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Oct. 24, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
25:07
Pepe Escobar : Iran Ready For War.
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Thursday, October 23rd, 2025.
Pepe Escobar from Bangkok, Thailand, joins us now.
Pepe, thank you very much.
And to the audience, my apologies for the last minute change.
We, of course, are 15,000 miles from each other, and sometimes things intrude, but we have to grab Pepe when we can.
Pepe, before we start, I spent a wonderful week, as you know, in Moscow with many of our mutual friends, Professor Mohamed Mirandi, who'll be on the show, I believe, next week.
Scott Ritter, who's on later today, Larry Johnson, who's on tomorrow.
I can't tell you how many people, maybe two dozen, said to me, why isn't Pepe Escobar with your group?
I said, because he's in somewhere, somewhere in Thailand or China.
We can't find him.
But, Judge, very important for you and for our audience.
You remember our live show from Kashgar's old city in China?
Yes.
It became viral in China.
Wow.
Everywhere, especially on Billy Billy and on several other platforms with subtitles, and some of them we are speaking Chinese via AI.
I know you sent it to me.
I haven't looked at it yet, but I can't wait to see what I look like and what my mouth looks like.
You know, the way the AI works when they have Chinese coming out of my mouth.
I'm thrilled that it was viral.
I'm also thrilled at what I saw in Mexico, excuse me, in Moscow.
Sorry, when the president of the United States said there are gas lines in Moscow.
Now, I was all over Moscow.
Not only are there no gas lines, Mr. President, gas is cheaper in Moscow than it is in Manhattan.
Exactly.
And not only there are no gas lines, most of the vehicles in Moscow now are EVs.
Yes.
From China.
Yes, I was in a Chinese EV and it's like riding on air.
You don't hear a sound.
You don't feel anything.
It's just a very unique.
I wasn't driving it, of course, but it's a very unique experience.
Moscow is as beautiful, busy, hustle and bustle, immaculately clean as can be.
I'll tell you one funny story.
As you know, there's an underground passageway from the Metropol Hotel to the Bolshoy.
It's maybe 250 yards long.
So for Americans, that's two and a half football fields in length.
You could almost eat off the floor in there.
But there was a guy in there playing a violin, and I didn't know what he was playing or who he was or anything.
He looked at me and he began to play the theme music from the Godfather.
What?
I've never seen this happen in New York City where I live.
It was little things like that were simply remarkable.
But enough about my music there.
Knowledge is outstanding.
Yes, yes.
As you know, the RT, where you were sorely missed, the RT 20th anniversary celebration was at the to nine.
Right.
I wanted to ask you about what was your gut feeling of your experience in Moscow?
30 seconds or gut feeling.
No analysis.
My gut feeling is A plus 2.0, that the Muscovites are happy, fulfilled, prosperous, and hard working.
They work 12-hour days.
They just put Larry Johnson and me, Larry's still there, and Scott Ritter through the ringer in terms of the number of interviews and podcasts they had us doing.
We were their guests.
I was happy to do it.
It was exhausting but fulfilling.
And I read a little bit of your meeting with General Apti.
He's one of the most important people in Russia now.
Yes, yes.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yes.
I think you met all the people that really met.
Well, it was a gift to be able to meet all the people.
It really matters.
We have some time limitations.
So before we get to the question at hand, which is, is Iran ready?
Do you know if it is the Russians or the Americans who canceled the meeting between President Trump and President Putin in Budapest?
According to the circus ringmaster himself, that was him.
Wow.
Well, you know, it is his secretary of state, not a well-respected person, who apparently said to Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who's at the other end of the respect spectrum from Marco Rubio, that President Trump wants a ceasefire before peace negotiations.
Now, that is a non-starter because Russians are not stupid.
They know what would happen during a peacefire.
Those Europeans would flood the place with personnel and start.
So I don't know.
I know Trump is taking credit for canceling, but it seems to me that Lavrov probably said, Marco, we're going nowhere with this.
Of course.
And Marco is not only not a good listener, but Marco doesn't know anything about Russia or Ukraine for that matter.
Marco knows about attacking Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba.
That's all he knows.
So this is Russian.
Yes, please.
I'm sorry to cut you off.
Russian and Western media are reporting that President Putin told President Trump during their 90-minute phone call, which happened while I was there.
I was on the set with our mutual friend Dimitri Simes when that call was going on, that Zelensky should surrender now or, quote, Ukraine will be destroyed, close quote.
Now, I don't know what the Russian is.
That's the English version, according to the Washington Post and the Financial Times.
Is this realistic that Putin would have said that to have been that direct with President Trump?
Absolutely not, Judge.
Putin is cool, calm, collected, and calculating.
It's a very sophisticated way of deploying foreign policy.
Nothing is stated bluntly.
It's when he answers a very complicated question, it can take like five minutes because he analyzes it from several points of view.
And then he tries to get a synthesis.
He's a dialectical thinker.
Donald Trump doesn't even know what dialectics means.
So, you know, it's a very complicated affair.
But the horrible, I would say the overarching horrible element of all this is, first of all, the lack of respect of the president of the United States, vis-à-vis Putin and vis-a-vis Viktor Orban, who mobilized half of the Hungarian government to organize a committee to make this summit happen.
And then after the circus ringmaster said, no, I had the idea to have a meeting in Budapest.
I call Orban, everything.
He says, no, I don't want to waste my time.
Maybe not.
It's not the right time now.
And it's always me, me, me, me, me.
He's not the king of the jungle.
Sorry.
In his own mind, yes, but he's not the king of the jungle.
And he's being mocked all across the spectrum because he's now, this is his war.
It's not the Biden administration war anymore.
This is NATO's and Donald Trump's war.
So he has to find a way to at least have an adult conversation with the other side.
And here's what Trump said about five minutes ago.
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump gave Hegseth permission to deliver long-range missiles for use inside of Russia to the Ukrainians.
Trump says the Wall Street Journal story on the USA's approval of Ukraine being allowed to use long-range missiles deep into Russia is in and caps fake news.
The U.S. has nothing to do with those missiles, wherever they may come from, or what Ukraine does with them.
But the Wall Street Journal, which is pretty reliable, a very neocon in this area, made it sound there.
It is.
U.S. lifts key restrictions on Ukraine's use of Western, not necessarily U.S., Western long-range missiles.
The move coincides with the Trump push to pressure Moscow into talks on ending the war and to withhold U.S. Tomahawk missiles from Kyiv.
Before you answer, also yesterday, the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States sanctioned two Russian oil giants, Rosneft and Lukoil, because of, quote, Russia's lack of serious commitment to a peace process.
Put aside the arrogance of these two oil companies interfere at all with Russia's military.
Of course not, especially because Lukoio and Rosneft, I had contacts with Lukoio and Rosneft these past two years on and off.
They were already expecting that sooner or later they would be sanctioned and their subsidiaries would be sanctions.
So they're already prepared for it.
That's no big deal.
And this is not the usual European argument.
Now we have to make Putin's war machine pay.
This has no interference whatsoever, especially how the Ministry of Defense is conducting the SMO.
These people really don't know how the war is conducted from the Russian side, of course.
And everything is about Putin's war chest.
The war chest is the Russian Federation's war chest.
And this has been planned.
And what they plan in terms of the SMO in the beginning of the year for the fiscal year, it doesn't interfere with Russian economy and the Russian investments over all the economy, or for instance, the development of the Far East and of Siberia.
So there's no interaction at all.
And of course, these Russian multinational companies, they know how to adapt very, very fast.
And of course, they have all their contacts and clients all across the global south.
Wow.
Can Zelensky surrender?
No, because it's going to be shot immediately.
I didn't even have to finish the question.
You're always ahead of me.
So where are these negotiations going to go?
The war is going to end on the battlefield, not on a conference table.
Vladimir Putin knows that.
I don't know what Trump knows.
I don't know what Rubio knows.
The only thing that Zelensky knows is that he simply cannot agree to anything, to agree to anything, because then he is a dead man.
By the way, he is already a walking dead, and he knows it.
So his only chance of surviving or escaping to his mention in Miami or his mention in Tuscany is to keep this war going.
And he has the support of the Europeans.
The Europeans today, as we speak, judge, today in Brussels now, of 140 billion euros of Russia's assets.
The prime minister of Belgium said, maybe we can agree, but if all of you in the European Union assume the risks and not us, because Euro clear is in Belgium.
So this is what they're discussing today in Brussels.
How to keep the forever war, which is a NATO-European forever war against Russia, going for at least the next three years using Russian funds.
That's where we are.
All right.
Is Iran prepared for an onslaught from Tel Aviv and from Washington?
The short answer, Judge, is no.
And I have a breaking news for you, which I was trying to confirm this past few days, and I managed to confirm today.
Very few people in the West know a guy called Ismail Khatib.
Do you know who Ismail Khatib is?
No.
And he was important.
He was appointed by former president Raisi.
So he is one of the top guys of the Raisi circle, which had nothing to do with the current, I would say, candidate for lame duck, President Pazashkin.
This guy, Khatib, is the Iranian Minister of Intelligence.
Do you know what he said a few days ago?
I have the tape here, but it's in Farsi, and I had some friends translate it to me.
Basically, he says in, in fact, it's a five-minute excerpt, was only broadcast in Iran.
He says that 50, and I repeat, 50 foreign intelligence agencies helped Israel during the 12-day war on Iran.
This is enormous and the consequences.
And of course, the Iranians have a very, very long memory.
According to Khatib, once again, he said they carried out a full-scale hybrid war that tried to balkanize the country and they were attempting regime change in Tehran.
Well, it took a while for the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence to put all these pieces together.
This is when Khatib announced this in public and it was broadcast all over Iran.
So what can we conclude from all that?
That the whole of NATO and most of the Arabs, if not all of the Arabs, were involved.
And crucially, two neighbors of Iran were directly involved, Turkey and Azerbaijan.
So when I was discussing this with my Iranian interlocutors, they said, and this explains why we had to stop after 12 days, even though we were winning.
And at the time, Iran was winning.
Iran was hammering Israel economically, especially with direct missile attacks in Tel Aviv.
It's because they could not fight a war in so many fronts at the same time.
They were encircled, essentially.
And the key point is Turkey, Azerbaijan.
It's now confirmed in Iran that the drones that they were launched in the first 48 hours against Iran, guess where they were launched from?
Azerbaijan.
And there is another information which is very important.
It's very difficult to confirm, but it makes sense.
According to the Iranians, the Turks were ready that if Iran retaliated against Azerbaijan, the Turkish military would intervene directly.
What does all of this mean if Trump green lights Netanyahu to begin bombing Iran and the U.S. helps?
What does this mean for Iran's defenses and its responses against Israel and against U.S. troops in the region?
Well, this is why they learned a lot from the 12-day war.
And they also learned a lot from the fact that they were caught basically staring at the headlights in the middle of the highway in the first 24 hours.
And it took them less, at least less than 48 hours to recover.
They had help.
I think we discussed this before.
They had underground Russian help to restore their grid and their information grid, especially.
This is all that we know in terms of direct Russian help.
We still don't know if Russia supplied more.
And that brings us to an exchange of letters, Judge, very, very important in the past few days.
Ali Ladyjani from the Supreme Security Council in Iran, he went personally to meet Putin in Moscow, carrying a personal letter from Ayatollah Khamenei.
Wow.
And guess what happened two days later?
He came back to Tehran carrying a personal letter from Vladimir Putin to Ayatollah Khamenei.
So this means that they are discussing everything that we are talking now at the highest level.
All right.
Now, I asked you earlier if Iran was prepared.
I thought you said no, but is Iran prepared for war with Israel?
Now, yes.
And this past few days, for a number of reasons.
I don't know if I told you or our audience.
I was expecting to go to Iran next week.
In fact, I applied for a visa and there was going to be a very important conference in Tehran next Tuesday.
And it will be on U.S.-Iran relations, especially.
Last weekend, we learned that the conference was canceled.
And the official reason was, in their own words, translated from Farsi doesn't sound very good in English, but war conditions or conditions at the moment that could lead to war.
So they prefer not to have foreigners in Iran at this moment.
I particularly think that is not the best, the wisest solution at the moment, because if a bunch of us, independent analysts outside of Iran, are in Iran in the next few days, it would be excellent to tell the rest of the world about the Iranian point of view.
But this proves that they are extremely worried about the possibility of something happen within the next few days and weeks.
One of our questioners, one of our chatters, has a very interesting question that he asked me to ask of you.
Is there any truth to the report that Omani and Qatari diplomats asked the Iranian diplomats, quote, build the damn thing, meaning a deliverable nuclear device?
There's no smoking gun confirmation, Judge.
This is something that's been circulating between Iranian circles and Qatari circles, especially.
Obviously, there will never be a confirmation from Tehran, first of all, because this involves an extremely sensitive issue, which is Ayatollah Khomeini revoking his fatwa and the previous fatwa by Ayatollah Khomeini in terms of banning nuclear weapons because they are un-Islamic.
From the point of view of a Shiite theology, this is an enormous deal.
And you cannot do this like that.
But what we can say, Judge, is that there are circles from the IRGC especially and some advisors at the highest level in Tehran that are telling Khamenei, look, I think we're reaching that moment.
Our nuclear policy has to change.
Otherwise, we're going to be attacked and attacked again.
Wow.
Well, I mean, right, one could argue that the greatest thing for stability in the Middle East would be the Iranian possession of a nuclear weapon that would keep the Israelis within their own borders.
Absolutely.
Well, it's the King John Il and King John Un syndrome, isn't it?
Would anybody dare to attack the DPRK?
Of course not.
Right, right.
Wow.
Pepe, this has been fabulous, my dear friend.
I know it's late at night where you are, and I know we've put it together.
It's 8 o'clock.
It's early.
Oh, you haven't had dinner yet.
Exactly.
Well, it's the beginning of the day here.
It's a beautiful, crisp fall day in New York City.
It's also a very full day for us here.
But thank you very much, my dear friend.
Always a pleasure to chat with you.
I understand, speaking to the audience now, there were some audio problems.
This was beyond Pepe's control and beyond our control, but they cleared up about halfway through.
Thank you for sticking with us.
Thank you for watching now to Pepe.
It's always a pleasure, my dear friend.
Always a pleasure.
Thank you for joining us.
Good memories of Russia.
Yes, safe travels.
We'll see you again next week.
All the best.
Absolutely.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
And coming up later today, we have a full day for you.
At 11 o'clock this morning, Max Blumenthal.
Max has a very interesting new documentary out.
You're ready for this about the Jews in Iran.
Of course, we're going to talk to him about contemporary topics as well.
Colonel Douglas McGregor at one o'clock this afternoon.
Is NATO collapsing?
I think he'll say yes.
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson at two o'clock this afternoon.
What Gaza ceasefire?
And at four o'clock, our cleanup hitter, Scott Ritter, what is the true state of the special military operation between Russia and Ukraine today?
Thank you for watching.
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