Judging Freedom - Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : A Very Dangerous Foreign Policy.

Episode Date: August 27, 2025

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : A Very Dangerous Foreign Policy.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. Thank you. Hi, everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, August 27th. August 27th, where is the summer gone? 2005, Professor Jeffrey Sachs will be with us in just a moment on America's very dangerous foreign policy. But first this.

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VIP access with special perks, including lifetime replay access and exclusive VIP panels use promo code judge for 20% off your upgrade. That's expatmoneysummit.com promo code judge. Professor Sacks, welcome here. My dear friend, I thank you for accommodating my schedule. Does the United States still lead the world? No, not in any practical sense. The U.S. is still very powerful, but the U.S. has made sufficient numbers of enemies in all regions of the world, that there's an open backlash against the United States, even from the countries traditionally closest to the United States. So leadership is not the right word. Threats, yes, some countries bending to U.S. demands, others utterly rejecting

U.S. demands. But leadership, no, not conceptual leadership, thought leadership, moral leadership, economic leadership, technological leadership. No, the U.S. is one of a number of powerful countries, but most countries are trying to figure out how to manage their relations with the United States, but do not want to be led by the United States, to say the least. In your view, does the State Department, does the Defense Department, does the White House, does the Deep State recognize the truth of what you just said? No, we don't have an effective foreign policy at all. Our diplomatic capacity is absolutely almost non-existent.

The president himself relies on ad hoc. friends and friends of the family to be official or unofficial envoys. We don't have a diplomatic corps that is stable. We just had the senior U.S. diplomat in Denmark called in, summoned because of U.S. meddling in Greenland, which is quite apparent where Trump says he wants Greenland, even though it's part of Denmark, and he doesn't rule out any options to take it. Denmark is not exactly an enemy of the United States traditionally. It's part of NATO.

It's part of the U.S. alliance. But it is completely vulnerable to and at odds with the United States right now. simply don't have diplomacy. Everything is utterly ad hoc. Terrible mistakes are being made, really shocking mistakes, even from the narrowest U.S. interest point of view. For example, within the past two weeks, Donald Trump, for no reason at all, has completely alienated the government of India and the people of India by putting a so-called penalty 25% tariff on India for importing Russian oil when Europe imports Russian gas, China imports Russian oil. But India was the one that suddenly faced this punitive action.

and I can only tell you the depth of anger, resentment, feeling of betrayal that is pervasive in Indian intellectual circles and beyond for a move that has no sense and no consequence. So it's really an ad hoc situation where America's role in the role in. the world is in a downward spiral. Let me ask you about India for just a minute and prevail on your other field of expertise, which is economics. We know that Trump has said the reason he's doing this is because he wants to punish India for buying oil from Russia because he somehow thinks that will diminish the purchases and that will affect the Russian military.

I don't think that's going to happen, but this is at least the argument that he's made. In the process of doing things like that, and notwithstanding his scowling and attempts to demonize bricks, hasn't he effectively unified and strengthened bricks? Of course. As soon as he took that measure, there was a flurry of very high-level diplomacy. among Brazil, Russia, China, and India. I happen to see some of it very close up, but it was at the level of heads of state, and it was at the level of foreign ministers, defense ministers, very senior officials, in other words.

And it was all of those countries talking with each other, Brazil on the line with Russia, Brazil on the line with India, Brazil on the line with China, China and Russia, China and India. Russia and India. It was amazing, actually, within a very short period of time. India's Prime Minister Modi will meet with China's President Xi Jinping at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting in just a few days. This will be a very high-level meeting. They will reinforce their partnership within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and within the BRICS, the BRICS countries, which are about half of the world's population and close to half of the world's GDP, are definitely taking notice, becoming more strongly aligned. This year is chaired by Brazil, where President Lula

Brazil said very pointedly and clearly, we don't want to. Rwandan emperor, referring to Donald Trump's demands on Brazil, in that case, to close down a process of the independent judiciary of Brazil. Absolutely bizarre, I have to say. Next year's, Bricks is chaired by India. So, yes, Donald Trump is the great unifier. Why the American disdain for India and China? First of all, an unbelievable level of ignorance. I don't know of senior politicians in Washington who know much of anything about either country or either economy. There is a general disdain of any other country in Washington. There is a particular disdain for, for large countries because they dare to not bow down to the U.S. as if they really

ever will again. But that disdain really emanates from an instability of American diplomacy and an ignorance of these countries. The anti-China sentiment has been cooked up. It proved successful for Donald Trump electorally. And so it became a bipartisan anti-China rhetoric. But it was basically cooked up in the

military industrial establishment a decade ago because these poobas decided that China must be contained because it was becoming too successful. This is a very weird idea that it becomes the U.S. mission to stop the success of another country that is being earned by very high saving rates, innovation, effective policy planning, and a very competitive

marketplace, by the way, which is creating world leaders in many technologies because they're very entrepreneurial. But the United States decided this has to stop as if that's a real U.S. possibility and an appropriate aim of U.S. foreign policy. It's neither. It's not anything the United States could accomplish. It's absolutely an illegitimate end of U.S. foreign policy. China wasn't threatening the United States. It was just becoming successful. That's all. And with India, this is a primitive blunder. of the last few weeks that has no real cause at all. It blew up years of attempted diplomacy

where on the Indian side, there was the thought, oh, we have an inside track. The US is against China, so they're for us. Well, that's convenient. We can substitute China in the global supply chain. Instead of assembling iPhones in China, they will now be assembled in India. I told Indian colleagues and friends, don't be naive.

The United States is not so stable, not so sensible, and not so open that it's going to invite India to substitute for China. The door will slam shut on India the same way. Lo and behold, it happened in a matter of weeks after I made that warning. I thought it would be more gradual. But the U.S. approach is so unprofessional, so startlingly non-institutionalized, so much coming from the social posts of one person who doesn't know what he's talking about on this regard, backed up by an incredibly insulting, harmful article.

by one of his advisors that was published in the Financial Times and that made its rounds in India and poisoned the waters very quickly. No one thinks, no one understands in Washington. It's a complete, completely short-term, opportunistic, without any strategic knowledge, sense, logic, or consistency. I've frankly never seen such unprofessionalism in my 40 years of work in international economic relations. And it doesn't seem to be getting better,

although I know you recently said that to the folks in India and Africa, they're optimistic about where the world is going, but where the world is going is without the United States. That's correct. The slowest growing regions of the world today are the two high-income regions, the United States and Europe. To some extent, that is a basic economic principle that poorer countries, if they're reasonably well managed, and if there's peace in general, have the opportunity, the ability to catch up, to adopt advanced technologies, to narrow the gap with the front runners. So it's not unexpected that poorer countries would have higher sustained economic growth

than the rich countries and narrow the gap. That is an underlying deep tendency in the world economy right now. But the United States and Europe are both adding to their woes enormously, especially by wars of choice, especially by the militarization, the U.S. nonstop engagement in Israel's disastrous wars, Europe's engagement, especially in the disastrous and senseless war in Ukraine. And so we're losing our time. Then Donald Trump also has basically condemned the United States economy to third rate status by saying that things like clean energy don't count. Yes, that is convenient if you have a time horizon of a day or six months.

or a year, but if you're asking who is going to lead the electric vehicle production of the next 25 years, who's going to lead the fast rail production of the next 25 years, who's going to lead the hydrogen economy, which will play a huge role in ocean shipping, in steel-making, metallurgy in petrochemicals. All of those will be in Asia, not in the United States, because Trump says, no, they're not important. They don't count for anything. So this is all tremendous self-inflicted wounds. It's not unique to Trump. It just continues onward with Trump. All right. This is unique to Trump, what I'm going to address with you now. Professor Sacks. In the past week, Donald Trump, with his one-person rule, has suggested that the Ukrainian military is doomed to lose unless it gets offensive and attacks Russia.

In the past week, he has authorized the sale of 3,000 erams, missiles that travel 280 miles so they can reach major targets in Russia. Russia. In the past week, the Russian military has destroyed the yet unassembled. They were to be assembled, Taurus missiles that the Germans delivered in parts to Ukraine. Is this any way to solve a war, or is this just the continuation of our co-belligerent status in the war proxy against Russia? Of course, it is profoundly inconsistent with what happened at the Alaska meeting. At the Alaska meeting, the idea, the correct idea was that the war should be ended by getting to the root causes of the war, and that is that Ukraine should be neutral, that NATO would not enlarge, all completely appropriate from a U.S. security point of view as well as necessary

for the Russian point of view, because it's their neighborhood. It's their next door neighbor. They don't want the United States missiles there. That's the point they've been making for 30 years. And on that basis, security arrangements should be made through the U.N. Security Council, which is the place to do this. If we had the minimal capacity of government right now, the minimal professionalism, then based on that meeting, there would be serious work to develop the protocols, the security agreements to end the war.

Trump always thinks in a very primitive way, well, I need the baseball bat behind me because I can smash their head and I need to threaten that. You actually don't reach solutions that way. You lose the possibility of solutions. Trump's idea of dealmaking is, yes, we can offer something, but I need to let them know that I can gun them down. And that idea is stopping diplomacy everywhere. The United States does not have the capacity to follow through on those threats other than through dramatic escalation of conflict and other countries say we're not going to succumb to that crude approach. And so you have the war in the Middle East raging in which the U.S. is complicit in an ongoing genocide. You have the war in Ukraine not stopped in 24 hours, but it could have been, had there been competence in this, you have the rising tensions and now break in relations with India because threats don't work.

the way that Trump thinks they do, or maybe they did if he was negotiating with the plumbers union in New York City on a building. But they don't work in international affairs, and they don't work with other great powers. Russia is a great power. China is a great power. India is a great power. whether we say so or not doesn't change that fact. And to deal with those countries requires responsible diplomacy, not threats of this sort. And this is where we're failing in every single case right now. By the way, I need to be clear, Biden was a disaster, as we talked about many times. The Biden administration failed also.

I'm not partisan on this. I'm just saying that we have a track record of massive failure that is continuing. Here's his latest threat yesterday at a cabinet meeting. It's exactly what you just, I don't know if you've seen this yet, it's exactly what you described, Professor Sachs. Chris, cut number two. I want to see that deal, and it's very, very serious what I have in mind. mind if I have to do it.

But I want to see it end. I think that in many ways he's there. Sometimes he'll be there and Zelensky won't be there. You know, it's like, who do we have today? I got to get them both at the same time. But I want to have it end. We have economic sanctions. I'm talking about economic, because we're not going to get into a world war.

I'll tell you what, in my opinion, if I didn't win this race, Ukraine could have ended up in a world war. We're not going to end up in a world war. And it will not be a world war, but it will be an economic war. And an economic war is going to be bad. And it's going to be bad for Russia. And I don't want that. Do you have any idea what he's talking about?

No, it's not possible. And honestly, maybe probably he doesn't understand. probably no one around him understands. You need actually to do homework. I'm sorry to say it. Professor, I give homework. You actually need to do homework. You need to have documents.

You need to exchange them. You need to discuss specific topics. You need to discuss the role of the UN Security Council. You need to move to solutions. these threats that go on and go off and go on and go off are worse than useless. They're not merely distractions. They absolutely undercut reaching agreements. And I understand I've never negotiated a casino.

I've never negotiated a building in New York City. Maybe it's done in a different way. but I have been involved for 40 years in intergovernmental agreements, and you don't do it this way when you're talking with other great powers. It has to be more serious than this. It's not improv land. This is also why the idea that was pressed by the U.S. and pressed by Zelensky, who also has. the least capacity and experience in this of everybody. We need a three-way meeting. We need a three-way meeting. No, you need concepts of how this is going to end.

You need documents that are exchanged. You need to discuss clauses of those documents where you disagree. Everyone can go online. Look at the New York Times because they posted them. the Russia-Ukraine communique of the end of March 2022, the draft agreement, April 15th, 2022 between Russia and Ukraine that ended the war if the United States had let it happen. Instead, the U.S. intervened, broke the process, and there has not been that kind of systematic diplomacy since then. Maybe the U.S. is incapable of doing homework assignments anymore.

But what we just observed in Donald Trump's statements has nothing to do with ending the war in Ukraine. It's worse than meaningless. It's worse than a mere distraction. It undercuts any serious kind of approach to get to the real issues that are real, legitimate, and can be addressed to end the war. Before we go, I want to play for you, even though this will turn your stomach. Minister Smotrich from the Israeli cabinet, the Israeli War Cabinet, and the coalition that keeps Benjamin Netanyahu in power,

talking about limiting the intake of food for all Gazans and talking about big picture what Israel hopes to accomplish in Gaza. Did you know Gazans can survive, according to Smotrich, on one piece of pita bread a day? Chris? What will come in over the next few days is very little. A few bakeries handing out peters, to people and public kitchens providing a daily portion of cooked food.

Civilians in Gaza will get a pita and a plate of food and that's it. That's exactly what we're seeing in the videos. People are standing in line waiting for someone to ladle them a bowl of soup. What I want to avoid having to bring even a single grain into the Gaza Strip altogether, not even for the civilians. Maybe so. I completely understand the anger. I completely understand the pain in our guts that we all feel as citizens.

The truth is, until the last hostage returns, We shouldn't even be giving water to the Gaza Strip. For a year and a half now, we've been beating Hamas to a pulp. We're dismantling Gaza and leaving it as sword lovers with total and unprecedented destruction in the world, and the world still isn't stopping us. With the aim of achieving the one and only required outcome, conquering Gaza, destroying Hamas, and bringing back all the hostages. In one word, victory.

And the world still hasn't stopped us. It's pure fascism. It is the kind of genocide that we have not seen since Hitler's regime in the 1940s. This is open declaration of genocide. This is open declaration of genocide. And I want to explain something very important to people. Smotrich does not say, and Netanyahu doesn't say, and Ben-Gabir does not say, and the foreign minister Saar does not say that after Hamas is defeated, quote unquote, then there will be a Palestinian state, then there can be two states. what they are saying, this is extremely important. We will defeat Hamas, and then we will rule over the Palestinian people who are still alive.

What they're talking about is complete Israeli domination. By the way, not only of what was once called British mandatory Palestine, but parts of Syria, parts of Lebanon and who knows where else they will claim they're not talking about peace they're not talking about merely defeating Hamas you'll notice they never say what would come the next day but they do say in Hebrew typically they say in the documents they say in the Knesset what will come the next day after the defeat of Hamas is complete Israeli dominant nation over the Palestinians that haven't been mass murdered or starved to death or ethnically cleansed, we will rule over them forever.

That's the intention. That's why not only is this mass murder and genocide, but it's mass murder and genocide without any even attempt at a political settlement. other than Israel's full domination. Now, someone like Smokritch probably perhaps reads his Bible. And in the book of Joshua, he reads how God commands the Israelites to kill all of the inhabitants of Canaan to commit several genocides, in fact, to take the promised land that may be smotech's actual motivation that genocide to him in his vision

is even god ordained to others it is simply a fact maybe they're not religious at all but mass murder not a problem because we are going to control everything i think that that's probably more Netanyahu's idea. But none of this is directed at peace and an eventual or sooner or whatever Palestinian state. It's all directed at a purpose which makes all of this completely illegal, completely murderous, and completely the opposite of peace. It's directed for the purpose of creating what they call greater Israel, which means permanent domination over the Palestinian people. And it's not disguised.

It's not reported in the New York Times or reported in our mainstream media, but it's not at all disguised in Israel at all, quite the contrary. The Israeli parliament, the Knesset, has declared that, the West Bank, the occupied territory of the Palestinian, should be annexed, that Gaza should be completely destroyed, that Jerusalem, including East Jerusalem, is always ours, never to be divided. So this is what makes all of this not only a genocide, but so pathetic of the American government to back this up, there isn't any attempt whatsoever at a real peace. It's all violence for the sake of permanent domination.

And that makes it, in my mind, the ultimate crime. Genocide for what? Not for peace. Genocide for complete and permanent domination. it's a mind-boggling idea you can't imagine it some people take a biblical genocide literally and think they have the god-given command to do it today others are doing it for other reasons but this is what we're really facing right now and all i can say is Israel will not stop but the United States should not be a party to this. The United States should not be complicit in this. The American people are disgusted by this.

The American people by a ratio of two to one that is 70% to 30% want Israel to stop its genocide, want a Palestinian state announced. That's what we want. not what Trump is doing. Our government is not a representative government. They're not listening to the American people. The American people do not want to be a party to genocide. And I can say, by the way, as an American Jew,

this has nothing to do with anti-Semitism or anything else. Being against Israel is a responsibility of morality right now. It's not a question of Jewish or not Jewish. Semitic or anti-Semitic, if you're not against what Israel is doing, you're missing the point. Israel is committing a genocide, and it must be stopped. And America must stop its complicity with this mass murder. Thank you, Professor Sachs. There is more from Smotrich, but I'll spare you. Thank you very much for your analysis of all of this. We began by discussing the United States

thinking it is still the hegemon, but not recognizing it isn't, and the independence of other great powers. And we ended on this very sad and miserable note, but the world needs to know what's going on. I don't know what will change Donald Trump's mind, but you put your finger on it. Only the United States can stop Israel, and it can do so with a phone call. That's it. Professor Sachs, thanks very much. Thanks for all the time. We went over a little bit. I appreciate it. Thank you for your eloquence. and we'll see you again next week. We'll see you next week.

Thanks a lot. Coming up later today at 12 noon, if you're watching us live just 20 minutes from now, Aaron Mote at 3 this afternoon, Phil Giraldi. Tomorrow, our heavy hitters, Pepe Escobar, Colonel McGregor, Colonel Wilkerson, and Professor Mearsheimer, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.

Thank you.