Judging Freedom - China and Russia Join Hands Militarily - Alastair Crooke

Episode Date: May 9, 2023

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Doctora Ramos a la sala de espera. Hay un problema que afecta a muchos niños que no puedo resolver sola. Se llama estrés tóxico. Es la manera en que el cuerpo de los niños responde a experiencias difíciles, desde palabras bruscas hasta una pérdida dolorosa. Esto hace que sea más difícil combatir infecciones y enfermedades. También aumenta el riesgo de problemas de salud a largo plazo. Pero hay pasos que los padres pueden tomar para ayudar.

Aprende cuatro cosas que puedes hacer para superar el estrés tóxico en FirstFiveCalifornia.com. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, May 9th, 2023. It's about 10.15 here in the morning on the east coast of the United States, about 4.15 in the afternoon in Italy, from which our guest, our happily regular weekly guest, Alistair Crook, comes. Alistair, always a pleasure. Thank you for joining us. When last we had spoken, the two drones had just been exploded and destroyed over the Kremlin. I mean, we still don't know who sent them, how they got there, how they were destroyed, why they were destroyed, the last minute, etc.

But what has been the reaction, either politically in Europe or amongst the populace in Russia, as far as you can tell, to the presence and detonation of these drones? Anger. Huge anger in Russia. A sense of humiliation. I mean, I think you've mentioned it yourself, equivalent of a drone being fired and attacking and hitting the roof of the White House in Washington. It's a sort of, somehow almost a sort of 9-11 moment when everyone says, oh my goodness. So what's happened, it's calmed down since then. It's much more, the government has done a very good job of making very measured and careful statements, saying, yes, of course,

we will have to react with this, but only in our own time and in our own way. Don't expect anything sudden. We're just going to get on with, you know, 9th of May today. And so it is it's it's calmed down. But I think the the the big takeaway, I suppose I would say, is that, of course, you know, when people keep talking about negotiations, negotiating what? With whom now? I mean, this was an attack on the president. I mean, as Russians see it, this was an attack, even if it was symbolic rather than in practice.

I mean, what sort of negotiations are you thinking about? So it's going to affect that enormously. No talk mirroring or mimicking former President Dmitry Medvedev, who basically said words to the effect of, well, Zelensky himself is now fair game. No, you don't hear anything like that out of the Kremlin after he made that initial knee-jerk reaction. Absolutely not. And actually, the only thing we hear is from the Duma, the parliament,

who say, listen, you can't even think of that, because until there's a resolution passed by the Duma, classifying him as a terrorist, You can't attack anyone like that. It's illegal. You can go to court. You have a recent piece published at Strategic Culture Foundation, which begins with the ominous phrase, things are going from bad to worse,

with extreme turbulence predicted ahead. In the piece, you opine that the West has made a catastrophic error choosing high-tech over natural resources. Can you explain and perhaps tie it in, or I can poke you with some more questions, to the war in Ukraine. Yes, I can. Of course, it's more of a gamble for Europe, who has no natural resources, than the United States, which is well endowed with natural resources. But nonetheless, the United States. But in Europe, it's more critical. And what I'm saying, this is a big gamble. Never, never before have states gambled on tech

as a substitute for 19th century natural resources, oil, coal, steel, iron ore, all those things that we need to run a modern economy. Technology doesn't produce energy. It may eventually, but it doesn't. And this is a huge gamble that we're taking, that we think that somehow either there's something magical will come, which will replace our determination to go where we've had everything, liquidity, goods moving, capital going, movement of people, everything. Now we've gone into the period of the reversal, and we are taking the biggest gamble in that reversal, because this was the period where there was low inflation and no real cost to fiscal expenditure. Fiscal expenditure just was written off for debt and disappeared. We're now moving into a new era where things are going to be more expensive, harder to take forward, less efficient, and there

will be fiscal real costs. And our shifts be only be financed in three ways inflation higher taxes or the printing press because america is almost with its uh even with it it's um it's committed expenditures on medication and pensions and everything else uh it's already expending virtually all its tax base. So before the war in Ukraine, much of Europe had cheap energy from Russia and inexpensive imports from China. Yeah.

Neither is the case any longer. And there was no reason to give it up, except they made this terribly bad judgment. And they thought this was slam dunk, to use a famous expression, that Russia would just topple over in a few times and then there would be a nice new Yeltsin-like figure come in and he would put all the prices down and Europe could go back to the future as it was with cheap energy.

And of course, it's an intelligence failure, in my view, on a par with the invasion of Iraq, when the intelligence services, all based on 1997 when there was a financial crisis in Russia, and extrapolated forward to today as if nothing had changed in Russia when everything had changed in Russia in the intervening period. From Germany's silence, from France's dalliances with China and perhaps from other evidence of which you are aware and which you may choose or not choose to articulate

do you think that Western Europe has reason to regret its obeisance to the United States at least vis-a-vis the war in Ukraine? Certainly, there is a sense that they've made a huge mistake in, if you like, taking the decision, which was taken by very few officials in Washington, my understanding, which was taken by very few officials in Washington, my understanding, which was not subject of consultation, even with the Federal Reserve or the Treasury,

to sanction Russia and to seize its assets. But I have to say, you know, Europe didn't take much persuading. They embraced it absolutely enthusiastically. You can't, you know, it would be wrong to say this was, you know, blame Biden for this. They made this error. They didn't do their homework. And now they have cut themselves off to having to take this huge gamble that somehow tech can replace all the advantages we had for those decades before. What would happen if Donald Trump becomes the President of the United States of America again and pulls the US out of NATO? Well, you know, the answer is I simply don't know what's going to happen in Europe as this, because there is no political opposition in Europe.

There's no political thinking. There is just a monoculture that comes out of Brussels, which is rah, rah, rah, Ukraine, Ukraine. Where is von der Leyen today? She's in Kiev sort of celebrating Europe Day with Kiev who moved the war celebration day earlier to the 8th so that they could have Europe Day today. So there's no, absolutely no sign of any form of thinking

penetrating into the elites in Europe. They are convinced that they can manage, muddle through, by stopping any form of protest. And the answer to the question of what comes next is they say, you know, net zero is not going to be a personal choice. I mean, it's going to be compulsory. And that's why the EU is seriously considering legislation. It hasn't passed, but they're considering legislation that the Germans are up in arms about

because it would limit the amount of meat you can buy to 13 kilos a year and that you can only buy five, eight items of clothing during a year well you can imagine the type of system that you need to enforce this type of uh of structure in in europe what will happen what will the people do i mean eventually it will explode the political the polos that's why I talked about turmoil coming. Turmoil not only in the sense of what is going to happen in Ukraine and with Russia and China, but, I mean, internal turmoil as well. More pronounced than in the United States. It's one argument to be made that the members of the EU

have sacrificed some of their sovereignty, just like the states of the United States when they formed the Union sacrificed some of their sovereignty. But are they in a position to sacrifice the personal individual liberty of the people that live there. I can't imagine Brussels telling an Italian peasant or a German aristocrat how much meat they can eat or how much clothing they can buy. I just can't imagine a local government enforcing that. Look at what's happening in Dutch farmers who are having to kill all their cattle in order to reduce nitrogen emissions. I mean, you know, this was the basic export of, you know, Dutch export of dairy products and dairy items was the mainstay and they're enforcing compulsory sale of farms and killing the cattle in order

to enforce this. You know, every time I look at my telephone this morning and I see my telephone supplier, Vodafone, has said, we have to change your contract because we've had a directive from Brussels to change your contract. This is how it works now. It's sort of, you know, executive orders. What is Brussels' hope, wish, expectation with respect to the so-called, when is it coming, Ukrainian offensive against the Russian military? They're very worried by that now.

I think particularly, as I say, in Germany and in France, the Czech president has spoken out very strongly, questioning it and saying, I don't know that it's a good idea to have an offensive at all because it might go very badly wrong whatever happens the Ukrainians are going to lose a lot more men in this process so I think there's a deep sense of unease about it but they don't know how to get out of this dilemma they they put themselves into this dilemma and there's no obvious exit from it other than to sit there and wait

for the worst to happen, which is the implosion of the Ukrainian project. And then what? As I say, there's been no sort of real thinking about this in the West. I would put it in the West as much as anywhere else, no rational. And everyone goes on in the West, we're still obsessed by narratives and stories. And, you know, you'll see that on the pages of the main media and saying, you know, to win you have to own the narrative. And we have the right narrative. You know ukraine is fighting for its independence and for its future and russia hasn't got a good narrative so even if we lose

in the battlefield we've won the war i mean it's delusion that almost sounds like uh an anticipation or expectation of a significant military losses by Tony Blinken and company, if they're going to say, we lost the war, but we won the narrative. Who the hell cares about the narrative if they've lost the war and the hundred billion American dollars, no bloodshed as far as we know, that went along with that loss. Yeah, I mean, it's evident. I mean, you know, I mean, this is what is so bizarre is that, you know, because they feel they own the narrative. I mean, what happens in the battlefield is of subsidiary consequence. Well, this is nonsense. You know, there are going to be a

lot of people who would die. It is going to be a humiliation for the United States and for NATO in the West, because everyone in the world, apart from a few people in London and Brussels and Washington, can see the failure, can see that this is making for a disaster. I mean, as it stands, the Ukrainians have about 50,000 men prepared. Not all of those will be frontline troops for this offensive if it takes place. And the Russians have half a million. I mean, you know, it's just, even if mistakes are made, and they're always attributing mistakes to Russia and not to anyone else. But even if mistakes are made, I mean, it's overwhelming. And just to put it very bluntly, the front line of this war, what was the front line? Financial war.

That's been lost. What was the second line of this war? It was public opinion. Well, outside of Europe and America, that's been lost. When we started this war, Ukraine had the overwhelming size of an army. It had a big army, and the Russians had a very small economy of force project. All of that is inverted too. Now Ukraine has no munitions, is short of munitions, it doesn't have artillery shells. Russia has a full logistic system, industrial strength, supplying everything that the Russian forces need for the offensive. The whole thing has turned completely inverted and there's no escaping. These are the facts on the ground. This is the reality. I want to show you a clip of President Zelensky. This is a portion of his speech to the Ukrainian people in anticipation of Europe Day yesterday or today I guess yesterday May 8th it's very

slickly produced it's in Ukrainian but you'll hear the English translation I'd like your it's about a minute long I'd like your opinion of it Alistair here we go we fight now so that no one ever again enslaves other nations and destroys other countries. And all those old evils that modern Russia is bringing back will be defeated just as Nazism was defeated. We will not lose what we have gained. We will return everything captured by the enemy. We will rebuild what was destroyed. And together we will protect it all. We do not yet know the date of our victory, but we know that it will be a holiday for all of Ukraine, for all of Europe, for all of the entire free world. Do the Ukrainian people believe that, do the Europeans believe it?

No. I think it's pretty obvious that, you know, he's reading the writing on the wall that the United States is equivocating about the support about the Ukraine project, is equivocating and they can see that the prospects are very grim. And I think he's trying to project himself as, you know, Queen Bodhisattva or someone like this. This is, you know, I am the standard of virtue, of morality. I'm fighting for the future of the world in the hope that that will be enough to give him a sort of safe base and an income. And maybe even, you know, a little bit more in the future. I mean, it's, you know, Joan of Arc, you know, I am there with my standard, this is

what the future is. But I mean, in the end, you know, what happened to Joan of Arc, but this is this is what he's trying to do, I think, because he can see the writing on the wall that I mean, even this last see the writing on the wall. I mean, even this last week, it's been very obvious with the United States is changing the narrative and not only going to the sort of Pyrrhic, Russia's got a Pyrrhic defeat, but I mean, they're talking about very clearly saying,

you've got to do this offensive now because by winter, by the autumn there will be no more money and we know it's a policy because borrell has just said the same thing in europe he said we and we know that and we know that some ukrainian leaders not president zelinsky but others have cautioned against expecting too much overselling the so-called spring offensive. Yeah. This is what I mean about, you know,

the writing is on the wall. And for all those, you know, who've enjoyed the good times in Kiev with, you know, plenty of money rolling in and good restaurants to eat in and nightclubs to go to, unlike the rest of the population. Those times may be coming to an end and everyone is thinking, you know, about their futures. And I think that video we just saw by Zelensky is, you know,

the sort of Joan of Arc to try and make sure that, you know, he's still a figure somewhere in his exile in the future, and maybe he'll get lots of money to set up a government in exile somewhere with plenty of money. I want to run another clip for you. You may have seen this. This is Yevgeny Progozhin exploding and condemning by name the Russian Minister of Defense and the Chief of the Russian Military for not supplying the Wagner

group with enough ammunition. He's doing it in front of a pile of dead bodies, which has been blurred, but he does point to them and use some universally recognized expletives. But take a look at this. Look at them, son of a bitch! If you give a norm of ammunition, they are five times less. They came here voluntarily and are dying for you to eat in your offices with red wood.

Take note of this! Now he sends us back down from that. I gather the Russian high command has given him more ammunition. But I don't think that was an act, and I don't know what he expects to accomplish by it, but maybe he did accomplish it by getting them to give him more ammunition. What are your thoughts? Well, it was a highly poorly considered outburst, but I understand it, having been in somewhat similar sort of situation where you're trying to do something and everyone

sits in London at a COBRA meeting and says, oh, this and that. No, you can't have that. You can't do this. I can understand that. It's not that there was a shortage of ammunition, by my understanding from people on the ground. My understanding is what they've experienced in these last few days is a sudden increase in the rate of artillery coming from the Ukrainians. There's only a small grouping in a fortress by two kilometres square in the west of Bakhmut, but they had an increase. And what he was complaining about really was the sense

that he would lose momentum unless he can now escalate. As they've escalated, he needs to escalate ammunition even more to keep the initiative, to keep the movement forward, to keep the momentum forward. And so he was angry and trying to put pressure. He'd obviously been refused that, probably by a bureaucrat, saying, oh no, you've had enough. And he's saying, you know, I need this because they've increased it. I think what has happened, the Ukrainians have started releasing some of their stockpile of shells that they were building up for the offensive and given some to Bakhmut.

So their rate of fire was going up and he needed to get it as high to compensate for that. And this caused this big ruckus but i mean you know it's a storm in a teacup because it's all been resolved he's got the ammunition he's got more than that i mean it's there's some very puzzling politics in here in moscow because if you recall a little while ago there was a a general um who was a deputy defense minister for logistics who was dismissed and we were told that this was something to do with corruption. What happened two days ago?

He turns up in Bahmut as a member of Wagner Group, as a deputy leader. How do you go from being a deputy defense minister to Wagner in one day, well, a few days? How do you go from being a Russian general to being a private militia soldier of fortune in one day? Exactly. And then he gets Zorovincki, Zorovinckin, who was the main architect of the last campaign of the defense lines and everything.

Zora Vinkin has now been appointed as the liaison. I don't think there's any doubt that you can give a speech like the one you've just showed on the thing. Survive that. Get your ammunition. Get two generals posted to you to help things out without some very high connections and good connections in Moscow. I guess as they say in America, this also works in Russia, money talks. Well, Alistair, it's always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm looking forward to our next conversation already. Thank you. Thank you so much.

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