March 31, 2026 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
35:15
Will Trump Go Kamikaze? (w/ Prof. John Mearsheimer)
On March 31st, 2026, Judge Andrew Napolitano and Professor John Mearsheimer dissect President Trump's failed preemptive war against Iran, noting the deployment of 7,000 troops to Karg Island despite strategic impossibility. They condemn Secretary Pete Hegseth's biblical rhetoric and the influence of pro-Israel allies like Jared Kushner, who allegedly drive escalation while ignoring international law violations in Gaza. Mearsheimer argues this "mad king" behavior mirrors Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam errors, suggesting that liberal media silence stems from lobby pressure rather than objective analysis. Ultimately, the episode warns that such reckless aggression risks nuclear proliferation and deepens global instability through unchecked military adventurism. [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, March 31st, 2026.
Professor John Mearsheimer joins us now.
Professor Mearsheimer, thank you very much for your time.
I usually don't do this, but I want to read a headline to you in today's Wall Street Journal, a newspaper generally rather favorable to the Trump administration.
Trump looks to exit with straight, still closed.
Goal is to limit Iran war to a few weeks.
Reopening passage could come later.
Well, if this is true, he would not have succeeded in any of his goals regime change, capture of nuclear material, degrading offensive weaponry, ballistic missiles, and now getting the Strait of Hormuz open, which was open before the war.
Yeah, I mean, your comments highlight that.
The war has left us worse off.
In other words, he's not achieved any of the goals.
Plus, now that we've gone to war, the Strait of Hormuz is closed.
And furthermore, you want to factor in here, most importantly, the huge economic damage that's going to be done to the world economy over time.
And also, I think the chances that Iran will get a nuclear weapon have increased significantly as a result of this war.
So it's really quite amazing what a colossal failure this has been.
Wow.
Why do you suppose, Professor Mearsheimer, President Trump is making up stories about the extraordinary progress of what we believe to be fanciful negotiations,
and yet in the same breath, sometimes literally in the same sentence, threatening to bomb and destroy civilian architecture like power grids and desalination plants?
Well, there are two possible interpretations, and it's hard to determine which one is correct.
The first is that he's a mad king, that he's just basically lost his mind.
Sometimes when you listen to him talk, you think that is the case.
It's hard to believe that this man is operating with a full deck.
That's one interpretation.
Another interpretation is he's just flailing, he's in a desperate situation.
To get back to the headline that you read, he basically is saying that we can't open the straight, we can't open it.
And that would represent a significant defeat for the United States.
This would be disastrous for him.
At the same time, he understands that he's in a situation that's probably worse than the one that Lyndon Johnson was in back in the day.
And he can't do anything about it.
And in fact, he's just getting deeper and deeper into the morass.
So he's flailing around and he's going from optimism to pessimism.
At 95 miles an hour.
And it's not that he's a mad king.
He's just flailing because he's gotten himself into this desperate situation.
So those are the two interpretations.
I don't know which one is correct.
Yeah, I guess we won't know.
But here he is Sunday night on Air Force One saying that Iran has agreed to his 15 point demand during these.
Quote unquote negotiations.
Chris, number 11.
If you had offered that 15 point plan to Iran, did they ever come back to us with the money?
They came back on the 15 point plan.
They gave us most of the points.
Why wouldn't they?
You make it sound like they made some concessions.
Can you identify those?
Well, they're agreeing with us on the plan.
I mean, we asked for 15 things, and for the most part, we're going to be asking for a couple of other things.
We're having very good meetings, both directly and indirectly, and I think we're getting a lot of very important points.
Sir, what do you find?
In fact, these meetings don't exist.
I know.
I don't know what to say.
What do you say about this?
The whole thing is just, it's preposterous.
The level of incoherence here is just off the charts.
This is the president of the United States, the president of the most powerful country in the world.
You can only wonder what other leaders around the world, other people around the world, are thinking as they watch this.
Yeah.
It's just hard to believe that this man is in charge of the United States.
What do diplomats think?
Critical juncture here.
That's what we have to emphasize.
Yeah.
What do foreign diplomats think of Woodcroft and Kushner?
Are they credible people?
No, I think that everybody recognizes at this point in time, because we now have enough evidence, that number one, they're.
Incompetent.
Number two, and relatedly, their level of expertise is not up for the job.
And number three, given that we're talking about the Middle East here, they're basically Israeli assets.
This is another one of these cases where we have a president, you saw this with Bill Clinton, who is heavily dependent on Israel's lawyers here in the United States to advise him.
And this is a prescription for disaster.
You want national security advisors who are loyal to the United States, period, end of story.
When you have Israeli assets like Witkoff and Kushner advising you, they're going to listen to the Israelis, pretty much push policies that the Israelis want, and you're going to end up in a disastrous situation.
And here we are.
You know, the Wall Street Journal piece that I quoted from and that you and I have commented on intimates that he may just stop this.
What will Netanyahu do?
If Trump stops the bombing and stops the war of aggression from the American side?
Well, I would imagine that Netanyahu and the Israelis will continue.
The Iranians will certainly continue.
And this is why Trump just can't walk away.
He's stuck and I think what's happening here, if you look carefully, is that Uh Trump is going up the escalation ladder.
I can't help thinking about Vietnam and how that war played itself out.
You want to remember that Lbj Uh took us to war in Vietnam understanding full well that we were in deep trouble and that we did not have a winning strategy.
I mean the reason that we upped the ante in march of 1965.
This is when the first combat troops land at Da Nang.
And this is when Rolling Thunder, the famous bombing campaign of North Vietnam, starts.
That starts on March 2nd, and ground troops land on March 8th.
But the reason that we're upping the ante is because we're playing a losing hand in Vietnam.
And he thinks that he can escalate, he thinks he can control the escalation, and that somehow we'll figure out the magic formula along the way.
I mean, that's what was really going on at the time.
They didn't think they had a war winning strategy.
And this is the situation that Trump is in.
He's involved and he can't walk away.
And it's in part because of the Israelis.
But even if the Israelis weren't involved, this is the United States of America.
It doesn't walk away from a fight.
That mentality is hardwired into us.
So what he's doing is he's escalating.
As we read the newspapers today, what you see is that the administration is.
Moving ground forces into the Middle East.
These are combat units.
And we're talking about invading some territory that Iran now controls.
We've seen this movie before.
And at the same time, we're bombing away, and the bombing is not working.
Again, we've seen this movie before.
And once you get your ankle in the water, it's not long before you have your leg in the water.
And once you get your leg in the water, it's not long before you're in water that's over your head.
And if you go back again to the Vietnam War and you start in March 1965 and you ramp forward, you end up on March 31st, 1968.
Today's March 31st, 2026.
On March 31st, 1968, a downtrodden President Johnson told the American people that he was not going to run for another term.
He understood full well that Vietnam had been a disaster for him.
And this is the path that President Trump is going down.
He's looking for a way to win this.
He's flailing around.
Again, it gets back to the rhetoric where he goes from wild eyed optimism on one hand to wild eyed desperation on the other hand.
He's looking for a way to fix this problem.
And the fact of the matter is, he can't fix the problem.
There's no military solution here.
It gets back to your point a few minutes ago about how we're worse off today than we were before the war started.
Right.
Remarkable.
And there's no sign that things are improving.
And I would imagine that he understands that and his advisors understand that.
And behind closed doors, there is wild eyed pessimism about where we're headed.
What can he do or hope to do?
What is General Kane, who's the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and an Air Force guy, not a combat guy, not an infantry guy?
And Hegseth, what are they telling him he can do with?
What is the purpose for the introduction of 10,000 more combat troops who arrived over the weekend?
Well, we don't know for sure.
I would imagine that there's a lot of difference between what Hegseth is telling him.
And what General Kane is telling him.
Everything I've seen about General Kane tells me that he's a rational legal person who understands the limits of military force.
Pete Hegseth is the exact opposite.
I mean, the fact that Pete Hegseth is the Secretary of Defense or the Secretary of War, or as Chas Freeman calls him, the Secretary of War Crimes, is a cause for great concern.
Oh my God.
I mean, This guy, you know, he never even took strategy 101, much less failed it.
So I wouldn't be surprised if Heg Seth is egging Trump on and telling him that, you know, we can do wonders with these ground forces.
That'll solve the problem.
But I imagine that General Kane, who has the benefit of advice from his fellow general officers and has all sorts of staffs advising him, that those people fully understand what's going on here.
And that there's not a heck of a lot of daylight between most of them and you and me.
That would be my surmise.
But, uh, well, your surmise is quite correct, Professor.
As you and I came on air this morning, Secretary Hegseth said this Chris, the new cut from Hegseth.
As far as President Trump and boots on the ground, uh, I don't understand why the base, which they have already, they understand, wouldn't have faith in his ability to execute on this.
Look at his track record of pursuing.
Peace through strength, America first, outcomes.
And what he's simply saying, and it's exactly true, and I've said from this podium too, we're not going to foreclose any option.
You can't fight and win a war if you tell your adversary what you are willing to do or what you are not willing to do, to include boots on the ground.
Our adversary right now thinks there are 15 different ways we could come at them with boots on the ground.
And guess what?
There are.
So if we needed to, we could execute those options on behalf of the President of the United States and this department.
Is this reckless or is it insane?
It's both.
And if he's whispering in Trump's ear and Trump's listening to him, what we'll do is go up the escalation ladder.
Like LBJ.
Like LBJ.
Again, it's very hard once you put your foot in the water to walk away, to pull your foot out of the water.
It's just built into a great power like the United States.
And when you add the rhetoric and the ideas that are put forth by the Pete Hexiths of the administration, and you also want to remember you have the lobby here pushing very hard to up the ante.
The lobby does not want to lose.
So there's a lot of pressure on President Trump, independent of those structural forces that are wired into the country, to up the ante.
Escalating the Gulf Conflict00:06:40
Are we going to lose?
Are we going to accept defeat?
This is the United States of America.
We don't lose, we're winners.
This mentality is very powerful.
And walking away from this is going to be very difficult.
And by the way, there's another whole dimension to this because we're talking about the escalation that involves bringing ground troops into the conflict, American combat troops into the conflict.
But we're also marching up the escalation ladder in terms of destroying economic infrastructure.
I thought we would do a better job of holding off on that.
But it seems to me that the Israelis are pretty much free to do what they want.
And they're destroying a lot of important infrastructure, including energy infrastructure and industrial infrastructure and universities inside of Iran.
And the Iranians, of course, are retaliating.
The Iranians, by the way, hit a desalination plant in Kuwait.
And Kuwait depends on desalination plants for 90% of its fresh water.
When you look at all those Gulf states and you think about who's most dependent on desalination plants, it's the Kuwaitis.
And what's happened here is the Iranians have hit a desalination plant there.
So we're going up the escalation ladder.
And this will have devastating consequences for the world economy moving forward.
You know, we talk about closing off the straight, and that matters enormously for all the obvious reasons.
But it's not only closing off the straight, it's also the fact that there's all this energy infrastructure that's being wrecked, and it's going to take years to replace once the shooting stops.
Here's General Barry McCaffrey, a retired four star, on one of the talk shows on Sunday morning.
Who more or less agrees with everything you've said.
Chris, cut number five.
Higgs says, in some ways, he looks like a comic book tough guy.
And so I think increasingly inside the Pentagon, there's an element of chaos and hysteria to decision making.
Our remaining objectives in the Gulf War are stop the nuclear program and open the Gulf of Hormuz.
Each of them are in danger.
You cannot stop a nuclear weapons program.
unless you have inspectors on the ground with robust rules of investigation.
That's not going to happen under the current approach by the United States or Israel.
The second thing you've got to do is you've got to open the Gulf of Aramuz.
I think the Iranians can outlast us.
And no U.S. Navy warfighting vessel wants to be in the Persian Gulf, shallow water, restricted.
A maneuver space and subject to instant attack by mini subs, floating naval mines, cruise ballistic missiles.
It's just a nightmare of an operation.
So the whole notion of forcing passage, even if the NATO allies joined us, is really tenuous.
This is probably not going to work.
We have to have a diplomatic solution.
Your thoughts?
I mean, it's hard to disagree with anything that he said.
You know, Trump is moving ground forces to the Middle East, the combat units, and he's bringing in 2,000 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne, and he's bringing in about 5,000 Marines.
And those Marines are going to be on amphibious assault ships.
If you ever sort of look at what those amphibious assault ships look like, you'll see that they're huge ships.
To use them against the Iranians, you have to bring them up close to the Iranian mainland so that the amphibious troops can be dispatched from this big ship and land on the beaches.
But there's no way you're going to get that big amphibious ship.
There are two of them the USS Iwo Jima and the USS Boxer.
You're not going to get these amphibious ships anywhere near the Persian Gulf because they'll likely be hit with cruise missiles and sunk.
To the bottom of the Jolly Roger.
You notice that we're parking all of our large naval ships far away from the Persian Gulf because we're afraid they're going to be hit.
So the question is how do you get these large ships like the USS Iwo Jima near?
The Strait of Hormuz, and then you're going to push that ship through the Strait of Hormuz, and as General McCaffrey said, into the Persian Gulf.
I don't even think you're going to get through the Strait, but if you get through the Strait, you're going to be a big sitting target in the Persian Gulf.
So this just makes no sense.
And then there's the 82nd Airborne.
These are light infantry troops.
You know, President Trump talks about using them to take Karg Island.
How are you going to do that?
Karg Island is right off the coast of Iran.
You can't get through the Strait.
To get to Karg Island.
So, how is the 82nd Airborne Division going to get there?
I guess maybe you can drop them out of airplanes.
I don't think that's going to work very well.
Maybe you can insert them with helicopters.
Again, I'm sure there are going to be a lot of Iranians down on the ground with anti aircraft artillery and all sorts of other weapons waiting for those helicopters.
And even if you get some 82nd Airborne Division troops on the ground on Karg Island, aren't the Iranians going to put drones over their head, blast them with ballistic missiles, artillery, and rockets, and so forth and so on?
How are you going to resupply those troops?
Again, they're on an island that's right off the coast of Iran and that you don't have access to.
So I kind of just don't understand what's going on here.
But again, what's happening is President Trump is walking up the escalation ladder with regard to ground troops.
So I don't see how he gets away at this point without doing something with those ground troops.
And if that doesn't work out very well, won't there be a serious attempt to bring in more ground troops?
Crusader Mentality Returns00:02:31
Oh, boy.
Here's the mentality of Secretary Haig says Tell me if in your years at West Point or your years in the Air Force, you ever heard a Secretary of Defense.
Speak like this.
Cut number nine, Chris.
Almighty God, who trains our hands for war and our fingers for battle, you who stirred the nations from the north against Babylon of old, making her land a desolation where none dwell, behold now the wicked who rise against your justice and the peace of the righteous.
Snap the rod of the oppressor, frustrate the wicked plans, and break the teeth of the ungodly.
By the blast of your anger, let the evil perish, let their bulls go down to slaughter.
For their day has come, the time of their punishment.
Pour out your wrath upon those who plot vain things and blow them away like chaff before the wind.
What God does he worship?
God, hard to believe.
I mean, in the past, it was unthinkable that any Secretary of Defense would talk like that.
And furthermore, it's just completely inappropriate in a secular nation like the United States.
People should be horrified by those comments.
And the way he uses Christianity, oh my, you just don't, you know, you're kind of left speechless when you.
Right, right.
But I do think that you remember Pope Innocent III, right?
Pope Innocent III, he was the Pope around 1200.
I don't personally remember him, no.
Pope Innocent III was probably the most famous Pope when it came.
To the Crusades going into the Middle East with these Christian forces to deal with the heathen.
I think that Pete Hegeseth should have been born back in the.
1100s, and then he would have been able to advise Pope Innocent III on the Crusades.
He could have been a spokesman for Pope Innocent III.
He sounds like a crusader, and I'm not a contemporary crusader.
I'm talking about a crusader from way back when.
Yeah, he does.
He does.
Complicity in Genocide00:09:16
How does that go over with the troops?
I noticed people in uniform, they seem to be senior officers, not grunts.
In his audience.
I don't know exactly to whom he was speaking, but there were uniformed military personnel in the audience.
Do their eyes glaze over or do they fall for this?
I would imagine that for almost all of them, they're shocked and they just go to great lengths to hide that fact.
Of course, you want to understand that Hagsith and Trump are going to great lengths to promote people in the military who have their worldview or support their worldview.
And they're trying to sort of weed out anybody who has a view.
That's at odds with their view or their views.
And so there may be a number of generals who are sympathetic to what they're saying.
I cannot believe that there are many of them.
I think that most of those generals have been socialized in ways that can't help but lead them to believe that this is outrageous, which it is.
If the 82nd Airborne and the U.S. Marines Do invade Karg Island or one of the other smaller islands, names now escaping me.
Would the IDF join them in those boots on the ground invasions?
Of course not.
No, they're too smart to get involved in this.
They're willing to let the United States pursue this foolish mission.
So the Israelis won't be involved at all.
The other thing is the Israelis are up to their eyeballs in alligators in southern Lebanon, in Gaza. and in Syria, not to mention the West Bank, where they're executing these various pogroms.
So they don't have troops to spare.
As we've talked about before on the show, the chief of staff of the IDF has said that the Israeli military is in desperate straits these days.
The soldiers are exhausted, and calling them up again has caused all sorts of problems because the Israelis have had a big mobilization for the war in southern Lebanon, which is not working out very well.
By the way, so the Israelis are not in any position to join with us to invade territory that belongs to Iran.
And furthermore, I think they surely understand that this is not going to work out very well, and therefore it's best not to be a part of it.
Do we know how badly Israel has been damaged by the Iranian retaliation, or have the IDF censors kept us from knowing that?
No, I think the IDF censors have done a brilliant job.
It's really quite remarkable how little information there is.
And TikTok used to be a reliable source for these sorts of things, but the lobby now owns TikTok and they basically control what we see on TikTok.
So it's hard to get information through TikTok.
But I would note to you that there was a piece in Haaretz that has not been challenged by anyone that says eight out of 10.
Iranian missiles are getting through and hitting Israel.
It's a quite remarkable statement.
Eight out of 10 Iranian ballistic missiles are getting through.
And of course, they're pounding them with drones, too.
And we occasionally see evidence of the damage that those ballistic missiles do in Israel.
But it's very hard to figure out what the big picture looks like and just how much damage Iran is doing to Israel and also how much damage Hezbollah is doing in northern Israel.
Because you want to understand that despite all this talk before February 28th about the fact that Hezbollah had been decisively defeated.
Right.
Capable of inflicting damage on Israel.
Hezbollah has been firing off huge numbers of rockets and missiles at northern Israel, and in some instances has been coordinating those efforts with the Iranians.
I thought of you the other day, Professor Mearshammer.
We came across, oh, about a 30 or maybe even 40 year old quote from Pat Buchanan, who must have been channeling his inner.
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, when he was asked what he thought about Congress, and he said, it's Israeli occupied territory.
Yeah.
You know, it's another sort of important dimension to this whole conflict that relates to, you know, the lobby and its influence here in the United States has to do with the morality of what we're doing or the legality of what we're doing.
If you think about the war last June, And you think about this war, these were gross violations of international law.
We didn't even make any attempt to argue that the Iranians had done something militarily to precipitate our attack on Iran.
We did nothing back in June of last year, on June 13th, and again on February 28th.
I mean, even Adolf Hitler, when he invaded Poland on September 1st, 1939, Staged this phony event to make it look like Germany was responding to a Polish provocation.
There's no provocation here.
We just decided we were going to go out and we were going to whack the Iranians, both last June and again this time.
Furthermore, both the Israelis and the Americans are running around the world assassinating leaders.
This was not something that the United States engaged in, in large part, or certainly in an overt way in the past.
And here we are.
And furthermore, there's the Gaza genocide, right?
The Israelis.
Here's an apartheid state executing a genocide in Gaza, and we're complicit in that genocide.
If there were Nuremberg trials, right, where the Israelis and the Americans were brought before the court, President Trump, along with President Netanyahu and many of their advisors, would be hanged, right?
This is a genocide, is it not?
It is a genocide.
What did we do in 1945 with those Germans who executed a genocide in Europe and who were not only accused of executing a genocide, but those German leaders were accused of launching a war of aggression?
It bears remarkable resemblance to what we and the Israelis have now twice done against Iran.
And as I said, one of the fundamental differences, at least Hitler pretended in 1939 that he was reacting to a Polish.
Provocation.
We don't even need a provocation.
And with regard to the whole subject of human rights and international law, the United States is a thoroughly liberal country.
And it's filled with pundits and academics who are liberal to the core, who have a deep seated interest in human rights and international law.
I've been operating in this environment for more than 50 years.
I know this environment very well.
Academia and the media, just to take two of our institutions, are or have been very interested in international law and human rights and preventing mass murder and preventing genocide.
Hardly a peep from any of the people in these institutions or from the institutions themselves, if you're talking about the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, about what the Israelis and the Americans are doing.
And you want to ask yourself, why is that the case?
What's happening here?
What's causing this abject silence?
It's really quite remarkable.
The silence is caused by the fact that we are now joined at the hip with the Israelis and the lobby makes it almost impossible in the United States.
For there to be any daylight between the United States and Israel, and also for us to criticize Israel.
So Israel can behave in the most reckless and despicable ways, and we can't criticize Israel.
And not only do we not criticize Israel, we end up joining with them.
We become partners in the genocide.
We are complicit in the genocide.
These assassinations, nobody protests these assassinations.
In fact, the administration and many outlets like the Wall Street Journal.
Cheer the assassinations.
Defending Personal Liberty00:01:38
You just want to ask yourself, where does this leave us?
A brilliant and right on the mark mini dissertation, Professor Mary Schumer.
There is no anti war movement.
The lobby has co opted so much.
They've just taken over CBS.
They're about to take over CNN.
And as you say, TikTok is now useless as an instrument of free speech.
Professor Mearsheimer, an early happy Easter to you and your family.
Thank you very much for your time.
Thank you for your brilliance and your personal and intellectual courage.
It's a privilege to be able to work with you, and I look forward to seeing you next week.
Thank you very much, Judge, and happy Easter to you.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Coming up later today at 1 o'clock this afternoon on All of This, Scott Ritter.
At 2 o'clock this afternoon on All of This, Matt Ho.
And if you have a chance, listen to Judge Napolitano Weekly.
This is my new defense of personal liberty in a free society.
It's about a six minute audio, which I think nearly all of you will appreciate.
Audio only Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your audio podcasts.
And you can tell us what you think of it by writing to Judge Knapp.