March 4, 2026 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
22:29
Gilbert Doctorow : Has Russia Lost Trust in Trump’s Leadership?
Judge Andrew Napolitano and Gilbert Doctorow analyze March 2026 geopolitical tensions, asserting Trump's preemptive strike on Iran decapitated its command systems to seize oil and sever China's 15% import reliance. Doctorow argues this strategy pressures Putin, whose indecisive Ukraine conduct faces internal Kremlin criticism, while Iran counters politically via Gulf terror attacks threatening the Strait of Hormuz. The discussion cites alleged CIA assassination plots against Putin, Alexander Dugin's dissent, and claims that international law has collapsed, suggesting Trump's aggressive tactics may ironically cost him the November election despite disrupting Russia-China corridors. [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 Wednesday, March 4th, 2026.
Our friend Gilbert Doctorow joins us now.
Gilbert, always a pleasure, my dear friend.
Before we get to the latest events and your analysis of them in Iran, I want to talk a little bit about what you have been observing and about what you have been writing with respect to Russia.
What kind of pressure, you've been warning for a long time about pressure on President Putin.
What kind of pressure is there on President Putin now to bring the war in Ukraine to a swift and decisive, from the Kremlin perspective, decisive end?
I think there's enormous pressure on him now.
It's not that people have changed their minds about the way that Putin has conducted a slowly, slowly war of attrition and has dragged this out and has increased necessarily the number of Russian casualties without need if he had the option of decapitation strikes on Ukraine.
But people were quiet about it for the most part.
Not everyone was quiet on Russian television, but they were cautious.
I think that the unleashing of the war on Iran by Trump and the way he's conducted it in the first few days loosened lips in Russia.
The Russian experts, professionals who appear on the most responsible news and analysis programs are in shock.
They are depressed, and I'll explain why regarding the way the war is proceeding for Iran.
But the main point is they're seeing a scenario for the same attack to be conducted against Russia.
And starting with a surprise preemptive strike that knocks out the air defenses and proceeds to systematically decapitate the country, remove its top leadership, and go after all military assets.
They see that in front of their eyes as what they had been worried about as happening now in Iran.
And Mr. Trump seems to be on a winning streak.
So that has forced the lips open.
And people are saying on Russian state television, they are criticizing severely every aspect of the way that Putin is conducting this war.
The only thing they're not doing is naming him personally.
Let me just interrupt for a minute and make sure I heard you correctly.
On Russian state television.
Yes.
What is the nature of their criticism, his slow, timid method?
That was exactly the word.
They don't say timid, but slow and irresolute, indecisive, and inviting further escalation and brazen provocations.
And they don't understand.
I'll be very specific.
For example, why Russia is negotiating with Witkov at the same time that the United States is flying spy planes along the Barents Sea, along the Black Sea, along all Russian frontiers, all of which has the purpose of preparing the United States to make a preemptive strike on Russia at any moment, the way they just did to Iran.
Why is Putin negotiating with Witkoff when the CIA tried to assassinate Putin in his country house?
That's another point.
Of course, what they have done to Ayatollah simply exemplifies what would have been the consequence had not Mr. Putin had a vast air defense around his installation.
But you know, he doesn't spend his whole time in the Kremlin or in that site in Valdai.
He travels all over the place.
And they don't have that type of air defense all over the place, meaning that the United States can, in principle, kill him anytime they want.
And that consciousness, of course, weighs heavily on the Russian thinking classes.
They don't find it inexplicable that their country is not shooting down those planes.
They shut down the U2.
They shut down Gary Powers.
And why aren't they shooting these planes down?
It's inexcusable, and the Russian thinking classes don't want to hear any more about it.
I say they don't call Putin out by name, but anybody with half intelligence understands whom they're talking about.
Now, you ask, what about state television?
Why are they saying that?
Because there are big boys in the Kremlin who are letting them say that.
What do you expect will be the response to this by President Putin?
Will he ignore it?
Will he speak to them?
Will he react to it militarily?
Does he take it to heart?
These are a lot of questions, so forgive me.
Answer them however you see fit.
Answer the ones you want and reject the ones you don't like.
And what about former President Medvedev, who's been the attack dog, verbally attack dog in all of this?
I put aside my personal preferences here and try to be objective.
What is the likely outcome?
I would say the likely outcome is that Putin will change his behavior fast.
I don't think he's blind to the great resistance around himself to what he's been doing.
If he, for example, should re-enter negotiations with Ritkov, I think he's finished.
I think he'll be removed, because that would be a pure sign that he is ignoring all of these warnings from people around him who are responsible.
Let's just name one person, some person whom you have known or heard about, and who many others in the West have heard about as being a close associate of Putin and who is a philosopher in court, Alexander Dugin.
Dugin became widely known when his daughter was assassinated in a terror strike by Ukraine a little over a year ago.
So Dugin was that became a name that a lot of people in the States and elsewhere know about.
He has just issued an essay, which is a devastating attack on the way that Putin is conducting this war.
Devastating.
Dugin is untouchable.
After his daughter's martyrdom, nobody in the Kremlin can say a word against Dugin.
And Dugin just let the bombs fall on Putin.
But again, without naming him.
I have great respect for Professor Dugan.
As you know, I spent three or four days with him in Moscow just about a year ago, and that was fairly close to the time of the murder of his daughter, which he believed, of course, was aimed at him.
And you're right, nobody can lay a glove on him.
Will President Putin listen to him?
They used to call Professor Dugan the right side of President Putin's brain.
We'll see what happens.
That it is inconceivable that Putin will not react to this.
He is a political animal after all, and he doesn't have a choice.
All of the right-minded people around him want him to do something to finish the war in Ukraine now.
China's Oil Routes Through Hormuz00:12:48
Where does our friend, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, fit in all of this?
Nowhere.
Mr. Lavrov, logically, as a minister of foreign affairs, he doesn't have an independent power position.
He is at the service of the president of Russia.
And so.
Well, he must be advising President Putin, no?
Well, yes, I'm sure he's giving a memoranda to Putin.
How much he's received in face-to-face talks is another issue, I don't know.
But Lavrov doesn't really have, he has become harsher, stronger, more unfriendly to the negotiations, quite openly.
But that is not the same thing as this very strong criticism of the conduct of the war and of particulars like the failure to shoot down America's pipelines that I just mentioned before.
What is the attitude of the Kremlin toward Trump's invasion of Iran, not with respect to fear of a precursor to an invasion of Russia, but with respect to the loss of Iran as an ally?
Well, Iran wasn't an asset to Russia, except insofar as it supplied parts and complete drones early in the war when Russia had very limited experience with drone warfare.
After that, the net benefits of Iran to Russia were minimal.
They were only projected in the comprehensive partnership agreements concluded in December of 2025.
And they were in the logistical area.
As some people, a few very clever and competent professionals on security issues have alerted me to the fact that the, again, that Mr. Trump's attack on Iran was not an idea of one moment.
It was not something that somebody whispered in his ear.
It was not because of pressure from Netanyahu over Epstein or Lord knows what else.
It was not the Israeli lobby.
This was a sitting, a program sitting in the Pentagon, probably well before Trump came to office, and he acted upon it.
I think that his very aggressive and overly self-confident Secretary of War, Hegseth, had a big factor in this.
What am I talking about?
It is about seizing oil, taking, stripping China of one of its major suppliers.
I think about 15% of Chinese oil is coming from Iran, just as maybe another 10, 15% was coming from Venezuela.
This puts enormous pressure on the Chinese economy, and still more.
It was an attack on logistics.
Both Russia and China have logistical projects with Iran, which is strategically very important to each location, for the purpose of avoiding passing for energy and other important freight through zones that are controlled by the United States, the narrow points in maritime logistics.
In the case of Russia, it's a north-south corridor.
That is reaching down to India through the Caspian and onward through Iran.
In the case of China, it was an east-west corridor, the Belt and Road investments that they've made in Iran, very substantial investments, again, to avoid maritime transport of energy and other important imports to China.
Mr. Trump's attack on Iran had among the points they attacked were precisely those port infrastructure facilities that enabled these logistical solutions of China and Russia.
So let's give credit, so I didn't say credit in quotation marks, but we're just due.
Mr. Trump's attack on Iran had many different layers.
Regime change, yes.
Helped the Israelis rule the whole region, yes.
The bigger issues to the United States were the ones I just outlined.
That is severe pressure on the two big rivals, global rivals, Russia and China.
What about India?
India's crude oil and refined oil stocks have less than a month to go.
What can India do, or how will India suffer if it can't do anything to bring about the end of the war?
Well, it doesn't have to.
It just will step up its purchase of Russian oil by tankers.
I think that's already underway.
The Chinese gave notes.
They gave notice, that is the Indians did, that we are going back to Russian oil.
What choice do they have?
What is your understanding of how Iran can win the war politically?
I think this is a very important point that you raise politically.
The Russian experts who I listened to last night, who were talking about the state of the war, were very gloomy.
They were looking at it from a purely professional military angle and then from a regional specialist angle that is an expert on Iran and its internal contradictions which make it easy to attack and exploit for Israel.
And looking at the first one, from a strictly military standpoint, Iran has lost the war and its chances of regaining position from military angle are impossible.
From the first day, its command and control systems were knocked out.
Its top military officership was knocked out, killed.
Its political leadership was killed.
The Americans had complete control of the skies.
One has to ask where were all those fantastic Chinese highest technology radars and control systems.
Nothing.
Useless.
Something went drastically wrong.
It has to put in question the value of the entire Chinese military.
It may be nil.
That's a separate question, which nobody's asking.
But coming back to the military side, when Iran lost control of the skies, and when Israel and the United States were able at their will to strike 2,000 targets in a couple of days of military assets and other strategic infrastructure, the war was lost.
They have now another 20 days to degrade what is left of the ballistic missile in caches and so forth.
So what is the logic if the, I believe that these experts in Russia know what they're talking about.
So what is the position of Iran and why do I believe they'll win the war?
It's because the Iranians are fighting a different war.
The Russians have fought a war in Ukraine unlike what the Americans imagined or could accept as a way of waging war.
And the Iranians are waging war in a different way.
Let's call it by its name terror.
The attacks on Dubai, on Abu Dhabi, on Kuwait, on Saudi Arabia, on Qatar, what are those?
By normal language, they are terror attacks.
The amount of damage that they did in any of these locations was minimal.
That is why the military experts said that Iran has no effectual counterattack from a strictly military standpoint of yield to target of their missiles.
That's correct.
In terms of political impact, it's dead wrong.
These countries, I was visited Dubai.
I know very well what the situation was there, is there.
80% of all of the staff of all the international business in Dubai is expatriates.
These people are there not for love of Dubai.
They're there for love of money.
They also have love of their own lives and family lives.
And these attacks, call them terror attacks, on residences, on hotels in Dubai and elsewhere, they get the foreign community to head for the hills to clear out.
And that will be the end of the boom of the whole Gulf State Middle East.
That's what the they also will come running to Washington to beg to end the war.
Are there still something left to save in their countries?
No, the straits of Hormuz.
Mr. Trump's statement that he's going to send American naval squadrons, it's all hot air.
It's absolutely irresponsible talk.
You don't have to have an army to close the straits of Hormuz.
You can do that with guerrilla warfare.
You just need people who can aim their shoulder-carried rockets at the ships passing by.
That's all you need.
On top of that, you've got friends in Hezbollah, you've got friends in Yemen, the Houthis, who are perfectly capable of sending missiles and drones to attack any U.S. naval ships in that very narrow strait.
The chance of Mr. Trump succeeding, I'd say, is zero.
Now, does this mean disaster?
No.
Mr. Trump already prepared his own off-ramp.
He said 28 days, and it will be a 28-year war.
And at the end, he will say, We did it.
America won.
We wiped out the missile caches of Iran.
We destroyed their command and control capability.
We have killed their senior leadership.
But we've done it and we're off.
And he'll be right.
For that very narrow concept, he's right.
On the other hand, he's going to lose the elections in November.
And that is what the Iranian strategy is based on.
And the United States.
Are the straits of Hormuz closed?
Is the Strait of Hormuz closed as we speak?
To my knowledge, not completely.
But the threat of attack is there.
If you.
Well, we know that Lloyds of London is no longer insuring those ships.
You can't take a ship with a billion gallons of oil anywhere without insurance.
Well, the United States can step in and reinsure.
That's what Trump has in mind.
That he would go to the private insurers and provide American reinsurance, government reinsurance.
That'll work.
The question is: can you really open the straits?
I say no.
It's complete folly to say that you can open the straits.
Wow.
Do you think the violence will be over by the end of March?
Yes, I do.
As I said, Mr. Trump is not trapped.
Some people thought, oh, he's dropped.
He didn't drop himself.
He said it's 28 days and he'll leave in 28 days and he'll claim victory.
And in a certain narrow sense, he's right.
But from a political standpoint, he's finished.
He's washed up.
He will never keep control of Congress.
He'll be lucky not to be impeached.
He'll be lucky not to be sent to prison.
What he's done is not just obnoxious, but totally illegal.
And depends, it doesn't have any really public dimension to it because he isn't engaged in sex with somebody.
No, no.
But he has violated American law.
He has the Republic, the Democrats up and against his neck.
He will have American gasoline at $5, $6 a gallon in a week or two.
He'll never survive.
What remains of international law from your perspective?
It's a good subject for my grandson to study in his law courses that he should take next year.
But as a practical matter, it's zero.
It doesn't exist.
Words From The President's Mouth00:00:36
I'm sorry to say I agree with you.
And those words came out of the president's mouth and obviously are obvious, are apparent from his behavior as well.
Gilbert Doctorow, great analysis.
As always, my dear friend, be well, and we'll look forward to seeing you next week.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Sure.
Coming up later today, if you're watching us live in an hour and a half at 10 o'clock this morning from Tehran, Professor Mohamed Mirandi at noon, Colonel Douglas McGregor at one o'clock.