Judging Freedom - Lt Col. Karen Kwiatkowski: NATO Cannot Defend Europe

Episode Date: July 30, 2024

Lt Col. Karen Kwiatkowski: NATO Cannot Defend EuropeSee 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 Tuesday, July 30th, 2024. Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski will be with us in just a moment. NATO, which wants to go on the offensive, can it even defend Europe? Right after this. You all know that I am a paid spokesperson for Lear Capital, but I'm also a customer, a very satisfied customer. About a year ago, I bought gold and it's now increased in value 23%. So $100 invested in gold a year ago is now worth $123. If you have $100 in the bank, it still shows $100, but $100 in the bank is now worth 24% less. Inflation has reduced all of your savings, all of your buying power and mine by 24%. And gold is largely immune from that. If you want to learn how gold will soon hit $3,200 an ounce,

call Lear Capital, 800-511-4620, or go to learjudgenap.com. Get your free gold report. Same experts who predicted the 23% rise that I've enjoyed have predicted this $3,200 an ounce gold. Learn about how to transfer this to an IRA. Protect your savings. 800-511-4620, learjudgenap.com. Tell them the judge sent you. Colonel Kwiatkowski, a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you for joining us. I want to spend some time talking to you about NATO and its own self-delusions in Europe. I also want to talk a little bit about your great piece at JudgeKnapp.com and elsewhere on the deep state is in trouble. But before that, I can't resist asking you your opinion of the speech given by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the United States Congress, which was interrupted 58 times in 55 minutes. One of those interruptions was for longer than a minute. About 100 members

of Congress weren't there. I believe all Democrats and just one or two Republicans. But what did this represent to you? Well, I have to tell you, I did not watch his speech. I'm glad that a lot of people weren't there for it. One Republican, Thomas Massey, was not there. All of the rest of the Republicans embarrassingly attended this speech. And of course, it's, I think, what, his fourth time he's addressed the Congress. His message, if you could call it a message, is basically a reminder that Israel runs our foreign policy, certainly in the Middle East and very likely beyond the Middle East. It's a reminder of his power, how and why he has power, how and why

Israel's government exercises such power over the American government. That's a complicated question. I'm not sure exactly. I think there's a couple of reasons. Certainly, Israel recognizes that they have power over our Congress. And our Congress, for some reason, doesn't seem to acknowledge its own power. It sits there. And to interrupt him with applause after the things that Netanyahu's government and he himself is advocating and doing and the way they're conducting, you know, I call it a genocide, the war in Gaza. This is it is insane to me, the hypocrisy. So I not only have no respect for Netanyahu, although he's not an American, he can run his country however he wants to. But I have zero respect for the Congress and their behavior.

That's all I can really say. I really thought the Congress, I agree with you entirely, Karen, but I thought the Congress's behavior was reprehensible. They were not representing the American people. They were just trying to kiss his butt as aggressively and ostentatiously as they possibly could. This is a war criminal who runs an apartheid government, who believes in the slaughter of innocents. He has no right to stand there and command the attention of the American public. And he even lectured those outside the building protesting, as Matt Ho points out, they must have gotten under

his skin. By the way, one of them was Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, a regular guest, your friend and colleague, the former chief of staff to the Secretary of State of the United States. They must have gotten under his skin. Yeah, no, it's true. And, you know, just this week, we had the story, which was actually carried on Yahoo News and CNN, both of the medical doctors there witnessing and trying to help folks in Gaza, remarking on the literal assassinations of children in Gaza. kids two and three years old with gunshot wounds through the heart, then a second one through the head. And he said, this doesn't happen by accident. These are sniper shots against children. And that made it into American media. So if people who just read mainstream media and they're scrolling through CNN, they will see that. And yet the Congress doesn't see that because they are complicit, 100 percent complicit, not only in the approval of the weapons and the money that finances this, but in basically they're

cheering the murder of children and lying about it. So I have I mean, there's nothing you can say about our Congress. They're useless. Your your Our other friend and colleague, Scott Ritter, says, well, Judge, what do you expect? The audience was bought and paid for. I mean, look at the donations that are made to their political campaigns. The last thing they want is to be on an APEC list with an arrow or a cross across their, wouldn't be a cross, you know, the one line of an X across their face indicating this person is no longer worthy of your support. All right, switching gears to the topic of the day for you. Does NATO believe, is NATO preparing for a land war against Russia? I think they're trying to justify budgets that would be increased. And in order to justify those budgets to their people, they have to threaten, they have to

scare them. And what scares Europeans, of course, is what used to scare them several generations ago. You know, and they keep hearing about Russia coming over. So I think they're using it to increase their budgets, both because they want to, because it's an institution, it wants to grow and be more and more important, regardless of whether it's a justified institution, because certainly NATO is no longer and possibly never has been justified as a defensive alliance. But, you. But it's a fundraising kind of thing. And also I think maybe to some extent many of these NATO countries realize if Trump or

someone like Trump, a more populist, America-first-leaning president, is elected that they will be scrutinized and they will be expected, these NATO members will be expected to pay quote-unquote their fair share. So it's a money-grabbing thing, and they're using the threat of war. Because in reality, and your guests, many of your guests know way more than I do about it and have talked about it, informed people around the world know this, Russia, under Putin or anybody else, has no intention of traveling west into Europe and taking over countries and reestablishing some sort of federation or Soviet Union. It's just not happening. It's not something they want to do. They're not designing their military to do this. Every clue that an analyst would look for and count in how Russia is behaving, every clue tells you that's not they're not going to come into Europe.

They don't care. They don't want it. Why would anyone want to come in and rule Europe? It's a mess. based on propping up their institution and trying to get a bigger share of their national budgets, which are, of course, in all cases, being compressed. The economy of European countries has shrunken specifically since the Ukraine war started. The forecast is not good. So the military wants to position itself. How can I justify the biggest share possible of the taxpayer dime in my nation that is a NATO member? So NATO was planning to put offensive missiles in Germany more than are already there. Here's what President Putin had to say about it on Sunday, two days ago. The situation recalls the events of the Cold War era. If the U.S. implements such plans,

we will consider ourselves free from the previously imposed one-sided moratorium on the deployment of medium and shorter range strike systems. We will take mirror measures for their deployment. We will take mirror measures for their deployment. We will take mirror measures for their deployment. Is that why there are Russian warships in Havana Harbor? Well, I'm sure that they're there to send a message. The message is, how do you like it? What does it feel like to you? But nobody in Washington is listening to that. You know, our country is, the political class, the deep state is totally in the grip of how will they survive this next election. So they're not really responding to traditional messaging, which is what

this is, you know, putting a worship in a certain place is a message sender. That is how great powers have always really communicated. So they, you know, the message isn't getting through. But certainly the ending, you know, five years ago when we got out of the INF Treaty, this opened the door. We get out of the INF treaty and the Russians behaved as if they were still bound by the treaty. And President Putin has basically said, you're taking us for suckers, enough is enough. That's the way I read what he just said. That's exactly right. And without that treaty in place, there's nothing holding back Americans or crazy German leaders or whoever else in the NATO countries that want to host these intermediate range missiles aimed at Russia. Of course, they'll all be aimed at Russia. There's nothing stopping them from doing that.

And, of course, you know, we're not an arms race, a renewed arms race, something that this time the Democrats have done to us. So it's just an almost an impossible situation. But certainly nothing Russia is doing is surprising. It is all predicated on things that we're doing. Like when you go and poke a hornet's nest, be prepared to run because you're doing something that has a very predictable response. And that's what our policies are doing right now. Why, other than because Mike Pompeo told him to, why did President Trump take us off of that treaty? Well, the American version of it was

Russia was cheating. Russia wasn't being transparent. Russia was doing things. The real story was our missile, in my opinion, our missile development had stagnated. Russia was developing missiles, not just intermediate range missiles. And think about where Russia might be able to use intermediate range missiles. It's a big country and there's lots of places they could deploy them, not always facing Europe. But their technology, Russian technology, was progressing at a good pace and using modern technologies and, you know, very good. Very, very good. We were noticing that. Our intelligence, our military is noticing that. They look at what we have, but we don't have

things that work very well. We still, five years later, 10 years later from the time we started to pull back from the INF Treaty, our stuff has not improved. I mean, we are still struggling to test successfully hypersonic, mid-range and long-range hypersonic missiles. We're still not there yet. They are. Russia is there. And of course, so is China. So I think if we think about the Mickey Mac or we think about the military industrial complex, what we see is it has certain needs and it's feeling threatened because it's not keeping up.

It doesn't have its budget share. And it forecast in the United States that our own budget share for the military will go down. So how do they position themselves to demand and require the taxpayer make sure it gets what it needs? Well, we say, well, you know, Russia's cheating. And what they don't say is we're way behind and we want to go ahead and go with next generation stuff. And, you know, this treaty stands in our way. But the U.S. did blame Russia entirely, 100 percent, for the failure of that treaty. And that's false, OK, because we were also cheating, as we generally do in this country, and violating the terms of the treaty. But Russia,

I think, had more faith in the potential that this thing could be healed or somehow sustained. And they were proven wrong. Their faith was misplaced. The United States is out of control. Here is the smartest guy in the room. Cut number three. When the United States entered the world stage in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, how did it end? What peaceful changes for the better occurred there?

Now, when they repeat like a mantra, we will support Ukraine for as long as it takes. I'm curious how long will it take? Like in Afghanistan, where it took 20 years to realize that you lost, or in Iraq, where you also left, although now you are trying to stay despite the Iraqi parliament's decision that the US should withdraw its troops. Or like in Libya, where the state collapsed and now everyone is trying to piece it back together. A multipolar world is a reality. It's not something someone invented. That, of course, was Russian Foreign Minister

Sergei Lavrov two weeks ago. But what he was saying was history and accurate and truthful. Compare him to the nebbish Tony Blinken. There's no comparison. I don't think Blinken has a strategic thought in his body. Has NATO turned itself from a defensive mechanism, and I don't think it's ever fought a defensive war at all, into an offensive entity with designs on China and the South China Sea and designs on Russia and the Black Sea? Yep. Well, I mean, it has. It has shifted itself into this expansionary type force. Looking at the two-front war,

and when we say a two-front war, that sounds like an American thing. The Americans have a two-front war. Yeah, I know, because NATO is an American product, and we own NATO, and it does the bidding of the U.S. government. So it reflects U.S. foreign policy, which is a global, we're going to preserve the unipower, we're going to preserve the hegemony of the United States. That is its mission. And then NATO's task is, how can NATO help do this? Well, obviously it's not defensive because we're not defending anything. There's no threat that people need to coalesce around to defend against. Now, in the case of Ukraine, there's a little story there that says,

oh, well, Russia invaded and we have to defend Ukrainian. It was once democracy, now I would say it's Ukrainian totalitarianism or Nazism. But there was a story there that they could latch onto. And that's gone very poorly for NATO and very poorly for the United States. In fact, it's an incredibly unpopular position to be pro-Ukraine or to want to support the war in Ukraine. Certainly in the United States, we see that with the voter and the electorate and the popularity of these anti-war messages. We see it here. But also these nationalistic pro-German, pro-whatever, of all the NATO members, you see these rises of populist nationalist parties. What unifies them? What is shared in their messages across these countries? It is we don't want war. We want to

take care of our people and our borders first. We do not want to fight other people's wars for reasons we don't understand. Certainly, we don't want to fight losing wars. And I think that's pretty clear throughout Europe and in Washington that the Ukraine war is lost, completely lost. Switching gears, why is the deep state so miserable? Their budgets keep increasing. They regulate the Congress. They can meet with the Speaker of the House in private, and he changes his vote.

And it used to be against mass surveillance. Now he's in favor of it. But yet they seem to hate life. Yeah, it's because they demand more than just to have all the resources. They also want our respect. They also don't want to be laughed at. They also don't want to be disobeyed. So it's really almost a, if you think about the deep state,

percentage-wise, population, power, even money, it's not the majority of anything. It is highly influential, but it's not the majority. And so it really wants to be respected more, and it doesn't get any respect. And it actually has a hard time standing up and demanding respect, because as soon as it does that, we all start laughing. We go, oh, yeah, we know what you're about. You're stupid. You're not putting America first. We don't like you. They want to be liked. And they will never be liked in this country. And in fact, you know, in the history of empires, the people that run the empire, whether it's the emperor or his closest advisors or whoever it is, they're always hated by the people. They're not loved and adored. This is a fantasy.

So that's why they're not happy. They're hated. Why are we submissive to them? Imagine Jefferson and Madison living in a society where government, even one that they ran, captured every keystroke on every mobile device and every desktop and every piece of fiber optic cable on every telephone call in the country. Yeah, well, we are at the stage of empire where we like to be entertained and we like all these things. And the price we pay for all of this communication is, well, we don't really understand how it works. I mean, how many people can really explain how their technology works? Most of us can't. We don't think about it. It's not something we understand well. to push outside of our experience the fact that we are the most highly surveilled data collected society that's probably ever been on the planet. So we don't like to think about that. But I think

emotionally Americans are very much the same as they were in the time of Jefferson. We're not intellectually, we don't understand the ethics of liberty, but we do kind of don't want to be pushed around. We kind of, you know, this thing that Trump and Vance are tapping into and have tapped into, that is an emotion in this country. And it's an emotion that says we are independent and we don't need your permission. So I think a lot of people feel the right way, but they don't think the right way yet. Is the deep state permanent? So I think a lot of people feel the right way, but they don't think the right way yet. They don't really. Is the deep state permanent? It's kind of to me, it's kind of like, you know, mushrooms or vermin.

If you don't take care of a place, if you if you have a shady, damp place or a place in your barn where you're leaving bits of food that nobody's eating, you will have rats, you will have mushrooms, you will have decay. If you clean up and the light shines, you'll have less of it. So our constitution has not done a great job of keeping our government clean and open, brightly lit. It hasn't done a great job at that. So we have a deep state. We have power that is unaccountable to the electorate. We're way too big. Even if we had all the lights in the world shining on Washington, our, you know, 335 million people cannot do a republic. We need to be smaller. That time is probably coming. But we're at a stage where we haven't done a good job of preventing the growth of the deep state.

And so now we're dealing with a deep state infestation. And it needs to be dealt with. It's very difficult to do that. And people aren't really, they're sensing it. I think many people sense it and feel it, but not many people, the number's growing, but we need more people figuring out how to fix the problem, how to eliminate the deep state, how to expose it. I hate to say this, but all the people that went to Netanyahu's little speech that he gave to Congress and stood up and gave him applause, we could start there. We could start with those. Well, those people are terrified by the deep state and do whatever the deep state wants. Those are the people who are going to ask surveillance and keep increasing the spies'

budget. They do. But they do that because they have their the house in particular has control of the purse strings. They should not be funded to do things that hurt this country and put this country last instead of putting it first. So and, you know, the normal economy, if the country goes broke, if our currency collapses in some way, different things can happen where the government will in many ways be greatly defunded, and then it'll have to make decisions as to what it wants to pay for. But right now, we are spending way too much on government, and so much of it is filtering into places that we have no visibility into. And again, the CIA is in the news always, but certainly past couple of weeks. But the CIA has black budgets. How is that legal?

Well, the Constitution says no federal monies shall be spent except those recorded in a public ledger. Now, you try and find out how the deep state, whether it's the Federal Reserve or the FDA or the EPA or the CIA or the DIA or the NSA, there's so many of them. You try and find out how they're spending their money. They'll laugh at you. I know. I know. We need to follow the money and follow it all the way down to the last penny. And I think that would be the way to really get better government and stop this unaccountable rule that we have of people

that are never elected and never show their faces and are really digging the grave of the United States right now as we speak. Karen, you're right on target. Thank you, my dear friend. I missed you for the two weeks I was away. Karen, you're right on target. Thank you, my dear friend. I missed you for the two weeks I was away. I hope you'll come back again at your usual time next week. Absolutely. Thanks, Judge. Of course. All the best to you. Very lively conversation with a great lady. Tomorrow, Wednesday, Professor Jeffrey Sachs at 8 a.m., Colonel Douglas McGregor at 2 p.m., and Phil Giraldi at 3 p.m. Right here. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thanks for watching!