Judging Freedom - [SPECIAL EPISODE]: SACHS is BACK! - Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Why the West Wants War!

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

[SPECIAL EPISODE]: SACHS is BACK! - Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Why the West Wants War!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

you Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Friday, June 6, 2025. Professor Jeffrey Sachs doing double duty joining us today. It's been such a momentous week in matters of international affairs. How better than to have the benefit of Professor Sachs' analysis at the end of this week and of course, who knows what's coming. So Professor Sachs, is there any doubt in your mind but that American and British intelligence were instrumental in the drone attacks

that exploded throughout Russia last weekend. Well, I think it's clear that the intelligence agencies have been deeply involved in the leadup to these events. What actually happened in the last few days is still a bit of a mystery. But it's clear that Trump and Putin at the end of the week had a pretty direct talk. And I think Trump heard an earful because these attacks last week by the Ukrainians were deeply destabilizing. They took place just at the moment of these negotiations. They were an attack on part of the Russian strategic triad, the nuclear triad, very dangerous, very destabilizing. There was also the attack on civilian passenger rail that downed a bridge and killed dozens of people. And there's no doubt that the

Western agencies were deeply implicated in projects that took place over the course of more than a year in preparation. So what we have had just today is a massive drone and missile attack by Russia all over Ukraine. The war is escalating. It's extraordinarily dangerous. The recklessness, in my view, of the Ukrainians and the Europeans to say no realistic peace proposals, no attempt to find a solution, just means more escalation, more devastation of Ukraine, more loss of life, and to no end, to no good end. Before we get into Chancellor Mertz and Prime Minister Stammer, I do want to ask you a little bit about a phrase you used, twice deeply destabilizing.

Alistair Crook and Colonel McGregor have referred to this as a penprick, a PR stunt which will explode with profound negative consequences to Ukraine. I think you probably agree with the second part. Do you agree with the first part that it was a pinprick and a PR stunt because you said it was deeply destabilizing? I don't think that any attack on the nuclear strategic assets of a nuclear superpower is a mere pinprick. I think that this whole war in Ukraine, the whole origins of the war involve the nuclear threat

because the context of this whole war going back a quarter century is America's abandonment of the nuclear arms control framework. Probably one of the most decisive, but in a way under discussed, parts of the path to war was the U.S. unilateral abandonment of the anti-ballistic missile treaty in 2002. And the reason why that's so important is that the United States destabilized the nuclear arms control framework and Russia felt from that moment onward that there was the risk

of decapitation strikes, the risk of a first strike nuclear attack against Russia, because the purpose of the anti-ballistic missile treaty was to prevent such an occurrence. Then the United States unilaterally installed anti-ballistic missile units, first in Poland, then in Romania. And I emphasize all of this because part of Russia's very deep, very legitimate, and very understandable concern about NATO enlargement was taking place in the context of the destabilization of the nuclear arms control framework. And the United States government refused to rule out also the placement of US missile systems in Ukraine.

And so the backdrop of all of this is that NATO enlargement was seen as a dire national security threat to Russia. We would feel exactly the same way with the installation of Russian or Chinese military bases near America's borders. This is a basic point that I cannot emphasize enough. What Russia feels and we dismiss or ignore is exactly what Americans would feel,

what President Trump would feel, for example, if there was any attempt whatsoever of Russia or China to place military installations near America's borders in the Western Hemisphere. There's no doubt about this. So all of this is to say that when there's an attack on strategic bombers, it's more than a pinprick from the point of view of the Russians.

And it was an attack thousands of miles in the interior. And then what Russian leadership can see is the chortling of the Western press and the Western political leaders. Oh, look how clever this was. This isn't clever. This is absolutely reckless is what it is. And so I think that's the context in which I see this. I think this will awaken a sleeping monster or I'm not sure that I wanna refer to Russia as a monster but it will result in a more ferocious attack than the Ukrainians imagined.

It's a kind of proof that this is about core national security of Russia. This is how it's viewed from the Russian side, totally understandably is the basic point. How is president Trump's denial of knowledge of this viewed from the Russian side? I mean, if what he's saying is true, that he truly didn't know, actually, he didn't say he didn't know, he said the US didn't know, then somebody is not reporting up the

chain of command. And there are serious rogue elements with the power to spend money and kill people in the American government. And the head of the CIA and the president and the secretary of state and the secretary of defense don't know about it. I think that what's happened last week gives no possibility of a legitimate answer from the United States side. First, it's very unlikely, maybe nearly impossible, that the CIA and MI6 were not engaged in all of this. Even if they were not engaged in it, it's almost certain that they knew about it. it. If they didn't know about it, it's unbelievably damaging to the whole concept of the U.S. and U.K. support for Ukraine's war effort that this could happen without the intelligence

agencies knowing about it. Whether the President of the United States knew about it is yet another question because the Russians have long said that the presidents are sometimes just told after the fact because it's the deep state that is at war with Russia. So that is a view that President Putin has expressed on many occasions, one in a famous interview he gave in Figaro in 2017, where he said he's dealt with many American presidents, they come into office with ideas, and then men in dark suits and briefcases come and explain to them how it really is.

And yes, whether Trump knew beforehand or didn't know, none of it is exculpatory because it doesn't answer any of the fundamental questions of how it— Who's in charge of American intel if this can happen and the leadership doesn't know it? Well, first of all, President Trump is. So is he listening? Is he taking detailed briefs? That's number one. Second is, of course, the director of National Intelligence and the Director of the CIA. What are they telling the President of the United States? Third, what actually happened here? How can it be that the United States claimed not to know?

And what does that say about this entire war effort, if it were true, it's terrifying, because it says that Ukraine can use Western intelligence, Western explosives, Western technologies to destabilize the nuclear arms strategic triad of Russia. So there's no explanation that is sound in what happened last week because what happened last week was a truly destabilizing event. At the risk of upsetting your stomach at the crack of dawn at this early hour, in the hours before this happened, President Zelensky was visited by Senators Richard Blumenthal and Lindsey Graham, who almost acted as if they were conducting their own foreign policy, informed him that the United States would never back down, told him they have legislation which has 80 co-signatures on it in the Senate to impose secondary sanctions on Russia. What is Trump going to do with these two? They're frustrating his foreign policy almost in violation of the Logan Act which prohibits people not in the executive branch from conducting their

own foreign policy. Well let me me say one thing. I'm not against Congress overseeing, reviewing, commenting on foreign policy. I will say that Lindsey Graham has been the biggest failure of foreign policy in the United States Senate for decades. He's been wrong on every single issue. He has done a profound disservice to the American people and to our national security. So I find him ignorant. I find him utterly warmongering. I find him on the wrong side of just about every foreign policy issue of the last 25 years. So for me, the issue is not whether senators are involved. The issue is if they are wrong at every single instance. That is absolutely a direct threat to all of us. absolutely a direct threat to all of us. And what happened last week worsened your security,

it worsened my security, it worsened the world's security. Zelensky is out of control. Zelensky is a cabal, a regime that is extraordinarily dangerous who was installed by the United States in a coup in 2014. It is without constraint, it behaves in an extraordinarily provocative way. It has nothing to do with democracy. This is a small group ruling by martial law that is endangering the world. That's why it's the responsibility

of the president of the United States to put an end to this kind of behavior. And as I've said, if the Ukrainian government doesn't want to agree, it is the responsibility of the president of the United States and the president of Russia to reach a security arrangement that is not destabilizing. We're going to take you to Neocon Central. Chris, play cut two and three back to back.

We saw credible evidence of a summer early fall invasion, a new offensive by Putin. He's playing the game at the peace table, he's preparing for more war, and I think the Senate is fed up with Putin. The American people see Putin as unreasonable, they see Ukraine is trying, President Trump has made that distinction real, so the Senate and the House of Representatives in the next two weeks will be moving forward with a sanction bill that's bone-crushing. Putin is playing President Trump. He's taking him for a sucker.

He is in effect stalling and stonewalling, prolonging the conversation so that he can mount this offensive and take control of more territory on the ground. If I were President Trump, I'd be insulted and offended by this affront personally, as well as to the United States of America. And America should be angry, deeply angry. Yeah, America should be angry at these two people. Richard Blumenthal was the one who said, this is the best that money can buy. All of this fighting and killing and no Americans dying.

This is using Ukraine to weaken Russia. And that means sacrificing Ukraine for this neocon idiocy of these two people. They've both been a disgrace in American foreign policy. And there was Lindsey Graham back in 2014 in the US-backed coup. He was involved in that. He was, of course, a big proponent of every war, the phony war, the real war, but on the phony pretext in Iraq, and all of the other adventures and escapades that have endangered American security, cost trillions of dollars, have been complete debacles. These two are just disgraceful and they're substantive views. I don't mind senators having views, they should have views.

These just happen to be people with completely wrong and despicable views that are endangering you and me and the rest of the United States. That's the problem. Tell me what Prime Minister, British Prime Minister Stammer and German Chancellor Mertz are up to. Is Mertz inching towards World War III? They are.

I don't think that they're doing it intentionally, but they're complete warmongers. They're so much driven by their intelligence agencies, probably linked back to the CIA is the one that orchestrates MI6, BND, other security agencies. But the rhetoric and the behavior of these politicians is absolutely reckless. Mertz comes in as Chancellor of Germany. You would think, not just think, you would hope, you would expect in a world that has some desire for self-preservation, that the Chancellor of Germany has newly arrived would at least have a call with President Putin to discuss the situation, to make an evaluation,

to try to understand. But no, from the first moment that Mertz came in, it has been expand the military, send Taurus missiles, strike deep inside Russia without even an iota of attempt at diplomacy. Stammer has been the same way. In other words, there's no attempt on the side of either of these two, who I think are basically factotums of their security states, and especially their intelligence agencies, to expand the war. So the absence of even a shred of evidence that they want to find a path to peace tells us what we need to know. They are warmongers from morning till night.

Let me take you back to the Kremlin. How do you think the Kremlin perceives President Trump's statement to President Putin that the United States had no knowledge of this? Do you think, and you know Foreign Minister Lavrov, who's almost as smart as you are, and he's a very smart guy, do you think that he believes that Trump is not telling the truth or do you think that he is asking, as you and I did a few minutes ago, who's in charge here? I think more the latter.

I think that from the Russian perspective, they view this as the usual business, which is that they often don't hear a clear line from the United States. They probably don't know exactly who knows what and when, but from their point of view, it doesn't really matter. It comes down to the same thing that they're facing in the United States, a hostile force supporting a military effort that threatens their national security, and that's enough for them to know. So they obviously said to President Trump, no matter what he told them, that what happened is absolutely unacceptable

and it will be met with a Russian response. And that's all President Trump said. Because whatever he told them, they told him something very, very clear, which was that this was an attack on core Russian national security and it would be met with a Russian response. I think we saw the very beginnings of this Russian response today, but the fact of the

matter is we're on a path of escalation right now. And whatever Trump knew or didn't know, what's been happening in recent weeks is no doubt a large and powerful lobby from within the U.S. security establishment. These two senators are a part of that, but it goes far beyond that. And within the security establishment of Europe to continue fighting Russia, because this has been a core doctrine for more than 30 years. This is not something new.

And it is the difficult job of the president of the United States to put a brake on the military industrial complex. That's the job. It requires skill. It requires steadfastness. This is a war machine that is always in operation. The president actually has to actively put the brakes

on the war machine. It's not enough to not be a warmonger himself and Trump has not been a warmonger when it comes to Ukraine. But it is an act of skill to put a stop to the war machine. We know presidents have sometimes paid the ultimate price for that, as John F. Kennedy did when he put the brakes on the war machine. The fact of the matter is there is a powerful big business, the one and a half trillion dollar business a year just in the U.S. alone, not to mention in Europe, and a powerful ideological force that says just fight. That's Blumenthal, that's Graham. They always want to have war. These two are pathetic, but they

represent a very dangerous foreign policy. And I just want to remind everybody, you know, at the end of the Cold War, Russia, even the Soviet Union before the end of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev said, we want peace, we want cooperation. And here we are 35 years later at the brink of nuclear war. It's mind boggling how the United States squandered the chance for peace. And it is in the likes of Lindsey Graham that we did so, because these people say if the other side wants peace, they're weak, kill them. And that's what we've been doing for more than 30 years.

And now last week there were supposed to be peace negotiations. And the day before the peace negotiations, Ukraine attacked the strategic bombers of Russia. The day before. What is this? What conceivable justification could there be? What conceivable good news could there be that the United States denies that it knew

about it? The whole thing is so horrific that it has to stop. Professor Sachs, thank you very much. Thanks for coming on at this unusual time of day. One of the viewers writes in the forecast today, partly cloudy chance of war. Thank you, Professor Sachs. Great to be with you. Have a great weekend. Yes, you as well. We'll see you next week. All the best. Thank you. And coming up later today at four o'clock this afternoon, the best time of the day, the end of the day, the end of the week,

the Intelligence Community Roundtable with Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. You