Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano - AMB. Chas Freeman : What Makes a War “Just”?
Aired: 2026-03-02
Duration: 25:17


=== Iranian Diplomacy Impasse (15:32) ===

[00:00:03]  Undeclared wars are commonplace.
[00:00:06]  Tragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression, with no complaints from the American people.
[00:00:14]  Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government.
[00:00:19]  To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected.
[00:00:27]  What if sometimes to love your country, you had to alter or abolish the government?
[00:00:32]  What if Jefferson was right?
[00:00:34]  What if that government is best which governs least?
[00:00:38]  What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong?
[00:00:42]  What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave?
[00:00:48]  What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now?
[00:00:52]  Hi, everyone.
[00:01:03]  Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
[00:01:06]  Today is Tuesday, March 3rd, 2026.
[00:01:10]  Ambassador Chaz Freeman joins us now.
[00:01:12]  Ambassador, a pleasure, my dear friend, no matter what we're talking about.
[00:01:15]  Thank you very much for your time and the belated happy birthday to you, young man.
[00:01:23]  I want to talk to you about the laws of war and what is a just war, but many questions before we get there.
[00:01:30]  Do you accept the explanation that is now making the rounds for the origins of this war that Prime Minister Netanyahu, who called up the president, said, we're going in on Saturday with you or without you, so you better support us?
[00:01:48]  Or do you believe that they agreed months ago back in Mar-a-Lago, right before New Year's Eve, that they would attack together when they both agreed the time was right?
[00:02:00]  No, they agreed on December 29 to launch this war.
[00:02:05]  There was an interesting, rather silly discussion that led up to the Saturday attack, in which some people in Washington argued that we should persuade Israel to go first so that we could claim that we were fighting a defensive war.
[00:02:26]  That morphed into the new argument.
[00:02:29]  Well, we knew Israel was going to go.
[00:02:31]  Of course we did because we were part of the conspiracy.
[00:02:35]  We knew Israel was going to go and therefore we had to preemptively prevent the Iranians from a reprisal against Israel.
[00:02:45]  Well, that is transparent nonsense and really has no persuasive power anywhere except apparently among some die-hard Trumpists in the Republican Party.
[00:02:59]  What is your big picture analysis now after four days of this war with respect to its origins, prudence, and goals?
[00:03:13]  So it is only four days into this.
[00:03:17]  It's going to be a long war.
[00:03:20]  There are, I think our military very correctly warned President Trump, first privately and then through leaks in the press, that there was no assurance whatsoever that we would be able to bring Iran to its knees before running out of ammunition and taking heavy casualties.
[00:03:45]  So, I mean, Iran basically was faced by Israel and by us with an existential threat.
[00:03:54]  And even a rat will fight tooth and nail if cornered.
[00:04:00]  So the result of this is that we are in a war that is not limited.
[00:04:04]  We would like to have it be limited, but it is not limited and it is expanding as we speak.
[00:04:11]  So there are a series of interesting developments.
[00:04:15]  Prime Minister Netanyahu has come out and chartled with glee that finally I persuaded my great friend Donald Trump to do what I've been trying to do for 40 years.
[00:04:29]  What is he trying to do?
[00:04:30]  He is trying to destroy Iran.
[00:04:33]  That is why Iran is now attempting to destroy Israel.
[00:04:38]  And the gloves have come off.
[00:04:41]  There's no respect on either side for the norms of international law or conduct.
[00:04:50]  Our secretary, a self-styled secretary of war, says that there is no respect for what he calls so-called international institutions and that there are no restrictions of any sort on rules of engagement, on what we can and can't do.
[00:05:12]  This is a pretty good definition of barbarism.
[00:05:16]  I know you wanted to talk about what is and isn't a just war.
[00:05:20]  One characteristic of a just war is that it is respectful of human life.
[00:05:27]  It does not casually engage in collateral damage of the sort we saw this war begin with, a girls' school in Minab in southern Iran, 160 dead girls, and no remorse, no apology, no nothing.
[00:05:47]  And so we're in a war that is going to go on for a while, and Iran has a clear strategy.
[00:05:53]  We don't.
[00:05:53]  We have a campaign plan.
[00:05:56]  The campaign plan is destroy this, destroy that, weaken this, weaken that.
[00:06:02]  And the stated objectives vary from day to day.
[00:06:06]  There's no clear war termination plan.
[00:06:11]  What would constitute success is not defined.
[00:06:15]  The Iranians, on the other hand, have a strategy.
[00:06:18]  Their strategy is, first of all, to, as I mentioned, retaliate in such a way that Israel suffers the fate that Israel intends to meet out to Iran.
[00:06:32]  Second, it is striking at neighboring countries that have allowed American bases to be established on their territory.
[00:06:42]  The purpose of those bases is not to defend those countries, as was said when they were established, but to enable and facilitate American power projection in the region against Iran and against any others, any other enemies of Israel.
[00:06:59]  And finally, we have a constitutional crisis in the United States.
[00:07:04]  Nothing new in a sense, but we have a president who believes that consulting with Netanyahu, the prime minister of a foreign country, is a perfect substitute for consulting with Congress, as the Constitution requires.
[00:07:21]  And that Netanyahu's authorization justifies this war.
[00:07:28]  We also have a president who appears to be more concerned, at least rhetorically, about the freedom of Iranians than he is about the freedom of Americans.
[00:07:38]  And it's really rather anomalous to see a war being fought in the name of freedom when our freedoms at home are being oppressed.
[00:07:49]  So I'll end here.
[00:07:51]  Over the weekend, there were reports that the administration reached out to a third party, the foreign ministry of Italy, and asked the Italian government, which has no beef with the Iranian government, to ask the Iranian government if they were interested in a ceasefire.
[00:08:14]  Now, the Trump administration obviously doesn't admit that it made this call.
[00:08:20]  The reports were all over Western press in Europe, not here.
[00:08:27]  If this call was made, what would that tell you?
[00:08:31]  It would tell me that there are some intelligent people in the administration who understand that we have made a huge mistake.
[00:08:40]  I note that President Trump has claimed that the Iranians want to talk to him and he's willing to talk to them.
[00:08:49]  That is not what the Iranians are saying.
[00:08:51]  Are saying that two instances of negotiation with the United States, where the negotiations were used as cover for surprise attacks, is two negotiations too many and they are not going to talk to the United States and they certainly don't want a ceasefire.
[00:09:10]  In fact, the 12-day war last June, which ended in a ceasefire, saw that ceasefire demanded by Israel, not by Iran, And many Iranians believe that agreeing to it was a mistake.
[00:09:25]  There will be no ceasefire.
[00:09:27]  Iran is, even if the United States stops attacking Iran, I don't think Iran is now going to stop attacking Israel because its existence is at stake and it's taken off, it's removed all the limits on its military actions.
[00:09:45]  So we see the war expanding.
[00:09:47]  Israel has moved into Lebanon, something that it thinks it can do under cover of this war.
[00:09:55]  We have strikes on the British base in Cyprus now that the British have offered that base to us for our use.
[00:10:05]  There are strikes on all of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and even Oman, the mediator.
[00:10:17]  Anywhere there is an American military presence, there are attacks going on.
[00:10:21]  Why?
[00:10:22]  Because Iran is trying to convince these countries that they can't afford to be part of this war by enabling American bases to function on their territory.
[00:10:37]  So this is going to go on for a while, and I don't know when it will end, but I suspect it will not end until Iran decides that it should end.
[00:10:49]  We don't have the capacity to end it.
[00:10:54]  How does this manifestation of the Americans using negotiations with Iran as a deceptive cover for a trick attack?
[00:11:07]  How is that likely to affect other negotiations?
[00:11:10]  I mean, stated differently, why would President Putin sit down again with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner?
[00:11:18]  Well, I think his patience with that dynamic duo, our crack team of amateur diplomats, is pretty near the end.
[00:11:28]  Of course, he'll keep the door open because you should.
[00:11:31]  You know, there's a military adage, never lose contact with the enemy.
[00:11:35]  That applies equally to diplomacy.
[00:11:38]  If you don't meet with the other side, then you have no way of conveying your own views and position accurately without a filter.
[00:11:49]  You have no way of probing the other side's intentions and position and the possibilities of some kind of resolution of a conflict.
[00:12:00]  So you keep the door open.
[00:12:02]  So he won't refuse to see these two.
[00:12:06]  But I think he, like everyone else, recognizes that they have been operating over the course of a year or more, and they have a batting average of zero.
[00:12:19]  No peace in Ukraine.
[00:12:21]  There's no evidence that they have done anything useful with Iran except provide deception.
[00:12:29]  No peace in Qatar.
[00:12:31]  No peace in Qatar.
[00:12:34]  And so I think they are discrediting American diplomacy.
[00:12:41]  Finally, I just note that the use of negotiations as a smokescreen is not limited to Iran.
[00:12:49]  This was the pattern before the invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro, its president.
[00:12:58]  We were engaged in talks then.
[00:13:00]  It was the pattern with Ukraine, Operation Spiderweb, a sneak attack on Russian bases with trucks filled with drones.
[00:13:15]  It has become the norm in our and Israeli diplomacy, and if you can call it diplomacy.
[00:13:23]  And why would anyone want to trust us?
[00:13:28]  We are looking, Ambassador, at a million people at the funeral for the 160 little girls who were murdered in their grade school on Saturday morning.
[00:13:44]  You're quite correct about the barbarity of this.
[00:13:48]  You're also quite correct that the United States has never acknowledged it, offered an apology, compensation, or anything like that.
[00:13:57]  I mean, it goes without saying that the rules of war do not permit attacking a school, do not permit attacking a hospital.
[00:14:08]  There's a hospital named after Mohandas Gandhi in downtown Tehran, where the neonatal unit.
[00:14:20]  I don't know how precise these weapons are, Ambassador.
[00:14:23]  Could they possibly have been aiming for the neonatal unit in a hospital?
[00:14:28]  What kind of monsters run the American Defense Department?
[00:14:32]  No, I think this has to be a misfire or mistargeting.
[00:14:40]  You know, we've seen incredible mistakes made before.
[00:14:43]  I don't know if you remember, but We actually bombed and blew up the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during our operations to vivisect Serbia, take Kosovo away from it.
[00:14:58]  So is there precedence for this?
[00:15:01]  You can imagine what our reaction would be if something like this happened to us.
[00:15:08]  So the notion that one of the many competing objectives for this war is regime change.
[00:15:18]  Secretary Hegset said that's not an objective.
[00:15:21]  The president says it is and calls for uprisings.
[00:15:26]  Do you think Iranians will respond to the murder of their children by embracing us?
[00:15:33]  I don't think so.

=== Why War Lacks Just Cause (03:55) ===

[00:15:35]  It's really, really quite irrational.
[00:15:39]  I don't want to get into a discussion of timistic theology, but even the basics of a just war don't appear here.
[00:15:49]  It wasn't started by a legitimate authority, which was the American Constitution, that that's the basic one.
[00:15:56]  Is it started by somebody who has the legitimate power to start it?
[00:16:00]  No, only the Congress does.
[00:16:03]  Is the objective clear?
[00:16:04]  We don't know what the objective is.
[00:16:08]  Are we causing more damage than we attempted to harm?
[00:16:12]  I mean, these are basic moral value judgments that are woven into international law, and the government fails, the American government fails every single one of these inquiries, Ambassador.
[00:16:29]  I agree, sadly.
[00:16:31]  You know, there's a huge literature on what is just and unjust, and you're right.
[00:16:38]  St. Thomas Aquinas is probably the most influential thinker on this.
[00:16:43]  But, you know, going back to St. Augustine and even St. Ambrose, there were discussions of this.
[00:16:50]  And, well, even before Christianity, Cicero.
[00:16:55]  Even Aristotle addressed this.
[00:16:57]  Yes, exactly.
[00:16:58]  I mean, it's a perennial subject.
[00:17:01]  And I recall Cicero saying that an unjust, that better an unjust peace than an unjust war, something that really applies in this circumstance, I think.
[00:17:17]  As you said, we're not defending anything.
[00:17:20]  This is aggression, pure and simple.
[00:17:24]  And a war without cause cannot be just.
[00:17:28]  So there we are.
[00:17:32]  Has the government articulated?
[00:17:34]  I think the answer to this is no, because we don't get the same answer out of the mouths of Donald Trump, Pete Hegsether, and Marco Rubio.
[00:17:43]  the government articulated a legally sound, morally grounded, militarily achievable basis for the war.
[00:17:55]  No, absolutely not.
[00:17:58]  This is a classic example of the chess player who has only an opening move.
[00:18:04]  We haven't thought through what the next move is.
[00:18:07]  We don't understand Iran and its motivations.
[00:18:13]  And we don't therefore understand how to approach it.
[00:18:17]  I don't think we have any credibility at all with Tehran.
[00:18:23]  I don't think it's going to listen to anything we have to say that is conciliatory because it will immediately suspect another trick.
[00:18:32]  So, no.
[00:18:33]  And the main issue, I agree with you, you know, I think our concerns should begin with our own condition at home.
[00:18:43]  We are experimenting with entirely unconstitutional government.
[00:18:49]  And one of the ironies here is that we seem to assume that Iran, like us now, is a one-man show.
[00:19:00]  We are a one-man show.
[00:19:04]  We've assassinated the leader of Iran and effectively his cabinet and military leadership.
[00:19:12]  Have we considered at all that, as Rabbi Hillel said thousands of years ago, one should not do to others what one does not want to have done to oneself?
[00:19:24]  You know, we've just legitimized the assassination of our president in retaliation.

=== Assassinations And Ironies (04:55) ===

[00:19:31]  And this during a period when disagreements over unjust treatment of immigrants have caused the Department of Homeland Security to shut down.
[00:19:43]  This is crazy.
[00:19:45]  No other word for it.
[00:19:47]  Unconstitutional, illegal, disrespectful of so-called international institutions, to quote Secretary Eggseth, and totally in violation of both domestic and international law.
[00:20:01]  Here's my friend and former Fox colleague Tucker Carlson talking about the relationship between the historic relationship between American presidents and Israeli prime ministers.
[00:20:19]  And the last American president to say no to an Israeli prime minister lost his life on November 22nd, 1963.
[00:20:30]  Chris, number 23.
[00:20:32]  Bibi told the President of the United States, you can join me or not, but I'm going.
[00:20:39]  And the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, said this in a call to congressional leaders yesterday.
[00:20:43]  He said, Israel said they were going.
[00:20:45]  And at that point, you really only have two choices.
[00:20:50]  You can get on board and try and help or contain Israel's war.
[00:20:58]  That's part of the calculation here.
[00:21:00]  Israel's going.
[00:21:01]  Let's try and keep this within bounds.
[00:21:04]  Let's try to be a moderating force on this adventure, whatever it turns out to be.
[00:21:08]  Or you can tell Israel no.
[00:21:13]  But that was not even on the table.
[00:21:14]  That's never been on the table.
[00:21:16]  No one has ever in the last 63 years considered doing that.
[00:21:20]  Really?
[00:21:21]  The last president to do that was John F. Kennedy in 1962, and he got in a, not as famous as it should be, dispute with the founding prime minister of Israel, then the prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, over Israel's nuclear program at Demona.
[00:21:36]  And then President Kennedy said, no, I don't believe in nuclear proliferation.
[00:21:42]  This is one of the pillars of my administration.
[00:21:45]  And you can't keep testing.
[00:21:48]  And I'm demanding inspections.
[00:21:51]  And of course, he was not able to make good on those promises because he was killed in November of 1963.
[00:21:58]  And the person who took his place is vice president Lyndon Johnson gave a green light to the Israeli nuclear program.
[00:22:03]  So that was the last time an American president said no, a hard no to Israel, tried to restrain its core ambitions.
[00:22:13]  I think that's accurate.
[00:22:16]  I think, you know, Tucker Carlson is controversial, of course, but he speaks the truth on important issues.
[00:22:24]  And that was true.
[00:22:27]  Well, I mean, it has all the earmarks of being true.
[00:22:35]  And it is not inconsistent with their agreement on December 29th or December 30th at Mar-a-Lago, the agreement between Netanyahu and Trump to engage in a joint attack.
[00:22:50]  Apparently, it was planned for the middle of January, and Netanyahu called up Trump and said, we're not ready.
[00:22:59]  I mean, who quotes the shots here, Ambassador?
[00:23:04]  Well, it's the we go back to Bill Clinton's reaction to Prime Minister Netanyahu, who's the effing superpower here.
[00:23:15]  We take orders.
[00:23:17]  No, and that is exactly what has happened.
[00:23:19]  As I said, Israel has a strategy.
[00:23:22]  It is to destroy Iran or break it up or emasculate it.
[00:23:28]  We take that strategy and we develop a campaign plan to implement the Israeli strategy.
[00:23:34]  We don't have a strategy of our own.
[00:23:36]  There are no American interests directly involved in this war.
[00:23:40]  The only interest that is involved is our protective role vis-a-vis Israel, which is something that our president believes strongly in, in response to many factors, no doubt, but including campaign donations from Zionist plutocrats who demand that kind of approach from us and get no backtalk, as Tucker Carlson just said.
[00:24:10]  Ambassador Freeman, thank you very much.
[00:24:12]  Most unpleasant subjects, but appreciate so much your vast experience, personal courage, and intellectual honesty on all of this.
[00:24:24]  Who knows how long this is going to go on?

=== Bombs and Peace (00:51) ===

[00:24:26]  We'll certainly see you in a week.
[00:24:27]  We may have to see you sooner.
[00:24:29]  Thank you, Ambassador.
[00:24:30]  Yeah, I think, if I may, Judge, just say that our approach seems to be the bombs will continue until peace emerges or until we run out of bombs.
[00:24:43]  I think we're going to run out of bombs before there's peace.
[00:24:46]  You know, that conclusion is a logical deduction from what the president said last night.
[00:24:54]  Exactly.
[00:24:55]  Yeah.
[00:24:56]  Thank you, Ambassador.
[00:24:57]  All the best to you, my friend.
[00:25:01]  Coming up later today, we have a full day for you.
[00:25:04]  At nine o'clock, Professor John Mearsheimer at 10 o'clock.
[00:25:08]  Aaron Mate at 12:45 this afternoon.
[00:25:12]  Scott Ritter at 2 o'clock.
[00:25:14]  Matthew Ho at 3 o'clock.
[00:25:16]  Colonel Karen Kwetkowski.