Judging Freedom - AMB. Chas Freeman : Trump and Xi: Who Won?

Episode Date: November 4, 2025

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Today is Tuesday, November 4th, 20205, Ambassador Chas Freeman will be with us on a moment. the confrontation last week in South Korea. Was it President Xi or was it President Trump? But first this. History tells us every market eventually falls. Currencies collapse. And look at where we are now. 37 trillion in national debt.

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no pressure, and that's why I buy my gold and silver from Lear. And right now, you can get up to $20,000 in bonus medals with a qualified purchase. Call 800, 511, 4620, or go to Learjudgeonap.com today. Ambassador Freeman, welcome here. Before we get to what President Trump wanted and what President G wanted and who got what they wanted and who did in a couple of prelimin. questions. Did you ever think that you would see the day when an ISIS monster who cut people's heads off would be welcomed by the president into the Oval Office as Syrian, quote, president, close quote, Al Jalani will be later this week? Never. But then the whole Syrian escapade $5 billion in U.S. money spent defending al-Qaeda. I'm kind of affiliation.

jihadis trying to overthrow a secular, if awful government run by the Assad family is just almost impossible to believe. The United States intervened to create a civil war and civil strife in Syria, and we created a petri dish in which the result, I had affiliated jihadi murderer as president of Syria results. You shouldn't make pacts with the devil. This guy in his youth actually fought against American troops. Now, the troops who were there illicitly under false pretenses. We were talking before the show came on about the now late Vice President Cheney and his role in these two awful wars.

and Iraq, but it is not improbable that Mr. Al Jolani, and I may have had a different name at the time, actually killed American boys. And now he's being embraced by a president who probably doesn't understand the history. This is all concocted by MI6 and CIA? Well, they were the backers. We were the backers of this movement, which had Tapir Hashem, which took over Syria when the Assad government collapsed. Al-Jalani or Ashara is his real name, which is now reassumed, was actually a product of the school of terrorism and murder that we operated in Iraq. He was jailed by us. He was tortured by us. And he's obviously a very pragmatic fellow.

He's emerged in this new role and given a clean bill of health by all sorts of people, including David Petraeus, who was responsible for putting him in prison in the first place. I recall we won't play it, but I recall General Petraeus's fawning interview with him. All right, switching gears, and again, before we. we get to President Trump and Xi in South Korea. Are the Israelis still murdering Palestinians during this so-called ceasefire? Yes, more or less at the same rate as they were before, and with no evidence of any additional restraint on their part.

They're conducting bombing raids. They're sniping. They're looting. They're stealing. They're shooting civilians. And they are playing games with the, so-called ceasefire. It isn't even, it isn't, it never was a peace plan, but it isn't even a ceasefire, really, any more than the one that the Israelis concluded with Lebanon are. That, that, that ceasefire

has been violated, I think, over 4,000 times by the Israelis. They are still occupying part of Lebanon despite the requirement to leave. And of course, in the meantime, they're also taking more and more territory. In Syria, nothing's changed. Are the Russians continuing to gain ground in Ukraine, notwithstanding the threats from Europe and President Trump's on again, off again, on again, off again, public statements about Tomahawk missiles? Yeah, I think the advance is pretty steady. It looks as though there It's about to be a terrible breakthrough against Ukraine in Pukrovsk, which is part of Donetsk, the oblast that the Russians seek to recover all of from Ukrainian occupation.

It's an oblast where the vast majority are Russian speakers, and in fact, on the Ukrainian side, As they evacuate towns in anticipation of Russian conquest, very often the local population refuses to evacuate because they are Russian speakers and they've been savagely oppressed by the ultra-nationalist of the Anderite government in Ukraine, Kiev. Isn't there a bit of delicious or I should say this tasteful, not delicious. irony here that President Zelensky himself was born and raised as a Russian speaker? Yeah, well, this is the complication of Ukraine. After all, he's an actor, apparently quite a gifted one. He's played his role as the frontman for the ultra-nationalists very effectively.

Earlier, of course, he ran on a platform of peace with Russia, an accommodation of Russian speakers in the eastern oblast of Ukraine under the Minsk Accords, which turned out to be a fraud perpetrated by Germany and France, intended not to give Russian speakers the cultural and linguistic autonomy that was at issue, but to gain time to arm and retrain the Ukrainian army to NATO standards, which they did, and which was the result of which was the Ukrainian army deployed ready to retake the rebellious oblast in early 2022 when the failure to enter into any diplomatic discussions with the Russians precipitated the Russian implementation of their ultimatum and their invasion of Ukraine. I know you're not a pollster, but do you think that most Americans actually believe President Trump when he argues that the country of Venezuela is somehow a threat to the national security of the United States? Well, I have seen polls that suggested very few people believe that.

It's a mystery to me where our president is getting his information. He alleges that Venezuela is a major drug export. to the United States of fentanyl, that is emphatically not the case, and everyone who has investigated it, including U.S. intelligence, agrees that it is not the case. He imagines that small boats that don't have the fuel or the engine capacity to make it to the United States are somehow en route to the United States, and he's carrying out murder on the high seas. Under international law, this is piracy. Under the American Constitution, It's a violation of the separation of powers because only the Congress can authorize this kind of action.

Under the laws of the United States, it's a violation of the War Powers Act, which the 60-day period stipulated in that act, expired on Monday. But the administration decided to ignore the act and continue its illegal actions. No, I don't think this has any support to speak of, except among people. people who are just credulous and believe anything the president says regardless of whether he put forward any evidence or not. In this case, there's no evidence. What is behind, do you know, what is behind Marco Rubio's insatiable animus against Venezuela? Well, I think his belief and the administration apparently has been persuaded that if we can knock out Venezuela, Cuba will crumble and fall.

And Marco Rubio, of course, is part of the Cuban-American community in South Florida, who are passionately against the regime in the Venom. That regime does depend on oil from Venezuela, and the relationship between Venezuela and Cuba is quite intimate. So they're linked, and that's enough to justify a regime change effort in Venezuela, from Mr. Rubin. I'm going to, again, before we get to President Xi and Trump, I'm going to jump back to Ukraine for a minute

because our dear friend and colleague, Colonel Douglas McGregor, is reporting that President Zelensky's army has, this number is mind-boggling, 20,000 deserters a month, 20,000 observers a month. And they are replaced with, conscripts we're going to play a very short clip just a 20-second video of a poor soul shoved into a van off a public street Chris? I mobilized. I'm mobilized. I'm going to show. I don't want to die. I don't want to

die. I'm just 23. Please. Basically saying over and over and I don't know who took this film, I don't want to die, I don't want to die, I don't want to die. So they're taking these kids. He appeared to be late teenage years, maybe early 20s at the oldest. They're taking these kids off the street and with little or no training,

putting a uniform on them, giving them a weapon and sending them to the front lines. Well, the problem for Ukraine from the beginning, the Ukraine began this war with a high. level of morale and commitment. It's now scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of supplying cannon fodder to the front. The clip said the guy was 23. He looked younger, I agree. He clearly was very unhappy about being sent off to the front with probably minimal training. The Ukrainian army is gradually collapsing, and it risks a sudden collapse.

But Doug McGregor follows us far more closely than I or virtually anyone else, and he's the person to ask about the prospects for the Ukrainian armed forces in the near future. Right, he will be on with us later in the week, but he sent that to us actually just a few minutes ago. What did the United States gain by its imposition of a 100% tariff on products coming to the United States from China? Not a damn thing. We finally come up against someone who will fight back in the Chinese. And the only thing that that produced was a much harder line on the part of the Chinese. The meeting at Busan in South Korea near Gyeongju where the APEC summit was being held down,

basically saw the United States do what is all too typical with this administration. First, we create a major crisis by imposing all sorts of arbitrary and capricious restraints and restrictions on others. Then we discover that it's causing a real problem for us and it's not working. So having launched a huge strategic initiative against another country, in this case, China, we then retreat and make a tactical adjustment and declare victory and say, well, the problem's been solved. But the problem hasn't been solved. We have a period, apparently of about a year, theoretically, in which U.S.-China relations might be stable, and in which the bureaucracy in Washington might actually follow the president's directive for a change

and not impose new restrictions on the Chinese that hurt American producers and consumers. There's a great deal of what we import from China is components for stuff that we manufacture. It's not just the stuff at Walmart and Target and other retail outlets. In this case, basically, President Trump, having created a problem, realized, I guess, that we couldn't muscle the Chinese to the ground and retreated. Does President Trump behave vis-a-vis China and tariffs as if he understands the irrepresses, the irrepress? replaceable need of U.S. pharmaceutical companies for Chinese raw earth minerals? I mean, literally irreplaceable. Well, I don't think the pharmaceutical companies are so dependent on rare earths,

but they're heavily dependent on generic manufacturing of components for drugs in China. And, of course, one of the main issues that President Trump raised in Edwassan was imports of precursor chemicals or exports from China to Mexico, basically, of precursor chemicals that then become in Mexican labs make into fentanyl, which many Americans are addicted to and many die from. Here I want to make a point. There's not a single instance in history in which an effort to cure an addiction problem by attacking supply rather than demand succeeded. The Chinese were not able to prevent the British from addicting them to opium by burning the opium and attacking the British. After our civil war, soldiers addicted to morphine, which was administered during the war

to prevent pain, were addicted. And in both cases, in China and in the United States in the past, the only solution that anybody could find was round up the addicts, make them go cold turkey, capture the pushers, and either try them or execute them. And this works. It does not work to try to cut off supply. So even if the Chinese intensify their effort, as they've said they will, to control the export of these precursor chemicals, by the way, it's not fentanyl, it's chemicals that are useful for other purposes.

then this isn't going to do a damn thing for Americans in terms of our death rate from fentanyl. Why? Because the markup between the production of these chemicals and what's sold on the street is hundreds of times, hundreds of times. So that the financial incentive for people to fill the demand is irresistible. And if the Chinese successfully control exports, one else will supply our imports. So what did President Trump want other than the end of a crisis which he created?

Well, that was the main thing, of course. But aside from that, this is a very interesting meeting because it was clearly a meeting between equals. President Trump is used to being the dominant figure in the relationship, and he wasn't. This was a meeting between equals, and it seemed to represent a conclusion by the president, if not by all of his entourage, that we can't hope to out-compete China, and we couldn't win a war with it. And so we better learn to live with it.

And that's basically what he tried to do there. The other objective, I have to say, seems to have been an appeal to his van. humanity. He wants to go back to Beijing and all the pomp and ceremony that were provided him when he visited in his first term. He thrives on that sort of thing. And it's something the Chinese are very good at providing. Wow. If you were to say who prevailed in the handshake public and then private meetings between President's Trump and Xi, How would you characterize it? Oh, I think the side that retreated can't claim to have prevailed and we retreated. Nicely put, Ambassador. Ambassador, thank you very much for your time.

I appreciate you letting me go all across the board on all of these issues. And your insight, particularly with respect to China, is very much appreciated and needed. All the best, my friend. I'll look forward to seeing you next week. Thanks. Thank you. Coming up later today at 11 this morning, Scott Ritter, at 1 this afternoon, Colonel Karen Koukowski, at 2 this afternoon, Matthew Ho, at 3 this afternoon, Professor Jeffrey Sachs. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.

Thank you.