Judging Freedom - Prof. Glenn Diesen : Alaska Viewed From Europe.

Episode Date: August 21, 2025

Prof. Glenn Diesen : Alaska Viewed From Europe.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, August 21st, 2025. Professor Glenn Deeson, joined us now from Norway. Professor Redizun, always a pleasure. Thank you very much for joining us. I'm curious about what you think is in the minds of the European elites, whether it's the people who mold public opinion, whether it's the wealthy people, whether it's the media people, or whether

it's that cast of characters that was in the White House with President Trump the other day. Do they want peace in Ukraine or do they want a forever war with their hopes that it would weaken President Putin? Well, of course, Europe is a very split and divided continent with different interests. I mean, the Greek and the Latvians don't have the same interest or security concerns. But if you listen to some, such as the prime minister, of Denmark, she said that continuing the conflict would be better than peace. If you listen to the German intelligence chief, he argued it would be better if the war goes on for another five years, so Europe can prepare itself.

So there's obviously some who fear that unfavorable peace would be worse than a continued war. And I think the main reason is simply because Europe, kind of went all in on this war. Traditionally, it's been Europeans who have been cautious about provoking war with Russia. As we know, back in 2008, it was Europeans who pushed back against Bush in terms of offering NATO membership to Ukraine and Georgia, as Merkel said back in those days, it would be interpreted by Moscow as a declaration of war. But now, of course, we have three and a half years of going full in its proxy war, contributing

to the killings of tens of thousands of Russians. Missile attacks supported by European countries to strike Russian cities. We went after the economy, attempted to isolate them internationally. The EU foreign policy chief, Kayakala, said she wanted to break up Russia into smaller countries. Also, boycotted diplomacy for three and a half years, essentially only leaving a military solution. So now the war is being lost and making matters worse, the Americans are suggesting they don't to just pull out of Ukraine, they would like to pivot out of Europe so they can pivot to Asia. I mean, this was a horrible, horrible bet on the European part, which went all wrong.

Are they unhappy with Donald Trump's efforts to negotiate? I don't think he's going to be successful, but I give him credit for trying. Are they unhappy with and wish him ill in his efforts to negotiate peace? between Ukraine and Russia? I think so, yes, because the main objective for the Europeans, which is kind of evident in all their statements, is they would like, they say they want peace, they want negotiations, but they want it on their terms,

which is, as Europeans define it, it tends to be keeping the path to NATO open. The Russians should pay reparations. There will be no territorial concessions. article 5 kind of type security guarantees like they want effectively Russia to capitulate in as Russia's

winning in this and I think it's also been obvious from the point from the start that the main advantage to European so was when Zelensky first agreed that yes we will accept a ceasefire all the main European leaders went out on Twitter and tweeted more or less exact

same words, the ball is in Russia's court. And you had a massive media campaign suggesting that now it was Russia who opposed peace. And this was good because now after the initial debacle they had in the Oval Office with Zelensky, now they could sell to Trump that

Putin didn't want peace. Never mind the three years of refusing to negotiate with the Russians. It was the Russians who opposed this and therefore Trump should bear full pressure on the Russians to get peace. And this is kind what they hoped that if you can bring Trump into the fighting again and make him the new Biden then then this was a goal on its own and then you can continue this containment and

balancing of Russia but no they they they don't want any kind of peace on the terms which apparently Trump and Putin agreed to in Alaska how was the G7 meeting in the White House of you and in the European press? Well, the main idea was that you would have all this big heavy hitters, as political called them, from Europe coming to back up Zelensky's to make sure that a bad deal wouldn't come long. So collectively, they would stand strong against Trump. But of course, the main strategy appears to be the same thing, just shower, Trump with flattery and essentially kissing up to daddy, telling him how wonderful and powerful he is.

And he's the best person to bring peace because he's powerful and he can threaten Russia. And if he just puts enough pressure, Putin will break because Trump is so strong. So it's the same tactic, but it's kind of empty and there's nothing there. This seems actually to be a bit of a backlash if you look at the British media as well as other places in Europe, where this lineup of these European leaders, for example, sitting in front of Trump's desk like schoolchildren, some are becoming aware that they haven't just thrown away all their military power here and thrown away their economies,

but they're throwing away their dignity as well. So this subordination to Trump, it might have the opposite effect of what they wanted because it's quite obvious that he has, you know, he rolled out a red card, carpet for Putin. He respect him as a state leader. Well, there seems to be a little bit of contempt for the Europeans who... I agree with you. I honestly thought he treated them terribly. I mean, at one point, he threw them out of the Oval Office while he supposedly made a phone call of Vladimir Putin. There was never any readout or any confirmation of the call, so who knows if he actually made it or if it was a stunt. Then when he brought the back in, they were no longer

around a table where they were equals, they were like schoolchildren facing the headmaster or the principal of the school to be chastised or interrogated. And I'm surprised that to some of them, particularly von der Leyen and Mertz, went along with it. I don't know what he said to them when the cameras were off, but I do know what Chancellor MERS and President Macron said he said to them. They both said he told the group he was willing to use American military as part of a security guarantee in a post-war Ukraine. Now, we know, you and I know and people watching this show know, and therefore they, the European leaders must know that this is a non-starter with the Russians.

So either Trump said it to dupe them or Trump said it in ignorance or they misunderstood what Trump said, but this is not going to happen. Yeah, I usually go with two competing theories. One is that Trump doesn't always know what is saying. It's a bit careless and, well, not too informed about the situation. But the opposing, well, the competing theory, is that he's simply trying to bring the Europeans and Zelensky along because he dropped this huge bomb on them

because they had bet everything on a ceasefire which meant to freeze the conflict, allow them to rearm Ukraine and prolong the war. Trump had also said he wanted to ceasefire and even threatened the Russians only a few days before. So now suddenly he has to take the ceasefire completely off the table, which was supposed to be the reason for why he was going to go and confront the Russians.

So in order to get the Europeans and Zelensky along, it seems it could be possible that, yeah, he was, well, let's say, throwing them a bone by suggesting, well, they might, they will not get NATO. This is off the table. There will be no ceasefire. There have to be territorial swaps. But, you know, the one little thing that he could offer was the security guarantees. But given that he was quite ambiguous in terms of what security guarantee would actually entail. there appears to be some walking back from Washington of this idea that the Americans would provide any air support. So it might be just this is what is trying to do. He's trying to manipulate both sides to bridge this massive divide. But at the end of the day, there's not much you can do with the Russians because for them, this is an existential threat and to have NATO in Ukraine. And the second is they don't have to make a compromise on the.

the red lines because the alternative to a deal is that they just win now on the battlefield and take what they want so the pressure kind of has to be put against europe and selensky if he does one in the war and this could be a way of yeah simply pulling them along getting their consent and then later on he will start to water out what any possible security guarantee might mean Do the EU elites recognize the dangerous, deplorable, and weakened state of the Ukrainian military? I mean, Colonel McGregor, Scott Ritter, Colonel Schaefer, they all say their days are numbered, and everybody knows it, including their own leadership. But do the Europeans acknowledge this? I'm not sure to be honest I just know from their statements from the media they're all stuck in a bit of a bubble whether or not this is some kind of mass psychosis I don't know but but you know what you get out of this bubble is always the same talking point which is oh look how slowly the front lines are actually moving how little territory the Russians have actually taken by this you know pace they will take them another 50 to 200 years to conquer all of you

Ukraine but again this is a very strange analysis because I always make the point this is a war of attrition and in a war of attrition you never send all your men and equipment to storm well fortified front lines and it does make any sense you will lose your men and equipment and you get nothing so what you do is first to destroy the enemy and then you can go for the territories and I think that's what the Russians have done and if you look at their tactics as well usually when they set up this cauldrons with where they capture or semi encircle some important

strategic regions or cities. The Ukrainians are rushing a lot of soldiers and equipment into this cauldrons and the Russians don't seem to be in a hurry to take the territory. Instead, they see the optimal situation to have this favorable attrition rate, that is that the Ukrainians are taking

high casualties where the Russians are taking low. And so they're slowly grinding down and bleeding the enemy white. And now that they achieve this, that the Ukrainian army has been largely destroyed, you see now they're not able to populate the front lines. So instead of going and storm, taking high casualties to take this fortified defensive lines, we see the Russians now entering many defensive lines, which aren't even manned with any Ukrainian soldiers. So they're able now to move ahead without

any loss, well, significant losses. And so I think it's very dishonest the way the Europeans have portrayed how slow and ineffective the Russian advances are. I think that in the final stages of wars, you usually do see that the territories begin to collapse much faster. Supply lines, logistics is disrupted, communication. We'll see more soldiers surrounded. More will surrender. They will desert.

And as we see now domestically within Ukraine, the war is becoming very unpopular. now that everyone knows that it is being lost. So I just, yeah, that's a long answer to your question. But my point is it doesn't make any sense. But given that everyone is saying the same thing, every politician, every newspaper, every news show is saying the same thing that the Russians are doing human waves and making slow advancements.

You know, sometimes newspapers still thinks that Ukraine can win this. So there might be some self-deception, wishful thinking, or just, as I suggested, mass hysteria. I want to play a clip from Secretary of State Rubio about what he says is the new relationship between the United States and Europe and Ukraine with respect to weapons. And they ask you if this can possibly be true. It's not very long. Chris, cut number five. But as the Ukrainians have said to us, and I think have said publicly, you know, the strongest security guarantee, they can come up with their future is to have a strong military moving forward.

And that's the other dynamic that's changed. We're no longer giving Ukraine weapons. We're no longer giving Ukraine money. We are now selling them weapons, and European countries are paying for it through NATO. They are using NATO to buy the weapons and transfer them to Ukraine. That's another big change from the way this war was approached just a few, you know, just under the Biden administration. Is that true? Are European nations paying American arms manufacturing?

to manufacture or ship arms to Ukraine? Because these things, if so, these things can't be made overnight. Well, I think this is the key problem. Well, some Europeans have already opposed this. The Italians said that this is not something they can do. The Slovakian prime minister went out yesterday and said, we're not going to participate in anything where we spend all our money on buying American weapons only to ship it to Ukraine to fight the war,

which has already been lost. But overall, this is a very strange proposition because the Americans don't really have these weapons to sell. They exhausted their weapon depots, and the Europeans don't have any money to buy these weapons because they have spent a lot of their weapons. They're deindustrializing, largely because of cutting themselves off from Russian energy

as well as the Nord Stream destruction, but also the Ukrainians. They can't actually use all these weapons because a key problem on the Ukrainian side is the manpower. As I said before, they've been bled white. They don't really have the people to use these weapons anymore. And so you have problems besides this, there's still even more problems. That is, a lot of these weapons would still have to rely on American intelligence and also targeting, if not even using it to some extent.

So all of this would still pull United States further into this conflict. So I don't think this is a reasonable proposition. Again, are they trying to pressure the Russians to make concessions? Are they trying to give the Ukrainian something so they can feel they're not leaving empty-handed? I'm not really sure, but this is not a recipe for victory. One of the more pugnacious neocons in the United States, the Senator Lindsey Graham, who unfortunately, for peace in the world, plays golf with the president all the time and sits next to him in the golf cart. It gets to whisper in his ear and is always arguing in favor of more and more war.

Here's some latest clips from Senator Graham. Putin fears Trump, and he's been a, I think he's been tough. And my advice to President Trump and Marco is if you've got to convince Putin that if this war doesn't end, justly and honorably, with Ukraine making concessions also, we're going to destroy the Russian economy. We have the ability to do it. To Europe, why don't you put tariffs on India for buying Russian oil? To Europe, why don't you threaten China with tariffs for being the largest purchaser of? of Russian oil. To Europe, you can do more. If Europe and the United States banded together and we told Russia that if this war does not come to an end, we're going to destroy your fossil

fuel economy, this war would come to an end. I think we have the ability to crush the Russian economy through putting tariffs on people who buy Russian oil and gas, buying cheap oil to prop up his war machine. And I intend to push that until I can't push anymore. Isn't that absurd? Yeah, it doesn't make much sense. I mean, we already saw what this led to. That is, ahead of the Alaska summit, Trump was going to have some leverage over the Russians in terms of showing that he could crush their economy unless they actually did what he wanted.

He did already do this. He put pressures on India, China, threatened them with secondary sanctions. both the Indians and Chinese have suggested that they will just have to learn to learn to learn to live with the secondary sanctions because they have returned to buying Russian energy. So this efforts to isolate Russia is not really working. On the contrary, it has a very unfortunate effect of isolating the United States because countries like India always wanted excellent relations with the U.S., and a lot of this has now been tarnished. But a key flaw in Lindsay Graham's analysis as well is he keeps referring to this fossil-fueled economy, which sounds a bit like John McCain's comment that Russia has this gas station masquerading as a country. But if you go through the numbers, Russia's not simply pumping oil and building weapons.

They do actually have a proper economy. I always make the point. If you look at the top 20 IT sites being. visited in the world. None of them are actually European except for one, which is Yandex, which is the Russian one. They do have a proper digital ecosystem. They do have heavy industries. Keep in mind that now, just in the weapons sphere, the Russians are now producing more than all of NATO combined much faster. In three months, they produce what NATO can produce in one year. That includes the United States in this big pack.

the idea that they're just you know selling oil and that this is what keeps them alive it's it's nonsense and uh yeah why on earth after all the years of happy neutrality did finland join nato what provoked that well the russian invasion of uh of ukraine it sure startled a lot of people and people only know essentially what they read in the papers and all the papers you know no one presented the russian security concerns or motivations everything from day one was this is unprovoked this is russian imperialism they want to restore the soviet union put in hitler so so for the first time you had a majority of fins who wanted who was in sudden in favor of nato enlargement and and then they just rushed

Finland in and they took essentially what was the greatest success story for neutrality to make it instead the largest front line against Russia and now the Russians are rebuilding the Leningrad military district and up close to the border of Finland and you know this we are it's just it they are instigating a security competition which every action there's an equal and opposite reaction it's terrible I want to ask you one last subject matter, or address one last subject matter, and forgive my ignorance. Is there meaningful diplomacy between EU nations and Russia? Do they have ambassadors and staffs and embassies and consulates,

or are they have a wall between them as the U.S. did with Russia until Trump knocked it down on Friday? Well, there's still embassies, but they have been cut down. severely in size in terms of the staffing. I'm not sure which country has perhaps revoked their ambassadors. It goes a bit back and forth in terms of the pressure. But it's, yeah, the lack of diplomacy, the unwillingness to call Moscow to sit down and talk with the Russians, this is quite extraordinary, especially that they're still doing this after Trump is holding this diplomacy, which,

puts them in this awkward position where they demand to be a part of the negotiations, but they don't want to talk to Russia. No one wants to pick up the phone. So there still talks in France. Should we pick up the phone now? It's the time to start to talk to the Russians because in the efforts of isolating Russia, it turns out that we're isolating ourselves. And I guess it just has to be pointed out what kind of a historical mistake has been done here,

that the whole process over the past 30 years of expanding NATO, what was supposed to create a collective hegemony of the collective West. What actually happened was we isolated or alienated Russia, which was the main strategic ambition it had was to create an inclusive Europe where it would belong. And instead, we pushed away the Russians, got engaged in war, which we're now losing. And this happens at a time when 500 years of Western leadership in the world is coming to an end with the rise of the East.

And we really needed Russia on our side of the ledger. But now, I think we'll go down in history as the worst geopolitical blunder. Because in the years to come now, all the Russians' weapons will point to the West, while all its economic connectivity will go to the East. So I think Trump recognizes this. Why fight the war we lost and alienate this massive country, which we could get along with? But the Europeans, they only double down, and they don't want any diplomacy. They don't want to normalize or legitimize the Kremlin.

So it's no, no, they still haven't adjusted to realities. Our friends and colleagues, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, whom you'll be working with soon. and Pepe Escobar have both opined that in one sense, Vladimir Putin was in Alaska as a representative of Bricks, reminding the Secretary of the Treasury, one of the people in the room, that Russia is self-sufficient with its friends, Brazil, India, China, and South Africa. The United States is going to tariff its way out of that economic community. Yeah, well, again, this is you said before. Every action has a reaction.

And this is the problem. The reason why you have breaks is a lot of countries they would like to find an alternative economic infrastructure. I mean, I've been to a lot of these conferences where you have Indian leaders, Chinese leaders. I talk to their ambassadors. and they're all more or less all saying the same thing. We want the bricks which offers an alternative economic infrastructure because we no longer can rely on American technologies, industries, transportation corridors, bank, payment systems, you know, insurances, whatever it might be.

So we need alternatives. But we do not want to be a part of an anti-American club. And they always kind of make this point a bit subtle, especially when the conference take place in Russia, given that they know there's tensions. But now with the U.S. US trying to, well, sanction all the BRICS member and punish them for trying to diversify away from the US, it's only incentivizing them from recognizing that, well,

we can't really be dependent on the US because, well, essentially, Trump is threatening countries that if they don't use the dollar, they will be punished and they can be punished because they use the dollar. So I think it all has a very, it's all very counterproductive. And at the end of the day, I don't think anyone gains from this. I mean, nobody wants to see the U.S. economy collapse or going to deep struggle. I think most of the large powers would see international stability rely on the United States, taking a more modest or moderate position in the international system as one many say like one among equals.

So this very adversarial relationship, it's not what anyone wants, but sorry, again, very long answer to your question. Yeah, I do think, to some extent, Prussia represented Bricks. It's a deep analytical answer, and I appreciate it, and there's much more to talk about on Bricks when we return. Professor Deeson, thank you very much for your time. Again, thank you for having me as your guest on your show earlier this week. It was a real pleasure. Safe travels. We'll look forward to seeing you here next week. Thanks. Of course. Coming up later today at 2 o'clock, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson at 3 o'clock, Professor John Mearsheimer.

Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.