Judging Freedom - Aaron Maté : Lindsay Graham: The Uniparty’s War Hawk

Episode Date: July 21, 2026

Aaron Maté : Lindsay Graham: The Uniparty’s War HawkSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Undeclared wars are commonplace. Pragically, our government engages in preempted 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? 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, July 21st, 2006 after a two-week break. I'm happy to welcome back. My friend, Aaron, Matta, Aaron, a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you very much for joining us. Before we get to Senator Lindsey Graham's bipartisan appeal when it comes to war, do you have an understanding about the basis for the media in the West claiming that Ukraine is on the cusp of some sort of a victory? against Russia? The same basis they've had to repeat the same line for years,

even though the reality on the ground was far different. Recall that in the summer counteroffensive of 2003, three years ago, and then the incursion into Kirch inside Russia one year later, the line was exactly the same that Ukraine's on the march, Russia is defeated. And in fact, this is the line we've ever been, this is the line we've been hearing ever since, Ukraine walked away from the Istanbul peace talks under US-UK pressure back in 2022, because you need that narrative to keep the war going to manufacture public consent

for funneling tens of billions of dollars in new NATO weaponry into this war rather than promoting diplomacy. So we're getting it now, and the new craze is that Ukraine supposedly inflicting serious damage on Russia by launching these long-range drone strikes. And again, it's the same pattern. These strikes have embarrassed Vladimir Putin in his government. They have. Putin's tried to project normalcy throughout this war. He's avoided, for example, a forced mobilization.

He's tried to give an impression that things are normal. And when you have these strikes hitting gas stations and long lineups for gas and people going through power outages in Crimea, it does puncture that. But the war, again, is not being fought in a narrative. It's being fought on the battlefield. And what's happening there, right? Russia is continuing the same progress that's made throughout this war, a very slow advance. And I think people in the West have a hard time understanding the strategy behind it.

But Russia is simply waiting it out using the fact that it has a much bigger population, a more efficient industrial process to produce weapons, to wait out the Ukrainians, to wait out the NATO patrons, and take more and more territories slowly on the ground in a war of attrition that favors the bigger side, which has always been the case. So we've seen this before. I mean, like, recall with Operation Spider's Web a year ago when Ukraine really humiliated Russia by launching this surprised drone attack, you know, using drones that they were smuggled,

that were smuggled into trucks to launch a wave of drone strikes on Russia's nuclear triad. That was embarrassing. But did it change the course of this war? No. So these drone strikes, it's the latest craze that Western proxy, lawyers can latch on to to make themselves feel good about continuing this war by shunning diplomacy, funneling more weapons into Ukraine. But it's not changing the reality on the ground.

Is there any significance or do we even care about the firing of the Ukrainian defense minister? Well, it speaks to something Zolensky's had to deal with for a very long time, which is managed different, managing different sources of power inside his government, which is always favored, by the way, the radical ultra-nationalists, including people who threaten to kill him. But in this case, you have a young defense minister who supposedly, and this is the reputation. I'm actually not sure it's true, but supposedly he stood up to corruption in the ranks with so much procurement benefiting, well-connected people. And apparently that was a factor behind his firing. But there's also an overlooked fact here, which is simply that there's been so much

Western hype around this drone campaign because it's embarrassing Russia. And this defense minister was a big proponent of that. But again, the fight is being waged on the ground. And perhaps if he just wanted a defense minister who was more, who's better versed in a ground war, which Ukraine is losing rather than these drone strikes, which got a lot of Western hype, but don't change much on the ground when it comes to the actual fight. But Russia continues its slow inexorable march westward. And nobody can really dispute that. Yeah, it's not disputed.

There have been attempts to claim that Ukraine has pushed Russians back in some areas. Maybe that's true. But overall, if you look at the trajectory of this war, it's been a slow Russian advance that Ukraine has been unable to stop. and just a series of public relations exercises to get the public to think differently. The time when Ukraine was best placed to consolidate its actual medical victories was the fall of 2022.

That's when Ukraine did actually have significant victories on the ground when they expelled Russia forces from Kersong and Kharki. That was a major, major victory for Ukraine. And that's when General Mark Millie came out, said, Ukraine should now consolidate its victories at the negotiating table. This is the time to negotiate. And there was a public spat about this. He went public. But who went out? It was Anthony Lincoln, Jake Sullivan, and Joe Biden, who didn't care about making peace. And they encouraged Ukraine to press even deeper. That's when they came up with a counteroffensive, which was a massive failure.

In fact, even inside the Pentagon, some officials have said that they don't even consider the Ukrainian counteroffensive to be a counteroffensive at all because it was such a counteroffensive. It was such a failure. And the only issue there for the U.S. was that Ukraine was not sacrificing enough men. They were frustrated that Ukraine was hesitant to sacrifice its own people. And that's why they believed the counteroffensive failed. Ukraine was too timid in pursuing it because they didn't want to lose so many people because they knew they would die. So that's where things are at. You have a series of public relations exercises to cover up for the underlying reality that Russia is winning a very slow grind on the ground.

You know, I was going to raise this at the end of our interview, but your answers are so fascinating. You have a book coming out called Their Blood Our Bullets, the hidden story of the U.S. Russia War for Ukraine. There it is, and we'll keep that up for a minute. If you want to scan your mobile device there, you'll get right to OR books, which is the the publisher. I think this is pre-ordering. I don't know if it's actually out there. But you have done extraordinary research on the origins of all this and the continuation of all this. Have you not? I have. And yeah, the book is not out yet, but it's available for pre-order. You can go to orbooks.com, or our books.com, or my website, ariamate.net. To pre-order a copy.

And yeah, the book is the, you know, culmination of all the work I've been doing. for the last decade on the proxy war in Ukraine, which does not begin with Russia's invasion of February 2020, begins with the Maidon coup of February 2014. And there's a spillover effect where the U.S. You haven't seen where Mrs. Newland is out there passing out cookies? Well, she is passing out sandwiches,

but of course she's not just passing out sandwiches to the Maidan protest, or she's also passing out millions of dollars. Right. support to movements that ultimately helped overthrow Ukraine's democratically elected government and set off this whole crisis. And she also wasn't even just handing out, you know, dollars to the opposition. She also was trying to hand out orders to the government that ultimately was overthrown with U.S. support, which is the government headed by Viktor Yanukovych, who was trying to stay neutral,

who wanted to, you know, deepen ties with the West, but he didn't want to bring Ukraine into NATO because Ukraine's own declaration of state sovereignty calls for Ukraine to be a permanently neutral state. And that was unacceptable to people like Victoria Newland. So Newland was trying to essentially order Yanukovych to abandon his pledge for neutrality and to adopt a series of Western-backed economic reforms that would have isolated his own support base, which is the ethnic Russian population of the east of Ukraine. And Yanukovych refused Newland's orders. That's one of the reasons why he got overthrown.

and one of the reasons why Victoria Nulam was caught on tape plotting about who should take his place, or at least who in the Ukrainian opposition should go into a power sharing government with him as part of a deal that the U.S. eventually helped sabotage anyway. Because Yanukovych, to put an end to the made-on protests, agreed to a power-sharing deal with the opposition, which after he agreed to, the opposition totally ignored and ousted him violently, which the U.S. turned around and cheered. And then all this has a spillover effect in the U.S.

where after a few years of fueling a coup in Ukraine and a proxy war there that begins after the coup, then you have Donald Trump come along and Trump on the campaign show in 2016 is talking about, wouldn't it be nice if we cooperated with Russia? And I don't want to go to World War III over Ukraine. So what does the Democratic Party establishment, including Victoria Nuland do? They frame them as a Russian agent. And so the book basically tracks how you have, The subversion of democracy in Ukraine also spills over to the subversion of democracy in the U.S.

And both, you know, the Ukraine coup and Russiagate sort of have this mutually escalating dynamic where they lead to a worse situation in both countries and ultimately help lead to Russia's invasion of Ukraine because one of the lasting impacts of Russia gate was to totally criminalize diplomacy with Russia, fuel an escalation in Ukraine, incentivize. Trump to send weapons to Ukraine that Obama wouldn't even send before because he didn't want to further inflame the conflict that he helped begin. And when Biden comes back to power, Biden essentially encourages Zelensky to crack down on his main opposition, which is friendly to Russia, to shun the Minsk Peace Accords, which could have put an end to the war on the Donbos that began after 2014. And Biden also ignores Russia's efforts to address Russia's security concerns over the expansion of NATO and the U.S. sabotaging arms control treaties, which culminates in Russia finally trying to impose by force what the U.S. had undermined at the diplomatic

negotiating table with the invasion. And then afterwards you have the Istanbul talks, which the U.S. sabotages again. And the book is called Their Blood Are Bullets, because the whole goal of the U.S. and Ukraine was not to defend Ukraine. It was to use Ukraine to bleed Russia. And the person who explained this best and this inspired the book's title was all over north of Iran-Contra fame who said Approvingly it's their blood and our bullets in terms of the US was setting the bullets to you That's actually a phrase from Arlington North that is actually their blood are great line because it's our bullets and Ukrainian blood and so many other people said the same thing including across the aisle I mean, this truly is a bipartisan project. And that's what I try to document in this book.

Wow. Well, I hope you sell a lot of copies. And I'm happy to see that the guests who just preceded you on the show, the great Professor John Meersheimer, called your book, a must read for anyone hoping to transcend Western propaganda about the Ukraine war. That's so typical of Professor Mearsheimer, just right to the point, Aaron. Well, yes.

And he called it back in 2015 when he said that the West is leading Ukraine down the Primrose path and then results that Ukraine is going to get wrecked. He said that back in 2015. And talk about a prescient observation. Everything he said from the start proven to be exactly right. And of course, because he said it from the start and because he was right, he's been vilified and isolated and, you know, called all these bad names. But that's what happens when you tell the truth.

And this book is trying to follow in that tradition. Last weekend, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, in uncharacteristically harsh tones, indicated that he, which must mean the Kremlin, which must mean President Putin, is fed up with EU leaders, is prepared, as pure. prepared for war is untrusting of the U.S. and has concluded that the anchorage Trump-Puton meeting was useless, was a bust. Were you surprised at Lavrov's tone? No, not at all. I mean, first of all, Lavrov is used to the West claiming to engage in diplomacy only to then use that diplomacy to prolong the war. That's what they did with the Minsk Accords,

as everybody involved the Mitz Accords now admits. Angela Merkel, François Alon, the leaders of Germany and France, who brokered the Minsk Accords, which was, again, the pact that was supposed to end the war and the Donbos that broke out after the U.S. back to coup in Ukraine, 2014. Alon and Merkel both later admitted that, yeah, we used the Minsk Accords to buy Ukraine time to boost up its armies that could fight a major war with Russia. So the Minsk Accords were a ruse. Previous diplomatic efforts that Russia engaged in were sabotaged in,

were sabotaged the Istanbul Accords. So I think the Kremlin is the last place to be surprised that the Anchorage Summit a year ago or a year ago next month led nowhere. But recall what happened, what led to the Anchorage Summit to begin with? What was happening right before? Well, Trump was under a lot of pressure from people like Lindsey Graham to sign a bill that would impose secondary sanctions on Russia's trading partners. And there was a lot of bipartisan support for this.

Trump was under heavy pressure. And Lindsey Graham had been given the impression, whether it's by Trump or somebody else, that Trump was going to go through with it. But then I think at the White House, a realization set in that, wait a second, like, we're already presiding over record high energy prices. We have an economic crisis at home. We're still possibly going to go back to war on Iran, which will spike energy prices even further. So we're in no position right now to sign a new measure, you know, going after Russia, trading partners who buy Russian energy that will increase the price of energy even more and further destabilize the global economy. So Trump needed an out. And what it was and Vladimir Putin gave

him an out by saying, let's have a direct meeting. And Trump immediately sees the opportunity and essentially use the anchorage summit, the fact that he could say I'm talking to Putin and now we're going to have peace talks. We're going to broker peace talks again between Russia and Ukraine. He used the Anchorage Summit to get out of his ultimatum to Russia. the over the sanctions because his ultimatum was unless Russia accepts a ceasefire we're going to put these secondary sanctions on Russia wouldn't accept that so Putin gave Trump a way to climb down by having this meeting in Anchorage that's what the Anchorage meeting did in terms of accomplishing anything did the Russians leave the Anchorage meeting thinking there had been some

unwritten but but articulated agreement of some sort beyond just the fact that Rubio and laveroff could speak, which wasn't the case when Tony Blinken was Secretary of State and Trump and Putin could speak, which certainly wasn't the case when Joe Biden was in the White House. Yeah, so they claimed that there was an informal understanding where basically the Trump administration would accept a peace deal that calls on Ukraine to give up all of Donetsk and all of Luhansk, even the parts of that territory that Ukraine still controls. That's what the informal understanding was, according to the right. Russians. And Lavrov has talked about that recently. But do the Russians really think that just because

Trump says something behind closed doors, that's going to mean anything, especially after years of dealing with the U.S. and dealing with Trump in his first term when he talked publicly about getting along with Russia, but he authorized policies that did the exact opposite. He tore up vital arms control treaties. He sent weapons to Ukraine that Obama wouldn't even send. So I'm not sure what the Russians expected to happen out of Anchorage. But yes, it, it does. It does, it It does sound as if there was a conversation where Putin spoke to Wickoff in front of Trump and Rubio and some terms or agreed to. And to the Trump administration's credit, after Anchorage, they did roll out a peace proposal. So Anchorage happens in August.

And then in November a few months later, Steve Wickoff did spearhead this initiative in Trump's 28 point peace plan, if you remember that, which was rolled out publicly. And they did call for what was allegedly agreed to in Anchorage, which was basically freezing the line of contact, but letting Russia seed all of the Donbos, including Donetsk and LeHontz. That was the initial proposal. But then what happened? Which is something always happens in Washington. The moment you have like a minimal step towards an accommodation with Russia, the bipartisan war lobby freaked out a bunch of senators essentially ambushed Marco Rubio and said, like, what is going on here? here. Rubio allegedly said this was a Russian plan. This wasn't us. So Rubio sold out, actually, Steve Wickoff and his administration colleagues who were pushing this plan by claiming it was

written by Russia. Rubio denied saying that, but a bunch of senators said that he did. And regardless, Rubio immediately deleted the provisions in the peace plan that outrage the bipartisan war lobby and outrage Ukraine as well, which is just so classic Trump administration. We're seeing a similar dynamic playout now with Iran where you have JD Vance criticizing Israel saying there's no military solution in Iran while other factions of the Trump administration and the faction that Trump is listening to are doing the exact opposite you know under my memorandum of understanding so it's just a classic dynamic where you have a large constituency in Washington including people inside the Trump administration that won't accept the minimal step towards diplomacy so Trump's so-called peace plan

which reflected what was agreed to in Anchorage or what was discussed in Anchorage was quickly made completely rendered useless by the bipartisan warhawks. Speaking of bipartisan war hawks, but transferring over to Israel, was the late Senator Lindsey Graham a foreign agent for the state of Israel? Well, effectively, he admitted to caring more about Israel than his own constituents. There was a clip of him on Fox News where there was a, I think, a storm going on in South Carolina and he was, you know, fielding concerns about it. But he says, I have to take care of Israel. And he was passionately devoted to that cause, the point where he would say the most offensive,

grotesque things, talking about how it's okay for Israel to level Gaza. He compared it to World War II when the U.S. dropped atomic weapons on Japan and said that, you know, if we can do that in Japan, why can Israel do the same thing to Gaza? It's absolutely horrendous. And was, committed to that cause to the end. Was a diehard proponent of regime change in Iran, proponent of regime change in Syria, because Syria was an ally of Iran. So yes, I mean, he certainly served the government of Israel

more than his own constituents. Here's some of his worst moments on Fox News compiled by our mutual friend, Rick Sanchez of Russia today. Some of these are hilarious. Chris Cut number seven. He was also known of late especially for appearing in public. I mean, it could happen to anybody, but it happened to him several times,

and it's out there. Appearing in public, drunk. He would show up at events, and he would show up at interviews sounding like this. We've got to give them a chance to see the difference between us and liberal Democrats. Well, what we're going to do is, well, I'm not going to agree. They would grind it to a halt. You couldn't deal with mass. We're not, we're not dealing with the, um, sanctuary states.

Yeah, sector under existing law that, uh, of the United States. Okay, who's Kim Davis, folks? Nothing to do with illegal immigration. I agree with her political, philosophical, not our, or religious views. There you go. But on war, the Democrats went along with them. Well, this is what's amazing. The reaction to Lindsey Graham's, uh,

passing among Democrats as people reflecting on his his Hockish legacy, how he was a passion supporter for all these disastrous wars. But when it comes to Ukraine, Democrats were in total lockstep with Lindsey Graham. In fact, the voting record between Lindsey Graham and Bernie Sanders on the Ukraine proxy war, I'm pretty sure he's close to identical. Maybe there was one vote where finally Sanders voted against military funding because it also included funding for Israel as it rained destruction on Gaza. So maybe for Bernie Sanders, that was enough. But Lindsey Graham was able to enlist Democrats across the board,

progressives, liberals, whatever, in his most passionate project for a long time, which was the proxy war in Ukraine. Because for years, Lindsey Graham has been trying to push regime change in Russia. And long before Russia invaded, he wanted to impose crippling sanctions on Russia. There's a clip of him in late 2016, right after Trump wins the election, he goes over to Ukraine with John McCain, and they go visit some troops on the front lines of the Civil War in Ukraine that was triggered by the Maidan coup of 2014. And he basically tells these Ukrainian forces, he speaks to them as if he's like their battlefield commander, not elected to represent people in South Carolina, but like now a general for Ukrainian soldiers fighting other Ukrainians in

Eastern Ukraine, people who want to speak Russian and have ties to Russia. They're being attacked by the new Ukrainian government, which doesn't want to have anything to do with Russia, and they're doing that with U.S. support. And Lisa Graham says, the 2017 will be the year of offense. And we're going to send back the Russian invaders where they come from. He's talking about, first of all, he's talking to Ukrainians, first of all, about how they should fight, throw more. And second of all, he's talking about actual Ukrainians. He's referring to them as Russian simply because they speak Russian and identify with Russian culture. So Lindsay Graham was a bloodthirsty warmonger who then wanted to use Russiagate,

the allegation that Trump and Russia were in cahoots and that Russia interfered in the election, which was a complete scam. He used that to push sanctions on Russia and to promote war because he said that, you know, Russia by interfering the election and committed an act of war. And he used that fearmongering to enlist Democrats. He tapped into their fear of Trump and their opposition to Trump to say, come along with me in fighting Trump.

and standing up to Russia by feeling a proxy war in Ukraine. And Democrats went along. So Lindsey Graham, despite his reputation as a Republican war hawk, he really represents something very, very bipartisan. And that legacy lives on because his Senate colleagues are trying to pass a new measure sort of in his honor that imposes the crippling sanctions on Russia. He's been trying to push for a long time now, including secondary sanctions on countries that buy Russian energy.

Wow. Aaron, pleasure to chat with you. Chris, can you put the book up one more time? This is their blood, our bullets, which is available on pre-order. Cy Hirsch, Katrina Vanden, Oval, John Mearsheimer, endorsing it. Aaron, good luck with the book. Always a pleasure, my dear friend. And actually, we do have Graham and McCain together. So before we leave, let's run this. Your fight is our fight. 2017 will be the year of offense. All of us will go back to Washington, and we will push the case against Russia.

We all of us will go to Washington, and we will bestowice to sanctions against Russia. Enough of a Russian aggression. It is time for them to pay a heavier price. I believe you will win. I am convinced you will win, and we will do everything we can to provide you with what you need to win. Is that the comments you were talking about? Yes, it is. And when John McCain says, we'll do everything we can to provide you what you need to win,

And what they did was they used the fact that Trump was being framed as a Russian asset to put pressure on him to send those weapons to Ukraine that Obama wouldn't stand by saying, you know, this is a great way to dispel the allegation that you're controlled by Vladimir Putin. And Trump under heavy pressure from his own cabinet and people like John McCain and Lindsey Graham and out of his own personal animus towards Obama caved and agreed. and he sent weapons to Ukraine that escalated the war. And then when he briefly paused those weapons, what happened? He got impeached. The Cold War mania in Washington at that point was so strong. And that's what I talk about in the book is that desire to use Ukraine to bleed Russia, that refusal to have any diplomatic compromise with Russia,

it fueled Russia's invasion. And that's why I called Their Blood Are Bullets, because this was driven by people like Lindsey Graham and Johnson. John McCain and their allies across the aisle to use Ukraine to fight Russia in Ukraine. And it's been a disaster for everybody, for most Ukrainians. Well, best of luck with the book, and thank you for continuing your time on the show. It's always a pleasure. We'll look forward to seeing you next week, my dear friend.

Thank you, Judge. See you then. Sure. Coming up later today, to this afternoon, does the United States even have the ammunition to do what Trump boasts it will be doing in Iran, Matt Ho, and at 3 o'clock this afternoon, how the deep state uses Donald Trump to further its nefarious deeds.

Colonel Karen Koukowski, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.