Judge Andrew Napolitano and Aaron Maté dissect the Trump administration's alleged plan for a worldwide naval blockade on Iranian oil, exposing it as a failed regime change strategy reliant on sophistry rather than diplomacy. Maté argues that Secretary Pete Hegseth's claims ignore logistical realities, risking global economic fallout while ignoring the Pentagon's $25 billion cost estimate and domestic backlash warnings from figures like Charlie Kirk. The discussion further reveals evidence suggesting the 2018 Douma chemical attack was a U.S.-backed false flag, challenging official narratives and highlighting the irony of past intelligence support for Saddam Hussein without accountability. Ultimately, the episode suggests that kinetic war driven by "Israel First" lobbying ignores diplomatic failures and potential global retaliation. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Regime Change and Sanctions00:13:30
Undeclared wars are commonplace.
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 Thursday, April 30th, 2026.
Aaron Mate joins us now.
Aaron, it's always a pleasure, my dear friend.
Thanks for accommodating my schedule.
Does the Trump administration really think it can impose a worldwide blockade on Iranian oil and starve the Iranian government out of existence or starve?
The Iranian people into uprising against their government when it couldn't do so by bombing them?
That seems to be the plan.
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that Trump has told his aides to prepare for a prolonged naval blockade of Iran.
And I think that reflects an awareness inside the White House that they failed at their regime change campaign.
So that's over.
There's no military option for them there to achieve victory.
So the best they can do is return to the maximum pressure.
Approach from Trump's first term that he's brought into his second term to just try to cripple, starve the people of Iran, impose a blockade.
Iran has suffered a lot.
They've been incredibly resilient, but keep in mind that the U.S. and Israel deliberately targeted Iran's industries.
Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of jobs will be lost in Iran as a result of the U.S. deliberately and Israel blowing up their infrastructure, their steel factories, their petrochemical plants.
So Iran does have a lot to recover from and a lot of high costs now.
That's why they're charging tolls.
In the state of Hormuz.
So, the Trump approach, I think, what they've settled on is let's have a prolonged frozen conflict, no agreement, no kinetic war, but a naval blockade that further deepens the suffering of the people in the hopes that one day they'll suffer enough and then finally do what we thought they would do or what Israel told us they would do when we first started bombing them.
Right, right.
So, Larry Johnson informs us that in order to do a naval blockade, it takes one or two U.S. Navy ships.
To stop and then escort the tanker to wherever you want it to go.
Well, there are more tankers than there are naval ships available to do this.
So when Heg Seth, Secretary of State, who calls himself the Secretary of War, says under oath yesterday, it's a worldwide naval blockade, well, that's sophistry.
That's not believable at all.
Yes.
And what I bet is happening behind the scenes, I do think there is a Trump administration effort to try to bully other countries into going along with the blockade because.
If I interpret Larry Johnson's comments correctly, that the U.S. doesn't have the capability to do it on its own, it will need other people.
And if that doesn't work, then Trump, I don't know what he will do.
And again, how long can he preside over the economic fallout to the entire world as a result of his blockade?
Because this is causing serious disruptions with energy markets and other critical supply chains.
So it's a waiting game.
I think Iran has calculated that it's willing to endure whatever Trump brings at them because it doesn't want to give up.
Its sovereignty.
And of course, hanging over all this is the option that Trump is not taking, which is serious diplomacy.
He claims that the issue is still nuclear weapons, that Iran can't have a nuclear weapon.
That can't be his concern because Iran has repeatedly affirmed it doesn't want a nuclear weapon.
And in the last round of talks in Geneva, brokered by Oman, Iran went further than it did under the JCPOA, the previous deal that Trump tore up.
So if Trump wanted an agreement with Iran, despite the fact that him and Israel have killed so many top leaders who favor diplomacy, That would still be there for him.
That still actually is an option.
But he's invested so much now in regime change.
He's surrounded by fanatics who want regime change.
And the Democratic opposition, even there, there's a split.
You have people like Chuck Schumer, who's the leader of the Democrats in the Senate, who's Israel first and also doesn't want to have a broad agreement with Iran.
Someone like Richard Nephew, who was a deputy envoy for Iran under Biden, he just wrote an article in Foreign Affairs saying that even if somehow there could be an agreement that addresses all of the U.S.'s stated grievances, not just the nuclear issue, but Iran's support for its allies, what are called falsely proxies, and so forth, even if there was an agreement on all of that, we still shouldn't make it because.
This is a chance to have regime change.
And nephew also admits that if there is an agreement that brings Iran sanctions relief, that could be enough to help Iran overcome all of its problems, including corruption and mismanagement.
So nephew is admitting that U.S. sanctions are the source of Iran's problems.
But for him, that's an argument not to lift the sanctions.
It's an argument to keep them on because the sanctions, he says, will help us achieve regime change.
So Trump has a strong bipartisan base of support in continuing this frozen conflict.
Do we know who controls Hormuz now?
I mean, isn't Iran still.
Collecting the $2 million per ship toll?
Iran is still collecting the toll, and some ships are passing through with Iran's permission.
So it's only once ships reach out a certain area, and if they've passed through Iranian ports, then the U.S. is trying to intercept them.
But even then, the U.S. has not had a 100%, as far as I understand, interception rate.
And meanwhile, the cost is mounting.
The Pentagon just told Congress that the cost of this U.S. operation.
Is $25 billion, which has to be a vast undercount.
I think they're being extremely conservative there and hiding the real cost of all of this.
Can you enlighten us on this odd story about a tanker full of stolen grain from Ukraine trying to land in Israel and President Zelensky has prohibited it from landing there?
Do you know about this?
Well, it's interesting.
It's causing some strain between Ukraine and Israel.
Who have been pretty closely tied up for a long time now.
But because Israel accepted a ship that Ukraine says is stolen Ukrainian grain, and I don't know the veracity of that.
Zelensky lies so much that I can't take what he says on faith.
Now there's tension.
But that reflects the fact that Israel also has friendly ties to Russia.
Because there are so many Russians inside Israel who claim to be Jews, which Israel wants, because Israel wants that population to help displace the indigenous Palestinians.
So Israel and Russia have always had this sort of.
Friendly relationship, even though Russia has been increasingly critical of Israel's genocide in Gaza.
So it's now pitting Ukraine and Israel, who are two key U.S. proxies, against each other.
And that's as far as I know about it.
All right.
Getting back to Iran, we are hearing stories out of Washington that American Zionists, led by Mrs. Aegleson herself, are aggressively lobbying the president to order short but powerful attacks.
On Iran, as if a resumption of the bombing is going to change their negotiating positions.
If true, he'll probably listen to Mrs. Adelson, but if true, it manifests yet again the American failure to understand the Iranian resolve.
Correct.
And I've always said that if there is a return to war by Trump, to kinetic war, then what he'll do is he'll try to do a brief round of strikes, sort of a parting gift.
To Israel firsters like Mary Middleton, that, okay, we didn't achieve regime change, so here's a door prize on our way out.
Let's just blow up some more Iranian infrastructure, maybe kill some more Iranian schoolgirls, because they know that the regime change aspect of this is lost.
But the problem there is, you know, Trump has listened to this constituency already.
That's who, you know, helped lobby him into war.
But now he has to deal with the Gulf states, who, since Trump started this war, have faced the brunt of Iran's retaliation.
And Iran has said that if we face more attacks, it is the Gulf states that will.
Bear the brunt of our response at a far greater clip than what we're taking.
So, Trump now has to balance what he's hearing from the people like Miriam Edelson, but also from the Gulf states, including countries that have parked a lot of money in his family's ventures.
So, he's caught now between essentially two fiscal sponsors.
And I guess the question now is how powerful is the Miriam Edelson contingent, the Israel First contingent?
It is pretty powerful.
The response would be not just the Iranian response, it would be not just against the Gulf states.
But against Israel, would it not?
Would it not be more severe than anything Israel has endured thus far?
It would, but it's the Gulf states who are the most vulnerable simply because they're just so close to Iran.
Iran can do serious damage to them that I don't think it can do to Israel because Israel is further away.
And also because Trump prioritizes Israel, Israel has more defenses than the Gulf states do, even though the Gulf states have U.S. military bases.
And as we've seen, the U.S. has concealed the real damage to those military bases throughout the course of this war.
This is always what happens.
Initially, everything is going great.
The Trump administration claimed we've destroyed Iran's military capability.
Two months later, now you're getting stories coming out, NBC News and elsewhere, that actually the damage to US military bases was far greater than we were told.
Well, if Iran does what it's threatened to do, those Gulf states would cease to exist.
It wouldn't have fresh water and they wouldn't have electricity in the middle of the summer.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And some of them, especially the UAE, have put themselves in this position.
By normalizing with Israel, sidelining Palestinians, and basically joining the coalition against Iran.
So they've made decisions that have made themselves extremely vulnerable.
Why they've done that is beyond me, but that's the situation that they're in now.
And certainly they're going to bear the brunt of any response from Iran.
Aaron, I'm scratching my head as to why Mrs. Adelson and her friends want more bombing because it just has failed to achieve even minimally any of their goals.
And history shows that bombing alone doesn't change governments.
It's spite, they hate the fact that this country successfully resisted.
I think when you're a hegemon and parties that are marked for regime change or resist you, it's intolerable.
That's why when the U.S. decided to overthrow the government of Syria, for example, so much investment was put into that.
You know, unknown billions of dollars laundered to the CIA to the insurgents in Syria.
We don't even know the exact amount because it's, it's, It's concealed.
And then the U.S. military went and occupied parts of Syria, stole its oil and wheat to deprive Syria of its own resources.
And then these crippling sanctions that made reconstruction and a functioning economy impossible.
And why?
I mean, when you successfully defy the hegemon and its junior partner Israel, you're going to get the terrors of the earth rained down on you.
And so these people who've seen Iran defiant, who've seen the images of Iranians come to the streets not to rally for regime changes, and Benjamin Netanyahu said they would, but to support their government.
And to oppose the Israeli and US attacks on their country.
I think that stirs just deep anger inside Israel firsters, and they want to do what they can now to punish the people of Iran on their way out.
Chris found a fascinating clip which had opened up the eyes of the MAGA crowd, and is probably a reason why there's such divisions in the MAGA crowd on what a catastrophe you'll know who this is as soon as you see his face and hear his voice on what a catastrophe it would be if we bombed Iran.
To be very honest with you, something that I'm against.
I don't think we should bomb Iranian nuclear facilities.
I just don't.
I think it would be a huge mistake.
It's an act of war against a major country.
You go to war with Persia, it will bring your country down.
The American people did not rise up in major numbers because we want war with Iran.
Trump's War Playbook Mistakes00:02:19
That was never part of the deal.
Okay.
It was never like, Hey, America first, comma.
We're going to go do a bunch of, you know, targeted strikes on the main, the inland of Iran.
So that's just where I, I would say that that would be a catastrophic mistake.
Why we believe this?
We have so many pressing problems at home and our leaders are internationally obsessed and they are domestically ignorant.
Internationally obsessed and domestically ignorant.
For those of you taking our program on audio only, that was, of course, the late Charlie Kirk.
Pretty profound.
Yeah, and he represents, as you said, a large segment of Trump's base who believed his claims about being against the deep state and opposing wars and all those things.
He's someone who actually took that seriously.
And that voice represents still a large number of people.
And we've seen what has happened when people like Chuck Carlson. Excuse me, and Megyn Kelly have tried to carry on that message.
Trump has turned on them and declared them to be traitors and so forth, but they still have a huge following.
And Trump still has to face a midterm election in a few months.
And there has to be some awareness inside the White House that this constituency that Charlie Kirk and others represent is still out there.
And what are they going to do to mobilize voters?
The old playbook of claiming to be anti war, that's not going to work anymore.
Right, right, right.
I don't know what he's going to do.
Maybe he's just going to give up the ghost on the House of Representatives, but that will make his last two years miserable.
If the Democrats ever take the Senate, forget it.
He won't get a judge or justice or ambassador or deputy secretary confirmed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it would entirely be of his own making.
You don't have to do much to not screw up as president.
And Trump could have simply just, you know, followed his traditional playbook of enriching.
Himself and other billionaires, and I think his base would have gone along with that.
But when you launch this unprovoked war, blow up the global economy, gas prices this week, I think, have hit their highest level in a long time.
People notice that, and people take notice when you have no solutions on offer.
Meanwhile, he's putting up a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget.
Chemical Weapons Cover Ups00:10:07
He's the same guy who previously talked about taking on the military industrial complex and reducing the number of nuclear weapons.
He's betrayed all of that.
And while there is a cult aspect to the MAGA movement, there are people who actually Still remember his promises, and they're not going to forget that on election day.
Here's what the head of the Pentagon thinks about those of us who criticize him.
Cut number 15.
The biggest challenge, the biggest adversary we face at this point are the reckless, feckless, and defeatist words of congressional Democrats and some Republicans.
Reckless, feckless, defeated words.
We are an adversary to the Pentagon.
And so are, according to Pete Hegseth, U.S. troops who criticized him for putting them in danger.
Correct.
At one of the Gulf military bases.
He was asked about that at that hearing.
And he basically said they were lying.
His performance yesterday was so wild.
It reminded me of the last of Donald Trump's cabinet appointees who had to be admonished by a Republican chair of the committee.
She was fired two months later.
That was Pam Bondi.
We are also hearing.
From leaks in Washington, that when President Trump spoke with President Putin yesterday, President Putin said, Don't resume the bombing in Iran.
And apparently, President Putin called Prime Minister Netanyahu and said the same thing.
So, what leverage does he have with Netanyahu and what leverage does he have with Trump?
I don't think Putin has a lot of leverage here because he's not going to introduce his own forces into defending Iran.
But he does have a prominent role to play.
Recall that under the JCPOA, which Trump tore up, Russia was a key actor.
It was Russia that was receiving Iran's enriched uranium as part of that deal.
And Russia has offered to resume that role.
So, Trump, if he wanted to, could seize the opportunity here, seize the fact that he has personally good relations with Putin, and return to that deal and even achieve something stronger, which Iran has already agreed to.
And I know that Putin also communicated that to Trump, that Russia would be happy to resume that role.
And so, but Russia has also made clear that Iran is a key partner.
That meeting this week with the Iranian foreign minister Rachi to Moscow was very significant.
Putin met with him for a long time.
And sometimes when foreign ministers come to Moscow, it's my understanding that Putin often doesn't meet with them.
He'll only meet with the head of state.
In fact, he met with the foreign minister, gave him a lot of time, reaffirmed the Russian-Iranian strategic partnership.
You know, that was a strong show of support, as was Putin hailing the Iranian people's response to the U.S. and Israeli active aggression, basically praising the people of Iran for defending their sovereignty.
That was a huge show of support for Iran at a time when Trump is trying to strangle them into submission.
And so while Russia, I don't think, will send forces directly on Iran's behalf, this meeting with Putin and his words show that Russia will not let Iran collapse.
Here's President Trump's comments on this phone call with President Putin.
Cut number 13, Chris.
President Putin today, do you think the war in Iran ends first or the war in Ukraine?
Well, we talked more about the war in Ukraine, but he would like to be of help.
I said, before you help me, I want to end your war.
So we had a good talk.
I've known him a long time.
I think he was ready to make a deal a while ago.
I think some people made it difficult for him to make a deal, but we talked more about Ukraine.
But which war do you think ends first?
That's an interesting question.
You know, coming from you, that's very interesting.
Which war would end first?
I don't know.
Maybe they're on a similar timetable.
I think ukraine, militarily, they're defeated.
Okay.
You wouldn't know that by reading the fake news, but he hates her.
Yeah, and he's also resentful of Ukraine because Ukraine's caused him a lot of political problems.
In his first, when he paused some weapons to Ukraine while pressuring it to investigate Joe Biden, he got impeached.
So that's always been a thorn in his side.
And that's why he sometimes will say blunt things like Ukraine's lost militarily.
Which no one else in Washington would say because you're just not allowed to.
But again, this speaks to sort of the relative lack of power that Trump has given himself.
If he wanted to, he could assert U.S. leverage over the war in Ukraine and push more forcefully for the peace deal that he promised to have within 24 hours.
But he doesn't.
As our friend and colleague, Max Blumenthal, said a couple of years ago, he could stop the war in 24 hours with a phone call.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But now, you know, you have people surrounding him who don't.
Want to see an end to that war.
And the US is making a lot of money off of selling weapons to Europe, which is financing those weapons and giving them to Ukraine, as Trump himself has bragged about.
So there's not a big appetite.
Look, when you're the top hegemon, you just don't believe in diplomacy.
Like the idea of sitting down with Russia, negotiating based on Russia's demands, forget it.
It just doesn't happen.
We've seen that.
We've seen that over across multiple administrations.
You had the Minsk Accords reached under Obama.
And even Obama himself personally, I think, supported the Minsk Accords, but people around him, similar to Trump, didn't.
People like Victoria Nuland and Joe Biden, they didn't want to see an end to the war in Ukraine.
So they helped prolong the war.
And we see a similar dynamic in the people around Trump.
We just don't believe in diplomacy because why negotiate?
Why have arms control agreements?
Why have peace agreements when you can just rule the world and make a lot of money off of it?
I know you have done terrific work on the use of chemical weapons.
Do you have a new piece coming out about this?
I do.
Thanks for asking.
So, just to catch people up, this is now, we're now eight years from April 2018, when Syria was accused of using chemical weapons on a town near Damascus called Douma.
And the U.S., then this is the first Trump administration, declared that before even international inspectors can go in to inspect, we're going to just declare Syria to be guilty.
And the Trump administration bombed Syria based on these allegations.
Then the OPCW, the world's top chemical weapons watchdog, got into Syria.
They produced a report that publicly aligned with the Trump narrative that Syria was guilty of a chemical attack.
But then we got a series of leaks from inside the OPCW, which said that actually all the evidence collected on the ground points to this being a false flag.
And that makes sense because if you're the insurgents of Syria and you know that the only way you can get U.S. direct military intervention on your behalf against the Assad government is if there's a chemical weapons attack because of Obama's red line, it makes sense you'll want to do a false flag.
And that's what the evidence showed in Duma.
And that evidence was suppressed by the OPCW.
It was a Cover up.
So there were two dissenting inspectors who protested the cover up internally.
And there was an incident now years ago where the OPCW, rather than respond to their concerns, basically publicly attacked them and questioned their integrity and said they were uninformed and accused them of being involved in the leaking of confidential information.
And after this, basically, the whole corporate media establishment, which was on board with the narrative that Syria was guilty of a chemical attack, they used this inquiry against the inspectors.
The dissenting inspectors as vindication that the inspectors were wrong.
Well, there's been an update on that because one of the inspectors, whose name is Dr. Brennan Whelan, and he wrote the key original report that was censored in the Duma investigation.
He challenged the OPCW's ruling against him and the claims made at this inquiry.
And finally, after years and years and years and years of stalling and a lot of just disingenuous maneuvering behind the scenes to delay this case and to impugn him.
Dr. Brendan Whelan has won his case at a major international tribunal.
And the tribunal ruled that essentially the way Dr. Whelan was treated was unfair.
The OBCW never even shared with him what he was specifically accused of doing, didn't share with him the investigation report, supposedly laying out what he had done wrong, and had falsely impugned him.
So, this international tribunal has ordered the OBCW to pay damages to Dr. Whelan.
And they've also ordered the OBCW to reverse its ruling, saying that Dr. Whelan can't work for the OBCW anymore.
So, after years and years of this, and years of Dr. Whelan being smeared in the media and dismissed, this is a major victory for him.
I'll be publishing a article written by Dr. Whelan.
Today at my sub stack.
In the Iran Iraq war, when the United States supported and gave weapons to Saddam Hussein, did we give them chemical weapons?
We gave them the intelligence to use the chemical weapons, as far as I know.
And we secured Iraq's ability to purchase the precursors for chemical weapons from other states.
That was the extent of it.
And that's one of the ironies of this whole OPCW cover up scandal.
All this indignation at Syria for allegedly using chemical weapons in Douma.
And other places, even though all the evidence points every single time to these being false flags by US backed insurgents.
The irony on top of, you know, just the cover ups and how false these allegations are, the fact that, in fact, we've been complicit in the use of chemical weapons back when the US and their allies were supporting Saddam Hussein when he was using chemical weapons against the people of Iran.
False Flags in Syria00:00:38
And there's never been any accountability for that whatsoever.
Fascinating conversation, Aaron, and great work on the chemical weapons.
Congratulations to you.
And thanks so much for your time this morning.
Thank you, Judge.
Sure, all the best.
Coming up later today at one this afternoon, Colonel Larry Wilkerson.
At two this afternoon, a new guest for us, but known to many of you, the British investigative journalist Richard Medhurst on the U.S. as international pirates.
And at three this afternoon, cleanup hitter on everything we've been discussing all week, Colonel Douglas McGregor.