Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano - Gilbert Doctorow : How Trump’s War Affects Russia and China
Aired: 2026-03-18
Duration: 24:20


=== Illegitimate Use of Force (11:57) ===

[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?
[00:01:02]  Hi, everyone.
[00:01:03]  Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
[00:01:06]  Today is Wednesday, March 18th, 2026.
[00:01:10]  Gilbert Doctorow joins us now.
[00:01:12]  Gilbert, always a pleasure, my dear friend.
[00:01:14]  Thank you for coming on the show.
[00:01:16]  Is there a new developing military relationship between China, Russia, and North Korea?
[00:01:26]  And if so, why is that not covered anywhere in the Western press?
[00:01:32]  Well, if that is developing, it's behind closed doors.
[00:01:37]  I raised this issue several days ago when Mr. Solovyov, the host of the very widely watched political commentary, a talk show on state television, after a week's absence, which no one explained, reappeared.
[00:01:55]  And it turned out that he had spent the previous week with a parliamentary delegation, a Duma delegation, to Beijing.
[00:02:02]  They have these occasionally.
[00:02:04]  The Russian parliamentarians go to meet their counterparts in China.
[00:02:11]  Well, the main point was that what happened during their visit was they learned something about why Mr. Xi, Chairman Xi, had this big military purge over the last month, his highest generals being dismissed, and what the parliamentarians hoped to discuss or did discuss with their counterparts and presumably with Xi's direct deputies.
[00:02:40]  On the last point, they were discussing precisely what you raised now, the issue of forming a trilateral military defense alliance.
[00:02:51]  Korea, North Korea, that is, China and Russia.
[00:02:55]  And this comes out of, this is a consequence of the shockwaves that have hit Russia from Mr. Trump's war of choice in Iran.
[00:03:06]  As I noted immediately after the start of the war, the first commentaries on Russian television were that Iran had already lost the war, had lost the war militarily.
[00:03:18]  They had military experts who explained that considering the destruction of the death of the Ayatollah, the destruction of the air defenses, the fact that Israel and the United States gained air dominance from the first moment, that spelled doom for Iran.
[00:03:37]  That was a strictly military evaluation.
[00:03:39]  As I commented at the time, they didn't take into account the asymmetrical nature of this conflict and the way that the Iranians would be pushing economic and political advantage as their counter to America's military advantage.
[00:03:53]  But I can tell you now, listening to most recent programs on Russian television, that this very gloomy prognosis for Iran persists, even as they've shifted from military to a political economic side of it.
[00:04:11]  And that is a bit perplexing, but I think it's worth our discussion because it counters completely, is completely at variance with the almost universal opinions within the American and Western alternative media that Iran is winning this war, that Mr. Trump has trapped himself, has no off-ramp, and that he will face a humiliating defeat.
[00:04:35]  That is the consensus of all my peers.
[00:04:37]  I'm not questioning them.
[00:04:38]  I'm just describing them.
[00:04:39]  And as just as I'm describing what the Russians are saying, and they're saying that, look what happened to Lazjani.
[00:04:47]  The most, the de facto head of government and military was assassinated.
[00:04:54]  This is a day ago.
[00:04:56]  And that demonstrates that the Israeli master plan is being implemented and implemented successfully, which is to strip away layer after layer of the regime.
[00:05:07]  And that they are now systematically in their bombing raids destroying all the police offices across Iran with an intent to destabilize the government, to remove its props and supports, and to prepare the way over time for regime change.
[00:05:23]  Over time, obviously, meaning more than four weeks.
[00:05:26]  Moreover, they point out that there is a witch hunt going on now, the top levels of the Iranian government, because the murder of Larshani was possible only by there being Mossad agents around him in his own entourage.
[00:05:47]  He was well hidden, whereas the murder of the Ayatollah was a simple exercise.
[00:05:53]  The Ayatollah never went into hiding.
[00:05:56]  He stayed in his residence.
[00:05:58]  They knew the residents.
[00:05:59]  He had a bunker 30 meters beneath the surface to protect him, which apparently he did not use.
[00:06:06]  So the murder of the Ayatollah was an easy case.
[00:06:11]  The latest murder of top leaders of military government is not an easy case.
[00:06:16]  And it shows you that Iran suffers from internal divisions that have made possible the American-Israeli attack.
[00:06:25]  And the Russians are keenly interested because they're in the same situation.
[00:06:30]  All right, let me go back.
[00:06:31]  Let me go back to the earliest part of your statement just completed.
[00:06:38]  Why do the Russians and the Chinese need North Korea as part of a military alliance?
[00:06:45]  Of what value would the North Koreans be to militaries as large and sophisticated as Russia's and China's?
[00:06:54]  Well, they, that is North Koreans, have some very sophisticated equipment of their own in artillery and in short and medium range missiles.
[00:07:05]  So they're not juniors in any way.
[00:07:08]  When you look at selected areas of defense, which are very relevant to the Russian-Chinese situation, particularly the Chinese, where they are threatened by American short and medium-range missiles from all sides.
[00:07:21]  Moreover, the North Koreans are the most ready to act.
[00:07:28]  They are not just talkers, they are actors.
[00:07:30]  And in that sense, I think the Russian parliamentary group would like to see them part of an alliance to wake up the Chinese, who are not very impressive.
[00:07:41]  And that brings us to why there was a purge.
[00:07:44]  What this delegation to Beijing learned, or think they learned last week, is that she staged this, could call it a coup, against the senior generals because the generals were too activist.
[00:08:00]  He believed that they were too keen on waging a war over Taiwan.
[00:08:06]  And she himself, according again, to this story from the Russian parliamentarians, he would like to forget, to skip completely the notion of an invasion of Taiwan, which because of the topography of Taiwan, would be very hazardous and costly in the lives of Chinese soldiers, and to strictly solve the situation by air and naval blockade of Taiwan.
[00:08:31]  So there was, according to them, a difference of opinion, and particularly a difference of activism.
[00:08:38]  That Mr., if I have criticized the Russian leadership for being perhaps overly prudent, the Chinese are still more prudent at a time when prudence is not the message of the day.
[00:08:52]  What is the pressure being put on President Putin?
[00:08:56]  Is it still there?
[00:08:57]  Is there still impatience with this war that's been dragging on for four years now?
[00:09:03]  I have no doubt that the pressure is there.
[00:09:08]  And as I've said, the shock waves that hit the Russian establishment after the United States demonstrated that there are no longer any rules, the opinion of experts, military and political experts in Moscow was, what are we waiting for?
[00:09:26]  Why are we being so civilized and pretending to follow the rules of engagement and the UN Charter when the United States has thrown it all overboard and doesn't even pretend to mask its intentions of seizing this and seizing that because might makes right?
[00:09:47]  Wow.
[00:09:51]  Has there been any indication from the former president Medvedev or from anybody in the Kremlin that the military is about to get serious?
[00:10:04]  Well, from the standpoint of Russian television, the military already is serious.
[00:10:10]  There are a lot of things that are being covered by Western press right now.
[00:10:14]  Among them, the daily advance towards Khamatorsk and Slavyansk, the two remaining fortress cities, you can call them, though on a very smaller scale than the cities that Russian forces have already captured in Donetsk Oblast.
[00:10:31]  They are approaching.
[00:10:32]  They're 18 kilometers away from Slavyansk.
[00:10:37]  Well, that's artillery range, of course.
[00:10:39]  Let's get that straight, what it means to be 18 kilometers away.
[00:10:42]  So it means they're pounding that area.
[00:10:44]  And they're preparing it, softening it up for what will be the taking of it.
[00:10:49]  We also, the news, we know, this is no big secret, that the Russians are preparing a summer offensive.
[00:10:56]  Right now, they're very satisfied.
[00:10:57]  The latest news on Russian state television is they're very satisfied that spring is coming to, has already come to Ukraine.
[00:11:06]  That means that there's a lot of mud, of course, but it's drying up.
[00:11:10]  And so what compensates for the difficulties in navigating the arteries or the roads, such as they exist in Ukraine, is that they have cover.
[00:11:23]  The trees are starting to come out and bloom.
[00:11:26]  That means that artillery and other offensive weapons are easier to hide, easier to hide.
[00:11:33]  And that gives the Russians a big advantage in what has been the main risk that all of their offensives have faced in the form of Ukrainian kamikaze and spy drones.
[00:11:47]  You used the phrase shockwave or shockwaves twice already.
[00:11:55]  What is the Kremlin's opinion of Trump?
[00:11:59]  Do they think he's a madman?

=== Foreign Minister's Ceasefire Call (11:59) ===

[00:12:00]  Do they think he's unpredictable?
[00:12:02]  Do they think he knows what he's doing?
[00:12:03]  Do they think he's trustworthy?
[00:12:05]  Is a handshake with him worth it?
[00:12:09]  Well, if there was any belief that a handshake was worth something with Trump, it's gone for good.
[00:12:16]  The best you can say about the Kremlin approach to Donald Trump is to humor him and to pretend to negotiate with him, but not to have any expectations of success because he and his swindler envoys are not worthy of any trust.
[00:12:41]  That is their evaluation.
[00:12:44]  It will be outwardly, well, the Chinese are even more mild in the same way while thinking that Trump is impossible.
[00:12:55]  You'll note that the Chinese never disinvited him.
[00:13:00]  They waited for him to postpone the visit indefinitely because he's busy with the war.
[00:13:05]  So they never closed the door on him, as literally, though practically speaking, they didn't want to see his face in Beijing.
[00:13:14]  Right.
[00:13:15]  I don't think President Xi wanted to see a photograph of himself shaking hands with Donald Trump on the front page of the Financial Times, not the post-Iran invasion Donald Trump.
[00:13:32]  I guess we can conclude that the Western sanctions on Russia are not going away during Trump's presidency.
[00:13:42]  Probably, but there is a dispute going on here in EU membership.
[00:13:49]  As you know, I'm a dual national, and so I also have a Belgian identity card.
[00:13:56]  And I follow very closely what the Prime Minister here is doing because it's remarkable.
[00:14:00]  In his own way, he is a bigger mover and shaker of a terrible consensus here in the EU member states than either Orban or Fitzo.
[00:14:16]  He is very careful in what he says and does.
[00:14:19]  He has defended himself in the last couple of days over a statement he made in an interview with the French-speaking financial newspaper École de la Bourse, which was picked up by Financial Times and put on their front page that he was calling for normalization of relations with Russia.
[00:14:37]  And he is explaining that he doesn't mean that normalization should take place now, but normalization should take place once a peace treaty takes form and is signed.
[00:14:47]  And here is the critical point.
[00:14:49]  That sounds like he's backtracking it.
[00:14:51]  Not at all.
[00:14:52]  Because he's saying what no one else has the guts to say, that a peace treaty is a peace treaty, not just a scrap of paper.
[00:15:00]  And it indicates that all the sources of conflict have been removed and that you normalize relations, you restore normal trade with the people who were your enemies.
[00:15:13]  Now, that detailed explanation tells you that Mr. De Wevor has his head screwed on right, whereas 90% of the EU member state leaders don't.
[00:15:27]  Fascinating.
[00:15:29]  Has the resignation of America's chief counterterrorism official, who of course had access to the same intel as the president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, head of the CIA, et cetera, resonated.
[00:15:46]  I mean, in his resignation letter, he said, Iran poses no imminent threat to our nation.
[00:15:54]  The president was duped by Israeli officials and U.S. media who created an echo chamber around him.
[00:16:01]  This is about as strong a language as you can imagine.
[00:16:06]  Well, in Russia, that has gone almost unnoticed.
[00:16:09]  What I will say is that the Russians are enjoying black humor around the United States.
[00:16:17]  They are mocking the United States.
[00:16:20]  Any sense of respect for the United States is gone.
[00:16:24]  There is fear of the United States, not because they think Trump is a madman, but because what he's doing with the help of Pete Hegstiff is beyond the pale.
[00:16:39]  It is not even pretending to have legal or moral justification.
[00:16:45]  It's just grab.
[00:16:46]  And that alarms them.
[00:16:48]  At the same time, they take pleasure in all of the Western European disputes over how to deal with Trump, who is out of control and who's making unreasonable, utterly unreasonable demands on Europe to participate, take part in the freeing of the Straits of Hormuz, when the United States, with its vast navy blockade,
[00:17:16]  seems to be unable to do it and is pulling its own ships 1,200 kilometers away from the area for fear of their being destroyed.
[00:17:23]  So they don't want to be used.
[00:17:26]  They don't want to die for the United States.
[00:17:29]  I would imagine that the universal decision of EU leaders not to send naval assets to Hormuz is well received by elites and by average folks.
[00:17:44]  Well, here's a complicating issue.
[00:17:46]  Look, I have an 18-year-old grandson who will be entering university next year.
[00:17:51]  And he was over.
[00:17:52]  We had lunch together yesterday.
[00:17:53]  And I asked him, what are your classmates saying about the war and so forth?
[00:17:59]  Oh, good.
[00:18:01]  You know, he said, oh, they all want to sign up for the army.
[00:18:05]  They all want to wear uniforms.
[00:18:07]  This is shocking, utterly shocking.
[00:18:11]  It repeats what I heard a year and a half ago at my privileged club of francophones here in Brussels when the mamas were saying, oh, our sons will profit from discipline in the army.
[00:18:24]  These people are utterly mad.
[00:18:26]  When you enter the club, on the first side, there's a marble tablet listing the names of club members who were killed in World War I. Somehow nobody stops and looks at that.
[00:18:37]  They're out of their minds.
[00:18:40]  It's almost inconceivable.
[00:18:42]  Your grandson is Belgian.
[00:18:44]  It's almost inconceivable Belgian troops would be involved in the war in Iran or the war in Ukraine.
[00:18:50]  Judge, we had enough sense years ago to ensure that he has a U.S. passport also.
[00:18:56]  Oh, thanks be to God.
[00:18:58]  Here's a little breaking news.
[00:18:59]  Jeremy Scahill, whom we all know, formerly of the Intercept, now drop site news, reports that Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff has been, quote, desperately texting Iranian foreign minister Aragachi to jumpstart ceasefire talks, but Iran has completely ignored him.
[00:19:21]  The U.S. is looking for a way out while pretending they are winning.
[00:19:26]  What do you think, Gilbert?
[00:19:28]  I think it's a very accurate and sober appraisal.
[00:19:31]  Look, my listening to the murdered President Raisi before his so-called accident in the helicopter, listening to the current foreign minister of Iran, the impression, the overwhelming impression, that these people are with dignity, self-respect, and circumspect.
[00:19:53]  They are not in any sense radical terrorists.
[00:19:58]  All the rubbish that's being thrown at them by Washington elites.
[00:20:02]  It's all utterly wrong.
[00:20:04]  And so I concur with several people who have appeared on your show who agree that what was said by the foreign minister accurately reflects the situation.
[00:20:15]  And what Donald Trump said, that they had been in discussions and the Iranians hadn't given him the terms he wants, was an outright outrageous lie.
[00:20:25]  Watch this interview of the Iranian foreign minister from Sunday, three days ago.
[00:20:33]  Chris, cut number one.
[00:20:36]  President Trump said this weekend he is not ready to make a deal with Iran because the terms aren't good enough yet.
[00:20:44]  Has Iran asked for a ceasefire?
[00:20:47]  No, we never asked for a ceasefire and we have never asked even for negotiation.
[00:20:53]  We are ready to defend ourselves as long as it takes, and this is what we have done so far, and we continue to do that until President Trump comes to the point that this is an illegal war with no victory.
[00:21:12]  And you know there are, you know, people being killed only because President Trump wants to have fun.
[00:21:26]  This is what he has said.
[00:21:28]  Have fun?
[00:21:30]  Yes, this is what he said that they are sinking ships and targeting different places because it is fun.
[00:21:40]  It is true that Trump said that it's remarkable that the chief correspondent for CBS News didn't know or acted as if she didn't know that he said it.
[00:21:49]  Before you respond, I have another one from the foreign minister, which is earlier today, just a few hours ago.
[00:21:56]  Chris, number 19.
[00:21:58]  We are not seeking a ceasefire because we do not want this scenario to be repeated again after some time.
[00:22:04]  Rather, we want the war to end completely and permanently.
[00:22:10]  Our position is the same as what I have stated here, and we have also conveyed it to our friends.
[00:22:16]  We do not accept a ceasefire.
[00:22:19]  However, if there is an idea for ending the war that meets our conditions so that the war ends permanently across the entire region and the damages suffered by Iran are compensated, we will certainly listen to it.
[00:22:35]  You analyze that, Gilbert.
[00:22:38]  Perfectly aligned with Russia's position with respect to the end of the war on and in Ukraine.
[00:22:47]  As I said, the Belgian prime minister said openly, and I will post later today on my substack the most recent statement of that with an overt in English.
[00:23:01]  It is, when you end a war, it's not in a ceasefire.
[00:23:04]  You end a war with a peace treaty that is made in good faith and seeks to resolve the points of difference that led to the war and to resume normal relations after the peace is signed.
[00:23:17]  That is exactly what the Iranian prime minister is, sorry, foreign minister is saying.
[00:23:24]  Of course, he goes on to speak of reparations.
[00:23:26]  In the Russian case, that doesn't apply.
[00:23:28]  But in the Iranian case, it certainly does.
[00:23:32]  Gilbert, Dr. Rowe, thank you, my dear friend.
[00:23:34]  Great analysis, as always.
[00:23:36]  Just terrific, terrific analysis.
[00:23:38]  Can you do me a favor and pound some sense into your grandson's head and that of his friends?
[00:23:47]  Our grandson is right online.
[00:23:50]  He doesn't need to be persuaded that his life is worth something and this war is nonsense.
[00:23:55]  But his friends, indeed, it's troublesome.
[00:23:58]  Wow.
[00:23:58]  Thank you, Gilbert.

=== Iranian Reparations and Goodbye (00:20) ===

[00:23:59]  All the best.
[00:24:00]  We'll look forward to seeing you next week.
[00:24:02]  Bye-bye.
[00:24:03]  Bye.
[00:24:03]  Coming up later today at one o'clock this afternoon from wherever he is, Pepe Escobar.
[00:24:09]  At two o'clock this afternoon, another view from Europe, our friend Professor Glenn Deason.
[00:24:15]  At three o'clock this afternoon, the great Phil Giraldi, Judge Napolitano For judging freedom