Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano - Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : How Depraved is US Foreign Policy?

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July 28, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano

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Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : How Depraved is US Foreign Policy?

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	Hi, everyone.
	Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
	Today is Tuesday, July 29th, 2025.
	Professor Jeffrey Sachs will be with us in just a minute on just how depraved is American foreign policy today.
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	Professor Sachs, welcome here, my dear friend, and thank you, as always, for accommodating my schedule.
	I have a broad array of the areas I want to touch on involving the depravity, my word, not yours, though I think you'll agree, of American foreign policy.
	Let's begin with the president yesterday sitting next to Sir Kira Stormer, threatening President Putin if the war in Ukraine isn't over in 10 to 12 days.
	The president is going to impose secondary tariffs on Russia.
	What kind of diplomacy is that?
	Well, a failure.
	Nothing is going to work of that sort.
	The president can't just say the war ends in 10 days.
	The biggest, I think, most precise adjective for American foreign policy is delusional, because American foreign policy under Trump, like under Biden and under previous U.S. presidents, is based on an extraordinary arrogance of power.
	The arrogance to say the war ends in 10 days on my terms, or the Middle East ends on my terms, or the war with Iran ends on my terms, or the conflict with China ends on my terms.
	This is the pattern.
	This is Trump's pattern, but it goes beyond Trump.
	Trump makes it very plain and very crude.
	But this is basically the idea that diplomacy doesn't matter.
	The U.S. does what it wants and demands that all other countries fall into line.
	It fails.
	This is why Trump's claim that he would end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours failed because he did not pursue diplomacy.
	He just made orders.
	This is why there is a genocide underway with U.S. full complicity and full responsibility in Gaza, a genocide of people being starved to death before our eyes with the U.S. playing a major role in this.
	This is a failure.
	This is why there is no settlement with Iran, despite Trump claiming at one point that he would have a diplomatic arrangement.
	This is why there is no settlement on issues with China and now maybe another 90-day postponement of whatever on these so-called trade negotiations, because Trump makes orders.
	The orders don't really accomplish anything.
	And that's the essence of the foreign policy.
	Depravity, yes, when it comes to Israel and Gaza, it's absolutely a complicity in genocide that is appalling and depraved.
	Of course, the word applies especially and in the first instance to Israel itself, a country that has written itself out of the world community, that has left the rest of the world other than Mr. Trump and the delusional and corrupt and perhaps blackmailed politicians in Washington nodding their heads as if nothing is happening.
	But this is a failed foreign policy because they don't understand diplomacy and they don't understand that you have to negotiate with counterparts.
	You have to understand the reasons for crises or tensions.
	You have to try to resolve them.
	You can't just make orders.
	Also, while he was sitting next to Prime Minister Starmer, he and the Prime Minister were wringing their hands Over the starvation in Gaza, a starvation which Prime Minister Netanyahu yesterday died.
	Another story for another time because the truth just did not come out of Netanyahu's mouth.
	How cold, calculating, misleading, wrong, and inappropriate is it for a person to be wringing their hands over starvation that he has caused by financing Netanyahu and never saying no?
	Of course, America is complicit and not just through the finance, but through the armaments and through awareness every day and military cooperation with the government that is committing genocide.
	So wringing hands is just the most bizarre response to an immediate starvation of a population.
	I just read a statement by the foreign minister of Norway who worried about the appearance of a double standard that the West isn't criticizing Israel enough.
	For God's sake, criticizing?
	It isn't the issue.
	Stopping mass murder?
	That's the issue.
	Is there any significance to the statement by French President Macron that France will soon recognize a Palestinian state and a similar, though less certain statement by Prime Minister Starmer after President Trump left him, that Britain will recognize a Palestinian state if the starvation and the war are not abated by September?
	Well, yes, there is significance to this.
	I think it is actually quite significant that there be the membership of Palestine as the 194th UN member state to tell to these murderous genocidares in Israel,
	no, you are not going to have permanent control for murder, genocide, ethnic expulsion, apartheid, or whatever you plan over the Palestinian people.
	So I do think that it is significant that even these last complicit holdouts in the West, other than the United States, are at least responding to the extraordinary situation that we have of a genocide before our eyes taking place.
	The U.S. will be the last to respond.
	I don't think any of this registers with Donald Trump.
	It doesn't seem to register with the corrupt American political structure.
	But yes, it is significant that even lackeys, as much as Keith Starmer, because this is a vassal state of the United States, a state that does nothing that the United States opposes, I'm speaking of the UK, has said even what it said.
	It didn't go so far as to say that there will be a recognized state of Palestine.
	It left open the door that Israel can make some prevarication.
	Israel can do something or other to avoid that painful decision that the UK doesn't want to make.
	But yes, it does show that what is happening is so gross, so extreme, so clear, so vulgar, so violent that even the UK and France, if I could put it that way, are having to acknowledge it.
	Not the United States.
	We're at the end of the extreme, but the others, yes.
	I have to play this for you, Chris, the shorter version.
	This is Prime Minister Nets in Yahoo yesterday denying that there is starvation in Gaza.
	Chris, 17.
	Israel is presented as though we are applying a campaign of starvation in Gaza.
	What a bold-faced lie.
	There is no policy of starvation in Gaza, and there is no starvation in Gaza.
	He's a mass murderer.
	There's nothing more to say about it.
	He's under an indictment by the International Criminal Court, and he is leading a country committing genocide.
	And he will go down in history as a disgrace of humanity.
	And the disgrace will be shared by Donald Trump and others who have been complicit in this.
	There's no question about the complicity.
	Jake Sullivan, Anthony Blinken, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio.
	I mean, I guess the list goes on and on.
	It's the American political class who stands up and gives standing ovations to this mass murderer.
	Now, why?
	Maybe the Epstein files would tell us something.
	Maybe the campaign donations would tell us something.
	Maybe the fact that tens of millions of Americans read the Bible and don't watch the news.
	I don't know.
	But the fact of the matter is there are many reasons why the United States is absolutely blind to its complicity at the political level.
	But the American people are completely onto it.
	The most recent surveys show that 60% or more of Americans support the Palestinians in this conflict, 30% and dropping like a stone, the Israelis.
	In other words, American policy runs against American public opinion by a very wide margin.
	But that's not surprising.
	We do not have democratic institutions functioning in the United States.
	We have rule by a small clique, by essentially a CIA Mossad operation that's been going on for quite a while.
	The politicians are in line for reasons that, again, we can surmise, can't be sure one by one.
	But the American people are onto it by and large.
	I was just going to ask you if the opinion of the American people counts for anything, but you already answered it.
	We don't have a popular government.
	The people that run the government are those who have been bought off by AIPAC or so ideologically committed and have such power behind the scenes like CIA and MI6 and Mossad that it's almost hopeless.
	Prime Minister Netanyahu received an absurd number, 56 standing ovations in 58 minutes.
	It was something like that.
	Yes, after.
	That has to tell you something.
	Nobody except Thomas Massey sat down.
	Everybody else stood up and cheered the daylight.
	Daylight's out of them.
	This is an indictment of the American political class in Washington.
	It is the Trump administration.
	It is the Biden administration.
	It was the Obama administration.
	This goes back a long time.
	It is our deep state.
	And even when the genocide is fully in the open, it doesn't change things.
	Even when the president himself mutters that there's starvation going on, it apparently doesn't change any U.S. policies.
	Wow.
	It's really amazing.
	But I think people should understand we have democracy in form, but we don't have democracy in spirit or in the sense of deliberation and public opinion mattering in the United States.
	And I always like to cite the most important case in history, in Western history, which was when the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire.
	It essentially became a military state.
	The Senate remained, had no power anymore, but it remained.
	So we have institutions that remain.
	We have Congress.
	We have the Supreme Court, but it doesn't really add up to democracy anymore.
	The way that this small clique in power determines actions irrespective of the U.S. interest or of American public opinion, which counts for nothing.
	The president doesn't explain anything in speeches.
	Congress doesn't hold hearings and have deliberations.
	We don't have debates in Congress.
	The Supreme Court says, well, the courts can't stop even blatantly unconstitutional actions by the President of the United States other than for the specific party that brings the case.
	In other words, the Supreme Court itself basically makes the court system useless in the face of one person rule.
	So institutionally, it's not what is sometimes said, we're wringing our hands, will democracy survive.
	We don't have democracy other than in the most formalistic sense.
	And between elections, public opinion counts for nothing.
	Even when there is an overwhelming American sentiment that we should not be complicit in a genocide, doesn't matter.
	Why are we complicit with ISIS and Syria?
	They're cutting off the heads of people whose religions differ from theirs.
	Because the CIA has been running al-Qaeda and its offshoots for decades.
	You see, the whole idea of jihadists fighting for power is something that goes back to the CIA, back to the 1970s, for example, when President Carter and Zbignudu Brzezinski ordered the CIA to support these Islamic jihadists in Afghanistan.
	The idea then was to antagonize the Soviet Union by bringing in, trying to entice or induce a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which they did.
	They destroyed Afghanistan in the process.
	It's never been put back together since then.
	A profoundly cynical, secret, covert, disgusting move.
	But the CIA created al-Qaeda in effect.
	Osama bin Laden was created by the CIA.
	All these are basic known facts for those who care to look and to understand this.
	Of course, the mainstream media, which has the role of being the mouthpiece for the U.S. deep state, doesn't report these things, but they're not hidden from view.
	And in the case of Syria, the overthrow of the Syrian government was a CIA operation, Operation Timber Sycamore, ordered by President Barack Obama.
	And peace could have come to Syria with stability 13 years ago.
	I happen to know because I was discussing this in detail with the UN negotiators.
	But the U.S. blocked peace because their purpose, their aim was to overthrow the Syrian government through covert CIA-led means.
	So this is basic U.S. approach.
	Al-Qaeda, don't think that this is some enemy of the U.S. deep state.
	This is a creature of the U.S. deep state.
	While we've been talking, Professor Sachs, Chris has been running a poll.
	Does the Ukraine-Russia conflict end before Christmas of 2025?
	That's five months from now.
	No, 57%.
	Yes, 24%.
	And 18%, did you mean Christmas of 2026?
	You know, the war could end quickly if the U.S. had a foreign policy that was clear, transparent, honest, and that was conveyed publicly clearly.
	The war in Ukraine was provoked by the United States first and foremost, by a decision taken around 1994, made very visible in 2008 and pursued ever since then to expand NATO and U.S. military bases and U.S. weapons systems to Ukraine.
	When Trump came in, he said a few things that seemed to suggest that he or his advisors understood that.
	And it looked like there could be a peace.
	But then the deep state came on and told Trump, no, you continue the war.
	Maybe a ceasefire, which is a phony policy of the West, which says we don't get to the deep roots of this war.
	Instead, we pause, we start it up again whenever we want.
	Russia said, no, to make peace, we make peace on the basis that the root causes need to be ended, which is absolutely the correct thing to do for all parties is to make peace, not to stop the fighting so that it can start in a week or a month or whenever on whatever provocation or whatever new weapon system comes.
	The problem is that Trump never once or anybody, Marco Rubio or any of the other negotiators or J.D. Vance or people who can speak coherently, tried to explain to the public, to the Europeans, to the Ukrainians, look, the underlying cause of the war is the NATO enlargement.
	The underlying cause of the war is the coup in which the United States actively supported extremist paramilitaries to overthrow a legitimate government that wanted neutrality.
	The underlying cause of the war was the U.S. rejection of the Minsk-II agreement, which could have ended the conflict by giving autonomy to the eastern Ukraine that would have stayed within Ukraine.
	The underlying cause of the war was the U.S. rejection of diplomatic negotiations with Russia at the end of 2021.
	And of course, as Ray McGovern has explained to us, that Blinken told his counterpart, Foreign Minister Lavrov, in January 2022, that the U.S. reserved the right to put in missile systems into Ukraine, that it was not going to self-limit itself.
	If we had a president that had the aptitude and the interest and the capacity to explain these basic facts, we would have peace on terms that make sense for Ukraine, for Russia, for Europe, and the United States.
	But we don't hear any of this.
	We hear demands for a ceasefire.
	For what?
	On what terms?
	On what basis?
	Without solving anything.
	And 10 days now.
	Well, this isn't going to work.
	And our foreign policy doesn't exist, basically.
	Making demands on a true social or in a statement like this is not a foreign policy.
	It's a route to disaster.
	And, you know, we're supposed to be a serious country with 6,000 nuclear warheads and the largest military in the world and $30 trillion U.S. GDP.
	You'd think a president could give a speech to the American people.
	Someone could write it for him.
	You'd think that we could have some coherence in foreign policy.
	You'd think that our leaders could behave better than children.
	They behave worse than children.
	But no, we don't have any of that right now.
	This is why the world is so dangerous.
	This isn't the publics demanding war.
	This is a few people playing games and the rest of us watching in stunned worry and alarm and amazement at how utterly childish, duplicitous, and ineffective all of this is.
	I want to change subjects and go to your other field of expertise.
	Isn't the tariff a tax?
	Of course it's a tax.
	It's a tax.
	Isn't the Constitution crystal clear that the power to lay and collect taxes is with the Congress and not the president?
	Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution.
	It could not be more clear.
	We actually had something called the American Revolution over this very point.
	And yet we have a president that I think utterly lawlessly and unconstitutionally is setting tariffs by the hour or by the day.
	Of course, we have a completely supine Congress, which is useless, useless.
	And we have a completely supine Supreme Court.
	So this is the sense in which we have what is technically a de facto government.
	It is not a constitutional order because we don't follow the Constitution.
	Professor Sachs, thank you very much for your time.
	Thank you for letting me go all across the board, including dipping my toe in the water of economics, about which we'll do more in the days and weeks to come.
	Thanks for joining us.
	As always, look forward to seeing you next week, my dear friend.
	See you next week.
	Thanks a lot.
	All the best.
	Bye-bye.
	Bye.
	Coming up tomorrow, Wednesday, at 8 o'clock in the morning, Professor Gilbert Doctorow at 11 in the morning.
	Colonel Douglas McGregor at 1 in the afternoon.
	Professor Glenn Deeson at 2 in the afternoon.
	The one and only Max Blumenthal at 3 in the afternoon.
	Madder than a wet hen over some of the things we've been mentioning.

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