Judging Freedom - Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Is the US the Essential Nation?

Episode Date: December 21, 2023

In this exclusive and thought-provoking conversation, with the distinct Professor Jeffrey Sachs we pose this compelling question: "Is the US the Essential Nation?" This discussion takes a deep dive into the role and responsibilities of the United States in the global arena, probing the very essence of its impact on international affairs.Professor Sachs, a renowned economist and scholar, brings a wealth of knowledge and insight to the table. As we explore the concept of the U.S. as the "Essential Nation," the conversation promises to be a comprehensive examination of America's historical role, its present influence, and the evolving dynamics of its global leadership.You can anticipate a nuanced exploration of the economic, political, and diplomatic dimensions that define the United States' position in the world. Professor Sachs' analytical prowess and extensive expertise in global development and diplomacy are poised to provide valuable perspectives on the responsibilities, challenges, and opportunities that come with the moniker "Essential Nation."#russia #ukraine #USMilitaryHistory #Israel #Gaza #ceasefire #hostages #Ukraine #zelenskyy #Biden #china #IsraelPalestine #MiddleEastConflict #PeaceInTheMiddleEast #GazaUnderAttack #Ceasefire #Jerusalem #prayforpeace #hostages #Israel #Gaza #ceasefire #hostages #Ukraine #zelenskyy #Biden #china #IsraelPalestine #MiddleEastConflict #PeaceInTheMiddleEast #GazaUnderAttack #Ceasefire #Jerusalem #prayforpeace #hostagesSee 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 Monday, December 18th, 2023. Professor Jeffrey Sachs is with us. Does Prime Minister Netanyahu have an off-ramp? Will the United States government confiscate and sell Russian assets that it has seized because Congress refuses to allocate more funds for the Ukraine war? Is the United States really the essential nation? All that after this. Can you believe the chaos confronting Americans today? The government is out of control. Debt is out of control. And have you heard?

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for you and your family. Go to learjudgenap.com or call 800-511-4620. Professor Sachs, welcome, my dear friend. Does Prime Minister Netanyahu have an off-ramp? Can he keep up the level of ferocity before the international community steps in, so long as he has the support of an overwhelming majority of the Israeli public? I think there are two issues here. He has an agenda. The agenda is not merely Israel's security, if I could merely in quotation marks, it is greater Israel. And what that means in the political jargon is that Netanyahu and his government want Israeli control permanently over all of Palestine, that is the West Bank and Gaza, as well as today's Israel. In other words, they have a political agenda that they are

fighting for. That political agenda is contrary to international law, contrary to repeated UN Security Council and UN General Assembly resolutions, contrary ostensibly to U.S. public policy, as Biden kind of mumbles it each day that the U.S. insists on a two-state solution. So Netanyahu is fighting a war for a political outcome that is against the international will of almost every country in the world and against international law. Now, can he do that? He can do that up to the moment when the United States says enough. And probably the U.S. is getting close to that, not out of any great revelation of justice or international law, but because this is very bad politics forically because the American public does not support Israel in this cruelty, in the war crimes, or in the intention of dominating the entire region. So this is why Netanyahu's war, I think, will be short-lived, could be extraordinarily damaging. It could

still provoke, as I think the Israeli government wants, a wider war in the Middle East, in which case what I've just said would not be correct because things could spin out of control. But I think that what should happen, the United States should say today, no, we don't support you in a war for that purpose, period. What I think is likely to happen is that it will get shut down fairly quickly. Do you think that Joe Biden can overcome the pressures of domestic politics and the influence of the Israeli lobby on the U.S. Congress and say that to him? I mean, he could have said that two weeks ago. He could say it this afternoon. He could stop the war while this show is on, if he wanted to, with a phone call. As always, Judge, American politics means two different things. One, it means public opinion. And the second, it means

powerful lobbies. When it comes to public opinion, Biden does not have the American public support, quite the contrary. He is losing the public support. Young people especially are aghast at what Israel is doing. But it's not just young people. The American public as a whole has said strongly in opinion survey after opinion survey that they want peace, they want Israel to stop what it's doing, that they don't want the United States to be abetting this. Then there is the powerful AIPAC lobby, the Israel lobby. Of course, it is pretty unrelenting. But in an election year, it's not all powerful. And I'm sure that the White House is shocked at how they've lost the public support because they don't understand public opinion anyway. And they certainly miscalculated about the opinions of people under the age of 35 and especially under the age of 25, but a very significant proportion of the electorate. And this is an election year and Biden is losing electoral support. So that has to loom large. But in addition, we have one vote after another, whether it's in the UN Security Council of 13 to 1 to 1, where the US stands alone in its veto, or whether it's in the UN General Assembly, the recent vote, 153 countries with 89% of the world's population voting for an immediate ceasefire, and the United States on the other side with 10 countries

of 5% of the world population, of which were 4%, and the other nine countries representing less than 1% of the world population. So we're alone in this. Can the IDF defeat Hamas? Or, and I don't want to box you into either or, but I'm just thinking out loud. Is Hamas an idea that cannot be eradicated? The idea that can't be eradicated is the idea of Palestine's political rights, whether it is two states, as the world community has repeatedly voted, including the United States, for 57 years since the so-called Six-Day War in June 1967, or one state, which is a one secular, ostensibly democratic state, which would have a majority of Palestinians in it, and Hamas, whatever version of that state, maybe it doesn't want a democratic state, who knows, but it wants one state that is Palestine. What cannot be eradicated is Palestinian political rights. And as much as

the Israelis attack and bomb and displace two million people and kill thousands or tens of thousands of people in Gaza. There will be millions of Palestinians demanding political rights, and there will be a vast majority of world opinion also backing them in that demand. Here's a person whose image you will recognize. This is from 2013, predicting with remarkable clarity just what we're seeing today. Netanyahu now, I believe, has decided unequivocally to move to a one-state solution, which every one of his predecessors in the prime ministership have condemned as a disaster for Israel. And I think Israel is now moving toward a disaster for itself and insisting that all

the way from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea has to be Israeli-controlled. That is a mistake. How prescient and how decent President Carter was on this issue all along. And how things don't change. Well, it's almost as if he's not in the physical condition that he's in and he's talking about what happened yesterday. No, this is exactly correct. And Netanyahu has been on this line and anyone that watches this has known that Israel, in this current dispensation of an extreme right-wing government, is out to do anything possible to stop peace based on two states. And we are arming that hour by hour for mass killing. So we're complicit in the war crimes. And for what? For something that is absolutely antithetical to peace and antithetical to international law. We're really in a terrible state of affairs of complete dishonesty

of our own policy in the United States because we're supporting the unsupportable. Here is the Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom. Now, it's a difficult interview to watch because they keep cutting each other off. Candidly, even though I disagree with what she's saying, the interviewer is cutting her off more than she's cutting him. But you'll get the picture. Two-state solution? Is there still a chance for a two-state solution? I think it's about time for the world to realize the Oslo paradigm failed on the 7th of October and we need to build a new one. And in order to build a new one...

But does that new one include the Palestinians living in a state of their own? Is that what it includes? I think the biggest question is what type of Palestinians are on the other side? This is what Israel realized on the 7th of October. Do they have a state? The answer is absolutely no, and I'll tell you why.

Well, then how can there be peace? How can there be peace in Israel? The reason there is no peace is because the Palestinians... Without offering a state to Palestine, how can there be peace in Israel? Israel knows today, and the world should know now, the reason the Oslo Accords failed is because the Palestinians never wanted to have a state next to Israel.

They want to have a state from the river to the sea. So the two-state solution is dead. Why are you obsessed with a formula that never worked, that created this radical people in the other side? Why are you obsessed with that? Man, is that the attitude of the Netanyahu government about the rights of the Palestinian people to live peacefully in their own sovereign state? Well, explicitly, one just has to look at the government, what it says, and the party platforms of Netanyahu's Likud or Otzma Yehudit, which is another extreme right-wing party represented in the government. Listen to the Israeli finance minister, Bizzalo Smotrich, who even called himself a fascist at one point and stood in front of a map

recently that people can find online where he spoke in front of a map showing Israel from the river to the sea, the idea of greater Israel, or listened to the defense minister, Gallant, or the interior minister, Ben Gavir. These are right-wing extremists that don't hide what they're doing. We just don't want to listen, but they don't hide what they're doing. They want complete control over millions of people, or preferably for some of them, and I think what they're trying to implement right now, ethnic cleansing, so that those people don't live there anymore. I know you are an economist and a historian, not a military person, but is there any conceivable military benefit to the idea, to bombing and destroying a Gazan cemetery? Or is that just to wreak havoc on the memory of those who died and were peacefully buried there? What we know is that Israel is bombing schools, clinics, hospitals, residential structures, people in open flight. they're killing massively. And this tragedy of three hostages escaping and then being killed by Israeli forces

is basically a reflection of a simple point. They're shooting to kill anyone. Does the Israeli public understand that that's the policy of their government? shooting to kill anyone. Does the Israeli public understand that that's the policy of their government? Shoot to kill anyone? Even bare-chested, barefoot young men carrying a white flag and begging for help and mercy in Hebrew? Yes. Basically, the Israeli public has backed this government, according to the opinion surveys, up until this incident. And this is the first time there are protests. syndrome right now after October 7, and they're fed despicable language by the government. So this is not the case of the government acting as a renegade force. It's a government that's committing massive war crimes and that is stoking the public hatred.

After 9-11, you know, in our country, it was possible to stoke the public to go to war just about anywhere, even when it was transparently clear, at least to me, that the war in Iraq was on completely phony pretexts or the attempt to overthrow the Syrian government or the Libyan government were on phony pretexts or the attempt to overthrow the Syrian government or the Libyan government were on phony pretexts in 2011. But the publics can be manipulated by governments that have agendas. And this Netanyahu government is filled with extremists with a very clear political agenda. And I always urge when we talk about Ukraine or when we talk about Gaza, I always go back to one of the most famous lines in the theory of war by Karl von Clausewitz, who was the German war theorist after the Napoleonic Wars, who wrote the famous volume On War in 1832. And he said something completely right, completely memorable and crucial for everybody listening to understand. Von Clausewitz famously said that war is the continuation of politics with other means. When you see war, understand politics. And this is politics. The

politics here is the politics of greater Israel. What does that mean? It's a longstanding doctrine for extreme religious zealots and for some others that God gave the Israelites all the land, by the way, not only from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, but if you look at the book of Joshua from the Nile to the Euphrates, it's even more frightening. It's even more frightening. Now there are people in Israel in government who believe that, who believe believe that or who follow that. Whatever they believe, they follow that. So this is about politics. And the politics is that this is absolutely horrendous. It's a complete barrier to any peace and the United States, because of APEC lobby or because of mistrained politicians, because of ignorance or confusion, are completely complicit in it. Not just in votes in the UN, I want to emphasize repeatedly, but in providing daily the munitions for the war.

We are completely hourly complicit in it. And when Lloyd Austin or Jake Sullivan say, oh, you know, you have to be more careful, they're feeding the bombs by the hour. And we have the story today in the New York Times that these are dumb bombs. Well, America's feeding these bombs that are destroying civilian populations. And people should think about how Israel has displaced 2 million people in this very short period of time. It's actually a lot of people. Yeah. I want to switch gears. Last week, President Zelensky came to the United States asking for money and it did not go well for him. The Republicans in the House of Representatives didn't even want to hear him. He did speak unofficially to a caucus of most senators, some of them left. It doesn't appear

as though President Biden's $60 or $68 billion for Ukraine is going to come to pass, even with the other compromises that certain factions in the Republican Party are demanding. Over the weekend, the Financial Times led with a story that Great Britain and the United States are thinking of confiscating the frozen Russian assets, which comes to about $300 billion. These are not government assets. These are assets of companies and individuals that Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak and his predecessor, I forget which one, seized. The governments are thinking of confiscating them, selling them, and providing most of the proceeds to President Zelensky. How bad would that be?

Well, first, let me say something about this $61 billion request. Not only is it a colossal waste of money, because actually $61 billion isn't exactly chump change, but it's completely devastating for Ukraine as well. to die tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands more because we'll continue to pump in the money for you to run to the front lines and be killed. That's what this is. So this is nothing in the interest of the Ukrainian people, period. And it's nothing in the interest of the United States. And the solution to this war, to have avoided it in the first place, to have ended it in March 2022, and to end it today, is for Biden to pick up the phone and talk to Putin and say, NATO's not going to enlarge. We need to stop this fighting, period. And this is what should have been said all along. This is not going to do it. I know

he's not. So now coming to your question, I just want to make sure that, I mean, I want to do whatever I can to make sure is the way I should say that, that when Congress reconvenes and they try again and again to get us to spend more money, it's for nothing. It's a disaster. Tell your congressmen and senators, stop this already. It's not saving Ukraine, quite the contrary. It's getting Ukraine destroyed. It's not saving us. It's no security for us. It is the vanity of Biden not to have negotiated all along and to have avoided this war or to have stayed out of the way when Ukraine and Russia were going to end it in April 2022 on the basis of Ukraine's neutrality. And then we stepped in and said, no, you don't, you keep fighting. So this is the first point. Now, confiscating the money, by the way, the 300 billion largely is Russian government

assets in Euro bonds and European securities held heavily by a Belgian entity, which is a depository institution. Okay, it's completely illegal. There's no way to do this legally. It's completely reckless. If the U.S. wants to totally break the international law, international finance, and do what it wants, the consequences of that kind of lawlessness will be extremely great for the U.S., for the dollar, for the international system, but it's against the law what's being talked about. Of course, these are desperate politicians and not very bright politicians. So they're constantly asking the technocrats, can't you do it this way? Can't you do it that way? They don't want it. They can't get it through a vote to actually provide funds because the public doesn't want it. They can't get it through a vote to actually provide funds because

the public doesn't want it. And even a Congress that normally goes along with funding military things knows that this is ridiculous. So they're going to try to do it illegally. States have immunity in their assets. You can't just do this. Of course, they may try to do it illegally. States have immunity in their assets. You can't just do this. Of course, they may try to do it, but it would be completely reckless. It would open the United States up to so many charges, lawsuits, counter actions, and so forth. I hope they figure this out. They haven't figured out much so far, but I hope they figure this one out. What do you think Joe Biden is talking about when he says the United States is the essential nation? Is this a Cold War era mentality that we will liberate Eastern Europe, which of course has

already been liberated? I think Joe Biden lives in the past, not hugely surprisingly. These are words out of the 1990s, which were inappropriate then. They were the kind of vainglory of the United States at the end of the Cold War. We won, you lost. We are the indispensable power. These are words of Madeleine Albright, who was the secretary of state that was one of the first neocons that pushed NATO enlargement and pushed a lot of other mischief that has put us into the trouble that we're in right now. Biden's been part of that group from the 1990s onward. I don't think he's got exactly his finger on the pulse of reality these days in public opinion, public understanding, international law, negotiations, ways to solve these crises. But what he is saying is words out of the 1990s, almost verbatim or sometimes verbatim. And they make no sense in our current period. They made no sense to me back in the 1990s. By the way, I thought it was a lot of bluster that would go badly wrong then. But today it's absurd. Joe Biden says the whole world looks to us for our leadership. And then we find that 1%, not quite 1% of the world's population votes with us in the UN. 1%. We have nine other small countries voting with us and 90% or nearly 90% of the world population voting against us. And Biden says, oh, we are the indispensable country that the whole world is looking to

for leadership. Is the whole world looking to us for leadership in the Security Council when the vote is 13 to 1 with one abstention? No. The rest of the world is looking at us and saying, what happened to the United States? Where is the sense? Where is the diplomacy? Where is any kind of cooperation?

That's what the world is asking. How do I know? Because that's what I'm told all the time by leaders who are asking me those questions. Professor Sachs, thank you very much. Thank you for your insight. Thank you for your insight. Thank you for your vision. I know next week is a sort of a holiday week, but maybe you'll come back and visit with us one more time

in 2023. All the best. All right, very good. Good to be with you. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thanks for watching!