Feb. 25, 2026 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
24:28
AMB: Chas Freeman : Israel Pushes US into Another Endless War
Ambassador Chas Freeman warns that Ukraine’s February 2026 strike on a Russian Urals plant—using British hardware and U.S. intel—risks escalation without battlefield impact, deepening Western-Russian tensions. He links this to Zionist pressures pushing Trump toward a U.S.-led Iran attack, citing the Gerald R. Ford carrier’s repositioning near Israel by February 20th and depleted munitions stockpiles. Iran’s likely response—direct strikes on Israel and Shiite militia attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq—could trigger a prolonged war, straining global military readiness, including Taiwan. Christian Zionism’s divisive theology further inflames regional instability, while Huckabee’s embrace of spy Jonathan Pollard signals reckless alignment with hardliners. The episode reveals how proxy conflicts and ideological extremism may drag the U.S. into another unwinnable war. [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 24th, 2026.
Ambassador Chaz Freeman joins us now.
Ambassador Freeman, thank you very much for coming with us, as you do nearly every Tuesday at this hour.
It's a pleasure to chat with you.
Thank you for accommodating my schedule.
Before we talk to talk about the Israeli push for another Middle Eastern war, I want to ask you a question about Ukraine.
How reckless was it for Ukraine to use British hardware and U.S. intelligence to strike a Russian munitions plant 800 miles into Russia deep in the Ural Mountains?
Well, it just invites a counter-escalation from Russia.
That's been the pattern.
Ukraine, of course, is at war with Russia and is entitled to strike anywhere it pleases in Russia.
But this doesn't help it on the battlefield in Ukraine, which is what is deciding the outcome of this war and the future of the Zelensky administration, as well as the peace or war in Europe.
So this is an act that boosts Ukrainian morale, certainly has some effect on Russian capabilities, pleases the hawks in Western Europe who want to keep fighting to the last Ukrainian, but it doesn't liberate Ukrainian territory.
It doesn't defend Ukrainian territory against further Russian inroads.
So it's strategically irrelevant, essentially.
Does it invite the consideration for Kremlin retaliation on Great Britain?
Does it further damage the Kremlin's view of the United States?
I mean, here we are supposedly negotiating with Russia.
The CIA was involved in the attack on President Putin's home, which might have been an attack on him had he been there.
The CIA was obviously involved in this.
Yes, of course.
It does increase the animosity of Russians against the British, reciprocating British rustophobia.
It certainly increases the danger that the war can spread.
But so far, the Russian leadership, Putin and company, have been quite careful to keep this war limited.
And it is not they who have been pushing the escalations.
They've been responding to escalations.
As far as the American element is concerned, I think it's been a long time since the Russians had any confidence or have placed any trust at all in either the word or the actions of the United States.
They understand very well that we have been engaged in an effort to bring them down, to engineer regime change, to weaken and isolate them internationally, as the former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said.
And so I don't think this changes their judgment of us, which is that we are hostile.
Well, there's no question but that we're hostile.
Do you expect the Russians to retaliate?
I mean, can you imagine if the Russians had attacked Mar-a-Lago while Trump was in DC?
Of course we would retaliate.
Yeah, no, the Russians are quite prepared to escalate.
In effect, they have done so.
The destruction of the Ukrainian power grid, the imposition on ordinary Ukrainians of fierce winter conditions with no heat, no electricity, is a retaliation for the Ukrainian strikes deep into Russia.
You know, those strikes, as I said a few moments ago, have been countered by Russian counter-escalation.
But the cycle of escalation did not begin with the Russians.
It began with the Ukrainians and the West.
So this is a well-established pattern, and I would be fairly confident that the Russians will find some way to make Ukrainians suffer even more than they have, which is pretty awful.
What kind of pressures are the Zionists putting on Trump as we speak?
Enormous pressure, and it appears to have had results.
We know that Lieutenant General Kane, who is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has essentially been the only voice of realism within this administration.
General Kane has not taken a position for or against an attack on Iran for reasons of his sense of military propriety.
But he has certainly warned the president and others within the Pentagon, certainly, of the extreme risks that this proposed attack on Iran will create.
Here, I think it's important to remember that the original conception of the Iraq war by the neoconservatives in the United States, who remain very much in positions of authority, neoconservatives allied with Zionists, was that after the attack on Iraq, we would attack Iran.
And there have been vociferous spokespeople for such an attack for quite a long time.
What's different is that I think Iranian patience with basically putting up with provocations and limited attacks and responding to those provocations and limited attacks with its own limited reprisals, Iranian patience with that approach has run out and so now we can fully expect a all-out response from Iran, which they warned us about,
in response to any attack, no matter how limited.
I think the attack is imminent.
The we know from photography that the Gerald R Ford aircraft carrier crossed the strait of Gibraltar on february 20th.
It travels at about 30 knots, 35 miles per hour, on a sustained basis.
That's enough time to bring it into the right off the shores of Israel Syria Lebanon, in the eastern Mediterranean.
So I suspect it is now in place.
We have, on thursday, a scheduled negotiation between messrs Witkoff and Kushner, which we are told will be the decisive moment for the president's decision about whether to attack.
It's pretty clear that such a decision is going to be made, because there is no evidence that those negotiations have been at all serious on our part.
The demands that we have made are obviously way beyond anything Iran can accept.
Even beyond that, we have uh, mr Witkoff uh saying that, two things.
First, he's puzzled, why haven't the Iranians capitulated in the face of all the force that the United States has deployed.
Of the U.s air force, two of the three active aircraft carriers would be.
We have an enormous naval flotilla.
Why haven't the Iranians capitulated?
Which indicates that he has no understanding of either Iranian mentality or how countries react to the kind of mafia blackmail tactics that we are employing.
And second, he has said Can repeatedly that we are demanding zero enrichment of uranium from Iran, and foreign minister and Ak Chi, on the other hand, has said that there's been no such demand at the talks.
What that suggests is that the talks are simply a means of dragging out things, stringing the Iranians along until we had the forces in place to launch a war, which is what I think we're about to do.
So the headline of today's Washington POST significant sized top of the fold, front page top general sees risk in attack on Iran.
I'm just going to read one paragraph.
General Dan Kane, chairman of the Joint Chiefs OF Staff, expressed his concerns at a White House meeting last week with Trump and his top aides, cautioning that any major operation against Iran will face challenges because the U.s munitions stockpile has been significantly depleted by Washington's ongoing defense of Israel and support for Ukraine.
General Kaine's remarks at the White House meeting have not been previously reported.
Now, something like this does not just pop up.
This obviously was leaked by someone, and obviously to the displeasure of the president.
Chris, I think we have the full screen.
This is what um, This is what the president has said.
The story does not attribute this vast wealth of knowledge to anyone and is 100% incorrect.
General Kane, like all of us, would not like to see war, but if a decision is made ongoing against Iran and a military level, it is his opinion that it will be something easily won.
I'll tell you this.
The Washington Post story is a lot more credible than the President's denial.
Absolutely.
First of all, it's very clear that that is a mischaracterization of General Kane's briefing of the president.
And second, he's absolutely correct that our stockpiles of weaponry are at an extremely low level.
And it's worth thinking for a moment about the consequences of that.
There's several.
First, the president would obviously like a sort of one-off in-and-out Venezuela-style, or for that matter, June 2025 attack on Iran-style activity rather than a war of attrition.
But we are going to get into a war of attrition because the Iranians are not going to play ball anymore on the limited strike option.
And therefore, how much weaponry we have in stock is a major issue.
Second implication, so we're not capable really of conducting a war of attrition against a country that is the size of Western Europe and formidably armed itself.
So the basic assumption on the part of the president, apparently, is incorrect.
The other issue is that not only are we not capable of sustaining warfare against Iran for an extended period, but we will expend the remaining low stocks of weapons.
And that means that we will have no means of defending places like Taiwan, if it's our decision to do so.
So this is going to greatly degrade American power, whatever its effects in the region.
And here I will say that if you read the mainstream media in the United States, you will find what I think is a fallacious assumption, quite contrary to what Iran has been thinking and saying, and that is that the counter to an American attack on Iran will be against U.S. bases in neighboring Arab countries rather than against Israel.
Iran knows where the impulse for this attack is coming from, and it will respond ferociously with an attack on Israel.
It will also, we know, participate in or authorize or at least agree to attacks on American forces in Iraq by Shiite militias that are aligned with it.
We have drawn down our Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain because we understand that that is a likely target.
We have drawn down our forces in Qatar at Al-Adaid Air Base for the same reason.
Qatar is not a member of the Abraham Accords.
Bahrain is.
That makes it, in the minds of Iranians, a legitimate target against the coalition run by Israel that is attacking it.
So this is very complicated.
It will have global implications as well as regional implications.
And I haven't even gotten to the notion that the risk to U.S. naval forces, and specifically to the Abraham Lincoln and the Gerald R. Ford, is very considerable.
Iran's Capabilities in the Mediterranean00:02:22
I don't know.
the Gerald R. Ford, as I said, is probably now on site in the eastern Mediterranean.
I don't know what capabilities Iran may have deployed to the eastern Mediterranean, but it certainly has the capability to strike the Abraham Lincoln and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
And, you know, there's a further problem here.
We don't have any search capability.
If a substantial number of ships are sunk or severely damaged, we don't have the ability to repair them.
We can't get into the Persian Gulf safely because the Gulf of the Strait of Hormuz will be closed.
We won't have the ability to, we don't have the shipyards.
We don't have the shipbuilding capability to replace sunken ships.
So this is, I think General Kane, far from overstating the risks, stated them quite realistically and in a limited, cautious fashion, not wishing to oppose the president's obvious subservience to Prime Minister Netanyahu.
And here, you know, I would say the Israelis also are delusional.
They imagine that they can use the cover of an American attack on Iran while staying out of the war themselves so they can attack Lebanon and take more territory and so forth and smash up Hezbollah.
I don't think this is going to go according to the plan at all.
And so I'm very apprehensive that before the week is out, we will begin to see some really grave consequences for our military and our political influence in the Middle East.
Attempting to understand the president, he's not aggravated at whatever private advice was given to him, but probably is furious at this headline in today's Washington Post and probably blames General Kaine or somebody on his staff.
It wouldn't be Pete Hegseth that leaked this and it wouldn't be anybody in the White House.
General Kane comes off as heroic in this piece in the Washington Post.
I mean, it's just one newspaper, but you know the influence that it has.
God Gave Land00:03:33
You once lived there.
You know the influence that it has inside the beltway.
Indeed.
Of course, there is another possible source of the leak, and that is the CIA.
John Ratcliffe, the director of the CIA, was at that meeting.
He apparently said virtually nothing.
I suspect that his own staff, whatever he himself may feel, I think, have been quite realistic in warning him about the risks that we are undertaking.
And so you don't know, I mean, but clearly you're right.
This was a leak.
It was intended to enable the professional military and perhaps the professional espionage agencies to say, I told you so when stuff happens.
Wow.
Let's switch slightly and perhaps you can tell me what you think of this.
Chris, cut number two.
Christian Zionism.
I want to go back because that's where we started.
I'm not going to let you off on this because you have went at three times that God gave this land to this people.
And so it is entirely fair for me with respect to ask what land are you talking about?
Because I just read Genesis 15, as I have many times.
And that land, I think it says, from the Nile to the Euphrates, which is, once again, basically the entire Middle East.
So God gave that land to his people, the Jews, or he didn't.
You're saying he did.
What does that mean?
Does Israel have the right to that land?
Because you're appealing to Genesis.
You're saying that's the original deed.
It would be fine if they took it all.
So I think there are three comments to make about this.
Earth, this is an incredibly ill-timed eruption of nonsense from an American ambassador in a crucial place.
It coincides with the attack on Iran and the proposed Israeli expansion of aggression against probably Syria as well as Lebanon, maybe even Jordan.
And so it has alarmed the entire Arab world and has been really very unprecedentedly condemned by virtually every government in the region as well as Muslim governments elsewhere.
So that's the first point.
The second is that the theology here is crackpot.
Abraham had a number of sons, one of whom is the progenitor of the Muslim, Arab populations.
So if God gave that land from the Nile to the Euphrates to the descendants of Abraham, that includes the Palestinians, the Saudis, the Iraqis, the Syrians, the Lebanese, and everyone else.
It's not exclusively Jews who immigrated from Europe and may have no genetic connection to the land beyond a trace in any event.
I mean, so this is preposterous.
Incompetent Ambassadors Exposed00:03:00
The third, and I'll just say this, this coincides with basically the French decision to exclude Ambassador Kushner,
a convicted felon who is our ambassador to France, from any meetings with government ministries other than the Minister of Foreign Affairs because of intemperate interference in their politics to which they object.
So here we have two American ambassadors, neither of them competent to conduct the job that they're doing.
One of them clearly, although he is ambassador to Israel for the United States, acting as though he was representing Israel, not the United States, in his commentary and views.
Not a surprise.
Amazing that he could be confirmed.
The other convicted felon who is now manifestly unable to do his job.
What the French have done is just short of expelling him.
Why didn't they expel him?
Well, he's the father-in-law of Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of President Trump.
He's a crony, a fellow billionaire, and the French have reserved a window through which they can speak with the White House.
But here we have indisciplined ambassadors, incompetent ambassadors, and theologians who don't appear to know what they're talking about.
A brilliant, brilliant analysis, Ambassador, and I am deeply grateful for it.
And I know the audience, which has grown rapidly in size since you began the analysis, is deeply appreciative.
There's a lot more about from Hakabi.
He defends his friendship with Jonathan Pollard, one of the worst committers of espionage in the modern era, maybe absolutely the worst.
I think absolutely the worst.
And there was absolutely no justification for clemency for him.
And he is totally unrepentant.
And Mr. Huckabee, Ambassador Huckabee, has even met with him in the American Embassy in Jerusalem.
And that was seen widely, correctly, as a statement of support for Mr. Pollard and by implication, a dismissal of the consequences of what he did as important.