Judging Freedom - AMB. Chas Freeman : Netanyahu Wants the US in All-Out War With Iran

Episode Date: July 21, 2026

AMB. Chas Freeman : Netanyahu Wants the US in All-Out War With IranSee 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 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? 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. Ambassador Chas Freeman will be with us in just a moment on just how badly Prime Minister Netanyahu once, bullout war resumed. But first this. Today's headlines aren't just bleak. They're an indictment of a government that has abandoned the Constitution. You are witnessing the direct result of the Federal Reserve's relentless war on the value of your dollar. For centuries, gold and silver have been the ultimate shield against the state's favorite tools. Monetary expansion and runaway inflation. To protect your wealth is to protect your liberty and you can do that

with gold and silver. I own both and continue to buy because J.P. Morgan is now lying gold at over $6,300 an ounce and Bank of America is suggesting silver could reach $300. That's great news for precious metal investors, don't wait for Washington to fix a mess they created. Secure your freedom today. Take possession of your precious metals or diversify your IRA by adding gold and silver. Call 800, 511, 4620 to see if you qualify for up to $20,000 in bonus medals. That's 800,5114620 or go to Learjudgeonap.com. Ambassador Freeman, welcome here, my dear friend. I missed you. during my vacation and welcome you back. I know the audience does as well. Before we get to Prime Minister Netanyahu and Hussu Woz and Machinations, a few questions, if I might, about

Ukraine. If Ukraine is winning, I guess that means successfully repelling or pushing back the Russians as the Western media claims. Why are they bombing an Amazon warehouse and why fire the defense minister at the height of the war? Well, I don't think they are winning, but that is very much the propaganda of the day. The answer to why they do things like bombing warehouses and refineries and everything else is that they are not winning on their only battlefield that counts for their survival, and that is in Ukraine. They may be retarding the Russian advance in some areas, depending a line effectively.

Certainly they've been very resourceful, innovative, and effective on the battlefield. No one would deny that. But basically these long range strikes, strikes on other facilities that are basically irrelevant to the front line in Ukraine are a diversion, a strategic diversion. First, they do have the purpose of trying to weaken in Russia,

but their main purpose, is to build morale and to bolster Western support for Ukraine in what has become a forever war. I mean, do we really care who the defense minister of Ukraine is, or is this the tip of the iceberg, either with respect to Malfizen's in office, corruption, or something else? No, I think we have to care. the ousted defense minister was a symbol of relative probity within a government in Kiev that is notoriously corrupt. And it seems that his stance on corruption, his effort to make the Ukrainian defense effort more efficient and honest and free of corruption had something to do with his ouster. He's also given credit by many Ukrainians for turning the war more in their favor, and therefore this makes his ouster all the more difficult to understand. But it is an illustration of a point that is lost in the Western media, and that is Ukraine is not a democracy.

We are not fighting to save a democracy. Ukraine is now an effective dictatorship. It is bolstered by Western support, but it has outlawed its political parties. It's nationalized, its media. It persecutes anyone who dissents. It has destroyed the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine as best it can. And it is basically conducting what is now a more and more direct Western war on Russia, with the risk that the Russians will abandon the restraint, they've shown so far and strike back at the western backers of Ukraine directly.

Ambassador, is the United States at war with Russia? In effect, we are. The Russians believe that NATO, the European Union, and the United States are in effect at war with them. What was a somewhat indirect proxy war has become more and more direct. The American military involvement has declined. We have handed responsibility for fueling Ukraine's effort to defend itself to the Europeans. But our intelligence and other support for the effort to injure Russia to weaken and isolated remains strong.

So whatever form you wanted, it depends, I guess, on your definite, your definition of war. We're certainly at economic war with Russia. We are at an intelligence war with Russia. We are in a military proxy war with Russia. The main problem in that is that our weaponry has been so badly depleted by the foolish adventure against Iran that we can no longer sell the Europeans the weapons they would hope to pass to the Ukrainians. Ukraine has been the main victim of this war, no doubt, but there's no relief in sight for it. Does Russia continue its slow march westward? Yes, that's my understanding.

You have guests on your show who are far more familiar with, and directly familiar with military matters in Ukraine than I am. But yes, the Russians are advancing. They're doing so with great brutality. the theory that somehow they're still losing huge numbers of men on the battlefield is questionable because they've turned to the sorts of techniques of other destruction that they employed in the war in Chechnya. They are using glide bombs against Ukrainian positions. They are conserving manpower.

They are upping their counter strikes on Ukraine strategically in response to Ukraine's. strikes on them and while the war is certainly not going wonderfully for them it is advancing from their perspective okay uh recently i'm segwaying now uh although this obviously involves ukraine foreign russian foreign minister lavrov uh made a series of uh i would call them out of character because they're so inflammatory statements indicating that the Kremlin is fed up with the West, is preparing for war with Europe based upon the statements made by European leaders, is untrusting of Donald Trump, and believes that the Anchorage meeting was a deception. Yes, these are very direct words.

and they do reflect the mood in Moscow. Moscow considers the European Union and NATO to be at war with it. It has absolutely no reason to trust Donald Trump or his amateurish and somewhat self-interested envoys, Mr. Kushner and his Mr. Whitkoff, So, yes, this is serious. And it raises the question which I posed in a few of a minute ago, and that is, at what point are the Russians going to stop treating this as a proxy war in Ukraine

and respond directly to the people who are developing weaponry and producing it for Ukraine to attack Russia? And I think we're, the Russians have many options ranging from sabotage. to direct strikes. I don't know what they will do, but they are signaling pretty strongly that they have indeed had it with the West. What did Anchorage accomplish? Not much, but the reason for that,

I think, has to be laid at the disorganization in Washington. We do not have a policy process anymore in the U.S. government. We have single decisions by Donald Trump. Very often his envoy is, don't have any professional staff support at all. There's no record of what they said or what the other side said. There's no mechanism for follow-up. So how can you implement an agreement?

If there were agreements at Anchorage, which the Russians thought there were, they were not followed up. They were not implemented on our side. So this is a measure of the disorganization and increasing in confidence of the US government. Jumping to Iran, What is the value of Trump's signature on the Memorandum of Understanding ambassador? If I can ask that with a straight face.

Well, you may well ask that. It's a fancy signature. It signifies nothing. And that has been amply illustrated by our avoidance of compliance with any of the terms of the memorandum of understanding. Of course, in business terms, a memorandum of understanding is not a binding contract. It's a statement of intent and nothing more. But if you are honorable, you are meant to implement what you have promised to do. We do not claim to be honorable in this context.

Take a look at this recent poll from the Washington Post. Do you approve or disapprove the way Trump is handling Iran? Approved 29 percent, disapprove 69 percent. disapproved 69%. This was this overwhelming, Ambassador? Well, this shows that Lincoln was right.

You can't fool all of the people all of the time. And obviously people understand that Donald Trump is in a geopolitical straitjacket of his own invention. He is focused now on restoring the situation before the war when Iran did not have a nuclear program, when it did not control the Strait of Hormuz, when the global economy was not being held hostage to American and Iranian blockades and counter blockades,

when shipping passed freely through that strait, and when the bases that the United States had established in the Gulf Arab countries appeared to serve a useful purpose. Those bases, by the way, are now basically uninhabitable and unusable and increasingly the United States is withdrawing from the region, now even from Jordan. This war began by destroying a vast amount of very expensive American military equipment. It is now taking lives of soldiers, and that raises the political cost of it somewhat, but apparently not enough to deter Donald Trump from pressing forward with a war that he has lost,

and has no prospect of winning. I'm going to ask you in a minute if there's a prospect for renegotiations, but first I want to play a clip from our friend and colleague, Treata Parsi. I think you probably know him. I'm going well. I'm sure you do, as do I, as do I, and many of us watching now. But this is fascinating what he said.

Chris, number six. It is a problem if the parties are going to the negotiating table while still trying to shape the negotiation landscape through military action. And this is, again, part of the reason I think the Iranians are not likely going to come back to the table anytime soon. Because they see the United States failing to achieve what it wants to achieve at the negotiating table and then shifting back towards military action in order to be able to improve its situation. And as a result, Iranians are not going to go back anytime soon, but rather than want to try to make sure that this round becomes as painful as possible for the U.S. So the temptation to go back to military action on the American side becomes significantly diminished. Until we have a full commitment or diplomacy and truly setting aside military action or other efforts to try to shape the landscape, we're not really going to be able to see diplomacy succeed. Great statement, the last line, I'm going to read it again.

Until we have a full commitment for diplomacy and truly setting aside military action or other efforts that try to shape the landscape, we're not really going to be able to see diplomacy succeeds. He's 100% correct, is he not? He is absolutely correct. And what we are doing is the opposite of diplomacy. There is no intent to negotiate a solution to. to the impasse with Iran on any terms that are conceivably acceptable to the Iranians. And they have learned the hard way that the United States freely gives its word and equally

freely breaks it. So the prospect that they will go to the negotiating table is very slight. I think the Iranian strategy is basically to accomplish what the Houthis did. If you remember the American effort to humble the Houthis in Anne. the blockade of the Red Sea by them, which ended with the U.S. just basically declaring victory and sailing away, I think the Iranians are visibly removing us as a factor in the Persian Gulf militarily and are pretty confident that they cannot last us in terms of the suffering from economic pain and political pressures so that we will eventually recognize that we cannot

accomplish whatever it is we're trying to accomplish, never been entirely clear in this aggressive war against Iran. And I note that Iranian statements have escalated steadily with Mutsubal Khanenei, the new son of the former leader, the new supreme leader, at least ostensibly in Iran, declaring that Iran is no longer bound to keep to tit for tat. It is in fact destroying infrastructure in countries allied with the United States like Kuwait. Electricities had to be rationed in Kuwait. These desalination plants are being destroyed. Iran is demonstrating that it holds the upper hand.

It holds escalation dominance and it's prepared to use it. And the United States, on the other hand, if, as is rumored, Donald Trump decides to go back to full-scale war is pretty close to empty in terms of its supply of key systems. I believe that almost 90% of U.S. and Gulf Arab interception capabilities have been exhausted. And this is why an attack on Mawafix solid in Jordan, the airfield that we had deployed and where several American soldiers were tragically killed and at least 100, seriously wounded, this is why the Iranians feel free to strike that.

If Israel joins this, or if we concentrate our tankers in Israel, as it's said to be in prospect, then I think they will think about striking Israel. At the moment, they're just as happy to have Israel tied down in Lebanon and not to be directly at war with it. How badly does Prime Minister Netanyahu want or need Iran War 3.0? Well, I don't see how he survives otherwise. He's enormously unpopular in many parts of the Israeli population. They understand that Israel did not win its war with Iran. They are bloodthirsty.

Of course, they are supportive of the Israeli aggression in Lebanon. and some of them support the effort to annex southern Lebanon. But they are not being presented with a choice based on these factors in the coming elections. It very much turns on personalities. Netanyahu needs to stay in office to avoid incarceration and punishment for corruption. so he's desperate. I think what we're looking at here are actually two desperate

self-interested figures. Donald Trump, on the one hand, who sees that the writing is on the wall for him in the midterm elections. He's doing everything he can to try to deflect those elections to distort them or prevent them. But Benjamin Netanyahu does not have that option. Israel is a functioning democracy.

for its Jewish population. And there will be a change in leadership, very likely in the fall. Here's a very interesting observation from my friend and former colleague, Tucker Carlson, that Trump is not the most powerful person in the world. He's weak. Chris number three. I don't think he's the most powerful man in the world. I have held him directly accountable.

It's his fault. He's the U.S. president. He was elected. That's his job. And a huge part of the job is resisting pressure from outside forces. I mean, many presidents have to varying degrees resisted, you know, attempts to control them from outside. And he didn't. So he's weak.

I'm not pretending otherwise. But it's also just a factually verifiable statement that Israel pushed us into this. And Trump allowed them to do that. The Secretary of State himself said that on camera. us. So this is not like a conspiracy theory. It's a fact. The United States is unwilling to or maybe unable, who knows, to restrain Israel. Like, you know, I'm on the outside. I'm not talking to Trump anymore. I haven't spoken to him since late February. So I don't really know. But I, you know, have a news feed. So I know that we did not restrain our ally and partner in this war, Israel. And so, of course,

it was never going to work. Okay. What do you think? Well, in many ways, we are a behaving like a vassal state of Israel in our policies generally and particularly in West Asia. And I think Tucker Carlson is right. You cannot equate impetuousness with firmness of character. You cannot equate, you know, winging decisions with an orderly process of considered judgment. You cannot equate opposition anger at being pushed around with the ability to resist it. And I don't think we've shown any ability to confront Netanyahu in this administration or to disobey the instructions of his political backers,

including some very odious characters in. his covenant. Here's a recent statement. We're going to put it up on the screen from the new Ayatollah, and I'll read it for the benefit of those who are taking the show audio only. Ayatollah Moktabakamani. Now that the American enemy is seeking to escalate the conflict, thereby incurring even heavier costs and further humiliation, it should know that the noble nation of Iran

and the Resistance Front have unforgettable lessons in store for it. What does he mean by and the Resistance Front, Ambassador? He means the various movements in West Asia, Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, Yemeni, Iraqi, who oppose Israeli expansion. And he may also mean something beyond that, because there have been threats not to restrict the theater of operations against the United States to West Asia. It's entirely plausible that we will see some actions of an unconventional nature. We'll call them terrorism here in the United States.

After all, we have killed thousands and thousands of Iranians. And it is not surprising that much of Ahmane would be bitter about what has been done. to himself and to his nation. His father was killed, his wife, his sister-in-law, his brother-in-law, his niece in a murderous attack on February 28th, a surprise attack by Israel and the United States. This is not the sort of thing that predisposes anyone to be conciliatory, and he's clearly know. Ambassador, thank you very much, my dear friend. I have a very large audience that welcomes you back to the show, and I deeply appreciate your time and look forward to next week. Well,

welcome back, and I'm glad to be with you. Thank you. All my best. Coming up later today, if you're watching us live in 33 minutes at 9 o'clock this morning, Professor John Mearsheimer at 10 o'clock, Aaron Monta, at 2 this afternoon. Isn't that you? the United States running out of ammunition, Matt Ho. And on three this afternoon, how the deep state manipulates President Trump. Who else? Colonel Karen Koukowski, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.