Judging Freedom - Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: How Dangerous To Threaten Nukes.

Episode Date: May 30, 2024

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: How Dangerous To Threaten Nukes.See 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, May 30th, 2024. Our dear friend, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, joins us now. You all should know, if you don't know already professor sachs lives in new york but goes to sleep on every continent on the planet and wherever he is he manages to be on the show with us jeff you know and and your lovely wife sonia knows how uh deeply grateful i am for that and the audience is grateful as well. I

wouldn't even say where you are, but it's warm and sunny. Well, I'm grateful to you. And when you work with the UN, you learn there are a lot of countries in the world, 193 of them in the UN. And so you visit a lot of them. There is some news out of Ukraine today and out of Belgium. And also you have written a very, very timely, very telling piece on the dangers of nuclear weapons. And I plan to get to both of Belgium. What, in your opinion, is the status of the stability of the government of Ukraine as we speak the last two days of May 2024 and the military as it attempts, I think, futilely to resist Russia? Well, of course, this whole Ukraine project, and we need to call it a project, a project of the United States that dates 30 years,

but especially 10 very violent years since 2014 when the U.S. helped to lead a coup in Ukraine to put in a pro-NATO government. Things are turning really south very fast. Zelensky is no longer constitutional president. His term expired. Under the constitution, there were to be elections. There were no elections. He had been ruling under martial law, but during the presidential term, the last martial law order that he signed as constitutional president expired. And so now, politically, Ukraine is in complete limbo. There is no constitutional government. time on the military front, this long contact line between Russia on the one side and Ukraine and NATO forces on the other side. Russia is pushing through the defenses of Ukraine in many parts of that long contact line. And this is quite significant. Russia has the initiative. It is advancing.

Ukraine is losing vast numbers of people. It tried a mobilization to cover the losses, but that mobilization was a failure. People do not want to fight and die in a losing war. Young people are desperately trying to escape Ukraine. Ukrainian enforcers are impeding this escape, shooting people trying to cross the rivers into Eastern Europe and so on. There's a desperate situation. People are being sent to the front lines with minimal training at all, and they're dying, usually 1,000 or 1,500 dead and wounded per day. The casualty rates are absolutely staggering. Russia has military advantages. You document in so many important interviews every week with Colonel Douglas McGregor and others. So the situation is that the Ukraine project of the United States has come to naught. It has ended up to this state

leading to the deaths of probably about 500,000 Ukrainians. Ukraine is losing more and more of its territory. The Ukrainian leaders who are now de de facto leaders because they're not constitutional leaders, are at an individual level desperate. They are bombing civilian areas inside Russia. are using drones in an absolutely astoundingly provocative way to attack Russia's nuclear war early warning systems in two attacks last week, which is so perilous, so reckless, so stupid that it's hard to find the words for what our Western leaders are doing. So there's a loss on the battlefield. There is mass political confusion. There is unrest inside Ukraine, profound unhappiness about people being sent to the front lines to die for a war that they cannot win. There is escalation from a lot of desperate and unpopular Western leaders, Biden, of course, among them, but not only Biden. Most of these leaders have approval ratings in the 20s or 30s and disapproval ratings vastly higher, and the insecurity of the world is multiplying

in this context. So it's a very alarming, very disturbing situation. I mean, alarming and disturbing to say the least, Professor Sachs. Do you think that the leaders of the EU, the leaders of NATO, and the West Wing and the State experts on the Russian nuclear early warning system, saying this is so dangerous and provocative, it is absolutely urgent. And he asked me to forward this with technical documentation to our leaders. But this person who is one of our country's most knowledgeable people said he did not believe that the people in responsibility understood the technical aspects of what they were doing and how extraordinarily dangerous they are.

I'm quite convinced that this is also the fact with all of the European leaders who at this point are speaking delusionally. We will defeat Russia. Ukraine should shoot anywhere it wants. Do not fear nuclear war. Russia must be destroyed. A kind of rhetoric that you might have around a board game, playing the game of risk, but not words that should ever come out of the mouths of national leaders in the nuclear age. But we're hearing them daily. So do I think they understand? No, I do not. And I very much worry about a president of the United States

who is 81 and not communicative with the United States people, with the American people. He meets with his donors, but has he given an address to the American people about these dangers? Is he explaining what is the position of the United States? Why are we now in three heated conflict zones where the risks are extraordinary because it's not only Ukraine, it is Gaza and the Middle East, and it is increasingly Taiwan and the South China Sea. What is happening? Why are we drifting to this kind of reckless escalation? A couple of days ago, Secretary Blinken said he thought that Ukrainians should be free to target what they want inside Russia. Mass confusion the last day in the U.S. with statements by the Pentagon, State Department and White House. No, no, we mean this targeting, not that targeting. Policy hasn't changed. A lot of confusion

when there should not be this kind of instability. And we should not be shooting under any circumstances at nuclear war early warning systems. Period. No questions. Unconditional. No exceptions. You went to my next topic, and that was the mumblings or meanderings, verbal meanderings, of Secretary Blinken that he's considering this authorization to use American offensive weaponry to land in Russia. President Macron did him one step farther. I don't know if you've seen this. This will raise your blood pressure, Professor Sachs. Cut number one. So how do we explain to the Ukrainians that we're going to have to protect these towns and basically everything we're seeing right now around Rakiv if we tell them you're not allowed to reach the point where the missiles are fired from.

The missiles. In fact, we're telling them we're giving you weapons, but you can't defend yourselves. So we stay exactly within the same framework. We think that we should enable them to neutralize the military sites from which the missiles are fired from and basically the military sites from which Ukraine is attacked. But we must not allow them to hit other targets in Russia, obviously civilian capabilities or other military targets. When it's from identified targets in Russia that Ukraine is attacked. Well, I think we have to be able to allow them to do that if we really want to retain our objective. So is this made, in your view, for domestic political consumption?

Does this president of France want to be the foremost leader in Europe? Or is he a madman that doesn't understand the consequences of what he's saying. Well, what he was actually trying to say was to step back a little bit in that, because what he was saying was attack from places where Ukraine is attacked. But he's speaking in a context in which in the last week, two nuclear early warning systems were attacked, which had nothing to do with the war. What is a nuclear early warning system, Professor Sachs? This is the radar systems that Russia uses to detect incoming ballistic missiles. In other words, this is Russia's eyes and ears for when to shoot off their nuclear arsenal in defense or response to an attack. You do not want to take out those eyes. You do not want to say you are blinded to a first strike. You do not want to raise the risks of a tripwire

of nuclear war. You do not want to say we are trying deliberately to blind you to possible missile attacks in Russia. It's unbelievable. This is why when I got this mail from our countries, one of our country's leading experts, it was complete alert. Jeff, this is so dangerous, so reckless. It's unbelievable. And I don't believe they understand this in the White House, the State Department, places where they absolutely need to understand what is happening right now. What Macron also said was, well, not civilian areas, but the Ukrainians are attacking civilian areas all the time in Beograd and other places in Russia. What's happening right now is that at the conventional level of the battlefield, Ukraine is losing. This is not a surprise. This is predictable. It was predicted by all the experts you've been talking to over the years. And now there's increasing desperation, rather than Macron saying, more than ever, we need to talk. More than ever, we need to avoid disaster. more than ever, we need to talk more than ever. We need to avoid disaster more than ever. We need President Biden and President Putin to sit down to de-escalate. This, to my mind, is completely alarming. American presidents, with the exception of JFK, understood the need to avert a nuclear showdown at all costs.

Very few presidents have understood any of this. I posted yesterday on Common Dreams uses the doomsday clock to make this point. The doomsday clock is the clock of the national security experts of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which watch day to day, how close are we to midnight? How close are we to nuclear Armageddon? How close are we to destroying the planet? And they have been charting that since 1947. And they have been reporting whether we are in dire disaster or whether we are getting some breathing space and a reprieve. And the story is very important to understand because most of our presidents have moved that clock closer to midnight. That means most of our presidents have failed to keep us safe. A few of our presidents moved the hands away from midnight. And this is not at all partisanship.

This is skill and diplomacy. Eisenhower moved the hands away from midnight because he understood in the mid-1950s, we need nuclear negotiations. He didn't achieve them for a lot of complicated reasons, but he understood talk to the other side. President Kennedy, of course, inherited this height of the Cold War. We nearly came to nuclear annihilation in the Cuban Missile Crisis, but then President Kennedy brilliantly, together with his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev, pulled the world back from the brink in 1963 and negotiated the Partial Nuclear Arms Treaty, and the Nuclear test ban treaty, excuse me, and the hands of the clock moved away from midnight. Kennedy was killed. Many people think I agree with that, that it was probably rogue

forces in the US government, which did not like his peace initiative, and Johnson moved the hands of the clock closer to midnight. Nixon understood detente. Nixon understood diplomacy. He went to Moscow. He went to Beijing. He actually pushed the hands of the clock away from midnight. Carter, closer to midnight again. Then what seemed to be our salvation from all of this, the end of the Cold War during the Reagan and Bush 1 administrations, and the hand of the doomsday clock was pushed back to 17 minutes away from midnight, the farthest from disaster that it had been. That was our safety. The Cold War had ended. Then every single president since then has done it wrong. We are a country that could not take yes for an answer. We could not take peace for an answer. We decided, well, we'll run the world. And so from Clinton onward,

the hands of the clock had moved relentlessly towards midnight. Clinton with his NATO enlargement completely unnecessary. George W. Bush Jr. with his war in Iraq and his war in Afghanistan and his unilateral departure from the anti-ballistic missile treaty in 2002, which was protecting the world, stabilizing the nuclear situation. He moved the hands of the clock backward. Obama comes in. He launches CIA regime change operations in Syria, a NATO regime change operation in Libya, a U.S. participation in a coup in Ukraine. He moves the hand of the clock closer to midnight. Trump comes in. He stirs the pot. He stops the agreements with Iran. He stirs the pot with China. He moves the clock closer to midnight. And Biden, yet again, has moved the hands of the clock to just 90 seconds to midnight.

We are the closest we have ever been to nuclear annihilation now. And we have three fronts under Biden, every one of them unstable. That is Ukraine, it is the Middle East, and it is East Asia, because these people do not understand negotiations. They think in one way, escalation. They do not understand negotiations. They do not understand diplomacy. And so we are in extreme peril. And the five recent presidents, this is again, irrespective of party, have brought us to the brink. when somebody at a fundraiser for Donald Trump revealed that he said at the fundraiser, if while he's president, Russia had attacked Ukraine or China had surrounded Taiwan, he would bomb Moscow and Beijing. And I thought, oh my God. You know, the issue is that was not understood is that these events have causes, these causes have causes. You have to understand the situation, how to pull back, how to understand the deeper reasons for these profound confrontations and anxieties.

This is one of the ways that Kennedy saved the world in 1962 and 1963. It's a complicated and subtle story. Kennedy was a subtle person and a great statesman. And he understood intuitively, first of all, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, pull back, don't just bomb, as all his advisors wanted. But he understood the deeper reasons for the Soviet anxieties. He got that. He could see things from their perspective too. So he said- It was missiles in Turkey. It was missiles in Turkey. It was this crazy idea of a nuclear Germany, which was being discussed at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s, which drove the Soviet leadership out of any kind of stability because they had lost 27 million people to the Germans within that last generation in World War II. And now the US was talking about sharing nuclear weapons and there were many things going on. Kennedy got it. He understood the deeper reasons.

We have no intrinsic conflict with Russia. We have no intrinsic conflict with China. And so if you say, well, if they do this, we do this, you're just trapping the world into a game of retaliation that you don't understand. What's key is to understand why does the tension exist in this place or in this place? How do we diffuse that? How do we use diplomacy to pull the two sides back from the edge? I once asked you on another program, this program but another show, who has the better understanding of the other? Biden's understanding of Putin or Putin's understanding of Biden. It's a no-brainer. But my longtime friend and colleague, Tucker Carlson, recently asked you in a terrific interview you gave with him, I have to promote the interview on Tucker's channel, your opinion of Vladimir Putin. We're going to play that and then we're going to follow it with cut

number four, Chris, Vladimir Putin warning NATO. First, Jeff Sachs with Tucker Carlson, and then Vladimir Putin to Russian journalists. What do you make of Putin? He's very smart. He has led Russia very effectively. And because he emerged from the KGB, he understands the U.S., the way the U.S. operates, because we became a security state. We became a state where the CIA has absolutely extraordinary influence, and Putin gets that. And so he really understands how we operate. He doesn't like it, but he understands it. And his background, especially because his background comes from the KGB, his counterpart was the CIA. He does not have illusions about the United States. Representatives of NATO countries, especially in Europe, especially

in small countries, they should be aware of what they are playing with before talking about striking Russian territory. In general, this constant escalation can lead to serious consequences. Professor Sachs, does Putin bluff? No, he's not bluffing. He is trying to say we need a security arrangement that is a security for Ukraine, for the West, and also for Russia. He actually put a document on the table on December 15th, 2021, called a draft U.S.-Russia security agreement. One can find it online. He said the reason is the United States unilaterally abandoned the anti-ballistic missile treaty in 2002. It placed Aegis missiles in Poland and Romania, just minutes away from Russia. Russia doesn't know what's in those missile tubes, what kind of missiles are coming, because the U.S. says it's none of your

business. The U.S. expanded NATO right up to Russia's borders in the Baltics, in the Black Sea. It's trying to do so in Georgia and Ukraine. When Russia says we have concerns, deep concerns, the United States literally says, literally, it's none of your business what we do, whether we're at your border or not. So this is not a bluff. This is real. The United States left the Intermediate Nuclear Force Agreement, the INF agreement. We left it. So what's the bluff about? He understands this is incredibly destabilizing. And he says, we need to talk. And you know what? The United States doesn't talk. This is the basic issue. Where is that summit of Biden and Putin? It doesn't exist. Where is the phone call of Biden and Putin? It doesn't exist. I don't know why, but if the president can't do it, we need somebody else

who can do it. The president needs to be able to be our lead diplomat. Tell me about the famous leaked memo from Bill Burns, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, who is now the director of the CIA and who I'm going to guess you believe understands the Russian mentality and understands diplomacy, but can't seem to get through to his boss in the White House. I don't know, of course, what Bill Burns is trying to do right now in his capacity as CIA director, but I absolutely know what he tried to do as a U.S. ambassador to Russia in 2008. That was the time that the Bush administration was contemplating committing NATO to enlargement to Ukraine, something that Putin had said the year before was a bright red line. Don't do it. Putin had explained, do not do this. Unlike Joe Biden, Putin's red lines are real red lines.

He told us in 2007 at the Munich Security Conference, do not do this. So Bill Burns, who was Ambassador Burns in Moscow in 2008, sent back to Condoleezza Rice a powerful memo. Again, people can find it online. Just type in, I would guess, Burns Memo 2008. Nyet means nyet because that is the famous name for it. How do we know it? Not because the American leadership explained anything to you and to me and to the American people, but because Julian Assange did us the service of making this known on WikiLeaks. And that's a real service because we wouldn't know the truth about anything if we don't have information and the government is hiding all of these critical points of information systematically. So we hear from whistleblowers who are heroic. We hear from people who post these things. We occasionally get something from the Freedom of Information Act, but from the government, the Russian political class said that NATO in Ukraine was a red line.

But by the way, how would it be with China in military bases along the Rio Grande? Would that be a partisan issue? Would that just be a president objecting to it? Or would the American political class say, no, don't do that? Of course it would be the latter. And that's what Burns was telling Condoleezza Rice. We were in a mood, delusional. We're the unipolar power. How can a second rate power like Russia tell us what to do? Well, of course it can't. We can bring them to their knees. This is how we think. With a counterpart that is 11 time zones long, stretching across Eurasia, and that has 6,000 nuclear weapons. Last subject matter. I'm going to play a clip. It's President Zelensky in Belgium. And then I'm going to ask you how on earth.

This is just a clip from a longer speech. That longer speech resulted in NATO promising him $1 billion in aid. Cut number two, Chris. Even from reconnaissance, you get maps, satellite images, but you cannot respond. I think it's unfair, but we cannot, and this is a fact, risk the support of our partners. And that is why we do not use the weapons of our partners on the territory of the Russian Federation. Please give us the opportunity to retaliate against their military. Up the Time magazine headline.

This is from yesterday, Jeff. Belgium commits $1 billion to Ukraine amid Zelenskyy whirlwind European tour. What are they thinking? the opinion surveys of the leaders of NATO countries, there's not one that has a public approval on net. That means approval greater than disapproval. Most are deeply unpopular, like Biden, like Schultz, like Macron, like Sunak. It's pretty much across the board. These warmongers do not carry the views of their own people. They are not respecting the security interests of their nations. Certainly, they are not respecting your and my security because they're bringing us closer to complete disaster. And they aren't thinking. They are seeing that their project is failing. And so they are flailing rather than saying, why don't we get out of this before real disaster strikes? They seem not to know how to do it. I've always believed. I've come to understand more and more as the years go on. It is the fundamental job of a president

of the United States to understand this, to keep us safe, to keep us away from the nuclear catastrophes. And we are closer than ever. And Joe Biden, that's your job. Do your job. Professor Sachs, thank you very much. Thank you for your knowledge, for your time, and for your passion, my dear friend. We'll see you again soon. Excellent. See you soon. Of course. All the best. You too. We still have an interesting afternoon lined up for you, my friends. At 2 o'clock Eastern, Scott Ritter. At 3 o'clock Eastern, Professor John Mearsheimer. At 4.15 Eastern, Max Blumenthal.

Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. I'm Paul Tenno for Judging Freedom. Altyazı M.K.