The Duran Podcast - Why the U.S.-Iran War Has No Offramp w/ Jeffrey Sachs

Episode Date: April 14, 2026

Why the U.S.-Iran War Has No Offramp w/ Jeffrey Sachs

All right, Alexander, we are here with Professor Jeffrey Sachs. I have Professor Sachs' information where you can follow him and his excellent articles in the description box down below and as a pinned comment. Gentlemen, we have to talk about everything that is happening in Iran and the blockade of the United States Navy of Iran. So let's get into it. Well, indeed. Let's get into it.

And Professor Sachs has been discussing. and writing and speaking about the events of the last few extraordinary weeks, I mean, terrifying and in some ways terrible weeks, and nobody has been doing it better than him. And we've had over the last few weeks, we've had an absolutely extraordinary attack against Iran launched in the middle of negotiations. We've had the murder of the Iranian leadership that was carried out during that first strike, that we found an attrition war, which it was clear that the President of the United States and his officials had not expected. Then we had an announcement of a ceasefire.

Then we had more talks. Those talks have collapsed. and we're now in a situation where the United States has ordered a naval blockade. And Alex, with us, has pointed out that what this amounts to is blockading the actual original Iranian blockade, if one could talk it about that. Now, the whole thing looks both terrible and utterly incoherent to me. Perhaps we should stress the terrible rather than just the incoherent. but there's no one better to talk to about all of this than Professor Sacks.

So Professor Sacks, without further ado, let's discuss where we are, and perhaps you can tell us some things about how we got here. We are literally in Donald Trump's delusions. We're living out in real time the madness of a president of the United States. United States, the likes of which we've never had in our history. In fact, I'm not sure that we've ever had in the nuclear age, a leader of a nuclear superpower that is as mentally deranged as this individual. Of course, there's politics, there's backdrop, there are interests, there are many things going on, but there's also delusion. And there's a complete breakdown as

well of any governmental process in the United States. What we're watching is the work of essential work maybe is not the right word. We're watching the actions and the impulsive behavior of one person. So let me just try to put that in a little bit of order. Of course, from a structural and systemic point of view, the United States has been in a kind of war with Iran since 1979. And so in a sense, this is a continuation of hostilities that have been maintained for decades. But of course, this is an open war that is on the path of doing untold and profound damage to the entire world economy and perhaps tipping the world into World War III, which is not a small and idle statement or a casual statement, but a reality that we're facing right now.

So in one sense, what happened in 1979 was that Iran got out from the grips of the U.S. Empire. The U.S. Empire had brought Iran under its domination in 1953 when a CIA MI6 coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran installed a police state. And the police state lasted for 26 years until the leader of the state weakened in part because of his aging and personal illness, which claimed his life that year. And in that context, the Iranians had a revolution, which was essentially a revolution against the police state. From that moment onwards, from 1979, the United States has been in overt regime change operations to try to bring down the revolutionary government. Not so revolutionary anymore since we're talking about more than four

decades later. But from the first moments of Iran escaping from American hegemony in 1979, the United States has tried many means to overthrow the government, including in the early 1980s, funding and arming Saddam Hussein, then an ally of the United States, another puppet of the United States, to invade Iran and actually to use a chemical warfare against Iran with the U.S. acknowledge and support in effect. And from that moment as well, the U.S. has been using every economic means confiscating tens of billions of dollars of Iran's own resources, money in American banks and other financial institutions, sanctions, and periodic military attacks.

Now, enter Israel into this, because especially in the age of Benjamin Netanyahu, which began 30 years ago when he first became. prime minister, the idea of overthrowing the Iranian government has been front and center of Israel's most fundamental foreign policy. And so when the recent U.S., Israel war started on Iran a few weeks ago, Netanyahu posted that this was the culmination of 40 years of his dreams, had been mistaken for years because I was saying it was 30 years, but I didn't really know the 10 years that preceded his entry to the prime ministership. Now, all of this is the structural side. So why did I start out with Donald Trump's delusions and the fact that we're living in his delusional world?

Because none of the recent actions makes any sense. None have. None have. has any chance of success. The actions, the bombings, the killing of the Supreme Leader, the killing of the leadership has the possibility of throwing the world into the biggest economic crisis of modern history. It has the possibility of pushing the world into World War III, but it does not have the possibility of achieving any of the aims that are in Donald Trump. mind. The point is the following. For decades, the U.S. tried to bring down this regime, and it used a variety of means. As I've mentioned, it used what is now called economic statecraft, I would call it thuggery or gangsterism. It has used confiscation of Iranian

reserves. It's used sanctions. It's used sanctions. on individuals. It's used assassinations of Iranian leaders. It's used attacks on Iranian facilities and on. None of it brought down the regime. The current war on Iran is delusional in that Trump because at personal level now, not a structural level, but at the personal level, the man is an idiot. He's a fool. He's just as dumb as they get, and he's as nasty as they get. He thought, okay, I'll do it. And even he posts every day, the other presidents didn't do it. I'll do it. Because he's a simpleton. Honestly, it's strange, but he's a simpleton. So Benjamin Netanyahu, who's a war criminal and has many other adjectives that could be attached to him, none

Pleasant at all. And the head of Mossad came to the White House and talked to the simpleton and said, Donald, it's simple. All we have to do is kill the Supreme Leader. The country will rally. They'll love you. Everyone will be in the streets. You'll get to pick the next Supreme Leader. And from all that we know from various accounts now, the American side, other than, than Mr. Trump sat there thinking, this is a farce. This is absurd. We're listening to bullshit. And Donald Trump, because he is a simpleton, said, ah, that's great. Let's do it. And they went around the room, apparently. This is how important decisions are now made in the United States. And there were a few sycophants in the room who said, yes, yes, Mr. Mr. President, if you say so, this is great. And then if you said, I don't agree, but I will support you in this. But from all that we can tell, other than perhaps the Fox News commentator, Mr.

Hegeseth disagreed with this. And some regarded it as sheer lunacy. or farce, but they could see Netanyahu spinning his web, and they could see their simpleton leader saying that this was a good idea. What impresses me about that event is the collapse of U.S. governance as a system. This is not how government. governments function almost anywhere in the world. I have dealt with governments, well over 100 governments in all parts of the world. You can almost never see such personalization of politics and decisions on something as important as this.

no interagency analytics, no system. Even within the executive branch of the United States, we're supposed to have a National Security Council, which collates the incoming intelligence, if that's what it is, and positions of the different agencies for a detailed consideration from everything we know, nothing like this happened at all.

And as much as one can try to see into this, and it's, of course, there's opaqueness for all of us. I can't find any name of anybody in a governmental position that actually support, this decision other than Trump and Hegeseth. We know that the CIA director objected. We know that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff objected. We know that the Director of National Intelligence objected. There was no consultation whatsoever with any other leaders around the world. There was

no consultation whatsoever with any congressional leaders. There was no process. whatsoever in the White House National Security Council other than the meeting itself. So this is the sense that a structural issue is turned into a personal delusion. And the bombing started, the killing of the Supreme Leader, the one that was steadfastly against nuclear weapons for decades. It was the first to die along with other senior officials. There was no uprising. There was no people taking to the streets other than to show their support for the government. The next moment are not so brilliant new artificial intelligence systems.

apparently the Maven system. A palanterer targeted a girls' school and killed 160 girls. Trump immediately lied about that, saying that it was an Iranian missile, later mumbling that he would look into it. And we were off to the races. and we've been for weeks now at the edge of global disaster. Everybody has learned about the Strait of Pormuz during these weeks. You know, our greatest novelist, I think the wisest in American history, Mark Twain, said that war is God's way of teaching geography to Americans.

And so Americans have found out something about the Strait of Hormuz, and they've discovered that around 20% of world oil flows through it. They've discovered that around a third of all world oil is produced in the immediate region, meaning in Iran, Iraq, and the Gulf countries. we are already on the precipice of a global economic crisis that is extremely severe. And Trump, in some way, showed some glimmer of that because of understanding this. He does understand something about his plummeting approval ratings and the collapse of any honest chance that his party will maintain control of the lower house of Congress in the November election coming up. So he started to try to look for a way out. And we know that in back channels, he was begging for China to bail him out somehow, begging for his NATO allies

after he has done what he's done to the world to bail him out somehow, begging for China to get Pakistan to put forward a ceasefire proposal so that there could be some kind of off-ramp. Now, the problem, though, is we come back to Trump's mental state. And it's important because, well, we sometimes think of history as moving in great structural ways or that this is a systemic crisis that goes back for decades, which it does. Individual behavior of leaders makes a difference in matters like this. Trump psychologically cannot agree to anything in which he's not the absolute victor. This is not just political posturing because it is impulsive, delusional behavior of his extremely

unstable personality. He has what is called the dark tetrad personality, or sometimes called malignant narcissism. The tetrad or the four characteristics of Trump's personality are that he's an extreme narcissist. He's the best at everything. Even today, he posted that he's Jesus Christ, bringing the sick and the dead back to life. He is what is called a Machiavellian, but it's completely unfair to Machiavelli. But Machiavelli, in psychological terms, means someone who is completely untrustworthy and completely conniving. And so the word means nothing. He is a psychopath in the

clinical sense, which means that the death of others that he causes has no influence on his mental state at all. He's not ruminating about the deaths of the 160 girls or the thousands of people that have died. It's not even a concern for him. The destruction of Iranian civilization, which he put on the table a few days ago, is not a concern to him. He's psychopathic. And the fourth characteristic of this dark tetrad is that he's paranoid. So the world is against him. According to today, the Pope is against him. He's after everybody.

By the way, Trump wrote ugly things about Pope Leo today. I looked it up to see whether Hitler, had openly attacked Pope Pius the 12th, and I did not do a comprehensive survey, but what I found was that there was no evident statements by Hitler openly against the Vatican or the Pope during the World War II period, even though the Pope was viewed in Nazi leadership circles as an enemy of the Nazi regime. Trump does not have that standard. He has no standard.

We've never seen anything like this in the American presidency in history. We have never seen a president write anything like, open the fucking straight, you crazy bastards. This is a president of the United States. This is a very sick individual. And on top of the malignant narcissism or this dark tetrad personality, there are lots of forensic psychologists and psychiatrists who say that he shows lots of

evidence of frontotemporal dementia as well. In other words, he's an old man with a malignant personality that is getting worse and more dangerous. So that's the situation. We are in a structural crisis that goes back decades. And maybe I'll just say one more word about the structural crisis. The United States foreign policy, as stated by the way repeatedly is global hegemony. That's not hidden. That's the stated idea of American foreign policy. It's sometimes called trinacy. It's got other names. It's sometimes called full-spectrum dominance. But the idea is hegemony. Iran escaped the hegemon in 1979. It must be brought back into subservience. So that's structural.

From Israel's point of view, Israel is aiming, especially under Netanyahu, but I would say that it is the right-wing Zionist position, basically from the whole history of the Jewish settlement of Palestine to the earliest days of Israel itself, that Israel has full control not only of the region, but over time that it becomes a regional hegemon. And so Netanyahu is also stating openly, we are a regional power. We're even in some ways a global power, he says. He has his own megalomania. He has his own dark tetrad personality. He's also an indicted war criminal. He is Donald Trump's peer in all of this. So this is also structural.

The war is structural in that it is a war for U.S. global dominance and for Israel's regional dominance. It also, just so everybody, you know, we can all be on the same page, everyone is right to say it's also about money because that's what dominance is about. Trump tortles with delight that he will grab the oil, that we'll all get rich. The man is a moron, by the way. But this is his level of thinking, will grab the oil. It's also, yes, about the military industrial complex. We have a lot of very sick people in our country in the United States, many of them in Silicon Valley. and many of them are testing their weapon systems right now.

And so this AI weaponization is part of the purpose of this war. One of the biggest boosters of this war is Palantir, which has a lead contract of the Pentagon for AI empowered battlefield management, including the murder of 160-7. schoolgirls because the first thing that this system got wrong was this military target. So there are many forces at play in any major event, but basically any sane president would have said, no. This is risky. It's likely to fail. It's against international law. It's even we might have had a few presidents to say it's immoral. Not all of them would have said that, but many of them would have said that. But it took an individual of mental instability and perhaps dementia to say,

let's go for it, and a complete deinstitutionalization of American systems. We don't have governance systems right now. We don't have a constitutional order right now. We don't have Congress, any role whatsoever right now. We don't even have an executive branch that functions in a systemic way right now. So we have the personalization of politics with a mentally unstable leader and all of these structural factors that have gone back for decades that have brought us to this moment. Final, final word before I turn it back over to you is It's a catastrophe. This is a catastrophe. It's a man-made global economic crisis that is likely, not just can, but is likely to intensify and spread out of control. And that means mass economic crisis,

hunger, deprivation, political instability, maybe World War III. So this is where we are. Well, lots here. Just a few quick points. I've had to, in my previous career, I've had to deal with lots of people with some of the personality traits that you've described, many of them. So I have some background here. And one thing I do want to say is paranoia and may.

Megalomania are two sides of the same coin. I have found this time and again. So that none of what you've described is surprising to me at all. Many of the aspects of the behaviour that you've described, I have seen obviously on a much smaller scale. The second point I wanted to make is that personalized extreme personalisation of leadership, the absence of controls. Well, we've actually seen that in the Middle East.

We've seen this happen, for example, just examples, with Iraq's decision to invade Iran in 1980, and then the decision that Iraq took in 1990 to invade QA, both disastrous decisions, and they were both the product of the extreme personalization, of leadership around Saddam Hussein and the inability of anybody in Iraq to argue against decisions that ultimately proved absolutely disastrous for Iraq itself and by the way for the whole region. And the third thing I wanted to say is that when you have a situation where

leadership has become so personalized and restraints upon it have completely broken down that creates a very, very real danger that all restraints will completely fall away in the way that something is done, in the way that it is conducted. We've already seen that to a certain extent with things like attacks in the middle of negotiations. Talk about destroying civilizations. I mean, the restraints of language have completely. broken down. Language matters, at least that's always been my own experience. If there is no restrained language, there is no restraint in actions either beyond a certain point. You talk about World War. One person who has on two occasions now said that this looks like

the start of a new World War is the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, perhaps the most experienced foreign minister around. Now, all of this does make one worry a great deal. Are there any restraints on what the United States might do in this conflict? We've seen them try assassination. We've seen, I say the United States. I mean, it should be very clear. We're talking about a small group of people. We've seen assassination. We've seen lots of talk about ground operations. We've seen. We've seen. seen threats against energy and infrastructure. We now have this naval blockade idea, which nobody I can see thinks that it makes any sense. When Love Roth talks about...

We couldn't even believe there's a, we're fighting against the blockade of the straight of Hormuz supposedly. So Trump adds another blockade. And you, you can't even make. this up? What the hell are you doing? Don't move or I'll shoot myself. You know, it's absolutely crazy what's going on. In the absence of restraints, in the absence of checks and balances, I mean, there are many people who are contacting us who are saying is, is this, does this have the potential to go all the way towards the use of nuclear weapons. I'm starting to worry that it is. And when Lavrov uses words like World War, I have to say to me, that looks like him warning that this is a real possibility, no. Over to you, Professor Sacks, not just about, you know,

all the various comments I've made. You know, the line between where we are and nuclear war is extraordinarily thin, and it has been even before this. It's hard to imagine. It's hard really to believe. We assume somehow deep down, no, we won't go there. but there's a recklessness of our global scene right now that's been true for years. We know even from the leaked reports of Western intelligence in the fall of 2022 when Russia was on the back foot in a moment of the Ukraine war, that the internal assessments were that nuclear war, nuclear use of the war, nuclear use of the war,

of nuclear weapons was maybe 20%. I don't know exactly the number that was used, but that was a number that was mentioned. When Biden incidentally said at a donor event in the fall of 2022, we may be on a path to nuclear Armageddon, he was then castigated by the US mainstream media. How dare you talk about those things? because we're not supposed to even acknowledge that this is something real.

And the point is that, of course, it's real. And it's been real for years. And the brazenness, I have to say, I think the British brazenness, because the irresponsibility on top of the bravado and on top of the limited capacity other than to get us into big trouble is remarkable for Britain, but Britain always wants to provoke. It wants to attack the Russian nuclear triad. It wants to help Ukraine to destroy nuclear capable aircraft sitting on runways in the open because that's part of the nuclear arms control regimen for accountability. And so there's been

tremendous irresponsibility with regard to the nuclear risk. And for the first time in the history of many decades, we have no functioning nuclear arms agreements at all right now. So this is part of the background. Another part of the background is we have two mentally unstable leaders that are pressing the Iran war. And that is Netanyahu and Trump. It's not just one. We don't fully understand Trump's relationship with Netanyahu. One basic theory is that they're both nuts and allied in their mental instability.

fully adieu, meaning that their craziness plays against each other. Another, which is not impossible is Epstein files and blackmail and all the rest, although there's so many reasons why Trump is a crazy man on top of the blackmail. Who knows, it could be yet another factor. I'm sure there are lots of interesting things that are not known about all of that. But we have, in short, in Israeli leadership, which is also capable of instigating a nuclear war. So it's not only the United States. We have a president that because of this mental instability, but I would also say a structural approach of American foreign policy, which says, never give in. never acknowledge the other side, never show any kind of compromise because you are the hegemon,

and any limitation is a limitation of your hegemonic power and so should never be on display, means that the United States path of escalation is always a dire risk. Trump said in an interview with Maria Bartaromo of Fox News yesterday, I don't want 90%. I don't want 95%. It's got to be 100%. It's going to be 100%. They're going to give me everything, everything. This is his own mental instability, but it's also a U.S. bravado that also bears on a Trump's actions as well. The whole point is the humiliation of the counterpart must be complete because you are showing everyone in the world at every moment that you are in charge. Of course, this is completely delusional, but it's known throughout history. I think, you know, countless of us have referred to the Athenian generals telling the Melians that the powerful, do what they can and the weak suffer what they must, and we will kill you.

And basically, the Athenians threatened to kill the Melians, and they killed the millions. And 14 years later, Athens was defeated by Sparta because of its extraordinary arrogance. So there's a structural U.S. arrogance and there is a mental instability of Trump and there is a pairing with Netanyahu and there is a general generalized decline of restraint right now that we've seen during the Ukraine war and we see it now where the line of nuclear weapons and not is not taken as the bright red line by any means. And just to add, finally, if one studies the whole nuclear age,

the whole atomic age going back to 1945, that line has never really existed. And there have always been in every crisis, voices in senior positions in the United States, that have said, go nuke him. Go do it. Why not? And that, of course, was true in the original use of the two atomic bombs in Japan, which were completely, totally unnecessary militarily,

and were made for demonstrative purposes. It was true during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was true at many other points. So we should just be absolutely worried, sick about this. And it raises the ultimate question. So what can stop this dynamic right now? And there are two kinds of answers to that, neither of which is utterly satisfactory,

but one is the internal checks in the United States. States. Are there grownups in the U.S. system? Are there grownups and not sycophants or crazy people? Because we've got a mix of crazy people, self-interested, greedy people, and sycophants around Trump. We don't have a process. We don't have government functioning. We don't have what John Meersheimer calls a government that thinks. We don't have a rapid. process. So can there be one? Can the congressional leaders understand that actually it's their oath and their constitutional responsibility not to be as pathetic as they have been in recent months cowering for fear of Mr. Trump? Internally, Director of National Intelligence,

head of the CIA, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. What if they get an order that's absolutely risking a catastrophe? What happens? So this is one issue. Can there be an internal check? Because it may very well be needed. And second, what about externally? I believed throughout this whole crisis that there are only three people in the world

that are of interest to Donald Trump because he wants to be in their club. And that's President Putin, President Xi Jinping, and Prime Minister Modi. The other, I consider the four, the United States, Russia, China, and India to be the world's four superpowers. And Trump, in his delusional world also,

needs to be in their club. So if they speak to him together and say, Donald, sit down, have a tea, let's calm down, let's have a nice chat. That actually could make a difference. I don't see any other leader providing that kind of safety for us. I should say I agree. And I would add something else. This is very brief now because we're coming to the end. But an off-ramp, people talk about an off-round.

It is there for the taking. It exists. That whole thing, it's all supposed to be about Iranian, Iran's quest for nuclear weapons. Iran has given every indication. It does not want nuclear weapons. It said so repeatedly. It came to an agreement back in 2015, which prevented it from acquiring nuclear weapons. This is a conflict over a mirage. It does not exist. Exactly. And if I may just may add, because in the last few years, Iranian senior officials

have repeatedly contacted me or I've met with them begging. Who do we talk to? How do we deal with this? We want to negotiate. We want to find a solution. And I felt, oh, it's so sad. You're a little naive. You don't know what you're up against. You're up against craziness. I met and listened twice to President Poschkian at the United Nations in the last two years. he's a lovely man. He's a heart surgeon. He spoke for quite a long time about how a heart surgeon, the core is save the patient, save life, not, you don't care even who's the patient on the operating table. And you just feel, oh, it's so sad. And they're saying, who can we talk to? Do you have any idea, Mr. Sacks, someone that may be, you know, may be interested. They have wanted to negotiate for 15 years.

They signed the JCPOA. The Supreme Leader said it was against the religion to have nuclear weapons. So what do these people do? They kill the Supreme Leader. It's just you cannot even imagine this. So this is absolutely the off-ramp has been there. all the time, all the time. And well, Professor Sachs, I just wanted to very quickly say something very, just a comment

of my own before we finish. Iran wants not only wants peace, but he wants peace because it wants to change. Iran is not the same country now that it was in 1979. It's highly educated. Iranian society wants to develop. It wants economic stability. It wants many things. And this is, in fact, reflected in their foreign policy. Perhaps you could just quickly say something about that before we end. Well, just at one point, you know, the picture in the American caricatures and in Trump's true social is that this is a medieval country. of whatever, I won't even use the language, but that this is a highly sophisticated, technologically sophisticated country, which is, by the way, one of the reasons why everything

that was done was a complete delusion. But just to add, I'm hearing from in Iran, from colleagues, from colleagues of colleagues, the U.S. and Israel have systematically attacked the universities across the country. These are sophisticated institutions. They did exactly the same thing in Gaza. If you want to know the most primitive, it's not even medieval because it's worse than medieval. primitive behavior, it is American and Israeli attacks on the core knowledge institutions of other societies. The destruction of the universities of Iran, the destruction of the universities of Gaza is premeditated and is high on the list. These are sophisticated societies that indeed the United States and Israel are trying to destroy. Professor Sachs, thank you again for this outstanding, masterly, summary explanation of where we are.

It's all very worrying, very disturbing. I do hope that the world leaders that you mentioned, Xi Jinping, Putin, and, Modi, that they're listening to what you say. I know they do, by the way. So I hope they're listening to what you just said and that we will actually have, we will actually see some concerted diplomatic action because I agree that is the way this is going to come to an end. Thank you very much. Great, great to be with you guys. Always. I'm sure we'll. Let's talk soon. Let's talk soon. Exactly. Thank you, Professor Taxi. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Bye, bye. Take care.