Judging Freedom - Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Is War With Iran Inevitable?

Episode Date: December 24, 2024

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Is War With Iran Inevitable?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 Tuesday, December 24th, 2024, Christmas Eve. Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins us now. Professor Sachs, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you for your time. Thank you for all the time you have given us in the past year. It's been a delight, and it's been very rewarding for my viewers, my team, and not least of all for me. And for me, and Merry Christmas to you and to everybody listening. Thank you. Thank you, Professor. I do want to talk to you about whether war with Iran is inevitable. But before we get there, some bigger picture questions. What has been the driving force, the main theme behind American foreign policy since the end of World War II, and how destructive has that

been? Well, the main idea of American foreign policy, actually, since the end of World War II, was that the United States should be essentially the placement of the world. The U.S. should be, should remain, should take actions to remain the strongest country in the world, the one that can essentially set the rules and dictate the way the world operates. And for many Americans, they would say, of course, what else could it be? That's the most secure for us. And that's the best for the world. We have the values of democracy and rule of law, prosperity, and so forth. So this is almost second nature for many, many Americans. The idea that America is exceptional in this way, that it is not only a powerful country, but it is the uniquely powerful country, that it is not only a superpower, but is the sole superpower, is the driving force. And the policy that comes from that is the idea that the U.S.

must resolutely oppose any country that stands in the way of that U.S. dominance, sometimes called full-spectrum dominance, sometimes called hegemony. And during the Cold War, this was portrayed as good versus evil, after all. And when America won the Cold War in the U.S. interpretation with the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, this idea went into overdrive. Not only was America self-evidently the world's sole superpower, now it really should declare itself the world leader, the one with the duties of keeping the peace everywhere in the world. This became the neoconservative idea. And part of that was when there are bad guys around, according to the authors of this policy, we should take them out. We should invade or overthrow or subvert other governments in the interest of U.S. good, U.S. values, the rule of

law, so-called, and so on. So this has been the driving force of American policy. It comes naturally to most Americans, I would say. It remains the view today of the incoming administration as well, though administrations and presidents debate how best to achieve it. They all take the view that the United States is the leader. We can basically call the shots and should call the shots and that without the United States, the world would be a jungle. It would be chaos. Now, my view is a little bit different, which is that we are one of actually technically 193 countries. We're one of the 193 UN member states. We are 4.1% of the world's population. There's 95.9% of the rest of the world.

Much of the rest of the world does not want the United States to be their leader. They recognize, of course, that the United States is a very powerful country, but they don't want to be led by any particular country, not the U.S., not China, not Russia, not anyone else. In fact, for many, many decades, this will be the 70th anniversary of the so-called non-aligned movement, where many countries said, we just don't want to choose sides among the major powers. We'd like to have normal relations with all of them. And there are other major powers. There's Russia, there's China, there's India, which is a nuclear superpower with the world's largest population. And we can say, well, we're the most powerful, or we're going to take steps to remain

the most powerful, or we're going to show Putin a thing or two, or we're going to show Xi Jinping a thing or two. But the fact of the matter is, in the nuclear age, that actually doesn't make us safer, in my opinion. It does just about the only thing that can actually threaten the United States, which is bring us closer to nuclear war. in the majority view on these matters, my view is that our grand strategy, as it's called, has become a great danger to the United States and to the world. And that's so ironic because the United States is extremely powerful. No country in the world would even imagine attacking the United States. But because we are, just to finish the thought, because we are so meddling everywhere, everywhere, with military bases in 80 countries, we're part of wars everywhere, we're bombing everywhere, we're sending our missiles everywhere. Well, that's what's causing us insecurity. Not that others would attack us,

but because we are stirring the pot in so many places in the world and against very, very powerful countries that say clearly, don't come to our back door this way. Don't come to our back door this way. Don't meddle in our garage. Leave us. Stay out of our house. And we don't want to hear that because we are America. This is my problem. Why did 9-11 happen?

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But we do know one thing that is unequivocal and it remains a fact until today, and that is what is called the Islamic jihadist forces, Islamic fundamentalist fighters, which in the normal interpretation are what launched the 9-11 attack, those forces were funded, armed, trained, supported, backed, prodded by the United States government for decades. And that is true until today. The forces that just toppled the government in Syria are forces that the United States has armed, back-trained, funded for a very long time. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were U.S. creations. U.S. creations can boomerang, but they are U.S. creations. I think everybody understands this now, but they didn't understand it so clearly then. A lot of this started back in the 1940s

when the CIA, this new organization whose main activity is to meddle in other countries, to bring down regimes, to create instability, to cause insurrections, to lead assassinations. All the things I bemoan because I think that they worsen our security and they worsen the world's security. But since the CIA was created, it thought that it could arm Islamist fighters to fight against the Soviet Union. And the great idea, big idea of Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was Jimmy Carter's national security advisor in 1979, was for the United States to fund and arm a jihadist Islamist fighting force in Afghanistan as a trap to induce the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan. And so we created the Mujahideen as a fighting force in 1979. Many decades later, Brzezinski bragged about it, saying that this was a great triumph because the Soviet Union took the bait. That was the founding of al-Qaeda, not in the literal sense because the term, meaning the base was chosen a decade later, but the fighters were under the CIA auspices.

And because of the CIA's modus operandi, none of this is ever simply explained by the government. The story is never told in an authoritative way. It's completely well known now, of course, but it's not accepted by officialdom because officialdom is lies and denial. The jihadists have been CIA backed for many, many decades, and they have created a lot of mayhem, ostensibly according to the powers that be in Washington and Langley to America's advantage. I don't believe it. I think it just leaves killing fields, instability, a widening arc of insecurity. Look at Afghanistan, look at Syria, look at Lebanon, look at Palestine, look at Somalia, look at Sudan, look at Libya. This is triumph? Not in my view. This is complete instability. It's dishonesty. It's a military approach to political, social, and economic challenges. The military approach doesn't work. We have a widening battleground in the world, one that I think is leading us to World War III. He's been saying that for years. And, you know, when he said that 10 years ago, I was shocked.

Of course, I listened to what he says because of his wisdom. But when he said it 10 years ago, I was shocked. And then the wars just keep expanding. And this is the pattern that we're on. Much of it hidden from the American view. Most of it falsely explained and falsely justified. And with one administration after the next, essentially following the same course. I want to put up a full screen from our friend and colleague Norman Finkelstein, who said in a very pithy way, if you ever feel useless, remember it took 20 years, trillions of dollars and four U.S. will make you another Afghanistan. That's what we've done with Ukraine. In all our wisdom.

I just saw an interview of Jake Sullivan chortling about what a great success this is, how it's weakened Russia and so forth. And what has it done? It has killed certainly more than a million Ukrainians and Russians needlessly. It's left comparable numbers gravely wounded. It's destroyed the Ukrainian economy and Ukrainian security. It has hurt everyone in the world, everyone. And for what? For something that could have been discussed and negotiated and actually solved peacefully decades ago. That's the real tragedy. And I think it's poignant and true on Christmas Eve when we have the messenger of peace that we can contemplate that we don't even discuss peace in general. Now, the issue in the Middle East is, OK, are we going to war with Iran? Is great victory in Syria? What victory? We've destroyed yet another country, destroyed it. Why are they tearing Syria apart? Back in 1996, a new Israeli right-wing prime minister came to power, Benjamin Netanyahu, with the very close U.S. connections

in the neoconservative, that is the U.S. militarist side, and they concocted a strategy, which was that we will change the regimes throughout the Middle East to make them compatible with Israel's and with America's interests. And this is now, I think, very well documented how destructive and awful and premeditated all of this has been. Netanyahu was the champion of wars throughout the Middle East because those governments that the U.S. attacked on Israel's behalf were supporting pro-Palestinian movements and supporting them also militarily, Hamas and Hezbollah and other fighting groups. Israel didn't want to have peace with the Palestinians. It wanted to dominate the region. The neocons said, yes, we believe in dominance. We don't believe in peace, or we only believe in U.S.-directed peace.

And so the idea came that the U.S. and Israel, especially the U.S., of course, it's our trillions, as Norman Finkelstein said, would fight all of the miscreant governments in the Middle East on Israel's behalf. The first was Iraq in 2003. Excuse me. Afghanistan was 2001 after 9-11, but then the list of immediate Israeli neighbors came when General Wesley Clark, I think we've discussed this previously, went to the Pentagon after 9-11. Seven wars that were to come in short order within a five-year period. And they were Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, and Syria. Syria, excuse me, the one we're talking about. And so seven wars were to come in five years and Iraq would be the first. And then we would quickly move on to Syria, not in 2024, but in 2003. And what happened? Well, remember all those exploding ordinances, the IEDs on the side of the road, the insurgency that the U.S. faced in Iraq after, quote, defeating the Iraqis.

Well, we got bogged down and all the wars got delayed. So it was left to Obama to start the war against Syria. And that started in 2011. That took 13 years, many events, the destruction of a whole nother country. fighting going on, of course, inside Syria between the American-backed Kurds and the Turkish-backed jihadists. We're just at the start of another cycle of violence. Do you think that Trump and his Republican colleagues and appointees will dismantle the movement for a Palestinian state? Probably, yes. They will try. You know, the positive side with the incoming

Trump administration is the talk of ending the war in Ukraine. This would be a huge, huge step for sanity and for peace. But almost all of the new appointees and Trump himself are ardent pro-Netanyahu supporters. And their idea all along has been to support this very militarized, violent Israeli approach to the Palestinian issue, which is essentially occupy the Palestinian lands, crush the Palestinians, either through some kind of apartheid rule or directly ethnic cleansing, kicking them out as is happening in Gaza now, and a lot of mass murder of civilians. None of it characterized this way. All of it characterized as Israel's national security and so forth, but without an iota of an attempt to negotiate with the Palestinians over a state of Palestine. In fact, the whole point is to

reject that. I personally have not come across any of the people in the Trump administration having any different idea about this. Their idea all along was ignore the Palestinians. Israel will take care of that through its various means. And the rest of the region will make peace with Israel because Israel is the most powerful country and the U.S. will give whatever blandishments and bribes and incentives that could be given. So we'll give arms sales to different countries, we'll give defense treaties, we will give economic incentives and so forth. And that was the approach in 2019, 2020, that Palestine, what Palestine? Then the last year and a couple of months, we see what is Palestine? Well, it's a place where several million people live under military occupation, under desperation, and now under murderous conditions and starvation in Gaza.

And probably hundreds of thousands are dead, though the official count is 45,000. People are starving. They don't have water. They don't have health care. They don't have access. They don't have the means of survival. That's Israel's objective right now. That has been the Biden administration's support for Israel. it looks likely to continue with the next government. The basic point about American foreign policy, the basic point has been continuity. It hasn't really mattered whether it's been Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump won, Biden, and probably Trump too. I hope I'm wrong about this. I think I hope, I think I know that you hope you're wrong about the likely answer to my next question. Is an American and Israeli war against Iran inevitable with the election of Donald Trump?

Of course, inevitable is a metaphysical term. Do we mean that there's nothing that could be done? It would be the easiest thing in the world to avoid a war with Iran. I've spoken with the senior Iranian officials in recent months. I've spoken across the Middle East with senior officials. I've spoken as best I could with Washington, though that is probably the most impervious chamber of denial imaginable. They don't want to have open discussions. They don't want to have any understanding. They want to do it their way. That is the American exceptionalism. We don't have to listen. We just have to do. So could a war with Iran be avoided? Of course it could be avoided. The Iranians have been sending messages for years to the Biden administration that they want to make peace, that they want to return to diplomacy,

that they don't want to have nuclear weapons. They want to have an agreement like the agreement that was reached in 2016 and then dismissed by Trump in 2017, in which the sanctions against the Iranian regime are lifted and a non-nuclear regime is put in place so that Iran doesn't get nuclear weapons. Well, the government has been saying we want that for many, many years, but the U.S. is so completely intertwined with the hardline Israel policies that our political class either doesn't know, doesn't care, doesn't accept, or is too afraid of the Israel lobby to actually look at the possibilities of peace with Iran. So is a war inevitable? No. Is a war increasingly likely? Yes. This would not be a kind of rollover war. This would be yet another fuse lit on the path to nuclear annihilation in the world. Iran's a big and it's a powerful country of 100 million people. It has powerful allies. It is a civilization that is, by conventional historical count, 5,200 years old. In some accounting, it eclipses Egypt as the world's oldest, longest, longest continuous civilization because the starting date is often put at 3200 BC.

It's a very proud and great civilization. So the idea that we're going to go in and bomb and everything is going to be just fine is like so many other things that the U.S. has done. I think it could be the prelude to ever-widening disaster. And when you look at the scorched earth that we have created in so many parts of the world and throughout the Middle East, if you can find any hope and solace in that, that war solves these political problems, boy, I can't. So in this sense, I'm hoping somebody, somebody in this new government understands you talk to the other side before you bomb them. You actually negotiate with them before you try to kill them. That's not the American way. It's not the Israeli way,

but it is the way to true security and the way to peace. On that somber note, we will conclude our time together for 2024. The world is dark and dreary, and we're awaiting a bright new dawn. Maybe we'll be surprised. brilliant and courageous and always willing to expose what goes wrong and to suggest what would make things right, maybe we have a brighter future. Thank you for all our time together. We look forward to it again in 2025. Absolutely. Happy New Year. Happy New Year to you. All the best. Bye-bye. Bye. A bit blue, but realistic and truthful. Coming up at 10 this morning, Aaron Maté and the cleanup hitter for the year at 11 o'clock,

the always worth waiting for, Scott Ritter. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. 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

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