Judging Freedom - Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : Is warmongering bad for politics?

Episode Date: September 8, 2025

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : Is warmongering bad for politics?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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That's an equivalent to $15 a month. Limited time new customer offer for first three months only. Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited. plan. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. Hi, everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, September 8, 2025. Professor Jeffrey Sachs will be here on just a moment, but first this. Why do so many financial experts call silver the most undervalued asset today? Because silver is essential to the future. From solar tech and

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That's why I urge you to call my friends at Lear Capital and get their free report. The AI Revolution and see why silver prices are set to soar. Call 800 5114620, 8005114620 or go to Learjudsonap.com. Don't wait. The government can print dollars, but it can't. Prince Silver. Professor Sacks, welcome here, my dear friend, shortly before we were coming on air, the French government lost a vote of no confidence.

How significant is this President Macron's not out of a job, but his administration, his prime minister is? It is very significant in that every one of the major governments in your Europe, including France, Germany, and not in the European Union, but in Europe, the United Kingdom, are led by extraordinarily unpopular political figures. They are the warmongers when it comes to Ukraine, the ones with the big talk of the massive military buildups and so forth. But the public says no, when the government comes forward and says, well, we need

great austerity we need to cut social benefits so that we can have more war the public reacts and today the government in france that was trying that approach was decisively defeated in parliament the government has fallen what has happened with mccrone he's lost another prime minister will happen in germany and will happen in the u.k in other words all this attempt in Europe and by the hardliners in the United States to continue a war economy, to continue to cater to the military industrial complex, to continue massive military outlays. Now we don't have a defense budget. We have a war budget, according to President Trump.

The public doesn't want this. We don't need this. pieces, a lot cheaper, a lot less expensive, a lot more effective and moral than war. But the leaders are war mongers. So what has happened in my view is quite significant. It shows war and the militaristic approach is extremely expensive. Our governments are absolutely drowning in debt. this is true of the United States. It's true of Britain. It's true of France. It's true of Germany. Germany a little bit less so, but the Chancellor of Germany said we can't afford our social expenditures anymore. And the public is saying, yes, that's right. Go to diplomacy. But the warmongers want to continue spending that the public rejects and that the governments can't afford. So all in all, quite significant. It means, means that the current approach of nonstop war is untenable. And why is the United States now looking to, Chris reminds me that this is the fifth prime

minister that President Macron will have to have appointed in two years? This reinforces what you said, Professor Sacks, about the deep and profound and abiding unpopularity of the motivating forces behind this government. This is the same President Macron who wants to threaten Russia. Before I get into the United States picking fights in Latin America, over the weekend, you mentioned Chancellor Mertz, personally attacked President Putin. Putin, calling him a war criminal, saying nothing, of course, about Prime Minister Netanyahu. What is with Mertz? Mertz is absolutely a war monger, and his approval ratings in Germany are plummeting. He came in already very shaky, but with roughly half the population on the first days approving his performance.

Now his approval ratings are in free fall. Macron's approval ratings, if I remember correctly, have fallen below 20% approval. The public is absolutely disgusted with him. We see this across Europe. We see President Trump's approval ratings falling very significantly. We're all in the same situation. Let's not forget the United States government is hemorrhaging deficits right now. We have an unprecedented deficit that will be around 7% of GDP and peacetime next year.

Why? Because President Trump was so absolutely insistent on tax cuts for the rich. He continues to say we need bigger military spending. Whatever he says about war and peace and everything else, he's for big defense, or it's not defense spending anymore, it's war spending now. I have to get our lingo correct. He wants the Department of War to have bigger budgets. Well, this is what's happening all across the so-called West.

It makes no sense at all. And we see it in Germany, the United States, France, UK, and there are a number of others that I could add. The State Department over the weekend announced that it will scrutinize carefully all requests for visas from Latin American countries if it believes that the visa requester had any made any. public statements in support of China. I don't get it. We're barring all Palestinians from Mahmoud Abbas to kids with no legs who could get prosthetics here in New York City. Now we're going to bar people from Latin America because of their expression of statements

exercising the freedom of speech in their own home countries. We are absolutely making enemies of every place in the world. By the way, a raid on a Korean investment in the United States, which rounded up Korean workers, has led also to a crisis with the Korean government. We have violations of all the international principles of people being able to come for peaceful diplomacy at the United Nations. We're shooting people out of the water, no trials, no evidence needed, just to shoot first in the Caribbean waters. our ally, ally in Japan, which is wondering whether the United States is an ally, the prime minister also just fell. In other words, political instability everywhere that the United States

aggravates everywhere. Or I should put it a different way. Political instability throughout the countries that ostensibly are cooperative with the United States, the ones we call adversaries, they're not unstable. They're actually getting together and saying, you know, this is what we need to do in the face of abuse from the United States. But what we are doing is isolating the United States in diplomatic terms, in economic terms, actually in financial terms because we're hastening the departure of the rest of the world from the dollar-based trading system because they don't want the unilateral sanctions, they don't want the unilateral tariff impositions and every other thing. And yet the White House continues to talk that, yes,

will put on even more sanctions. Extraordinarily, what Trump has said to the European leaders, excuse me, is that, well, you should stop buying even the residual amounts of oil and gas that you buy from Russia and buy it from us at six times the cost. He's an arms salesman, and he's a natural. gas salesman and this is what we call governance in the United States. Since his disastrous imposition of a 50% secondary tariff on India and the now public reaction of Prime Minister Modi, how strong has the BRICS SCO group become economically,

vis-a-vis the West? The bricks are the large emerging economies that say we don't get bossed around by the United States. So that includes Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. Trump has gone after each one of those with Brazil. There, the penalty tariffs are because Trump didn't like a judicial process underway in an independent Brazilian judiciary against a coup attempt claimed by the former president. So we put on tariffs on Brazil. On Russia, we know on India, these are the penalty tariff, so-called, because India buys oil from Russia. as does Europe, as does much of the world, as we do with uranium and other purchases from Russia.

But he put the tariffs on. With China, we know it's a whole panoply of unilateral actions with South Africa. We also saw the abuse of South Africa by our government. So that's been after each of the bricks. the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is the Asian grouping. It has some overlap. It includes China, India, Russia, and then four Central Asian countries, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, and Belarus. They just had their meeting in Tengen, China. They were all pulled together by Trump's government, Trump administration, action.

against those countries as well. And so there was a great deal of camaraderie. There was the famous pictures we've seen in recent days of Prime Minister Modi of India, President Putin, of Russia, and President Xi Jinping of China, all together, very jovial, very cooperative, absolutely pushed by the United States into their embrace.

So whatever the U.S. may think it's doing, it is bringing down our allied government, so-called allies, one after another of these governments is falling, whether it is France or Japan or governments put at threat like Korea because of U.S. Korea tensions or the absolutely plummeting approval of the other countries. that I've mentioned, or it is strengthening greatly the various groupings of countries that say stop with the unilateral punishments and sanctions and demands and penalties that the United States is putting on us. If you look at Asia, I think not only have India and China and Russia gotten much closer together during these days of the first year of the Trump administration because of U.S. policies. But China, I'm sorry, but Japan and Korea certainly are reevaluating their own security issues as well. And I am absolutely of the view that basically the Asian countries will say Asia is for the Asian countries and the United States should stop its meddling.

And this is perhaps the opposite of what the administration thinks it's doing, but this is the absolute clear result of the policies that the administration is following. You and I usually do not discuss domestic politics, but I can't resist posting on the screen for you to view. what President Trump posted of himself over the weekend. I mean, that's the Robert DeValle character in Apocalypse Now, who of course played a madman. Trump's saying, I love the smell of deportations in the morning. Chicago about to find out why it's called the Department of War.

Is the President of the United States threatening to use the military to bring violence to the streets of Chicago? They said no after this posting, but the President of the United States is deploying the troops to American cities. This has not gone unnoticed. And there are, of course, lawsuits all over the country about this. There are very serious concerns about our constitutional order, our constitutional system with the president that believes.

that he has the right to set our tax system, that he has the right to set our economic system, that he has the right to walk out of any treaties that he wants, that he has the right to call out troops or the National Guard to American cities because he says that there's some emergency, even when the circumstances and the hard data say quite the contrary. So there are very deep and very legitimate concerns about whether our constitutional order is actually in effect right now.

A remarkable amount depends on the Supreme Court of the United States, which is rather shocking to say. Congress is more abundant. There's not really a peep from the Republican side, which has a tiny. majority in both houses of the Congress, they have given up, abdicated all constitutional responsibilities whatsoever. The lower courts across the United States, as you know, better than anybody, Judge, are ruling one after another that Trump has violated the Constitution or has violated his authority under U.S. the whole tariff system was ruled, or Trump's tariff policies were ruled by the U.S. Court of Appeals

as absolutely in violation of the law and the Constitution. So it comes down to what's going to happen in Supreme Court because the Trump White House is not pulling back from its egregious assertions of executive power to do. do anything that they want by emergency decree. President Putin made it very clear over the weekend, both directly and through his chief spokesperson, Mr. Peskov, that under no circumstances would NATO troops be tolerated in Ukraine. They've been very, very consistent on this. It is arguably the whole reason for the special military operation.

is Finland, which sided with the Nazis in World War II, and now has joined NATO, presenting a security problem. It's got an 800-mile border with Russia, a security problem with the Russian Federation. Let's just go back to understand this whole issue. Back in 1990, when President Mikhail Gorbachev was president of the Soviet Union, he said we need a common home in Europe, friendly relations, and he unilaterally disbanded the Warsaw Pact, which was the Soviet military system that operated in Central and Eastern Europe. Germany was calling for reunification of East and West Germany, and President Gorbachev said, yes, of course, but not under conditions that would threaten our security. And on that basis, the United States government and the German government of the time, this is President George Bush, Sr., and Chancellor Helmut Kohl, said, in absolute

unequivocal terms, that as Germany reunifies, nothing will be done that will harm in any way the security of the Soviet Union. And specifically, NATO will not move one inch eastward. That is, the U.S. military alliance will not take advantage of the Soviet military alliance unilaterally being ended. Rather, we would have peace. Of course, the United States cheated on that. The cheating already started under Bush Sr. in 1992. And then President Clinton was the one that really brought about this absolute grievous error of the United States to begin this NATO enlargement. He was the one that cheated in practice by starting the NATO enlargement. every president since then has continued on this path and what we have until today is the russian saying do not put your u.s military alliance on our border in exactly the same way that the united states

has said to the european powers since 1823 in the monroe doctrine exactly the same way stay away from our borders don't meddle in our neighborhood militarily. But you see, the United States says one thing to others and then does the opposite. This is what gets us into war, this absolute not only inconsistency, but this gross violation of any kind of reciprocity. Now, until this day, this remains the central issue of the Ukraine war. Russia is saying no NATO troops in Ukraine, just as the United States would in our neighborhood, exactly the same way. It makes perfect sense. For Ukraine to be secure, it should be neutral. When Finland was neutral from 1945 onward, the Soviet Union never bothered Finland because it posed no risk of hosting U.S. missile systems and U.S. intelligence operations and so forth, it was neutral.

So the Soviet Union and Russia never bothered Finland at all, never bothered Austria at all as a neutral country, never bothered Switzerland at all as a neutral country, never bothered Sweden at all as a neutral country. And this is the obvious way to end the war in Ukraine, that Ukraine should be a neutral country, neither side bothering the other through its military presence in Ukraine. It's completely straightforward. It was the basis on which Ukraine became independent in the first place in 1991. It was only after the United States participated in a violent coup, that overthrew a government that favored neutrality that the U.S. helped to install a regime that said NATO, NATO.

Now, to this moment, the European countries and the U.S. political establishment are saying, no, we will be there. U.S. planes should fly over Ukraine. European troops should be on the ground. And the Russians are saying, excuse me, we've been at war now for 11 years since you made a coup in 2014. We've been talking about this for more than 30 years, to be precise, 35 years. Do you continue to this moment to insist on the country? contrary. Well, the Secretary General of NATO, Mark Gruta, I can't even express how pathetic this is, but he said last week after all of this, Russia has no say in anything of where we put their

troops, of where we put NATO troops. Russia has no say at all in this. This is, if I could say so, most indecilic, idiotic, dangerous, provocative approach imaginable. You think the United States has no say in whether there are Russian military bases in Mexico on the U.S. border? Yes, the United States has a say in that. You think Russia doesn't have a say on whether there are U.S. missile systems or U.S. planes flying overhead or NATO troops on the ground in Ukraine. Yes, Russia has the say, let's not blow up the world over this kind of imbecility. But Judge, this is where we are today with these leaders,

with our own politicians, to this moment. So why did Finland eschew its happy, prosperous neutrality for NATO? Not just happy, by the way, the happiest. As we have discussed, I actually am part of a process using Gallup data to assess how countries, how people in countries assess their own happiness. And not only was neutral Finland happy, it was the number one highest evaluation of happiness in the whole world consistently. This was a period of prosperity, security, well-being, riches for Finland. On substance, there isn't a reason in the world why they did that. But of course, believe me, the U.S. military industrial complex, the U.S. security apparatus,

the CIA and others are constantly pushing politicians in Europe who support NATO enlargement who want to buy weapons systems from the United States. This is part of an ongoing war-mongering game. And President Stubb, this president of Finland, does not tell a word of truth about his country's history. Why they do this? Well, I can't say definitively why he misrepresents all of Finland's post-World War II history the way he does, but I can say that he does so. Not to give you heartburn, but here is the Secretary General of NATO saying that Russia has no business. Can you elaborate a little bit why you highlight this importance, even though Russia is clearly saying that they won't accept any NATO troops in Ukraine anytime soon?

Yes, but why are we interested in what Russia thinks about troops in Ukraine? It's a sovereign country. It's not for them to decide. I'm really amazed. I'm not criticizing you, but I hear this question, of course, more often. So thank you for asking the question. But I'm really amazed. Russia has nothing to do with this.

It's the same like Finland then should have had a sort of a yes from Russia, to join NATO? No, of course not. And Sweden. There you have it. You know, it's amazing, by the way. I asked my friends in the Netherlands, they say that this man is so stupid you can't even imagine. It may be. But there it is.

This is really what we're facing. This is why we're going to go to World War III. This is why we're continuing to sacrifice Ukrainians by the thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands for this stupidity that Ruta just uttered, that he can't see any reason why this is an issue for Russia and that the fight on. This has been the game of the U.S. military industrial complex. By the way, the Ukrainian people want this war to stop, but their martial law president does not.

So this isn't even about what the U.S. Ukrainian people want. Just look at the recent Gallup survey. Overwhelming majority in Ukraine. Stop the war through negotiations. But I think what Ruta has said, everybody can see and they can understand why this insanity goes on because these leaders like Ruta are so fundamentally dangerous, either idiotic or. or corrupted or fools, hard to know which, but what he said in the context of the last 35 years shows you how absolutely we are in the hands of people

who are driving our world to endless war. Professor Sachs, thank you very much. I know we went fully across the board here, but as always, you have extraordinary, knowledge to share with us for which i and the viewers are deeply grateful thank you my friend safe travels we'll look forward to seeing you next week see you next week thanks so much sure and coming up later today at three o'clock this afternoon on all of these topics scott ritter judge napal tano for judging freedom

Thank you.