Judging Freedom - Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: America the Bully.

Episode Date: February 2, 2024

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: America the Bully.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thanks for watching! Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Friday, February 2nd, 2024. My dear friend, Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins us now. Professor Sachs, always a pleasure. Great to be with you. You always manage to find time for us. I'm glad you're in the U.S. this time, but thank you so much for joining us.

A lot going on in Ukraine, $50 billion either loan or see, the decision by the International Court of Justice does not seem to have tempered the behavior of the Netanyahu government one bit. And in Pakistan, where they put their political opponents away on trumped up charges for 10 years. President Biden can't travel anywhere without being interrupted. The Secretary of State can't leave his house in Washington, D.C. without people throwing what appears to be, but is not actually, gallons of blood on the street in front of him. Bobby Kennedy says if he becomes president, he'll stop the war in Ukraine, but will not stop the slaughter in Gaza. Okay, how's that for an introduction? Do we have enough

to talk about, Jeff? Let's go for it. All right, let's start with Ukraine. The EU has agreed to lend or give 50 billion euros, about 54 billion US dollars over four years to Ukraine. This is cash. This is not military equipment. They don't have the military equipment to give. If they do, it'd be second and third rate. In order to achieve this, they needed unanimity. In order to get unanimity, they had to use a carrot and a stick on Viktor Orban, the president of Hungary, who's the only one of them that understands the relationship between the EU leaders, that understands the relationship between Russia and Ukraine. What carrot, what stick, and what is Ukraine going to do with the cash?

Well, let's start out with the situation in Europe. Europe is in an economic recession because of the backlash, the boomerang effect of the sanctions by cutting trade between Russia and Europe. It's Europe that has ended up suffering. The center of the European economy is German industry. German industry is in contraction because a lot of German industry was based on the low-cost energy that was imported from Russia. So when you look at the politics of Europe, there isn't a popular leader in Europe right now that is in this pro-war coalition. In fact, the approval ratings of people like Chancellor Scholz of Germany are in the low 20s. That's generally true across Europe right now. In other words, Europe is adopting policies that are extremely unpopular with the people of Europe. I think they are mistaken policies. Viktor Orban of Hungary

is not alone now because the government of Slovakia is now also saying, though it wasn't pressing in this particular negotiation, but it is very clearly saying that this war in Ukraine needs to end at the negotiating table. The elections in the Netherlands led to the most votes for a politician, Geert Wilders, who is against the NATO war with Russia. The fact of the matter is the politics in the European Union are absolutely against this war. Now, the leaders have been falling into line with the U.S. approach all along. They've not said a word about negotiations. They have been gung-ho on the war. What is the result of all of that gung-ho militarism? It is that step by step, Ukraine is being destroyed. because not only has Ukraine lost territory, but it's lost people by the millions who have fled the country. Some have gone to Russia, others have gone to the European Union, a vast number are displaced internally, the economy is destroyed, and vast numbers of Ukrainians are being wounded and killed each month. So what Europe is doing in thinking this is somehow coming to Ukraine's help

is simply an extension of this mistake in policy that the U.S. led and that continues to this day. The only solution for this war in Ukraine is at the negotiating table. And the core issue that has been the causus belli, the cause of this war from the start in 2014, is NATO enlargement. And ironically, the person who personifies this disastrous approach, Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State, was in Kiev again, and rather than apologizing or resigning or leaving, She was there to tell them, we're going to give you more weapons. No single person has done more damage to Ukraine than Victoria Nuland. And she remains in responsibility as the point person in the United States. That's an extremely sad commentary on Joe Biden and his foreign policy and his team. So all of this is to say that, yes, Europe has voted 50 billion euros, which is a fair

sum, but it's over four years. It's not going to change anything for Ukraine. It's not going to change the results on the battlefield. It's not going to save the country. It doesn't even make sense. What Europe hasn't done and what the United States has not done is to say, we need serious negotiations. We should have had them before this war started. We should have allowed them to go forward in March 2022 when actually Ukraine and Russia reached an agreement that the United States then blocked. And those negotiations are needed till today. But unfortunately, we don't have presidential leadership. What did the EU leadership do to President Orban to get him to give in?

Because it required unanimity and he was, I think, the last holdout. He was. The truth is, I don't know and nobody reported it. I've not spoken to him or his team. I know him. I really respect the positions he's taken. I don't know what pressure was put on or what the concessions were made, if any, to get him to go along. So I can't answer the question. $5 billion a year. What are they going to do with it? The head of the military is about to be fired, if the president can pull this off. Very popular guy, General Zeluzhny, whom our military people say is serious military and is respected. But even he has said, I lost 500,000 men, I need another 500,000. They don't have the other 500,000. Is this 13 billion a year going to go into the pocket of corrupt political leaders? Is it going to go to fund the government or is it going to go to buy military equipment from some source other than the U.S.?

I may be optimistic in a way, but I don't think it's ever going to happen in the sense that I think events are going to move forward faster than this four-year period. And by optimistic, maybe it's a strange word, but I still believe that there can and I know that there should be basic negotiations. The United States says, okay, okay, we were wrong. It was stupid. We knew it. We should not have pushed NATO enlargement. That really is your red line. And it's an understandable one, by the way. Now let's figure out how to end this fighting and this bloodshed, which I think is in Russia's interest as well. So I think before that date of this four-year period, we're going to see a resolution. We know, by the way, that if Trump is elected, the war really is going to end very, very quickly. We know that if Bobby Kennedy is elected, as you said, the war is going to end very, very quickly. We know that if Bobby Kennedy is elected, as you said, the war is going

to end quickly. Even Biden and his team might figure out finally, though they've been at this for a decade, literally a decade. It's been the same group, Biden, Sullivan, Blinken, Newland, though they've been at it for a decade and it's been a disastrous gambit, maybe they figure out that not only did they make a huge foreign policy blunder, but it's not good election year politics either. So maybe they'll figure out how to do something smarter. which there is much to discuss. You have a fascinating piece out this week arguing that the United States was complicit in the trumped-up charges against Imre Khan, the former cricket star who was the very popular prime minister, forget if it's prime minister or president, popularly elected prime minister leader of the Pakistan government, who since has been sentenced to 14 years on two absurd charges, crimes that he couldn't possibly have committed. Did the United States engineer

the removal of Prime Minister Khan and his banishment to a Pakistan prison for 14 years? Does the U.S. still do things like that? It doesn't every other day, it seems. This is the point of my article, is to understand American foreign policy, one should understand the concept of covert regime change. That means that the United States, unlike just about any other government in the world, doesn't think about how to have diplomacy with another government. It thinks about how to replace that other government. And this has been a string of complete disasters stretching back more than 70 years. When the CIA was established in 1947, it was established with two different tasks. One was

intelligence, in other words, analysis, understanding the world, and the second was covert operations. And basically, the CIA has been a lawless extension of the White House and the Pentagon and the security establishment generally to do what it wants, when it wants. And there have been dozens and dozens by a realist account, 80 or more covert regime change operations by the United States. Now, they generally end in disaster. These are coups or overthrows of government or destabilization of countries or other kinds of pressures on militaries of other countries and other means to bring down another government. It's illegal.

It is fundamentally contrary to the UN Charter and a principle called non-intervention, which was deal with the other country, but don't intervene in its internal political affairs. Now, in this case of Imran Khan, first, I know him and admire him a lot. He's very smart. He's very decent. He's got high integrity, and he's extremely popular. Not only was he one of the world's greatest cricket stars, but he's an extremely intelligent, capable, down-to-earth leader. And so he is the single most popular politician in Pakistan, not a surprise. But he did something that is absolutely against the U.S. principle, which is, he said, we want to be neutral. Can you imagine? He said, we want to be friends with the United States, but also Russia and China and other

countries. Now, to the U.S., it's so weird. But neutral, that's fighting words. How can you be neutral? Either you're with us or you're against us. And when Imran Khan said, I want to be neutral, the U.S. ambassador characterized it as aggressive neutrality. It's almost a joke. But this is the attitude, the arrogance of the United States. Now, this goes back a long time because just about every popular leader that somehow got into the middle of an American geopolitical gambit that declared neutrality suddenly became viewed as an enemy by the United States. And there's a whole litany, a whole history.

I've studied this deeply for decades, and I've actually watched it close up. So what happened here was that when the special military operation took place, began on February 24th, 2022. Imran Khan was pressed by the U.S. and Europe condemn Russia. And he said in a rally on March 6th, 2022, popular rally, he said, they're pressing me to choose sides, and we're not going to choose sides. He said, we're not their slave. They can't tell us what to do. We want to be friends with the United States, with China, with Russia. The next day, and we know it because of a leak, The next day, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State called the Pakistani ambassador in Washington and said, this is very, very serious. This could really endanger relations. But if the prime minister were to fall in a vote of confidence, that could actually make things work. And that could make amends.

And that message was conveyed by the Pakistani ambassador back to Islamabad, back to Pakistan. And somebody leaked it, according to The Intercept in its investigative reporting. Somebody from the Pakistani military leaked it to the investigative reporter of The Intercept. And somebody clearly leaked it to Imran Khan as well, because Imran Khan later on said, you know who brought me down? It was the United States who brought me down. And he said, I have the document. And he waived the document. And then waiving it, he was charged with espionage. Oh, for revealing a secret document. Exactly. And so they didn't say that's a phony document.

They said, oh, that's espionage. The document that explains how the U.S. brought him down. And on that basis, he sends to 10 years in prison this week. And the United States State Department says, oh, we respect the courts of Pakistan. About a document that the Pakistanis obviously think is legitimate, describing how the Pakistani ambassador was pressured to convey the message to overthrow the prime minister of Pakistan. So Pakistan is a vassal state of the CIA. Well, we know that the military, we know that politicians there are absolutely, groups of them are beholden to the U.S. Obviously not everyone, because the most popular politician and the largest party is not. But they are being outlawed, basically. And they're being outlawed with the connivance and then the public acceptance by the United States.

This is American foreign policy. People should understand this. The idea is that the U.S. wants to decide who governs any other country if that country is challenging the U.S. And to tie it back together with Ukraine, the United States actively participated in the overthrow of the neutral president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014. Not only did they participate in the overthrow, they chose the next prime minister. And your listeners can go Google Victoria Nuland, Jeffrey Pyatt, P-Y-A-T-T. He was then the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. They had a phone call in late January 2013, and they discussed who would be the next government four weeks or so before the actual coup took place. And the Russians intercepted it and made it public. And anyone can listen to it

right now. And this goes on. Did our government ever explain it? Did the American people ever hear that we destabilized Ukraine through a covert regime change operation and through our policy of NATO enlargement? No. So this is what foreign policy is all about, unfortunately. This is an awesome, detailed, deep, value-laden, but succinct lecture on American history, which is much appreciated by the viewers and by me. But if I could just say very quickly, this goes back to 1947. And people need to understand when Putin says NATO is not a peaceful organization, what he's referring to is the regime change operations that topple governments all over the world. And it happens with impunity and it happens with deniability. And when I tried to

publish a piece like this in the New York Times describing this, I was told, no, you can't publish that. We don't know it's true. It may not be true. It's a game. But it's an absolutely dangerous game. And it's almost unique to the United States. I wouldn't say completely that the U.S. is the only country, but the vast preponderance of internal interference in the politics of other countries, up to and including coups, assassinations, deliberate destabilizations, overthrows, and pressure like on Pakistan to bring down in a vote of no confidence a popular politician. That is a U.S. specialty, and it needs to stop for our security. For our security. This doesn't make America safer. This is destabilizing the world. And that's really the point I want to make, which is this isn't good for us and bad for them. This is bad

for us. Wow. We must get to Israel. It was a brilliant, brilliant lecture you just gave us, transitioning. Has the behavior of the Netanyahu government, has the killing, destruction, and slaughter of the IDF in Gaza abated at all since the International Court of Justice says there's plausible evidence of genocide and there's plausible evidence that you guys have to stop? In the ICJ, International Court of Justice, finding, there were two elements to it. One is the statements of intentionality, and the second is the events on the ground. So let's consider each of these. With regard to the statements of intentionality, I would say the ICJ ruling meant nothing to the Israeli leaders. Not only did they denigrate the ICJ ruling, but there was a shocking rally of right-wingers in Tel Aviv, including several ministers of the government calling for the Jewish settlement of Gaza and in horrible language of the

kind that was cited by the ICJ as demonstrating genocidal intent. All right, I'm going to stop you for just a second, just to let you rest your voice for a minute, because we have the statements by Smotrich and Ben-Gavir. They're not very long. They're about 30 seconds each. It's in Hebrew, but there are translations. One of them mentions Netanyahu by name who wasn't there, but both are appreciated by the crowd, which seems to be as extremist as the speakers. Mr. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, I'm addressing you from this stage. extremist as the speakers. Mr. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, I'm addressing you from this stage.

It's a shame to wait another 19 years to understand that Gush Katith and northern Samaria must be returned. The responsibility of brave leadership is to make courageous decisions. We are settling our land from width to length, controlling it and fighting terror always and bringing with God's help security to all of Israel. You know what the answer is. Without settlement, there is no security. You know what they're talking about, what they're driving at, what they're encouraging Prime Minister Netanyahu to pursue? All of this is being carefully noted, recorded, annotated, and will go to the International Court of Justice in 30 days, basically.

So Israel is just digging the hole deeper into what looks more and more like a finding of genocide when the court finalizes this report. These politicians are living in an internal bubble with their zealot followers and their own rhetoric, and they don't understand that the whole world now is watching because the International Court of Justice made a clear ruling to stop this kind of behavior, and that there would be a report in 30 days by Israel, and that that report would then be commented on, and I'm sure expanded upon, by the plaintiff in this case, the government of South Africa. So what is happening is being watched meticulously right now. They're fools to be doing this, and they're just setting a large and vivid record of genocidal statements. All right. The other point you wanted to make besides intent was behavior.

Well, the behavior is that the shelling and deaths continue. And the defense minister, Gallant, just said we're going to drive all the way to the south of Gaza. One will recall that the Israeli defense forces told the people of Gaza, go to the south to get out of the way of our bombing. They then proceeded to bomb quickly and thousands and thousands died under the rubble. But they said, go to the south. Now the defense minister says we're going all the way to the south to finish our war. So I think there is no limit on the action either. And so what what Israel is doing these days, it thinks we act with impunity, the United States backs us, what difference can it possibly make? I think it's a very, not only cynical, cruel,

and destructive set of choices, but also a grave mistake because everything is being carefully monitored and recorded, and it will have its legal impact. Have you ever heard of state actors dressing in health care garb and invading a hospital and murdering three young men who were injured in their hospital beds? And the country that sent them claims it's conforming to international legal standards? We're seeing scenes that are so shocking and all recorded and annotated, and I get long Excel spreadsheets of event after event with the citations, with the links, and so forth, because there are various human rights groups watching all of this. There are scenes of murder in cold blood that we're seeing each day. There are scenes of mass demolition of universities, of schools,

of apartment buildings, with the gloating of the Israeli Defense Forces in front of the camera as those demolitions take place. And then this horrible, horrible, horrible scene of these murderers coming into the hospital this way. It's just so disgusting. Is there anything that can, besides Joe Biden, we know he could stop it with a phone call. He doesn't look like he's going to do so, even as his political support erodes here. But is there any power that is likely to stop this? Do you foresee Arab animosity in the Middle East rising to such a point that leadership is forced to do something to stop Netanyahu and company in their tracks? No, I doubt it. I don't think anybody wants a regional war because the devastation of that would just be a huge multiple of what's happening right now.

But I would also not discount the fact that the isolation of the United States, the loss of support for Biden inside the United States, the clarity of the Arab and Islamic leaders in every day at the UN demanding a ceasefire, the International Court of Justice ruling, while it's not saving lives as we speak and this hour, I still believe that in its cumulative effect will force an end to these massacres that are shocking and extraordinarily self-destructive of Israel and, of course, utterly destructive of Palestine. Professor Sachs, thank you so much. Thank you for your comprehensive...

By the way, this is outside of Tony Blinken's house. Yeah, much deserved. Yep, those are... Much deserved. Those are the ladies from Code Pink. It looks like blood. It's water-colored red, but they're making their point. He should take note.

Yes, I doubt that he will, but he should. But thank you for your brilliance. Thank you for sharing your vast and comprehensive knowledge of these things with us. And thank you most of all for your time as you're traveling all over the world. We'll see you next week. Have a good weekend. We'll see you next week. Thank you, Professor. All the best. Bye-bye. Bye. Wow. I think brilliance is an understatement. Coming up at three o'clock,

Professor Lawrence Wilkerson, I'm going to ask him point blank, is Bibi Netanyahu a terrorist? And at four o'clock, you know how we end Fridays and end the week, the boys, Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson on our intelligence wrap-up for Ukraine and Israel and some stuff going on in Washington, D.C. also. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thanks for watching!