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June 17, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
29:04
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : Trump and War.
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, June 17th, 2025.
Professor Jeffrey Sachs is with us on Donald Trump and war.
But first this.
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Professor Sachs, welcome here.
I want to ask you how dangerous was the deception perpetrated by President Trump on the Iranians and others.
But in order to be fair to the president here, it's only about 60 seconds.
Here is the core of what he said last month in Saudi Arabia.
Before our eyes, a new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts of tired divisions of the past and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos.
This great transformation has not come from Western interventionalists.
The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons, or liberal nonprofits like Cabal, Baghdad, so many other cities.
Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves.
In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies.
That they did not even understand themselves.
They told you how to do it, but they had no idea how to do it themselves.
Peace, prosperity and progress ultimately came not from a radical rejection of your heritage, but rather from embracing your national traditions and embracing that same heritage that you love so dearly.
It's fair to say, Professor Sachs, that as he was uttering those very words, CIA, MI6, and Mossad were preparing the dastardly and unprovoked attack that Israel visited upon Iran last week.
Certainly, Mossad is in the lead.
It's assassination and murder unit number one.
But Mossad effectively has determined U.S. policy for decades, and Trump is falling into line.
So it's quite amazing to see.
One president after another falls into line with the murder incorporated led by Israel.
When he said those words, you and I and others on the show rejoiced.
An American president condemning the neocons, an American president condemning military adventurism and intervention into foreign countries.
It was a charade.
It was a facade.
It was a deception.
We don't know exactly what happened between then and now in one sense.
I think President Putin in 2017 expressed something that we all learn as well.
He knew it in 2017 in an interview with Le Figaro that he gave.
He said, I've dealt with many American presidents.
They come into office with ideas.
But then men in dark suits and briefcases wearing blue ties show up and explain to them the world the way that it will be.
And so you never hear of those ideas again.
So I can't peer into the inner thinking of Trump, but everything he's saying and doing today violates what he said last month.
And in the end, we know.
That our foreign policy is governed by a deep state apparatus, the CIA, Mossad, MI6, as you said.
And we know that the actions that occur, for example, Ukraine's attack on Russia's strategic nuclear bombers, had the same provenance, that is, the same authors as Israel's attack.
In Tehran last week, same methods, same crates carrying drones inside a country to make a decapitation strike or to make a strategic strike.
So Mossad was involved in both the Ukraine operation and in the Tehran operation last week.
Now, we've discussed in recent weeks, what did Trump know when?
I have no idea.
What did the CIA know?
Well, of course it knew it was involved in all of this.
Who leads all of this?
Mossad, I would say.
It's weird, but it's actually true.
America does not have an America-first foreign policy, despite what Donald Trump says.
America has an Israel-first foreign policy.
It happens that Israel's foreign policy is completely reckless, dangerous, and delusional.
And it has been that way for decades.
I was going to say for 30 years, that's the time span of Netanyahu, who is the current most despicable person on the planet, in my view, because he's the greatest war progenitor of them all.
But it actually goes back beyond 30 years.
This is a long-term plan for Israel to have its way in the Middle East.
Netanyahu has explained it repeatedly for 30 years for anyone who cares to read his books and articles and watch his speeches, and it's painful, but it's actually worth doing because he tells you what his modus operandi is.
And the modus operandi is that we will do what we want in the Middle East, and if any government in the region objects, we will overthrow that government.
But when he says we, he's very nice.
It's his U.S. buddies that will do it.
The U.S. will spend trillions of dollars and lives and the utter destruction of world trust in the United States to do this extremist Zionist bidding.
And Netanyahu has been right.
The U.S. has done his bidding up until now.
We know that there was a plan already hatched decades ago, but unveiled to the former NATO commander, General Wesley Clark, in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, which said seven wars in five years.
And those seven countries were Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Somalia.
Sudan, Libya, and Iran.
And the U.S. has been engaged in six of those seven wars.
Still now, a long plan, delayed, by the way, because every one of those turned into a complete debacle compared to what Bibi promised us all the time, how wonderful these wars would be.
And now we're in the seventh war, finally.
And Donald Trump has fallen completely into line.
As of today, it's amazing to watch.
It's terrifying to watch.
It would be nice if we had an American first foreign policy.
I want to ask you about the consequences to American diplomacy of this kind of deception.
But before we do, there's an interesting back and forth between a reporter, I don't know who, and President Trump on Air Force One last night.
And she asks President Trump, About a director of national security, Gavard's statement under oath that the intelligence community has concluded that Iran does not have and is not building a nuclear weapon.
Watch this, cut number 13. People always said that you don't believe Iran should be able to have a nuclear weapon.
But how close do you personally think that they were to getting one?
Because Tulsi Gabbard testified at March that the intelligence community said Iran wasn't building a nuclear weapon.
The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.
I don't care what she said.
And I think they were very close to having one.
I don't care what she said.
I think they were very close to having one.
How profoundly irresponsible is a statement unsupported by any evidence like that?
This is how the U.S. government acts and has acted for decades.
Donald Trump is not alone in this.
There was a famous interview back in around 2003 where one of the George Bush Junior top advisor said when he asked about the real situation, he explained to the reporter, we make our own reality and you report on it.
And this is the view of government that has become nothing more than PR and bond.
That's what the U.S. government is.
They have their own narrative.
They smirk when they say it.
They're uninterested in anything truthful at all, and they believe that the weapons are the only determinant of reality in the end.
You know, this whole approach is repeatedly put to the test.
The whole idea that it is the weapons that create the truth.
Not the rhetoric, not the analysis, not the actual events, but the weapons that create the truth is found to be wanting.
That's been true for a long time in human history, but it's found to be wanting month after month, year after year in our current circumstances.
Netanyahu has left behind a wasteland.
It's the old...
It's the old...
They create a desert and they call it peace.
This is Netanyahu.
He's been the champion of overthrowing Gaddafi.
Now there has been 14 years of violence and death and destruction in Libya.
He was the proponent of overthrowing the governments in Sudan, in Somalia, in Lebanon.
In Syria, in Iraq, and now quite explicitly in Iran.
Now, the wars that have occurred have been complete disasters.
So this is the empirical record.
They don't care about the empirical record.
It doesn't touch them.
These are powerful people whose families are not being bombed, whose relatives are not being killed.
You know, underworld dons that think that violence just runs the show.
So they don't care about the truth.
There's no analysis here.
There never is these days.
There's no honesty in any statement that anybody makes.
After all, you know, the day before the Israel attack, the U.S. government statements were having...
This was in a context of ongoing negotiations.
And then suddenly, a massive murder attack by Mossad.
No one says, oh, but we were going to have negotiations.
it's taken for granted well that was a What kind of behavior is this?
Maybe it's a behavior of the underworld, but it's not a behavior in which the overworld can survive, frankly.
Chris put together a montage.
There it is.
And it reminds me of that phrase from my friend, the Columbia University historian, Tom Woods.
No matter who you vote for, you end up with John McCain.
This has been the deep consistency.
You end up with the...
CIA-led foreign policy has the advantage that it's unaccountable.
You don't have to explain it.
You don't have to justify it.
You don't have to review what's happened.
You don't look at the record of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan.
You never review it.
You just move forward, after all.
More deaths, more killing, more regime change.
We're in the middle of it right now, but it's the big one.
This is a country with more than 90 million people, and it has powerful allies.
And Netanyahu's madness and Trump's complicity is, yeah, sure, let's kill all the top leaders and kill.
How do serious diplomats like our mutual friend, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, view this?
Marco Rubio said on Thursday night when the bombs first started falling, the United States knows nothing about this.
Donald Trump posted on Truth Social, yeah, we're behind it and the Iranians deserve it.
Donald Trump's speech in Saudi Arabia, the lying and deception.
How do serious diplomats view this?
How will they view dealing with the United States from and after these events?
Of course, serious diplomats don't believe a word that the United States, Britain, France, or just about any other close ally of China, The Chinese have gotten over it a long time ago.
We attack them through projection all the time, saying they don't tell the truth.
All they hear is lies from the United States.
I just went to a U.N. Security Council session last week at the end of the week after Israel bombed in an unprovoked manner Iran.
And after it had assassinated many scientists and many of the military top leaders three days before the next round of negotiations was to take place.
and I listened to the U.S. and the...
All she did was threaten Iran.
Of course, the French, the British, talked about Israel's rights to self-defense.
And the United States representative at the Security Council basically said, if any American is harmed in this, we will destroy Iran.
I'm paraphrasing.
But it was thuggery.
That's what is called diplomacy these days.
This is actually alarming because diplomacy is a set of tools to keep the world safe.
It's not a game.
It's not a show.
It's not a clever statement on true social.
It's not a clever witticism made standing outside the U.N. Security Council.
It's actually a set of survival tools, especially in the nuclear age.
Now, that idea that diplomacy is serious is It's very much debunked.
A lot of people would say, Sachs, you're an idiot.
You're naive.
You're a fool.
It's all about power.
But, in fact, survival is not all about power.
If it becomes all about power, we will not survive.
It has to be about cooperation, understanding, enough truth-telling that if it's four days before you're to start, The next round of negotiations, you don't create mass assassinations the third day before the negotiations are about to start, and then chortle about how wonderful that is.
You don't say, yes, we want to negotiate, but if you don't capitulate entirely, we will destroy you, typically in big, bold letters with exclamation points attached.
Thuggery is not survival.
Thuggery is thuggery.
And there's a difference, actually, of underworld behavior and the behavior that we actually need for survival.
I know it's a little quaint, the idea that there's actually honesty, follow-through, that negotiations really mean negotiations.
That we have a UN Charter.
I know it sounds all very quaint, but it's actually the undergirding of survival, and we are sliding, absolutely sliding rapidly now to the unprecedented world war in which it's a war with nuclear weapons.
Yesterday, I interviewed a friend of yours, Professor Mohamed Marandi in Tehran, just an hour before the following happened at a television station in Tehran.
If you hear the voice of an invader on the homeland, it is the voice of an aggressor against truth and justice.
What you observe, the sound you heard is the murky dust laden voice of the studio.
*Burk*
That, of course, was the Iranian state television being destroyed on air.
By Israeli missiles, obviously.
With Trump then thereafter saying, much, much worse is to come.
Much worse is to come.
We demand total capitulation.
What is this, Star Wars?
It is almost, it is barnyard-like.
How is this viewed in Beijing, in Moscow, in India?
How do other great countries in the world view this?
Well, let me restate the question, Professor Sachs.
Who would trust the United States in any significant negotiation after this?
Nobody.
These negotiations, of course, not only on life and death issues of war and peace, but even on quotidian issues like tariffs.
There is no trust because the U.S. has no sense.
Trump is an extreme case, but it's a general pattern.
No sense of honor or responsibility for fulfillment of one's word in a treaty.
So I think everybody understands that what's called transactional, Is less than transactional.
It means the immediate moment.
An agreement is not a binding agreement.
The full faith and credit means nothing because there is no faith and there is no credit to this.
So everybody in the world right now, vis-a-vis the United States, is improvising.
The Europeans, in their absolutely pathetic way, which I think Trump loves, it's like watching the vulnerable mice scurrying around among your traps.
He's playing games with them, and they allow themselves to be played with.
China's extremely different.
China, of course, knows that it is...
It doesn't want to put that to a test.
China is an ancient civilization and it has civilizational depth and status and it basically doesn't respond to the minute to this.
Again, I can't use the word I would use, but to this show that is underway right now.
But it tries to create some sense in the midst of all of this of stability.
It refers daily to the UN Charter and to the need for multilateralism.
It's a valiant attempt, actually.
And most countries of the world, of course, want that.
Yeah, the U.S. has everybody scurrying around, but now the time horizon for decision-making has been reduced to minutes, and that by itself means that we're at the very edge of nuclear war.
The doomsday clock that I often refer to is at 89 seconds to midnight.
attack Russian strategic bombers, you get closer.
Make a...
Everyone wants to play games.
By the way, not everyone.
I'm talking about this tiny, tiny cabal that has our lives in their hands.
There's no such thing as any public scrutiny of foreign policy at all.
Anywhere, by the way, right now, this is a small group of people that hold the fate of the world in their hands.
We had a Constitution of the United States that aimed to do something different, but it's completely in shreds.
Chris, do you have the full screen of the tweet from the senior senator from South Carolina?
Two or three words.
I don't want to repeat it.
There it is.
When this happened on Thursday night, just what you said, it's a game to him.
Game on.
Pray for Israel.
Lindsey Graham.
Most single, most despicable person in U.S. politics, I'll say.
But he plays golf with and whispers into the president's ear.
So this is very dangerous.
Donald Trump appears to be believing whoever he spoke to last.
Do you expect Trump to authorize some sort of U.S. military involvement, which God only knows how it's going to end up?
We have 90,000 troops on the ground within striking distance of Iran missiles.
Ritter says they're not even infantry.
They're support troops.
Well, I think it's likely that the U.S., under Trump's commands right now, will escalate and that this war will continue to escalate.
30 years.
The war is now raging across a 4,000-kilometer expanse from Libya to Iran.
So nothing has put down any of this conflict.
Security?
This is the opposite of national security.
U.S. interests?
This is the opposite of U.S. interests.
Israeli security?
It's the opposite of Israeli security.
All we do is take a step closer to the end of the world.
And then, I'm sorry to say, I get emails from fundamentalists who say, read the sign of the times, Professor Sachs.
The end of the world is coming, as in the prophecies.
Well, I have a different approach, which is that we as a human being should be working towards avoiding the end of the world.
Thank you, Professor Sachs.
Thank you very much for your time.
As unhappy as all of this is, your analysis is spectacular and deeply appreciated.
Stay well.
Travel safely.
We'll see you next week.
Excellent.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
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