Jan. 6, 2026 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
26:47
Is the Western Alliance Breaking? Prof. Glenn Diesen Explains
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Undeclared wars are commonplace.
Tragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression, with no complaints from the American people.
Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government.
To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected.
What if sometimes to love your country you had to alter or abolish the government?
What if Jefferson was right?
What if that government is best which governs least?
What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong?
What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave?
What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now?
Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Wednesday, January 7th, 2026.
Professor Glenn Deason joins us now.
Professor Deason, such as it is, happy new year to you, but thank you very much for your time here with us.
Are the American neocons now triumphant over American foreign policy?
Well, it appears that this is the case.
Whatever rhetoric Trump has about being a peacemaker, avoiding the forever wars, this seems to have gone out the window.
Again, some people try to look for excuses, I guess.
Last year, when he backed the genocide in Gaza, he attacked Iran.
And, you know, there were arguments he was trying to shorten the wars, all of this.
But now, of course, with this attack on Venezuela and also making the list of next, the future attacks longer and longer, you know, they might go after Panama to get the canal again.
They're talking about Cuba, Nicaragua, Colombia, Mexico.
And that's just in the Western Hemisphere.
They might also do go back, bump Nigeria again.
Why not take annex Greenland?
And of course, the CIA continues to be heavily involved in the war in Ukraine, provocations against China over Taiwan.
I mean, it doesn't really end.
So I think the neocons have definitely won him over.
What kind of damage has been done to the United States geopolitically from your perspective in Europe to this invasion and kidnapping, invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of President Maduro?
Well, it just shows that all the rules are now gone.
And this is what was surprising for many, that, again, this is not the first time something like this has happened.
And of course, usually the Europeans are all in.
What was interesting now is there was no pretense that international law had to be put aside to serve some higher liberal democratic ideals.
This is usually what we do when we invade a country.
We look for a liberal democratic justification.
So spreading democracy or advancing human rights.
But here there was some very brutal honesty.
That is, we want our oil back.
And of course, some less honest arguments like the narco-terrorism and all of these things.
But it was, I guess, a signal out of the White House.
This is our hemisphere.
It can't really be confused.
This is imperial control being asserted across Latin America.
And essentially trying to make Venezuela an exclusive gas station of the United States, demanding that it doesn't trade with other large powers.
This is a very dangerous approach to multipolarity, that is to just carve out exclusive serves of influence.
The liberal Democrats, lowercase L and lowercase D in Europe, cannot be rejoicing over this, can they?
No, no, not at all.
Well, especially the Europeans, because they've been running with the assumption that as long as they do what Trump wants, then they will at some point be rewarded.
But instead, I think they merely see weakness, which can be exploited.
But again, often one is presented as if everything was just nice and well until Trump came along and now everything is falling apart.
I would say it's been gradually moving in this direction.
So again, this whole idea that this new wars, that this is a new thing.
I mean, we, especially over the past 30 years, have done a lot of wars where we essentially said that we had the reasoning to go and invade, which were justified, even though they were not legal.
I always make the point that this started really with Kosovo, where we said it wasn't legal, but it was just because we allegedly were protecting human rights.
So I think that this unholy marriage we had after the Cold War, that is between this liberal humanitarianist or liberal humanitarian interventionists and the neocons, they all came together assuming that if we just dominate, then liberal democracy will triumph.
Well, that marriage has kind of been broken now because there's no pretense anymore that this is going to help our values.
Going to play a clip of Donald Trump two days ago and Donald Trump four years ago.
Tell me how Europeans are likely to react to this.
Chris, cut number seven.
We're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.
Our current strategy of nation building and regime change is a proven absolute failure.
We won't break the cycle of regime change.
We must abandon the failed policy of nation building and regime change that Hillary Clinton pushed in Iraq, in Libya, in Egypt, and in Syria.
Regime change takes chaos.
You've seen how that works over the last 20 years.
That hasn't been too good.
Not a reckless interventionist globalism.
We're getting out of the nation-building business.
We're going to stay until such time as the proper transition can take place.
So which Donald Trump should the Europeans believe?
I guess the first and the last one whose unstated mantra is really might makes right.
There's no moral basis for anything that he did.
No, not at all.
But again, it's not the first president to go down this route.
Keep in mind that Bill Clinton really began a lot of this nation building in the 1990s.
And when George Bush came along, he ran on a platform that America wouldn't do nation building.
But of course, then they did it on steroids, essentially, with Afghanistan, Iraq.
And, you know, one after another, every president comes and say that they will change the course.
And Obama comes, he says, well, you know, we're going to change, no more, you know, foolish foreign policies.
And of course, he has his own wars, the worst of all, probably the war triggering the war in Ukraine by toppling the government there in 2014.
So this is not new.
I mean, but Donald Trump on the campaign is a very different person from Donald Trump, the president.
You know, he spent all this time criticizing this forever war sea.
He was mocking Biden.
What is he doing in Yemen?
Why would you bomb Yemen?
And then, of course, when it's his turn, his time in office, he does the exact same thing.
But on the nationbuilding, though, it's not sure what kind of nation building they will do in Venezuela.
Keep in mind that he might have been a bit premature.
This talk about running Venezuela, but they went in with an attack.
They killed a bunch of people.
They kidnapped the president and the wife.
But the government is still there.
So I'm not sure why he would control Venezuela.
He might be able to.
Maybe he can coerce them.
But so far, it seems a bit premature.
You know, it doesn't appear that there aren't any American troops on the ground.
There are between 15 and 20,000 Marines and soldiers in Puerto Rico, which is not very far away.
The 12 to 16 ships, which Trump calls the largest armada in history, probably not a true statement, but he's calling it that, are still there.
And the CIA is, of course, still on the ground.
But you're quite correct, Professor.
The government is still intact, a government manned by people of the same ideology as the person who was just kidnapped.
I guess they're looking at the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan when they dismissed everybody who was running the government only to learn that they couldn't replace them.
I mean, the American government can't deliver the mail in the United States.
Is it going to collect the garbage and fill the potholes in Caracas?
Of course not.
No, no, I don't think this has any chance of succeeding.
Trump might understand this, though, which is why he argued that Venezuela's acting president now, Rodriguez, that she could stay in power if, and I think this is a direct quote, if she does what she's told.
So essentially, she can be the puppet president there as long as she obeys.
But so far, there's no indication that she will obey.
So again, all of this might be a bit premature.
But if this is the case, then perhaps Trump has seen the futility of trying to run a country, as you say, on the size of Venezuela.
And again, much like Iraq, they're not going to be welcomed with flowers there either.
Yeah, are other countries, and I guess by that I mean Russia and China, just going to allow him to go around the world, in this case, I guess, not limited to Latin America.
We'll talk about Greenland in a minute, using brute force or threats of brute force to acquire real estate, fossil assets, or power.
I mean, how much longer can this go on before somebody says enough is enough?
Yeah, well, it depends because not anywhere in the world.
I don't think the, well, obviously China and Russia are not happy about this kind of aggressive approach to Latin America, especially for the Chinese.
They have their largest trading partner for more or less all of Latin America.
So it's not a great, they're not happy about these efforts to install this new exclusive sphere of the entire Western hemisphere.
So obviously they're not happy, but neither the Chinese nor the Russians would want to confront the U.S. militarily in its own backyard simply because it's quite dangerous when great powers begin to threaten each other or build up a presence along the border of another one.
I think this is why we have a war in Ukraine, and that's probably why we might get a war with China over Taiwan.
So this is not something that has done.
But that being said, if the U.S. keeps hijacking or pirating oil tankers and other ships of Russia or China, then obviously they will be compelled to take action.
But this all being said, if this is replicated in other places, like just a random attack on Iran, I don't think that China or Russia could afford to see Iran fall to the United States, because if they start trying to defeat or destroy Iran, that's a very important power on the Eurasian continent.
So then the U.S. is far away from the Western Hemisphere and China and Russia will behave quite differently.
Colonel McGregor informed us a few hours ago, Professor, that the Russians are advising Russian citizens in Israel, so these are mainly Russian Jews, but Russian citizens in Israel to leave and return to Russia.
This must be in the anticipation of a war in which the Kremlin expects Israel will be severely attacked.
Yes, well, it appears that there's a lot of indications that a war is coming.
We see the rhetoric coming out of the United States and Israel, the reference to the great danger of Iran rebuilding its missile capabilities after the first war.
And of course, now with the protests in Iran, which have become violent as well, there's some hope that this could be an opportune time because if there's internal instability, then that could be exploited in a war.
So as Trump said, again, leaning into a liberal democratic justification for war, is that if protesters are killed, the United States will come to the rescue of Iranians.
Somehow, you know, we can doubt the altruism behind that statement.
Rather, I assume that this will be an excuse.
And as he wrote in his tweet, we are locked and loaded and ready to go.
And so the indications are quite strong.
You also see military hardware being moved into the region.
So I think a war is becoming increasingly likely because Israel didn't achieve its objectives in the first round.
And I think they're not going to let this go.
There's going to be a second round, but this time I think it's going to be a much more destructive and violent war.
So I hadn't heard the Russian statements, but that doesn't come as a surprise.
How do you think the Kremlin is thinking as we speak in light of the events of the past two weeks?
The drone attack on the residence of President Putin, which the Kremlin says they can demonstrate irrefutably was CIA orchestrated, and they've given some of the physical evidence to the military attaché.
The seizure in the high seas earlier today of a tanker from Panama bearing a Russian flag and of course the kidnapping of President Maduro.
Does that change the way the Kremlin views Donald Trump and dealing with the United States of America?
No, well, I think that a lot of the hopes that Donald Trump would be a profoundly different president is dying.
Many people hope that he would be the one that could possibly break the cycle because the US and Russia doesn't really have that many conflicting interests.
But after a century of conflict, many have hoped that the relationship could be fundamentally transformed to become, if not allies, at least closely aligned.
But all of this has more or less gone out the window because, well, Trump's peace initiatives is a bit like his peace initiative in other parts of the world, such as when he was negotiating with Iran and said, we're making great headway and this was just an excuse to do a surprise attack.
I mean, I think the Russians understand that the main force acting against them now in Ukraine is still, besides Ukrainians, of course, is still the American intelligence agency, so the CIA.
And so they don't want to escalate with the United States because it doesn't have any purpose.
It doesn't have any utility.
But at the same time, it can't look the other way when the United States escalates in such a dangerous way.
Well, talking about having no purpose, is Putin going to waste five hours again with the two real estate agents that Trump has sent to negotiate with him, his former business partner and his son-in-law?
Well, no, I do think he will waste that time, but it is a waste.
And I think he recognizes this.
But it's always good to talk.
I mean, at least there's a hope that things can change.
And also, I do think that within the United States, there is a, in the government, there is a division.
There are those who would like, I think, to end this proxy war in Ukraine, who thinks that there's no fundamental reasons why the U.S. and Russia has to continue this century-long track record of being enemies, but rather that it's possible to change relations.
But again, this internal struggle.
I mean, Trump always had two people.
They saw Witkoff as being the good guy versus Keith Kellogg, which was the bad guy.
And they were hoping that the good guys seeking to essentially end the Cold War or the Cold War 2.0 would win.
But I think it's become quite obvious that Trump is very deep with the neocons.
And whatever peace initiatives he's pushing is more or less just handing over the conflict to the Europeans while letting the U.S. intelligence agencies continue as they did before.
How will the Europeans react if American troops show up in Greenland and purport to remove the government and take over the place?
Well, it's hard to say.
This never happened, but I'm guessing they won't do much at all.
And this is, I mean, this has been coming for quite some time.
Keep in mind that Biden destroyed Europe's energy infrastructure, that is Nord Stream, blew it up.
And everyone knew that it was the United States and possibly aligned with Ukraine behind this.
But everyone had to go and pretend as if, no, the Russians just blew up their own energy infrastructure.
This is completely normal.
It's the Russian playbook, they said, as if it made any sense.
And I think they would do the same.
That is, if the U.S. would land a warship, plant a flag, what is it that they can do?
I mean, are they going to fight the United States?
No, I think they would just counter losses and hope to save the partnership.
And I think the United States knows this, which is why the Europeans look so weak and why this becomes an attractive proposition.
I think Trump has shown over the past year that he is the president of low-hanging fruit.
If he can get a nice deal with a little bit of threats, such as what he did with Panama, he would like to replicate this now with Greenland.
So he might not even need to send troops.
All he does would threaten a little bit, and then he can maybe offer to buy Greenland.
either get the money or have a war so and they might take you can't buy Greenland without the Congress and be I can't imagine the Senate going along with this unless his wealthy billionaire friends are going to buy it for him and name it Trumpland.
I'm being a little sarcastic here.
Is the Western alliance collapsing?
It does appear so for many reasons.
Well, first of all, you can look at the new national security strategy, how the U.S. views Europe.
It sees the EU as trying to, well, it's not trying, it's at least destroying European civilization.
It refers to the EU's authoritarianism, economic decline, inability to reproduce its culture, and essentially it's civilization killing itself.
And this national security strategy even calls for cultivating opposition.
So almost implying regime changing in several countries in Europe.
So it is that intention is there.
But again, it's not just Trump.
Keep in mind, it was President Obama who first said the United States have to pivot to Asia because this is where the gravity, well, the center of power is shifting.
And if you pivot to somewhere, you have to pivot away from somewhere.
And that is Europe.
It's becoming less and less relevant.
And as I said, from Biden's ability to destroy Nord Stream to Trump threatening to invade Greenland, it's really clearly tilting in one direction.
And I think that for the Europeans, by making Russia into an enemy, they made a massive mistake.
They thought this would at least cement the position of the United States in Europe.
But this is not the Cold War anymore.
There's not a bipolar distribution of power.
There's a multipolar.
So the United States doesn't necessarily want to be in Europe anyways.
At least it wants to reduce its presence.
All the Europeans achieved by making an enemy out of Russia was to make themselves excessively dependent on the United States, which have different priorities now.
So this allows instead the US to form a more extractive relationship, a tributary relationship with the Europeans, where they should make sure they buy expensive American energy, its weapons, invest whatever profits they have in the United States, and essentially drain the Europeans.
So the relationship is very different.
I know many people in Europe think about after World War II.
I mean, some of our trade agreements we got from the U.S. were extremely generous because it was an incentive then to build powerful frontline states.
The US paid for European security for decades, but the realities are now shifting and they're gone.
So the foundation for the partnership or this alliance is eroding.
And of course, the perfect person to come in and kill it off, I think, is Donald Trump.
Yesterday, the Coalition of the Willing, in quotes, is such a silly name, in Paris issued a statement with which they all agreed, except for Hungary, that they will offer to send troops to Ukraine to provide security in a post-war Ukraine.
I mean, to me, it is inconceivable that they would expect such an offer to be taken seriously by the Russians and tolerated for a minute if they tried to do it.
No, of course not.
But the Russians aren't represented.
They're just negotiating with each other.
It doesn't really make any sense at all.
Keep in mind that over the past four years, the Europeans, they organized many different peace summits from in Saudi Arabia to Denmark, but the Russians were never invited to any of them.
So they just sit there among themselves negotiating.
And it doesn't really make much sense.
But they also call for, at least we heard from Starmer, that they want to set up military facilities to protect across Ukraine after the war, which so this doesn't make any sense.
The Russians invaded for one very explicit reason.
They saw that since 2014, after the coup, that the NATO countries were trying to establish themselves, entrench themselves in Ukraine to build Ukraine as a powerful proxy, which they can use to weaken Russia.
This is what they can't live with.
And this is why they weren't able to end this through the Minsk peace agreement.
So they ended up using military force instead.
And, you know, this is not condoning or suggesting it's according to international law, but this is the logic of the Russians.
This is an existential threat to them.
And this is why they act the way they have.
So the idea that now that the Russians have spent four years, lost tens of thousands of their men in this proxy war by the West, that now they can have the one, now the peace agreement should be that the NATO countries will entrench themselves in Ukraine.
I mean, it doesn't make any sense at all.
So no, there's absolute zero chance the Russians will accept this.
And if there's no peace deal, the Russians will probably just seize much, much more territory, because this is the ultimate guarantee that these territories won't be used against Russia in another future proxy war.
Professor Deezen, thank you very much, my dear friend.
Great analysis, as always.
And thank you for letting me go all over the place from Greenland to Venezuela, to the heart of Europe where you are.
Much appreciated.
Happy New Year to you.
We'll look forward to seeing you next week.
Yeah, happy New Year's.
Hopefully the rest of the year will be a bit more stable.
Yes, hopefully as well.
Thank you, Professor.
All the best.
Coming up later today at 2 o'clock this afternoon, Sheriff David Hathaway, former supervising officer of the Drug Enforcement Administration for the U.S. in Latin America.
And he will tell us who the real drug dealers are.