Alastair Crooke argues China’s Beidou satellite system, long-range radar (YLC-8B, 700km stealth detection), and Persian Gulf intelligence ship render U.S. jamming ineffective, explaining Iran’s defiance of missile or proxy demands—Netanyahu’s four conditions reportedly presented to Trump at the December 29, 2025 Mor-a-Lago meeting. Witkoff’s Russia-Ukraine talks fail by ignoring NATO’s influence and intermediate missiles, favoring $800B reconstruction funds (overseen by Larry Fink) and bondholder profits like Rothschild. Lavrov rejects Western dominance, pushing for Novorusia and cultural concessions in Ukraine, while Zelensky’s insults at Davos and Munich undermine his credibility—Crooke suggests Ukraine’s collapse could force negotiations, but not with its current leadership. The episode hints at a possible shift from battlefield to diplomatic resolution. [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.
Aleister Crook joined us again.
Alistair, thank you for coming back.
Our conversation earlier today was disrupted by the gods of the internet.
We think we've calmed them down now.
But as we were chatting and before the internet went down, I believe that you were about to offer an opinion about why Iran is confident in its ability to defend itself and not intimidated by the proximity of Donald Trump's self-proclaimed armada.
Yes.
And I think that this is very strange because, you know, people are saying, but we don't see anything.
I mean, you know, yes, there have been transport planes coming from China and Russia, but we don't see the results of all of this.
And what's going on?
Well, actually, what's going on is invisible because it is a data ecosystem that China has transferred.
Since June, what has happened is that Iran has completely shifted away from GPS, American GPS, and even the Russian GLONAS system to Beidou, the Chinese system.
But the Chinese system is something quite different because what you have is the Chinese have provided the Iranians with long-range surveillance radar, the YLC-8B.
Now, this is a very long-range radar, but its importance is this.
It can detect stealth fighters up to a range of 700 kilometers, proven.
It is quite clear that it has this capacity.
And because it works at a very low frequency of radar emissions, it can pick up the shape change or the other elements of stealth.
So this is one aspect, the radar.
Secondly, they have, and the most important unseen element is it, is the Chinese in their agreement, their coordination agreement from 2125, their partnership agreement, provided Iran with access to their military-grade enciphered data link of Beidou as well.
So the radar connects, if you like, into this data link.
Then they have stationed, there are the satellites overhead, the Chinese satellite system, which can provide targeting to within one meter, a very accurate targeting.
And that is now linked to the Beidou system.
China even have installed a ground receiving station and ground relay bases.
And this data link can't easily, if at all, be broken by jamming or other American elements, which were so apparent in June.
And then they have put an intelligence ship off the Persian Gulf, which is like an AWAC.
It's bristling with radars and structures, and it can intercept messages, and it can provide a direct link from the satellite information straight through.
And just so that people understand that this is real, the Chinese have started putting out some satellite images, not their highly with high-resolution ones, but of the FAAD missile positions, the American FAD missile positions, and also the aircraft, the American aircraft sitting in Alode.
This was just, if you like, a tease rather than anything, because really what's happening in real time, the information from the radars, coupled with the targeting data coming down from the Chinese satellite, augmented by the ship just off shore, which can also have capacity for submerged imaging,
i.e. American submarines, Israeli submarines in the area.
And of course, Iran has small submarines in the area too, between 25 and 30.
So this is a complete network.
And if you want to get an idea of it, this is what the Pakistanis, it was slightly different one, called Link 17, which is how they defeated the Indians so effectively.
A complete radar system, radar satellite system that provides the controller, the military controller, with a complete real-time live picket and all the targeting details they need to load into their missiles.
And their missile towns, their small missile towns, which they are really towns, are now linked directly through Beidou, both to the satellite, to the ship, and to the radar system, and can provide direct information for any launch of satellites.
So this is a complete, as I say, it's unseen, but actually what the Chinese have done in this last period is they have put on the ground a complete military data ecosystem.
And so all the problems that Iran had from jamming, GPS spoofing and things are removed.
Beidou is at the moment anyway, unjammable.
The stealth, American stealth aircraft are completely visible to this Chinese radar too, to a depth of 700 kilometers, which gives the Iranians plenty of time to prepare for incoming, if you like, F-35s coming from Diego Garcia or from the ships.
Why Iran Refuses Talks00:09:21
And I think this explains this context why people wonder and say, but why are the Iranians taking, if you like, a very strong line and saying, no, we'll talk about the negotiation on nuclear issues, but missiles?
No, absolutely not.
And also links to Hamas and Hezbollah.
No way we're going to do that.
So we have to see.
And Netanyahu believes that this is contributing, I suspect, to trapping Trump, because Trump has said, well, if I don't get a negotiation, then there will be war.
They say he says it quite clearly.
Last night, he gave a briefing.
It's reflected in the Hebrew press.
And he said, I told them.
And again, he says he got the green light at the Mor-a-Lago meeting on the 29th of December from Trump for an attack on Iran, an Israeli or an American attack on Iran, if the Iranians do not negotiate on all those four elements that Netanyahu insists on.
No enrichment, no capacity to enrich, no missiles, no links to Hezbollah or Hamas or what they call their proxies, and a complete, utter disarmament of Hamas.
Those are his four demands which he put to Trump when he came to Washington.
And he's insisting and he says, you know, if they don't do that, well, we are going, first of all, you know, if he come up with an agreement that's not adequate on nuclear, which isn't zero enrichment, then we won't endorse it.
We will actually go against it.
We will not give it its kosher certificate.
And so this is where we are.
And it looks increasingly that to my mind, because the negotiations I don't think will succeed, that Trump is in some sense is trapped.
And he's been kicking down his ladders out of it by sending a second carrier force.
I mean, he only increases the momentum on him to do something.
You've got two carrier groups there.
Why aren't you doing something?
You've got it there.
The momentum is huge against for an attack.
And he's still looking.
He's asking his team, find me a way we can do a quick strike and scoot attack.
Go in there.
We'll bomb a lot.
We'll do a lot of damage.
And then we'll say, oh, we're done with this and we're out.
And of course, this is why this Beidou development is so important, because this means, and I think the Iranians see, this means, you know, a very different calculus.
Of course, we have to wait and see.
Proof of the pudding is always in the eating in military sense.
We have to wait and see how it works out.
But that's the reason why the Iranians are more, if you like, willing to be hardline on the negotiations.
And Prime Minister Netanyahu added the fourth requirement, which is the destruction of the equipment with which uranium would be or could be enriched in the future.
That was never in there.
Here's the president on Friday night.
It's rather simplistic, but here he is half boasting, half threatening about the second aircraft carrier, Chris number eight.
Second aircraft carrier that you decided to send?
Talk about why you made that choice.
Well, in case we don't make a deal, we'll need it.
If we don't have a deal, we'll need it.
If we have a deal, we pitch the president.
It'll be leaving.
Very simple in his thinking: either we have a deal or we don't.
Does the United States intelligence community understand the significance of this why-do Chinese system?
I don't know.
I'm sure, I mean, some of them, you know, there are very bright people in that system.
But does the information get translated into, you know, real evaluations, evaluations that are not sort of propagandized, but are realistic?
I don't know.
I rather doubt it.
I mean, you know, I think he listens to people, you know, on Fox News who say, you know, the American forces is massive.
It's huge.
The Iranians are nothing.
We can knock them down in a few days and then they will be destroyed.
And he's also kicked down another ladder because he said very clearly, well, the best thing would be regime change.
So he's now, you know, so now he's, you know, increasing the bids and making it harder for him to find a suitable ladder down.
And I don't know how long, you know, the Pentagon envisaged that it's capable of keeping some of those carriers on station.
I believe the Ford has already been eight months at sea and has some technical problems, but Larry is the expert on all of that.
Larry and I have not discussed this big due.
This is the first I've heard of it, but Larry agrees with everything you're saying.
I'm going to jump topics, but before I do, we are running a poll of those who are watching us, and it's a simple question: yes or no?
Are U.S. strikes against Iran imminent?
Let's go to Mr. Witkoff's other headache, which is his negotiations with the Russians and the Ukrainians.
How would you characterize the Witkoff approach in those negotiations?
This was supposed to be a radical new approach.
And the idea was to move away from old diplomacy and to make it all about money.
The basic assumption of Trump and Witkoff were there were so many people that were profiting financially in the boondoggle, if you like, of Ukraine, that what one had to do is construct a sort of financial system by which they would continue to benefit financially.
But at the same time, in so doing, in benefiting financially, you could avoid the need for casualties or the consequence of deaths.
And this was the plan.
And the idea was to float it off.
And there are a huge, of course, there are a huge interest in the continuation of the war.
I mean, first of all, you've got all the bondholders.
Rothschild is superintending, if you like, shepherding all those.
I mean, and if there is a settlement, there's, of course, going to be a huge profit on those bonds.
They've been down to 10 or 15 cents in the dollar at some stage.
They're now much higher because they think there's going to be an agreement.
And then you have this proposal of a reconstruction fund for Ukraine, $800 billion can reconstruction fund.
And so the idea is you take these two elements.
You've got the Rothschilds, you've got Larry Fink superintending or bringing together all of the new money coming in for reconstruction.
And then you would bring in Zelensky, and he needs some of this for his people, for his followers to keep them on side and keep them going.
And then, of course, you need it for the European banks who have guaranteed loans to Ukraine at the World Bank, particularly the UK, World Bank, and IMF, huge amounts.
So they have literally, there would be a financial black hole if Ukraine was, if these debts were to be, you know, were to go be bad debts and have to be written off.
I mean, Europe would be in dire straits fiscally if it had to make good on the guarantees that it is provided to the World Bank.
Now, the problem with all this, it sounds very clever.
You know, well, actually, we're going to do it.
Shift From Military to Business Scene00:13:10
And, you know, we're going to forget the military side.
Instead of a military scene, we're going to go to a business scene.
And the business scene we're going to go to, you know, is going to provide benefits for all, including for the Europeans who will get money going to their nascent sort of rebirth of their military industrial strategy.
Everyone's going to be happy, and we can do a deal.
You can't do a deal like that because that's not what it is all about.
And this is what Lavrov keeps saying.
You know, it's not about dividing up the rebuilding cake so that everyone gets a little bit of douche, you know, coming through to them.
Actually, what it is all about is about a big question: what is the extent of the sphere of influence of NATO?
Where does that boundary lie?
And where does the boundary of Central Asia lie?
Russia, China, Central Asia.
Where is the frontier between these two spheres of interest?
And how do we manage that?
And how do we deal with it?
This is about security.
And, you know, it's very demeaning.
It's very reflective of the sort of nihilistic world we live in, which we've seen again and on view at Munich.
You know, that actually people have invested lives, have invested blood in this conflict.
There's history in this country.
You can't just, you know, buy it out as if it's some, you know, you have a real estate block and there's a tenement building in the middle of it, which is still occupied.
And you say, but that spoils the whole concept of a new Trump tower.
So these people have to be bought out and we have to get rid of it.
And, you know, it's, you know, conflicts, war is not just simply a matter of sort of, you know, a little bit of money here.
Who's it?
And by the way, this is exactly what Kushner and Witkoff are doing in Gaza, trying to create a financial structure so that everyone can get an element.
And Israelis are joining in it because they want part of the reconstruction.
The people who knocked down Gaza are now wanting slice of the action.
Is this more about wealth than it is peace?
It's all about money and it's all about wealth and it is all about real estate type dealing, financialized real estate sort of.
It's real estate methodology transferred to real world war and conflict.
And it doesn't work and it's not going to work.
And that is why Lavrov has said very clearly, actually there's no progress at all since Anchorage.
It's gone backwards since then.
It's gone distinctly backwards and it's in danger because also America is increasing, if you like, its dominance as it is affected by the debt crisis and by the need to have more and more resources coming into the U.S., a capital account.
What is happening, they are trying to take control of the corridors of oil and gas and resources and to seize ships on the high seas.
And so very clearly, I mean, Lavrov is saying this is simply incompatible with multipolarity.
This is domination.
Trump is trying to dominate not only oil and gas, but trying to economically dominate the area.
And, you know, they talked about multipolarity, he says, when they came into power and accepted it.
And Rubio was one of those who talked about multipolarity.
But actually, it is shifted into domination.
And it is shifted into a structure, a financialized structure, which is completely severed from the reality of real life war and conflict.
Alistair, do you place any significance in the addition of senior Russian foreign ministry officials, but not Sergei Lavrov, to the negotiators in Geneva tomorrow?
Yes.
I mean, you're probably referring to Kirill Dmitriev.
No, no, not Dmitriev.
I don't remember the fellow's name, but he's a deputy foreign minister.
He's the deputy to Lavrov.
Well, I think, yes, I think this is important because, you know, what they want, I mean, the Russians want, they don't want a deal.
Look, you know, let's have a handshake on this, okay?
And we'll agree to this.
They want something written, legal, you know, binding, not something that, you know, oh, did we say that?
Oh, I don't remember that we said that.
We want it on paper and we want it done in a legal way.
That's what Lavrov and the foreign ministry are saying.
Now, I think, you know, there's a lot of controversy about Kirill Dmitriev.
But really, what he's doing, I mean, it's, you know, and I know Bloomberg has come out and said they're about to join the, to join, you know, the dollar sphere.
I mean, you know, this is like Medvedev.
He's trolling the Americans.
They are taking a little bit of pleasure.
I mean, have a look at Dmitriev's Twitter account and you'll see.
I mean, he has huge fun sort of, you know, writing.
Let me just count you.
Let me just stop because I have those names.
One is President Putin's aide Vladimir Medinsky and the other is Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzhin.
Do these names mean anything to you?
They seem to be high-ranking to me.
Yeah, Medinsky led the first negotiations.
So he was the chief negotiator in the first instance.
And the Ukrainians complained about him bitterly because they said he lectured them.
But that was the negotiation that produced the agreement, which if the Ukrainians had signed it, they'd have a lot more land than they're going to end up with that was trashed by Boris Johnson and Joe Biden.
Yes.
Yes.
Exactly.
But now, I mean, clearly, I mean, what you can see happening in Russia is a result of the sense that, I mean, and Lavrov is clear, you know, Alaska is lost.
We've moved further and further away from it.
That is gone.
And so you hear them talking now, not so much about the five oblasts, but they're talking, the language is Novorusia.
And Novorusia extends right along the Black Sea coast.
It was the ancient seat of Catherine the Great that she conquered from the Turks.
And it controlled and they fought bitterly for this land.
And it is largely people by Russian-speaking people there who are sympathetic.
And in the other oblasts, they voted in large numbers to stay with Russia.
So I think that we see a hardening of their position.
They haven't specified it, but it is very clear that as they talk about, you know, that what they thought had been the understandings reached in Alaska, again, you know, this is what Lavrov would say.
You see, we need these things in writing.
Not, you know, just what, because no one really knows what exactly was agreed, what were the understandings that Trump agreed to there, that we needed in writing.
So this is certainly a part of it, but also because it's moving further and further away from reality.
As I say, you know, this has got to be, you know, address the security needs of the region in the big picture, in missiles, in intermediate missiles, in where is the boundary of NATO.
NATO has just had a meeting, or at least they spoke at the Munich Talk conference talking about moving further forward and along with the European Union.
We're going to go two speeds so we can incorporate more people even if they don't conform to EU standards.
So, you know, it really is necessary.
And this attempt to sort of put a siege on Russia by attacking, you know, the British have now said that they've got drones in the North Sea to stop any shadow fleet passing through the channel, the British Channel.
I mean, this is nuts.
I mean, of course there's going to be a response to this from both Russia and China.
You know, if you're going to squeeze their security of energy in that way, expect a response.
Of course, there's going to be a response and they'll harden their position and Ukraine.
And don't forget the final thing which Lavrov refers to, and he refers to it obliquely because he talks about, well, you remember, you know, what was in the Minsky Accords was proper respect for the Russian language and the Russian culture within the context of Ukraine.
And that has been completely, completely negated.
And so they are saying, you know, it's not going to be possible to have a proper solution and for us to live in proximity until there is a change in culture in Kiev.
They have to change the culture and then we can, you know, live as fraternal states in a normal way with normal relations.
But until there's a change in culture in Kiev, away from their suggestion, you know, that Slavs are sub-humans, as the national security advisor said, it's not going to be possible, I think, to have a proper solution there.
Last two items, one informational, one a question.
The vote of our chatters, are the U.S. strikes against Iran imminent?
Yes, 64%.
No, 36%.
So two to one.
Do you think that the special military operation ends on the battlefield when the Ukrainian military collapses or in a conference room when President Zelensky signs a piece of paper?
Well, I think one will lead to the second, you know, as it did in 22, April 22.
But I mean, it was, you know, a sense of the collapse in Ukraine will lead to it.
But whether it'll be with, whether the discussion will be with Zelensky or a rather culturally different structure in Kiev, I mean, is the big question.
But that's now possible.
I think that we see that Zelensky, I mean, look at his speech in Munich.
I mean, it was just ridiculous.
And earlier at Davos, he just spent his time insulting the Europeans.
I'm not complaining about that, but it doesn't suggest someone who has a sort of strategic view of how to find a solution to Ukraine.
Alistair Crook, thank you very much for the double duty today.
Very, very, very informative, particularly about the Chinese radar system, which I've not heard anywhere.
But I deeply appreciate your coming back.
I know it's nighttime where you are and you have plans, but thank you very much and happy birthday to your daughter.