Judging Freedom - Gilbert Doctorow : Trump Embraces Realism

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

Gilbert Doctorow : Trump Embraces RealismSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom. Today is Wednesday, December 10th, 2025. Dr. Gilbert Dr. O joins us from Brussels. Dr. O, a pleasure. My dear friend, thank you for accommodating my schedule, as always, and welcome here. I want to go back a little bit in history before we get to your views on Donald Trump and realism. views logically deduced from the national security strategy document that he authorized to be released earlier this week. Why did the Ukrainian government bomb its own people in the years preceding the SMO in eastern Ukraine? Well, because the people whom they were bombing were largely Russian speakers who rejected the coup d'etat, which brought the people in Kiev to power. So it was the start of essentially a civil war.

And in a civil war, you do things like you bomb your own citizens. The coup d'et in 2014 that threw out, I forget the name of the president. Yanukovych, right, who now lives in Moscow, or at least fled to Russia, is the one celebrated by Lindsay Graham, John McCain, Victoria Newland, and Hillary Clinton, as part of the neocon plan to westernize. Ukraine and arguably led to the special military operation i agree completely um do we know if m i 6 or cia were involved or would it be absurd to conclude that they weren't the second surely they were involved i mean it's it's what they do yeah that as a as a background Does the State Department, as it is currently constituted under Marco Rubio, does Marco Rubio himself understand or accept these views of the origins of the war

that you and I and most people watching us now and guests on this show do? We can assume he does not accept what we on this show and the audience understand. But let's not be too cruel to Rubio. He is a neocon who's been put in charge of a neocon organization. There's a reason why the State Department has been sidelined by Donald Trump. He had enough experience with the State Department backstabbing him from the start of his first mandate in power. These people, you don't come in from the streets and become an officer in the State Department. You come up to the ranks.

And when you go back to where the people who are now holding important positions in the State Department came in, they came in at the turn of this new millennium, when Dick Cheney was busy purging the State Department, purging the intel organizations of anyone who disagreed with them in their neocon ideology and was very busy replacing these people who were fired. with outsourced intelligence, which was purchased commercially using public sources for information. So the State Department as a whole has been a big obstacle to Mr. Trump's attempt to turn around American foreign policy. I could not agree with you more, and one wonders why Trump felt compelled to please Mrs. Adelson, who wanted Marco Rubio to be Trump's about. Vice President by saying no, but I'll make him Secretary of State. I know Marco Rubio, I don't agree with him on many things, but I feel sorry for him. I can imagine him saying to Trump, I'm going to Russia next week to meet with Putin and Trump saying, no, you're not. I'm sending two real estate agents, Whitkoff and Jared. Okay, then I'm going to Geneva to meet with the NATO foreign ministers. No,

you're not, I'm sending the Secretary of the Army or Tom Barrett, another real estate developer, this one from Long Island, but a buddy of mine that I can trust. I wonder how much longer Rubio will last in that office. He's not really accomplishing anything. And from the Russian perspective, which is where you have a unique and almost jeweler's eye ability to discern what they're thinking, he's not the de facto secretary of state, is he? Well, when there is an actual negotiation, when whoever is in charge of Ukraine sits down to whoever Mr. Putin designates as his representative. I assume that Rubio will be there because without Rubio there, it's hard to place

Lavrov there and Lavrov should be there. So I think he will be there. The main thing, Rubio has nowhere to go. So he's in a really tough spot. He certainly doesn't enjoy his job. He certainly doesn't enjoy the direction of foreign policy Trump is imposing on him. But if he walks out in the street,

that he has given up a very good job for space on the street. Right, right. And for that very good job, he gave up a scene in the Senate he probably could have held for the rest of his working life. Exactly. So he's uniquely handicapped. I'm not like people like Rex Tillerson, who was Trump's first secretary of state, who was retired, essentially.

So he didn't have anything to lose by taking that job. But Rubio had a lot to lose. I wonder what, and maybe you can give us some insight here, the Russians think of Whitkoff and Kushner, not as human beings, but as sophisticated negotiators. I mean, I don't think it's an understatement to say that Sergei Lavrov has forgotten more than these two know about international diplomacy and Russian history. Well, there is a certain parallels here. Well, again, not to be unkind to Lavrov and not to overdo the role of these two, Witkoff and Jared Kushner.

But the similarity is that they are both implementing policies made by others. The other is on the one hand, Trump and on the side Putin. So in that sense, what the difference is, the lack of professional preparation for diplomacy. But on that point, from my own personal experience, I'd like to raise an issue that no one else will on this show or most other shows because there are very few businessmen who appear on these shows. And while I don't consider myself professionally prepared to be a businessman,

In fact, I spent 25 years in my life doing just that, not businessmen, but executive in a large corporation. And in that position, you have to understand that the basic task of the CEO, or in my own case, the fill-in for the CIA as a country manager, is diplomacy. That's what you're doing. I had accountants who looked after the finances. I had marketing people to look after the marketing time. And I was supposed to look after diplomacy. Understood.

Understood. I want to read for you. We'll put it up as a full screen, the opening paragraph from the lead story in today's Washington Post and ask you to comment on it. A new U.S. National Security Strategy, berating Europe, has triggered a wave of acrimony across the Atlantic, enraging and dismaying European officials who say the document has turned the Trump administration's vitriol against European democracies into a form. formal policy. Agree, disagree, or somewhere in between? I've been living here for 45 years. Since 2017, I am a dual national, a citizen also a Belgian. And you have a different perspective on these things from when you travel through. Or even if you spend a few months here, the fact is that everything that Trump said regarding the lack of democracy here is perfectly true.

And I am just a half an hour's walk from the European institutions for at least six years when I had a very kind member of Parliament who invited me into conferences there in the EU Parliament building run by various party factions. I saw the European Parliament for me and it is rotten. People who just pass through or look at it from a distance think, oh, the problem with Europe is just bureaucratic. I hear this every day. It's run by a bureaucracy. Untrue. It's run by people who are politicians, essentially, and not career bureaucrats. Thunderland is not a career bureaucrat. She is not a functionary. She's not a non-entity. She is a dictator, a usurper of power, but that's a separate issue. She is elected by indirect representation. Well, where do you have direct representation in this world? in one place and only as far as i know it's switzerland uh other countries including the united

states do not have direct representation after all i mean formerly speaking our president is not selected by you or me selected by the electoral college so these things are there have to be fine-tuned and looked at in depth without broad generalizations and the fact of the matter is that the european institutions are a top-down democracy not a bottom of the members. The people who are the candidates, sorry, who are the deputies in that parliament and who elect someone like Fondolean, they are not responsible to the voters in the country from which they come. They're responsible to the party bosses, of whom there are very few. And that means that they're having been elected, relieve them of any responsibility to do anything

with the public wants. And they don't. The leverage system has to be explained. A vote in Germany counts for five times more than my vote here in Belgium. Why do I say that? Because Germany with 85 million population or something like that controls 450 million Europeans. Since it controls, it's the most important constituent element in the European People's Party, which is a centrist right party, that has systematically for the last 25 years, really been a dominant voice and controlled who is who in the European Commission. Let me ask you a few questions about Germany. A Chancellor Shulza's approval rating is in the low 20s.

Is he long for that job? Or is the AFD, one of those right-wing groups, going to put together a coalition and oust him? considering the cordon sanitaire around the afd it's improbable they could put together a coalition anytime soon yes they are more popular but let's look at seriously they don't have 50 percent popularity they have i don't know 18 25 percent so um they could be a dominant force in a coalition but first they have to have partners willing to deal with them which they might at present they don't not at the federal level anyway even if in one or two of the landa the German states, they do participate in the government.

He cannot be ousted. If you had been invited, I wish you had, if you had been invited to No. 10 Downing Street on Monday to participate in the four-way conversation between Lodomers Zelensky, Chancellor, Murs, Prime Minister, Starrmer, and President Macron, him. What would you have told them? How would you have advised them? Because I don't know what they told what they could possibly have told Zelensky. They can't raise taxes. They can't borrow money. They can't steal the money in the Belgian banks. What are they going to do for him?

Well, this coalition of the losers is able to cause Trump. And we saw the kind of trouble they could raise today. When Zelensky put out his bid, oh, I can held elections in 30, 60, 90 days. if the British and the Americans, if NATO comes in and gives me security. So if you give me security and secure the elections, then we can have them. Well, this is sneaking in exactly what has been outrightly rejected, inserting Western armed forces into Ukrainian territory. So Etienne just come from the sky. That must have been what they cooked up together,

Downing Street on the way. Wow. If we define realism by its generally accepted definition of a genuine recognition of the sovereignty and security needs of other countries, Donald Trump, because the neocons don't accept this, is Donald Trump becoming a realist? Well, he became a realist. I argue that he became a realist before the elections in 2016 when he consulted. Well, he must have a sympathy for him.

Just change my verb tense. Is Donald Trump a realist? He is, a motto. But no, actually, he himself has been very careful in the NSS, this new national security strategy paper, to distance himself from the word realist in the sense that he is arguing against any ideology. He would say, he says, and it's the top of his NSS paper, Realism, not

realist. And that's an important distinction that we have to introduce here. He is not a hardline realist as Henry Kissinger was in 1994 and stopped being in 2015. That is to say, he recognizes national values or values driven thinking but he doesn't accept them as as directing foreign policy which instead is dominated by by national interests so yeah that that is where he stands and of course there are always exceptions people are not perfectly consistent and

people and anyone watching the show will say he accepts who he declares the fundamental rule of realism which is non-interference in the affairs of other countries. Then he goes on to interfere in other countries. Right. Right, right. He bombed the Houthis in Yemen. He paid for the slaughter of the Palestinians in Gaza. And just yesterday, he said the president of Venezuela's days are numbered, according to Colonel Larry Wilkerson, the government is spending a billion with a B dollars a day to maintain 20,000 troops and more than a dozen ships at sea off the coast of Venezuela. And yesterday they had war games, or they practiced these, I don't know if war games is the right term, amphibious landings in Puerto Rico.

So something's up. I mean, I don't know if the government would waste a billion dollars a day and not use it for its ostensible purpose. This is hardly realism. In fact, it is not realism at all? Well, there's a hierarchy of priorities. And at the highest level of priorities, Trump is being a realist in the full sense of the capital art. The highest of his priorities is establishing the normalization of relations with Russia. And that is a first step to a revised governance of the world, which would look in perfectly kiss him Jerry's terms as a power sharing between Russia, China, and the United States

with designated areas of interest for each other. That's where he's headed on the big scale. That is perfect realist. When you come to the lower priorities, and of course, you have the contradictions that you just call it out. I want to go back to Rubio for a minute because Chris has just given me a piece in Politico. This is a year ago. This is January 2020. and I start by saying that I know the Secretary of State and interviewed him many times when I was at Fox and he was a senator. This is at the time his nomination was made. This is in Politico.

Rubio will be fairly, and this is before Whitkoff and Kushner, we're on the scene. Rubio will be fairly hamstrung and will feel sidelined and frustrated. One foreign diplomat told Politico, if he is surly or complained, the humiliation will escalate, and then he'll be fired. If he sucks it up, takes the humiliation of smiles through the teeth. He will survive until someone else whispers into Trump's ear and angles for the job. The headline of the article is, again, it's before he was even sworn in. Marco Rubio isn't likely to last long as Secretary of State.

I would say, so far, I don't know what goes on behind the scenes. He's sucking it up, taking the humiliation, and smiling. through gritted teeth. I mean, for all we know, he calls Lavaugh on the phone and they speak. He has some comfort and comfort with

the people who put him into the Senate. My point is that his game is this whole Caribbean operation you're talking about. After all, his primary interest and his primary expertise, if you want to say he has a professional expertise,

it's in these matters as speaking out as a as a human refugees do and in that regard he can go back to his original electors in Florida and say look I did a pretty good job for you look what I'm doing for regime change in Venezuela right so it's not as though he has no comfort zone here he does have something to play with very very interesting observation I want to go back before we end to Venezuela is the CIA which has an enormous investment both in, well, in money, in assets and in human assets in Ukraine, likely to be working to undermine a peace plan. I mean, the CIA has built 20 stations in Ukraine, which would be gone if the land is seated to Russia.

Well, I think I'd better defer to my colleagues with former CIA experience on a question like that, because I don't have an inside view of how the CIA functions or how respectful is of orders from above coming from the presidency. But yes, of course, as you say, they will have an enormous loss when the Ukraine war is over under the terms that are likely to be completed with Trump. participation which is essentially a capitulation and a loss of face for all of the neocons who got us into the war yeah do you have a level of comfort and commenting similarly on MI6 no no I don't except that MI6 has been judging by what they do well they do very well false flag operations and provocations That's their specialty at a world-class level.

No, you have to take your hat off and say, if you want to do dirty tricks, go to the MI6 because they have a wonderful curriculum data. But that is not an insight on understanding. That is looking at the outside of what is happening and who would have the expertise to do it, which is almost always MI6. How about Mossad?

Are they in Venezuela? Are they in Ukraine? I'm not aware of it. But again, this is outside my area. Okay. Good, good. Much appreciated. Well, thank you.

Thank you for your analysis on the national security strategy. We'll see where all this goes. I mean, by the time we speak next week, the United States could have invaded Venezuela, or maybe the situation will remain the same. Christmas is coming up. It's a large Catholic country, and maybe the president doesn't want to do anything. a Christmas time, who knows. But thank you for your time, my dear friend.

We'll look forward to seeing you next week. All the best. Always a pleasure. Thank you. And coming up later today at 1 o'clock this afternoon, Professor Glenn Diesen, at 2 o'clock this afternoon, Max Blumenthal, Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thank you.