Judging Freedom - Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Is the UN Toothless?

Episode Date: January 2, 2025

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Is the UN Toothless?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, January 2nd, 2025. Happy New Year to everyone. Professor Jeffrey Sachs will be here with us in a moment on Is the UN Toothless? But first this. We're taught to work hard for 35 to 40 years. Save your money, then live off your savings. Unfortunately, there are too many threats undermining the value of our hard-earned dollars. The Fed's massive money printing machine is shrinking your dollar's value. Just the cost of groceries is absurd.

Let me be brutally honest. I think the dollar is on its way to being extinct. Not just here, but globally. The BRICS nations, led by Russia and China, threaten to remove the dollar as the world's reserve currency. Central banks have been shifting away from the dollar and into gold. And if we go to central bank digital currency, that will not only destroy the dollar, but we will lose our freedom. We will lose our

privacy. They can track anything we do. You need to take care of yourself and your family. So here's what you need to do. Immerse yourself in knowledge and information. The writing is on the wall. Now is the time to consider shifting some of your dollars into gold and silver as your bedrock financial asset. Call my friends at Lear Capital, the leader in precious metals investing for over 27 years. They help me diversify into gold and silver. They can help you too. Call Lear today at 800-511-4620, 800-511-4620, or go to learjudgenap.com. Professor Jeffrey Sachs, welcome here, my dear friend. Happy New Year. Thank you, as always, for your time.

Before we get into your thoughts on the UN, its relationship to Israel, its ability to be a moral force in the world, something about which I know you could discuss in your sleep, I want your take on Russia today. President Putin, in one of his two lengthy press encounters at the end of last year, just last week, told the Russian people that everything will be okay. And he's been mocked in the Western media for that. But what is your understanding of Russia's economy today, its political stability today, its perception of itself in the world today, and its likely triumph in Ukraine? Well, Russia is a great power, one of the few in the world, the United States, China, Russia, India, I would count as the world's four great powers. That reflects a mix of factors. Russia is a territorially the largest country in the world. It's a vast 11 time zone country. It's a populous country of 150 million people. It's a technologically and educationally sophisticated society as it has been for many decades, including during the Soviet

period. Many breakthroughs in mathematics, in science, in technology, have come from what was the Soviet Union, now is today Russia. Russia is a country with a great civilizational history and a great cultural history. We read the great Russian novelists today, past and current. And in this sense uh russia i i believe is not like our propaganda holds it day by day on the verge of uh collapse it's a a country under and by the West. It is not an irrational beast, as we're told, or an incorrigible conqueror of nations, as we're told. There's a great deal of Russia hatred and Russophobia in the Western world that goes back actually two centuries. It's a long British tradition. When Britain ruled the world, the British hated Russia. Why did they hate Russia? Well, Russia stood in the way of Britain's claim to be the world's hegemon. Today, Russia is seen by the United States as an obstacle

to U.S. hegemony or U.S. complete dominance. So Russia is hated for that reason. But the idea that Russia's somehow, as Obama reportedly put it, a gas station with nukes or a country on the verge of collapse is plainly wrong. And one final point, point just to say in this brief overview, Russia has successfully with China, India, Brazil, South Africa, and now another four countries that joined that association, the BRICS, last year, and another nine that are joining this year, is creating a major global group of like-minded countries that don't like the United States bullying, that trade with each other, have good relations with each other. And so the idea that Russia has been isolated by the United States is also one of the myths that were fed daily by the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, MSNBC. I'm mentioning them because these are the mouthpieces of the American deep state that continue to peddle the Russophobia.

Do you think that the elites in Europe and the neocons in the State Department, I can't ask you about the Trump administration yet because it doesn't exist yet and we don't know, but do you think that those people recognize that their experiment in Ukraine has been a catastrophic disaster? Hey there, Ritual here to give a big shout out to you for making it through the hectic holiday season. The magic of those family moments, that was you. And now there's new milestones to prep for in 2025. This new year, check clean, quality pregnancy nutrient support off your to-do list with Ritual. We've done the research to create science-backed pregnancy

support like our prenatal multivitamin, natal choline, and fertility support, all designed to be taken alongside each other. But don't just take our word for it. They're also third-party tested for microbes and heavy metals and clean label project certified. So whether you're trying, thinking about trying, or already there, we don't have to tell you that prioritizing yourself can be the hardest part. That's why we're helping you get started today with 30% off a three-month supply for a limited time at ritual.com slash podcast. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. No, because for them, as they live comfortably in Washington or in Alexandria or Bethesda or in Manhattan or elsewhere, it's been, you know, water off their back. It's been nothing to them. The fact that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are dead,

that the Ukrainian economy has been destroyed, that's nothing to them. This is a game for them. This is what is the most shocking part of our off. And no, it doesn't bother them at all. We know it. We hear Jake Sullivan talk about what a splendid period this has been. That's not just protecting himself. That's his real view, which is, yeah, you spend a few hundred trillion, sorry, a few hundred billion dollars here or there, a few trillion dollars, and you weaken your adversary. We're playing a game after all. We have to be tough. We have to show our reputation. We have to stand strong.

The American people are not party to this game, but the behavior of these deep state officials is mind boggling to me. But to answer your question, do they see that they have failed? They haven't failed. It hasn't cost them anything. Their lives are intact. They are getting good salaries paid by the military industrial complex. They're doing their job, after all. And so that's why these wars continue. The pain is felt by real people, by Americans who feel an economy that doesn't serve their purposes, by Ukrainians that are dying in the hundreds of thousands in Europe, which is in an economic crisis because of all of this.

But the leaders, no, they don't feel it's a failure because from their point of view, since they haven't paid a penny for this personally, no, for them, they're doing their work. Russia sells natural gas to Europe and the pipeline goes through Ukraine. And as of yesterday, the day before or today, that pipeline no longer works. Ukraine is almost literally biting the hand that feeds it in order to punish Russia. It's not allowing natural gas to Western Europe. I think Western Europe anticipated that or has adapted to it, but were you surprised at this? Well, you know, one of the Western newspapers said, Russia cuts off gas supply to Europe.

No, that's got to be a CIA headline. No, but it just shows the falsity that we live with. Our government's lying every single minute. Russia did not cut off gas to Europe. The U.S. cut off gas to Europe through its agent, Ukraine. So Ukraine stopped the gas shipments. This will hurt Ukraine. This will hurt Europe. It will at least a bit enrich American LNG exporters. So this is a U.S. game for a few people that count, that make campaign contributions, that make money. And we see the U.S. with the LNG contracts to Ukraine and U.S. LNG at many times the cost that they would have paid for Russian gas rushing to Europe right now.

So, again, it's a game that the losers are the people of Ukraine, the people of Europe. The idea is to punish Russia because in our kind of our government's deep state, it's not I won't say it's masochism because they're not inflicting pain on themselves. They're inflicting pain on the American people. They're inflicting pain on the Europeans. They're inflicting pain on the Ukrainians, and they're doing it so that they can do their best to inflict pain on Russia. It's a great world where the great challenge is how much harm can I cause to someone else, not can I solve any single problem in this world. President Putin has indicated several times a desire to speak to Donald Trump when he becomes the president of the United States in two weeks.

What do you think Putin hopes to gain from, I'm going to use the plural, those conversations? Well, what he hopes, but I think his hopes will be tempered by experience, but he hopes that the U.S. and Russia can establish a security relationship. What do I mean by that? The U.S. and Russia each have 6,000 nuclear warheads, most of which are aimed at the other side. They have 1,600 deployed nuclear warheads ready to be launched, most of which are aimed at the other side. This relationship determines whether the world survives physically, literally, or not. We are at the brink of nuclear Armageddon, though our mainstream media are just as stupidly dumb and silent about this as can be. The United States has destabilized the nuclear arms framework. Starting in 2002, the United States unilaterally withdrew from

the anti-ballistic missile treaty. Then the United States unilaterally over Russia's strident and ardent and understandable objections began to deploy anti-ballistic missile systems, the Aegis missile systems in Eastern Europe near to Russia. The United States continued to pursue the eastward expansion of U.S. military bases, so-called NATO enlargement. Seven countries in 2004, as we've talked about, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, and Romania. And then in 2008 said, we'll move on to Ukraine, which is the reason for the war in Ukraine. Then in 2019, under the first Trump administration,

the United States unilaterally abandoned the Intermediate Nuclear Force Treaty. We have war and we have a breakdown of the nuclear arms control situation. This is our real crisis. This has put America at greater risk than ever before. These fools or demented or absent President Biden, for example, has made America far less secure in the last four years. It's a disgrace. This is what President Putin would like to speak about, grown up to grown up. God help us. I hope such a serious discussion takes place. It would involve the question of whether NATO is going to stop moving, whether the U.S. is going to stop deploying missile systems near Russia's border, whether the U.S. is going to reenter agreements like the Intermediate Nuclear Force Agreement or the broader nuclear arms control strategic framework.

Those are not only serious issues. Those are existential issues. With Biden, we didn't have one moment of this in a serious way, not one. This is why Jake's not been all there mentally, even from the start of his term. But that's what President Putin wants to talk about. Actually I agree with everything you just said, Jeff, Professor Sachs, is really going to go against the American cultural grain in all of American government, not just the deep state, but even the people that Donald Trump has indicated he intends to appoint, to surround him on national security, have the same mindset as Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken. They just have R after their names instead of D. This is correct. There's a fundamental, fundamental mindset issue in the United States. It was pointed to by J. William Fulbright 60 years ago. It was probably the first foreign policy book I ever knew of when I was a young

kid. And this was a book that he called The Arrogance of Power. He was then the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And we know that pride goeth before the fall. American pride, American arrogance, American belief that we must get our way always, because if we don't get our way, oh, we'll lose the trust of all the allies around the world that support us. So we have to stand up and win every time. This is profoundly, deeply set in the American psyche, in the political class in Washington, in the acceptable rhetoric, in the opinion columns, in the editorials. It's true today. David Ignatius in the Washington Post, basically, you know, he answers questions for his readers at the start of the new year. He's a voice of the CIA, typically. And it's all the blather of the U.S. will triumph.

Russia will be defeated. The U.S. will triumph. So this arrogance is extraordinary. And it went into overdrive in December 1991, when the Soviet Union ended and then America declared itself as the indispensable country and the world's sole superpower. A wonderful new history of this period after 1991 by a wonderful historian Jonathan Haslam has the title, the book title, Hubris. This is another word for arrogance. Hubris is the hallmark of American foreign policy. And unless we get over the hubris, we'll drive ourselves to destruction. This is the basic point. Do the superpowers, the United States, Russia, China, India, take the UN seriously? The United States acts with disdain towards the UN. That was true during the Biden period.

It will be even more true during the upcoming Trump period. Why? Because the United Nations is viewed as an assault on American sovereignty. The idea that the United Nations, which was created by the United States, is a mechanism for collective security has somehow disappeared from the American mentality. The UN was created by Franklin Roosevelt, in my view, our greatest president, and also, in my view, one of his greatest creations. The idea was to have a meeting place in the world so that we could collectively solve security challenges so that we wouldn't have nuclear Armageddon or World War III, which would be about the same thing under our current conditions. And so the UN is an instrument for peace, but it doesn't work if the United States doesn't want it to work. There was a congressman yesterday I saw quoted

saying, I don't recognize the International Criminal Court. We're a sovereign country, the United States. This is a big confusion of ideas. Yes, the United States is a sovereign country, but it doesn't mean you just act alone. have treaties to agree on nuclear nonproliferation, to agree on nuclear arms control, to agree on preventing world war and so forth. You still, even if you're sovereign, the United States is 4.1% of the world population. There's another 95.9%. We're not alone. Hey, there are others there too. And they also have nuclear weapons too. And we are threatened by them for our survival because of that reality. We are in a collective security challenge, not an individual one. It's not just our will, it's our need to cooperate. So this is why the UN is essential, but it can't function when the United States says, we don't care. And look at Israel. Israel, its whole policy is to break international law at every turn because it says we have the right to do so. We can break international law. We can completely neglect nearly unanimous world opinion. We can thumb our nose at

the International Criminal Court, which has indicted our prime minister, for God's sake. We can laugh off the International Court of Justice, which is adjudicating a claim of genocide, genocide against Israel. And all they say is, ah, the UN, it's a hate-filled institution. We can ignore every single thing it does. in fact, kill UN officials, aim for them, target them in missiles, neglect their safety, break institutions that provide urgent relief for civilians, and so forth. So yes, the UN is vital for our survival, but you asked, is it toothless? It is toothless. If the world's major powers, starting with the United States, I'm going to say, absolutely say, no, we're sovereign. We don't care. We don't have to cooperate with anyone else. That's my definition of arrogance or hubris that could get us all killed. Professor Sachs, thank you very much, my dear friend. Much appreciated. The world is a dark and gloomy place, even in this bright new year,

which just started yesterday. Thank you for coming here. Well, we're not going to give up hope for 2025. No, no. Only the beginning. We'll look forward to seeing you next week, Professor. Excellent. Thank you.

All the best. Thanks so much. Coming up later today at 1030 this morning, Professor Gilbert Doctorow at one o'clock, Scott Ritter at three o'clock, Professor John Mearsheimer at five o'clock, the always worth waiting for, Max Blumenthal. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. We'll see you next time. Thank you.