Here is the full transcript of a conversation between Judge Andrew Napolitano and American retired diplomat and writer Charles Freeman on Judging Freedom Podcast titled “Will China Cave on Trump’s Tariffs?” premiered April 22, 2025.
The interview starts here:
Pope Francis’s Legacy and Global Impact
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, April 22, 2025. Ambassador Charles Freeman will be here in just a minute with his views on the new and coming relationship between the United States and China.
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JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Ambassador, good day to you, my friend, and welcome here. Before we start on China and tariffs, Taiwan and the coming conflict between China and the United States, what is your view on the passing of the Pope? Is there any geopolitical significance to the passing of the Pope?
CHARLES FREEMAN: Yes, this was an extraordinary man, a great Pope. I’ve been terribly moved. You know, every week he would call of the small Christian community in Gaza, which is being subjected to genocide. And he was like a father to them. He cared for them. This was exemplary. And of course, the loss of this man diminishes the level of decency in the world considerably. I’m not sure geopolitically what this means, but the contrast between his caring attitude and our indifference to gross violations of human rights really is quite stark.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Do diplomats, whether from the United States, the West, or elsewhere, pay heed to what the Pope says? I mean, suppose he sent Cardinal Parolin, the Secretary of State, or went himself in his healthier years, to Tel Aviv and said to Netanyahu, stop, you’re slaughtering innocents. What would the reaction have been to that?
CHARLES FREEMAN: I think there would have been strong support. I’m speaking to you from my former home state of Rhode Island, which is the most Catholic state in the country. There really is genuine sorrow here over the Pope’s passing. I think he had political and moral influence beyond the members of his own church.
But frankly, we have a secular government and people behave in consonance with that standard. I don’t think it would have had much impact on the practitioners of diplomacy directly. What he would have done is rallied public opinion, put pressure on diplomats to do the right thing.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: I was present in the House of Representatives. Congressman Thomas Massa gave me his seat. Only in America can a Methodist give an old-fashioned pre-Vatican II Catholic his seat on the floor of the House. Anyway, I was right there. The Pope was not introduced as the head of the Roman Catholic Church. He was introduced as the head of the Holy See, which is the actual name of the Vatican City state. And he appeared there as the head of state, not as the head of a church, even though of course, the Pope, at least the modern popes are both.
It was a moving event. And when I got to the cameras, Fox cameras were right outside. I was at Fox at the time. Fox cameras were right outside the House of Representative chamber. And they said, quick, what did you think? And I said, “More LBJ than Fulton Sheen.” I don’t know if I would say the same thing today, but that’s what I felt at the time. And he was received not the way Benjamin Netanyahu was received, but it was received with great enthusiasm.
And then, of course, I had this strange encounter with him where we were in the same dining room in his residence. I spent a week living in the same residence where the Pope lives. I say residence. It’s a small boutique hotel inside the Vatican. It’s about 60 rooms. He lived in a suite there and I was with Jeff Sachs and some others, and we were making presentations on Thomas Aquinas. And one day the Pope showed up at dinner and he just sat two tables away from us, didn’t say hello to anybody, and then left. If it had been John Paul II, he would have come over and introduced himself just as if he was one of the boys.
Trump’s Tariffs and Legal Authority
All right. The statute under which Trump claims authority to impose tariffs has a trigger, and the trigger is the existence of an emergency. And Trump claims that the emergency is the imbalance of trade, which to me is ridiculous because an emergency is also defined in the statute as a sudden and unexpected event, the imbalance of trade since 1934. So where is he going with this?
CHARLES FREEMAN: Well, I think there’s a problem with his use of tariffs. Although they’re justified legally in the terms that you just mentioned, which frankly, are ludicrous, that is a great stretch of the legislation and executive power pursuant to it. They’re justified also economically as producing reshoring of industry and building jobs and so forth. But economists pretty much unanimously dismiss that as nonsense.
What they’re really about is what Mr. Trump said. You know, he imposed these tariffs, and now at least 70 countries want to come and kiss my ass, he said. Now this is a power play. It’s an effort to receive attention, adulation. It’s showing off the power of the presidency, as he interprets it, and I guess it’s personally very gratifying to him. But it doesn’t make legal, economic, or even political sense in any respect.
And in fact, you can see the reactions of those most knowledgeable about the law, economics and politics. Lawsuits against the abuse of authority by the president are multiplying daily. The stock market is gyrating wildly. The latest effort by the Trump administration and the President himself to face down the independence of the Federal Reserve has unnerved investors all over the world. The dollar is falling in value against other currencies, even as other currencies themselves are subject to stress.
And politically, it looks as though there’s a lot of buyers remorse among those who voted for Mr.
Trump as president. So this is not an economic measure. It’s not legally justified. It’s politically unwise, and
it could be disastrous for our country.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: You understand better than almost anyone the mentality of the leaders of China. Is it wise or is it foolish for Trump to expect that President Xi will come begging for relief?
China’s Response to US Pressure
CHARLES FREEMAN: There will be no capitulation, preemptive or otherwise, by the Chinese. They have an intense pride in their own achievements. They are now, by purchasing power measures, an economy about one third larger than that of the United States. They make one third of the world’s manufactured goods. We have a balance of trade in services in favor of us in China. They’ve probably choked that off in retaliation.
It’s been clear to them for some time that the United States has a policy of trying to retard or reverse their progress toward greater prosperity and influence internationally. We are trying to block their access to other markets. And they look at this and they see no real benefit in dealing with the Trump administration.
Mr. Trump apparently expects them to pick up the phone and call, as you suggested, to offer the surrender of some sort. That won’t happen. They look at the administration and they see it as a constant violator of its own commitments. A treaty with the United States is not worth very much these days. An executive agreement is worth nothing. And so they’re not in a mood to negotiate.
They are doubling down on their effort to survive without the United States. Globalization, in fact, is continuing in our absence. We are not present at any of the rule-setting bodies where the rules of the road for trade are set. So this is a confrontation which comes on top of rising political tensions over the abandonment by the United States of the understandings that Nixon, Kissinger and Jimmy Carter reached with the Chinese about how to kick the Taiwan can down the road rather than have a confrontation over it. Very dangerous. Very, very dangerous. And not anything that is going to lead to a success for our country, I’m afraid.
The Taiwan Question and Military Balance
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: You mentioned Taiwan. We can talk a little bit about the personal, the alleged personal misbehavior of the Secretary of Defense, but when he was in Japan two weeks ago, he practically challenged the Chinese military to attempt to exert some sort of control over Taiwan. Ambassador, is it even conceivable that the United States military could effectively defend Taiwan from a military incursion by mainland China?
CHARLES FREEMAN: It’s less and less credible. And our own military commanders tell us that we are falling behind in various arms races with China. China now has over a fourth of the world’s STEM workers, scientists, technologists, engineers, mathematicians, and they are very, very innovative.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which was ironically set up and funded by the State Department to belittle China, now reports that of the 64 areas of technology they monitor, these are technologies which are both civilian and military. Of the 64, in 57, the Chinese are ahead of us. The South Koreans are ahead in two, and we are ahead in five.
Every war game that we run against China shows that both China and the United States lose something like half to two thirds of our navies and air forces in the conflict. This would basically remove the United States as a global power. China has the industrial base to replace lost ships and aircraft. We don’t. So if we get into a war with the Chinese, the first casualty will be the democracy and the prosperity and the industrial base in Taiwan, which is central to the global economy and to our own.
You have to ask yourself, why do you want to challenge someone to a war that no one can win? And that could prove to be existential. And a final point here is how did we get into the Taiwan issue? When the Chinese civil war resulted in a Communist victory on the mainland of China, we helped Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, the remnants, the losing side in the war, remove themselves to Taiwan. And we’ve protected them ever since from the consequence of their defeat on the mainland. Taiwan has evolved. It’s now a robust, admirable democracy, probably the best society that’s ever existed on Chinese soil. But it is on Chinese soil.
And the final point here is that when in my experience and in the national experience, the side that is more determined to win, that feels there is most at stake, has the balance of fervor. A little guy in a bar whose wife is insulted can beat a big guy because he’s angry and determined. The Vietnamese beat us despite the fact that we spent vastly more money on our military and had a technologically superior military. We basically destroyed our army in Vietnam. It had to be rebuilt.
The consequences of a war with China would be vastly worse in large measure because it could escalate to the nuclear level. And the Chinese historically have had a policy much like that of the French. The French have what they call a “force de frappe,” meaning a strike force which can take enough of a bite out of an aggressor so that the aggressor is deterred from attacking France with nuclear weapons. That was the Chinese policy.
They have now, in response to our nuclear modernization program and the sorts of threats that our Secretary of Defense politically issued in Japan, adopted our mutual assured destruction or MAD policy. And if we attack them with nuclear weapons or if they think they’re losing the war over Taiwan, they may very well escalate to the nuclear level. They are acquiring the ability not just to take a bite out of us, but to destroy our society completely.
This is not a pretty picture. It’s not handled accurately in the press. The historical background is not described. The growth of Chinese military power, which the military are well aware of, is not adequately assessed. Now we’re talking about a country which is now flying two sixth generation prototype bomber aircraft. And we are about to authorize a program to build a sixth generation aircraft. They are ahead of us in quite a number of military areas and we should be very, very cautious not issuing threats.
Secretary of Defense Controversy
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Have you ever come across in your years in the Defense Department, the Secretary of Defense sharing battle plans with members of his family, his wife, his brother, and his personal attorney?
CHARLES FREEMAN: No. If anybody in the military or civilian workforce in the Pentagon did that, they would be subject to criminal prosecution and jailed. So this is an example, an unfortunate example of elitist behavior, the assertion by the Secretary of Defense that he’s exempt from the rules that he applies to all his subordinates. And that is one of the major things that ordinary Americans object to. So this, from a political point of view, this is a terrible development.
Secretary of Defense Controversy
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: A podcaster, whom I don’t know, by the way, understand from Chris, is very, very popular, by the name of Brian Tyler Cohen, has put together some interesting clips of the Secretary of Defense. This is mocking him, but the point is quite clear and it’s worth watching. Chris, cut number eight.
[VIDEO CLIP STARTS]
PETE HEGSETH: See, this is what the media does. They take anonymous sources from disgruntled former employees, and then they try to slash and burn people and ruin their reputations. Not going to work with me.
BRIAN TYLER COHEN: Yep. Not going to work with him. And this is where I actually agree with the Secretary of Defense. It is appalling when members of the media try and slash and burn patriotic Americans simply for mishandling some classified information. Right, Mr. Hegseth?
PETE HEGSETH: If the top man on the job was to handle classified documents this flippantly for that long, why was that the case? Was it really that he didn’t know? Because when you take something out of a skiff, if you’re a senator, you know exactly what you’re doing.
Any security professional, military, government or otherwise would be fired on the spot for this type of conduct and criminally prosecuted for being so reckless with this kind of information.
BRIAN TYLER COHEN: Oh, no. First, the Pope is dead, and now hypocrisy. Why? So? The man who is widely criticized as unqualified has shown himself to be just that.
Seriously, this is the guy that we’re keeping around, apparently, to be the Secretary of Defense, the person in charge of a proposed trillion dollar budget and the largest military in the world.
All you need to be is a white guy with a nice head of hair and some broadcasting experience. I’m coming for you, Pete.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: I mean, the point is very well made. There are now two instances of this. The first one with the reporter for the Atlantic magazine and Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, took the fall. The second one was, of course, with Pete Hegseth’s wife, brother, and personal lawyer. Nobody seems to be taking the fall or taking the blame. I suppose, unless public pressure becomes insurmountable, they can just keep doing this because they control the mechanism for prosecution.
CHARLES FREEMAN: Well, I have to say he was more successful as a talking head with greasy hair than he is as Secretary of Defense. And the fact is that sharing this kind of information with your wife and others on a Signal call, they have no need to know this information. It puts it in jeopardy. It risks the lives of those carrying out a military operation. This is the behavior of a small boy boasting to people he cares about. It’s an act of self aggrandizement. It’s not responsible. And it says something very bad about the psychological state of the man doing it.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: How does it resonate with the troops? I mean, theoretically and maybe even practically, he jeopardized the lives of pilots who are flying though the planes shouldn’t have been there, the pilots shouldn’t have been there, but they’re just obeying orders. But if the other side knows they’re coming, their lives are jeopardized more so than by just their being there.
CHARLES FREEMAN: Yes, and it appears that there have been multiple chats on multiple military national security topics conducted by Mr. Hegseth and others. It’s not, this is not new. We’re now seeing that this is a regular pattern. It definitely jeopardizes the lives of those carrying out the operations they’ve been ordered to carry out. But, you know, it is from the point of view of the rank and file of the military who are subject to very strong discipline, this is an act of hypocrisy, as Mr. Cohen, the podcaster said.
Closing Remarks
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Ambassador Freeman, thank you for your time. My dear friend, thank you for your economic as well as geopolitical analysis. Thanks for accommodating my schedule. All the best to you. We’ll look forward to seeing you again next week.
CHARLES FREEMAN: Very good.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Thank you. Coming up later today at 11:30 this morning Eastern, Pepe Escobar at 2:00 this afternoon. Aaron Mate at 3:00 this afternoon, Karen Kwadkowski, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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