Judging Freedom - How Much Longer Can Ukraine Last? w/Prof Jeffrey Sachs

Episode Date: October 5, 2023

How Much Longer Can Ukraine Last? w/Prof Jeffrey SachsSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, October 5th, 2023. Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins us from the other side of the world from where I am. I know you folks are all around the world. Professor Sachs is coming to us from Hong Kong today. I would say this morning, but of course, it's nighttime where he is. Professor Sachs from Columbia University, 10,000 miles away. It's a pleasure. Thank you for joining us. Always great to be with you from wherever I am.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. What is the or what has been the neocon 30 year plan for Ukraine? What is their long term goal with respect to Ukraine? Look, 30 years ago at the end of the Soviet Union, the neocons had the idea that it's a unipolar world. The United States would be, should be, and must continue to be the world's only superpower. And so the neocons took aim to expand the U.S. military alliances everywhere in the world, tremendously overextending us. And one of the plans specifically was to surround Russia in the Black Sea region with NATO. And that has proven to be yet another neocon disaster, because I would add to the list of neocon disasters, the war in Iraq,

the war in Syria, the war in Libya, the war in Afghanistan. And now we have the war in Ukraine, a war that was provoked in very significant part by the attempt that has been pretty relentless now for a quarter century to push NATO right up to Russia's border, 2,300 kilometer border, by the way, with Ukraine. And Russia kept saying, no, don't do that, don't do that, don't do that. The neocons, their whole game is not to listen. After all, we're all powerful. And so every time Russia said that from Gorbachev first, then Yeltsin, then Putin, the neocons said, it doesn't matter. It's a bluff. We can do what we want. We are the only superpower. And when things got sticky in 2010 to 2014, when Ukraine elected a president that didn't want NATO, that wanted neutrality, the U.S. ended up conspiring in his overthrow. That was in February 2014. And they continued the march onward. And here we are today. Ukraine is getting destroyed. This is no favor to Ukraine. This is, as an adage that I constantly repeat, Henry Kissinger famously said that to be an enemy of the United States is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal. And here we are creating disaster in Ukraine,

absolute disaster. What is the basis for their hatred of all things Russian and the personification of that hatred onto President Putin? Why are they willing to shed the blood of other people? How perverse were the comments of Senators Romney and Blumenthal? Best money we ever spent. We're killing Russians and no American boys are dying. I mean, this is morally reprehensible. Okay, I've asked you a lot of questions. No, no, we're hearing that line because it's a neocon slogan. We heard it recently from the Dutch defense minister in a conference yesterday. I hear it from a lot of Congress people. It's unbelievable the depth of the cynicism in that, oh, it's the Ukrainians dying. We're getting our money's worth. No Americans are dying. They're fighting for us. It's grotesque. Now, where this comes from is this sense that we need to be all powerful. So there's a profound resentment of any other country

that professes to have some power and say in the world. And by the way, it actually goes back to the British Empire. The Russophobia in the British Empire is even more remarkable than the Russophobia in the American capital. And you could trace from the 19th century onward, this intense desire to crush Russia. And by the way, this precedes communism, this extends past communism. This is just something that is deeply embedded, cultural and ignorant, because I've worked with the Russians. I've worked with the Ukrainians. I was an advisor to President Gorbachev's economic team. I was an advisor to President Yeltsin's economic team. I was an advisor to President Kuchma, the first president of independent Ukraine, to his economic team.

They wanted just normal relations. Normal. They didn't view the United States as an enemy. They wanted normal relations. We could not take yes for an answer of just normalcy. We had to dominate. And that's the whole neocon approach. Here's the princess of neocons, your fellow Columbia faculty colleague, the former Secretary of State, blaming your attitude and mine and the attitude of the thousands watching us on Vladimir Putin. I think Putin is not only thrilled by the divide over whether we continue and at what levels to fund Ukraine, I think he is fomenting it as well. Putin and his team that does the kind of interventions, covert and overt, aiming to undermine democracy and to suborn political leaders, is a big part of how he sees his role.

Extraordinary. Who would take, this is the former Secretary of State. But by the way, extraordinary. A direct descendant in the line that started with Thomas Jefferson. And she's mouthing this nonsense. Well, talk about suborning and covertly overthrowing other governments. She was the mastermind that we're going to overthrow the Syrian government in 2011. Look at the debacle over the next 12 years, complete devastation of that country. She was the one that said we had to overthrow the Libyan government. Look at the

disaster. She was the one, after all, that oversaw Victoria Nuland as we participated in the overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Absolutely extraordinary. And not, you know, by the way, it's just the demonstration of a very great difficulty in listening to others in the world. This is a big problem. Do you sense, Professor Sachs, that support in Europe for sending military aid to Ukraine is beginning to wane? It is waning fast. in Slovakia this past week, where the new government, the candidate that led the party that won the boost votes, was campaigning on ending all military support for Ukraine. And that party won a decisive election victory in Poland, which has been the stalwart supporter. They're barely on speaking terms with Ukraine right now because of the massive feuds on many fronts. Hungary has long been opposed to the U.S. neocons, and Prime Minister Orban has been

very clear, very clear-headed, I would say, uniquely so, in Europe for a long time. But what's happening in the places that are still strongly supporting Ukraine is that essentially every political leader in Western Europe right now is unpopular. This is amazing. Just like in the United States, President Biden's disapproval ratings are much, much higher than his approval ratings. This is true throughout Europe right now. And this is the sign that people are very unhappy with the way things are going and the direction that's being taken. The new defense minister of Great Britain recently made some allusions to boots on the ground and there was a significant pushback. And then Prime Minister Sunak, using a very British phrase, said, well, we don't mean it in the here and now. You know these folks better than I do. What does that mean? We meet it next

week. Are they seriously considering boots on the ground, maybe in the Biden mode where they're out of uniform so he can claim they're not combat? Or are they seriously considering sending troops in this never-ending war that the Russians are about to triumph in? I have to tell you, you know, when I was growing up, when I was starting my career, I adored the British. And they speak such beautiful English, after all. And it seemed so sophisticated. But over time, over decades, I've come to understand that this imperial mentality is so deep in Britain. They not only cheerlead the United States, they love war with Russia. And they have, at least since Palmerston led the empire in the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856, which

is just like the war we have right now. It was the desire to surround Russia in the Black Sea and to crush Russia's military power by taking over Sevastopol Naval Base, which was Russia's Imperial Naval Base from 1783. It's the same attitude till today. The British are even worse than the American neocons, if I could say that. It's been shocking to me. The British media is for war morning till night. And it's so deeply imbued in the imperial outlook. It's amazing. But is that because there are no British boys coming home in body bags?

You know, it's a reverie. They still think that they're a world empire. And it's so easy on the sidelines, as you're pointing out. Yes, they're on the sidelines. They're giving such great advice that Ukraine has lost, by one recent estimate, half a million killed. And it was the British who love this counteroffensive that started in early June that has been a complete devastation of Ukraine. How can the European globalists and the neocons close their eyes to the economic, demographic, and military catastrophe, destruction, demolition, whatever word you want to use, that has become Ukraine? Because they are blinded by ideology.

They are blinded by this hatred of Russia. They are not counting the Ukrainian dead. They have lied to the public all along about the military situation. By the way, as has the mainstream media in the United States, starting with the New York Times, which has been disgraceful during this whole war. And the point is, they're just not telling the truth. They want so much to fight Russia and to have someone else do the fighting and the dying that they want another massive recruitment of the remaining Ukrainian young men that can be grabbed off the streets and be thrown into the killing fields almost without any training from what we're hearing from the soldiers themselves on the front line that are dying in massive numbers. And what we're

being told is they have no training and they're being sent. Russia has air superiority. It has artillery superiority. It has drone superiority. And this is absolutely clear. If you watch day by day, the battlefield reports and you listen to multiple sources, not just what is coming out of London and Washington. And they don't care because they are driven by ideology. I have to play another clip of your fellow faculty member.

This is former Secretary Clinton, cut three, Gary, saying this fight is our fight. I know that the majority of Congress is still in favor of supporting Ukraine. So we've got to get through this period. We have to pass legislation and continue to support. And, you know, Jeff, this this fight is our fight. Honestly, I don't understand any American siding with Putin, but we've seen it and we've heard it and we have to fight against it. I want to say very clearly, I am not siding with Putin. I'm siding with Ukraine. I don't want Ukraine to be completely destroyed by these neocons, by their fantasy world, by their desire to throw Ukrainians by the hundreds of thousands to their death, by the destruction of Ukraine, by pushing NATO, NATO, NATO. This is the issue. This isn't siding with Putin or siding with

anybody. This is trying to protect Ukraine from American zealots. And our own top diplomats, I'm not speaking about Secretary Clinton, I'm talking about professional diplomats who have understood this from the beginning. George Kennan, Jack Matlock, our ambassador to the Soviet Union, William Burns, who's now CIA director and was the U.S. ambassador to Russia in 2008, they have understood completely as professionals that this push of NATO enlargement to Ukraine was completely reckless and would lead to war. And then anybody serious in this, not the propagandists, but people serious in this, the ones, Judge, you have been interviewing all along, have known that Ukraine is not going to beat Russia militarily on the battlefield. Quite the contrary. It's going to get destroyed in this war. And that's what's happening in front of our eyes.

And so when Secretary Clinton says, oh, this is our battle, what she means is that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are dying. That's what she means by our battle. Professor Sachs, I've never seen you so angry, but it's a righteous anger. She's attributing to us motivations that we don't have in order to justify her own political biases. And you put your finger on it, right on the pulse of it. Suppose there is some sort of a peace negotiation. Suppose there is some sort of a standstill. And suppose Joe Biden promises Vladimir Putin that NATO will not move any further eastward.

Why would Putin believe him? You know, we're so far on this path that it's absolutely tragic. I don't know whether Biden at this stage of his, you know, even his physical situation, whether he could really negotiate at this point. But we could have negotiated to avoid this conflict. This conflict was so avoidable. There were so many off ramps that stretch back 30 years, by the way, but stretch back to before 2014, before overthrowing Yanukovych, that stretch to 2016, 2017, when an agreement was reached. Russia wasn't demanding the territory of Donbass. It was demanding that Ukraine honor a U.N. Security Council backed agreement called the Minsk II agreement that would have given autonomy to the Donbass, not annexation.

And people don't remember this and they're not reminded of this. Russia wasn't demanding the Donbass's territory, but the United States was telling Ukraine, you don't have to implement that agreement, even though it was voted 15 to nothing by the UN Security Council. You can blow it off. We don't believe in autonomy for the Donbass. We believe that as a un Security Council, you can blow it off. We don't believe in autonomy for the Donbass. We believe that as a unitary state, you should be a NATO member. That's what we told them. And then on December 17th, 2021, when President Putin put on the table a draft security arrangement between Russia and the United States, perfectly sensible, a lot to negotiate, but based on no NATO enlargement, we could have avoided the war then too. This war could have ended in March 2022

when Zelensky in a glimmer of reality, realization of the situation, said we can be neutral. And on that basis, Zelensky and Putin were close to signing an agreement until the United States rushed in and said, no, you don't have to do this. This is our fight and your fight. We have your back. So go to it. And hundreds of thousands of dead later, here's where we are. So this war could have been avoided so many times with negotiations. What President Biden should do today is pick up the

phone. And I've offered my Zoom link, and I'm sure you could offer your studio link to him so he could call President Putin because he hasn't spoken to him one time since February 2022 and say, look, we got to end this thing. We got to stop the bloodshed, stop the fighting, stop the destruction of Ukraine. We got to sit down and negotiate. I accept NATO is not enlarging. I accept that you have security interests that are real. I accept, by the way, that we got to get back also to negotiations over nuclear weapons, because that's part of what has made this so dangerous, because the U.S. unilaterally walked out of the anti-ballistic missile Treaty, placed missiles in Poland and Romania over Russia's

stark objections. We said, we don't care. That's our business. Then unilaterally pulled out of the Intermediate Nuclear Force Agreement in 2019. And so we have stoked so much provocation in this, so much anxiety, overthrowing governments, starting multiple wars, pushing NATO enlargement, abandoning nuclear agreements, and then saying, oh, he doesn't want to negotiate. So of course we could negotiate. President Biden needs to do his job, which is to pick up the telephone and talk to his counterpart. Professor Sachs, a brilliant summary of where we are today. I'm sorry we have to go. I could talk to you all morning or in your case, all evening. We'll do it again soon, I hope. Thank you. Safe travels. We'll see you next week from wherever you are on the planet. Thank you so much.

Sounds great. Thanks so much. Of course, more as we get it, more as we get it, my dear friends. Alastair Crook in 30 minutes at nine o'clock Eastern. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. I'm out.