Judging Freedom - AMB. Charles Freeman: Will Russia and China Defend Iran?

Episode Date: April 1, 2025

AMB. Charles Freeman: Will Russia and China Defend Iran?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

you Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, April 1st, 2025. Ambassador Charles Freeman is here with us today. Suppose Israel and the United States attack Iran. Do you think Russia and China would just sit back and watch? But first this. Markets are at an all time high, euphoria has set in, the economy seems unstoppable,

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My dear friend, I want to explore your thoughts on the interrelationship of Russia and China to Iran, should the United States and Israel do what they both have been threatening to do. But before we get there, some other questions that are pressing that I would like your thoughts on. Is the EU or is NATO without the United States preparing for a war with Russia? I don't think so, but there has been a leak of defense guidance from Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, which basically

tells the Europeans you're on your own against Russia. We're focusing on China. That's the sole scenario war planning should focus on. Dealing with Russia is your problem, not ours. So what we're seeing is the beginning of an effort to put together a European alternative to US domination of defense architecture in Europe.

The British and the European Union are discussing this actively. There are some issues in the way between the British and the French over fishing rights and so forth. But they do seem to be making a serious effort to require the ability to handle their own defense on their own. So that is an important development. How do you account for the bellicose language of von der Leyen, Stammer,

and Macron? In the case of Stammer, it's almost ridiculous because he can't back up militarily anything that he says, but I would think von der Land and Macrone could start a war if they wanted to. Why are they so bellicose? Is the general population of Europe going to bed at night fearing Russia? I don't think the general population is but there's a very long tradition particularly in the UK of Russophobia starting in the 19th century. The Russians were the bedmar of the British Empire. They were thought to be trying to come south through Iran and Afghanistan to take India, the great prize of the British

Empire. There was the great game in progress. The French have a different view. I think Macron is very deliberately using fear of Russia to advance French dominance of European policy. I don't think it's succeeding. Von der Leyen is von der Leyen. She's pretty much on her own in many respects. There are other currents in Germany that are coming to the fore. Europe is confused about Russia. There's no evidence, of course, that the Russians have any capacity or any ambition to take over Europe. They can't even conquer Ukraine. And all sorts of objectives are attributed

to them, which they don't have and which there's no evidence for. So this is almost pathological. So this is almost pathological. Why did the president of peace in one week threaten to bomb Iran if it doesn't come to a negotiating table and exceed his demands and bomb a tiny helpless country 10,000 miles away 65 times in 48 hours and then dispatch everybody from his Secretary of Defense to his Attorney General who has nothing to do with this to say the bombings of Yemen were successful. Well I think there are two elements here one is the president's personality and his approach to negotiations, which is bombast, bluster and bombing. And that's how he thinks he gets leverage.

So he's inclined to this. But more of the more important factor, of course, is that this is the Israeli agenda. That is, Yemen is opposing the genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, which is beginning more and more to resemble genocide, as well as the Israeli assaults on Lebanon and Syria by blockading shipping in the Red Sea, destined for Israel, or connected to Israel. So Israel has, even if Yemen were not firing the occasional

missile at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel and Tel Aviv, Israel has a reason to want to bring Yemen to heel. So did the Saudis, they failed. I don't think the Israelis with American help will succeed either. And of course, the Israeli agenda with regard to Iran is well known. Prime Minister Netanyahu has made no secret for decades of his desire to flatten Iran the way the United States flattened Iraq, and thereby consolidate Israeli hegemony in the region. So I think this is a combination of the personal style of the president and the fact that he's pretty much in the pocket of the Israeli government. Have you followed the recent travails of Prime Minister Netanyahu? I mean, yesterday he was testifying in his own corruption trial. The trial was interrupted when the police arrived in the courtroom with a warrant for him, requiring him to give secret testimony

about one of his principal aides who had just been arrested in a scandal in which there are allegations of payoffs from Qatar. And the same day he withdrew his nomination of a person to replace Ronan Barr as the head of Shin Bet because of demonstrations in the streets. Is he on thin ice domestically? Well, very definitely. That's one reason he has to have the war continue. That's his claim to legitimacy and his means of perpetuating himself in office. The man is despised by many

Israelis, not all. He does have a following. He's a very clever politician, no question about that, but his own intelligence apparatus, Shin Bet, the domestic and Palestinian occupied territory, intelligence service, Mossad, the foreign intelligence service, the Israeli Defense Forces are all at odds with him on various issues related to strategy and the survival of the Israeli state, which more and more people wonder about. The hostage families obviously feel abused, whipsawed by him.

He uses the hostage issue as an excuse for genocide and Gaza, but in fact he's never shown any interest at all in getting the hostages out and appears to have endorsed the invocation of the Hannibal directive by which Israel kills its own people rather than have them taken hostage. The ultra-orthodox are up in arms about his approach to them and the demands of the military in Israel that they be conscripted. The secular Israelis, the Democrats, oppose him because of his efforts to destroy judicial independence. And now he has legislation from the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, which politicizes the appointment of judges in Israel to an unprecedented degree.

So he's got, you know, and then on top of that, the economy is tanked. There are many tens of thousands of bankruptcies. I don't know how many now lost track. So you got immigration from Israel, people leaving because they don't have confidence in the future of the country. Parts of Israel have been depopulated by the threat from neighbors in response to Israeli attacks. They have attacked Israel. So, yes, I mean, he's beleaguered on every side.

Does Donald Trump make sense to you when he indicates that he can interfere with the sale by Russia of oil to China and India? in the Foreign Service as an American diplomat, one of the principles that we were advocating was no such tertiary boycotts, that is to say. And this was the Arab League boycott of Israel that was at issue. We considered it entirely illegitimate under international law. It's now one of our main foreign muscle practices. It is an extension of our sovereignty that intrudes on the sovereignty of others. It is an extraterritorial exercise of power and it is totally unjustified by international law. In fact, under the UN Charter,

by international law. In fact, under the UN Charter, sanctions must be approved by the UN to be legitimate. But we have been imposing them unilaterally or in concert with our European allies. Not withstanding that, everybody's forgotten that there are laws internationally about these things. international laws Yes, bomb, bomb, bomb. Look at what Trump has done in Yemen. Listen to what he's threatening to do to Iran. Look at what he does in Gaza.

And now he's impatient with President Putin. I am not comfortable with a policy that deliberately targets civilians for killing, for murder, that assassinates people at will. That is what we have. As for the relationship with Vladimir Putin, I think there is a rude awakening going on. Mr. Putin has a strategic vision, and that vision is the reordering of European security. We are inadvertently aiding him in doing that by telling the Europeans they're on their own to deal with him and with Russia. But he is not interested in a band-aid on the European security dilemmas. He wants a fundamental solution to peace,

a European security architecture that ceases to threaten both Russia and other parts of Europe from Russia. And we do not seem to understand this. We're fiddling around with various, frankly, not very adroit, not very well thought through ceasefire proposals. What do you suppose China and Russia would do if Tel Aviv and Washington began bombing Tehran? Very hard to say.

I think the Russians have their hands full dealing with European issues as I just outlined them. I think they would up the ante with technology transfers and weapons transfers to Iran, but not intervene themselves. I don't see that they really have the option of creating a diversion for US forces to distract us. The Chinese, on the other hand, do.

And they might well take into account the recent defense guidance, which said that the only strategic scenario we're going to be planning for is a war with China. If you hear that on the Chinese side that probably gets your attention and you might well consider a diversion of U.S. attention by making the long heralded effort to reconquer Taiwan and bring it back into China. So I think the Chinese would probably respond indirectly if they did that, but they would see this as a fundamental validation of their theory

that the United States has become a lawless rogue state that must be opposed. a socialist rogue state that must be opposed. Here's State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce purporting to summarize the administration's anxieties about Iran. Full disclosure, I've worked with her at Fox News for about 10 years. But in my opinion, she doesn't sound

any different other than tone and physical appearance from her predecessors. Chris Cutten of her 18. Iran's behavior across the globe threatens US national interest, which is why President Trump reimposed the maximum pressure campaign designed to end Iran's nuclear threat, curtail its ballistic missile program, and stop it from supporting terrorist groups. As the President has said, Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. He has also been very clear that the United States can't allow that to occur. The President expressed his willingness to discuss a deal with Iran, as we know.

If the Iranian regime does not want to deal, the president is clear. He will pursue other options, which will be very bad for Iran. If you are listening to this program rather than watching it, you probably don't know that all she did was stand at a podium and read from her laptop, at least Joe Biden and Tony Blinken's people engaged and interacted with the reporters who challenged them. Well, she does remind me of Smirkula, the Biden State Department spokesman, Matthews. You know, I think, Matthew Miller,

I think there's a lot of nonsense here. This at the very same time that the CIA has reaffirmed in national intelligence community has reaffirmed the judgment that Iran has not made a decision to build a nuclear weapon and yet it's constantly accused of that. Iranian terrorism seems to be mainly opposition to Israeli depredations in the Levant these days. And when it was an active factor, it was primarily directed, in fact almost exclusively directed at Iranian dissidents abroad.

I know that the United States has supported a violent terrorist movement against Iran in an effort to produce regime change. This has been toned down a bit because it had Saudi support before the Saudis re-engaged with Iran and began to approach Iran. But this is Kant.

It is Washington BS, which doesn't have very much credibility at all anywhere outside the Beltway. Here's the Iranian response. These are two clips, one from the Ayatollah himself and the other from a very senior general, Iranian general. Chris, cut number 20. The enmity from the US and Israel has always been there. They threaten to attack us, which we don't think is very likely, but if they do commit any mischief, they will surely receive a strong reciprocal blow.

The Americans have at least 10 bases and 50,000 forces near Iran. This means they are sitting in a glass room. Someone sitting in a glass room should not throw rocks at others. What do you think? That's actually about the most explicit Iranian threat to directly counter the United States that I've heard. I don't know whether Israel would also be the subject of retaliation as basically the motivator for an American attack on Iran. I mean, the thesis that Iran is a worldwide threat is unsustainable. It certainly is a threat to Israeli hegemony and to our own dominance of West Asia, which is pretty tenuous these days anyway. But basically, I think you can see that the reluctance of the places

where we do have bases in the fact that the gathering of stealth bombers and so forth at Diego Garcia and aerial tankers, usually based at Alvarez Air Base in Qatar, got to have all been moved from Qatar to Diego Garcia, or other locations because Qatar and other countries that are aligned with the United States and the Gulf do not want to be part of a war with Iran. The only country in the region that wants a war with Iran, or between Iran and anyone in the United States is

Israel. or between Iran and anyone in the United States, is Israel. Before we go, Ambassador, the Trump administration is threatening to delay, defer, or deny legal commitments that the government has to fund research at Harvard because it doesn't like the expression of free speech on the Harvard campus. What's your take on this? Well, the ostensible justification is that Harvard hasn't been sufficiently harsh in its opposition to anti-Semitism. But Harvard, like Columbia University, is a citadel of American Jewish intellectuals.

If there were ever a place which was tough on anti-Semitism and open to the anti-Palestinian suppression, it's Harvard. So this is absurd. And what it really illustrates is that the target is not at all anti-Semitism. The target is American intellectuals, the universities, freedom of academic inquiry, and any criticism whatsoever of Israel even in response to genocide. We've come to a very nasty point when opposition to genocide is equated to anti-Semitism.

That is positively Orwellian. And I note that many Jewish professors and students have been at the forefront of opposition to Israeli genocide. And also now are in the forefront of opposition to this effort to reopen contracts to renegotiation or repudiation by the federal government. I guess I would say that if you wanted to come up with a way of igniting widespread anti-Semitism in the United States, doing this, privileging a foreign country acting on behalf of its interests to suppress

the free speech and academic inquiry of Americans and of our universities which are global institutions, is about the best way you could come up with to justify the restoration of a heinous ideology of anti-Semitism that we had largely vanquished. I'm not sure where this is going to end. I've been writing my column each week on the suppression of free speech and the denial of due process, and it seems to just keep happening over and over again. There's a young man who's in that supermax in El Salvador for whom the government refused to hold a hearing before deportation and now the government itself admits it was a mistake to send him there, that he's not a member of the Venezuelan gang, and now they can't get him out.

This is what happens when the government disregards the Constitution and acts as if the due process requirement can be trumped by the president's will. No pun intended, I assure you. No, no pun intended. Anyway, I agree completely with you. I think the major problem we have in this country is the collapse of the emphasis on due process. Due process essentially says that if the process that reaches a conclusion is just and fair,

the conclusion must be accepted. But we have turned this around. Unless we like the conclusion, we repudiate it. This is completely contrary to the constitutional traditions of our republic. Yes. Ambassador, it's a pleasure, my dear friend, no matter what we discuss.

Thank you for your time. I hope you'll come back and visit with us again next week. I hope so. Of course. All the best to you, my friend. Coming up later today at 11 o'clock this morning, Colonel Douglas McGregor. At 2 o'clock this afternoon, Scott Ritter. At 3 o'clock this afternoon, Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski.

Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. You