Judging Freedom - COL. Lawrence Wilkerson : Is NATO Finished?

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

COL. Lawrence Wilkerson : Is NATO Finished?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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That's an equivalent to $15 a month. Limited time new customer offer for first three months only. Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited. plan. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. Hi, everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom. Today is Thursday, September 4, 2005. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson will be here with us in just a moment on. Is NATO finished? But first, this. My friends, if you care about your liberty and your right to control your own future, you need to hear about this.

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for 20% off your upgrade. That's expatmoneysummit.com promo code judge. Colonel Wilkerson, welcome here, my friend. Before I ask you about NATO, I want to play you a clip which might startle you a little bit. It's a 14-minute interview

where Chris has narrowed it down to two, two minutes. of Matt Miller, who's the former spokesperson for the State Department in the Biden-Blinkin years. You, of course, ran the State Department when Colin Powell was the Secretary of State. But after we hear what he has to say about Prime Minister Netanyahu's duplicity, I'll ask you what your views are. Chris cut number three. I did never fully understand how the least.

up to October 7th with the government of Israel facilitating payments from another country to Hamas wasn't a bigger issue. It's consistent with the pattern we saw for many months. They were always looking for ways to add conditions or make the terms more difficult. The government of Israel came back with its insistence on keeping troops in the Philadelphia. quarter. We were really close to a deal, and the prime minister added these new conditions. And then we presented a proposal to bridge those differences. And the prime minister accepted that proposal. And the proposal was very clear about when Israeli soldiers would

withdraw from Philadelphia. Somehow it managed to leak that he told the families of hostages that Israel would never withdraw from Philadelphia, which of course, was a complete contradiction of the position that he had taken. We spent at every level of government in the national security establishment an enormous amount of time trying to get this ceasefire over the line. And when anyone said anything or did anything that made it more difficult, it's incredibly frustrating.

Will it be true to say that you wanted a deal, a hostage deal more than Israel? I believe that's true. The secretary was laying out all of our concerns to the prime minister and to the rest of the war cabinet. And he said, without a plan for the day after the conflict, you were going to be dealing with an insurgency in Gaza forever. You have continued instability in the West Bank.

You are making it impossible to realize the dream that the state of Israel has had since its founding. You're going to be bogged down here fighting this war for years and decades to come. And the prime minister said, you're right. We are going to be fighting this war for decades to come. That's the way it's been. That's the way it's going to be.

Does this tell you about the absence of personal courage on the part of this young man and the utter duplicity, the diabolic duplicity on the part of Benjamin Netanyahu? I need nothing to confirm the latter. Let me be a little bit of positive, optimistic person here for a moment. That's rare for me these days. I had to deal with Richard Boucher quite frequently, the spokesperson for Colin Powell for the majority of the time that we were there. And I know how difficult that job is. I know how Richard even was really tense on.

times because of what he had to say to the public and what he actually knew was the reality or even sometimes the truth. And this was under Colin Powell, mind you. So I understand the pressure he was under, but my first inclination is to say a day late and many dollars short because as bad as you were describing it, I suspect it was worse than even he was saying, you should have resigned. That's the consensus of your colleagues on this show. He should have resigned and become a whistleblower.

Should have resigned and revealed what Netanyahu was doing and his level of duplicity. Colonel, will there ever be peace in Gaza for the Palestinians? No, not until something happens like what we're trying to brew up right now. The UN General Assembly is moving to Geneva. I'm told reliably. The vote was 154 to 2, which tells you something. And they're moving there. So the Palestinians, including Mahmoud Abbas,

the recognized leader of the Palestinian state, can present their credentials for the UNGA session that starts on 22 September. And then we're hoping, we're hoping we got our fingers crossed that he will present a letter that we have written for him. This letter requests the UNGA, under its charter powers to call for, because Mahoudabas asked for it, that has to happen, a protective force to deploy immediately into Gaza and stop the killing.

Chapter 7, ROE, not chapter 6. Chapter 7 is... Can that happen without the consent of the Security Council? Yes. The UN Security Council cannot stop it. It's a provision in the charter that was used in 1998, 1980. 88 in order to let Yasser Arafat attend. And where would these troops come from, Colonel?

We're hoping, and I've got an initiative working on this too, that we can talk the Chinese into providing the predominant number of the troops and then have others. As we saw at the SCO, there are plenty of countries that would probably contribute if China would lead, even Russia perhaps. We are hoping China will lead. Of course, that means China would have to pay the majority of the funds for it, too. But we'd also like to see China become a hell of a lot more active in the U.N.,

and maybe we even might think about moving the U.N. headquarters out of New York and to someplace like Shanghai, for example. You know, I didn't see anything in the Western Press, Colonel, about the vote in the General Assembly to move the annual September October meetings, which, if you live in New York, you know it was a big deal, to Geneva. I wonder why I didn't see that.

Nor did I. I found this this morning when someone alerted me to it, and it's a Middle East press piece, and then I confirmed it. I googled the UNGA moving, and up came horrified in 1988 repeatedly, and then down at the bottom of it. about the ninth hit or so, was UNGA on two September votes 154 to two to move its opening session

and subsequent sessions, if necessary. I wonder who the two were. I mean, I'm being sarcastic. It must have been the U.S. and Israel. It had to be. It had to be. Wow. I can't imagine anyone else in the world voting against it.

Yeah. You and I have talked about this for a long time, and I don't know if this changes over time. Where is the Arab street over the slaughter and starvation in Gaza? Why aren't there a hundred million voices pressuring their governments in the Middle East to do something using force to stop the Netanyahu regime? I'll give you one example. Saudi Arabia broke some records, I think, this past 12, 13 months in terms of executions. And if you examine those executions, such as you can in this country,

many of them were of people like Khashoggi, of old. There were people who were exposing the regime. There were people who were taking the side of the Palestinians in a climate fashion. And they got their heads cut off or whatever they do there in Saudi Arabia. I think it's swords where they cut their heads off. So, yeah, there's a streak swell, if you will, but they've got their own problem. Look at Egypt, for example. Egypt has got tremendous problems right now, just feeding itself and watering itself.

One of the reasons why they certainly don't want two million Palestinians in their land. Jordan's got similar problems, not quite as bad, but they've got less to call upon. So it's not a question of their being quiescent so much as it is, is they've got their own very significant problems to worry about themselves. Right. I would imagine that Egypt is hog-tied. I mean, they get $4 billion a year at least from the U.S., and that would be cut. It doesn't come all at once.

It comes periodically. That would be cut off immediately if Egyptian troops were to strike out at the IDF, don't you think? This administration would do it forthwith. I think you're right. Right, right. I think it really was unconscionable. Rubio stepped in and refused visas to the Palestinians under these circumstances. Right.

You know, it just. Well, Colonel, it's not just Palestinian officials. It's all Palestinians. You've got five-year-old kids that have no legs. You have doctors here in New York prepared to treat them. I don't know what you do to a baby that doesn't have legs, but there's some medical procedures. Not far from where I am right now at Wild Cornell Medical Center, and those kids are not allowed to land at JFK. Right. Meanwhile, we're off blasting supposed drug smugglers out of the international waters.

Colonel, in my view, that was an act of murder. I agree with you under international law, under anybody's law, under Christian law. You go out there and you blast somebody out of the ocean. I mean, we would have fast-rope down on them in my administration. We did that several times. We would have taken the boat. Now, they throw the car. go over sometimes, but from what Trump was saying, I don't know if it's valid or not, the stuff

was spread all over the boat. So if it was spread all over the boat, take a video of it, take some pictures of it, and then fastrope down. The New York Times interviewed a retired Department of Justice Chief of Narcotics Interdiction, who said a couple things. One, Trenda Aragua does not traffic in drugs. They traffic in human beings. Two, unless they were transporting human beings to another country for which those people paid dearly, there would only be two people on that boat.

Why would there be 11? Why would they have 11 smugglers, expose 11 people? Three, the boat was 1,300 miles from the United States. There's no way it could have reached the United States with the fuel needed to get there. And when asked about the legal authority for this, both secretaries, Heg Seth and Rubio said, ask the president, there is no legal authority for this murder. Not any at all.

It's illegal under every regime I can think of, international or domestic, for that matter. There was no congressional authorization for the use of force. Correct. Correct. Moving back to Europe, because I want to ask you some questions about the viability of NATO, Do you think that Ukrainian elites, military diplomatic government officials other than Zelensky, recognize that the end is near and it's not going to be the end they hoped for? Well, it depends on what you included in that term elites. I was made aware recently, and I think it was reliable information,

that there might be as many as 100 to 200,000 of the Nazis, if you will, left in Ukraine. because they've been very judicious about the way they deployed to the various battles, refusing to deploy to those where they knew they would be destroyed. And so they're still intact. And that's a huge domestic force to put pressure on Zelensky, after all, he's just their tool, I think, and the rest of the oligarchs in terms of, I will kill you if you don't do what I tell you to do or don't do what I want you to do. So it's a real tense situation, I think, now.

remains of Ukraine, and that's about to be squashed by the Russian juggernaut. Putin's not going to stop. Are you still of the view, Colonel? And if I'm wrong when I say still, I think my memory is serving me correctly, but I could be wrong, of course, that Zelensky is not free to enter into a peace agreement, because if he did so, he would lose his life at the hands of these Bandaris, neo-Nazis, ultra-nationalist, whatever you want to call them, the same people we're just talking about. Right. I think you're right. I think he's trapped. Wow.

Earlier this week, the United States Ambassador NATO, Matthew Whitaker, said NATO is strong and well. Does he know what the hell he's talking about? He's got a really bad thermometer. If I stuck my thermometer in its mouth or somewhere else, it might be more tail-tale. It would be dying.

What's the state of NATO today? And what would it be like if Trump pulls us out? If he pulls us out, I actually think it would be a healthier state than if we stay and let them think we're always behind them like this business he's just talked about with regard to Ukraine and their deployment of guardians into Ukraine, whatever's left of it. I think that's dangerous, extremely dangerous, because we're not going to do what we say we're going to do. We're going to leave them hanging out on the limb they put themselves on. That would be traumatic, and I think an end to the relationship as well as an end to the alliance. I think the alliance is going to crumble principally because of Ukraine as a precipitate reason, but the long-term reason is it no longer has a viable purpose for existing.

And you're going to have major changes over the next 24 months in the political leadership in each one of these countries. And by and large, they're going to be very different, especially in France and in Germany and in Britain. Well, those are the principal cast of characters whose governments are about to collapse. You know, let's start with Germany. Chancellor Merse, he may be a very successful financial guy at BlackRock. but he's a babe in the woods when it comes to running the government. And it appears as though AFD, you talk about supernationalists, will be prevailing in the next election as soon as his government collapses.

Let's just say that's of deep concern because I think there's an element in AFD that is salivating, not against, but salivating over what he has started. in terms of re-arming Germany. Well, McGregor agrees with you. And McGregor, Colonel McGregor, your colleague argues that Mertz's rearmament is making him the most dangerous German chancellor since Hitler. I agree. Are you saying that?

He's not to take note of that, too. Yeah, I'm sure he does. And are you saying that it's feasible that his sense? successor could be worse? Don't know. I don't know who his successor would be. I have not surveyed painstakingly the AFD and tried to figure out who might emerge in some kind of coalition leadership. Well, in Great Britain, you have Nigel Farage and that reform party is now out pulling the labor and the conservatives. And in France, you have Marine Le Pen and the young

man that works for, I forget his name, Bartella, I think is not even 30. They're out pulling Macron's people. Is it possible? We'll see a radical change in Europe that will show a happy face towards the Russians? Very possible, I think. I'm even judge. I've got two really close contacts in Poland. One lives in Chicago, but stays very much in touch with the cognoscenti in Warsaw, and another one is in Warsaw. And they tell me that they are creeping very slowly to a better appreciation of their situation. And that means that they don't like making an enemy out of Russia, and they don't like what has happened in Poland with regard to the affection polls have for the United States.

Wow. Well, you have the prime minister of Poland who sounds like an American neocon, and then you have the newly elected president of Poland who sounds like it could be a guest on this show. I don't know how they can work. I don't know how they can work together. It's Poland.

You're a friend in Chicago probably lives in one of those many. I went to law school right outside of Chicago in South Bend, Indiana, one of those many neighborhoods in Chicago where English is not spoken, where everybody speaks Polish. Even the mass, the local Catholic church is in Polish. Yeah. I had somebody tell me one time, if you want to know why we always favor Poland, go to Chicago.

Well, all right, where does NATO stand right now? I mean, are they in any position to guarantee any kind of security for Ukraine or is this totally off the table because of what our friend Sergei Lavrov has said? Well, that plus, you know, all these things, I take Scott and Doug McGregor and others and people who talk to me from time to time. at their at their word none of this stuff that trump is promising to sell to nato is going to be available anytime soon so what are they going to go into ukraine for or with if they do come to a settlement that includes and putin might agree to it they're being a part of the security guarantees and when they can't do that what have you said to the world about the viability of NATO. Wow. Do all American presidents disrespect the Constitution, particularly when it comes to war

and killing? Yes, in many respects. It's built into the system, Judge, but it's supposed to have two major checks on it. One, the legislature, the primary check, because read the Constitution people, that's where it all is and the Supreme Court and unfortunately we've had one or two periods in our history where those things kind of jibed with the executive branch this is one of the most egregious i think and going to go down in history as perhaps the most egregious and that's danger and it's a fault in some it is you can't do out it except hope the people wake up enough to change the apparatus in terms of the people serving it wow Colonel, thank you very much. I don't know where the time went. It seems like we started two minutes ago, but it's been a delightful conversation, as it always is with you. I wish I could kiss your head again, but we're a few hundred miles apart.

Let me remind you that at the Tabard Inn on Monday, was it, Randy kissed my head. You're talking about that great character, Randy Credico. He said, I got to rival the judge here. Did you get that on the camera? Well, thank you, Colonel. All the best, sir. We'll see you again soon. Take care. Thank you. And soon is very soon because coming up at 3 o'clock today, Professor John Mears Schumer, and immediately following at 3.30, Colonel Douglas McGregor, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.

Thank you.