Judging Freedom - Ray McGovern: China/Russia/Ukraine and Nukes

Episode Date: September 3, 2024

Ray McGovern: China/Russia/Ukraine and NukesSee 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, September 3rd, 2024. Ray McGovern will be with us in just a moment. And we will examine it as in as much depth as we can at this moment. The recent very serious attack on a military educational institute not far from Kiev, carried out probably by two ballistic missiles launched by the Russian military. But first this. A divisive presidential election is upon us and the winner is gold. Let me tell you what I mean. Since 2016, our national debt has grown a staggering 70%

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people are killed, and I think it's 41 now, and more than 180 were injured. What do we know about this attack, Ray? Well, Zelensky has already complained about it, has said that these figures, 41 killed and hundreds wounded, he said that there was no chance for people to get into the shelters because the early warning radar or the early warning siren didn't go off in time. That suggests to me that these were hypersonic missiles against which there is no defense. Even Biden admitted that at one point two years ago. I asked Colonel McGregor, I said, do you think these were hypersonic? He said, well, yeah, they probably were. But, you know, Ukrainian air defenses are so shabby these days, they could have been something less and still hit this target.

It's a major target. This is a major Russian retaliation for all the things that have been going on, especially the recent dealings in Washington. Do you think that President Putin has lost his patience with what has been going on in Kursk? Do you think he is caving to right-wing pressure, or do you think that this is just the next step in his very slow, very methodical, very inexorable, seemingly unstoppable movement to win back eastern Ukraine? Well, it is unstoppable. He is in the catberg seat. I don't think he's going to be provoked by things like invasions of Kursk to change his mind. Now, that doesn't mean that the Russians aren't worried about what the U.S. and the Ukrainians might intend to do in the short

term. And I mean, of course, before November 5th, when the election takes place in the United States. So the Russians are doing all they can to remind people, look, we have tactical nuclear weapons, too. And I see that as a preemptive, a kind of, well, a kind of a move that would remind the ukrainians that you know if you ask the the us to use just a little mini tactical nuke that's crazy because we have them too don't even think about it um do we know if this was a military target as the russians claim or if it was just an educational institute and a hospital as the president zielinski claims well the times has already said that the cadets the trainees were lined up and had no chance to disperse or seek shelter so uh it's not a matter of trusting the Russians.

The New York Times is not very trusting the Russians, but the New York Times pretty much confirmed that this was a military educational training center. It's been a traumatic weekend in terms of events. We'll get to Israel in a minute, but what is your take on the German elections, which showed a startling success for the AfD would win 30%, 33%, as it did in Terentia and Saxony. Bundes-Sarawakian-Knecht. It's an offshoot of the old Morabun-Linke party, the left party, and it garnered 16% of the vote, more than the ruling parties in Berlin, all put together, 16% in Thuringia.

And if you put that together, 12% in Saxony, but there's also a remnant of the Die Linke in Saxony, 5%. So there's 16% in both regions. Now, Wagenknecht and the AFD differ on many things, social policies among them, but they're united against further involvement in Ukraine. They want to have a more respectful and more decent relationship with Russia. So in the bottom analysis, it would seem to me that Scholz's government is very short-lived now.

I don't think it's going to last very much, not probably even until the next parliamentary elections, which don't really come until October of next year. All right. So the elections of which you speak were regional elections, not national, like a state legislature in the U.S. as opposed to the U.S. Congress. What is the name of this new party? And can you translate? I love the way you speak. And can you translate it into English after you give the name in German? Well, no, the name is the Alliance, the SANA, Wagenknecht.

Now, Wagenknecht is not so difficult for the Germans, okay? More than that, she's incredibly popular. I mean, she's smart as all get out. She's reasonable in many respects, and she has resurrected what was left of the Die Linke party. I heard from one of my friends who was a pretty high-level official in her Bundes, in her alliance, and he said things are very spannend here. Spannend is exciting, dramatic. This is a big deal that she makes this showing. Now, the other side of it, of course, is this is a fraction of the German population. Altogether, maybe six, seven percent of all the voters in Germany. But it's a harbinger of things to come. And on Ukraine, I think it's kind of the death knell here, not only on Ukraine, but on the prospect of the U.S. having persuaded Schultz to put in the equivalent of intermediate, short-range, and even longer-range nuclear

missiles in Germany starting in 2026. That's, in my view, that's over because these people are wising up to the fact that they shouldn't be so subservient to the United States, particularly on Ukraine. Tell me about AFD. Well, AFD is a right-wing sort of thing. Their big thing is immigration. I don't agree at all, and neither does Saddam Hussein on their very extreme views on immigration. But they're not as Nazi-like as many people make them out to be. If you read the New York Times today, you know,

they're still singing the praises of the Christian Democrats. The Christian Democrats are finished as far as I'm concerned. They didn't win many votes at all in either of those regional elections. So the AFD is a power to contend with. Scholz this morning said, don't form any coalitions with the AFD. Well, I don't know if you can make that stick in Saxony and Thuringia. I don't know if you'll even be able to make that stick in the rest of Germany as the new elections come up. There are more regional elections before the national parliamentary elections in October of next year.

And so we'll have to see how it pans out. But the Germans already said they run out of money. They're not going to give a lot more support to Ukraine. And now this is sort of the coup de grace, in my view, not only for German support for the Ukrainian misadventure, but also for Scholz, who has shown himself to be inept. Also over the weekend, President Erdogan announced that Turkey wants to join BRICS. Now, how could they possibly be in BRICS and NATO at the same time?

Well, only Erdogan could do that. You know, it's like having one leg on either side of the Bosporus, for example. You know, he's very clever. But the big thing here is what it shows about NATO. NATO is splitting apart. You've got not only what I mentioned in Germany now, you have the French paralyzed by the last election there, the snap election that Macron called.

You have Hungary, you have Slovakia, all out of step with what's going on. And so the notion that NATO is united as never before with the Finns and the Swedes, give me a break, they're not. And what that will mean for Ukraine is substantive, because without an alliance that can claim with some credibility to be united, it's going to fall apart. And the question is still, in my view, what happens between now and November 5th? How will the U.S. try to rescue Ukraine out of this mess? And you know my fears about what the U.S. might resort to. What are your views about the interest that China can be sort of kept away from Russia can be cajoled into not supporting Russia. He wanted to see if that was still true. It was never true during his tenure. And so I think the Chinese, I would say the Middle Kingdom gave him the middle finger, okay? And what Jake Sullivan has had to

learn from the Chinese is that if there's trouble, if the balloon goes up really drastically in Ukraine, the Chinese will be likely to do more than issue serious warnings as they used to do in the 60s. They're likely to stir up trouble in the South China Sea, where they claim territory that the Filipinos and the others are challenging them on. In other words, the prospect of a two-front war. I think the Chinese disabused Sullivan of any notion that the Chinese would, so to speak, stand or sit idly by while the balloon goes up in Ukraine and the U.S. raises the ante there. If the Chinese wanted to influence the ability of the U.S. to help the Israelis fight Hezbollah, might they just stir the pot in the

South China Sea and tempt the Secretary of Defense to get one of his aircraft carriers out of the Mediterranean? Well, there are two carriers, at last report report in the Mediterranean Persian Gulf area right now. I don't think the Chinese really care much about aircraft carriers. They're sitting ducks. That's why the Chinese only have one such aircraft carrier. So I could see the Chinese diverting attention by stirring up some trouble, even in the Taiwan Strait. So I think that's less likely than the South China Sea. But the whole idea is the Chinese read the riot act and said, look, Jake Sullivan, if you think that Russia and China can be split apart here so that you can deal with Russia first and then come after us, you know, we read your strategic read your strategic documents. We know what the Pentagon

says. China's the main enemy. That's us, right? And you're going to get Russia first? Give me a break. We're together, and we're not going to let you do that. And so all this business about enhancing nuclear capabilities, the US is saying, well, we're going to have to go after China and North Korea as well as Russia now, so we have to enhance our capability. Well, the Chinese are worried about that. They're already rebuilding or building more ICBMs and so forth. But it's a very volatile situation. And the Chinese and the Russians are trying to say to the U.S., look, don't even think about nuclear weapons. We can match them, but we don't want to have to do that.

Here's what Jake Sullivan had to say about his own trip to China. I think he's still in China when he's saying this, but he was about to depart. Chris. about to depart. Chris? President Biden has been very clear in his conversations with President Xi that he is committed to managing this important relationship responsibly. And the outcomes of the Woodside Summit and the work we have done since then demonstrate that, that we are working to ensure the competition does not veer into conflict, and that we find ways to work together where our interests align. What the heck is he talking about? I don't know. You know, he's just trying to reassure people he got everything under control, and that's far from the case. Now, I worry that with the inexorable, your word and mine too,

march of Russian troops to the West, with the ease with which they are going, Putin said just yesterday to some high school children, you know, I'm surprised at how fast we can go now. We're going twice as fast before, and that happens to be true. So what happens if the Russians end up on the Dnieper River before the election and sort of advertise the definitive defeat of NATO, the U.S., and Ukraine? What will Blinken and Sullivan be tempted to do? As you know, I am afraid that they will look on their shelf and see only a

nuclear, a sort of a mini-nuke, a low-yield nuclear weapon left, and that's the only thing they can put into play to prevent a defeat in Ukraine, a defeat in the election, and perhaps a defeat at the hands of this new guy who comes in, who has the book on them and can put them in jail. Here's President Putin yesterday on Ukraine. Sorry about that. Ukraine's failure, cut number four. Their calculation was to stop our offensive actions in key parts of the Donbass. The result is known. Yes, of course, our people are going through a tough time,

especially in the Kursk region. But the main task of the enemy was to stop our offensive in Donbass, and they failed. Stop our offensive in Donbass, and they failed. There's no in Donbass and they failed. There's no disputing this, is there? Well, on the ground, yes, they failed. What their intention was in the beginning,

if they thought that by taking their best troops, best armed troops, out of the Donbass and do this feckless invasion of Kursk. If they thought that that would mousetrap the Russians to matching their folly and drawing troops away from that line, they were crazy. The Russians didn't need to do that. The Russians have plenty of troops up there in Kursk, and they're going to take their time grinding away at what's left of the Ukrainian

forces there. Some 8,000 have already been killed. Now, I take no delight in that, but this was really a crazy Hail Mary pass, trying to get the U.S. and others to realize, look, we've got all kinds of capabilities here. Give us more weapons. Give us the kind of weapons where we can strike really deep into Russia. What are your thoughts on the massive demonstrations and the one-day general strike in Israel over the weekend? It does seem as though Netanyahu is impervious to these things, doesn't it? He didn't waste but an hour or two to say, no, we're going to keep doing this. We're going to stay in that Philadelphia corridor. And we're just going to keep grinding away. Now, again, I think he's depending on people like Sullivan and Blinken to make decisions that will bail them out if they get involved in a wider war.

I don't know how you disabuse him of that. Only if one of them or Biden himself said, look, Bibi, you're on your own if you widen the war. Only if that happens can that be prevented. And now, of course, they're in the way. United States military support for Israel, utterly and totally unconditional. No matter what he does, no matter who he kills, no matter how horrific his behavior, the U.S. is going to back him, or is there some, I hate to use this phrase because it doesn't stick with Biden, red line that he can't cross. Apparently there's no red line. And you have Kamala as well saying all these same things to include

bald-faced lies about Hamas raping Israeli women. That has been disproven. You've had Max Blumenthal on. And the New York Times has actually recanted that. And yet here you have Kamala Harris saying the worst, the rape charges that are not only unproven, but if there are rape charges, they're very much on the side of, it's the Israelis that have demonstrably raped people. Well, there's a video of that, and there's the efforts of Smotrich and Gebir to get the Knesset to give immunity to those nine soldiers who, sorry to say this, videoed themselves raping Palestinian prisoners.

But I think you're right, Netanyahu does seem to be impervious to the outrage. Well, here he is, cut number one. We're asked to make concessions? What message does this send Hamas? It says kill more hostages, murder more hostages, you'll get more concessions. The pressure internationally must be directed at these killers, at Hamas, not at Israel. We say yes, they say no all the time, but they also murdered these people. And now we need maximum pressure on Hamas. or anyone serious about achieving peace and achieving the release, would seriously ask Israel to make these concessions.

We've already made them. Hamas has to make the concessions. Very little truth in what he said when you talk about killers. How many Palestinians are dead now? 44,000? Yeah, Judge, it's not Hamas, it's Palestine. Palestine is being liquidated as we speak. 40,000 is what they can prove. Some people, as you know, say up to 200,000 Palestinians, not Hamas, have all been liquidated. Now, you and I talked about polio a full month ago when the first signs appeared in the excrement there in Israel or in Gaza. Now we have, what, 650,000 vaccinations that are going to be put on children in Gaza under 10. You know, why don't they just stop bombing them, for God's sake? You know, maybe I thought, well, this is a good thing,

you know, vaccinating. Well, there are a lot of people without, not without reason saying, what's in those vaccinations? And why are they letting vaccinations in and not food and water and other supplies as hospital supplies? It stinks to high heaven. I don't know. You could be a conspiracy theorist or not. But why the polio vaccinations are being made now and the rest of the carnage continues. The objective is to exterminate the Palestinians. That's called genocide.

And, you know, that's what's going on. It's going to be interesting to see if the International Criminal Court does finally indict Netanyahu and Gallant, his defense minister, because if and when they do, the world's going to take even more notice of the kind of corners that's going on. And Iran, you know, Iran over the weekend said, look, the Israelis are now in the West Bank, pillaging and killing West Bank citizens,

Palestinians there. We're not going to let this continue very much longer. The Iranians don't have to get involved directly. They can have their surrogates or the people that they support and arm, the ones in Iraq and in Syria and Hezbollah up in the north. They can all do their work on Israel. There were seven U.S. servicemen wounded in Iraq over the weekend. What's that all about?

What are they doing there? So there's lots of ways they can get back. The Iraqi government has asked the Americans to leave and the Defense Department has refused to go. I mean, I couldn't imagine the situation in reverse. You mean

the Iraqi government? Yes. They've asked the Americans to leave and they've refused to go. Imagine Iraqi troops in Texas Yeah, you mean the Iraqi government, you mean? what we're seeing now. I don't know how this is going to end. Nobody does. But I don't think we're going to see a definitive end to either what's going on in Gaza and what's going on in Ukraine before November 5th, something you pointed out many times. Yeah, Judge, you know, when I watched Kamala Harris with the crocodile tears, let's face it, crocodile tears, saying, oh, we need to stop the violence. Oh, we need to blah, blah, blah. Well, she and Joe Biden can simply say, look, Bibi Netanyahu, not one more rifle for you if you continue this genocide. They have that in their power. And it seems to be just off the table, just can't do

that because of the strong influence of the lobby, and especially before an election two months hence. Ray McGovern, thank you, my dear friend. Always a pleasure. We'll see you at the end of the week with that youngster, Larry Johnson. You're most welcome, Judge. Okay, all the best. And the aforestated Larry Johnson coming up at 11 o'clock Eastern, at noon Eastern, Jeffrey Sachs, at 2 o'clock Eastern, Matt Ho, at 2.30 Eastern, Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski.

Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.