Judging Freedom - Scott Ritter: Can Trump Successfully Threaten Putin?

Episode Date: January 27, 2025

Scott Ritter: Can Trump Successfully Threaten Putin?See 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 Monday, January 27th, 2025. Scott Ritter is here with us on, can Donald Trump really threaten Vladimir Putin? But first this. Markets are at an all-time high. Euphoria has set in. The economy seems unstoppable. But the last administration has buried us so deep in debt and deficits, it's going to take a lot of digging to get us out of this hole. Are you prepared? Lear Capital specializes in helping people like me and you grow and protect our wealth with gold.

Did you know that during Trump's last presidency, gold rose 54% to a record high? If that happens again, that puts gold at $4,200 an ounce in his next term. Don't wait. Do what I did. Call Lear at 800-511-4620 or go to learjudgenap.com for your free gold ownership kit and special report, $4,200 gold ahead. When you call, ask how you can also get up to $15,000 in bonus gold with a qualifying purchase. Call 800-511-4620, 800-511-4620, or go to learjudgenap.com and tell them the judge set you. Scotty, welcome here, my dear friend. I want to spend most of our time talking about President Trump and what we can

expect of his relationship to President Putin. But before we do that, he did make some rather unusual statements recently involving Gaza, suggesting that he would like to see a million and a half Palestinians relocated against their will to Jordan or Egypt. Before we get to that, I have a very interesting clip to begin our conversation. You may know this gentleman, Daniel Levy, a former Israeli negotiator, not very complimentary about the state of affairs in Israel today. Chris, cut number one. One cannot underestimate the impact on the Israeli public psyche of the release, the initial three who were released. And of course, everyone, everyone therefore saw those images.

They've been told, Al-Qassam defeated. They've been told, the public has turned against them. They've been told so many things. And then they saw those images. An occupying army, armed and aided

by the most powerful military in the world, the US, a nuclear armed state, Israel. In a struggle between that and a resistance movement, we saw a very powerful display and Israelis saw that. We're being told by Israeli analysts, talking heads, political leaders, and their backers in the West, that the next phase has to be to move forward. We have to have the demilitarization of Gaza. The reality is the most significant force in Gaza, by a long long stretch is Hamas. Al-Qassam emerges from this with a very strong narrative. Israel's narrative doesn't look so good at all. What do you say? I've said all

along, Judge, that Israel lost this war. I said Israel was losing the war on day one. I mean, there's a lot of people, including some in your commentary, that think I'm smoking dope. Israel lost this war. Hamas didn't lose. Israel could only win this war by militarily defeating Hamas. We know that 70% of the tunnels or more remain intact, that this extensive underground network that Hamas had constructed is still there. Where do you think all these guys were hiding? And they weren't just hiding. They were popping up and killing Israelis up until the last moment. It was Israel that was defeated. Yes, we said from the very beginning, Israel will be able to go in and blow up buildings, and then Israel will have to take those buildings.

And Hamas will operate underneath those buildings, pop up in those buildings, and make Israel's life a living hell. That Israel will die a death of a thousand cuts, which it did. Israel was defeated. Everybody knows this in Israel. The Israeli government tried the propaganda exercise. As Levi says, these images prove the lie to that. This is not a defeated army. This is a victorious army. It wasn't designed to occupy Israel. It was designed to defeat the Israeli occupier, and it did just that. How dangerous is it for Trump to be discussing the forcible removal of 1.7 million

Palestinians to Egypt and Jordan, an event that is extremely unlikely to occur? Well, it's not extremely unlikely. It's not going to happen. And the simple reason is that both Sisi of Egypt and the King of Jordan understand that if they were to receive Palestinian populations in this numbers, it would be the end of their governments. You know, Sisi is not a very popular dictator. He governs with a, you know, with a heavy police state. This would bring about a level of instability that would see him overthrown, collapse. The same thing with the King of Jordan. The majority of the population in Jordan are Palestinians, which would be the end of the King of Jordan. So it's not going to happen. We saw that. Sisi and the King have said no, but that's not the issue. The Palestinian people aren't going

to go home or aren't going to leave Gaza. They didn't sit there for the last, you know, however many months it has been, taking the casualties they did, suffering the way they did, just to surrender at the end. Remember, Hamas is an extension of the people. Hamas are children of the camps. And these people now have fought and won a battle about the camps. Who is in control? Israel is not in control. That's the ultimate conclusion here. You know, there's difficult days ahead, but the idea that these people who struggled so hard are just going to up and turn around and leave, that isn't going to happen. Donald Trump has made a huge mistake publicly commenting about it because he's going to have to back down.

Chris, run the clip of Prime Minister Netanyahu this morning. How unstable is the Netanyahu premiership as we speak? Scott. Oh, okay. I didn't know if I was going to be talking. No, no, no. I'm sorry. It's my fault. There's no sound to it. This is him. You see what he's doing? He's putting his fingerprints on the device as he enters the last place he wants to be, a public courtroom for his trial and corruption. So this man's in a lot of trouble. He's in trouble for the charges of corruption.

He's in trouble because his government is collapsing. He lost Bing Devere and the hard right element that had sustained him throughout the conflict. They've gone. Whether he can build a new coalition, a governing coalition that is sustainable is yet to be seen. But now he is politically vulnerable. It's not just the charges of corruption that he's going to face. This is a man who is under investigation for violating state secrets, for putting, for violating, for lying to the Israeli population about the hostages. You know, the release of the hostages

is the hell on earth for Netanyahu. It should be one of his greatest political triumphs, he would say, except for the reality that he never wanted them released. He killed them. He murdered them. And that's the reality that's going to come out as the hostages speak about the attacks that took place, et cetera. I mean, you'll see the Israeli media try to spin the hostages release and talk about ill treatment and all that. The bottom line is these hostages could have been released very shortly after they were captured, but Netanyahu didn't want that. And we fought, you see, a battle for 15 months. And now the survivors are going to come out and they're going to tell the truth about what happened

under the ground, who was trying to kill them and who was trying to save them? This will not end well for Benjamin Netanyahu. Did Netanyahu's government know about October 7th in advance? Look, the answer is yes, but they didn't believe it. There was intelligence information out there that said that Hamas was getting ready to do this, but the Netanyahu government was infected with a preconceived notion that Hamas would never give up the deal that Netanyahu had made for them, the Israeli government, to allow work permits to buy off the Palestinian people of Gaza by giving thousands of them an opportunity to work in Israel, earn an income, and bring that money back to Gaza. They believed that this gave Hamas legitimacy in the eyes of the Palestinian people. It just shows how poorly attuned the Israeli

government was to the reality of what was going on in Gaza. Meanwhile, the Israeli intelligence services are collecting information that says that Hamas is actively preparing to carry out large-scale attacks. But the government said, well, this is just an internal political ploy by Hamas to pacify their more militant elements by letting them train, but not actually do something. And so when the attack took place on October 7th, I truly believe that the Netanyahu government was shocked in the same way that Golda Meir's government was shocked when the Egyptians came across the Suez Canal in 1973, despite the fact that everybody told them that the Egyptians were getting ready to do this. Then they opted not to believe it because they said, no way Egypt would ever do something like

that. I think the Netanyahu government fooled itself into believing that Hamas would never do something like this. Why do you think President Trump resumed the shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to the Israelis? I mean, for what conceivable purpose would they be using them now? To buy off the Israeli, the American pro-Israeli population, to say I'm supporting Israel to an extent that the Biden administration wouldn't. I mean, the bottom line is, you know, hopefully these bombs will be put into storage and won't be dropped. But if they're dropped, that means that Donald Trump is as guilty as Joe Biden was of furthering genocide, because that's all these bombs are used for. These bombs weren't used to

blow up, you know, military targets. These bombs were used to destroy civilian infrastructure and slaughter tens of thousands or more of innocent Palestinian civilians. Switching to Russia and Ukraine, Scott, how dangerous is it for Trump to claim that the Ukrainians have killed one million russian soldiers that the russian economy uh is faltering and that president putin's leadership is to blame i mean this is absurd but but how reckless is it for him to say that i mean you make a heck of a comedy routine on the Vegas strip, but it's just, it's so void of reality. And that's, that's the danger. You see, Trump has come out and he's, he's, he's talked about hard love. You know, we can do it. I love the Russian people he put out in a, in his Truth Social posting. And I have great respect for Vladimir Putin, but if you don't do what I want,

it's going to be hard love. We can do it the easy way, which is for you to fully capitulate to me because I have deemed you taking casualties you can't afford to take, that your economy is failing. And it's all your fault, Mr. Putin. Or we can, you know, or we can do it the hard way. I'm going to punish you. But the problem is the easy way that he talks about, none of that's true. The Russians haven't taken anywhere near the casualties that Trump has talked about. Russia has

taken serious casualties. This is a serious war that's going on. This is high intensity conflict using the most modern weaponry, conventional weaponry imaginable. We here in the United States, even everybody in our military have no clue whatsoever about what's the reality is on that battlefield. Cause none of our people have ever fought that kind of war. We're running out of people that even trained to fight that kind of war. Our, all our people cut their teeth on the low intensity conflict of the global war on terrorism, which while you're in the middle of a firefight, I'm sure is a, is a hell of

a bad day, but it ain't nothing like what the Ukrainians faced, the mass slaughter, the mass death, the constant bombardments. We have no clue how to operate in that environment. The Russians are doing it, and they're winning. Every day, they're winning more and more and more. This is a reality. Putin isn't losing his economy. Yeah, look, the sanctions have caused all sorts of hardships for the Russians, but they have adjusted and they have adjusted in a way that

allows their economy to grow while the blowback on Europe's economy has been devastating for the Europeans. And it has also weakened our position. And leadership wise, Putin won by a mandate far greater than anything Trump will ever experience in his life. So he's off base on this. The danger now is he thinks there's a hard way. But what is it? Keith Kellogg gave us a hint. And this shows you, I have to be careful in my language, but I would say the lack of lucidity on the part of the Trump administration, especially Keith Kellogg. He's going to lower oil to $45 a barrel because he has a simplistic argument. The Russians, he says today with the $60 barrel cap, which the

Russians have blown through, are making billions of dollars. You're right. But if we lower it to $45, which he calls the break-even point for Russian oil, then the Russians make no money and their economy collapses. It doesn't work that way, Keith. You see, the Russians have two breakeven points. So one is what they need to balance their budget because it's an oil-driven economy. They need oil to be above $60 a barrel, around $70 a barrel, $71 a barrel. And if you drop it down to $45, they can't balance their budget. But the cost of oil production is $41 and lower, meaning that the Russians can continue to produce oil.

Now, to get oil dropped to 45 barrels, we have to get the cooperation of the Saudis. Their break-even point is $85 a barrel. They're already losing tens of billions of dollars a month because of our desire to lower oil prices. They need the price to go higher, not lower. But even if we bring it down to 45, they can produce oil at around $10 a barrel, which means they can just continue producing oil. Here's the kick.

Permian Basin in the United States, all of the oil growth in the United States in the last four years comes from Permian Basin. It's the benchmark for us. Where is that? That's in West Texas. The break-even point for oil in the Permian Basin, there's two factors. One is existing wells. The old wells that have been in place takes about 33. If you sell oil at $33 a barrel, they break even, but that's not where the growth is.

All of the growth is in the new drilling. In the new drilling break-even point, $66 a barrel. Hey, Trump, go to West Texas and sit down with the wildcatters. They're the ones doing all the new of significance. Ask them how it feels to sink hundreds of millions of dollars into a project based upon the presumption of $78 a barrel oil, which the American government has promised them so they could put all their life savings in this. And you're going to tell them, no, we're going to have an economic war with Russia where we're going to drop the price of oil to $45 a barrel. And all of those new wells will drop. American oil production will drop 33% in two years. You know whose oil production won't drop?

Russia and Saudi Arabia. Donald Trump has to be smarter than he is going forward, and he needs to fire Keith Kellogg because Keith Kellogg has no clue how the world works, no clue how the world economy works, no clue how oil works. He's out there just throwing stupid numbers out there, and Trump's listening to him.

Vladimir Putin has to be laughing right now saying, well, where does Trump go? This is a great explanation of the interplay of geopolitics and economics. It's a terrific explanation, Scott. Much appreciated. But back to this, the Russians have lost a million troops. Is he getting this from the intelligence community? Is he getting it from Keith Kellogg? What source would he rely on for something so outrageously inaccurate? One of the problems with the U.S. intelligence community is the politicization of intelligence. And there are a number of things. Ukrainian casualties, I believe the U.S. intelligence community was not allowed

to independently calculate these numbers. That was forbidden. They had to totally rely upon the data coming from Ukraine so as not to create two sets of numbers, which then if presented to an American policy maker would say, why do we have two sets of numbers? They only wanted one set. So the U.S. intelligence community basically deferred to the Ukrainians. And the Ukrainians are all over the map. Even the Ukrainians don't know how to lie convincingly about this. They say one number, they say another number. But that's the problem is the U.S. intelligence community has not been allowed to do the deep dig into these numbers. And if they did, they would come up with a number that is far, far reduced. He says a million. The bottom line is the Russian Ministry of Defense has

probably suffered closer to 95 to 98,000 dead. Now that's a lot of dead, but it ain't a million. And then when you add in Wagner and the Netsk and Lugansk People's Militias, Ministry of Interior Forces, et cetera, you probably get the number up around 150,000, which is a realistic number for Russian casual deaths in battle so far. That's a lot of guys. The 1.1 million, that's the number of dead Ukrainians. And that tends to be what happens with Ukrainian numbers. They mirror image. They reverse it. They say, we've suffered a number, which is what the Russians have suffered. And they say, they've suffered what the Ukrainians have suffered. That's the Alice in Wonderland. Why start your negotiations with Putin by insulting him and insulting the

Russian people? It makes no sense. And I don't know how far he thinks he's going to get on this one. You know, the Russians have straight up said, here's another absurdity. Just to show you how far out of touch Donald Trump is, they put out a hundred day plan, leaked it to the press. And one of the aspects of it is that they want this deal to be done on May 9th, as if they're giving the Russians a gift. We're going to give Vladimir Putin a gift so that on May 9th, he can declare that he surrendered to Donald Trump. May 9th is Victory Day. This is the 80th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany. Now, the Russians are very gracious, and they talk about the allies and the role of the allies, but everybody in Russia knows who beat the Soviets. It wasn't an American flag that went up on the Reichstag on May 2nd. It was a Soviet flag. You mean who beat the Nazis?

Beat the Nazis. That's right. Everybody knows who beat the Nazis, and it was the Russians who did it. 60 to 70% of the German divisions were destroyed by the Soviet army, not by the American army, not by the Allied army. And this anniversary, the 80th anniversary of the defeat is a huge, huge deal. Donald Trump would be better off calling up Vladimir Putin and saying, Hey, I'd like to send an American delegation. Let's send the 82nd airborne and 101st airborne to march in your parade, to join you in the celebration of the defeat of Nazi Germany. That would be the best negotiating ploy. If he did that, he'd have Putin eating out of his hands. But instead, he wants Putin to sign on to an agreement that is, in effect, a surrender for Russia.

It's just never going to happen. A nation that lost 27 million dead to defeat Nazi Germany isn't going to turn around and surrender to the very Nazis that continue to rule in Ukraine today. Here's President Putin on Saturday about what the U.S. will need to do with respect to Zelensky. Cut number three. The current regime in Kiev is happy to receive hundreds of billions of dollars from its sponsors. Excuse me for the simplicity of popular expressions as we say among the people they are like hamsters chewing with pleasure these hundreds of billions of dollars on both cheeks but they are in no hurry to follow the instructions of their sponsors and

we know that such instructions exist to cancel the adopted decree banning negotiations. But I think that in the end those who pay him money, they should still force him to do it. And I think he will have to do it. Does the United States force him to sit down with Putin or does the United States get rid of him and replace him with someone who'll be more realistic? But you missed the point judge it doesn't matter what the united states wants putin will never sit down with zielinski zielinski is a an illegitimate leader um who hasn't had elections the russian putin has already called him illegitimate well he has never putin will never meet with zielinski no russian official will ever meet with Zelensky.

The reality is the United States must remove Zelensky and then bring in somebody who is going to be able to negotiate what is the terms of surrender. Russia isn't going to make a deal with the United States. I don't know why Trump doesn't understand that. What Trump needs to do is think strategically. Stop talking about Ukraine because Russia won that war. Accept that Ukraine is defeated. Accept that NATO lost its bid and accept that the United States isn't going to get what it wants out of this and focus instead on

the larger strategic picture or question of what will European security framework look like in a post-Ukraine environment? That's the most important question. What will the role of NATO be in European security? What will the role of the United States be in NATO? And how do you balance that with a victorious Russia? That's where Trump needs to be focused. And if he did that, there's a deal to be made there. There's a really good deal to be made there. But in order to make that deal, you have to concede what Russia has already won, which is they have defeated Ukraine. On the day after Trump was inaugurated, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping spoke on the phone for 90 minutes. How significant was that? It's as significant as every single one of the meetings between these two.

I always remind people that before the special military operation began on February 24th, 20 days prior to that on February 4th, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping met in Beijing where they basically inked a strategic agreement, a 5,000 word agreement that talked about how they're going to join forces against the United States to defeat the rules-based international order. And they haven't lost purpose or sense of direction ever since then. Donald Trump can have a short conversation with Xi Jinping. Donald Trump is the president of a very powerful country. There's no doubt about that. The Chinese will take that call and listen. But does Donald Trump, does Marco Rubio,

does Keith Kellogg, do they understand this? No, they don't understand anything. They labor in this artificial world that they've constructed of American primacy. And there's ways for America to leverage its considerable strength, and it has considerable strength, but there's ways for America to bleed off whatever advantages it has. For instance, seeking $45 a barrel oil, that's a suicide pill that will destroy the American economy. So Trump really needs to start dealing with reality. And instead, he's just a lot of bluster, a lot of bluff. And for a man who says that he doesn't want to get in wars, you know, he's moving us, inching us towards conflict all around the world right now. This is a very dangerous situation because he apparently doesn't understand the reality of the world. How much longer can,

well, before I ask you that, has the spigot been turned off to Ukraine? Or is there still military hardware and ammunition in the Joe Biden pipeline still making its way to Kyiv? That I can't give you a definitive answer. There's been a lot of contradictory information coming out in the press. Even the Biden administration or the Trump administration isn't clear on what exactly the orders have been given. We know, for instance, that USAID, the non-military aid, has been cut off and that the embassy has issued instructions to that. Rumors about him firing the officials in the Pentagon who were responsible for that haven't played out with demonstrable fact. My guess is that there's still material in a pipeline and that pipeline is trickling material into Ukraine, but that anything that required

additional approvals from a Trump administration isn't going to go forward. But those where all the final paperwork had been finished, that will go in. But this will be devastating for the Ukrainian government. You know, I think Putin has said and Zelensky has pretty much acknowledged that two weeks after the United States cuts off military aid, that that's it for the Ukrainians. This may be one of the goals and objectives of Donald Trump is to basically destroy the Ukrainian ability to resist by eliminating American weaponry. And then you have Russia creating a reality that can't be ignored. Scott Ritter, thank you, my dear friend. Thank you for your analysis on Gaza and Israel. And thank you for your analysis on Gaza and Israel. And thank you for your analysis on Ukraine and Russia.

A terrific, terrific analysis, particularly all the economic explanation of the interplay of oil to this geopolitical morass. All the best, my dear friend. We'll see you again soon. Thank you. Thank you. A terrific, terrific conversation. Coming up tomorrow at eight in the morning, Ambassador Charles Freeman at 12 noon, Max Blumenthal at two in the afternoon, Matt Ho at three in the afternoon, Karen Kwiatkowski. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Altyazı M.K.