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July 13, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
25:36
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs :
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, July 14th, 2025.
Professor Jeffrey Sachs will be here with us in just a moment on why the U.S. decline.
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Mr. Sachs, welcome here, my dear friend.
Thank you for accommodating my schedule.
What do you believe was Trump's purpose in bombing the mountains in Iran and did he achieve it?
Well, the purpose supposedly was to stop the nuclear activities of Iran.
No, he didn't achieve it.
I think all expert views concur that nothing much happened except Iran realizing that it could not negotiate with the United States and withdrawing from monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
This was a debacle of the first order.
And the International Atomic Energy Agency turned out to be an asset of Mossad, did it not?
It played into Israel's hands in a very stupid way.
So it played its role.
What we've seen here is the CIA, Mossad, operations operating through the international system and operating through the U.S. military once again, all to no achieved purposes.
That's also a standard operating procedure for the U.S. military-industrial complex.
We've been at this for decades.
Nothing comes of it except people making money in the military sector and increasing insecurity for the world as a result of these stupid operations.
If the purpose of the bombing was to degrade Iran or terrify Iran or bring about regime change, it obviously had the opposite effect.
How could Mossad and CIA have been so wrong in their guesstimate as to what this bombing would bring about?
Look at the damage that was inflicted on Israel because of its unlawful, unprovoked attack on Iran.
The damage was even exacerbated because of the bombing.
Well, which genius forecast of the CIA are you referring to in the last 30 years?
The one about remaking Afghanistan as a democracy?
The one of American soldiers being greeted with the flowers in Iraq?
The one about the pushover of Bashar al-Assad in 2011?
The one about removing Muammar Gaddafi and leading to a new stability in Libya.
These people are completely unaccountable.
They have no knowledge of the world other than assassinations, coups, and military operations.
The world does not settle down that way.
The world becomes more dangerous and unstable.
These geniuses, in quotation marks, have done the most remarkable thing in the world.
They have absolutely degraded the security of Americans from a position of basically complete security.
If we just behaved ourselves and stopped entering these asinine wars to a situation where we're on the edge of nuclear war in at least three regions of the world.
because this military-industrial complex doesn't know how to behave.
What do you think President Trump and Prime Minister Nets and Yahoo were discussing last week?
They met in private three times while Nets and Yahoo was in Washington.
He returned with a gift from the Air Force of Two high-tech, sort of private-like planes, the planes that generals and secretaries of state used to fly around.
And I didn't know the president could give away Air Force gear, but another issue for another time.
What do you think they were talking about?
Of course, I don't know specifically what they were talking about, but we once had the idea that there would be a ceasefire, a peace, and a resolution of the unending wars in the Middle East, and that kind of talk is basically gone.
That talk is also gone in the case of Ukraine.
That talk is gone all over the world.
Trump is basically proving to be absolutely incapable of solving any problem.
And he is proving to be the extension of the Biden administration because the Biden administration was nothing more than the military-industrial complex.
We're basically stuck with a militarized, undemocratic system.
Presidents come and go, but the system remains.
It does anything Israel wants to an extent.
It's actually run by Israel, which is shocking.
Maybe it's blackmail.
Maybe it's some other reasons.
But whatever it is, we have a permanent state that does not respond to the public will, does not respond to American security, does not respond to the public interest, does not respond to budgetary realities, because now the budget deficit's heading towards 8% of GDP, in part thanks to the big, beautiful bill that was Trump's signature to get us even deeper into a financial hole.
But this is the permanent state.
Trump made noises that he was going to change the permanent state.
That was his signature pledge.
It turns out that's the opposite of the case.
He is a continuation in every single way, whether it is in Ukraine, whether it is in the Middle East, whether it is in East Asia.
It's more war, more military spending, larger budget deficits, and incompetence by the military-industrial complex.
There are signs that he's going to announce soon that he's going to do a full Joe Biden on Ukraine.
I don't know where he's going to get this other gear from, but there's all these indicators.
General Kellogg, the combative neocon, ostentatiously shaking hands with and meeting with President Zelensky.
Lindsey Graham running to the microphones as soon as he finishes playing golf with the president.
Netanyahu meeting three times with Trump in three days in private in Washington.
What do you think he's going to do tonight?
Announce more offensive weapons, digging us deeper into our co-belligerency against Russia?
That is at least the word everywhere, and it makes sense because Trump has proven not to be an independent actor capable of making changes.
He's proven to be a continuation of this crazy, expensive, destructive American foreign policy that's been going on for decades.
So Trump is not getting us out of wars.
He's not making America any safer.
He's not doing anything other than continuation.
It is Biden, too, if you want that, with more noise, I would say, but not any change of direction.
I came across this clip over the weekend of a very emotional Mandy Potinkin, the actor, expressing his opinion on the damage.
This is right out of your lectures, Professor, but stated in a highly emotional and most memorable way, as you'll see in a minute, that Netanyahu is destroying Israel by the manner in which he's slaughtering the Gazans.
Chris, cut number one.
And I ask Jews all over the world to consider what this man, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his right-wing government is doing to the Jewish people all over the world.
They are endangering not only the state of Israel, which I care deeply about and want to exist, but they are endangering the Jewish population all over the world.
He is the most dangerous thing, not just since October 7th.
It has been a deeply troubled situation for the Jewish people to allow this to happen to children and civilians of all ages in Gaza for whatever reason is unconscionable and unthinkable.
And I ask you Jews everywhere all over the world to spend some time alone and think, is this acceptable and sustainable?
How could it be done to you and your ancestors?
And you turn around and you do it to someone else.
Yeah.
Well, you know, well put.
And the point is, look, Israel is a rogue state committing massive war crimes, killing tens of thousands of innocents, slaughtering people, starving millions actually now, 2 million people in Gaza being starved systematically.
By the way, all with American support and complicity every step of the way.
This has nothing to do with Judaism as a religion or belief system or set of ethics.
And the idea that it does is absurd.
And similarly, the idea that criticizing Israel is somehow anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic is just a, I don't know, the most ridiculous idea imaginable for anyone like myself who grew up with Jewish values.
The idea that you shouldn't criticize Israel, well, that would be the opposite of those values.
What Israel is doing is absolutely disgusting, despicable, criminal in every possible way, and has nothing to do with Judaism.
So it's a state, and it's a state ideology.
The state ideology of Netanyahu is murder those who oppose whatever the Israeli state is doing.
That's nothing to do with Judaism as a religion.
And of course, as we've talked about and as many historians have written, the whole extremist Zionism, that is the state ideology, was opposed by the rabbis, by the teachers of Jewish thought, Jewish law, and Jewish ethics from the beginning of Zionism and continuing until today for many Jewish communities around the world.
So the point that Mr. Potinkin is making with great passion and great eloquence is a very basic idea.
And the basic idea is that state ideology of a militaristic, murderous regime is not a religion and it doesn't represent a religion.
It represents an extremist, violent ideology that has nothing to do with Judaism.
You have argued so articulately that foreign policy doesn't seem to change.
There's that one liner, no matter who you vote for for president, you end up with John McCain.
Here's somebody who fully agrees with you and said so on May 30th, 2017.
Press cut number seven.
I have a certain perspective.
You see, I've already spoken with one U.S. president and another and a third.
Presidents come and go, but the policy doesn't change.
Do you know why?
Because the power of the bureaucracy is very strong.
So someone gets elected, comes in with their own ideas, and then people show up with briefcases, well-dressed, wearing dark suits like mine, but not with a red tie, more like a black or dark blue one.
And they start explaining how things should be done.
And everything changes right away.
You see what I mean?
This happens from one administration to the next.
For those who are listening to the show and didn't recognize those words as translated, it was Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia.
He's 100% correct, Jeff.
Look, he said in this interview with Figaro in 2017 that it's interesting for him.
He said, I've dealt with three presidents and they actually come in with ideas.
But then those ideas disappear because the men in the dark suits and the briefcases, that's the CIA, by the way, that's the other security agencies.
That is the Pentagon.
That's the Armed Services Committees and so forth.
That's the big donors.
They come in and they say, no, no, no, Mr. President, you do it this way.
Now, we've just witnessed this exactly happening with Donald Trump.
And Donald Trump ran on a campaign of making peace.
He was going to make peace here and there.
He was going to make peace in Ukraine.
He was going to make peace in the Middle East.
He doesn't have perhaps the knowledge, but he certainly doesn't have the guts to make peace because to make peace, you have to go against the CIA.
You have to go against the military-industrial complex.
You have to say they're wrong.
They've made terrible mistakes for 30 years.
Well, on the campaign trail, that was easy, but Trump doesn't have the gumption to stick with it.
So to make peace with Russia is straightforward.
You have to say clearly the NATO enlargement to Ukraine was wrong because it provoked a conflict with Russia.
You have to say that publicly.
You have to say that it was wrong for the United States to help overthrow violently the Ukraine government in 2014 to bring in a NATO-friendly regime.
You have to say that publicly.
To say that publicly goes against the U.S. deep state.
Trump obviously doesn't have the guts to say it publicly.
To make peace in the Middle East, you have to say that Israel can't murder, starve, and ethnically cleanse millions of Palestinians, and that in fact, Palestine needs a state so that it is not under the militaristic and murderous control of Israel.
You have to say that.
Well, it's very straightforward from a policy point of view, but to say it runs against the CIA and Mossad and the military-industrial complex.
It takes guts.
It also takes attention.
You can't have attention deficit disorder in your foreign policy where it's one day this, the next day it's terrorist, the next day it's a ceasefire demand, making demands.
Oh, Putin doesn't listen to my demands.
Well, the United States has not been clear at all about what needs to be done.
And it's interesting, all of this talk, for example, in Ukraine of a ceasefire, a ceasefire.
A ceasefire is an escape from talking about the real issues that are at stake in Ukraine about NATO enlargement first and foremost.
You see, Trump won't talk about that.
He's afraid to.
That runs against the U.S. deep state.
Every president has been afraid to for decades.
We are run not by these presidents, but we are run by the CIA, by the military-industrial complex.
And if I might, because you rightly brought attention to Putin explaining, I've seen this show before, that was in 2017, and he's experiencing it exactly again with Trump.
Now, we should recall the most famous words about this by the president who was perhaps best equipped of all our modern presidents to understand this.
And of course, that was General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the commander of the Allied forces in World War II.
And he was the one famously that warned us exactly about this in his farewell address to the nation on January 17th, 1961.
And if I might just quickly quote it, because I wanted to show his words are so prescient.
He said, this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in this American experience.
The total influence, economic, political, and even spiritual, is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government.
We recognize the imperative need for this development, yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.
Our toil, resources, and livelihoods are all involved.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.
The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
And that was 1961.
We are run by the military-industrial complex.
Trump is a sideshow.
What Trump has done in recent weeks with Ukraine, with the Middle East, with China, with Epstein Capes, with all of it, is just fall into line as presidents are supposed to do.
MAGA turns out it's a campaign slogan, of course.
It's nothing new.
It's a continuation of the deep state.
And the deep state has led us to one war after another.
Yes, military stocks are soaring.
The Israeli stock exchange is soaring.
Can you believe it?
Israel's at war.
It's disrupted.
But the war profiteers are making a fortune.
And this is what runs the American show now.
Not Trump, not Congress, which is irrelevant, not even a sideshow.
And the Supreme Court, by the way, has basically said to Trump, yeah, you do whatever you want.
We're not going to stop you.
So we have the ability completely out of control of the military-industrial complex to run our nation.
And it is.
And that means war non-stop.
How close are we to World War III?
We may already be in it.
The problem with World War III is that there will be no historians alive afterwards to understand when it really started.
But if we were in a conventional era with conventional weapons and there would be a world war and it would be devastating, but there would be a history afterward, maybe the historians would say World War III started in 2014 or maybe 2019 or maybe 2022.
Maybe we're in it already.
The late Pope Francis often said we're already in World War III.
There's no will in the political class to talk about peace.
You don't hear peace anywhere.
And Trump, who told us he was coming into office to make peace, turns out that he's coming into office as a continuation of the war machine.
And he's tired of Putin and he's blah, blah, blah, this and he's calling out the Ayatollah.
This is all propaganda nonsense because we don't have a serious policy of diplomacy, of negotiation that gets to the core issues of why these conflicts exist and how the United States should live peacefully alongside Russia or the Arab states or Iran or China,
which with some common sense and some prudence and some honesty and some historical knowledge would not be hard to achieve.
But instead, we have a revving war machine.
And as Eisenhower said, it has changed everything.
It's non-stop war.
Professor Sachs, thank you very much.
I know you're traveling and on the other side of the world, but deeply appreciate your time with us.
We'll look forward to seeing you again soon.
All the best, my dear friends.
Wonderful.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
Truly a brilliant, brilliant and gifted intellect.
More coming at 11.30 this morning.
Larry Johnson at one o'clock this afternoon.
Colonel Douglas McGregor at two o'clock this afternoon.
Scott Ritter at four o'clock from South Korea on the Epstein files.
Ryan Dawson.
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