Judging Freedom - Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Netanyahu On the Ropes.

Episode Date: November 6, 2024

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Netanyahu On the Ropes.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Bay with WGU. WGU is an online accredited university that specializes in personalized learning. With courses available 24-7 and monthly start dates, you can earn your degree on your schedule. You may even be able to graduate sooner than you think by demonstrating mastery of the material you know. Make 2025 the year you focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu. Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, November 6th, 2024. Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins us now.

Professor Sachs, always a pleasure. Great to be with you. We're going to talk about, of course, Israel, Ukraine, and the American election. Before we do this, some breaking news, and perhaps you can enlighten us on it. Chancellor Schulz of Germany has just fired his finance minister, and his ruling coalition is on the verge of splitting up. Is this significant? Well, it is significant because Germany is the main economy in Europe. It is a very important economy. The Ukraine war has caused a tremendous damage to the German economy. Scholz went along with the war in ways that I always regarded as utterly misguided because Scholz should have been the one to say, why are we fighting

this war for NATO enlargement? This is a great danger to the European economy and particularly to the German economy. Scholz should have been the one to say, don't blow up the Nord Stream pipeline that brings gas from Russia to Germany. I think he knows that the United States did this, but he has been the loyal partner of the United States despite that. Well, the German economy has taken a very heavy hit from the war, from the loss of access to Russian gas, which fueled a lot of German heavy industry. This led to a downturn. It led to large budget deficits. There is a three-party coalition in Germany. Scholz is the Social Democratic Party, but the finance minister is from another party, the Liberal Party, in essence, the FDP. The foreign minister and deputy

chancellor are from the Greens. It's been a difficult coalition, as you would expect in an economic crisis and a war period, and it seems to be breaking down. One of the reasons it's breaking down is that the public's absolutely against what's going on. And the approval rating of Scholz is around 20% approval rating. The coalition partners are losing state election after state election, because Germany is a federal system. So it has the federal elections, but it also has elections in the lander or the individual states. And the parties of the coalition have been even wiped out in some cases, but doing very, very badly. So this is a government that is tottering right now. The war is the essential reason. The blowing up of

the Nord Stream pipeline is part of this story. It all is demonstrating that this war in Ukraine, which as we've discussed so many times and many of your regular guests that appear with you say this is a war fundamentally caused by the U.S. push to expand NATO. Well, that's done a great deal of damage to Western Europe and to Germany in particular. Has there ever been any repercussion, either investigation, litigation, prosecution over the Nord Stream pipeline? I mean, does Schulz know that the Americans did it and Joe Biden lied about it and Seymour Hearst told the truth and everybody else, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, went along with a nonsensical story about three guys in a sailboat? I'm sure that he knows. It's unimaginable that he doesn't know.

Yes, there were investigations. No, they were never released to the public. The Swedes investigated, Denmark investigated, Germany investigated, and lo and behold, nobody found anything, but also nobody released any information. who understands this knows that this is completely ludicrous, that given the technical challenges of what was done, of blowing up an enormous pipeline at a very great depth in the North Sea, is not something that you do out of a little sailboat. So, yes, he knows. Of course he knows. But the Bundestag, the German parliament, was never informed properly of any investigation.

I was asked to testify in the UN Security Council calling for an independent investigation. I was basically found a complete rejection by the United States. No, we don't have to investigate. There are independent, there are already investigations going on. Let them follow their course. This is typical. When you commit a crime like this, you delay. You delay until interest is lost, until the issue just goes away. And that is what the United States has done. But strangely enough, Scholz has been the silent partner of all of this. And it's not exactly clear why. Yes, Germany has a certain dependency on the United States, but Germany has had chancellors from Helmut Schmidt, from Schroeder, from Angela Merkel, who spoke up, who opposed the United States on many issues. But Schultz has not done that at all.

Right. What will become, well, let me rephrase it. What do you think is the conversation amongst the elites in the EU and NATO now that it is known that Donald Trump will succeed Joe Biden. It is known that he opposes the war in Ukraine. It is known that he opposes what he views as the lopsided American contribution to NATO. What do you think they're talking about as we speak? I think that they're completely shocked, dismayed, don't know what to do. Of course, the whole thing's ludicrous. I could have told them this all along, not that precisely that Biden would get elected, but that this whole adventure of the American neocons to expand NATO to the east, to surround Russia, to challenge Russia, to defeat Russia, to dismember Russia, all of this could only have a bad ending. And so Europe made bad choices, mainly the choice of not telling the United States, stop it.

Don't do this. Don't pull us all into another one of your terrible adventures. The United States gets into terrible adventures. Vietnam, Afghanistan, for 20 years of occupation, zero results. A war to overthrow Assad in Syria, disaster. An overthrow of Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, disaster. So when it came time for Ukraine to be the next disaster, it was not hard for me to say to many European leaders, as well as to the Ukrainians, don't fall for it. You're going to be the next Afghanistan. In other words, disaster, and then someday the US will leave. Well, here we are again. It's not surprising. A disaster for Ukraine and the United States will leave as it should leave because this war never should have gone on.

But who bought into this? Can't anyone learn a lesson? Stop these wars. They make no sense. They are just provocations. They're dangers for everybody. They absolutely didn't have to happen. Any normal set of relations between the U.S. and Russia would have told the U.S., don't push your luck. You know, you already expanded NATO. You already expanded it to Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Romania. Stop, okay?

You don't have to keep going on right up to Russia's border. But you know our side. There's no self-restraint. And Europe played into this, and now they're saying, oh, my God, he's going to leave. Well, of course he is. That's the American way. Two days before he was elected president, so three days ago, Donald Trump said that his two leading, this will ruin your evening if you don't know what's coming, his two leading candidates to become Secretary of Defense are Mike Pompeo and Tom Cotton.

Now, if this happens, the neocons will have their way again, no matter what the attitude of the President of the United States is about this absurd, destructive war in Ukraine, which was caused by the United States? One thing about Trump is that he often picks lousy people that absolutely do not follow his general ideas and play games, play tricks on him. The one in the first administration was John Bolton, whose memoirs depict all of the stratagems that Bolton used to trick Trump. So this is really a major question for Trump. He told us, I learned my lesson.

I'm going to pick more carefully. But look, he also said, yes, Ukraine is a very bad idea. This NATO enlargement is just a provocation. We don't need a war with China and on and on. And I think J.D. Vance has been very clear on this. He was clear in the Senate. He was clear in the campaign. They should understand you pick your senior officials that actually are going to implement your basic foreign policy. So I hope that that's what they do. I don't think we know for sure anything about this, but that's really a big lesson for Trump from the first term, which is be careful who you

pick. How thin is the ice on which President Zelensky of Ukraine is now standing? He's losing thousands of troops a day, either killed in action or seriously wounded. Who knows if his next tranche of money is going to come. And now he's got this headache called Donald Trump to deal with. And the Russians are moving closer and closer, almost unimpeded, Jeff. I don't think he's on thin ice. I think he's in water up to here, and the water is rising. You know, this is, he was sold a bill of goods by the Biden administration. We got your back. You keep fighting.

And he bought into it. So it's not just the U.S. irresponsibility. It's also his irresponsibility. It's also the irresponsibility of the Ukrainian political class. I told them, I did tell them, they didn't want to hear me. They considered me an enemy of the state by telling them, look, you're going to end up in a very, very bad place if you go this way. I often repeated the very famous quip of Henry Kissinger that to be an enemy of the United States is dangerous, but to be a friend of the United States is fatal. And I tried to tell them, you know, if the U.S. says we got your back, you better run for it because this is

actually not a good situation. We've got warmongers that get into wars of choice that end up just creating mayhem. And Ukraine was predictably just another one of those. And Zelensky had the opportunity to get out of it in March 2022, just a few days after the Russian special military operation started. Zelensky said, okay, okay, okay, we'll be neutral. And on that basis, with the help of Turkish mediators, they came to a draft agreement. And then the United States and the UK told him, no, no, no, fight on. Boris Johnson, Victoria Nuland, others, no, no, fight on, fight on. Well, that was hundreds of thousands dead since then. And what's going to happen now is the United States is going to say, well, this is this what that means. That may be a metaphor for what his thinking is. But whatever it is, let's say he puts a stop to the massive transfer of cash and munitions to Ukraine. Will that be replaced by

the EU or NATO? Or will they just let Ukraine go? There's no NATO. There is the United States. Okay. No, no, no. I mean, the rest is nothing. It's an alliance. It's the US having military bases all through Europe, but this is the US military and it's the US.S.-led military alliance. And there is no NATO without the United States doing this. And Europe has no capacity and no interest in doing it. And the idea that, OK, it ends and then Russia invades Europe. Well, this is fantasy. Yes, then we would be in World War III, but

Russia has absolutely no interest in doing that. What Russia has an interest in is saying and hearing and agreeing with the United States, you're not coming near our borders. Your missile systems are not coming near our borders. Your military base is not coming near our borders. Your missile systems are not coming near our borders. Your military base is not coming near our borders, just like we would say the same thing about anyone encroaching close to our borders. And so it's just a little bit of a matter of reciprocity. Stay away. Create some space. And if we had done that, already recognizing that 30 years ago, this never would have happened. If we had not said we're going to enlarge and expand NATO to the Russian border, as we said in 2008, wouldn't have happened. If we had not participated in the

overthrow of Ukraine's neutral government in 2014, this wouldn't have happened. If we had not participated in the overthrow of Ukraine's neutral government in 2014, this wouldn't have happened. If Biden had negotiated with Putin at the end of 2021 on the basis of a proposal for negotiation that Putin put on the table, it wouldn't have happened. If Zelensky had settled in March 2022, it would have stopped. So this is really a very basic, very clear story. I've heard a half dozen people describe the domino theory. He's got his eyes on Poland. He's got his eyes, speaking of Putin, he's got his eyes on Eastern Europe. Again, not to give you heartburn, and I want to move over to Israel. Two of those half dozen are the two whose names I just mentioned, Mike Pompeo and Tom Cotton.

Yeah, of course. There are a lot of Americans that have taken our country into absolutely disastrous misadventures for the last 30 years. When the Soviet Union ended, we've talked about it many times, in December 1991, the hubristic neoconservative said, now we run the world. Now we are policemen of the world. Now we can change regimes at will. Now we can win wars at will. And it's been one long continuing disaster. And the first thing Trump should do is have a list of who said all these wrong things and say to them, thank you, but I need people in my administration that are going to do the right thing. I want to play a clip for you from former Israeli Defense Minister Galant and ask you what you think of this. It's relatively short.

He gave a defense of himself. Chris edited it down. Chris, cut number six. This dismissal comes as a result of a dispute on three issues. The first, my firm stance that everyone who is eligible to be drafted to the military must be drafted to the military must be drafted to the military they must serve in the IDF and protect the state of Israel second topic our moral obligation to return our sons learning from the mistakes of the war.

I support a deep investigation into looking into who is responsible, and I call for a national commission of inquiry. So the first of those reasons has to do with the Orthodox and the ultra-Orthodox. I can't imagine the IDF wants them in the IDF, but the Supreme Court of Israel ruled that there is no religious exemption for them. And this is a coalition government in which a lot of the absolutely religious Jews are a core part of this government. And so you can see where the conflict came. Second part, a moral obligation to return our sons and daughters.

I mean, that is obviously true. It is obviously a moral obligation, and it is also the drums of politics have been beating for, you know, since October 7th over this. The third, I think, is very, very intriguing, a deep investigation into looking into who is responsible. But that might turn on him also. I mean, he, Gallant, was the defense minister when this happened. If they knew this was happening, or if they looked the other way, or if they intentionally didn't respond to what the Egyptians and the Americans warned them about, maybe it reached Netanyahu's level.

I don't know. What do you think? He's a committed Zionist. He's no angel. He talked about mowing the lawn. He talked about committed Zionist. He's no angel. He talked about mowing the lawn. He talked about starving the Palestinians. Now he talks about, well, we should stop the fighting to bring these people home. We need a post-war plan, which we don't have.

There is no post-war plan other than to have Jared Kushner develop Gaza into mansions and high-rises that he'll sell to the wealthy. Gallant was being courted by the Biden administration as the less extreme part of the government that would perhaps replace Netanyahu and certainly aim to keep Netanyahu under control. Netanyahu is not under any control right now. And Netanyahu believes that whatever he does will now be backed by Trump. This is his fondest hope, that Trump would win, win big. And it's Netanyahu's belief that now Trump will be the ardent supporter of greater Israel, meaning Israel's continued occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, Golan, East Jerusalem, that Trump will oppose any two-state solution and so forth. I wouldn't be

so sure, by the way, because there's a clear path to peace and a clear path that is in America's security interest. And if Trump is looking out for America, not looking out for Israel, but looking out for America. Actually, I'll phrase it another way, not looking out for Israeli extremists, but looking out for America and looking out for Israel's own good, though it denies it. Trump would be really smart to say, look, I'm not going to have endless war during my administration. It's not in our interest. There has to be a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

We'll make sure that Israel's secure. But I want this to end. And there's an added benefit for that, which is that every Arab state says, if you do that, we normalize relations with Israel, we end the state of belligerency, we just go on with the normal life. And that is great for Israel, by the way, but also tremendous for the United States, because the U.S. needs these partners as well rather than isolating itself by siding with an extremist government in Israel. But isn't that a pipe dream? It's not a pipe dream.

It's the right thing to do, not just the right thing to do. But Netanyahu's not interested in the right thing to do. I'm not talking about Netanyahu. I'm talking about Trump. Well, Trump would have to butt heads with Netanyahu. Of course. And he has a $100 million debt to Mrs. Adelson. Look, Trump is president with a solid majority and with control over two houses of Congress.

Trump is our president-elect with a lot of power. Butting heads with Netanyahu would not be a hard thing, frankly. Netanyahu has led the United States down, it's not quite the primrose path, down the bloody path of Netanyahu's wars for 20 years. And what Trump should say to him is enough. You got us into a lot of mess. We backed you up a lot of times for 20 years. You just want more and more.

You're going to have to face reality now. This is a good message for Trump to give. It's actually the one absolutely in the U.S. interest. Is the concept that former Defense Minister Gallant, who's also a former general, called for realistic, and would it be fair and get to the bottom? A national commission of inquiry. Is this like the IDF investigating itself?

Or do the Israelis have a history and a custom of a serious investigation, even if the target is the present or former prime minister? It's a good question. They do have some record of some partial investigations of some events, such as what happened in Lebanon with the massacres of secrecy. Mossad, the intelligence agency, the comparable agency to the US CIA, is not exactly a public and transparent institution. So I wouldn't hold my breath that we're really going to see this. I don't know if I fully appreciate the meaning of those words in an Israeli political context, but it could really be the fact that he wants to understand what happened in this disastrous failure of Israeli intelligence and Israeli border defense, because it was a catastrophic failure on October 7th,

2023. Professor Sachs, thank you, my dear friend. I know it's the middle of the night where you are. I appreciate so much your accommodating our schedule. Of course, anytime. I look forward to seeing you next week already. Excellent. Wonderful. Thanks a lot. All the best. A busy day tomorrow at eight in the morning, Ambassador Charles Freeman. At 11 in the morning, Max Blumenthal. At noon, Chief Dennis Fritz. At one o'clock, Professor Doctorow.

At 2.30, Aaron Maté. At five o'clock in the afternoon, Colonel Larry Wilkerson. Please like and subscribe. We just broke 475,000 subscriptions. We have a month and a half to reach our goal, which is a half a million by Christmas. If you like what we do, or if you think we appropriately stir the pot, if the Q&A on this program caused you to think or rethink your values, tell friends, tell relatives, tell colleagues, help us spread the word that there is an alternative media out there, whether you like Donald Trump or not. The media is in lockstep with whatever the media wants to do, except for places like this and

my half dozen or so colleagues that do what we do as well. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Bay with WGU. With courses available online 24-7 and monthly start dates, WGU offers maximum flexibility so you can focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu.