[Music] [Music] hi there everyone Judge Andrew napalitano here for judging Freedom today is Wednesday July 3rd 2024 Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson joins us now Colonel we're beginning a long holiday weekend I'm deeply appreciative of uh your time and your willingness to accommodate my schedule thank you very much and I can tell you from the number of people lined up already that my appreciation is shared by many um I want to start off with picture how close are we to World War II pick your spot China Ukraine Israel that's an interesting question um actually I was just talking with that with a group of former colleagues from the military I was I was not there I was not a fly on the wall we all agreed that um one we are as close to a nuclear use if you will nuclear weapon use as we've been in the history of nuclear weapons short as it is 75 years or so um and second that we were extremely close as close if you will to a conventional conflict that would lead to this exchange of nuclear weapons and this is the first time we have agreed that it is in multiple theaters of War if you will um in the Levant so there there is no consensus on it's going to be in the South China Sea it's going to be in Ukraine it's going to be in the Middle East look the South China Sea was the least of our concerns at the moment and that might be a uh a warning because if xiin ping and the Chinese military wanted to take advantage of preoccupation and other theaters of War it would be an ideal time to do it but we put that down as the lowest possibility in terms of what it is in our view the possibilities um Israel and uh Gaza GI given the likelihood of their attacking um hisbah given the likelihood of Ukraine coming to hisb Blah's defense uh Ukraine Iran Iran excuse me giving the probability of Russia coming to Iran's defense if Iran struggles which seems unlikely but I'll let you take it from there well one of the imponderables in that situation which we were discussing was uh as we understanded theaa the international atomic energy agency has been more or less on its own valtion in some people's views but uh Iranians too probably put some pressure on it uh pushed out it's evacuated and so we know that there's enough enriched uranium for at least three possibly four or five bombs um we know that for pretty much a fact the iea has led us to that conclusion um so that's a very worrisome thing and and that leads you into will Iran I I don't think there's any question that Netanyahu is going to try he's going to try to get Hezbollah involved big time by invading Lebanon and he is going to find the United States very recalcitrant at coming in on his side because as I understand it even though we have a president apparently who is not with it all the time there's been some pretty uh strong advice given him about widening the war to Hezbollah in a significant way but I think he's going to do it because I think he's desperate I think he realizes his position is becoming more and more precarious every day as indeed is Israel's and his government's position is becoming more and more precarious every day he has not satisfied a single one of the objectives he set out for himself immediately after October the 7th and you might as you might imagine the pop is getting restive in different ways because he hasn't and don't know they don't know where to go except to evacuate Israel which they are doing at alarming uh rates and in alarming numbers um so he's in a desperate situation and men like him in Desperate situations are truly Troublesome because they will do things that are unexpected they'll do things against the advice of their sugar daddy the United States and they'll do things that are in a word suicidal so that was our number one concern was the leavon um if you're not a fan of Netanyahu and I don't think you are I'm not uh this will aggravate you but here he is speaking to a group of I think American diplomats I don't think they're American journalists it's not clear there's an American flag over his shoulder this is him at his most arrogant and bellicose worst if you'll pardon my language cut number five Chris and Iran is uh fighting us on a seven front War uh obviously Hamas balah uh htis uh the militias in Iraq and Syria uh Judea Samaria West Bank uh Iran itself they'd like to topple Jordan and their goal is to have uh uh a combined uh ground offensive from various front mons uh coupled with a combined um missile bombardment we we have to uh we've been given the opportunity to Scuttle it and we will the first requirement is to cut that hand uh Kamas uh people who do this thing to us are not going to be there and we we'll have a long battle I don't think it's that long but uh we'll get rid of them we also have to deter the other elements of the Iran Terror axes uh but we have to deal with the axis the axis doesn't threaten only us threatens you uh it's uh it's on uh the march to conquer the Middle East conquer the Middle East conquer that means actually conquer conquer Saudi Arabia conquer the Arabian Peninsula just a question of time uh and what standing in their way is the small Satan that's us on the road to the middle siiz Satan that's the European they're always offended when I tell them that you're the great Satan not them okay and uh we have to stop them any evidence whatsoever that Iran wants to conquer Saudi Arabia have you ever heard this before not at all there were so many lies and exaggerations in that let's just take one small one sure I I just read an intelligence analysis which I trust very much so that Russia has brought inordinate pressure to bear on Bashar Al Assad in Syria and in essence the reason the one or two or three shells that have fallen in the Golan Heights fired from Syrian guns militias or state or otherwise have missed their targets by hundreds of meters and landed in innocuous dirt in the desert is because Assad took Putin's advice he is not widening the war to include Syria he is not allowing things to come out of Syria and damage Israel no doubt he would like to but Russia's put pressure on him because Russia does not want to have to divert troops from Ukraine or from any other place to help him in Syria should he get in trouble uh but believe me they would if they had to so that was an outright lie and the only one who covets Jordan is bib Netanyahu and the only one who might be a threat to march on the Middle East would be him except now he is so attenuated his milit AR Power and so decimated his Israeli Defense Force that I doubt he could take on anyone in the region who had a reasonable military effort and strategy to take him on so that was just full of lies in the fact that the sitting around the audience and you hear laughter here or laughter there at the kind of joking way he says things and he always has to use these images too what other leader in the world says we're going to cut their arm off uh it's not going to last very it's going to last long oh well it's not going to last very long come on baby you are in trouble you were in serious trouble you're in the worst trouble you've been in in your life about uh 15 minutes before we came on air uh the New York Times put a piece up on its website that'll be uh on the front page tomorrow the headline of which Israeli generals low ammunitions want a truce in Gaza Israeli generals speaking to the New York Times to get the message to A A thick sculled uh BB that the only way to get the hostage at home is a truce in Gaza because I'm paraphrasing because Hamas cannot be beaten does he know that but won't admit it or or does he not know that I've always thought that on top of everything else his cruelty his brutality is really causing the Assassin a of yac rine and all the other crimes that one could lay at his feet one could not lay at his feet stupidity maybe Insanity from time to time but he usually recovered from that in enough time to do something relatively clever or smart um not anymore I think this has gotten to him I think it's actually gotten to his brain cells I think he's being impacted and he's desperate but he's a very very good politician at hiding signs of desperation unlike some others I know um and and that desperation is being it's impacting the people around him so they're getting frightened they're getting scared because not only do they see what's actually happening on the ground to their formidable Force but they also see that the leader is not in his best suit if you will and so they've got to figure out a way to get this guy out of there and I like said before many times they don't have a constitution I don't know how you do it there there is no real process to do it other than this elongated process of Elections um and you know you almost you don't have a 25th amendment you don't have anything at all like that so how do you get rid of this guy other than forcibly walking in with guns putting one in his belly and saying you're leaving Mr Prime Minister how uh realistic is this so-called s son option whereby if uh the houis destroy Tel Aviv uh Israel will Slaughter tens of millions of people using a nuclear bomb I would have a hard time believing that of any individual but BB Netanyahu in a moment of absolute desperation personal and political but I don't think the the state of Israel would contemplate that I I do I do take some fear from the fact that they have nuclear weapons and the fact that they are driving themselves now into such a corner such an existential Corner that there might be some collective decision to use a nuclear weapon should that be a propitious thing to do at a particular moment like for example War Teran to suddenly show up with a nuclear weapon however that might be exemplified a test or confirmation by Massad right he said in the past the moment I get information the moment I get confirmation that tran has a nuclear weapon it's it's finished for Tran now he always meant footnote the United States will attack them and take out their nuclear weapon complex including any existing weapons but I I don't put it past him to get to that point and maybe make some kind of decision like that now here's where I think they would step in I I have to believe that the people around him would step in at gunpoint if necessary and remove him from office if he was about to use uh a nuclear weapon uh to kill Innocents we're not talking about some low yield tactical thing in the battlefield we're talking about hoshima and Nagasaki multiplied many times well you know these people who talk about these uh low yield nuclear weapons I was doing some checking the other day about yields now on these modern weapons and I think Putin's right when he says they're crazy if they think these are small Pop Guns these are not small pop guns if you dropped one of these things in the heart of Tran it would be very difficult to say that you could continue the administration of the urban area after you did it and you would have so many casualties I remember when they had the earthquake and Bam we had what we had somewhere around 30,000 or north of that casualties um and dead people and we have well George Bush put everything on the on the rails that he could he put search dogs and firemen and people who knew how to do this kind of business and forget the animosities we went to Bam and we helped them recover from that earthquake that' be worse it would be worse uh Switching gears uh during your time at the state department with Colonel uh Powell and then about 18 years later uh two American president impetuously compulsively and without reason uh abrogated two treaties George W bush your boss's boss uh abrogated the ABM Treaty in 2001 and Donald Trump abrogated the INF treaty in 2019 how harmful today were those two thoughtless abreg the first one was very harmful because it started the train reaction of getting rid of nuclear weapons treaties um and it didn't have to happen U to give you some idea of how Powell took it he was so shocked by the fact that it was so sudden and no attempt to let him know to get to Moscow to kind of soften the blow or whatever or work something out with them that he he went to Moscow and uh actually sent others to Moscow but we negotiated the Moscow treaty where we sort of saved their wounds a little bit the INF treaty po was so proud of that because as Deputy National Security advisor and National Security advisor for Ronald Reagan the last two years of Ronald Reagan's second term Howell was very instrumental in negotiating that treaty and he used to say to me that was the most important nuclear treaty in all the panoply of treaties because it eliminated an entire class of weapons it didn't just curb them it didn't just put limits on Warheads or uh vehicles to carry them it eliminated them and that was a hell of an achievement and it it was also hell hell of an achievement because it eliminated one of the most dangerous classes of nuclear weapons you may recall the gckm controversy in Europe the Europeans were opposed to us putting ground launch cruise missiles with nuclear warheads on them in Europe because they knew darn well that a lot of those missiles would be going off on their territory these are short range missiles and they don't shoot that far so if the Soviets are coming in and they're coming through the full to Gap you're shooting the full to Gap that's Germany as helmet Cole used to say you're hitting my territory with those nuclear weapons very dangerous weapons so this was the worst possible thing to do was to eliminate the INF treaty why did Bush and Trump do it as far as you know was it was Bush just under the pressure of uh Cheney and those and that crowd and Trump under the pressure of Pompeo and that crowd I think that's part of it but part of it too is Judge the nuclear weapons industry in the United States is a small niche of a monstrous almost trillion dollar defense complex every year but it is very rich it's very full of opportunity uh opportunity for cost overruns opportunity it's a it's a area where no one knows anything at all there's no Congressman on this Earth that knows anything really sophisticated about tridium or about nuclear warhead control or about shity and securization and all that language they use it's the labs so you have got this complex and then you got the nuclear waste the nuclear waste which have made billionaires out in Utah for example this is so much money that everyone in it guards it zealously and wants it to grow and when they saw the C War ending and US destroying weapons on both sides of the Atlantic they got really scared they deployed all their lobbyists engineers and nuclear physicists and others and they put the pressure on and now we're building out again Colonel should the United State state department be and defense department be worried about Russian warships in uh Havana and off the coast of Venezuela no but they should be very much worried about a nfly zone at least it looks very much like one to me over the Black Sea which Putin is in the process of putting in effect well that we caused that ourselves by the the death in sasto two Sundays ago absolutely I'm this this is going to be a very dangerous escalation if he does do it and those very competent pilots and airplanes have orders to shoot down anything that looks like it's providing intelligence to the ukrainians even if it's me even if it's man does the US understand that do does whoever make the decision I don't know how far up the food chain it went we talked about this last week to to facilitate the killing of innocent children on a beach on a Sunday afternoon understand uh the unintended consequences I think that's one of the reasons Austin picked up the phone and called his counterpart in Moscow and they may be doing that again over this because this is if if what I heard Putin say and what I interpreted from it is accurate or even partially accurate this is a significant escalation and it comes from just what you were talking about um I'm going to read a statement to you and then I'll tell you who said it and as I read it I would like you to take into account the EU parliamentary elections the uh election that just took place in France and the likely outcome of the elections in Great Britain tomorrow the Brussels bureaucrats want this war they see it as their own and they want to defeat Russia they keep sending the money of the European people to Ukraine they have shot European companies in the foot with sanctions they have driven up inflation and they have made making a living difficult for millions of European citizens Victor or ban yes the only voice in Europe that reminds me of Winston Churchill in 1938 and 39 The only voice and he could have said and look at what your great sugar daddy on the other side of the Atlantic did to you in terms of your economy it attacked the nordstream pipeline look what that did to Germany the engine of Europe's economy and look what it did peripherally and look what it's still doing and think that some of this political change which is coming about rather rapidly was motivated by and this is an attempt by the United States people don't understand our strategy this is an attempt Ukraine is as much about bleeding Russia it's as much about that as it is about reestablishing American hemony Economic Security and otherwise over the Europeans let's face it they were with Russia 740 million people almost a billion people and they had a GDP this last the the last year before ukra the Ukraine Invasion roughly equivalent to our own 2223 trillion dollar that's competition that's serious competition and the Germans looked like they were breaking out of the box in terms of someone we would be happy with in terms of econ economics they were the engine of the manufacturing world not us not China Germany was so we did what we did as much to reestablish economic Emy over Europe and teach them a lesson as it were as we did to bleed Russia these These are Insidious strategic objectives but they are our strategic objectives I want to read to you some comments from the Shanghai cooperation organization by President Putin and president X we shake hands with each other built on the principles of equality and mutual respect each country is currently experiencing the best period in their history China's 4,000 years old the Russians are a thousand years old uh the cooperation between our countries is not directed at anyone we are acting in the best interest of our peoples this is for Eternal friendship and the legitimate rights and interests of our peoples Vladimir Putin and president g at the Shanghai cooperation organization earlier today PS we're all going to join bricks and we're going to tell the Americans on their dollar go take a hike their their dollar bills go take a hike the relations of Nations back a few years ago long time ago well not a long time in the scope of human history but some time ago when the British Empire was getting a little bit too big and a little bit too Brazen and a little bit too arrogant and the British East India Company was acting as if it were her majesty or his majesty whatever it happened at the time then Russia and China got together and Russia and China got together to oppose Britain and opposed her all over the region from Babas and chabahar at the southern mouth of the Persian Gulf up through India and Afghanistan and all the way into the the southern part of Russia the British got scared to death of that and started doing all manner of things to try and counteract them just to say that this has been here be we've been here before we've seen this sort of thing before today we are Britain and by the way Britain didn't last a whole long after that I got one more uh cut for you I'm taking you back to uh China uh because uh what we're just talking about Russia and China uh I know you will appreciate this I'm not even going to tell you who it is but you'll know in a heartbeat cut number three the most indispensable factor in guaranteeing the security of Taiwan is a good relationship between the United States and ping if we have that relationship that may restrain them if P King has a relationship like that with the Soviet Union then Taiwan is in Mortal danger ah and ping as he calls it Beijing and Moscow are now buddies they just shook hands publicly for the second time in a month yep that's probably as much of a tectonic shift in the geopolitical landscape across this Earth as anything that's happened recently um maybe even the the move in that respect of the first half of the 21st Century and I think it signals um essentially what people have been saying about Biden's debate performance for example but they're saying it in words that make me think they're saying it on a wider tapestry and let's take the uh polish foreign minister who's who compared it to the period uh in Rome of Marcus Aurelius and he said Marcus Aurelius couldn't figure out who to replace him when he died and it's always better to ride into the sunset with some reputation than with it all shattered and tattered and falling apart around your feet and then we had some others saying similar things and those remarks were being made not just about Joe Biden in my view they were being made by allies and so they were couched in terms that seemed personal they were being made about the Empire The Empire riding into the sunset the Empire overwhelmed by its opponents in the world which is what's happened to every Empire in the 5,000 years of human history of which we know a little bit or a lot you ride into the sunset you go out peaceably and with some kind of vision of your future is less than an imperial state or you go out catastrophically now let's talk about how we might go out catastrophically the CBO just released a report saying that by 2034 we will have an aggregate debt of 50.7 trillion that means they said this too that means that in that at that time and it might come before 2034 it could come as early as 2032 that's not very far away that means that the interest payments we will have to pay on that debt or forfeit will be equal to Social Security Medicare Medicaid and the defense budget combined and yet no one in that Stellar group of senators and Representatives is doing a damn thing maybe Thomas Massi that's about it nobody nobody takes the warning seriously nobody's worried about uh debt I couldn't watch uh the full debate because I was cringing too much but they're tweetle D and tweetle dum neither of them talked about Fidelity to the Constitution they're both in favor of mass surveillance they're both in favor of Wars um of opportunity and they're both in favor of debt not much Choice I'll agree with you there no and that 340 million people of whom I say roughly I haven't checked the Dem demographics but roughly a 100 million got to be above 35 uh male and female and we can't find anybody else that's another comment on the Empire like Marcus Arius I cannot find anyone to replace me who's conf great Colonel Wilkerson it's a pleasure uh my dear man no matter what we talk about thank you so much for your intellect your analysis your knowledge and your charm a happy Independence Day to you same to you thank you my dear friend all the best we'll see you next week uh coming up at five o'clock Eastern the one and only Max Blumenthal judge naano for judging freedom [Music] [Music]