Ambassador Chaz Freeman argues on May 5, 2026, that the U.S. war against Iran is collapsing because a "grand plan" for Greater Israel has been checkmated by Iranian missile blockades in the Strait of Hormuz. He condemns reliance on advisors like Steve Witkoff and cites assassinations of top Iranian leadership as counterproductive, predicting an economic depression by August due to lost maritime hegemony and a weakening dollar. Freeman asserts that performative negotiations mask Iran's desire for sanctions relief against Israel's regional devastation, while symbolic bombing campaigns fail to address the shattering of NATO alliances and China's rise as a trade alternative. Ultimately, this strategic failure suggests the U.S. is losing its global standing through unilateral aggression rather than diplomacy. [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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Illegitimate Use of Force00:03:09
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 Tuesday, May 5th, 2026.
Ambassador Chaz Freeman will be with us in just a moment on Israel's grand plan is collapsing.
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Ambassador Freeman, welcome here, my dear friend.
So, last night, the federal government announced that Steve Witkoff, demonstrably ignorant of Iran, deferential to Israel, arguably a crude profiteer, has a new assistant, a guy by the name of Nick Stewart, a lobbyist for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Fake Negotiations with Iran00:06:26
A Mossad front in Washington, D.C. Is it any wonder the Iranians don't want to negotiate with these people?
Well, Nick Stewart doesn't approve of negotiations with them.
So I guess the feeling is mutual.
Basically, what we're dealing with now, to go to your broad theme of the grand plans of Israel, is checkmate.
This war most likely is not going to end with a negotiation, it will continue.
at lower intensity with no settlement, with Israel chasing because it realizes that if it attacks Iran again, the United States will not be with it, and it will not have the capability to prevent huge damage to its own society and infrastructure.
So the negotiations at this point are for the most part performative, intended to influence the American stock exchanges, the price of shares, and influence voters.
In the midterms.
They're not serious.
So, Mark Thiessen, whom I know from when we worked at Fox together, is a columnist for the Washington Post, and he wrote a column suggesting that the United States assassinate, murder Iranian negotiators who don't bend to American wishes.
A crazy lunatic suggestion.
And then the president posted this.
Op ed on his own Truth Social.
What does that tell you?
It tells me that we are in an advanced stage of decadence and we've lost all sense of moral balance.
And I wonder, I was very struck the other day by an article in the Financial Times which expressed grave concern that Iran might actually emulate us and start assassinating our leaders, meaning leaders in the West, those against Iran, those for Israel.
The remarkable thing is, here we are accusing Iran of all kinds of completely unacceptable behavior, and yet it's our side which is doing assassinations, murdering people.
I think we've, quite aside from the assassination of General Soleimani in the first Trump term, we were complicit in the attack that murdered the entire top echelon of the Iranian establishment.
And left Mujtaba Khamenei, who is now the supreme leader, apparently disfigured and forced into hiding, lest he also be assassinated.
So, this is appalling.
It is a terrible commentary on what's happening in our society.
And even if it would work, which it doesn't, it does not work even in different circumstances.
Complex system of checks and balances.
It has been able to produce successors to leadership with dispatch and efficiency.
It has not missed a beat.
The idea that somehow assassinating the moderates, those who might prefer to negotiate a resolution with the United States, is somehow going to advance American interests is appallingly misguided.
Are you surprised?
To hear this kind of rhetoric about assassinations, almost as if the United States government is going to mimic Israel.
No, we are mimicking Israel in many respects.
I think you made a career in the law, and you know, as I do, that due process, the constitutional safeguards of our freedoms, the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, the Sixth Amendment in the Constitution.
Are all in grave danger of disappearing, notwithstanding the efforts of courts to reinstate them, which draws the denunciation of judges from the administration.
We are not the democracy, we are not the republic that we were, and we're the worst for that.
Don't basic premises of negotiation?
And you participated in many negotiations.
Don't the basic premises of negotiation presume a recognition of the sovereignty of the other country and an understanding of its legitimate security needs?
And don't the basic premises of negotiation try to find a commonality of interests?
I mean, what commonality of interests are there here?
Iran wants to be left alone and wants the sanctions lifted.
Israel wants to devastate and dismember Iran.
The United States wants whatever Israel wants.
Well said.
That's why I say this is not a negotiation.
It's a series of presentations of ultimata in the guise of negotiating offers formulated basically not to reach agreement with Iran, but to manipulate stock prices and change the mood in the country.
I think it's not working anymore.
That is, people have wised up to the fact that this is all fraudulent.
It is not serious.
And the Iranians, for their part, You know, they are bemused by all this.
They wonder maybe some Iranians have snuck into Donald Trump's brain and are operating inside his head in a compliant fashion, impressed by his brilliant negotiating positions.
Endurance Contest in Strait of Hormuz00:15:57
And that is why he continuously announces things happening with the Iranians that aren't happening at all.
But the reality on the ground, or on the sea, if you will, is that.
There is no way to remove Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz by force.
There are no negotiations to do that.
And therefore, what this is, is in a contest of endurance between Iran and the United States, an economic war of attrition, which I think we will lose because, in the end, we are less able to take the pain of an economic recession, which our participation in the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Is promoting.
Maybe by August it will not be a recession, it will be a depression.
And the wear and tear on the US Navy is extraordinary.
You know, I'm looking at this in a historical context.
If you go back to the question of the command of the seas, who has maritime hegemony?
Britain achieved that in 1763 with the defeat of the French in the Seven Years' War.
And Britain.
Britannia ruled the seas, as they used to say.
Right.
On March 2nd, 1943, which happened to be the day I was born, the Battle of the Bismarck Sea is taken by most historians to signal the transition to American maritime hegemony.
The baton was passed from the English to the Americans.
And that Anglo American hegemony in the world's oceans created a framework.
A set of rules which are all now going away.
So, 163 years after 1763, we've lost the command of the maritime domain that we have.
You can see this in the war with Iran, where American ships are unable to perform the tasks assigned to them, they must remain at a specific distance from Iran, otherwise, they get shot at.
Perhaps they're able to deflect or shoot down the incoming ordnance, but it has the desired effect of invalidating our command of the oceans.
So we're in a stalemate here.
And if there's no negotiation of any seriousness, it's just going to continue.
The level of violence may subside, but it will not go away at some level.
That's what I see happening.
Does the United States, I'm going to guess the answer to this is no, but maybe you want to pursue this a little deeper.
Does the United States have a viable military option in the Strait of Hormuz?
No, absolutely not.
And this is because of the geography and Iran's preparation to use that geography.
We talked the other day.
Apparently, we claim we sank, shot out, probably killed the people on them, six small craft from the Iranian Navy in the Strait of Hormuz.
Perhaps that's so.
But it's irrelevant essentially because land based artillery, land based missiles of various sorts, drones, command the strait.
And so again, I come back to this is a historic change.
It was forecast in a way by the Houthi and Sarala, a successful blockade of the Red Sea from the land, not on the sea.
This was a first, a sea blockade operated from the land.
We spent a billion dollars and a lot of effort to try to overcome that blockade, and we failed.
And now we are failing again with another land based blockade.
So the fact that some of the Iranian navy is sunk really is not quite, doesn't tell you very much of anything.
The blockade continues, and we can't stop it.
On the side of the screen is.
Portion of the live briefing at the Pentagon.
That's General Dan Kane, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
To his right, not in this picture, is the Secretary of Defense who calls himself the Secretary of War.
What is the status of Hormuz as we speak, Ambassador?
It remains essentially under Iranian control.
The sea blockade that we are attempting to conduct is not effective.
We are not able to intercept all of the Iranian approved ships that come out of the strait or go into it.
We have apparently succeeded in assisting a couple of ships, American ships, to exit the strait, but a couple of ships is an infinitesimal fraction of the number of ships that are stuck.
Well, um, The president is apparently under a lot of pressure from Mrs. Adelson and her colleagues, as well as from the Israelis themselves, to commence another round of bombing.
Last week, we were told it would be very heavy but very quick, sort of like what they claimed would happen in the first 96 hours.
And then they said, oh, the people will rise up and throw out the government, all that nonsense, none of which turned out to be true.
What do you think he's going to do?
Will he.
With an eye on November and his really sinking approval ratings, say enough is enough, or will he, with an eye on Mrs. Adelson's bank book, say okay, we'll try it again?
Both probably.
That is to say, I expect he will essentially give Iran the finger and leave, and the finger will consist of some sort of symbolic bombing campaign.
Which Iran will respond to.
This so-called ceasefire, a fragile ceasefire, is not a ceasefire at all.
It was never agreed by anyone.
It's never been respected really by either side, but most definitely not by the United States.
After all, a blockade which we initiated after the so-called ceasefire is an act of war.
And seizing ships on the high seas is an act of piracy.
We've just seen Israel do that to a flotilla aiming to relieve people in Gaza from the dire conditions under which they live.
Boarding vessels, kidnapping people, beating them up off Crete in the Eastern Mediterranean.
But we're doing the same thing in the Indian Ocean and beyond it, the Bay of Bengal, which is on the other side of India from the Indian Ocean.
And so basically, I go back to the thesis that there were rules, the Anglo American maritime hegemony.
Created and enforced them.
And there is now a sort of anarchy creeping in.
And I don't see any real prospect that the rules will survive our own violation of those.
Do you think that Trump himself and his advisors are consciously aware of the fact that they are participating in the plan for greater Israel?
Oh, I think some of them surely are.
Especially the two envoys, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son in law, and Stephen Witkoff, and of course his new deputy, Nick Stewart, as you mentioned.
I think they're all very much on board that Greater Israel Project.
They're very aware that we're doing that.
And I know that people in the Make America Great Again MAGA movement, among the earliest supporters of it, people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owen, And so forth, Marjorie Taylor Greene, are all very aware of it and speaking out against it.
So I don't think there's a lack of awareness either by the proponents in the administration of the Greater Israel Project or the opponents.
They both know it's what we're doing.
How is it collapsing?
It is collapsing because there's essentially a checkmate.
The United States, I mean, The other day, Barack Obama said, you know, Netanyahu tried exactly the same arguments on me that he used to get Trump to launch this war with Israel.
Obama did not accept those arguments.
Netanyahu said publicly he'd waited 40 years to find a president he could twist around his little finger and take to a war with Iran.
Okay.
That's happened.
It hasn't worked out.
I don't think another president, not even Donald Trump, if he, as he says, is going to continue in office after his term, I don't think any American president is going to do this again.
The experience has not been a positive one.
And it has done huge damage to the international standing, prestige, influence of the United States.
As I said, it has shown us to be militarily ineffective in a way that is very damaging to our.
Influence internationally.
It has shattered NATO.
We have NATO dissolving before our eyes over this unjustified war.
There is not a single country in the world other than Israel, which is our partner in crime, that supports this war.
And everybody, including our World War II enemies, Germany and Japan, are hedging against us, doubling their defense budgets, building more capabilities that are independent of us.
And while they don't want to give up American protection, why should they?
They're also not prepared anymore to accept dictation.
From the United States.
So we ended, we're coming down to the end game in this war with no plan for war termination, no prospect that the damage to NATO, to other alliances will be reversed, no prospect that our prestige, our reputation in the world at large will be restored, no ability demonstrated to protect our client states in the Persian Gulf.
We've demonstrated we will not and cannot.
Defend them against Iran.
The UAE soldiers on in the company of Israel against Iran, but the others are not with us.
And Israel has been chastened.
I think the Israelis are under huge pressure, not just in this theater, but in the Lebanese theater that they themselves have opened, where they're taking heavy casualties.
Even as they try to reduce southern Lebanon to the condition of Gnaza.
Let me switch gears to another field of expertise for you.
Well, there's my colleague, James Rosen, formerly from Fox, as am I now at Newsmax, questioning his former colleague, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense.
I want to ask you about China, Ambassador.
Two things.
One, which you've already mentioned, The United States Navy is second rate.
This must be known to the Chinese.
And two, China is now notoriously not cooperating with U.S. sanctions.
What does all this tell you?
It tells me that the administration, on the one hand, claims it is preparing for some kind of symbolic meeting of the minds in Beijing later this month as the president travels there.
Apparently, he is traveling there, that is to say.
There's video footage of large aircraft disgorging the usual American operant vehicles and the like to support a presidential visit in Beijing.
But at the same time as it is purporting to court the Chinese for various reasons, it is upping the pressure on them through sanctions that, frankly, no longer have the effect that they once did.
The net effect of the push for sanctions now.
It is to weaken the use of the dollar as a means of trade settlement and therefore ultimately as a reserve currency.
We are playing with disaster because our entire position internationally, our domestic economies, prosperity depends on selling debt to foreigners.
And that debt is becoming far less desirable because we have weaponized it against people.
The Chinese now have come to the point.
After years of passive resistance, where they are actively resisting, we have taught the Chinese an entire litany of moves in terms of economic aggression, sanctions, export controls.
These are all new to Chinese practice.
But the Chinese have learned their lesson.
They have used the rare earth monopoly they have to great effect against us.
And now they are standing up to us with regard to.
The purchase of Iranian and other embargoed oil.
And by the way, you know, everybody forgets, according to the United Nations Charter, economic sanctions are not valid.
They are illegal unless approved by the Security Council.
Our sanctions regime is almost entirely unilateral.
It is deeply resented by our allies as well as by our foes, and its utility is rapidly diminishing, as the Chinese response to the latest round illustrates.
High Fuel Taxes and Gas Prices00:02:20
One of the chatters that writes into us just wrote translating liters into gallons and whatever the monetary denomination in the Netherlands is into dollars.
Gasoline costs $11 a gallon in the Netherlands this afternoon.
Well, you know, here's actually, there needs to be a bit of clarification of that because European countries very intelligently.
Tax gasoline and diesel fuel at high rates in order to promote fuel efficiency.
That's why European cars and Japanese cars, they do the same, tend to have a much higher mileage per gallon than American cars, tend to be smaller, more nimble, and now increasingly electric, where that is something that China has done and which I feel that it now dominates.
In the United States, we have a differential between states.
California taxes heavily for the same reasons of environmental and social concern and a desire for the efficient use of fossil fuels.
And I don't know what the price of gasoline is in California now, probably $8 or so.
It's about $4.50 where I am.
And this is merely the beginning.
It's going to go way up.
In effect, we have by participating in the closure.
Of the Strait of Hormuz by precipitating it and then reinforcing it with our own blockade, we are levying a tax on everybody in the world, including our own consumers.
Wow.
Ambassador Freeman, thank you very much.
A great conversation all across the board from Israel over to China.
All my best to you, dear friend, but look forward to seeing you next week.
See you then, I hope.
Thank you.
A busy day for you.
At nine o'clock this morning, Ambassador, excuse me, Professor.