Judging Freedom - Shifting World Powers & Ukraine Russia War - w_Alastair Crooke

Episode Date: April 11, 2023

Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here with Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, April 11, 2023. It's about 10.20 in the morning here on the east coast of the United States, probably about 4.20 in the afternoon in Rome, Italy, where our guest Alistair Crook, or from where our guest Alistair Crook joins us today. Alistair, it's a pleasure. It's a pleasure to have you as part of the Judging Freedom family. Thank you very much for coming on to the show. Good to be here with you. Thank you. In America, we are in a bit of a kerfuffle right now. As you can imagine, over the leaked Pentagon documents, appears to be about 100 documents, more than 100 pages,

but 100 separate documents. Top secret, no foreign. Top secret cannot be shared with anyone from foreign government. That's the highest level of security clearance that these kind of documents can have put on them. Somehow ended up on the internet, one batch about a week ago today, and another batch on Good Friday. It appears that the Pentagon was warned about this shortly before these batches of documents appeared. They show that the U.S. spies on everybody under the sun, including the Mossad, including President Zelensky, including his intel people, and including his military people,

as well as, of course, Russia and China. They also show that Ukraine is in a far weaker position militarily than the U.S. has ever acknowledged, to the point where the author of these documents, we don't know who it is, opines that Ukraine's air defenses will be down to near zero by the end of May. How has this been received in Europe, particularly in the NATO countries, which are under pressure from President Biden to provide cash and military assistance to Ukraine? Well, first of all, there's been a great deal of nonsense talked about these documents, which I guess is inevitable. People have watched sort of spy films and have their own ideas

on it. But it is a lot of nonsense about whether it is a deception operation, whether these are legitimate or not. I mean, quite clearly they're legitimate. Quite clearly they are intelligence documents. I can just tell you, you know, the initials and the set out and the layout, even the language is a sort of art form that it's not easy to replicate. I mean, it's learned over several years how to fill those in in the right way in the right form. Now, I mean, I think the big sort of letting the cat out of the bag for many people is the fact

that, you know, intelligence assessments that have all these top secret and secret, no foreign use, and everyone expects them to have something surprising, something extraordinary in it. In fact, they're often quite banal. I used to get these and read these assessments. And really, I often didn't bother because an intelligent reading of the open press would lead you to the same conclusion that some of these intelligent five hours intelligent reports would show. And I think this is what we have with these documents. I mean, they don't tell us anything startling, but nothing that is really new to what we did. But I think it is so that qualitatively nothing new, but quantitatively was important. I mean, I think it did show two or three things,

very important. One is the ones you've just mentioned, that the amount of ammunition is dire. I think the second thing that it told us that was really significant in it, but we knew this, is that the air defense systems of Ukraine were almost non-existent now. How did we know this? We knew this because we can see that the Russian Air Force is flying and using dumb bombs in Devkir, in Bakhmut, and other parts, and it is flying helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft freely, and that means the air defenses have been destroyed. So that's not new.

Everyone knew about the ammunition, the state of the ammunition. Yes, they're worse than we did. I think the thing that is quite intriguing for me, at least seeing it, is how much the Ukrainians are keeping America in the dark about the state of their actual military forces. Because both in Germany and Britain and elsewhere, these units are being trained, and they're trained as a team, I mean, to operate together with each other as a team. Then they go back to Ukraine, and they go into a black box.

And then some of them go this way, some of them end up in another way and so you have no real clear idea from these documents actually how much of these people are capable of a real offensive sharp end as opposed to logistics and backup and everything else how many are experienced fighters because they some units they allow to bleed out and then reform new units and right america really in the dark as to what actually ukraine has and they're doing this deliberately obviously they're keeping this um so that america is not very clear but i think the key message from all of this thing and this is why there's the the concern but is it's quantitatively worse and this is probably why the the the documents were leaked because it all looks from the documents that is's heading for a major debacle for the United States.

To support your argument that it is quantitatively bad, there is some language in there about the kill ratio, the ratio of Ukrainian soldiers killed to Russian soldiers killed. And those numbers to me were startling, 76 to 16, meaning for every 16 Russian soldiers killed, 76 Ukrainian soldiers are killed. Now, do the math. If that ratio stays constant, it won't be much longer before there are no Ukrainian soldiers left to kill. I would think that that is an eye opener to the American Congress, to NATO foreign ministers, not to the Pentagon, because they probably knew this and were laboring mightily to keep the public... Of course, yeah. I mean, this is... and Ukraine has been... I mean, this is the whole point of having it so opaque as to what the status of force is, because we don't know, but I think it's probably we're talking about 40 to 60 actually forces that are capable of fighting. I mean, not people who are sent. I mean, you can see it every day.

They're going around surrounding an entire village with 48 police cars and just recruiting, so-called kidnapping, every male in certain villages to fill up. But these are not soldiers. These are not going to be able to sustain this sort of offensive. They are sheep being led to the slaughter. They're not even trained. That's right. And this is why I suspect, I do not know who leaked the information at all, but I would imagine it is probably a patriotic American. try and find and prosecute and lock up for 20 years, much like Chelsea Manning, who gave WikiLeaks all the materials about American war crimes during the Afghan and Iraq incursions. But I don't want to move off this topic into that, though, of course, there are similarities.

I don't know how Joe Biden gets out of this. He doesn't have an off-ramp, as we say here in the U.S. He doesn't have a political off-ramp. He isn't even talking about this. He's sampling Guinness and pubs in Ireland as we speak. I don't mean to diminish that type of diplomacy, but he doesn't seem to want to talk or able to talk about this at all. I agree. I mean, but I suspect, you know, that the hope in the release of these documents

is that two things. One is that it would give an off ramp, that people would say, well, look, clearly, I mean, you know, all our information is now in public domain. It's not possible to go ahead. Maybe we need to delay it and push it back and then eventually sort of fade out and let it sort of die its own, the counter-offensive die its own sort of quiet death. But I think the other expectation in leaking these documents was there is a lot of divisions in NATO, particularly the uniform branches of the military, not the bureaucrats and the people who sit on these committees and NATOs, but the uniforms in Germany and France and elsewhere have deep reservations about the merits of having an offensive. They don't think Ukraine is going to be able to

launch it, doesn't have the manpower, doesn't have the resources, and if they do, it's going to be a disaster. And so I think they hope that by putting it out like this, it's going to be able to allow critics who have felt unable to say these things, controversial, come make me. I think you really have put your finger on this with respect to the military. Now, we know that there are American troops on the ground in Ukraine outside of uniform operating some of the very heavy, sophisticated equipment that it would take too long for Americans to train Ukrainians to use. We know there are Americans on the ground in uniform in Poland triggering the equipment in Ukraine. We know, put two and two together, American boys are aiming and shooting missiles

at Russian boys, and we know that the Congress of the United States has not authorized this. Question. How does the American military feel when it's now been revealed that their own leadership has been lying to the public and therefore to them, and when it appears that they are in a losing, fruitless venture in which their lives are exposed. Well, I'm not in America, but I read a piece which I thought was so striking from a man who said he was in his 60s. He and all his family had served in the military. His uncle had been wounded. All of them had supported

the military throughout this period. And he said, now everything has changed. He said, I can tell you, if I had access to classified information, which I don't know, I would run with it to the nearest Russian embassy and throw it over the fence for them to have. I've come to hate this process that we're in. I go down to the VA hospital once a week, and I can tell you there are many people that feel the same as me. I found that really striking. If this is the case, then this is, I mean, you know, this is from a family that always been solidly behind the military, have served every single one of them in the military. And that's the sort of attitude that people have. He said, I would risk my life to get

onto the Russian embassy and pass over this information if I could. He put it in, you know, he put it in an email on a public platform. This is very courageous, whoever this person is. Many people in America share the values of this person. Certainly most of the people watching us now and who will be watching this show when it is streaming. The American involvement is without moral justification. It's just a political involvement because Joe Biden wants to run for re-election as a wartime president. Although Victoria Nuland, do you know who that is?

You probably interacted with her when you were a British diplomat, has argued that the United States should commence an invasion of Crimea. Stated differently, she's arguing that we should start World War III. Yeah. And by their standards, do it without a congressional declaration because they believe in this muscular military foreign policy. We already have American boys shooting at Russian boys as the Congress declared war. It absolutely has not. I would call whoever leaked these documents an American hero. But of course, the government is going to call that person once they find her or him a defendant and then a convict.

It's the way these things go. You know, Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers escaped prosecution because the FBI broke into his psychiatrist's office during the trial, and the federal judge was so furious he dismissed the indictment, and the government didn't move to have it reinstated. But Bradley Manning, then later called Chelsea Manning, was sentenced to 45 years in jail for stealing the documents that Julian Assange leaked, and then President Obama commuted the sentence and Manning was freed. I don't know what will happen to this person. The American laws that protect the publication of these materials clearly do not protect the acquisition by the original thief of these materials. But as you say, they bear the earmarks of being real,

of being legitimate, of being genuine. And so we can only conclude because of that top secret no-forn, N-O-F-O-R-N, which means it couldn't even be shared with you when you were a diplomat with top secret British security clearance because you weren't American, whoever did this was somebody on the inside. It's not a janitor who found this stuff in a wastebasket. This is someone who knew exactly what they were doing. Someone fiercely opposed to American involvement, fiercely opposed to American leadership, lying to the American public and to the American military.

Yeah, and it wasn't a deceit because, you know, those days have gone. During the Second World War, you could have a deceit, whereby the Germans believed that the invasion was going to take part in a different part of France than Normandy, and you could do this. But this is the era of satellites, of spy planes. Everything is photographed. Of course, the Russians know exactly where things are. And of course, America knows where the Russian forces are

because they're following it second by second in huge teams. I think the point here is what is so important is that if they can find an offer, there is no advantage in winning too much for Russia or losing too badly. No one wants to see America humiliated because it could be a terrible humiliation, America and NATO, especially in the context of what's happening with China and everything like this, a humiliation, because you never know what happens. I recall very well the British were very poor at the end of the Second World War in coping with their own humiliation at the end of the war,

and it ended up with a terrible, the Suez incident, the Suez disaster right it was a catastrophe because every cabinet meeting during that period in Britain and I talked to the cabinet secretary who was secretary at the time and he said we had one item on the agenda every week same agenda same item and they spent the whole time discussing it, how not to look weak. And all around, the weakness of Britain was evident to the world. You mentioned China. I'm going to read to you a statement from yesterday's Financial Times, made by a prominent European leader.

I think you'll know who this is. Do we Europeans have an interest in speeding up on the subject of Taiwan? No. The worst of things would be to think that we Europeans must be followers on this subject and adapt ourselves ourselves to an American rhythm and a Chinese overreaction. Now we go to the article. He added that it would be a trap for Europe to follow America's lead on Taiwan. This is, of course, the president of France. I applaud that kind of language. He's being sharply criticized by American diplomats and Eastern European diplomats. Where do you see this? How do you see this? Why did he say this right after leaving President Xi? He actually said it on his plane as he was flying from Beijing home to Paris. Yeah, I think the timing wasn't great from his point of view because then China did a siege of Taiwan the next day.

However, yes. But partly I think it is him preparing because the mood has shifted in France very much against Europe, against NATO, against the United States. The mood is difficult in France. And although the election is some way off, I think it was aimed at Le Pen. But I just have to say this, that, you know, the sentiments,

I mean, the problem with our politics at the moment, European politics, American politics, it's all linguistics and emotion. It's all saying the right things, the right language, the right things, and then, you know, giving the right sentiments and things like that, and no substance. How is he going to do this? How realistically can Europe now, after so long, actually distance itself and stand equidistant from the United States and China. It's just not feasible. First of all, there is no consensus in Europe about that. We have Poland, we have Czechoslovakia, the Baltic Republics, all of these want to move closer to the United States, want to be NATO's new power in Europe. They want to stay closer to the united states want to be nato's new power in europe they want to stay

close to to the united states and they want to pursue the war with russia to a bitter end then you have west europe that's paying the economic price of the war in ukraine and they would like to see an end to it there's no no consensus. Does President Macron have a realistic goal of the EU being another economic, political power base in the world, much like the US and Russia and China? Or is he saying this just for domestic consumption, since he has a lot of domestic political problems which have nothing to do with this, and he's looking to garner some political support at home?

The latter. I mean, the main effort at the moment is to stop Europe breaking apart, not turning it into a third empire. There's no basis for the third empire either. The euro is just a derivative of the dollar. There is no weapons manufacturing. There's just little periodic, there are isolated bits of weapons manufacturing in Europe. The whole currency of the relationship with the United States is you want to have access in Washington, okay, go and buy 100 F-35s. So everyone has bought these F-35s and NATO weapons

as the price for doing business with the United States. There's no domestic industry and there's no political agreement. The Poles don't want a new empire. They want sovereign states, and they say, we don't want German degeneracy forced upon us. I mean, these are the sort of the language coming out of the government. I mean, I don't know the government will survive the next elections in Poland, but that is where we are. So it's more the question of can you stop Europe disintegrating

rather than turning it into a new empire, realistically. There's a report this morning that among the many things President Zelensky and the President of Poland discussed 10 days ago when President Zelensky was in several parts of Poland, certainly in Warsaw, was an offer by President Zelensky was in, well, he was in several parts of Poland, certainly in Warsaw, was an offer, an offer by President Zelensky for some Western Ukrainian provinces to join Poland in return for serious Polish military assistance, one that would spearhead an invasion of Crimea. Would Zelensky have offered something as radical as that? And would the Poles have accepted

an offer as drastic and catastrophic as that? I think it's quite possible that Zelensky is desperate. In his desperation, would like to see, if you like, an extension of the war and a war, if you like, involving NATO with Russia, i.e. Poland joining in, if you like, the conflict against Russia as a NATO. I don't think there is the support for that in Poland. There's a lot of criticism of Poland. There's a lot of criticism of it and there's a lot of problems. I'm not sure that the government will survive. It may do. It seems very close. But I think there is talk of that. But I don't think that will happen and I don't think NATO has any appetite for allowing the Poles to, if you like,

to move into Ukraine, into Western Ukraine. You know, their history in Ukraine was very troubled. The Ukrainian, the Polish invasion of Ukraine, when they came in and imposed their aristocracy and their leadership on Ukraine, was much resented. And then there was a bitter fighting, and many of the Poles were killed at the beginning of the Second World War, when the nationalists started to get empowered and become much more fervent with the advent of the German forces. Alistair Crook, always a pleasure, my dear friend. We're never at a loss for anything to talk about,

whether we're looking at the trees or the forest, and you're one of the best at helping us to analyze it, particularly from the European perspective. Thank you for joining us. We hope you'll come back again and chat next week. Thank you very much. My pleasure. Thanks. If you like what you just saw and heard, like and subscribe. More as we get it. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.