Judging Freedom - Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: The dangers of unbridled war.

Episode Date: November 10, 2023

"Because if we back #Netanyahu's policy,what are we backing? We're backing massive #war crimes in #Gaza with no prospect of a real settlement.FLASHBACK: #Nixon January 1992 interview with @ABC @Nightline 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, October 10th, 2023. Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins us from France, from Paris. Professor Sachs, it's always a pleasure. Thank you very much for taking the time out of your travels to spend some time with us. I have a lot of questions for you about the behavior of the Israeli government in Gaza and its comportment or lack thereof with international law. And you have written and spoken about this extensively. But before we go there, just a few questions on Ukraine. In the past three or four days, the following has happened. General Zelensky, the military commander of all Ukrainian military, has given an interview to

The Economist magazine in which he has said the war is a stalemate. President Zelensky's administration erupted vehemently and condemned him for that. General Zelensky's chief of staff was assassinated when he opened up what he thought was a birthday gift. And rumors are circulating, as reported by NBC News, I assume they have some source, that American and Western diplomats are talking among themselves about the need for diplomacy and for the war to end before things get worse. How does Jeffrey Sachs unpack all of that? Basically, the West, the U.S., and the NATO allies were banking on a Ukrainian counteroffensive, as you know, the one that started in June and the one that completely failed. Not only did it fail, it cost tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives and a vast amount of the equipment that the West had given to Ukraine. So Ukraine did not achieve any of the goals that were stated.

By the way, many of our generals predicted great victories, which shows once again the vacuousness of such predictions by our generals. So they called it wrong. I never believed any of that hype beforehand. So none of this really surprises me because I'm listening to all of the different perspectives on this war from various military experts, including on your show, Judge. And we shouldn't be surprised at this debacle. Zeluzhny says it's a stalemate, but it's not a stalemate. Russia has the offensive now, and in various parts of the front line, Russia is making advances, and those advances could become significant because Ukraine really has lost so much manpower. That means so many people dead

and wounded that Russia has, it appears, a real opportunity for breaking through Ukraine's defense lines. And so maybe Zelensky is really just expressing wishful thinking. Now, Zelensky is expressing delusional thinking, which is that Ukraine still has the offensive, it's still going to win, it's never going to negotiate and so forth. From the point of view of the United States, this is a debacle. Well, thank you. I think many of us have been saying this is a debacle and was heading to a terrible debacle basically from the start. I wrote well over a year ago that this was the neocons latest debacle and nothing that has happened has really in that sense been a surprise. But now the Biden group and the Democrats are scrambling what to do. This is an election year. The president's approval ratings are plummeting. The president's polling numbers are awful. So they're scrambling, and that's why they're looking at some kind of deal or way to freeze this conflict. But the Russians are saying, we're not freezing this conflict. We would negotiate a true political settlement, but we're not freezing the conflict so that you come back again in six months or a year with your NATO enlargement and provocations and new weapon systems. So the Biden administration had its back to the wall

even before the disaster in Israel and Palestine broke out on October 7. So this is really a mess and the mess is building. Clearly, the political crisis in Ukraine is extreme, whether Zelensky faces a coup or some kind of domestic upheaval has to be a possibility taken seriously at this stage. I'm not predicting anything, and I certainly know nothing on the inside, so I don't want to be misunderstood. But this is a disaster that has been unfolding now for quite a long period of time. It's been obvious to those who are looking objectively at this. That means those who are not relying on the New York Times for their information, but are relying on more objective information coming from a wider variety of sources. Professor Sachs, I would argue that this is almost entirely the fault of the United States.

The Russians and the Ukrainians had an agreement until Boris Johnson and Joe Biden said, oh, no, no, no, no, we have your back. You're going to become part of NATO. And then we spent $113 billion. And now the president of the United States has asked the Congress, I don't think he's going to get it, for another $68 billion, all because they want to expand NATO. Will the West, will the United States, forget the West, the West does what the U.S. demands. Will the United States ever stop

this maniacal expansion eastward of NATO, notwithstanding the natural and probable consequences of such an expansion? Well, the NATO expansion has stopped because the Russian army has stopped it in effect. But what continues is the Western insistence that NATO will expand. So the reality is already clear. But the continued insistence that NATO will expand means continued war. This has been my point all along. All Biden had to do going back years and as recently as December 2021, before all of this broke out, was to say NATO won't enlarge. And then there would not have been a cause of war. The war would not have taken place. But even till today, they still make these claims that yes, NATO is going to go to Ukraine. So Russia says, well, if NATO is going to come to

Ukraine under your view, why are we to stop right now and let that happen? We've been clear for 30 years and extremely clear since 2007 when President Putin spoke at the Munich Security Conference and extremely clear since 2008 when Bill Burns sent his Nyet Means Nyet memorandum to Condoleezza Rice. Right. This is a no. So ante at every stage, knowing that it's a failed hand or not even recognizing that it's a failed hand. So if you go back, if I might, just very quickly, you go back to 2008, all we had to do was not put NATO enlargement on the table. And then in the Yanukovych period, 2010 to February 2014, Russia wasn't demanding territory. Russia was demanding a long-term lease of the Sevastopol naval base. That's all, not territory. And then the United States conspired in the overthrow of Yanukovych, bad move. That was February 2014. Then Russia took Crimea, not wanting it to fall into NATO hands. But even then, it wasn't demanding the territory of the Donbass, of the eastern Ukraine, of Lugansk and Donetsk. And even then it was bloodless. Even then it was saying, look, don't shell the Russian people, don't attack them, give them autonomy under an agreement that was negotiated, the Minsk II agreement.

Well, the West, the United States rejected that. It told Ukraine, you don't have to do that. We don't believe in a federal Ukraine as if the United States should be the one making a judgment like that, especially after a treaty was negotiated. President Putin put on the table a draft U.S.-Russia security agreement. They were not calling for the annexation of eastern Ukraine. They were calling for the Minsk II agreement to be implemented and for NATO to stop saying that it was going to enlarge, in other words, for Ukraine to commit to neutrality. So every step of the way, then the special military operation began on February 24th. And the idea of that was push Zelensky into negotiations. Well, those started a few days after the February 24th incursion. It wasn't to conquer Ukraine. It was to enforce neutrality, stop the

NATO enlargement. Zelensky agreed on that in March. The United States rushed in and said, no, no, you don't agree. We need to weaken Russia. You fight on. We're going to put on all of this weaponry. You're going to get the HIMARS, you're going to get the nuclear option of finance, we're going to cut Russia out of the swift banking system, and all of this predictably failed, overblown hype. And in the end, what we could have expected from the beginning. For Russia, NATO enlargement is an existential issue. NATO is not able to defeat Russia on an existential issue, not least because of 6,000 nuclear weapons, by the way. So there was always a point of escalation. But now with conventional forces, it's been shown to be the case. So you're completely right. This is a disaster that we have made because we absolutely can't listen to anybody else.

And Joe Biden is proving the accuracy of what your friend and colleague Henry Kissinger once famously said, it is dangerous to be an enemy of the United States. It is worse to be a friend. Well, he actually said, if it's quoted correctly, that it's fatal to be a friend. Wow. That's even stronger. Now, I don't know if that's apocryphal or not, but that's how I quote him. And, you know, when you hear, we've got your back for the U.S. saying it, you better worry because we had the back of a lot of countries from Afghanistan and Vietnam, South Vietnam, and many, many others. And we don't understand the politics of the wars that we get in because these are all about politics.

If you don't understand the politics, you blow it. Let's get into the politics of the other war, Professor Sachs. Is the government of Israel committing war crimes? Yes, clearly. And the whole world... And is it using American equipment, weapons, and ammunition with which to do it? Of course. Well, this is absolutely plain. And it's tragic. And more than 10,000 people have been killed, civilian, innocent people in Gaza. And of those, more than 4,000 children. And another hospital was bombed today, from what I'm reading on the wires. And it's an absolute disaster. And they're besieging a Gaza strip of 2 million people, cutting off water, food, fuel. Of course these are war crimes.

Will there be accounting, legal, political, military, whatever it is, accountability for these war crimes? There will be geopolitical accountability in the sense that the world is aghast and it's turning against Israel dramatically. And it is turning against the United States for being the one to backstop this. And it's putting a lot of pressure on the U.S. and Israel can't do this without the U.S. So, yes, this is geopolitical accountability. I would not expect any other kind of accountability automatically. It's so haphazard. But geopolitical accountability, we see it in the United Nations every day. There's a vast, vast majority of countries that are saying stop. I was just in the Middle East.

I was in the United Arab Emirates, and I was meeting with a lot of people. And you can imagine how that region feels about this, co-religionists, people in Muslim countries. people in Muslim countries, they're absolutely shocked and aghast that this takes place day after day with bombings of civilian population, mass deaths, no diplomacy. Netanyahu quoting quoting these biblical passages as his justification that are really awful. Does he believe that he and he alone can decide life and death in Gaza? That is how he is acting, because he's not negotiating. He's not trying to negotiate anything. He's not trying to explore any other options. The underlying premise of Israel's actions is that there's no other choice, because Hamas is a mortal threat, and the only way to do it is through this mass civilian bombing and deaths,

and that countries have the right of self-defense. Now, if you unpack that, this is all wrong, because Hamas is not a mortal danger to Israel. Boy, it did a huge amount of killing in a massacre on October 7th. But those were people on foot carrying guns because Israel let its guard down. So that was a security failure. It wasn't Hamas with the massive tank companies moving over Israel and invading Israel, not at all. We should understand what this was. This was a terrorist attack that came because Israel totally let its guard down, and that was Netanyahu's responsibility. And he completely failed. Israel today is not at a mortal threat from Hamas because Hamas can't even do the same

thing again. The border is now secured because when they blew it before, now they're not going to do it presumably the same way again. So that's the first point. The second point is, this isn't the only way to address this issue. There are other ways to address this issue that are going to cost a lot fewer lives or no lives at all and actually get to a real peace. And that is through negotiation and diplomacy, something that Israel completely discards and the United States has proven to be incompetent at in recent years. So that way would say, look, we understand that there is an underlying political issue here, and that is the profound failure over more than 50 years to secure the political rights of the Palestinian people. And we're going to solve that problem. But in the context, Hamas needs to be demilitarized and demobilized with the support of the Arab countries and Iran.

Now, that may sound far-fetched, but it's not far-fetched at all, because what we should be aiming for is a political solution. And what Israel is doing is mass killings, war crimes, and so mobilizing the hatreds that Israel is profoundly undermining its real security. And moreover, every day, making it more likely that this turns into a devastating regional war, because U.S. troops are under attack every single day right now by militias through the region. And when one missile hits and kills a lot of Americans, God forbid, and it happens, if that does happen, we're going to suddenly have the demands here from our hotheads, of course, in Congress. Now we have to go bomb Iran and everything else. And this could turn into an absolutely general war.

Now, you think Israel is going to be secure in the midst of that? No, no way. So this has nothing to do with a real response to Israel's security. It has everything to do with fury, with revenge, and with a deep point, which is that Netanyahu has absolutely no intention, not an iota of intention, of any kind of political settlement with the Palestinians because his whole government is premised on the fact that you never have to have a political settlement with the Palestinians. That's what we're backing. We're backing an impossibility. We're backing a profound injustice. Well, that's what we're backing right now. I want to talk to you about the United States backing Israel. And as a springboard for that conversation, I want to play a tape for you. I'm not even going to tell you who's in it, but you'll know both of these people immediately. You make the observation in your book, and you say that you have said it many times when you were president of the United States, that no president is ever going to desert Israel, right? Correct. I put it more bluntly. I said, as I told

congressional leaders during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, no American president will let Israel go down the tube, Democrat or Republican. It's not a nation. That is stated fairly categorically, and yet in your book you make it clear at the same time that Israel really is not of any enormous strategic value to the United States anymore. That's correct. So why then would the United States continue to burden itself with huge loans, in some cases outright grants, to the Israelis, jeopardize possibly young American fighting men, when there is no strategic value involved or little strategic value? Because the United States is concerned by more than strategic values. That's maybe a weakness, but it's the way we are.

And there are moral issues involved here. We don't have an alliance with Israel, as you know. They're not an ally of the United States in a technical sense. But we have a bond to Israel that's much stronger. It's a moral commitment. A moral commitment because of what happened during the Holocaust and a moral commitment because it is a democracy, the only democracy in that area. I saw you smiling.

I'm sure that brings back memories. Yes, yes, yes. Was he right then? Is he still right? Are his statements still resonant today? You know, during his presidency, this was immediately after the Six-Day War, which was 1967. And what happened in the immediate aftermath, and it's very important for people to understand, Israel, of course, occupied the West Bank and the Sinai and Gaza in the Six-Day War. It occupied the Palestinian lands.

And then it had to decide what to do about all of this. And in 1970, Israel started to implement pieces of what was called the Alone Plan, named after one of the ground in the form of Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories, in strategic 400,000 Israelis on the West Bank and more than 200,000 in East Jerusalem. This is a lot. And these are, in many cases, zealots. They are fervent. Anyway, they like their homes and their communities, even though they're in the middle of Palestinian territory. And many of them are true believers in what's called Greater Israel or Eretz Yisrael of the Greater Land of Israel, meaning a biblical interpretation that actually goes back in the Old Testament to the book of Joshua, that God gave the Jewish people, according to this religious view, all of the lands that are west of the Jordan River and reaching into Syria and so forth.

And with this view, the idea is never compromise with of Israel. And here we were backing Israel, which makes sense, but not backing a political settlement. And Israel made facts on the ground, which made a political settlement extraordinarily difficult. Is Nixon saying to Joe Biden, you have to back Israel, not saying it directly, but you understand what I mean by that. You have to back Israel no matter what, even if they commit war crimes, even if they commit genocide. Well, I think the question for us is what do we mean by Israel? We have the state of Israel and we have occupied territories that are Palestinian territories. And it has been the world opinion and it is formally U.S. policy, even reiterated by Biden, that there should be a Palestinian state on the Palestinian territories. But it doesn't happen. This has been the view for decades, but it doesn't happen. Why? Because the Israeli government has no intention of it happening,

even as we repeat over and over again that that is our policy. Joe Biden said it himself just a few days ago, that the two-state solution is U.S. policy. And that is in innumerable resolutions of the U.N. Security Council and the U.N. General Assembly. It is the overwhelming view of the world. It is absolutely opposed by Netanyahu. Let's be clear. He's the obstacle to a political settlement, he and what he represents politically, which is not the dominant part of Israel, but is the dominant part of the coalition that governs Israel right now. But in any event, it puts the whole world at danger and it puts the United States in an absolutely untenable situation. Because if we back Netanyahu's policy, what are we backing? We're backing massive war crimes in Gaza with no prospect of a real settlement. That's what we're backing. So what are we doing?

We're faking it right now because they want to get to the election and win re-election. The truth, like on so many issues of American politics, Biden doesn't explain anything. He doesn't tell the truth, but most U.S. presidents don't, by the way. But it happens that our present president also isn't explaining the issues. And the issues are that the current government of Israel is an absolute obstacle to peace. This is absolutely clear. And that the United States is put in an intolerable position as an accomplice to war crimes. And we don't want to be an accomplice to war crimes. And we don't want to see tens of thousands more Gazans killed and wounded by Israel's bombing and its ground operations. And we don't want

American soldiers dying by shelling by Islamist forces in the region that are coming to the side of the Palestinians. And we don't want, I believe, World War III. And so we need to have some diplomacy. Now, the good thing that I've been trying to point out from October 7 onward is this is a case where the whole world essentially is of the right view, which is that the solution to this crisis is Palestinian political rights alongside Israel. Now, the Israeli government doesn't accept it, but the whole rest of the world does. This is a case where U.S. interests, Russian interests, Chinese interests, of course, U.K. and French interests are the same, named the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. We're all on the same side of this. So this is time for the UN Security Council

to do what it's supposed to do under the UN Charter, and that is to take responsibility for the global peace before this gets completely out of hand. But that requires the president of the United States to actually have some gumption and explain issues correctly and say very clearly to the Israeli government that there is no solution by this approach, that the only solution is a political settlement and it's time for a political settlement. Now, that probably would shake Netanyahu out of power and that would all be for the good, but that doesn't have to be done directly by us. We just have to state the facts. Right. I didn't see the entire interview between Ted Koppel and Richard Nixon.

So I don't know, President Nixon, I don't know if Koppel asked him, but backing Israel for moral reasons doesn't mean agreeing with everything that the government does. Well, we'll end with that the next time we talk. I'd hope we got to it today, but we've run out of time. I want to talk to you about Joe Biden's statement that the United States is the indispensable nation and the dangers, the dangers that come from that kind of a statement out of the mouth of the president. Boy, you could imagine the eyes rolling around the world when they heard that whopper. So this is something for us to discuss. And just to point out, if we want to help Israel, we need to help Israel save itself from itself. And that is what we need to do. We need to be grown up and say to Israel, you're on the wrong path. And it's extraordinarily dangerous for you, for us, and for the world. Get off that path and

get on a path to diplomacy and peace. Professor Jeffrey Sachs from France, I know it's late in the day there. Thank you very much for your time and all your thoughts and all your articulate ideas and analysis of all this. Very, very much appreciated by all of our viewers and by my team and me. We'll see you next week. Of course, on The Indispensable Nation. Coming up at three o'clock Eastern, Professor John Mearsheimer on these similar topics. We're up to 231,000 subscriptions. Keep those numbers coming. Our goal is a quarter of a million by Christmas. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.