Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano - Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : Israel’s Next Moves.

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Oct. 22, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano

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Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : Israel’s Next Moves.

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	Hi, everyone.
	Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
	Today is Wednesday, October 22nd, 2025.
	Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins us now.
	Professor Sachs, thank you for accommodating my schedule.
	I do want to talk to you about Israel's next moves, but before we do that, do we know, Professor Sachs, if it was Russia or the United States that canceled the Putin-Trump meeting in Budapest?
	It was the United States.
	Basically, Trump, every day, like a weather vane, is back and forth on basic issues.
	And suddenly, he demanded an immediate ceasefire, which he had abandoned after the Alaska meeting on the basis that what was needed wasn't an immediate ceasefire.
	It was a solution to the underlying causes of the conflict.
	But Trump has no consistency at all, maybe no understanding at all of what he's engaged in.
	And so he swings back and forth and he said, why should we have a meeting if Russia doesn't agree to immediate ceasefire?
	So it's bizarre, but this administration is completely incompetent, basically.
	But Foreign Minister Lavrov publicly, perhaps President Putin privately, probably, but we don't know because it was private, has made it crystal clear, crystal clear, the Russians would not agree to a ceasefire because during that time, NATO would restock Ukraine.
	And a more fundamental reason, which is that there are reasons for this conflict.
	They are fundamentally because Europe and the United States have insisted on NATO being with bases in Ukraine.
	And that's the reason we have this war.
	And without solving that problem, there is no solution to this war.
	In other words, Russia says we have very deep security concerns, which you have neglected, brushed aside.
	And if we're going to end this war, we need a concept called indivisible security, which is that our security interests, your security interests, Europe's security interests, Ukraine's security interests are on the table, but they're all respected.
	And I think this is too subtle for Trump and the amateur hour that is this administration.
	And so Trump says one hour, yes, and then the next hour he listens to the Europeans and he says no.
	And then there's a phone call with President Putin.
	He says yes.
	And then he listens to the neocons and he says no.
	And everybody is completely bewildered.
	But it's not so bewildering.
	Trump doesn't know what he's doing.
	That's all.
	It's sad to say, but this is the basic point.
	Russian and Western media are reporting that President Putin told President Trump during their 90-minute telephone call, which was one of the days I was in Moscow last week, that Zelensky should agree to a surrender and release any claim on the territory that Russia believes it has militarily liberated from Ukraine,
	or Ukraine will quote.
	Now I'm quoting the Financial Times.
	I don't know what these words are in Russian, but here's what the Financial Times translated them to in English.
	Ukraine will be destroyed.
	What is your take on that?
	Is that the type of harsh statement that you think President Putin would have made to President Trump and presumably Trump would have passed on to Zelensky the next day when they met in the White House?
	What's happening is Russia is, of course, the dominant power on the battlefield.
	And every day, Ukraine is losing large numbers of soldiers to death and serious injury, and its infrastructure is being destroyed.
	And Russia has said this war will end when the fundamental reasons for the war are addressed and when there is an agreement on the territorial changes that have resulted from this war.
	Okay, these are conditions for negotiation.
	These are conditions for ending the war in some kind of agreement.
	The European countries and the American neocons who used to say that Russia will be defeated, it's losing, it's about to give in, now say ceasefire, ceasefire, because, of course, Ukraine is losing.
	The Russians say, well, not ceasefire.
	Give us a solution to the underlying issues.
	And again, this is the reason why this meeting was canceled.
	And I don't know what the Russians said specifically, but what they're saying is the war will continue.
	Ukraine will continue to lose until we have a settlement that addresses the core issues that led to this conflict.
	That's been Russia's position, basically, not just since the invasion in February 2022, but going back to the real start of this war, which was a coup that overthrew Ukraine's government that America backed in February 2014, and which really started this war already 11 years ago.
	Russia said we need to get to the underlying reasons, especially NATO enlargement.
	And here we are 11 years later, and I think Trump is so out of it and so incompetent that they can't focus on real issues.
	But we're still talking about the same thing.
	Ceasefire?
	No.
	Solve the underlying problems.
	Ceasefire?
	No.
	Solve the underlying problems.
	And Russia says, okay, if there isn't a solution to the underlying problems, the war continues and we will continue to take more territory.
	And I think the implication is eventually, you know, Ukraine is going to lose everything because there's no discussion on substance.
	By the way, Zelensky to this day, to this day, to this hour, to this second, says, yes, we will be part of NATO.
	Yes, we will recover every inch or square millimeter of our territory.
	Yes, Russia will pay penalties.
	In other words, there's no discussion whatsoever on the Ukraine side because Ukraine is ruled by a military junta.
	That is Zelensky, who is far past his term of office, rules by martial law.
	The polling data show us month by month, the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians want this war to end at the negotiating table, but not Zelensky for reasons that are somewhat unclear.
	One is that he's part of a corrupt regime, which is raking off billions of dollars.
	Another is that the extreme right wing in Ukraine would kill him if he made peace.
	There are various theories, but whatever it is, it's not the Ukrainian people that want this.
	It's quite clear what they want.
	What's amazing, though, well, I mean, it's not amazing.
	It's just the incompetence, the sad, tragic incompetence of President Trump and his group.
	They can't even hold to a line day to day.
	The Europeans are shocking.
	You know, you have three European leaders, the UK prime minister, Starmer, President of France, Macron, and Chancellor of Germany, Mertz.
	Their populations in those three countries despise these three leaders.
	They each have approval ratings of about 20%, disapproval ratings of about 80%.
	And they're warmongers, and the public is sick of this war in Europe, in the United States, in Ukraine.
	And yet all they do is talk about continuing a losing war.
	And Trump, just to make absolutely 100% clear, this is now Trump's war.
	He kept saying this is Biden's war.
	Wouldn't have happened on his watch.
	Well, it's happening on his watch.
	He's not competent enough, it seems, and he doesn't have a team that's competent enough to end the war.
	The way to end the war is to address the real issues that caused this war, to say clearly, publicly, NATO enlargement is over.
	Ukraine will be neutral.
	These are basic points.
	Here's a recent development that underscores what you just said.
	Just about an hour before we went on air, the Wall Street Journal reports, quote, U.S. lifts key restriction on Ukraine's use of Western long-range missiles.
	I'll just read the one paragraph.
	The unannounced U.S. move to enable Kyiv to use the missiles in Russia comes after authority for supporting such attacks was transferred from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon to the top U.S. general in Europe, General Alexis Grinkiewicz, who also serves as NATO commander.
	Under the mechanism, the Defense Secretary had the final say over whether Ukraine could employ Western long-range weapons to strike Russia.
	No attacks were approved until recently, when authority for approving such attacks was returned to the European Command.
	Two U.S. officials said this will be the front page of tomorrow's Wall Street Journal.
	At the same time, Professor Sachs, the Treasury Department announced the imposition of U.S. sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil, two of the largest sellers of gasoline and oil-based products, because, quote, of Russia's lack of a serious commitment to a peace process, close quote.
	It seems like the United States is accelerating things rather than doing what would be done by serious, real diplomats.
	President Putin in 2017, in an interview in France, made a statement which applies exactly to this circumstance.
	He said presidents come into office with ideas, but then men in dark suits with briefcases, he meant the CIA and the rest of the military-industrial complex, come to the presidents and explain things as they are.
	And then you never hear of those ideas again.
	And what President Putin was saying is America is not governed by its presidents.
	America is governed by its military-industrial complex, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Pentagon, the armed services committees in Congress, the war profiteers who are everywhere.
	There's big money in this war, believe me.
	It's expensive, and it ends up in Silicon Valley.
	It ends up with the arms contractors.
	It ends up with the retired generals working on the boards of all of these companies.
	This is big business.
	War is America's biggest business.
	And they tell the president, no, you keep going.
	If you have a strong and effective president who knows what he's doing, and an example of that was Dwight D. Eisenhower himself, the supreme commander of Allied forces in World War II, who then became president between 1953 and January 1961.
	Yes, he can face them down and stop wars.
	But if you have a Donald Trump, he may come into office saying, I can end the war in 24 hours.
	And in the end, he ends up escalating the war so that we come ever closer to a nuclear war.
	Sounds to me like we've taken another terrifying step closer to a full-fledged war by the account in the Wall Street Journal.
	I've not read it.
	It's just happened.
	I happen to be in Europe late at night, so I can't obviously verify the account or even know the details of it.
	But what you described is what hardliners in the military-industrial complex press for.
	They want this war to continue.
	They want to test their weapons.
	They want to escalate.
	It's extraordinarily dangerous.
	Trump said he had a different idea.
	In fact, he probably did, but he is not competent enough, consistent enough to even understand what's happening by the evidence that we see.
	That's why you have one day an announcement of a meeting with President Putin in Budapest and the next day it's called off.
	This kind of inconsistency is not safe for us.
	It's not safe for our world.
	The amateurism, the lack of a stable viewpoint, the fact that you have a president who says, yes, it's not the point of a ceasefire.
	It's the point to get to the root causes.
	He says that at some moment, and then he reverts, demanding an immediate ceasefire.
	He says at one point, sanctions are not the point.
	We need to negotiate.
	Then sanctions are put on.
	He says one day, no, it wouldn't be safe to use these missiles.
	And then the next day he reverses.
	This instability is astounding.
	I think I could mention in passing, it's a reason why we don't even have a functioning open government right now, because processes like budgets that normally would be negotiated and settled don't get done in our country anymore.
	We're winging it, but we're not winging it.
	The executive office of the president is winging it.
	The military-industrial complex seems to be in authority right now.
	It's very, very disturbing and very dangerous and taking us closer and closer to disaster.
	Before we transition to Israel, can you put on your other hat as an economist?
	Can you tell us if the sanctions, and I know this was literally just announced right before we came on here.
	The administration's on a jihad this afternoon.
	The sanctions against Rosneft and Lukoil will impair the Russian military.
	No.
	This is crushing sanctions have been put on for years.
	Any sanction that Biden could think of would have been put on.
	This doesn't change anything.
	Russia is selling its oil and gas largely to Asia.
	They're going to continue to buy it.
	When Trump then claims to penalize Asian countries, recently, notably India, he drives India and China and Russia ever more closely together, which we saw at a meeting of what's called the Shanghai Cooperation Organization that took place in China a few weeks ago.
	Trump basically unites the world against him.
	And that means that these threats and these sanctions by the United States do not have consequences that are imagined.
	I was told by officials in the Biden administration how the sanctions that were put in place were going to crush the Russian economy.
	I could say a lot of people followed the official narrative making that claim.
	I always thought it was nonsense and it proved to be nonsense.
	And I think we're, again, seeing nonsense.
	We're going to take a break just for about 60 seconds and then we'll transition to Israel's next moves.
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	Professor Sachs, is Israel preparing to invade Iran?
	Yes.
	And will the United States greenlight it yet again?
	Yes.
	You know, look, to this moment.
	I guess I could ask you one more question and you'll say, yes, is Israel honoring the ceasefire?
	No.
	No, of course not.
	Israel is killing dozens of Palestinians in Gaza and it is killing and tormenting Palestinians in the West Bank.
	It is absolutely not honoring the ceasefire.
	It is blocking aid.
	Today, the International Court of Justice declared that Israel has an absolute obligation under international law to allow the United Nations to provide urgent emergency relief.
	And the Israeli government immediately declared that it did not respect the International Court of Justice and would not abide by the ICJ ruling.
	Israel is in a complete state of lawlessness, and the United States backs that.
	The ceasefire basically is not a ceasefire.
	It's not going to hold, and there is no peace plan.
	What we were discussing about Ukraine applies to the Israeli genocide in Gaza as well, which is that Trump wants the fighting to stop.
	I think he wants the fighting to stop in Ukraine.
	I think he wants the fighting to stop in Gaza, but he does not understand the politics, and he does not understand root causes, and he doesn't understand how actually to end these wars.
	And he's surrounded by war profiteers who want the wars to continue and ultimately prevail in the White House.
	So what we're seeing in Israel is the same as what we're seeing in Ukraine.
	Every time there is the idea that there is an end to this fighting, you have to ask the question, well, does that end address the underlying causes of this conflict?
	The answer with the Trump administration is never, because to address the underlying causes means to delve into the politics.
	It means actually to make some decisions, not just some grandstanding.
	Trump wants the accolades of the fighting to stop so he can say, you see what I've done, but to make the fighting stop, you have to understand the war, where it came from, what causes it, why it continues, and how to use politics and diplomacy to end the war.
	That's not happening in either of these two wars.
	The so-called peace plan has no peace plan at all.
	It has a ceasefire, and then it has some fantasy of Trump sitting on some board of peace, but it doesn't address the core issue, which is that there's Israel ruling over 8 million Palestinian Arabs in,
	at best, an apartheid state, but in fact, in a state of lawless mass murder, which is, of course, vastly worse.
	And nothing in the so-called peace plan got to the core issue.
	There needs to be a state of Palestine.
	This is what more than 180 countries of the United Nations out of 193 are saying, what countries representing far more than 90% of the world's population are saying.
	But Trump, of course, doesn't hear, maybe doesn't understand, but in any event salutes Marion Adelson, his gazillionaire funder and backer, who he saluted when he spoke to the Knesset in Israel.
	He doesn't talk or even know or care about how to really end the conflict.
	And how to end the conflict, everyone else understands.
	The whole world says, yes, you want to end the conflict.
	You want disarmament of the militant groups.
	You want normalization of diplomatic relations.
	It's not complicated.
	There needs to be a state of Palestine constituted of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, according to the internationally determined border, which is the border of the 4th of June, 1967.
	And then a state of Palestine and a state of Israel would live side by side.
	And in that context, Hamas and other militant groups would disband, would disarm, because there would be a political solution.
	But just like we talked about in Ukraine, there's no politics in what Trump does.
	He wants the show to say the war stops, the magic wand, the ceasefire, it's over.
	But it's not over.
	It's not over if the underlying reasons for these conflicts are not addressed.
	The last time Israel attacked Iran, Prime Minister Netanyahu went begging to President Trump to call everything off because the Iranians had hit Israel so hard.
	Do you think Iran would stop this time or would cause serious and almost irreparable damage to the Israeli state?
	I think that the chance of a devastating escalation is very real.
	What we saw in that so-called 12-day war is that Iran can penetrate Israel's air defenses.
	Israel has layered air defenses, but Iran has hypersonic missiles and it has the capacity to evade and penetrate Israel's layered air defenses.
	If it targets vulnerable targets in Israel of high significance to Israel, the results would be devastating for Israel.
	And Iran could do that if it is attacked again.
	There's also the not small issue of Iran's highly enriched uranium, which would not require a major effort from where that stands now to become the fissile material for several atomic bombs.
	It would not take a lot of time or a lot of centrifuge effort to bring that stockpile that exists to weapons grade.
	And if Iran were attacked again, who knows which hardline factions in Iran would say enough is enough.
	We're not going to abide by these religious decrees that have said no nuclear weapons and the commitments of the Iranian government to negotiate an end to the nuclear program with international supervision, but in a context in which the United States and Israel are not attacking Iran.
	Who knows what would happen.
	So I think war gets out of control.
	In a nuclear wage age, war can lead to global annihilation.
	We keep playing with this.
	We keep being told by our military-industrial complex, by the war profiteers, oh, don't worry about it.
	It's all fine.
	But no one's going to be around to hear the apologies afterwards.
	Sorry, we were wrong about our assessments.
	Unfortunately, we just do not seem to have the basic know-how and consistency and maturity to actually deal with these issues right now.
	This is the very, very scary point of what we're seeing with the Trump administration in both of these conflicts.
	One last topic before we go.
	I know it's very late where you are, Professor Sachs, and that is Jared Kushner talking about the availability for development of the Gaza waterfront property and a comment by the Vice President of the United States, which I think will irritate everybody watching.
	Chris.
	And Gaza's waterfront property, it could be very valuable too, if people would focus on kind of building up.
	It's a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but I think from Israel's perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.
	Well, Jared's the investor here.
	I'm not going to give you a percentage, but look, I think that everybody should be proud of where we are today.
	Jared Kushner is the investor that was the vice president of the United States in Israel speaking of the Gaza Strip yesterday.
	These people are so giddy with their power, so drunk with their power.
	They don't understand that a whole world is watching aghast.
	This is delusional.
	So don't sit at the edge of our seats waiting for these investments to show up.
	This is sheer delusion.
	But why is it happening?
	Because of really a drunkenness with power and corruption.
	It doesn't signify anything real except the continued suffering of the people whose lives and homes and infrastructure have been destroyed.
	But it's not a plan that's about to happen.
	It's not anything that is real or feasible.
	It's empty, giddy, drunken talk.
	It's meaningless except in its cruelty and its ignorance.
	Professor Sachs, thank you very much.
	Thanks for staying up late.
	Thank you for your time.
	Thank you for letting me go all across the board from Ukraine to the ICC to Gaza.
	We look forward to seeing you again next time, my dear friend.
	All the best to you.
	Fantastic.
	Thank you so much.
	Thank you.
	Have a nice evening.
	Thank you.
	Well, thank you for watching, everybody.
	Tomorrow, Thursday at 11 in the morning, Max Blumenthal at 1 in the afternoon, Colonel Douglas McGregor at 2 in the afternoon, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson at 4 in the afternoon, just back from Moscow, Scott Ritter.

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