Transcript of Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: War and Tariffs

Read the full transcript of a conversation between Judge Andrew Napolitano and economist and public policy analyst Prof. Jeffrey Sachs on Judging Freedom Podcast titled “War and Tariffs” premiered April 8, 2025.

The interview starts here:

Introduction

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, April 8, 2025. Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins us now. Professor Sachs, a pleasure as always. Thank you.

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Great to be with you.

U.S. Military Actions in Yemen

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: I want to ask you about what military gain, what political gain, what geopolitical gain there is with the United States bombing a helpless country like Yemen. And then this morning, I saw a video that the President of the United States himself posted on his own website of about 30 or 40 men in a circle or an oval about to break their Ramadan fast when one of Pete Hegseth’s bombs obliterated all of them in the president’s posting. The full video is there. We’re obviously not going to show it. What is gained by this? The posting, the boasting and the killing?

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Obviously, we gain nothing except to prolong America’s expensive, cruel, illegal, perpetual war in the Middle East at Israel’s behalf. This is a war that stretches across North Africa, Libya, East Africa, Sudan, Somalia, into the Eastern Mediterranean, Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and of course, with the intention of Netanyahu, who was in Washington this week, to extend it to Iran.

This is a regional war that has raged for more than 20 years. It’s a war that comes because there is no peace due to Israel’s policy of domination over the Palestinian people, which generates support for the Palestinians, including military support around the region.

Netanyahu’s doctrine, as we’ve discussed, is never to negotiate, never to compromise, but rather to crush not only the Palestinians, but the Libyans, Somalians, Sudanese, Lebanese, Iraqis, Syrians, and Yemenites who would support the Palestinian cause. You name them as terrorists, you name them for whatever you want.

But the terrorist, and in fact, the genocide now is being committed by Israel in Gaza and in Palestine, not because there is an implacable opposition, but because Israel is implacable about dominating what they call Greater Israel.

This is a mix of theological and secular desires of a radical extremist government which Netanyahu leads and has been his vision for 30 years. We are party to that. Trump again gave green light in the visit to Netanyahu, a man that is under an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity. We have seen in recent days the brutal slaughter of aid workers deliberately targeted by the Israelis. Nothing stops it.

So when you ask, what’s to gain, well, you can say, but the Houthis are attacking us because they’re defending the Palestinian cause. Oh, The Hezbollah, they’re attacking because they’re defending the Palestinian cause. Hamas, they’re attacking because they’re defending the Palestinian cause. And the point is that Israel says there is no Palestinian cause. We crush them, we kill them, we destroy them. We ethnically cleanse them. We colonize the West Bank with hundreds of thousands of settlers.

Of course, there will be no peace that way. But is that really America’s best interest? Perpetual war to bankrupt our country, to isolate our country internationally, to absolutely break relations across the world? Because people can see this for what it is, complicity in an ongoing suppression and commission of war crimes. So it’s very, very sad because war cannot solve political issues. It can kill a lot of people, but it can’t solve basic political issues.

Trump’s Demands on Iran

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Our friend and colleague, Colonel Douglas MacGregor has offered here and elsewhere that the demands that President Trump has imposed on Iran, a dismantling of nuclear facilities which his own CIA and DIA and other intelligence communities tell him do not exist. A dismantling of ballistic missiles and other offensive weaponry, A, would essentially reduce Iran to a non-sovereign country, something sort of like Syria, and B, are non-starters. So I wonder if these demands, in your view, Professor Sachs, that the President has made, is just an excuse to engage in the war that Netanyahu ardently wants.

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: We should understand that part of US arrogance over the last 30 years is you don’t negotiate with the other side. You bomb it, you threaten it. You believe that American dominance always prevails. And in the case of Iran, there was a negotiated agreement to end Iran’s nuclear program at whatever state it is, and in return to end sanctions. That was the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, negotiated in 2016 by several countries, including the United States.

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When Donald Trump came into office in 2017, he immediately repudiated the JCPOA at Israel’s urging. By the way, Israel wasn’t interested in the denuclearization of the JCPOA. Israel was interested in Iran being the seventh war that was on the list that we’ve discussed many times. Israel wants the United States to bomb and ostensibly destroy Iran.

And so there was an agreement. We were there. This is like what happened in North Korea, by the way. Same thing. In the late 1990s, President Clinton negotiated with North Korea a program for denuclearization. The United States did not carry out its obligations. North Korea violated terms of the agreement as well. In those circumstances, you double down and get back to the agreement that was signed. Instead, George Bush Jr. came in, appointed John Bolton, one of our most destructive diplomats of modern history, Bolton said, take a hard line, threaten and cajole the North Koreans. And yes, what do we have in the end? A nuclear North Korea with ever growing nuclear arsenals and delivery capabilities because we rejected the negotiated path.

So now, same thing, maybe Trump says, yes, we’ll negotiate, but we’ll destroy them if they don’t agree on our terms. We’ve heard that before. This is the American approach that fails again and again and again. Somehow American leaders believe that the key is to show utter disrespect and disdain for the other side and that that somehow brings about the desired outcome. This is the opposite of the truth.

It’s the opposite of how we should behave in our daily lives vis-a-vis other people that we want to have a normal, ongoing relationship with. It’s the opposite of how you should behave with an irascible neighbor next door. It is the opposite of a way to reaching a real agreement. We will threaten, Trump will cajole. He’ll say, we’ll destroy you. Who knows? But very likely, negotiations will collapse in distrust and then God knows what will happen. Will it be war? Will it be a nuclear Iran? We don’t know.

But to get to an agreement, one actually has to approach matters through building a sense of confidence on both sides that one could actually find the mutual benefit of ending a nuclear program or definitively ending it if it is essentially ended. And on the other side, ending the threats and the sanctions and the risks of attacking that country under the control of a really disgusting Israel lobby which pushes relentlessly for America to be at war, that you have to actually solve by talking with the other side, not merely threatening the other side.

But America – and I don’t mean American people, of course. I mean the arrogant people in Washington who believe that only threats and bombs are the solution, have led us for 30 years of non-stop war since the early 1990s. It’s unbelievable. But that’s still where we are till today.

Trump’s Comments on Iran

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Here’s the President yesterday after just having had lunch with Prime Minister Netanyahu. Now, he’s seated next to the Prime Minister, but you can’t see him in this clip, but there’s one or two lines in here that probably made Netanyahu’s eyebrows raised, even though the target of what Trump is saying is Iran. This is the Oval Office yesterday.

[VIDEO CLIP STARTS:]

REPORTER: Is the United States under your leadership, ready to take military action to destroy the Iranian nuclear program and remove this threat?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: I think if the talks aren’t successful with Iran I think Iran is going to be in great danger, and I hate to say it, great danger, because they can’t have a nuclear weapon.

You know, it’s not a complicated formula. Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. That’s all there is. You can’t have it right now. We have countries that have nuclear, nuclear power that shouldn’t have it. But I’m sure we’ll be able to negotiate out of that too, as part of this later on down the line. But Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. And if the talks aren’t successful, I actually think it’ll be a very bad day for Iran.

[VIDEO CLIP ENDS:]

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: We get to Iran, he’s seated three feet away from someone who runs a government that illegally possesses nuclear weapons.

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Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: That’s another long story in its own right, how the United States tried to prevent Israel from getting nuclear weapons in the late 50s. President Eisenhower and President Kennedy and the machinations that Israel took, with many charges being made and so forth that I won’t go into. But in any event, yes, Israel is a nuclear power that is obviously not shy at deploying, I’ll say, the US Military at its side because it pulls the US into war after war after war on its unjust behalf and it wants to do the same with Iran.

President Trump is correct. It’s not that complicated. In fact, he walked into office the first time on January 20, 2017, with such an agreement already in hand. Perhaps he couldn’t stand that it was an Obama negotiated agreement. Perhaps he just fell under the Israel lobby. Perhaps he just took the hard line position which he often takes, which is any agreement must be bad. If the other side agreed, we have to add more pressure until an agreement collapses so that we can add even more pressure to get whatever we want. Or at least as he believes so the agreement was already there.

It’s true. He’s right. An agreement could be reached. Threatening to destroy Iran is not a great way to get that agreement, I have to say. But an agreement could be reached because it’s a proof of concept. We already had that agreement.

Iran-Israel Relations

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Do we know if American intel views Iran as a threat to Israel? We know American intel views Iran as no threat whatsoever to the United States. Isn’t it more likely that Israel is a threat to Iran than that Iran is a threat to Israel?

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: I don’t know the American intel and anything called American intel. I put intel quotation marks.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Of course.

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: It’s what the intelligence agency. And intelligence, in that phrase, is a term of art. It’s not an adjective.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: How did they co-opt that word.

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Well, that’s another very good question. But the fact of the matter is it’s not a matter is it a threat or isn’t it a threat? It’s what we make of another country if we threaten other countries with bombing, if we violate agreements, if we negotiate agreements, and then we stop them.

By the way, it is worth recalling for I hope some listeners who, if they haven’t read about it, will go back to read it. The US ended Iran’s democracy in 1953 in a joint MI6 CIA coup against Prime Minister Mosaddegh. Mosaddegh was an elected, popular, very intelligent prime minister of Iran who had the temerity to believe that the oil under the ground belonged to them, not to the British and the American surgeons. The nerve of it all. So they overthrew him in 1953 and installed a police state until 1979.

Then we were very upset when the Iranians were upset with us for those decades of a police state. But have no fear, when their revolution came in 1979 and we had the hostage taking and then the hostages released at the time of President Reagan coming to office, what did the United States do? The United States armed Iraq, Saddam Hussein, remember our good friend and ally, the one that we overthrew later on, armed Saddam Hussein to go kill hundreds of thousands of Iranians and with absolute devastation of civilian populations, we did that. We armed and equipped and financed Iraq to devastate Iran.

We’ve been there before. Overthrows, coups, police state, and we say, look at how terrible, what an enemy they are, what a danger they are. There’s a history to everything and it’s often worth recalling the history.

If we sat down now and discussed, if we had just abided by an agreement negotiated in 2016, if we took, as we should have, the repeated, I would say, almost incessant peace feelers by the Iranians during the brain dead Biden administration, which neglected or threw out every time Iran tried to return to the negotiating table. We may have been somewhere different from where we are right now. We just can’t get it through our big skulls in Washington that threats and war and bombing and overthrows are not the right way to make peace.

Tariffs and Geopolitics

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Let me take you back to the conversation we had last Thursday, which was received by an enormous audience in which you and I were harshly critical. You from an economic point of view, me from the legal and constitutional point of view. Although you made these arguments articulately of the President’s Tariffs. What effect do these tariffs as unlawful, unconstitutional and misguided economically as they are. What effect do they have on the geopolitics that we have been discussing?

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Global Economic Fallout from Trump’s Tariff Policies

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Well, first of all, people are not amused all over the world that $10 trillion of market capitalization has been wiped out in three days. They’re not amused that we’re spiraling into a new economic downturn, that there’s more economic unpredictability than there has been in decades. We have China saying, no, we’re not going to be blackmailed by you, Mr. Trump. And then President Trump saying, okay, I add another 50% to 50 percentage points to the tariff rates to put them over 100%.

And apparently just before we’re speaking now, if I caught a headline properly, the US is saying it’s going to move forward on that. I don’t know whether that’s actually the fact because I haven’t seen a detailed report. But within three days, the world system was overturned by an executive order that starts with the powers invested in me as president of the United States. I declare an emergency.

This is not how the United States operates as a democracy. This is a degradation and derogation of democracy. It’s a disgrace that our country operates this way, but it’s operating this way and affecting the entire world.

International Reactions

Now we’re seeing all over the world countries scrambling to understand. Some, yes, they’re coming in bended knee. “What do we have to do to make you happy, Mr. President?” So some are doing that. That no doubt delights the White House. Some are taking the view that this is absolutely unacceptable for one person by a self-declaration to break a system built over many decades.

And most countries are asking, “My God, who are our trade partners? What are we going to do next week? What are we going to do when the tariffs start hitting?” And so I believe that many, many countries are coming to the view quickly, we need to cooperate among ourselves because the United States is breaking apart things that our people depend on for their livelihoods.

There was a call between the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and the prime minister of China, where the two sides said we had better negotiate stability right now so that we don’t amplify the devastating effects that Trump’s decisions are having on the world economy.

So China and the European Union are, I hope, sitting down in a mature way to say, let’s not amplify this. I mentioned last time we talked that India and China are taking steps to make sure that the relationship is calm and balanced. China, Korea and Japan are taking such steps. ASEAN, the 10 countries of Southeast Asia have been meeting to discuss how ASEAN should coalesce more closely together among themselves, which is 700 million people. And I know and believe that ASEAN recognizes that it must integrate even more with China as a result of the instability coming from across the Atlantic Ocean.

So Trump has single-handedly, by a decree not debated, deliberated in Congress, not voted on the basis of law, no backing in the American business community, no backing by the American public, certainly thrown the entire world into a crisis. And a crisis that I think will cause countries to coalesce in a kind of defensive mode with each other facing the United States as a dire economic threat to them.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Professor Sachs, thank you very much. We’ve been all over the globe and I deeply appreciate your comments. I know it’s the middle of the night where you are. You’re so gracious. All the best. We’ll see you next week.

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: See you next week.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Take care.

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Bye bye.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Bye, bye. Coming up at 2:00, Aaron Maté. And at 3:00 this afternoon, Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.