hope there's also an understanding that if we were to employ something like the Tomahawk in the future, that it would require mission planning and execution by Americans, whether they're in uniform or contractors.
And that's an escalatory step in the wrong direction.
That tends us in the direction of a potential war with Russia.
So I think President Trump also understands that.
But back to what you were saying before and what we were discussing, at this point, he thinks he can afford to walk away and focus elsewhere and quote unquote, let the pot boil.
And I think that's what he's done.
Colonel, what is the state of things on the ground vis-a-vis the Russian military?
You emailed me this morning of some rather significant victory in the capturing of an island.
I didn't really grasp it fully, but I knew we were going to be talking about it this afternoon.
Yeah, well, the Russians have crossed the Dnieper River.
They already have special operations forces and agents on the ground outside of Odessa.
They're now putting together a bridgehead on the west side of the Dnieper River, for all intents and purposes.
It's a bridgehead that will be utilized to position forces to cross that river in strength.
Now, why would the Russians cross the river, the South Dieper, with large forces?
It would be to take Odessa.
Why would you take Odessa?
Odessa would turn, if it's in Russian hands, would stop the flow of many, many arms, equipment, and support into Ukraine from the sea, from the Black Sea.
Secondly, it would also landlock Ukraine.
In other words, turn this future rump state we call Ukraine into a state with no outlet to the sea, which of course would be very harmful to the future of Ukraine.
Now, everybody's saying, oh, no, that will never happen.
No, absolutely, I think it's going to happen.
I think they're going to take Kharkov up in the north.
These are things that have been discussed for a very long time.
And I think President Putin to this point, had he sat down with President Trump, would have been willing to discuss alternative futures for Odessa.
But at this point, the incentive is gone.
There's no incentive for much restraint.
Now, that doesn't mean the Russians are going to put nuclear warheads on missiles and launch them.
No, absolutely not.
That's the last thing in the world they want.
But they have the military power, the fighting power on the ground, the manpower.
They're bringing in more manpower every day.
They have no shortage of people willing to volunteer.
And they're very well trained.
They're very well equipped.
The morale is high.
There's no reason to stop any longer.
So I think Odessa will fall into their hands, and that's a long-term goal.
Now, up north, what could happen?
Well, Slovyansk.
I mean, we could go through a whole range of discussions up and down the line where these battles of encirclement on a tactical and operational level have been conducted with great success by the Russians.
And they're gradually, systematically moving forward and annihilating whatever they find.
Now, people are saying, well, why don't they just go forward at a much more rapid pace?
Well, number one, when the war ends, they really don't want to govern people who are not Russians.
In other words, to the extent that they can, they want to ensure the populations are pro-Russian or Russian culturally and ethnically.
So they don't want to govern Western Ukraine.
Secondly, they want to ensure as they move further to the west that there are no fifth columns left behind.
Ukrainians are very good at hiding in the woods and in small areas, coming up and shooting Russians, civilians, and military.
They don't want that.
They want to make sure that doesn't happen.
So these things take time.
But I think at this point, President Putin has probably signaled to the general staff: let's plan on taking Odessa.
Let's plan on moving further forward to the Dnieper River.
And we'll see if this has any impact on the West.
It's doubtful.
But there's something else going on.
And you mentioned this at the beginning, and this is what we really need to focus on.
And we're not looking at it in the United States.
We've had explosions, damage done to oil refineries in Slovakia, in Hungary, and I understand in Romania.
These refineries, especially in Slovakia and Hungary, are refining oil that comes through the so-called Druzhba pipeline that crosses Ukraine, comes out of Russia.
Why would these explosions occur suddenly?
The Slovaks and the Hungarians aren't blowing up their own pipelines.
So who's doing it?
Well, it's not the Russians.
Could it be Ukrainians?
Potentially.
Could it be Poles?
Maybe.
But the Ukrainians have their hands full as it is.
Could this be British, MI6, or IA operatives?
We don't know.
But this is driving a larger wedge between the Hungarians, the Slovaks.
I think the Czechs are watching this and see this is a very ominous sign.
The Slovenes are very uncomfortable with it.
So are the Croats.
The Romanian population is stuck with a president they really didn't want who is a puppet of the EU, but the population is very opposed to going to war with Russia.
All of this is bad news, and it signals, I think, the decay, the destruction, the disintegration of NATO and the EU, which is these things are now inevitable.
Should Russia fear NATO since it's disintegrating?
I don't think Russia needs to fear NATO, except the possibility that a maniac in London or Paris would turn to the use of a nuclear weapon.
And I say maniac because I don't think Starmer or Macron are maniacs.
Could a maniac come to power and do that?
I think that the possibilities are remote.
But the Russians can't ignore that as a possibility.
Otherwise, no.
And again, who would you rather fight?
Would you rather fight with a large force that is homogenous, where the language of command is uniform across all the formations, where the general staff, the command structure are set, there is absolute unity of action at every level.
Is that what you want?
Or do you want NATO, where you have units that speak different languages that do business differently, that are equipped differently, that think differently, that have different levels of commitment and interest, and governments that may not fully back whatever the supreme commander wants to do.
And so the supreme commander really isn't the supreme commander.
He's commanding what effectively looks like a compromise force.
Which one do you want?
Well, you don't want the compromise force.
So if you're a Russian, you look at this, say these people aren't going to be difficult to defeat because there's no unity of action and there won't be.
Wow.
Nevertheless, one of the preconditions for the cessation of the special military operation is a neutral Ukraine or what remains of it with an assurance forever, theoretically, not that you're going to assure anything forever of no NATO.
Yeah, no, I know that the Russians say that.
And for the moment, the Russians have to deal with facts.
And the fact is that NATO still exists.
What I'm saying is that NATO is fragile.
It's brittle.
It will break easily.
It's already begun to break.
That's why you have Mr. Orban, who has sent a note, I don't know if you've seen it, to his friends in Warsaw, because the Poles and the Hungarians really have a long history of cooperation.
They've always been on friendly terms.
And Mr. Orban is appalled by the attitude and the statements coming out of Warsaw.
Right.
Orban has been leading the charge against war with Russia.
Everybody knows that.
Now he's being treated as though he deserves to be treated as the enemy, that he should be grouped with Russia as the enemy.
This is insane, but it's also destructive.
It signals the end of NATO, frankly.
Our mutual friend, I wouldn't mention his name on air without his permission, who regularly emails you and me from Poland, very, very, very smart, astute, a person whose words we respect, is indicating that the Polish defense minister is a madman who would love nothing more than to bring the Polish military into a fight against Russia.
Well, he's not the first madman in European history or Polish history to feel that way.
The good news is that there are many senior officers in the Polish armed forces who are far more astute, and they understand the danger of that kind of action.
So while he is bombastic in his statements, much like this Donald Tusk or the foreign minister Sikorsky, there are others in Poland with common sense and they're in touch with reality.
So I wouldn't panic at this point.
I would just shake my head in disappointment, which I think is what Mr. Orban is doing.
I think that's happening in Slovakia, in the Czech Republic, and as I said, Slovenia, Croatia.
Colonel, thank you very much.
Thanks for letting me go across the board with you from Gaza to Ukraine.
Always a pleasure, my dear friend.
And thank you.
This is not your usual day or time, but thank you for accommodating my schedule.
Good to have you back.
Thank you, Colonel.
It's great to be with you.
Look forward to seeing you again soon.
Okay, bye-bye.
Bye.
And coming up soon at two o'clock this afternoon, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson at 3:15 this afternoon, Max Blumenthal.
▲
Export Selection