Judging Freedom - INTEL Roundtable w/ Larry Johnson & Scott Ritter : Weekly Wrap - 21 AUGUST

Episode Date: August 21, 2026

INTEL Roundtable w/ Larry Johnson & Scott Ritter : Weekly Wrap - 21 AUGUSTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Undeclared wars are commonplace. Pragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression with no complaints from the American people. Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government. To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected. What if sometimes to love your country you had to alter or abolish the government? Jefferson was right? What if that government is best which governs least? What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What if it is better to perish fighting for

freedom than to live as a slave? What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now? Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom. Today is Friday, August 21st, 2006, the end of the day, the end of the week, our favorite gathering, the intelligence community roundtable in which we review the events of the preceding seven days with Larry Johnson and Scott Ritter. Larry, Scott, welcome here, much appreciated. Scott, to you first, can Iran escape reliance on the West? Will Trump and Besson's threat? in the past two days to choke it economically, have the effect that Trump and Bessent are boasting about? Well, you know, the West has been trying to choke Iran for almost 50 years now since 1979.

So, and it's failed to do so and will continuously fail to do so because, you know, in order to have influence on a nation economically, there needs to be economic interaction. Now, the United States and Iran have zero direct economic interaction. Over the decades, though, there's been indirect, meaning that, you know, the United States could put pressure on nations that did have economic interaction. You know, this is one of the reasons why the JCPOA ultimately failed, because Iran did have considerable economic interaction with Europe and desired to keep it that way and expand it. but again because Trump withdrew, threatened secondary sanctions and Europe balked. That went away.

So today there's virtually zero economic interaction between Iran and Europe. Iran has made the pivot to the east that, you know, they've been talking about for decades now. But, you know, the moderate element of the Iranian domestic political dynamic had always resisted it because, you know, there were historical ties between Iran and the West. This is not going to get restored. Iran is now plugged into the east. Bricks is becoming, you know, something that Iran wasn't just, remember Iran's president, the one who died in the airplane,

whose name I'm going to forget right now, Raisi, I think, you know, he was all about bricks. He and his foreign minister, they died. The new president came in and he hesitated. And so when Russia had the big gathering in Kazan in October of 2024, I believe, you know, Iran wasn't all on board. Iran hesitated with the strategic framework agreement with Russia. Iran also hesitated with China. There's no hesitation today.

They're all in. And so, therefore, you know, the only way that Trump could strangle Iran is if China in Russia, agreed to allow Trump to strangle Iran like Europe did. China just sent the message out. We will not tolerate any, any secondary sanctions for our doing business with Iran. And Russia, of course, couldn't care less about anything the United States does anyways. So, no, this has a snowball's chance in hell. And let me make the following prediction.

In less than a week, Trump will reverse course because it'll become painfully obvious that there's zero economic leverage. This was a panic tweet sent out by Trump. all posts by social media. This isn't a well-thought-out policy. This is because he received a briefing from the Pentagon that said, we have zero military capacity to impose our will on Iran about the straight or moose. And so this came out, this ridiculous statement, economic D-Day. You know, to have a D-Day, you know, you had to have months of planning.

There's no planning that went into this. There's no strategy that goes into this. This is simply policy by tweet. Larry, you wrote about. this last night. More nonsense from Bessent, as Scott just mentioned. Does he really think that Chinese banks, which buy American debt and finance Iranian industry, are going to cooperate with U.S. sanctions? These people are in another world. Yeah, you know, you think of the sanctions. If you have a child, you can threaten your kid. Hey, I'm going to cut off your allowance. Get out there and mow the grass.

you're not getting your allowance. Okay, you can sanction them. But you can't go out to your neighbor's kid and go, hey, if you don't cut my grass, I'm going to cut off your allowance. Kids can go, yeah, you know, just wave at you. Or maybe, you know, gesture with some part of his hand

or fingers at you. The United States has lost leverage over Iran. If you go back to 2015 when the JCPOA was in effect, You know, at that point, both China and Russia agreed with the West to impose sanctions on Iran. Iran didn't have it out. Now, today, you've got the north-south corridor with Russia. You've got an east-west corridor of the new Silk Road, Old Silk Road, with China. And you've got these six land routes with Pakistan that were opened.

If you recall it in April, when Trump first announced some sanctions against Iran, that the blockade actually when he announced the blockade the the Pakistanis came out two days later and said hey we're opening these six land routes to trade with Iran now right now if they if they go forward with this economic deeday and try to punish countries the only one they've really got potential leverage over is Pakistan but Pakistan you know the problem with the US

bullying like this and threats, is that it forces countries then ultimately to say, do we want to stick with the United States or do we want to go with China? And the reality is with China and Russia and Brooks, the setting up

of this alternative financial network has actually made some progress. China's cross-border interbank payment system, SIPS, is now the hell has, I've seen two different numbers, over a hundred countries, which I think is more likely,

someone put 185. I don't think it's that high, but 100 countries are now signed up and using it. This is an alternative to swift. So the bottom line is, as Scott was saying, the United States, in its words, its threats

don't make sense because it doesn't have control. And let me just point out one other things. You know, Trump and his true social post announcing this said, we've defeated the army, the army's wiped out, the Navy's wiped out, the Air Force is wiped out, we've wiped out their missiles. They have no nuclear capability.

So we've won, so why do you need to do these sanctions if you've won? I mean, this would be the equivalent of Joseph Stalin after his troops took Berlin, turning around and said, okay, Germans, now we're going to hit you with super-duper economic sanctions. That doesn't make sense. Scott, does anybody believe and any significant world leaders believe Trump, when he makes these kind of claims, we've defeated them militarily? Isn't it obvious to everybody, probably even Netanyahu, that the Iranians have prevailed? Yeah, nobody believes this. There's zero buddy. And again, we come to the danger of policy by social media. It not only skips over the interagency process, which means you have, you know, Scott Besson,

compelled to convince the other departments and agencies in the United States government that sanctions will work and that there's a, you know, there's, you know, there's coordination and everybody's on the page. There's no policy. There literally is no policy because you can't have policy that hasn't been staffed. But the other important part about the policymaking process is the diplomatic aspect of it, meaning that you go out to your, especially if you're going to do international sanctions. You go out to your partners and your allies and those who you want to influence and you engage with them and say, this is why we're doing it. This is what we're doing. What are your concerns? None of that has happened. You know, Pakistan, let's say Pakistan is

the target of this, which it may be. You know, Pakistan woke up this morning knowing that they have a Chinese-Pakistan economic corridor that's very important to them, very important. There is no United States, Pakistan economic corridor. The United States, all they can do is threaten secondary sanctions. The United States is not a major, you know, huge trading part. China, Pakistan just did, you know, a PAC, security pack with Saudi Arabia. They pretty much guarantees that Saudi Arabia will continue to fund, to provide loans to Pakistan to prop up. So we did no homework.

We did nothing. There's nobody in the world today that believes the United States won this war. And there's nobody in the world today who believes the United States is capable of an economic deed day. This is Donald Trump fantasy world. Here's the guy presiding over $40 trillion in U.S. government debt and having difficulty finding people to buy enough bonds. Chris, cut number two. Economic pressure means that we are going to all of our allies, and this is going to be the greatest coordinated economic isolation in the history of the world and we are going to them and saying you were either with us or against us

you want this murder regime to end and if you insist on they are doing business with them either transferring money buying their oil they are doing seabornship transferers then the U.S. Treasury and the U.S. government they will put its full might and force toward enforcing against you so it is time for our allies and the rest of the world to make a decision and we are going to be a squash the economy of this murderous regime which that will curtail their ability to project power through their proxies it will it will mean that they cannot pay the military and you know we have substantial inflation both food inflation and ordinary inflation in Iran and you know what we have seen

I see lots of reports and said, oh, well, this has never worked. It does work because we have a combination. It is a one-two punch. We have the blockade, and we are going to have the toughest sanctions in history. And I will tell you, this will work. It worked in Venezuela once we put up the blockade. It is working in Cuba right now, and it is going to work in Iran, and we are going to collapse this regime. Iran, it's not Cuba.

Iran is not Venezuela and I would think the Chinese and the Russians would flip the bird to Scott Besson after hearing that nonsense. He's a delusional ass. I mean, I have never heard such stupidity coming out of the mouth of somebody with his education, his background,

to believe that oh yeah, this is, we're just going to collapse it. Notice what happened yesterday in the markets. You should also show the video of Scott. Besson, I don't know why the price of oil is not falling. I mean, we've announced these sanctions and price of oil is going up. Yeah, tacit evidence, or this is indirect evidence of how the administration's been manipulating the oil market.

Because what happened yesterday is China and Japan, both, they started offloading treasury bills. And here's Besson trying to do his best to keep. the yield, you know, the interest they have to pay on those treasury bills from going up. He's trying to get it to go down, but boom, it kept going up, and the price of oil was going up. Gee, why is that? Because there's a shortage. Right now, there is a global crisis. Doesn't admit it, but a global crisis out of the shortage of diesel fuel.

And it was touched off by the fact that once, the amount of oil coming out of the Persian Gulf ended. And it didn't end on March 2nd when the block, or I guess, the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz went into full effect. It took about another 30, 40 days for that to impact because there were still tankers on the high seas delivering oil. But the clock, the countdown clock started around the 1st of April. and between since April until recently, countries were mitigating that threat by drawing down on strategic petroleum reserves.

Those now are running out. And now the crunch is here. And the refineries, particularly in the United States, notice we used to get one of our major sources of oil that's used to create the diesel fuel, came out of Canada. Well, what's Canada doing now? They told us to hose off. They're selling their oil to China because Trump's been such an ass.

Wow. Larry referred to, I want to move on to Israel and eventually Ukraine, but Larry referred to Besson saying he doesn't understand why oil prices are rising. He actually did say that, cut number one. Anything that happens within a 24-hour period is, noise. And I think that once the market understands that we are focusing on fiscal consolidation and that we are trying to bring the market back into equilibrium in a thinly traded market, I think, you know, I'm confident that bonds will continue declining. We've got a spike in oil prices today that I don't really understand. Our announcement is for economic action.

And I think that the economic action will mean that oil prices will come down sooner. Can I just a quick throw in something? Just two points. One, the statement that Bessett made prior to this was proof positive what I said. He hasn't coordinated his policy with anybody. He said, we will be talking to our allies. So we've announced something with zero coordination, which means that nobody's on board yet. He said they will come on board.

Nobody will come on board. Two, I don't understand what's going on. Let's just, Larry brought up diesel. You know that Scott Besson is behind the targeting of Russia's refinery capacity because he believes it's going to bring Russia down economically. It's backfired horrifically for the United States. Yes, Russia had a problem with diesel because they hit a couple of places that made diesel. So Russia stopped exporting diesel.

But Russia doesn't have a diesel shortage. Russia has all the diesel they need for their military, for their agriculture. there's no diesel shortage in Russia. They're just not exporting it. Now, that means that there's a diesel shortage globally, so the prices are going to go up. But Besset would say, well, that means that we're strangling the Russian economy. No, because now all the oil that was supposed to be refined to diesel

is now being exported by Russia. Russia is making windfall profits right now. If the goal of hitting Russia's refinery capacity was to strangle Russia's ability, to fund the war machine. Russia's making more money. They made 60% more money last July, all of the attacks than they did a year before. Scott Besson has no clue what he's doing. Nobody in the United States has any clue what they're doing because they're not talking to real experts. They're simply doing knee-jerk reaction to a president's social media posts. Larry is the Kremlin getting more aggressive militarily in the special military operation?

Yeah, well, I think it probably can no longer be classified as the special military operation. There has been a little bit, there has been some criticism within senior ranks in the military of Putin. You know, they think he was too soft. And again, this gets us to this other contradiction, that the West is obsessed with getting rid of Putin. They want to get rid of him. they haven't thought through what comes next. But Putin has, you know, he's, he has basically taken the gloves off now. Because you're seeing it in this comprehensive, first the shutdown of the Black Sea.

Both Odessa, Nikolaev, ports up the Danube, they've been closed. Russia is bombing them. Any ship trying to get into those ports, they're taking it out. So they have essentially put an economic stranglehold on Ukraine. It has no options there. Then what they're doing with the nightly attacks on Keef, on both military structures, industrial plants, warehouses, it's causing damage that frankly Ukraine will never be able to recover from,

in the foreseeable future. And then on the ground, the movement of the troops, it's not just, you know, we saw like in 2023, people were focused on Bachmuth, the battle for Bachmuth. And then going into 2024, it was the battle in Nobdivka. Then, you know, in 2025, Pakrovsk. Now it's multiple.

It's not just one. They are attacking along at least seven axes of attack. from the north even up into chernigiev into sumi in kharkiv and in denetsk and zapparisia in neprosk uh so uh and hirsan so russia russia is now on a role and yeah they still call it an smo so be it but it's got all the makings of actually a total war effort now scottie i want to jump over to Israel. Are Israel and Turkey on the verge of some conflagration? And if so, has Israel forgotten Turkey's in NATO? Are they on the verge of some conflagration? Look, Israel has called Turkey the greatest strategic threat to Israel in the world today, greater than Iran. There are people in Israel

say we have to stop Iran because Turkey's the problem. And the reason is that Turkey is actually in Syria and Syria borders Israel. And this means that and also the Jolani government is a Turkish-sponsored government. And so Israel is in a state of panic because Erdogan has articulated policies that condemn Israel for what they're doing in Gaza and has called Israel out as a genocidal state. So the potential from the perspective of Israel is that if Turkey actually gets down, to the border, there could be problems. And Israel's just not going to beat. It's not, forget NATO. Turkey's not a member of NATO. People need to stop saying that. Yes, they are in name only.

Turkey's been running independent foreign policy, independent national security policy, in the Middle East and Central Asia. NATO had nothing to say about Turkey's intervention in the Azerbaijani-Armenian conflict. NATO has nothing to say whatsoever about Turkey's involvement in Iraq, Turkey's involvement in Syria. NATO is not involved in this. You know, Turkey has, you know, a residual nature. But after 2016, when NATO in the United States back to coup against Erdogan, the Turkish military has been purged of their pro-NATO element. The Turkish military today is NATO in name only.

They don't function as an adjunct of NATO. And NATO, frankly speaking, if we parse out what happened in Ankara, NATO has turned its back on Turkey. They were hoping that Turkey could shoulder the burden of the Ukraine conflict for them. Turkey's not playing that game. the United States is incapable of an agreement. The F-35 stands as proof-positive. But the thing that Israel needs to understand is, you know, the Turks like to fight,

and they're pretty good at it, and they're not afraid to die. I just bring up, you know, the example of the duty officer on July 16, 2016, at the Special Forces who received his phone call from his commanding general saying, my deputy is coming with 40 commandos. They're traitors. They're launching a coup. They're going to land and try and take over the headquarters. You need to kill him when he gets off the helicopter.

And the sergeant, yes, sir. He said, you know what I'm saying? Yes, sir. You know what this means? Yes, sir. Okay, I'll see you in heaven. And he hung up. The guy took his pistol, loaded it, helicopter landed.

He walked out there. It's on videotape. He walked out, went up, shot the general in the head, killed him. He got killed. He lost his life. But Turks, this is what they do. Look at Israel. They lose six guys.

The nation goes to the morning. coming out of their nose is they cry and wail and all that turks bury their dead and say let's keep going look at the turkish brigade in korea that if the israeli fought the turks the turks would overrun Israel in about 3.2 seconds and paying that law and that's why israel's nervous they want to try and nip this thing in the butt larry last question if we use nets and yahoo's definition of terrorism which is violence against civilians for political gain what's the world's largest sponsor of terrorism united states followed by israeli Israel? I mean, you know, people

say, oh, well, that's outrageous. I put an article up on sonar21.com two nights ago. It lays out the facts. You know, and one of the interesting, you know, actually, I knew this,

but it didn't really dawn up on me. When you go back for the last 25 years, 95% of all the terrorist incidents that have been recorded by the National Counterterrorism Center and put into the annual report on terrorism

that my old office at state issues, it's a group, Sunni extremists, Salafists, as they're called. You know, we're calling about al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, etc. And the biggest funders of those groups, the Gulf Arabs, and the United States. Now you've got to step back and say, why would the United States

be funding these Sunni Salafist groups, these radical Islamists? Because who else do they attack? They attack Iran. We were actually, we've been using these groups as proxies. We did it to, we funded,

you know, we were behind the extremists, these Sunni extremists that attacked Russia and led to a 10-year war in Chechnya. And we've been doing it as well in the Middle East to go after Iran. So we need to disabuse as Americans of this notion that, oh, we're really against terrorism.

No, we've been funding it, unfortunately. Guys, I have to run. A great conversation. Deeply appreciate it. We'll look forward to seeing you both next week. All the best. Thank you. All right, Judge, take care.

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if we can lasso him into another time with us. Thank you for watching. Have a great weekend. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.