Judging Freedom - LtCOL. Karen Kwiatkowski: Whom to Blame For Ukraine Failure?

Episode Date: April 8, 2025

LtCOL. Karen Kwiatkowski: Whom to Blame For Ukraine Failure?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 Tuesday, April 8th, 2025. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski joins us now. Colonel, always a pleasure. Thank you. You have a very interesting think piece on Judge Knapp in which you, typical of your fashion, provoke a lot of deep thoughts on a variety of topics. And I plan to go through as many of them as we can get to. Why is the United States still funding the war in Ukraine? Why are we still sending billions to Kiev? Yeah, that's a really good question.

I thought that he froze, Trump has the capability to stop it because he did stop it for about a week or so, I think. And then it was turned back on. for about a week or so, I think. And then it was turned back on. I really think that there is a lot of institutional Pentagon military industrial complex power that pushes this stuff through. And Congress too, as Congress is pressured to continue all this stuff. You know, they do not want Trump to impound or to use the impoundment clause or whatever to stop anything that Congress has supported or funded or authorized.

And so they have, you know, Congress has authorized this stuff. So I don't know if they're not ready for the impoundment fight or this is revealing to all Americans the true deadly power of the military industrial complex? I don't know. That's my initial thinking on that. Can Zelensky negotiate for any sort of amicable end to the war when he is surrounded by people, these arch-nationalists who ideologically and with religious fervor believe that death is to be preferred to surrender,

even a noble surrender with no other opportunity. Yeah, and not just death, but they're willing to destroy Ukraine, Russia, Belarus with nuclear explosions, you know, blowing up nuclear plants and contaminating the environment. They're willing to sacrifice everything there, then submit. So it's kind of a tough position. And those are the people who are propping up Zelensky. I mean, Zelensky has some European support, but the real people he's afraid of aren't the Europeans. It's not Trump. Clearly he's not afraid of Trump. He is afraid of the people around him. The ones, as well, all military dictator types should be afraid

of the people closest to them. And Zelensky has much to fear. You know, it's funny, not funny, it's interesting that he has not absconded yet from Kiev and gone to one of his homes or to a safe place, you know, and vacated that office. You know, why hasn't he done that? Because he has got to be incredibly fearful of his life. I mean, this is why he says one thing to Trump and then he goes home and changes it because he will not do this, you will do this other thing. He's also not the legitimate leader. Russia's not going to deal with him. So while he's there, I don't think we're going to see any ability to have even a short-term ceasefire that Trump wants, that he's not going to get that because

Zelensky not only is a liar, I mean has a history, a track record of lying more than most politicians, he also, you know, is not elected. He's overstayed his legal role as president there. So what can you do? It's he has to go. Yeah, the people around Zelensky are not the only ones who believe in extreme lethality. Here's from just about an hour ago, the Secretary of Defense of the United States. I want to be very clear. China did not build this canal. China does not operate this canal.

And China will not weaponize this canal. Together with Panama in the lead, we will keep the canal secure and available for all nations through the deterrent power of the strongest, most effective, and most lethal fighting force in the world. We will do this in partnership with Panama. Together we will take back the Panama Canal from China's influence. So they're upset that a Chinese company has been operating it very profitably pursuant to a long-term lease for which China pays Panama dearly. By the way, he didn't say legal, he said lethal because that's really one of his favorite words Karen this is after last week. We don't have the actual clip. He was in Japan

saber-rattling Toward Beijing. Don't you have your any? Ideas about Taiwan because we'll be here to defend it ideas about Taiwan because we'll be here to defend it. So question, where does this saber rattling get us? And on the actual issue of defending Taiwan, I mean, your colleagues on this show who are military background like you say, forget it, it can't be done. The United States couldn't possibly win a war against China over Taiwan. Not at all, not at all. We would be in the same position Zelensky is. We would have to destroy the entire island so that there's nothing to fight over. That would be the only way to prevail against China on something like that.

And hopefully it's not going to come to war, what happens in Taiwan and China. China should be between Taiwan and China. But yeah, this idea, I mean, it's almost when you watch Hedgeseth there saying those words, I was thinking Teddy Roosevelt a little bit, except Teddy Roosevelt, probably a little bit tougher and smarter than Hedgeseth. But this idea of we own North and Southern hemispheres. North and South America are our territory. Monroe Doctrine, the great white fleet showing. And the great white fleet has some instructive value here.

They painted, Roosevelt painted all the, Teddy, Teddy Roosevelt painted all the ships, repainted them white and shining and made them look really good, but they were old ships. They were old ships and we had a poor reputation of not taking care of our Navy. It was in decline. So what he did was he painted them to make them look good on the outside and he floated them all over. Took a big tour around South America, Australia all over to send the American message that we're here, we're bad, we're big, we're lethal. And the people who were the recipients of that,

who saw that, saw it for what it was 120 years ago, they saw it for what it was. And when you see Hedgeseth there with his slicked back hair, looking very youthful, but not very bright, we see through this. And I think definitely our potential adversaries around the world see through this. They see it as posturing and it is actually conscientious.

He strike you, listen, I know he has an undergraduate degree from Princeton and a master's degree from Harvard but he doesn't strike me. And I've known him for 10 or 12 years. Does he strike you as a deep thinker? Does he strike you as the type of person who if Donald Trump says, I want to blow up that bridge in Tehran, but say, when I, wait a minute, you got to think of the natural, unprobable consequences of something like that to me is, he's the type of guy who'll say,

you want to blow up the bridge, when do you want it done? Yeah. Yeah. He doesn't. If you look at his life, his adult life and his work, he stayed busy doing non-academic things. He's been through a couple of divorces. He has a large family. Families are very important commitments

and I believe he's committed to his children. But that takes energy. And so he's putting his chosen energy into things like that and also occurring political favors, certainly. He is ambitious, he was happy to take over this job that he maneuvered himself into really to get the Donald Trump appointment. So he spends his energy and his brain power on the things he cares about and he does not care about history and he doesn't necessarily care about reflection. I don't think he cares about strategy. His idea that he did come in with some ideas

on reforming or fixing, streamlining the Pentagon. He wanted to make it more lethal. He wanted to make fighting forces dedicated and competent and respected. There's nothing wrong with wanting your fighting forces to be respected and competent and having the money well spent on the important things. There's nothing wrong with that. But I haven't seen him do anything yet towards that end. What he has done is been a servant boy to the president, which in part is his job.

But you know, the president also has appointments like this to advise him, to wisely counsel him. And that's what's not happening. I don't think Head Set is prepared to wisely counsel the president. I do think he might be a disruptor and he might be somebody who really can improve and really break the Pentagon up, you know, really change the way we do business, bring troops home, close overseas bases, close domestic bases, focus on things that make sense, cut the outrageous acquisition costs. There's things that he can do

and I think he's capable of doing them, but right now- Do you really think he wants to close things down? I mean, this morning he boasted about, he's the first administrative department in the world to have a budget of a trillion dollars. It doesn't sound like he's interested in shutting anything down to me. It sounds like he wants to spend that money, not return it. Yeah. And that's not how he advertised his candidacy. That's not how he said he would be.

So he's revealed himself to either be a weaker person, a weaker character than he proclaimed he would be, or he simply does whatever Trump wants and he's not even smart enough to understand what Trump wants and how Trump got elected. Because Trump is, he outclasses, he does crazy things, but he outclasses most of the people around him in his ability to play the game. He says, we say, oh, he's random. He says whatever he thinks. Well, he kind of does, but there's always, not always, but a lot of times there's a purpose

behind it. But when Hedges says something, I don't have any sense that there's any purpose or strategy behind what he's saying. I think he's… Let's get back to Ukraine. You ask an interesting question in your piece, after Ukraine and NATO are spun off, who's next? The title of the piece.

When Ukraine falls, I mean, who's going to blame who? I mean, Trump will blame NATO, the Democrats will blame Trump. I don't know if Zelensky will be around to blame anybody else. How do you see this coming down? Yeah, well, you know, what made me consider this, well, we know that Ukraine has lost and there really isn't any predictable way, there's no way that we can think of that Ukraine could ever even regain lost territories, much less retake them.

So we know this, we're in a new phase of this conflict. But what kicked this article off really is looking at the details of the mineral deal that Trump wanted, that Zelensky said three times he would do, but then when he goes home they tell him, no, no, you're not going to do that. But it's a very harsh, it's a harsh deal. It's a deal that from a Ukrainian perspective is basically making them indentured servants.

And I'm using Moon of Alabama's phraseology there because he was describing how that would be perceived. And if you have a peace with your allies that is worse than a peace with your enemy, and that would be peace with Russia, then maybe Ukraine would be better off being administered by Russia. And having Russia as the kind of, I hate to use the word overlord, but Ukraine is a broken state, it needs so much money and so much help, they might be treated better by the Russians, their fellow Slavic brothers with a long history,

despite the conflicts, then they will ever be treated by Europe, who sees them as substandard Europeans, and by the Americans who totally could care less about Ukrainians. I mean, we have no traditional connection, cultural connection with Ukrainians other than American Ukrainians, okay? And that's not a powerful group. So if this was off the table, if Ukraine was spun off, let the Russians administer and have their piece,

do what they need to do, finish their special military operation, clean up the Nazi situation there. If you put that off the table, then Trump is looking at what? What is he looking at? Well, he's got the Middle East. And of course, what I'm thinking is, you know, when something is too difficult and too expensive and non-productive to support, Trump will cut it. It's like the capital firms that go in and the vultures that go in and they sell off all the bad parts of the company that aren't working. You know, we can do that with Ukraine. And then the next one, who's next?

Well, very well could be NATO, and they talk about that, but it also then after that we're free of NATO, we blame NATO, NATO's on its own, stop expanding, pay attention to your naval, whatever you need to do NATO, we don't care. And then the next expensive bad and malinvestment of the American corporation is Israel. And we'll spin them off too, at least that

is a possibility. So I just was playing kind of a game, an intellectual game to see if anything fits because to me Trump is very fascinating. He breaks so many things. Ideologies, you know, he's unpredictable, he's all over the place. He doesn't care about the international order that so many people in Washington love and adore and have been enriched by. He doesn't care about that.

So he's fun to watch, but I don't understand him. So it's kind of a way that I try to play out to see, can we make sense of what we're seeing? And for the most part, we cannot, but anyway, that was my attempt. Thank you and I share the same view of tariffs. It's a species of central planning. It impairs free choice. In the case of the president imposing tariffs, it's unconstitutional. It's a sales tax, only Congress can impose a tax. I think we're on the same page on that. But you have a very interesting observation

also in this piece where you say, quoting our mutual friend, Lew Rockwell, the language of tariffs is the same as the language of war. Can you explain please, Colonel Kwiatkowski? Yeah, well, we can, even if we know nothing about the history of tariffs or anything, or whether it's attacks, whether it's unconstitutional, all these things, the language of tariffs, the way Trump speaks of them, is war. He uses them as a weapon, an M16, a hammer, an axe, that, you know, he is attacking,

he is defending, in his mind I think, defending. And he's doing it with this weapon of tariffs. And his idea, I throw these, he puts a tariff up there, then they come to him to negotiate, and he either makes the tariff bigger and punishes them or he rewards them with less beatings. He uses it as a weapon, but he speaks of it as if it's a weapon, a tool of the executive suite. But we can just say, we can see that.

Anybody who watches that will, if they think about it, yeah, that's exactly the same language. But the people that study tariffs, the people that write about them, the economists who understand them, you know, Bastiat said, where goods cannot flow, armies will follow. So a tariff is a precursor to wars, it's a precursor to so many historic wars that it should be a common knowledge.

And of course, Lerocque has written about it, a lot of people have written about it, but the Austrian view of course is that, as you said, attacks, it always comes back on the people, it strengthens the power of the executive branch of the government. Clearly, since he's not allowing Congress to do their job, it is devaluing that representative body to legislate, he's doing the legislation.

Yeah, he's a, I hate to agree with the lefties, but he very much in this regard is a leaning totalitarian, in terms of how he will exercise war powers because the president can have some limited war powers. He's including tariffs in that. The president can have some limited war powers, he's including tariffs in that. Let's watch something together for the first time because Chris just got it. Apparently Ukraine has captured two Chinese citizens fighting for Russia. And Tammy Bruce is attempting to explain it. Now this Tammy Bruce whom I know from Fox, she is the

spokesperson for the State Department. She is no more credible than Matthew Miller, her predecessor who was Tony Blinken's spokesperson, but this is about 30 seconds long, so I'm not sure what we're going to see, but if it's from Tammy Bruce, it'll be worth commenting. Here we go, Chris. You know, it's disturbing. It's disturbing with North Korea participating. It's disturbing with the Chinese soldiers having been captured. We're aware of those reports that Ukraine captured two Chinese citizens fighting on behalf of Russia in Ukraine. China is a major enabler of Russia in the war in Ukraine. China provides nearly 80% of the dual-use items

Russia needs to sustain the war. God, I wish she could just talk to reporters instead of looking down and reading from her iPad all the time. Tony Blinken must have written her, must have pre-grieved. It sounds that way. You know, it reminds me, I've used this line before. It's, I first heard it from Tom Woods. No matter who you vote for, you got John McCain.

He's talking about voting for president. The people that run the State Department and the Defense Department are the same also, and their spokespersons are the same. Oh my gosh. I know it's very... And I'm surprised you used the word disturbing, because it's disturbing to me that we have engaged in a proxy war with Russia, nuclear-armed power threatening World War III to destroy the planet because of what?

That hasn't been explained. There's no value there. Why are we doing it? That's disturbing. I'm disturbed by that. But she's the two Chinese guys were fighting. I mean, my God, how many Americans have gone over there and fight?

We have, they have local hometown interviews when they come back, talk about their time in the Ukrainian army. These all kinds of things. when they come back, talk about their time in the Ukrainian army, you know, these, okay. The State Department will not reveal how many Americans have been caught, captured and killed, but our intrepid reporter who reports into us from time to time, an American named Patrick Lancaster,

who's right there at the intersection of where the fighting occurs, tells us he has seen Americans. Yeah, absolutely. That's also disturbing. So yeah, she has no credibility. Maybe that's why she's reading her notes. She is afraid. She doesn't really know. They told her to say this, but it's a shame. We need more people that will stand up and just say, you know, say what they say with it. I mean, if you're going to use the word disturbing, it better be disturbing what you're doing. You're devaluing that word.

RT Russia Today, you and I have both appeared on the network reports over 1,100 American mercenaries have arrived in Ukraine to fight against Russia. At the tail end of the war that Ukraine is losing, are these people out of their minds? Wow. That is interesting. These aren't over the period of three years. This is recently. They have newer influx. According to this summary that I have of the RT, what RT is reporting. So Russian Intel knows

exactly who they are, where they're from, and where they are. That's right. Well, you know, it is Russia's neighborhood, that part of the world. Russia, we would expect them to be highly knowledgeable about what happens, their intelligence to be pretty good, just like we would if it was something close to us. So we have to appreciate that the Russians in particular as kind of the opponent here of Trump and Zelensky and Europe, he's very competent. You know, this is again, we see this with Pete Hedges.

There's really no recognition of how incompetent we are in our Defense Department particularly, but also how incompetent we appear to the rest of the world. We seem unaware of that. And that's a problem because when the truth always wins out, reality bites. And when it does, many Americans who still, the remaining Americans who have bought into the fantasy of we're

number one and we have the best, most powerful military in the world and we can do anything we want, when that bubble bursts, they will be very unhappy. These Americans will be shocked and unhappy. I think the percentage of Americans in that group is shrinking. I think many Americans get what I'm saying. We couldn't recruit for many years,

and you could say the military, oh, well, this was DEI. It was this or that. It wasn't this or that, and it wasn't DEI particularly. What it was, was everybody's uncles and cousins and brothers and sisters were coming back from these never-ending wars, and they were advising their nephews and their children and their spouses and their spouses' cousins, do not join the United States military because what it does is not what you think it does. And so they found other work.

That's why we couldn't recruit. And we have a little bump up, oh, more people wanna join the military. Well, in a bad economy, you're gonna see that. But I'll tell you, the lesson that was brought home by 25 years of war in the Middle East, failing, failing more, losing war, 25 years straight, multiple assignments, rotations for a lot of people.

They come back, they share the word, that word gets spread. And Trump voters are part, a big part of, you know, they share that view. They are related to these guys, they're patriots. But they understand, I think, more about American foreign policy and military than the people around Trump. Thank you, Karen, for another very, very thought provoking and deep conversation. I love these conversations. I appreciate them dearly. The viewers do. And we'll look forward to seeing you again next week. All the best. Absolutely. Thank you, Judge. Thank you. Coming up tomorrow, Wednesday at eight in the morning,

Professor Gilbert Doctorow at 1.30 in the afternoon. Who knows where he's coming from this time? Pepe Escobar at three in the afternoon, Phil Giraldi. At four in the afternoon, the always worth waiting for Max Blumenthal. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. You