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Aug. 21, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
24:23
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : Netanyahu Ready to Invade.
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Thursday, August 21st, 2025, as you can see, the good Professor Jeffrey Sachs is here with us.
Professor Sachs, we spent a happy morning together on Saturday at the Ron Paul Institute, where I must tell you you gave a most informative lecture that brought the house down.
And then you were kind enough to sit on the panel with Colonel McGregor and Anya Parampol and Max Blumenthal.
And that program together with your lecture has been viewed by about 250,000 of our regular viewers.
And I'm grateful for it.
Since then, of course, we've learned a little bit more about Alaska and we had this kabuki dance, if you will, in the White House on Monday.
All right, that's background.
I mainly want to talk to you about Netanyahu invading Gaza.
But before we get there, the U.S. must know that Russia has legitimate sovereignty-based security concerns and would no more accept.
EU, UK, or U.S. troops on the ground or in the air in Ukraine than the U.S. would accept Russian or Chinese or North Korean troops in Mexico.
This is exactly right.
All of the issue of the Ukraine war comes down to a basic reciprocity or the golden rule.
We should not do in other places what we would not have others do to us in our own neighborhood.
We have had the so-called Monroe Doctrine for 202 years.
The Monroe Doctrine was issued in 1823 by President Monroe, written by his secretary.
his Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams.
It said to the Europeans, don't meddle in our neighborhood and we won't meddle in yours.
Very important, that second clause, very often forgotten.
As the United States became its own imperial power, it was more do as we say, not as we do.
In other words, don't come close to us.
but we will meddle wherever we want in your neighborhood.
And of course, the war in Ukraine, I say of course because anyone who knows the background knows that it is of course, though the narrative or propaganda of the U.S. government is the opposite.
But of course, the war in Ukraine came because the U.S. was meddling right against Russia's border, meddling in a most direct security sense, which is to push NATO and U.S. missile systems into Ukraine and not only into Ukraine, into the South Caucasus region as well.
People should look at a map and look at the absurdity, worse than absurdity, the trend.
the tragic arrogance of the U.S. saying that the country Georgia should also be part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Well, the idea was the opposite of what we would ever tolerate in our own region.
That is, the United States wanted to surround Russia in the Black Sea region.
forming literally pincers of Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia to surround Russia where its Black Sea Naval Fleet is.
It's out of a playbook from the 19th century, believe it or not.
It's the playbook of the British and French empires in 1853 when they launched a war against Russia called the Crimean War.
Well, all of this is to say that Russia said, no, don't do that.
It said that in the 1990s.
It said, really, don't do that.
In 2007, President Putin said, don't you dare do that.
In 2008, the United States, being the arrogant U.S. that it is, said, of course we'll do it.
Who are you?
You're a third rate power.
We can do whatever we want.
And pushed our vassal states, otherwise known as the European countries, to support the U.S.-led expansion of NATO to Ukraine and Georgia at the 2008 Bucharest summit.
As we've discussed many times, there was one little fly in the ointment, and that is the Ukrainians didn't want to be drawn into this proxy war between the U.S. and Russia.
So the Ukrainians voted for a president who said, we'll.
That was President Yanukovych.
Well, the U.S. hates neutrality.
And so the U.S. overthrew Yanukovych in February 2014.
And the ra-ra, yes, we'll be part of NATO regime came in, including Zelensky to this day.
Anyway, the whole upshot of it is the Russians are not tolerating, understandably.
the US and Europe having military presence on their border in Ukraine.
And anyone who says, and this is the mantra of the people who don't think very clearly in the U.S. Oh, Ukraine has any right to choose what it wants.
It's not about Ukraine choosing.
It's about if Russia invites China to have a military base in Mexico, if Mexico chooses that.
Are these people going to say, yeah, that's Mexico's choice.
We're fine with a Chinese military base in Mexico on our border.
Of course, the United States would not tolerate that.
So this is the point.
And this is clear.
It's understood by everyone.
that has looked closely at this, it was understood by U.S. diplomats going back to the 1990s who told the CIA and the politicians, stop.
This is crazy.
You're going to get us into deep trouble.
George Kennan, who was the greatest Russia expert of the age, a great statesman, said in 1997, this is the biggest conceivable blunder.
that we're making to expand NATO.
This is going to ruin everything.
What should be peace is going to be turned into a new confrontation.
Bill Perry, who was Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense, said to Clinton, you'll ruin everything.
And Perry thought about resigning in protest because the decisions to expand NATO were so stupid and so reckless.
Anyway, here we are, Judge, all this time later, except with a million Ukrainian dead because of this little U.S. adventure.
So when, and we, We know that he must have said this, President Trump must have given the unmistakable impression to Prime Minister Starmer Chancellor Murray and President Macron that the United States would participate in militarily and security guarantees.
I'm doing air quotes because nobody can really define what that means to the satisfaction of everybody else.
He must have known that Putin and Lavrov would never accept EU, UK.
US troops on the ground or in the air.
Then the president said to Fox News the next day, well, I didn't mean boots on the ground.
I meant boots in the air.
He didn't say boots in the air, but reference to American pilots in the air.
They're not going to accept that.
Doesn't Donald Trump know that or is he telling the kabuki dancers who visited him in the Oval Office who he treated like children.
Another story for another time, what he thinks they want to hear.
Everything is deliberately vague, opaque, smiles.
This is why the war didn't end in 24 hours as Trump said that it would, because if there were clarity and honesty, the war could have ended in 24 hours.
The president of the United States should say clearly, NATO will not enlarge to Ukraine.
There will not be NATO troops on the ground in Ukraine.
Ukraine's security is not going to come through NATO.
It's going to come through Ukraine's neutrality, which all sides are going to respect because it's going to be very visible.
And any violation of that will be understood by the whole world.
And so that's where the security is going to come from.
If the president knew some history or had any advisors who knew some history, they would know that the neutrality approach has actually worked repeatedly and dramatically well.
The most famous example is Austria becoming neutral in 1955 with an agreement with the Soviet Union that the Soviet Union would withdraw its troops from Austria on the basis of Austria's neutrality.
That happened.
and the Soviet troops went home and never bothered Austria again.
That's also the truth.
Unfortunately, we don't have Nobody explains anything.
Nobody's willing to say clearly almost anything.
Everything has ambiguity to it deliberately.
They think this is somehow clever.
All it means is the war goes on and on and on.
And one of the reasons is that the United States was playing a game.
Of course, Ukraine in NATO is not core to U.S. security.
So what was the U.S. doing pushing this?
It was pushing NATO enlargement as a game to weaken Russia.
Right.
Brzezinski spelled it out.
You just people have to read.
But of course, the whole public narrative of the US government is to keep
But the whole game that the U.S. would play was spelled out by Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1997 and the game was to weaken Russia and it was a game because it's not core to U.S. security in fact it's created U.S. insecurity by bringing the United States into war with Russia now Trump somehow you know gets this or people around him kind of get
this but nobody explains it clearly Nobody.
And so everything is like you say, Kabuki theater of what do these words mean?
Yes.
And Trump, we love you and we love you and we love you and everything is ambiguous and the result is the war goes on day by day.
Before we get to Netanyahu's latest monstrosities, I want to prevail upon your other field of expertise, which is international economics.
Was Vladimir Putin in Alaska in a certain sense there representing BRICS?
Well, in the following strange way, President Trump has united the BRICS countries.
The BRICS countries are Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and a number of new members, but the five that I mentioned are the original BRICS countries.
President Trump has united them because he has gone after every one of them to a shocking extent.
And in the lead up to the Alaska Summit, Trump destroyed years of developing closer relations with India, destroyed it almost overnight by putting a so-called security tariff against India,
a 25% tariff, because India buys oil from Russia, as Europe buys natural gas from Russia, as the United States buys many things from Russia, but they decided to go after India.
That pushed India away from the United States.
I can only tell you in shorthand the reactions in India, which I follow very, very closely are to have united a country of 1.5 billion people to say the United States is completely untrustworthy.
Completely.
It united the whole country.
Same with Brazil, by the way.
He penalized Brazil.
Why?
Because there is a court case in Brazil against the previous president, Bolsonaro.
President Trump said, I'm going to punish Brazil because of a court case in Brazil.
Well.
Well, President Lula, the duly elected president of Brazil said, excuse me, we don't need an emperor.
We have an independent judiciary.
So Trump has put on tariffs against Brazil.
And basically what he did was say to all of these large countries, the U.S. is your enemy.
And we are underpriced.
have gone on a campaign of insulting India every day.
And it's shockingly stupid, unbelievable from America's point of view.
What do they think they are doing?
Well, what they're doing is there has been a flurry of diplomacy.
of Brazil, Russia, India, China, meeting each other nonstop in phone calls, visits by foreign ministers, visits by heads of state, calls of heads of state, meetings coming up of Prime Minister Modi and President Xi Jinping coming up in just a few days.
Okay, fine.
This is American foreign policy.
You couldn't make this up, how inept this is, by the way.
It's unbelievable.
Transitioning to the unfortunate and deplorable situation in Gaza.
Under what conceivable rational basis and by what moral or legal standard can Netanyahu justify an invasion and occupation of Gaza, which he is apparently beginning as we speak?
Israel is the most lawless, violent, criminal, rogue state on the planet.
It is committing a genocide.
It is starving 2 million people, and it is now proposing to do more, very explicitly, first to occupy Gaza through another major military operation against a population facing starvation and in the occupied West Bank of Palestine to establish new settlements that explicitly according to the
minister zealot minister of this government Smotrich will destroy any chance for a state of Palestine.
In other words, Israel is not only committing a genocide, it is upping the ante right now.
It is a rogue state operating completely outside of international law, spitting in the face of the entire world.
The American people are overwhelmingly against what Israel is doing, overwhelmingly.
And they are calling for the United States to recognize a state of Palestine to save millions of people who are being starved to death or facing.
expulsion, ethnic cleansing, murder, and expropriation.
I'm sorry to be so blunt, but we have not seen anything so shocking as this in our lifetimes, actually, in recent decades.
What is happening right now is utter criminality.
What is the U.S. doing about it?
It is siding with Israel in everything.
It is completely complicit in everything.
It sanctions the International Criminal Court.
which cites these war crimes.
It sanctions the judges of the International Criminal Court.
President Trump declares that Netanyahu, who presides over these crimes, is a great person and a war hero.
And he calls himself a war hero also for his war on Iran.
We are seeing something that is beyond imagining taking place before our eyes.
And it is two countries doing it, not one.
It is the United States and Israel.
And how Trump operates in this way.
way and draws the American people against our will into this is a disgrace.
He calls himself a peace president.
This is a genocide president.
Not to add to your heartburn, but here is Minister Smotrich, who with his colleague Ben Gavir are really the linchpins of the government because if they and their colleagues leave the Netanyahu government, then he has to face the Israeli public and likely loss of his position and resumption of prosecutions.
Anyway, here's Smotrich four days ago, Chris Cutt number 14.
The time has come to fully apply Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, to forever remove from the table the idea of dividing the land, and to make sure that by September, Europe's hypocrite leaders will simply have nothing to recognize.
This is literally notorious and bold.
about what they're doing.
They recognize no standards, no humanitarian constraints on their behavior whatsoever.
No international law?
No international law community, no respect for the decent opinions of mankind, as Thomas Jefferson said, just mass murder, by the way, mass murder.
And the United States is a full party to this.
I was particularly upset when I heard President Trump refer to Prime Minister Netanyahu as a war hero.
He's a war criminal.
Absolutely a war criminal.
He's under arraignment by the International Criminal C court for crimes against humanity, for war crimes and his country is at the Hague in the International Court of Justice facing charges brought by numerous countries for the crime of genocide and and the United States is every hour every day a party not only a party to this it is a
partner in this I have to run, Professor Sachs.
I didn't mean to run your morning, but thank you very much.
You needn't apologize for being blunt.
The Israeli behavior calls for blunt speech, whether people are listening or not.
A lot of people are listening, not Trump and his cohorts and not the people that run the Israeli government, but the world is listening.
And by the way, if American politicians, the ones that aren't so corrupted or blackmailed, would open their eyes, they would see the American people are disgusted by the behavior of the Congress.
standing ovations for this war criminal.
Look at the Reuters poll just a few days ago.
We are disgusted by the behavior of Washington.
It's Trump.
It's the Congress in the hands of this lobby that is committing a genocide.
We're disgusted.
It has to stop.
And this is the overwhelming view of the American people.
Professor Sachs, thank you very much.
Safe travels.
And we look forward to seeing you next week.
All the best.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
This tough and direct talk is absolutely required in the face.
of this genocide.
More about all of that to come.
Scott Ritter at 11, Professor Deason at 1, Colonel Wilkerson at 2, Professor Mir Scheimer at 3.
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