Feb. 15, 2026 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
27:41
Larry Johnson : Why War With Iran Is Imminent
Larry Johnson warns that a U.S. war with Iran is imminent, driven by Donald Trump’s deployment of a third of the Air Force and two carriers to the Middle East despite Iran refusing to abandon missile or enrichment programs. He ties this to Russia’s expanded demands in Ukraine—including Novorossiya’s six regions—after Western sabotage, framing both conflicts as geopolitical power grabs. Iran’s 2026 trilateral pact with Russia and China, bolstered by Chinese radar tech, strengthens its defense against strikes, while Johnson dismisses U.S. claims of Iranian unrest, citing ethnic cohesion and regime adaptations. The push for war mirrors historical overreach, like Iraq, where U.S. actions caused mass deaths without proportional retaliation, suggesting irreversible consequences if Trump attacks. [Automatically generated summary]
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 Monday, February 16th, 2026.
Larry Johnson will be with us in just a moment on just how imminent is the United States attack on Iran.
But first, this.
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Larry, good day to you, my friend.
Thank you for accommodating my schedule, as always.
Before we get to whether a U.S. attack on Iran is imminent, what is Foreign Minister, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov saying today that is markedly different from what he told you and me personally in his residence about a year ago?
Yeah, he's been very meticulous in describing the atmosphere surrounding the negotiations with Ukraine and what happened in April of 2022.
You know, I think you were as surprised as I to hear from him that he said, look, the draft agreement that we signed off on, that was brought to the meeting by Ukraine.
And what that draft agreement entailed was, yes, Ukraine was going to dramatically reduce the size of its military to below 80,000.
But Donbass, which means the republics of Luhansk and Donetsk, they would remain as part of Ukraine.
They would not have become part of Russia.
And then, you know, that agreement was sabotaged by Joe Biden, Lloyd Austin, and Boris Johnson of the UK.
And then that kicked the war off into a new direction.
And as a result of that, Russia then changed its tactic and they held a plebiscite.
The people were asked a very simple question in both the Netzlohans, Kherson, and Zaporizhia.
Do you want to become part of the Russian Republic or do you want to remain part of Ukraine?
All four voted overwhelmingly, no, Vladimir, we're with you.
So they came over to the Russian side.
Now, in April of 2024, Vladimir Putin made a speech before the foreign ministry senior officials, in which he laid out what were Russia's demands.
And at the heart of it was that there would be the recognition of those four former oblasts of Ukraine, you know, the Netzlohansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia, recognition that they are now permanently part of Russia.
But there was no additional demand for territory.
That has now changed as a result of the continued rejection of the Russian proposals during all the negotiations.
They have now made it quite clear that they are going to incorporate Novorossiya, the new Russia.
It's a historical concept that dates back to the 18th century and under Catherine the Great.
But basically what it entails, the historical version signed Odessa, which is down on the Black Sea, and then Nikolaev or Mikolaev, which is a little farther up, and then Zaporizhia and Dnipropetrovsk.
But the modern version of it, and the first one to really speak about this was Vladimir Putin back in March of 2014, when he said, hey, we're looking at Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk.
And look, I think it's even going to go out and include Sumy and Potava.
But what it is, is now Russia is going to take additional territory that is east of the Dnieper River.
And they've made it clear to Ukraine, they had their chance.
That chance is over now.
And I think that'll be one of the demands presented at the talk that are supposed to take place tomorrow in Geneva.
So it is Ukraine's foolish acquiescence to Boris Johnson, Lloyd Austin, and Joe Biden, foolish persistence in fighting a war it ought to have known from day one that it couldn't have won, which has now resulted in the expansion of Russian territorial and other demands.
Larry, that deal that they persuaded Zelensky to reject is fantastic compared to what they're going to have to suffer now.
No, they'll suffer basically complete loss of access to the Black Sea.
And so Ukraine will be basically an island.
And there'll be no foundation for it returning to any kind of economic strength.
It's important to remember that before this war started, Ukraine was in the top five of all countries in the world in terms of natural resources, which is, you know, when you consider that Russia is number one, that put it in a very powerful position to grow economically.
And it's also, frankly, an indictment of what the West had been doing to Ukraine, because Ukraine, at the start of this war, was also ranked as the poorest country in Europe.
And there's no way that they should have been the poorest country.
They should have been one of the wealthiest by virtue of the natural resources.
However, the corruption, the endemic corruption that is swamping Ukraine is what prevented that from happening.
One of the former members of President Zelensky's cabinet, who's been charged twice with corruption, a former justice minister and a former energy minister, was arrested on a train as he was trying to leave Ukraine on Sunday afternoon Ukraine time.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's the they've all, this is why they want the war to continue.
You know, let's, it's important to recognize Zelensky, even though he gets portrayed in the press as, you know, the face and the leader of Ukraine, he is not the leader.
He's merely a front guy.
There are powerful oligarchs behind him that are tied into organized crime that have been literally looting all of the aid that has been provided by the United States and by NATO.
And, you know, until that stops, they're going to continue to send Ukrainian men forward.
In fact, you saw the other day, they have now said, okay, it's okay.
Guys over 60.
Yeah, we'll draft you too.
Here's a map.
I just want to look at it and chat about it with you, Chris.
If you could post it, we have it.
Okay, we'll have it in just a minute.
Okay.
So, Novorossiya is the generic name translated loosely, new Russia.
Here it is.
For those areas, you see Crimea on the bottom, and then you see those other oblasts or provinces, which are now more or less occupied by the Russian military and in which these plebiscites, which were overwhelming, took place.
One of the things that Foreign Minister Levrov told you and Mario and me, and which he has said as recently as two or three days ago, is these are Russian speaking, Russian culturally, Russian historically.
We are taking back what Ukraine took from us.
We are not seizing Ukrainian land.
This is Russia through and through.
Do you accept that?
Yeah, no, I do.
And as Ray McGovern, you know, one of the things I've always learned from Ray, he said, listen to what the Russians say.
You know, hey, that's brilliant and simple, but it's true.
Lavrov, he's not making, he's not just making idle conversation, and he's certainly not making idle threats.
They are revealing exactly what they think, which is this is these are Russian-speaking people.
This historically has been part of Russia.
The only reason this area got assigned, if you will, to Ukraine was because of the Bolsheviks during the revolution back in 1917 into the early 1920s.
It was just an administrative move.
It was not based upon a cultural foundation.
And there is a demonstrable difference between the people that live east of the Dnieper River and those that live west of the Dnieper River.
When you get over into places like Lvov, which used to actually be a Polish city.
So there's not this Ukrainian nationalism that is touted by many supporters of Ukraine in the West.
Here's Foreign Minister Lavrov last week on this very topic, Chris.
Cut number six.
The people of Crimea, Donbass, and Novorossiya have expressed their will in referendums, and we will see through the process of returning these historically Russian lands to their native harbor, fully in line with the aspirations of these people.
The linguistic, cultural, and religious rights of those who remain under Kiev's authority must be restored, along with the elimination of another root cause of the conflict, the military threats to Russia's national security emanating from Ukrainian territory.
What he has mentioned elsewhere, but not there, is that this is the part of Ukraine which was bombed by the Ukrainian military in order to deter the Russian-speaking and Russian cultural people there from wanting to join the Russian Federation.
I mean, why the West doesn't see this?
Why the American government doesn't understand it?
Who knows if Witkoff even understands this?
Well, what we're seeing, I mean, what the West is looking at is oil, natural gas, coal, minerals, wealth that we can take.
That's what we're looking at.
We don't give a damn about the Ukrainian people.
They can rot and die for all we care.
And that's been demonstrated by the callousness and carelessness of the West.
It was in the aftermath of the Maidan, the coup, the Western back coup, in February of 2014, that by March, the new Ukrainian government was beginning to attack the rights of the Russian-speaking people in the Donbass and to go after the Russian Orthodox Church.
And then it erupted into civil war.
What I think may have surprised the Ukrainian side was how many Ukrainian military personnel, officers, and enlisted, went over to the side of the people of Donbass and fought for them.
That's why Ukraine didn't take over the territory.
Here's the lady that kicked a lot of this off in 2014.
Cut number two.
He has betrayed the West.
He's betrayed human values.
He's betrayed the NATO Charter, the Atlantic Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
A lot of what has been done before to try to make sense of how difficult it is to restrain people who want unaccountable power.
And none of us in this room, including all of us on this panel, would choose to live under a regime that was so unaccountable that it could act with impunity the way that Putin does, except that's who Trump is modeling himself.
All right, play the other one, Chris.
I think that the Trump administration's position toward Ukraine is disgraceful.
I think the effort to force Ukraine into a surrender deal with Putin is shameful.
I think the effort that Putin and Trump are making to profit off the misery and death of the Ukrainian people is a historic error and corrupt to the nth degree.
So I believe Ukraine is fighting for our democracy and our values of freedom and civilization on the front lines, losing thousands of people and having their country destroyed by one man's mania to control them.
And I think Trump either doesn't understand or could care less about that suffering.
So that's what I think.
She's got a lot of animosity towards President Trump, but she still maintains that same attitude that she obviously had when she and President Obama and Victoria Newland concocted the coup in 2014.
I got a question for you, Judge.
There are about 190 countries in the world, right?
Guess which country in the world was the largest donor to the Clinton Foundation?
What is Ukraine?
Wow.
Ukraine, these oligarchs, these criminals that that woman was in bed with, she is as much responsible for the blood that has been shed by the Ukrainians as anyone.
Absolutely.
And for her to sit there and try to moralize, she ought to be in jail.
And what you say is absolutely correct, Larry.
Let's transition.
Has, in your view, has Trump made up his mind to attack Iran?
I don't know if he has made the decision to launch, but the forces are in motion that people who are in the military are saying the last time they saw this was last June when we started moving forces to carry out a strike in Iran.
So all of the pieces are moving.
There has been a massive movement.
U.S. Air Force Deployment00:08:42
And again, this has all been reported in public sources of almost all the tankers in the U.S. Air Force have been deployed into the Middle East.
Those are used for air refueling.
And accompanying the, when you move those, that means you're also moving a large portion of the U.S. Air Force capability.
My understanding is we're looking at about a third of the entire U.S. Air Force is being deployed or has deployed now to that region.
You have the one aircraft carrier there, but now reportedly two additional aircraft carriers are being sent.
So this is maybe that's intended for right now as an intimidation factor.
But the mistake, I believe, the miscalculation that Trump and his team are making is that Iran is weak.
You know, we've heard this before with Russia, with the Russia Ukraine.
It's like deja vu all over again.
Iran is weak.
They only have half their missile force, et cetera.
Except what they're not paying attention to is in the wake of the attempted color revolution that was launched on December 28th, culminated on January 9th, January 10th, when with the assistance of Russia and China, the internet and Starlink system was taken down and the ability of the West to control or give direction to the anti-government elements.
At the end of January, Russia, China, and Iran signed a trilateral security agreement.
So this is something new.
A year ago, Iran and Russia entered into a security agreement, but it wasn't a mutual defense pact.
And three years ago, China and Iran had signed something similar.
Now they've all three come together and basically saying, hey, we're going to work together to protect each other.
And to that extent, both Russia and China have been pouring in an enormous amount of support.
China in particular has deployed a radar that's specifically designed to detect stealth aircraft like the F-35, like the B-2 bomber.
And Iran has in its arsenal the missiles that are capable of shooting those planes down.
And so this, Trump is, you know, I think he believes what he's being told that the United States, that nobody can stand up against us.
And if he decides to go ahead with this, and I think it's likely it'll happen within a week or two.
I think they'll let this week go by.
They'll keep up the pretense of a negotiation.
But as you did when your conversation with Alistair that got disrupted by internet problems, as he pointed out, the demands that the Israelis in the United States are wanting to make on Iran are unacceptable to Iran.
Iran will negotiate on allowing inspections of its nuclear facilities so that the West can be reassured that there's no program to build a nuke.
And they will limit, but not eradicate, their program for enriching uranium.
Beyond that, they're not going to give up the ballistic missiles.
That's like telling the homeowner that's in a dangerous neighborhood, hey, give up all your guns so that the criminals can run amok.
They're not going to do that.
It would be a surrender of sovereignty, which is what Nexan Yahoo wants, but they're not going to do that voluntarily.
Correct.
You know, the other thing, I mean, the other point they keep coming back to is say, hey, look, we're still signatories to the International Atomic Energy Agency, you know, to the Nonproliferation Treaty.
Right.
Israel isn't.
Right.
Get them on board.
I'm going to play Senator Graham not to drive you crazy, but because this is what gets into Trump's ear.
This is his biggest cheerleader.
He's in Munich, still trying to talk the president into attacking Iran.
The essence of what he's saying is, we're not going to stop this time.
If we start, we're going to take out the government.
Cut number seven.
We had the JCPO.
That didn't work.
Everything we've done, Europe, America, we haven't.
We've done a lousy job standing out for the Iranian people.
You know, Gaza, a lot of people protesting.
Almost nobody's protesting for the Iranian people.
But let me tell you what I think is going to happen here.
I think Trump said three things that nobody else has said.
And people are still fighting and still encouraged because of the president.
They're getting weaker.
We put tariffs on their oil.
You had a very good, it is a zombie regime.
You can't do business with Iran normally anymore.
25% tariff, you buy their oil.
So it's going to collapse because the people have had it.
And what happens next, I don't know, but I do know this.
If we pull the plug on the people, whatever problems associated with the day after, if the people win against the Ayatollah, are a fraction of the problems associated with the Ayatollah killing his way out yet again, standing to murder another day.
If you don't realize we're on the verge of history, you're missing a lot.
We're talking weeks, not months.
And when we do this, if we do, we're starting and we're not stopping.
Nonsense that Trump hears.
I'm sure you recognize the face to which the camera went about one quarter through.
That was the Shah's son who has these visions of glory of him being returned and proclaimed the Shah of Iran.
Yeah, what, you know, again, Graham and his ilk, they're focused on the minority ethnic groups in Iran.
There are two main ethnic groups that account for 82% of the population.
You've got the Persians.
They're about 61, 62%.
And then you have the Azeris.
And the Azeris make up about another 20%, 18%.
Guess who is an Azeri?
Oh, that would be the Ayatollah Khameni.
So this notion that there's widespread dissatisfaction with even the rule of the mullahs or having the religious foundation of the society is sort of the controlling interest is just not true.
That is a Western fantasy.
The fact is, the mullahs have been adaptive.
They used to enforce pretty strict doctrine regarding how women could dress in public, but that's disappeared.
And as our friend Max Blumenthal and his wife, as they saw during their trip, along with Alistair and his wife to Iran a year ago, they saw young people, teenagers, canodling on the subway, which said, well, that's rather un-Islamic.
But the fact of the matter is the United States has this visceral hatred of Iran that's not justified by any fact, because we continue to insist that Iran is this murderous regime.
When if you let's total up the body count, the United States is responsible for more deaths of Iraqis, directly, Iranians, directly and indirectly, than Iran is of Americans.
And it's by a factor of 100, not a factor of just low digits, 100.
We are responsible for having promoted policies that have led to the deaths of more than a half million Iraqis or Iranians, excuse me.
U.S. Body Count Silence00:01:10
And so when we sit back and wonder, gee, why do they chant death to America?
Do you think if Iran had actually killed 500,000 Americans, we'd be chanting death to Iran.
But here we are chanting death to Iran.
We're just not saying it as a chorus, but that's exactly what we're doing.
It's just, it is, if Donald Trump moves forward with this attack on Iran, it's going to rank right up there with Adolf Hitler's invasion of Poland.
Completely unjustified, completely contrived for a bigger purpose of the United States to try to control the world.
Great stuff, Larry.
Thank you very much, my dear friend.
And the internet held out for us.
We'll look forward to seeing you at the end of the week with Ray.
All the best, Larry.
Thank you.
All right, my friend.
Thank you.
Sure.
Ray McGovern coming up at 10 o'clock this morning.
And watch the website because we have a very good chance of my resuming the internet interfered with conversation with Aleister Crook at one o'clock.