Ambassador Chas Freeman joins Judge Andrew Napolitano to analyze a disastrous U.S. defeat in Iran, which he attributes to neoconservative hubris and an unanticipated war of attrition. Freeman argues this loss forces the U.S. into a diplomatic entente with China, Russia, and Iran, threatening the petrodollar system and causing severe inflation, evidenced by rising gas prices and 190 deaths from aggressive naval actions against fishermen. Regarding Donald Trump's upcoming visit to China, Freeman predicts the President will act as a supplicant seeking Xi Jinping's help on Iran but expects only ceremonial gestures due to poor diplomatic preparation and the unresolved Taiwan issue, while warning of further escalation involving Venezuela and depleted U.S. ammunition. [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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Gold Silver And Government Force00:02:43
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 12, 2026.
Ambassador Chaz Freeman will be with us in just a moment.
Just what should Donald Trump expect when he's in China on Friday?
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Ambassador Freeman, welcome here, my dear friend.
Thank you for accommodating our schedule as always.
Before we get to China, a field in which you have substantial expertise and personal experience.
Israel Iran Strategic Conflict00:15:38
Were you surprised to learn that Robert Kagan, the neocon grandee, former advisor to Dick Cheney, husband of Victoria Nuland, wrote in The Atlantic that the United States and Israel have lost their war against Iran?
Well, he's right.
And there are some elements in what he wrote that are incorrect.
He Overestimates the damage that our military have done to Iran and the capacity that the Iranians have to carry on.
But he's right.
Iran now controls the Strait of Hormuz, which means it has its hands on the throat of the world and everything has changed.
And for someone like Mr. Kagan, who is concerned about the well being of Israel, this is a disaster because.
It means that in the future, in as much as Iran is not going to be dislodged from that control, the entire world will have a stake in constraining Israeli actions that might provoke Iran to exercise the power it now has.
So he's absolutely correct.
This is a very important development strategically to the detriment of the United States.
And it greatly devalues American power and prestige.
How did we, how did the U, I don't want to say we, how did the U.S. and the Israelis lose this war?
What did they fail to do or take into account?
Fairly classic example of wish casting, thinking wishfully about what could happen, acting on the basis of hubris, overestimation of your own capabilities, and underestimation of those you propose to attack.
Iran has been preparing for a war of attrition for a very long time.
Both Israel and the United States have military forces that are configured not for wars of attrition, but for short, victorious wars over opponents with very limited capacity to resist.
Israel has been conducting such a war on the Palestinians since, well, now for 100 years, even before the State of Israel was created.
It has been violating the sovereignty of its neighbors.
With impunity, thanks in part to American protection.
And suddenly it has come up, and the United States has come up against a country that has thought through how to conduct an asymmetric response to an attack on it.
Iran has succeeded in fending off the United States Navy, basically destroying the basis for the law of the sea by demonstrating.
That land based missiles and drones can control the seas, that a flotilla no longer can.
And of course, Israel invited grave damage to itself.
There's a lot of unrealism in neoconservative quarters.
Mr. Kagan apparently is a realist, but others argue that, well, you know, we began this job of dismantling the Iranian state, now we have to complete it.
But the fact is that we are, to use a chess term, in Zugzwang.
There is no move that we can make that will not result in our losing.
And we need to come to grips with that.
Mr. Kagan has.
Wow.
I mean, did U.S. planners really think they could win this war just by outspending the Iranians?
I don't think military planners had any such mistaken notion.
This was a political decision by the president and his little band of sycophantic advisors who never tell him anything he doesn't want to hear.
I believe that General Kaine and others in the military did, in fact, advise him that this attack on Iran was very likely to have very adverse effects and not succeed.
He ignored that and went ahead with what has turned out to be, according to Robert Kagan, The most disastrous defeat in American history.
It is the most disastrous defeat in American history.
Has it had the effect of pushing Russia, Iran, and China closer together, sort of an embrace?
I don't want to call it a treaty.
You can tell me what it is, but it's certainly an embrace of some sort.
Well, I would call it an entente.
That is a French diplomatic term, which means a limited partnership for limited purposes, perhaps for a limited time.
This is not unusual.
For example, we had such an entente in World War II with the Soviet Union.
It was not an ally, but we had interests in common that we worked together to achieve, namely the defeat of fascism.
So in the case of China, Russia, and Iran, they have a common interest in a number of things.
They also have differences.
The common interests include preserving the principle of state sovereignty.
Freedom from wars of aggression and so forth.
This is something rooted in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, and it's the basis of international law, and the United States has set it aside.
And these three countries have a stake in restoring it or preserving it if it is not completely dead.
So there is a common interest in sustaining international law.
Ironically, of course, our country was one of the main sponsors of the international move to Adopt international law as the regulatory mechanism for foreign affairs.
We have, however, abandoned that.
There are ways in which they differ and their interests are in conflict.
For example, China is the world's largest trading nation, it is also the principal advocate of free trade in the current context.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which represents the end of the Anglo American rules for the sea that are Embodied in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea is a real blow to China.
It's a blow to every country that wants to get through narrow bodies of water to travel between one larger body of water and another, which is, in other words, straits.
We hear now that Indonesia is talking about charging fees, tolls, for transit through the Strait of Malacca and other straits.
This What the Iranians have come up with is extremely destructive of the global order, and it's likely to be a set of precedent that will be followed by others to the detriment of everyone who believes in free trade.
Another thing that Trump and his merry band of sycophants did not consider the likely economic consequences beginning with the Strait of Hormuz and now extending to other parts of the globe.
How profound.
The truism that wars never go the way you expect them to.
Well, I think that's very clear.
And one of the potential victims here is the petrodollar, the arrangement reached by Treasury Secretary Simon and Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State, back in the Ford administration with the Gulf Arabs.
That they would use the profits from the inflated oil prices they had imposed on the world to invest in the United States and specifically to float treasuries and thereby underwrite American debt, which of course has become extreme and increasingly unmanageable.
So, one of the possible victims of this is the dollar supremacy on which so much is based.
It is an exorbitant privilege to.
Quote the former French finance minister or prime minister, and it enables the United States to exchange little green paper portraits of dead presidents for real things.
That could go away, and the privilege may subside.
If that is the case, we'll see a drastic reduction in our standard of living in the United States.
And the other consequences, of course, have been.
Begun to be felt.
We're seeing inflation now beginning to roar forth.
We're looking at a further round of serious inflation in the summer.
The summer is when gas prices tend to go up anyway.
They're going to go there now.
The average price in the United States is about $4.70 or so at the pump.
It's $6 and something, almost $7 in California.
It's going to be that way throughout the entire country.
There will be backlash politically, domestically.
And of course, since the effects of this war extend to every country on the planet, the entire planet will be united in demanding.
That we undo what we did, namely produce a closure of the Strait of Hormuz that was entirely predictable and that I believe was predicted both by the intelligence community in Washington and by our military.
When I filled up the tank of my vehicle on Sunday in Northwest New Jersey, both regular and super, so called super, the better quality gas.
Were the same, $5 a gallon.
I don't remember ever $5 a gallon in New Jersey in my lifetime.
We'll see where it goes.
What cards does President Trump have to play with President Xi on Friday?
Not many.
I think he conceived of this visit originally as a demonstration of American power.
And it has turned out to be something quite different.
He is now a supplicant.
As I said, he's stuck in Suxfang.
There is no move that he can make with regard to the situation in the Persian Gulf that does not cause us to lose.
He will probably ask for support from Xi Jinping as a supplicant to help persuade Iran to yield at the negotiating table.
what it has so vigorously defended on the battlefield.
That is not likely to go anywhere.
There is very little evidence that this visit is about anything other than appeasing Donald Trump's ego with pomp and circumstance, which the Chinese are superb at.
He will be received as an equal, not as Richard Nixon was, a more powerful figure visiting a A country that needs American support.
The two sides, it seems to me, have very minimal expectations and objectives.
Basically, each side is trying to avoid provoking the other into a war or further moves.
But the United States continues, even as Donald Trump travels to Beijing, to up the ante with regard to arms sales to Taiwan.
The central issue of the Chinese Civil War remains unresolved, and it is one on which Chinese are passionate, and to continue with the effort to contain Chinese technology and remove China as an economic competitor around the world, but particularly in the Western Hemisphere.
So this is a relationship of contention, and it's a good thing that the two sides can talk at the top.
But I see no evidence that Sherpas, people preparing for the assault on a summit, have in fact been employed by either side.
There is a business delegation going with our president to Beijing.
I suppose there is a possibility of some significant trade deals.
The United States desperately needs the restoration of a soybean market in China.
And we always like to sell Boeing aircraft.
But the Chinese have learned the hard way that depending on the United States enables the United States to weaponize trade against it.
And they do not want to be dependent on the United States.
So I don't know how this will turn out.
Tell me how these meetings go.
You mentioned Sherpas.
Is it not true that when the heads of state get there, they don't negotiate a deal, they ratify a deal that has already been agreed to in advance by their Sherpas, and then they sort of take credit for it?
Yes, I have a question.
If my understanding is correct and the emissaries have not agreed to anything yet, then what's going to come out of this besides some handshakes and photographs?
Not clear.
I think you're exactly right how things work.
Normally, a meeting at the summit is carefully prepared by both sides through extended discussion and negotiation.
Very often, the negotiations do not succeed but reach a point where A meeting between the principals, between the two leaders, can resolve the remaining obstacle to an agreement.
Dramatic Diplomatic Failures00:05:07
So that is the normal pattern.
This administration has no policy process in place, it has no professional diplomats in action, it is dependent on cronies and not on people with deep knowledge.
Of either the language or the culture or the interests or the history of the countries with which we are dealing.
And that is why we've seen such dramatic diplomatic failures from Ukraine to Gaza to Iran now.
I don't know why China would be the exception.
Wow.
If, well, is China aware of how, through its intelligence services, Of how depleted the American military is, according to our friend and colleague Scott Ritter, dangerously, dangerously low supplies of missiles and other projectile ammunition.
Well, this was entirely predictable.
And in fact, it was predicted by a number of people, I think by the U.S. military, by me, by Scott Ritter, by others, that the result of a war with Iran would be.
The depletion of our weaponry and our defense capabilities.
The Chinese are completely aware of this.
Fortunately for us, the last thing on earth they want to do is have a war or resume the civil war kinetically with Taiwan.
Psychologically, Taiwan is now very disturbed.
They are concerned that Donald Trump, in his effort to make nice to Xi Jinping, Will give away something on the Taiwan issue.
In many ways, that wouldn't be a bad thing if we could set it aside as an obstacle to good relations with the largest economy on the planet, which is now China, since it has overtaken us in all but nominal exchange rate terms.
But we don't know what's going to happen.
And I'm not sure that Donald Trump knows what's going to happen.
He will be thrilled, of course, to review the Chinese troops and Attend banquets and watch celebrations of this, that, and the other, or performances.
I don't know what the Chinese have in mind.
But as I mentioned, they are particularly good at staging things that impress foreign guests.
They'll do that for Donald Trump.
Wow.
Just to segue to a new subject, because I'm writing about it this week in my column.
The Trump administration continues to murder fishermen on the high seas, the most recent of which was late last week, and it got no publicity.
Yes.
You really had to dig.
I monitor this stuff professionally, and I had to dig to find it.
It's now 56 attacks, one follow up attack, the infamous case where they murdered survivors.
Uh, and 190 dead, three survivors, and 190 dead.
No media coverage and no outrage.
It's remarkable.
Um, uh, you know, the United States Navy justifiably has taken great pride in its maintenance of the rules, uh, in the oceans of the world, and uh, it is now being ordered to murder people.
With no justification whatsoever, other than suspicion and no explanation of why.
This is piracy.
And it has been ordered to conduct aggressive attacks on other countries, Venezuela, now Iran.
And it has proven unable, in the case of Iran, to prevail.
So, this wonderful institution, the United States Navy, which was.
Really, the crown jewel in American global power is now depraved.
And if I were in the Navy, I would be deeply upset.
And I think probably a lot of our officers in the Navy are deeply upset.
This is not why they joined the Navy to murder fishermen.
Navy Officers Murder Fishermen00:00:43
Ambassador Freeman, a pleasure, no matter what we're talking about.
Thank you very much.
If something dramatic comes out of the China meeting, we'll reach out to you.
Short of that, we look forward to seeing you at your usual time next week.
Well, I'd be happy if nothing dramatic comes out of the meeting.
But anyway, I look forward to speaking with you again.
Thank you.
Thank you, Ambassador.
Coming up later today, if you're watching us live in 36 minutes at 9 o'clock, Professor John Mearsheimer at 11 o'clock.
Colonel Douglas McGregor at 2 o'clock, Matt Ho at 3 o'clock, Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.