| Time | Text |
|---|---|
|
Sovereignty And Freedom
00:05:32
|
|
| 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 Thursday, February 12, 2026. | |
| Pepe Escobar joins us now. | |
| Pepe, it's a pleasure. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| I know you're on the other side of the earth, but thank you for taking the time to meet with us. | |
| I want to spend the next half hour exploring with you Iran, its relationship to Russia, but especially its relationship to China. | |
| But first, a couple of background questions to allow you to run loose for us a little bit. | |
| Does Iran pose the slightest threat to the national security of the United States of America? | |
| Absolutely not. | |
| Well, the only argument, that's pretty direct, the only argument that the Trump administration can make is that their friends in Tel Aviv can't tolerate having Iran that close to them and not subject to them. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| And this touches on the key issue here, sovereignty. | |
| There are very, very few sovereign nations in the world, and Iran is one of them. | |
| And not only sovereign, but not subjected to the dictators of the international financial system and the weaponized dollar. | |
| From the point of view of Washington, of course, and the Atlanticist axis, we can put it this way, this is anatoma. | |
| Of course, there's not much they can do against Russia and China, superpowers, both, and one of them, the number one nuclear superpower in the world. | |
| But I guess Iran, they think they can. | |
| So that's why we have, as you just mentioned, Tel Aviv issuing diktats that should be followed by the Trump administration so Israel gets its war against Iran, which is viewed by Israel as an existential threat. | |
| And this brings us to the triad of diktats. | |
| Iran should not have a nuclear enrichment program, period. | |
| Iran should decrease its ballistic missile program to the bare minimum. | |
| And Iran should not support what all of us independents call the axis of resistance, including the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah, militias in Iraq, etc. | |
| This is effectively a demand for Iran to surrender its sovereignty. | |
| Capitulation, exactly, Judge. | |
| It's capitulation. | |
| If you don't capitulate, you're going to be attacked. | |
| And that's where Trump comes in, because the final decision is going to be his. | |
| And he is between a rock and a very, very hard place. | |
| What is the vice that is squeezing President Trump on this as we speak? | |
| We know what his Zionist donors want. | |
| We know what his masters in Tel Aviv want. | |
| What are the countervailing factors or what are the factors he's considering if he's even considering them? | |
| Exactly. | |
| Excellent, Judge. | |
| If he's even considering, don't forget, he's not a strategist. | |
| You know, it's epidemic reaction, usually. | |
| We can talk, of course, about the Epstein files, but all of us everywhere are speculating on what the Epstein files really reveal about Trump-Epstein relationship. | |
| There are many possibilities, including the fact that he was deep into it. | |
| So this is being used obviously by the masters of that death cult in West Asia as a form of pressure against him. | |
| But the most important thing is his donors, the people who finance his reelection, they are all hard Zionists. | |
| And of course, the diktats apply to this international Zionist access from Washington, New York to Tel Aviv, and including capitals in Europe. | |
| Do the Russians trust Donald Trump? | |
| No, not anymore, Judge. | |
| I'm sorry to break the news. | |
| Did this happen in part as a result of mimicking Foreign Minister Lavrov now? | |
|
Chinese Satellite Surveillance
00:11:22
|
|
| I think you know this, what he said to the British. | |
| You may have been there when he said it. | |
| The Biden sanctions not only have not been removed, they've been exacerbated. | |
| Some of the Biden sanctions, the public reason for them is, you ready for this? | |
| Russian involvement in the 2016 election, which Trump himself has denounced. | |
| And the third leg of this monster is the CIA's involvement in the drone attack on President Putin's home in Valdai. | |
| Novgorod, at the end of last year, Judge, very important, because Novgorod, there is a presidential residence in Novgorod, but most of all, Novgorod is part of the nuclear triad. | |
| It's a command and control center, part of the nuclear triad. | |
| That was the target. | |
| The residence, let's say, may have been a sub-target, but the Minister of Defense in Moscow, they have the evidence that the Americans were behind it. | |
| And they handed over that evidence to the U.S. military attaché in Moscow. | |
| The thing is, considering everything that was especially not leaked, we don't know if this evidence directly implicates the CIA or a rogue sale of the CIA or a rogue sale in industrial military complex, etc. | |
| But there was American direct involvement. | |
| That's for sure. | |
| And after that, the point of view of the presidency in Moscow and the Security Council, including our unplugged friend Medvedev, who is allowed to say what he thinks, you know, in public, changed radically. | |
| And now we have Lavrov himself saying that the spirit of Anchorage is practically dead. | |
| This is very... | |
| Lavrov has led us to believe that there was a handshake and some personal agreements between the two presidents in Anchorage. | |
| True. | |
| And we don't know what they were, but they never happened. | |
| But they never happened. | |
| That's the point. | |
| There was an agreement, and that's why the Russians keep on coming back to what was agreed during those five hours. | |
| A very, very long conversation. | |
| And I remember a few days after Anchorage, whenever the Minister of Foreign Relations in Russia was talking about it, they were saying, Look, we have agreed on a set of guidelines, and we hope to progress from there. | |
| But then nothing happened. | |
| And that's why we can see even from Lavrov and Ryabkov, number two at the foreign ministry, you know, Uber diplomats, they are obviously exasperated. | |
| The language, the tone changed completely compared to, let's say, two months ago, completely. | |
| And after the attack in Novgorod, wow, that was the straw that broke the nuclear camel's back. | |
| Right. | |
| Right. | |
| Again, before we get to China and Iran, and I have to say that you have a piece called How the China-Iran Strategic Partnership Really Evolves. | |
| It's been distributed to my sub-stack people, but more important, it's in the op-ed section of judgnap.com. | |
| I encourage everyone to read it. | |
| I encourage the people that read it to send it to the White House. | |
| It's granular, it gets into a lot of detail. | |
| We're going to get into some of the detail in a minute, but before we do, does Beijing trust Washington? | |
| Of course not, Judge. | |
| Wow, I was in China last week. | |
| Remember, when we talked, I was in Chongqing. | |
| Chongqing, as you know, is directly administered by Beijing. | |
| It's one of the only five cities in China that have this status. | |
| So Chongqing is very, very important. | |
| So a lot of important information flows through Chongqing. | |
| And it's obvious that the Chinese are basically studying the positioning of the Trump 2.0 administration. | |
| But obviously, they do not trust it at all. | |
| I would not say that the Russians are at that level, but the Chinese are already on another level. | |
| And now the Chinese are much more assertive than they used to be in what they do practically and in what they say in their foreign ministry briefings. | |
| And, you know, coming to the I would say the core of this column that you just mentioned, which was published an hour ago or so, now they're actually helping in terms of military intel Iran directly, which is something that did not happen before the 12-day war. | |
| So now we are in a completely different ballgame. | |
| All right. | |
| So again, before we get into the nitty-gritty in your article, I'm glad you just mentioned about China helping Iran intel. | |
| And we know the same can be said for Russia, correct? | |
| Okay, so there's a theory making the rounds this morning in the West that the January 13, 14, 15, whatever it was, cancellation of the attack on Iran was a stroke of Donald Trump genius. | |
| Please pardon that oxymoron. | |
| Claiming that it was all planned, it was all plotted to induce Iran to expose its defenses and expose what it plans to do as soon as the attack is coming, and that Mossad, MI6, and CIA took note. | |
| Why is that theory nonsense? | |
| It's total nonsense because this what this actually means is that a few people in the Pentagon may have noticed that the Chinese were literally, I wouldn't say on the ground, but in the seas, Chinese vessels were already in the sea of Oman. | |
| And this means two destroyers, one of them the most important destroyer that the Chinese have. | |
| It's considered the best destroyer in the world. | |
| Research vessel, it's called the Ocean Number One, translated into English. | |
| And another support vessel specialized in tracking undersea activity everywhere with some of the best raiders in the world. | |
| So they were already there in January. | |
| January means a few weeks ago, three of the middle of January. | |
| We're now approaching February. | |
| Talk to us about the commercial relationship between Beijing and Tehran and why China simply cannot afford a destroyed, damaged, or fractured Iran. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| I backtracked a little bit in the column. | |
| Sure. | |
| Going back to the Islamic Revolution was end of 78, beginning of 79. | |
| This was right at the beginning of Deng Xiaoping in power. | |
| And it's very important to remember what the Chinese were talking about the revolution at the time. | |
| I would say between 79, 80, 81. | |
| That was the first few years of Deng Xiaoping before China, before he ordered China to start growing like crazy in his famous 82. | |
| Well, the Chinese intellectuals were looking at this revolution as a revolution organized from a religious point of view in terms of Shiite theology, but also in neocolonial, under a neo-colonial overview. | |
| So it was a mix of both. | |
| So in China, this became extremely popular, especially after Khomeini himself at the time, he said, our new foreign policy is going to be neither east nor west. | |
| Obviously, people in Beijing found that. | |
| Wow. | |
| So now we can have a very good close relationship with the Persians, like we used to have in the past, like during the Silk Roads, for instance, when we were the two top powers in opposite ends of the Silk Road and our main interest was doing trade with each other. | |
| So the long cultural interpenetration of Persian culture, Chinese culture, this comes from centuries. | |
| And now it's renewed because two key factors. | |
| Number one, Iran is one of the top energy suppliers of China. | |
| So Iran for China is a matter of national security. | |
| And number two, Iran is the most important node in West Asia of the new Silk Roads, of the Belt and Road Initiative. | |
| Most of the traffic, trade traffic coming from China, crossing Central Asia and then going to Europe goes through Iran before heading west. | |
| So they are important from a geoeconomic point of view and from an energy point of view. | |
| So you simply cannot have a destabilized Iran because the Chinese know very well if Iran is destabilized, it's going to be absorbed by NATO and it's going to be immediately anti-Chinese. | |
| So what aside from Intel and aside from the proximity of this destroyer or two destroyers, what can and will the Chinese do? | |
| I mean, can we expect the destroyer will fire on American naval ships that are attempting to send missiles to Tehran? | |
| No, Judge, it's much more subtle than that. | |
| They are integrating their grid, their radar high-tech grid with Iran and vice versa. | |
| Iran is using Beidou. | |
| It's not using GPS anymore. | |
| So Iran is already linked to the Chinese satellite system. | |
| And the Chinese are providing satellite information gathered in real time 24-7 on the movements of the U.S. Navy in the Arabian Sea, by the way. | |
| They are not in the Sea of Oman. | |
| The Americans are not, they don't have the balls to get into the Sea of Oman because they would be very close to the southern shores of Iran and very close to these Chinese ships. | |
| So they are in the Arabian Sea. | |
| This means they are, to put it roughly, south of Pakistan. | |
|
U.S. Navy's Arabian Sea Dilemma
00:04:01
|
|
| All right. | |
| So are the Chinese destroyers there just to send a message or to do something militarily? | |
| No, they are there to send a very clear message. | |
| Like, look, we are looking at what your Navy and what your submarines are doing 24-7. | |
| Not only we know where you are, but we are monitoring your communications. | |
| Because this is part of the ocean number one research vessel. | |
| It analyzes signals information, it analyzes everything. | |
| And of course, they are being tracked in real time. | |
| So all of us can assume that people with the brain at the Pentagon are aware of that. | |
| And some of them are trying to tell the president, look, this is what's going on with us. | |
| We cannot risk an attack because the response is going to be heavy metal, to say the least. | |
| Chris, can you post the president's truth social, I think, from last night? | |
| Yes, exactly. | |
| So there's no deal. | |
| Okay, so here is what he said. | |
| Right. | |
| After he finished meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu, I have just finished meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel and various of his representatives. | |
| It was a very good meeting, the tremendous relationship between our two countries. | |
| There was nothing definitive reached other than I insisted that negotiations with Iran continue to see whether or not a deal can be consummated. | |
| If it can, I let the prime minister know that will be a preference. | |
| If it cannot, we will just have to see what the outcome will be. | |
| Last time, Iran decided that they were better off not making a deal and they were hit with Midnight Hammer. | |
| That did not work well for them. | |
| Hopefully this time they will be more reasonable and responsible. | |
| Additionally, we discussed the tremendous progress being made in Gaza and the region in general. | |
| There is truly peace in the Middle East. | |
| Thank you for attention to this matter. | |
| I mean, this is such nonsense. | |
| A, there is not peace in the Middle East. | |
| B, last time it was not the Iranians that didn't want to negotiate. | |
| They were on the way to the negotiating hotel when the Israelis and the Americans began their bombing. | |
| Absolutely, Judge. | |
| And what we have at the moment is the imposition of this triad of diktats by Israel, which is exactly what Netanyahu yesterday was doing in the White House, forcing Trump to make this decision. | |
| And the way Trump, it's interesting the way Trump phrased this post. | |
| It's non-committal, in fact. | |
| The most important part is that he's basically saying, look, the Israelis want me to start a war. | |
| I don't want it. | |
| I still want a deal. | |
| If there is no deal, we're going to see what happens. | |
| Okay, but the president and the secretary of state have made it clear. | |
| You said this at the outset of our conversation 20 minutes ago. | |
| No nuclear enrichment. | |
| Get rid of your offensive weapons and stop aiding your allies. | |
| All of those are non-starters. | |
| We know that for reasons of sovereignty and common sense. | |
| So what are they negotiating? | |
| There's one, let's say, that's a window, Judge. | |
| The Iranians might agree, for instance, on enrichment up to 60%. | |
| Let's put it this way, between 50 and 60%. | |
| But if I'm not mistaken, some officials, including members of the Majlis, the parliament in Tehran, said, okay, we could agree on that, but the U.S. has to destroy all the sanctions against us, which we all know will never happen. | |
|
Could Iran Agree?
00:10:06
|
|
| So it's not going anywhere. | |
| Talk to us a little bit about Iran and Russia. | |
| What is unseen between, I'm using your word, I didn't come up with this because you're between commas on purpose, Judge, because no. | |
| Well, it resonated with me. | |
| What is unseen between Moscow and Tehran? | |
| None of us know. | |
| And if anybody says they know, they're lying. | |
| Because this is considered in Moscow as a supreme national security military matter. | |
| And it only, this is the stuff that is discussed. | |
| I could venture to say that not even between Arakhi and Lavrov. | |
| This is discussed at the highest level when the Iranians send a direct emissary of Ayasola Khamenei to meet with Putin in Moscow. | |
| This is the kind of stuff they discussed. | |
| And of course, between the ministries of defense. | |
| This means what kind of hardware and software was transferred from Russia to Tehran in that series of IL-76 flights a few weeks ago. | |
| They were going every day from Russia to Tehran. | |
| Nobody knows for sure. | |
| It could be anything. | |
| It could be aerial defense, sieging communications, missiles, you name it. | |
| And nobody's going to leak anything about it in Moscow or in Tehran. | |
| That's why I call it unseen, but it's there. | |
| How embedded, either physically or digitally, is Russian and Chinese intel with Iranian intel? | |
| It's not totally embedded. | |
| In the case of, I would say that now in the case of China, it's much closer because now they are sharing top of the line a satellite intel in real time. | |
| So this means that the Iranian grid is integrated with the Chinese satellite grid. | |
| I'm not sure this is the case with Russia. | |
| And none of us can tell for sure because the Ministry of Defense in Russia will never tell any of us about it. | |
| So maybe it's more pinpointed the kind of health coming from Russia to Iran, not necessarily linked to satellite intel. | |
| But for instance, when we remember that during the beginning of the 12-day war, when there was that famous blackout of the whole Iranian grid and they were panicking because they were not prepared for that, they were saved by Russian technicians between 24 to 48 hours. | |
| And everything was put back in place by the Russians in less than two days. | |
| That's why the Iranian military machine started to work after two days. | |
| So we can assume that the degree of collaboration is also very, very close. | |
| Last week, or maybe it was earlier this week, I think it was earlier this week, was the anniversary of the fall of the Shah. | |
| Of course. | |
| And we had a clip from an American journalist who was on the ground in Tehran. | |
| He said he was surrounded by two to three million Trump Iranians. | |
| Pepe, this was covered nowhere in the Western press. | |
| Are you surprised? | |
| No, I'm not. | |
| From China, I took a look at the European media. | |
| There was not a single coma about that. | |
| You're absolutely right. | |
| And there are numbers which are mind-boggling, that perhaps 40% of the Iranian population hit the streets. | |
| This was the, you know, the number one participation in terms of celebrating the Islamic revolution in these past 47 years. | |
| It's immensely impressive because it shows that deep Iran and also the major regional capitals, they understand the stakes. | |
| They understood the logic behind the attempted regime change last month. | |
| They are siding with the government, even if many of them are not necessarily pro-government. | |
| They understand that the economic crisis that they are going through nowadays was basically inflicted by the Americans via manipulation of the Real, which at the time many of them couldn't make this connection, and now they can. | |
| So that explains practically half of the Iranian population in the streets, right? | |
| Wow. | |
| The Chinese foreign ministry just issued a statement. | |
| It's about Cuba. | |
| It's not about Iran, but it could easily apply to Iran. | |
| China again strongly urges the United States, in accordance with the United Nations constitutional decree and principles, they mean the United Nations Charter, as well as international basic standards, they mean international law, immediately cancel all sanctions against Cuba. | |
| I mean, Iran's a member of the United Nations, so theoretically, the Americans should have to go to the Security Council before attacking Iran. | |
| They won't do that. | |
| They don't go to the Congress. | |
| They don't go to the Security Council. | |
| Trump feels constrained by nothing. | |
| Chris order, right, Judge? | |
| There's going to be an executive order. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Chris, can you put up the photo of Secretary of State Romeo and Prime Minister Netanyahu? | |
| I mean, when the United States puts this out there, we'll have it in a second, showing that Benjamin Netanyahu has signed an agreement personally to join Trump's ludicrous board of peace. | |
| There's a semi-smiling Benjamin Netanyahu and an apparently happy Marvel Rubio. | |
| And then Trump issues a statement saying there's peace in Gaza and in the Middle East. | |
| Two statements profoundly erroneous. | |
| What message does this send? | |
| Wow, Judge, this is something that I discussed already, I think, two or three podcasts this week and in one of my columns. | |
| When you have a president of the United States in his own words saying, I don't care about international law, only about my morals. | |
| And you see this picture and you see that he's receiving with the highest honors a war criminal in the White House responsible for the killing of untold numbers of civilians, including children in Gaza. | |
| And when you mix that up with the fact that his morals are not minimally concerned with what's in the Epstein files, which is essentially, I would say, the perfect Polaroid of how a great deal of Anglo-American elites behave. | |
| And this was considered normal since the Go-Go 80s. | |
| Wow. | |
| That's it. | |
| Yes, yes. | |
| Do you have sort of a feeling in your gut of whether we can wake up some morning and find out that an attack has begun? | |
| Or do you think that these negotiations between the Americans and the Iranians will proceed in normal diplomatic fashion and in an atmosphere of nonviolence? | |
| Well, many of our friends, including our friend Larry Johnson, they are saying that the decision has been made already for an attack. | |
| If that's the case, this is beyond terrifying. | |
| Next week, I'll be in Moscow. | |
| So I'm going to ask the Russians directly and expect some answers about if they are convinced that this should be the case. | |
| The Chinese, for the moment, they are just, they are acting, in fact. | |
| You know, this message that they are saying, these naval messages they are sending means, okay, if you try something, you're going to regret it. | |
| But obviously, we know that the warmongers in the industrial military complex among Trump's donors and among these international Zionist access and New York, Washington, the Tel Aviv, they don't care about that. | |
| They only want their war. | |
| And this is what Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday was telling the president of the United States. | |
| I want my war and you have to launch it. | |
| Wow. | |
| Pepe, thank you, my dear friend. | |
| I know we've been across the board, but your analysis and in many cases, your firsthand knowledge is extraordinary and invaluable asset to us. | |
| Thank you for joining us. | |
| Safe travels to Moscow. | |
| We'll look forward to seeing you next week. | |
| Next week from Moscow, Judge. | |
| Yes. | |
| Thank you, Pepe. | |
| All the best, my dear friend. | |
| All the best. | |
| Thank you. | |
| And I again can't underscore enough Pepe's piece at Judge Knapp, how the China-Iran strategic partnership really evolves. | |
| It gets into the granular relationship between Iran and China and how Pepe believes and demonstrates China will not let Iran collapse. | |
| Coming up today at one o'clock this afternoon, all of this, even the latest very bad news from Venezuela, Max Blumenthal at two o'clock. | |
| Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson at three o'clock. | |