Judging Freedom - COL. Lawrence Wilkerson: Is Trump for Peace?

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

COL. Lawrence Wilkerson: Is Trump for Peace?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

you Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, May 8th, 2025. Our dear friend Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson joins us now. Colonel Wilkerson, a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you for joining us. Big picture question I want to put to you is, is Donald Trump for peace? And before we actually get there, I wonder if you've seen this and what you think Trump's understanding of the Russia-Ukrainian conflict is after watching this. Chris, cut number 10. Ukraine, there's been discussions they will have to give up some of the land. Russia will have to give up all of Ukraine because that's what they want. All of Ukraine, meaning they wouldn't keep any of the land that they've claimed?

Russia would have to give up all of Ukraine because what Russia wants is all of Ukraine and if I didn wants is all of Ukraine. And if I didn't get involved, they would be fighting right now for all of Ukraine. Russia doesn't want the strip that they have now. Russia wants all of Ukraine. And if it weren't me, they would keep going. How can such a profound misunderstanding, unless it's some sort of a farce or political ploy, be taken by the Kremlin and extrapolated into negotiations? I've seen it one time before with utter disbelief. It recalled to me a line from Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. Pushkin being probably the best Russian poet that ever lived.

He goes something like this, Enough, enough I tell you, you've paid insanity it's due. Think about that for a minute. Enough, Donald, you've paid insanity it's due. Where are you on any substantive issue that you claim to be here on on Monday, there on on Tuesday, and utterly divorced from on Friday? This president is insane. How does this play in the Kremlin? How does it play in the Kremlin?

How does it play with the others with whom Steve Witkoff is negotiating, whether it's Hamas or Israel or the Iranians? Not well, because it signals what he is, which is a circus clown, apparently. I've gone out of my way to try and give him credit for this or that and try to find some reason in his madness to try and understand if he's trying to build pressure because he's behind the power curve and understands he is, and that's the case in Ukraine. But I think it's just, as I said, it's insanity. I don't know what he's up to. I don't see even a skintilla of strategic thought in anything he is doing.

Here is one of his two emissaries. I don't know why General Kellogg is still around, but tell me what you think of this, cut number 18. So you tell the Ukrainians, look, this is one of those things that's gonna be evolving over time, and if you do a ceasefire in place, the ground that you own, the ground that you fought for, that that's your ground right now, what happens five or 10 years down the line is different. And you don't have to basically freeze everything in place.

Right, and we've got that right now, the Ukrainians are willing to do a freeze in place, what I call basically freeze everything in place. Right. And we've got that right now, the Ukrainians are willing to do a freezing place, what I call a ceasefire in place. And then for a period of time, they're willing to set up a militarized zone. What they basically said is we'll back up 15 kilometers, you back up 15 kilometers to the Russians.

So you know, it gets this 30 kilometer, 18 mile zone that you can actually observe. And you can actually say, okay, are there any intrusions? And you've got what's called the coalition of the willing. That's the British, the French, the Germans plus right now, at least 12 other countries are willing to put forces in an air cap west of the Nipah River, not east. That's gonna be a ceasefire force

to actually slow this thing down. And if you get to 30 days, John, I really believe this, you get to a 30 day ceasefire, it'll get extended. And it is so hard when you're, it do this, when you're a military guy, is to restart a conflict. And I don't think they will. The straight general, the Russians who will not accept NATO in Ukraine will accept Western peacekeepers from 12 different countries in Ukraine.

You can't make this stuff up. He negated it. The moment he started with those forces. I mean, the man has to be certifiable. I add him to the category of enough, enough. You've given insanity its due. There's no way Russia is going to accept that. And I don't blame them a bit, given the record that we have of duplicity and nefariousness.

Colonel, who's winning the special military operation militarily, Russia or Ukraine? Russia, devastatingly so. So devastatingly so that as Klausowitz warns again and again, war has its own momentum. You let it go and stop trying to fix it, as it were, and that momentum is going to have its own purpose eventually. And that purpose might be to hell with you and all of your people, like just watching her, Vandervoorn, preposterous speech, as if she were king of the world and dictating to that world. You take those people and throw them all together and Putin doesn't have really much incentive to listen to any of them and just go on with the special military operation until he's sitting at the border of NATO formally.

Here's General Kellogg who says the Russians are not winning. Cut number 16. Better go back and read the art of the deal. You know when he said to be would be willing to walk away from a bad situation. And I think he's just telling both sides that but the ones who are going to be hurt by that are not the Ukrainians can be the Russians because the Russians are not winning this war. If they're winning the war they'd be on the western side of the Dnieper River, they're not. If they're winning this war they'd be in Kiev, they side of the Dnieper River. They're not. If they're winning this war, they'd be in Kiev. They're not. They'd be in Odessa, and they're not.

They wouldn't have lost combined forces when you talk about industrial strength killing. The losses are over one million killed and wounded on both sides. And so when people say he's winning the war, if he just comes to an agreement right now, ceasefire in place, I think then he said, OK, he kind of accomplished everything that he may want to and just step back from that. What do you think, Colonel? I mean, I don't know how much more criticism we can level in him. His premises are so far from reality. He doesn't want to be on the other side of the nipper. He doesn't want to go to Kiev. He doesn't want to take the entire country. My God, just think. Netanyahu's

got his own mess brewing right now that's fierce, this sustained military operation. That's why Sharom would drew in 2005. That's exactly what Putin would be doing, a sustained military operation amongst a bunch of partisans and guerrillas who are fierce, if he tried to take the whole country. He would rue the day he did it. So he doesn't want to do it. It's preposterous. This general is smoking some really cheap material. Why would president Trump unleash him?

Why would president Trump three days before the grand victory celebration, the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany in Moscow, say, well, the Russians didn't win World War II, the Americans did. And why would Donald Trump claim that the Russians have lost a million men? Because they're all liars. They're pathetic, patent liars. That's all I can figure. And I have so much proof of Donald Trump being a liar. I mean, if we assume that he's a typical human being,

as A equals Z and A equals B, that he's telling a lie. Now, I don't know that. I don't know that he has enough brain power to figure out when he's telling a lie because I don't know if he intuits or knows the truth. But these are all lies. They're just preposterous lies. And by the way, somebody needs to balance this discussion a little bit. I've listened to a lot of people here lately. The United States had a strategy to be the democracy, to be the arsenal of democracy. That was a very effective strategy. The FDR looked back on what the the arsenal of democracy. That was a very effective strategy. FDR looked back on what the New Deal had done. It was becoming one of the most powerful economies

in the world, and he knew the war would unleash it. So we became the arsenal of democracy. We supplied the free French, we supplied the British, we supplied the free Poles, we supplied the Soviets, and the Soviets would never have won at Stalingrad and never pushed the Wehrmacht back to Berlin and taken Berlin if we hadn't done that. So this is a shared victory, not a sole victory for the 20 million casualties on the Soviet side or the much fewer casualties on the US side. It's a shared victory. But my point is, why would Donald Trump manifest an unrealistic view of history at the time that these people are celebrating and Witkoff is negotiating?

I think because he doesn't have any view whatsoever of history that's even anywhere near accurate. Now I can go back to my previous supposition. It's frayed now, really frayed, but he's trying to build pressure. He thinks he's doing a deal here, a real estate deal, and he's trying to build pressure. And the lies and the half-truths add to that pressure because Putin doesn't know whether he believes them or not, nor does anyone else. So he's confusing the table, if you will, on which he's dealing. But I'm really, really skeptical of that now. It looks more like a circus to me than it does a deal.

Netanyahu announced that the IDF will occupy Gaza. This must mean that they will continue to use the starvation as a weapon of war, that they will either kill or expel the 2 million people living in Gaza. Will Turkey and Egypt just take that laying down? I don't know about Turkey or Egypt, but I do know this. I know what happened to the coalition provisional authority in Iraq once we declared that sort

of the vision for our strategy. And that's what Netanyahu is doing. He sold it as a sustained military operation in Gaza to the Knesset and to his cabinet. I'm told they even created a law for it. What he's doing is he's creating the situation that I just said before, Sharon withdrew from in 2005 because he was losing too many soldiers. He closed down 21 settlements and he got out of Gaza. What Netanyahu is doing is entering a Gaza that is a terrorist heaven. There are more unexpended ordinates and things to make IEDs out of, improvised explosive devices that cost most of the casualties for

the Marines and the soldiers in Iraq, than you can shake a stick at. There is going to be an insurgency in Gaza that will eat the IDF's lunch if he goes ahead with this. It's totally counterintuitive to what Sharon, a much more brilliant military guy than Netanyahu, intuited in 2005. He knew he was gonna get involved in an insurgency in Gaza. That's what Netanyahu is inviting. And by the way, it will also invite every Arab 18-year-old, male and female in the region to join that insurgency.

Colonel back to President Trump. Whatever Netanyahu is planning to do, whatever the cost, whatever the death, whatever the horror, whatever the terror, whatever the destruction, the United States is paying for it. Yes. Does Donald Trump have any appear to have even the remotest misgivings about that? The only inkling I saw of that was when he was talking about the Yemen situation, even though he was lying there too, about some of the dimensions of it.

But nonetheless, I think I detected in his words, in his manner, that he was, what the Israelis had done in Yemen to utterly destroy the Sinai Airport, which was mostly civilian airplanes and civilian people, was reprehensible. And maybe that wasn't something that should be going on, so he was going to make a deal with the Houthis, because that was a deal that he made that I think stuck a finger right in Netanyahu's eye. So I think he at least showed that he could recognize that some things were going on that probably shouldn't be going on. Why can't he recognize that in Gaza? I have no answer to that question.

Did we cut a deal with the Houthis and who prevailed? Pepe Escobar is saying the hoodies prevailed because they haven't been degraded, they haven't been restrained, and we wasted a billion dollars and lost three F-18s in the process. And that's, and Reaper's galore, that's at 30 million a piece, that's probably a part of the reason, if not a large part of the reason that Donald Trump did what he did, whether they agreed or not, because we're losing too much ordinance and too much money. And what did we gain by this mini war? I say many people died and we spent a billion dollars, but it only lasted about a month and a half in Yemen.

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Judge, we have gained nothing since we started helping Saudi Arabia and the Emirates originally years ago in a frustrated effort to put the Houthis back in their place as Mohammed bin Salman said, and they never did, and no one has, and I suspect no one's going to. Do you think that Trump is sick and tired of Netanyahu?

I do. I do. And I watch his behavior, his mannerisms. I think he is, and he's searching for a way to do something about that, but he simply has no conception of how to do it because he's so beholden to all the different wickets that the Jewish lobby, the Israel lobby, as Mir Shomri calls it, exercises. And he's also concerned about what's going to happen in the Levant should Israel go down.

And therefore, he's got no reason whatsoever to do anything to do that. What do you think would happen militarily if Trump listens to Lindsey Graham and strikes Iran with the Israelis? I think Iran will go all in and respond with everything they've got and respond all over the region. So we will have a burning Saudi Arabia and oil facilities. We will have a destroyed LUD in Qatar. We'll have probably a destroyed military city where a lot of US assets are in Saudi Arabia. We'll have a destroyed fifth fleet headquarters, the largest fleet headquarters we have now

in Bahrain. We will probably have a reception and ongoing procedure complex in Kuwait destroyed. Everything the U.S. has on the ground in the Middle East will be destroyed, and Israel will be destroyed, in my view. And Iran will make it existential for themselves if they have to. I mean, this is like India and Pakistan except ratcheted up about 20 degrees. Here's Lieutenant General Dillon speaking in English. Now, he doesn't dress like a Western general does. He's a general of the Indian Air Force basically saying Pakistan better back

off or it will cease to exist. Cut number two. If you look at Pakistan from northeast to southwest, their east-west depth, they do not have the strategic depth to absorb our strike. All their major cities, population centers, they are all within this small little strip of land. Our depth is so much when Pakistan strikes, we will be able to absorb that strike because of course there will be damage. But when we go back with a massive strike, which is our declared policy and unacceptable damage, Pakistan will cease to exist. Pakistan will cease to exist. Is this going to get out of hand? I heard that same kind of language from similar people in 2002.

From the ISI on the Pakistani side, not from the civilians, but from the ISI and the military and from the military on the Indian side. The Indians sort of got their rear end handed to them when Pakistani F-16s shot most of their aircraft out of the sky, because the F-16s are such better aircraft than the Indians had. And the pilots, I think, were better. What he's saying is kind of like what Mao Tse-Tung said when he talked about deterrence. I'll destroy Los Angeles and Houston and New York

and maybe some other US cities and maybe you'll get Shanghai and maybe a little bit of Beijing, whatever. I'll still have 800 million people left and you'll be virtually destroyed. That's the kind of threat he's making. Now, if he means it, he's a fool. If he's just saying it,

I can understand that he would be doing that because there's a lot of tension between those two countries and it's really bitter and passionate tension. I got news for him on another thing though. If we fire as we told them, we told Islamabad and Delhi in 2002, if we fire a hundred nuclear weapons and we thought they would probably expend their arsenals eventually, because that's what escalation theory teaches us as long as you can shoot you're going to shoot and if they are really devastating you you're going to shoot everything because you don't want to lose it you wipe both countries out virtually because Pakistan stockpile is pretty extensive. And you probably, according to studies that have been done,

eliminate agriculture, for example, in the middle of the United States between the Mississippi and the Rockies for about five to 10 years because of the nuclear winter, you create because of the upward atmosphere moving those clouds of nuclear waste over to us. So this is not just localized like he was trying to hint. This is global. And he better watch out what he's talking about. I hope

he's just, you know, a military guy let out there like a bulldog, like a Doberman Pinscher to threaten the Indians do that. So do the facts. Do you see MI6 or CIA fingerprints on any of this military activity between Pakistan and India? The CIA has always been wrapped up with the ISI, integrally wrapped up with the ISI. So their fingerprints are over things like Lashkar-e-Taiba and other terrorist groups that the ISI uses from time to time to give India trouble, particularly in Kashmir, and other groups like that. And one of the things we tried to do was talk both capitals into doing something about the Casimir situation so that you didn't have this tendency to use that as the focal point of these terrorist groups and to get rid of the terrorist groups. Didn't work. Obviously, they're still there and they're still causing

their havoc. But the answer to your question is CIA is plugged into the ISI. Here's the same general, Colonel, on the concept of first strike and on the concept of surveillance. Chris cut number three. No first use does not mean we will wait for him to strike. Nuclear bombs are not kept at one place. Warhead is kept at other place. The launch projectile is kept at other place so that you know there is no accident. So when the coupling or mating starts.

How do we know when the coupling? No, our intelligence will know. Because these are not small things and we know where their things are located. And those places are always under surveillance. Not only India, the world is keeping them under surveillance. So anything moving out or moving in those locations is noticed by all. So, when the coupling or mating, suppose they pick up a piece, projectile from here and warhead from there, and they bring it to place A, B or C,

and now we know that they are in the process of coupling or mating or, you know, joining this as a nuclear bomb, and in the process of joining, it's not for training. It's a live bomb. That is the time we should be very clear. This is the first strike of Pakistan. We are well within our rights to prevent that first strike for the safety of our citizens and it is well within the declared policy of us that we will not do first strike, but we will not allow him also to do the first strike.

Should this be taken seriously? Would this actually escalate to nuclear weapons? Well if I were in the audience or I were a reporter talking to this guy or anyone for that matter making these kinds of statements I would ask first of all why do you have to go to nuclear weapons? Do you not have any conventional capability? Do you not have any conventional capability? Does Pakistan not have any conventional capability? If you want to teach them a lesson, go to conventional lessons. Don't go to nuclear lessons. Vice versa, same thing.

Now, one of the things we did in 2002, I was trying to see if he knew that. I'm sure he probably does, is we gave them permissive action locks. We sold them. What that does is it makes each nuclear weapon require two keys and therefore two people, normally, to activate it. Pakistan's weapons are a little more densely placed just because of geography than India's weapons, as I understand it.

And we had something to do with spreading India's weapons out too. But you're looking at a situation where I think the civilians, now I may be wrong, I think the civilians are using people like this guy to go out there and make threats so that things do eventually calm down and so that better, cooler heads prevail in other words. But this is backdrop by something else judge and the floods in Pakistan made this quite apparent. The Himalayan glaciers because of the climate crisis are melting and they're melting much more rapidly than many experts thought they were going to. That's what caused the flood in Pakistan that flooded about a

third of the country. What's happening now is Pakistan is corralling that water now as best they can and is threatening to build dams on the river and ultimately to deprive the entire western part of India of any water of consequence. So this is much bigger than just the fracas in Kashmir. Do you agree with Professor Mearsheimer that Pakistan and India are in the same camp of Israel owning nuclear weapons without signing any agreement or permitting any inspection? Yes, and I would even go further. Both cultures, and this is going to sound like a racist comment, but I don't mean it that way at all because I've dealt with both cultures extensively.

Shouldn't have nuclear weapons. Should or should not? Should not. Oh, okay. It wasn't sure that I heard you correctly. Correctly. I'm still waiting for somebody to ask President Trump's Secretary Rubio, Secretary Hegseth, or even Prime Minister Netanyahu about the Israeli nuclear weapons. Well, that's another one I would say they shouldn't have nuclear weapons. Let's face it, as long as Golda Meir is quoted accurately, and I think she was, the BBC printed it on the front page,

yes, I would exercise the Samson option if we were in existential peril, which meant clearly she would use a nuclear weapon. Colonel Wilkerson, thank you very much for your time. Thank you for allowing me to go from topic to topic. Much appreciated. Give my regards, I know you're going to be with Ritter, give my regards soon. Give my regards to Scott. Thank you for joining us. We'll look forward to seeing you next week. Thank you. Have a good weekend. You too, my friend. Thank you. Coming up at 4 30 this afternoon, he just flew from Tehran to Moscow. Who else? Pepe Escobar. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. You