Judging Freedom - Col. Lawrence Wilkerson : Does Russia Fear the West?

Episode Date: July 3, 2024

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson : Does Russia Fear the West?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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gentle guidance and encouragement to create these incredible changes for yourself and see what good can come from them. Trust me, listening on Audible can help you reach the goals you set for yourself. Start listening today when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.com slash wonderyca. That's audible.com slash wonderyca. That's audible.com slash wonderyca. Hi there, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, July 3rd, 2024. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson joins us now. Colonel, we're beginning a long holiday weekend. I'm deeply appreciative of your time and your willingness to accommodate my schedule. Thank you very much. And I can tell you from the number of people lined up already that my appreciation is shared by many. I want to start off with big picture. How close are we to World War III? Pick your spot, China, Ukraine, Israel. That's an interesting question.

Actually, I was just talking with that with a group of former colleagues from the military. I was not there. I was not a with that with a group of former colleagues from the military. I was not there. I was not a fly on the wall. We all agreed that, one, we are as close to a nuclear use, if you will, nuclear weapon use, as we've been in the history of nuclear weapons, short as it is, 75 years or so. And second, that we were extremely close, as close, if you will, to a conventional conflict that would lead to this exchange of nuclear weapons. And this is the first time we have agreed that it is in multiple theaters of war, if you will, in the Levant.

So there is no consensus on it's going to be in the South China Sea, it's going to be in Ukraine, it's going to be in the Middle East. The South China Sea was the least of our concerns at the moment, and that might be a warning because if Xi Jinping and the Chinese military wanted to take advantage of preoccupation and other theaters of war, it would be an ideal time to do it. But we put that down as the lowest possibility in terms of what is, in our view, the possibilities. Israel and Gaza, given the likelihood of their attacking Hezbollah,

given the likelihood of Ukraine coming to Hezbollah's defense, Ukraine, Iran, excuse me, giving the probability of Russia coming to Iran's defense if Iran struggles, which seems unlikely. But I'll let you take it from there. Well, one of the imponderables in that situation, which we were discussing was, as we understand it, the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, has been more or less on its own volition in some people's views, but Iranians too probably put some pressure on it, pushed out, it's evacuated.

And so we know that there's enough enriched uranium for at least three, possibly four or five bombs. We know that for pretty much a fact, the IAEA has led us to that conclusion. So that's a very worrisome thing. And that leads you into, will Iran? I don't think there's any question that Netanyahu is going to try. He's going to try to get Hezbollah involved big time by invading Lebanon. And he is going to find the United States very recalcitrant at coming in on his side, because as I understand it, even though we have a president apparently who is not with it all the time, there's been some pretty strong advice given to him about

widening the war to Hezbollah in a significant way. But I think he's going to do it because I think he's desperate. I think he realizes his position is becoming more and more precarious every day, as indeed is Israel's, and his government's position is becoming more and more precarious every day, as indeed is Israel's, and his government's position is becoming more and more precarious every day. He has not satisfied a single one of the objectives he set out for himself immediately after October the 7th, and as you might imagine, the populace is getting rested in different ways because he hasn't, and they don't know where to go except to evacuate Israel, which they are doing at alarming rates and in alarming numbers.

So he's in a desperate situation, and men like him in desperate situations are truly troublesome because they will do things that are unexpected. They'll do things against the advice of their sugar daddy, the United States, and they'll do things that are, in a word, suicidal. So that was our number one concern was the Levant. If you're not a fan of Netanyahu, and I don't think you are, I'm not, this will aggravate you. But here he is speaking to a group of, I think, American diplomats. I don't think they're American journalists.

It's not clear. There's an American flag over his shoulder. This is him at his most arrogant and bellicose worst, if you'll pardon my language. Cut number five, Chris. And Iran is fighting us on a seven-front war. Obviously, Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, the militias in Iraq and Syria, Judea, Samaria, West Bank, Iran itself, they'd like to topple Jordan. And their goal is to have a combined ground offensive from various fronts, coupled with a combined missile bombardment. We have to, we've been given the opportunity to scuttle it, and we will.

The first requirement is to cut that hand, Hamas. People who do this thing to us are not going to be there. We'll have a long battle. I don't think it's that long, but we'll get rid of them. We also have to deter the other elements of the Iran-Tehran axis. But we have to deal with the axis. The axis doesn't threaten only us. It threatens you. It's on the march to conquer the Middle East. Conquer the Middle East. Conquer. That means actually conquer.

Conquer Saudi Arabia, conquer the Arabian Peninsula. It's just a question of time. And what's standing in their way is the small Satan, that's us, on the road to the middle-sized Satan, that's the Europeans. They're always offended when I tell them that. You're the great Satan, not them. And we have to stop them. For any evidence whatsoever that Iran wants to conquer Saudi Arabia,

have you ever heard this before? Not at all. There were so many lies and exaggerations in that. Let's just take one small one. Sure. I just read an intelligence analysis, which I trust very much so, that Russia has brought inordinate pressure to bear on Bashar al-Assad in Syria. And in essence, the reason the one or two or three shells that have fallen in the Golan Heights fired from Syrian guns, militias or state or otherwise, have missed their targets by hundreds of meters and landed in innocuous dirt in the desert, is because Assad took Putin's advice.

He is not widening the war to include Syria. He is not allowing things to come out of Syria and damage Israel. No doubt he would like to, but Russia's put pressure on him because Russia does not want to have to divert troops from Ukraine or from any other place to help him in Syria should he get in trouble. But believe me, they would if they had to. So that was an outright lie. And the only one who covets Jordan is Bibi Netanyahu. And the only one who might be a threat to march on the Middle East would be him, except now he has so attenuated his military power and so decimated his Israeli defense force that I doubt he could take on anyone in the region who had a reasonable

military effort and strategy to take him on. So that was just full of lies. And the fact that sitting around the audience and you hear laughter here or laughter there at the kind of joking way he says things, and he always has to use these images too. What other leader in the world says we're going to cut their arm off? It's not going to last. It's going to last long. Oh, well, it's not going to last very long. Come on, baby.

You're in trouble. You are in serious trouble. You're in the worst trouble you've been in in your life. About 15 minutes before we came on air, the New York Times put a piece up on its website that'll be on the front page tomorrow, the headline of which, Israeli generals low on munitions want a truce in Gaza. Israeli generals are speaking to the New York Times to get the message to a thick-skulled BB that the only way to get the hostages home is a truce in Gaza because, I'm paraphrasing, because Hamas cannot be beaten. Does he know that but won't admit it,

or does he not know that? I've always thought that on top of everything else, his cruelty, his brutality is really causing the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, and all the other crimes that one could lay at his feet, one could not lay at his feet stupidity. Maybe insanity from time to time, but he usually recovered from that in enough time to do something relatively clever or smart. Not anymore. I think this has gotten to him. I think it's actually gotten to his brain cells. I think he's being impacted. And he's desperate, but he's a very, very good politician at hiding signs of desperation, unlike some others I know. And that desperation is impacting the people around him.

So they're getting frightened. They're getting scared because not only do they see what's actually happening on the ground to their formidable force, but they also see that the leader is not in his best suit, if you will. And so they've got to figure out a way to get this guy out of there. And like I said before, many times they don't have a constitution. I don't know how you do it. There is no real process to do it other than this elongated process of elections. And, you know, you almost you don't have a 25th Amendment. You don't have anything at all like

that. So how do you get rid of this guy, other than forcibly walking in with guns, putting one in his belly and saying, you're leaving, Mr. Prime Minister? How realistic is this so-called Samson option, whereby if the Houthis destroy Tel Aviv, Israel will slaughter tens of millions of people using a nuclear bomb. I would have a hard time believing that of any individual but Bibi Netanyahu in a moment of absolute desperation, personal and political. But I don't think the state of Israel would contemplate that. I do take some fear from the fact that they have nuclear weapons and the fact that they are driving themselves now into such a corner, such an existential corner, that there might be some collective decision to use a nuclear weapon should that be a propitious thing to do at a particular moment.

Like, for example, were Tehran to suddenly show up with a nuclear weapon. However, that might be exemplified, a test or confirmation by Mossad. We said in the past, the moment I get information, the moment I get confirmation that Tehran has a nuclear weapon, it's finished for Tehran. Now, he always meant, footnote, the United States will attack them and take out their nuclear weapon complex, including any existing weapons. But I don't put it past him to get to that point and maybe make some kind of decision like that. Now, here's where I think they would step in. I have to believe that the people around him would step in at gunpoint,

if necessary, and remove him from office. If he was about to use a nuclear weapon to kill innocents. We're not talking about some low-yield tactical thing on the battlefield. We're talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki multiplied many times. Well, you know, these people who talk about these low-yield nuclear weapons, I was doing some checking the other day about yields now on these modern weapons. And I think Putin's right when he says they're crazy if they think these are small pop guns. These are not small pop guns. If you drop one of these things in the heart of Tehran, it would be very difficult to say that you continue the administration of the urban area after you did it. And you would have so many casualties.

I remember when they had the earthquake and bam, we had somewhere around 30,000 or north of that casualties and dead people. And we helped. George Bush put everything on the rails that he could. He put search dogs and firemen and people who knew how to do this kind of business. And forget the animosities. We went to BAM and we helped them recover from that earthquake. Then it'd be worse. It would be worse.

Hmm. from that earthquake. Then it'd be worse. It would be worse. Switching gears, during your time at the State Department with Colonel Powell, and then about 18 years later, two American presidents impetuously, compulsively, and without reason, abrogated two treaties. George W. Bush, your boss's boss, abrogated the ABM Treaty in 2001, and Donald Trump abrogated the INF Treaty in 2019. How harmful today were those two thoughtless abrogations? The first one was very harmful because it started the train reaction of getting rid of nuclear weapons treaties. And it didn't have to happen. To give you some idea of how Powell took it, he was so shocked by the fact that it was so sudden and no attempt to let

him know to get to Moscow to kind of soften the blow or whatever or work something out with them. But he went to Moscow and actually sent others to Moscow. But we negotiated the Moscow treaty where we sort of salved their wounds a little bit. The INF treaty, Powell was so proud of that because as Deputy National Security Advisor and National Security Advisor for Ronald Reagan, the last two years of Ronald Reagan's second term, Powell was very instrumental in negotiating that treaty. And he used to say to me, that was the most important nuclear treaty in all the panoply of treaties because it eliminated an entire class of weapons. It didn't just curb them.

It didn't just put limits on warheads or vehicles to carry them. It eliminated them. And that was a hell of an achievement. And it was also a hell of an achievement because it eliminated one of the most dangerous classes of nuclear weapons. You may recall the Glickham controversy in Europe. The Europeans were opposed to us putting ground-launch cruise missiles with nuclear warheads on them in Europe because they knew darn well that a lot of those missiles would be going off on their territory. These are short-range missiles and they don't shoot that far. So if the Soviets are coming in and they're coming through the Fulda Gap, you're shooting the Fulda Gap. That's Germany, as Helmut Kohl used to say.

You're hitting my territory with those nuclear weapons. Very dangerous weapons. So this was the worst possible thing to do, was to eliminate the INF Treaty. Why did Bush and Trump do it, as far as you know? Was Bush just under the pressure of Cheney and that crowd, and Trump under the pressure of Pompeo and that crowd? I think that's part of it. But part of it, too, is, Judge, the nuclear weapons industry in the United States is a small niche of a monstrous, almost trillion-dollar defense complex every year. But it's very rich. It's very full of opportunity, opportunity for cost overruns,

opportunity. It's an area where no one knows anything at all. There's no congressman on this earth that knows anything really sophisticated about tritium or about nuclear warhead control or about surety and securitization and all that language they use. It's the left. So you have got this complex and then you've got the nuclear waste, the nuclear waste, which have made billionaires out in Utah, for example. This is so much money that everyone in it guards it zealously and wants it to grow. And when they saw the Cold War ending and us destroying weapons on both sides of the Atlantic, they got really scared. They deployed all their lobbyists, engineers and nuclear physicists and others, and they put the pressure on. And now we're building out again. Colonel, should the United States State Department and Defense Department be worried about

Russian warships in Havana and off the coast of Venezuela? No, but they should be very much worried about a no-fly zone. At least it looks very much like one to me over the Black Sea, which Putin is in the process of putting in effect. Well, we caused that ourselves by the deaths in Sevastopol two Sundays ago. Absolutely. This is going to be a very dangerous escalation if he does do it. And those very competent pilots and airplanes have orders to shoot down anything that looks like it's providing intelligence to the Ukrainians. Even if it's manned? Even if it's manned. Does the U.S. understand that? Does whoever

make the decision, I don't know how far up the food chain it went, we talked about this last week, to facilitate the killing of innocents, children on a beach on a Sunday afternoon, understand the unintended consequences. I think that's one of the reasons Austin picked up the phone and called his counterpart in Moscow. And they may be doing that again over this, because this is if what I heard Putin say and what I interpreted from it is accurate or even partially accurate, this is a significant escalation. And it comes from just what you were talking about. I'm going to read a statement to you and then I'll tell you who said it. And as I read it, I would like you to take into account the EU parliamentary elections, the elections that just took place in France, and the likely outcome of the elections in Great Britain tomorrow.

The Brussels bureaucrats want this war. They see it as their own, and they want to defeat Russia. They keep sending the money of the European people to Ukraine. They have shot European companies in the foot with sanctions. They have driven up inflation, and they have made making a living difficult for millions of European citizens. Victor Orban. Yes, the only voice in Europe that reminds me of Winston Churchill in 1938 and 39. The only voice. And he could have said, and look at what your great sugar daddy on the other side of the Atlantic did to you in terms of your economy. It attacked the Nord Stream pipeline.

Look what that did to Germany, the engine of Europe's economy. And look what it did peripher economy. And look what it did peripherally. And look what it's still doing. And think that some of this political change, which is coming about rather rapidly, was motivated by. And this is an attempt by the United States. People don't understand our strategy. This is an attempt. Ukraine is as much about bleeding Russia. It's as much about that as it is about reestablishing American hegemony, economic security and otherwise, over the Europeans. Let's face it. They were with Russia, 740 million people, almost a billion people. And they had a GDP this last, the last year before the Ukraine invasion, roughly equivalent to our own $22, $23 trillion.

That's competition. That's serious competition. And the Germans looked like they were breaking out of the box in terms of someone we would be happy with in terms of economics. They were the engine of the manufacturing world, not us, not China, Germany was. So we did what we did as much to reestablish economic hegemony over Europe and teach them a lesson, as it were, as we did to bleed Russia. These are insidious strategic objectives, but they are our strategic objectives.

I want to read to you some comments from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization by President Putin and President Xi. We shake hands with each other, built on the principles of equality and mutual respect. Each country is currently experiencing the best period in their history. China is 4,000 years old. The Russians are 1,000 years old. The cooperation between our countries

is not directed at anyone. We are acting in the best interest of our peoples. This is for eternal friendship and the legitimate rights and interests of our peoples. This is for eternal friendship and the legitimate rights and interests of our peoples. Vladimir Putin and President Xi at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization earlier today. P.S., we're all going to join BRICS and we're going to tell the Americans and their dollar bills, go take a hike.

The relations of nations. Back a few years ago, a long time ago, well, not a long time in the scope of human history, but some time ago when the British Empire was getting a little bit too big and a little bit too brazen and a little bit too arrogant and the British East India Company was acting as if it were Her Majesty or His Majesty, whatever had happened at the time, then Russia and China got together. And Russia and China got together to oppose Britain and opposed her all over the region from Bandar Abbas and Chabahar to the southern mouth of the Persian Gulf, up through India and Afghanistan and all the way into the southern part of Russia. The British got scared to death of that and started doing all manner of things to try and counteract them,

just to say that this has been here, we've been here before. We've seen this sort of thing before. Today, we are Britain. And by the way, Britain didn't last a whole long after that. You know, one more cut for you. I'm taking you back to China because we're just talking about Russia and China. I know you will appreciate this. I'm not even going to tell you who it is, but you'll know in a heartbeat. Cut number three. The most indispensable factor in guaranteeing the security of Taiwan is a good relationship between the United States and Peking.

If we have that relationship, that may restrain them. If Peking has a relationship like that with the Soviet Union, then Taiwan is in mortal danger. And Peking, as he calls it, Beijing and Moscow are now buddies. They just shook hands publicly for the second time in a month. Yep. That's probably as much of a tectonic shift in the geopolitical landscape across this earth as anything that's happened recently. Maybe even the move in that respect of the first half of the 21st century. And I think it signals essentially what people have been saying about Biden's debate performance, for example.

But they're saying it in words that make me think they're saying it on a wider tapestry. And let's take the Polish foreign minister who compared it to the period in Rome of Marcus Aurelius. And he said, Marcus Aurelius couldn't figure out who to replace him when he died. And it's always better to ride into the sunset with some reputation than with it all shattered and tattered and falling apart around your feet. And then we had some others saying similar things. And those remarks were being made not just about Joe Biden, in my view. They were being made by allies.

And so they were couched in terms that seemed personal, they were being made about the empire, the empire riding into the sunset, the empire overwhelmed by its opponents in the world, which is what's happened to every empire in the 5,000 years of human history of which we know a little bit or a lot. You ride into the sunset. You go out peaceably and with some kind of vision of your future as less than an imperial state, or you go out catastrophically. Now, let's talk about how we might go out catastrophically. The CBO just released a report saying that by 2034, we will have an aggregate debt of $50.7 trillion. That means, they said this too, that means that at that time, and it might come before 2034, it could come as early as 2032.

That's not very far away. way. That means that the interest payments we will have to pay on that debt or forfeit will be equal to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the defense budget combined. And yet no one in that stellar group of senators and representatives is doing a damn thing. Maybe Thomas Massey, that's about it. Nobody takes the warning seriously. Nobody's worried about debt. I couldn't watch the full debate because I was cringing too much, but they're tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum. Neither of them talked about fidelity to the Constitution.

They're both in favor of mass surveillance. They're both in favor of wars of opportunity, and they're both in favor of debt. Not much choice. I'll agree with you there. And the 340 million people with whom, I say roughly, I haven't checked the demographics, but roughly 100 million got to be above 35, male and female, and we can't find anybody else. That's another comment on the empire, like Marcus Aurelius. I cannot find anyone to replace me who's competent. Great. Colonel Wilkerson, it's a pleasure, my dear man, no matter what we talk about.

Thank you so much for your intellect, your analysis your knowledge and your charm a happy Independence Day to you same to you thank you my dear friend, all the best we'll see you next week coming up at 5 o'clock Eastern the one and only

Max Blumenthal, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom Finally, Max Blumenthal, Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. I'm