Feb. 17, 2026 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
31:29
AMB. Chas Freeman : Why the Kremlin Mistrusts the US
Ambassador Charles Freeman traces U.S.-Kremlin mistrust to Rubio’s undiplomatic Venezuela rhetoric, echoing Cold War-era policies that now harm Cuba’s economy, with its people driving Chevrolets. He contrasts China’s legalistic support for Iran—1.4M barrels daily, opposing regime collapse—with U.S. and Israeli actions in Gaza, where UN reports detail war crimes since October 7th, including starvation tactics and attacks on civilians. Freeman argues NATO’s 2014 Kyiv coup and 780K-troop rearming of Ukraine violated agreements like Anchorage summit pledges, fueling global skepticism toward U.S. commitments, from fictitious IOUs to Japan to Gaza’s humanitarian crisis. [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 Tuesday, February 17th, 2026.
Ambassador Chaz Freeman joins us now.
Ambassador Freeman, a pleasure as always.
Thank you for accommodating my schedule.
I do want to speak with you at some length about the relationship between the Kremlin and the White House.
But before we get there, were you surprised to see yesterday a decidedly undiplomatic Marco Rubio crowing about the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro?
No, I think that was very much his project.
He's all cock a hoop over it.
He sees it as the path to the overthrow of the Castro legacy government in Cuba, from which his father emigrated during the Batista era.
Ironically, not during the Castro era.
But his constituency in South Florida, particularly the older generation of Cuban Americans, are very much focused on getting rid of the Cuban regime.
And kidnapping Maduro was a very skillfully executed criminal act by our military.
And this is probably, for him, just the first step in a series of these.
They're choking the Cuban people to death, almost literally.
Yes.
And there is some initiative that Southerate and other people, they will blame their government for the amiseration and overthrow it.
So the assumption is, for example, in the case of Iran, that if we bomb Iran, Iranians will somehow blame their government rather than us for the suffering they undergo.
I don't think there's any evidence that this works.
I think instead, what we've done in the case of Cuba over many decades is to provide the regime with an excuse for everything that goes wrong.
They can all be blamed on us and our embargo, which, by the way, has no support internationally at all.
In fact, every vote in the UN General Assembly every year is it's usually two, that is the U.S. and Israel per farm, supporting us with that embargo against everybody else.
All the others vote against us.
So this is very much a project of our domestic political establishment and not anything that is supported internationally.
And I think when we do crow about conducting raids or military activities that are grossly illegal, we do ourselves no favors internationally.
Isn't the non-military, isn't the blockade of Cuba a war crime?
No, I don't think so.
The blockade of Cuba is not actually a blockade in a technical sense.
It is export controls, sanctions.
Of course, our extraterritorial application of those restrictions is a violation of the basic principles of international law.
I want to make a point here, and that is after the Castro Revolution in 1959, 1960, there was an argument for ostracizing, isolating, and so forth Cuba.
And the argument was based on the fact that we basically had four interests.
One was to deny Cuba as a platform for an extraterritorial, extra hemispheric power, the Soviet Union, to emplace missiles that could reach us with no warning, rather like the missiles that we have emplaced near the Russian Federation.
We objected to that strategically.
We undertook to overthrow the government in the Bay of Pigs invasion.
That failed.
Anyway, the first interest was to deny Cuba to a hostile power.
The second one was to stop the export of the Cuban Revolution to other Latin American countries or to Africa.
The third was to ensure that Cuban refugees who were exiting in large numbers chaotically did not continue to do so.
And the fourth was to settle various claims of Cuban Americans and Americans who had property in Cuba against the Cuban government for expropriating those properties.
The first two issues, that is strategic denial and the end of the export of the revolution, were in fact achieved during the Reagan administration.
The Soviet Union first attenuated and then essentially eliminated its support for the Castro regime.
And then Castro made a decision to replace the export of revolution with the export of doctors, many of whom have now had to return from Venezuela, where they were the backbone of the public health system.
Cuban medicine is excellent and very inexpensive.
That left to the last two issues.
How to tone down, prevent, or mitigate refugee outflows from Cuba, and how to deal with property and other claims arising from the revolution.
Well, the first two objectives, strategic denial and stopping the export of the revolution, justified isolating, ostracizing, embargoing, blockading, if you will, Cuba.
The last two issues can only be dealt with by engagement.
If we want Cubans to the Cuban economy and society to be sufficiently acceptable to the Cuban people that they won't feel obliged to risk their lives to cross the Florida Strait from Cuba in small boats, many of them drowning, as they do, then we have to engage.
If we want to solve the property claims and so on, we have to negotiate.
But we have continued on course with a policy of maximum pressure, a policy of maximum isolation.
And we're now entering a particularly brutal phase of that policy, which frankly doesn't make sense.
Is it any wonder the Cuban people seem to be driving Chevrolets almost as old as you and I are?
Older, I think.
Let's move on.
Iran's Defense Against Houthis00:08:28
That's a fascinating understanding of what's going on there.
Of course, in Marco Rubio's mind, the government is evil and he'll cause any suffering he can to try and overthrow them, whether this is vengeance for his father, which is absurd.
It's not the same government and the father emigrated 60 or 70 years ago, or whether it's some bizarre belief that we can export democracy, something that's never really worked.
We've never been able to do it.
I want to ask you about Iran.
China, a country that you are expert in, imports 1.4 million barrels of oil a day from Iran.
Do you think that China would allow the Iran regime to collapse or would be very pleased if the Straits of Hormuz were closed?
No, I think the Chinese would be very concerned about the cutoff of oil from Iran for whatever reason.
I note that in the case of Iraq, where we overthrew the government and occupied the place and so forth, it's the Chinese oil companies that have benefited.
So change of regime doesn't necessarily mean depriving anybody of oil unless you do what we're doing in Venezuela, which is effectively operating a new colonial policy and disregarding Venezuelan sovereignty in favor of imposing our own policies.
I think the question of whether the Chinese would intervene to support the Iranian government is easily answered.
The Chinese do not believe that alliances are assets.
They see them as liabilities.
The ally can do things that will get you into a war you don't want or get you into a position you don't want.
We should understand that because we have declared Israel to be an ally and it continually gets us into trouble and places burdens on us, financial and military.
So I don't think the Chinese would intervene to protect the Iranian regime.
But what they will do in their interest of not just supporting their relationship with the Iranian regime, but in the interest of international law, the UN Charter, the Westphalian order.
That is, they will do what they can to protect Iranian sovereignty, to bolster Iranian self-defense capabilities, and to ensure Iran's territorial integrity against the effort by Israel to fragment Iran, break it up into smaller countries that would be more manipulable.
So they will back Iran.
They have, I believe, they have supplied the HQ-9 and air defense and anti-missile system, which is equivalent at least of the S-400 from the Russians.
And they have provided radars, which allegedly can detect the F-35 despite its being stealth.
So they are they are backing Iranian sovereignty, self-defense capability, and territorial integrity, but they do not have a commitment to act themselves in defense of Iran.
Aleister Crook reports that the Chinese have given the Iranians the most sophisticated radar in the world, radar that can't be jammed by the United States and one that will alert even U.S. stealth planes, so-called stealth planes at a distance of 700 kilometers.
So we'll see where that goes.
I don't think we know for sure that there will be a war.
I mean, obviously a war would be incredibly stupid on our part.
Well, I was just going to ask you, do you think Trump has made up his mind to strike?
I don't think so.
I think he wants a deal.
The question is, what deal is on the table for him to get?
The Iranians are very clearly willing to negotiate.
They are intent at Geneva, where they're meeting today with us, or I should say with the quasi-official White House envoys Witkoff and Kushner.
They are very intent on proving to us and the world that, in fact, as all the intelligence agencies following this have attested, they have not made a decision to build a bomb.
They do not have a bomb program per se.
So they are using the negotiations in an effort to show that.
And they're quite willing to address the nuclear dimension.
What they are not willing to do is what Netanyahu has persuaded or tried to persuade Donald Trump was essential, and that is disarm themselves by destroying their missile forces or curtailing their production and research on those forces.
And they will not sever their own relationships with like-minded movements in the region to Israeli hegemony.
So they will not break with Hezbollah, with Hamas, with the Uthis in Yemen.
And they've been quite clear.
They will not negotiate on these latter two subjects.
They're quite prepared to do a deal on the nuclear matter because they claim, and with some evidence, they don't have a nuclear program, that all this is much ado about nothing.
And it is basically Prime Minister Netanyahu using the nuclear scare, the nuclear proliferation concerns of the United States and others, to obtain backing for his real agenda, which is the reduction of Iranian power, the regime change, and the breakup of Iran into smaller countries, much like what Israel has done and wanted to do to Syria.
Right.
Here's the Ayatollah just yesterday making an allusion to some super weapon that the Iranians have, which would be catastrophic for American aircraft carriers.
Chris, cut number 15.
We recently made the decision to send a powerful warship directly towards the coast of Iran.
Now it is true that a modern warship is certainly a very dangerous and formidable device.
But what is even more dangerous than the warship itself is the specific type of advanced weapon that has the capability to send it straight to the dark bottom of the sea.
Iran has a number of weapons that would quite convincingly sank an aircraft carrier, for example.
One of these is a torpedo that depends on cavitation.
It actually travels at about the speed of sound under the water and is very, very hard to intercept or even to detect before it arrives.
Another is thermally guided ballistic missiles.
Iran has hypersonic missiles.
We have not been able to develop them effectively ourselves, but Iran has them.
And apparently they are like Chinese anti-ship missiles, the so-called carrier killers, able to maneuver to strike a moving object, adjusting their trajectory to kill an airplane carrier.
So I don't know what else they have, but I think we're not talking about fighting the Houthis, you know.
Fighting the Houthis who we were unable to defeat.
Fighting the Houthis00:07:57
Exactly.
So I mean, here's the great, you know, go back to the question of whether Donald Trump has made a decision or not.
He has apparently convinced himself after the success and quotes of the decapitation of Venezuela that the U.S. military can do anything at all on the prevail over any conceivable enemy.
And therefore, he's full of hubris and self-confidence.
And I think in the case of Iran, this is questionable.
I hope that people around him, in fact, our military, are telling him honestly what the difficulties of attacking Iran are and what the probable consequences of that will be in terms of the devastation of Israel and possibly other countries where we have massed,
reportedly massed aircraft, including Jordan, including Azerbaijan and Armenia, which Vice President JD Vance just visited to celebrate the entirely fictional peace agreement between them that Donald Trump arranged, but perhaps to shore up their support for our use of their territory to attack Iran, in which case we'll retaliate against them.
Moving to the Kremlin and Washington, do you place any significance in the addition of the deputy Russian foreign minister to the Russian delegation in these trilateral negotiations, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States in Geneva?
I think it has multiple significances.
One of them is an invitation to the United States to finally field a professional, well-informed, constitutionally authorized envoy to these talks rather than conducting them with people who have no official government status,
may not even have proper security clearances, do not avail themselves of the support of professionals in the government, do not speak Russian, and are not necessarily fully conversant with the issues concerned.
That is Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner, whose relationship to the president is their only qualification.
So this is perhaps an invitation to reciprocate by including someone from the permanent government establishment to the extent that it still exists.
The other thing here is that this is a bit of a constraint on the unofficial Russian presence and it resonates entirely with Vladimir Putin's statement that in the end, if there is to be a peace in Ukraine, it's going to be arranged by professional diplomats.
He's quite willing to talk to the President Trump's personal envoys, his cronies, his son-in-law, apparently, in order to keep the door open.
But it's clear he doesn't have much expectation that they will be able to reach an agreement, or if they do reach an agreement, to get it implemented.
And to date, all the evidence is in Vladimir Putin's favor on this point.
Just some breaking news.
The Hindustan Times is reporting that Iran has sent shockwaves through global markets by declaring a round-the-clock surveillance lockdown over a portion of the Straits of Hormuz.
The Iranian Navy announced a full-spectrum monitoring across surface vessels, drones, and even submarines during this intense naval drills.
Wow.
They are conducting a full-scale naval exercise there with relatively small craft.
And clearly they are demonstrating to the world with a show of force that they have the ability to shut down the major artery of commerce for energy in the world.
That's not a surprise.
It coincides with the talks in Geneva.
It's meeting American pressure with their own pressure.
Do you have an opinion as to why those talks were moved from Abu Dhabi to Geneva?
I mean, might it be the principal Ukrainian negotiator is the head of Ukrainian intelligence, whom the Russians believe is responsible for the assassination of a Russian general and the attempted assassination of another Russian general.
Might this guy have been arrested in Abu Dhabi?
I don't think so, but I think Geneva is a congenial environment for us to hold these talks.
And the Russians are quite comfortable doing that in Switzerland.
I don't put too much significance on the change of venue, really.
Do the Russians trust the Americans?
Of course not.
We've given them no basis to do so.
We have repeatedly misled them, including on the major issue of NATO enlargement and power projection of our sphere of influence to their borders from the West.
We have assured them of various other things which we then have violated.
We conducted a coup or managed a coup in 2014 in Kyiv to derail an effort by the then Ukrainian government to split the difference between the European Union and the Russian Federation.
We then, with NATO, retrained, reformed, and reorganized, re-equipped the Ukrainian armed forces to a level of 780,000 troops on the eve of the outbreak of a Russian invasion.
Those troops were poised to attack the Donbass rebels, the Russian speakers of the Donbass, when the Russians attacked.
We have repeatedly, in negotiations, appeared to reach agreements on things, mostly at the Witkoff level, but you could say Anchorage, Alaska, the summit meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, in which the two sides agreed that there would be broad enlargement of engagement between the two countries, was not implemented.
So we have a very good record of not keeping our word and in fact doing quite the opposite of what we have agreed to do.
Instead of relaxing tensions, we have increased them.
So I don't think they trust us at all.
And I have to say with some sorrow, that they're not alone in the world in not trusting us these days.
Right.
Right.
Genocide In Gaza00:06:36
My goodness, how things in the Middle East would change if everybody recognized a Palestinian state.
Well, instead of pursuing a resolution of the Israel-Palestine issue, we are trying to cash in on the genocide in Gaza.
That's what the real estate program is.
It's basically building a resort on the corpses of dead Palestinian women, children, and men.
And the cynicism that you have to have to produce the kind of plan that Jared Kushner presented to this so-called Board of Peace for real estate development,
basically setting up an enclave for political self-indulgence and hedonism, served by an effective force of Palestinian slaves, greatly reduced from the current population, but bottled up in an Israeli-controlled environment.
It's really telling that in this regard, the so-called Board of Peace has not a single Palestinian representative.
It is Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel and other Zionists are members of it.
And of course, some opportunistic countries who haven't yet come up with the billion-dollar pay-to-play deal and probably never will are pandering to us, to Donald Trump, with a nominal membership in this thing.
Tony Blair, who is widely regarded in the Middle East as a stooge of the Israelis, is on this board.
And there is a technical group of technocrats supposed to implement the decisions of the board, which is Palestinian, but they've not been allowed to get into Gaza.
Who paid Prime Minister Blair's billion-dollar membership fee?
Surely it didn't come from his own bank account.
No, I don't think it's been paid yet.
I mean, the Trump administration operates in large measure on fictitious IOUs.
Ask the Japanese, the Koreans, the Europeans, the Indians, about all of the so-called investment commitments they've made in the United States.
Are these real or not?
They're not real.
They are IOUs, which I don't think they have any intention of executing.
You'll appreciate the summary of the UN Human Rights Commission report, which was announced just a few minutes before we came on air.
Chris, cut number 17.
In relation to Israel's military operations and attacks in Gaza from 7th October, we conclude that Israeli authorities are responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity and violations of international humanitarian and human rights law, including extermination, intentionally directing attacks against civilians and civilian objects,
murder or willful killing, using starvation as a method of war, forcible transfer, gender persecution targeting Palestinian men and boys, sexual and gender-based violence amounting to torture and cruel or inhuman treatment.
Israel's total siege of the Gaza Strip has weaponized the provision of life-sustaining necessities for strategic and political gains, including through cutting off supplies of water, food, electricity, fuel, and other essential supplies, including humanitarian assistance.
It constitutes collective punishment, disproportionately impacting pregnant women and persons with disabilities, and is causing grave harm to children, including starvation-related deaths.
The deliberate use of heavy weapons with large destructive capacity in densely populated areas constitutes an intentional and direct attack on the civilians.
I mean, none of this is new.
None of it is news.
Where does it go from here?
Well, other than that, of course, they're law-abiding.
Israelis are law-abiding people.
I mean, that is a devastating presentation, as you say, of things that we've all seen with our own eyes, which are denied in the official narrative.
And they coincide, by the way, this finding coincides entirely with that of the beleaguered rapporteur for Palestine, Gaza, Francesca Albanese, who is the subject of a slander and smear campaign of the sort that we have come to expect from the Zionists, trying to discredit her, cut her off from access to her bank account and credit cards,
and make her life essentially impossible.
We've heard statements from spokespeople for the Zionist cause that very viciously outline exactly everything they plan to do to persecute Ms. Albanese.
And here we have the UN Human Rights Commission basically very directly corroborating everything she is accused of having reported.
You know what the UN Human Rights Commission has also said without using words, that Joe Biden and Donald Trump are war criminals because they paid for this.
Well, certainly in a just world, a world ruled by law, I think they would both be in the dark.
Yes.
Wow.
Ambassador, thank you.
Great conversation.
Thank you for letting me go across the board from Venezuela to Gaza.
Very helpful, very informative, as always.
We'll look forward to seeing you next week, my friend.