Transcript: Judging Freedom LIVE from the Ron Paul – Blueprint for Peace Conference

The failure because we didn’t launch World War Three, because the two presidents had a good meeting together because they announced progress. This was taken as failure in our media, which of course is hawkish by the moment and manipulated by, controlled by, paid by, or simply aligned with the military industrial complex in the country.

So it’s extraordinarily hard to hear a word about peace in this country. It’s not so complicated actually to end these conflicts. It’s a little surprising how long it takes and how hard it is to accomplish this. But it’s not so hard in substance because the underlying reasons for the conflicts that the United States is in perpetually are not sound reasons from the point of view of America’s interests, from the point of view of our security, from the point of view of our well-being, or our economy.

All of the conflicts that we are in and those that we could get in are misguided, misdirected, provoked by us to a very large extent, and solvable. That’s the basic point. It really is not so complicated.

# Eisenhower’s Warning

I think the wisest words which we repeat and Dan just started us with that we’ve heard in the eighty years since the end of World War Two were those in President Eisenhower’s farewell address on January 17, 1961. And I’ll just repeat them because they summarize all that has come to pass. He said, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence whether sought or unsought by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

This is a man who knew what he was talking about as the supreme allied commander and as president of the United States and I might add as president of Columbia University, his most important job. He knew what he was talking about. And he was reporting to us a reality that existed already in January 1961.

# The Cuban Missile Crisis

That reality almost led to the end of the world actually, just a year and a half later in the Cuban Missile Crisis. President Kennedy experienced the full nearly catastrophic weight of the military industrial complex at that time because if President Kennedy had followed the overwhelming advice of absolutely almost every adviser in that ExComm that was famously preserved for history through its recordings of the days of that crisis, we would not be here today.

And I think people know or you should know that even after Kennedy and Khrushchev resolved the crisis through a kind of genius of decency and humanity against the advice of all of their military advisers, we nearly had the world end anyway because of a disabled Soviet submarine that was out of communication. And when it began to surface some jackass in the US military was dropping live hand grenades as a joke rather than depth charges.

They thought they were under attack, and it happened to be the one submarine in the squadron that had nuclear tipped torpedoes and they were entered into the bay. And a man named Mr. Arkhipov, who was senior to the captain, countermanded the order and saved the world, only to go back home by the way and be reprimanded and live in obscurity, but literally the man who saved the world.

Saved the world within one second because US doctrine at the time was that any attack by nuclear atomic weapon would be met by the full force of the US nuclear armaments and the estimation at the time was 700 million dead across the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, but good reason to believe that all of humanity might have perished. And we came within a second of that.

# Kennedy’s Peace Speech

Next year, Kennedy made peace with the Soviet Union in one of the most brilliant and illustrative episodes of modern history. I commend everybody to listen to Kennedy’s peace speech of June 10, 1963. My poor family has had to listen to it maybe a hundred times. I wrote a book about it because I love the speech so much. I was a friend also of Ted Sorensen whom I admired enormously.

But Kennedy made peace by praising the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, talking about their valor, their culture, their scientific accomplishments, and the fact that both sides would perish in a conflict so both sides could be depended on to seek peace.

And Khrushchev heard the speech, immediately summoned Kennedy’s envoy, Averell Harriman, said “That’s the finest speech by a modern American president. I want to make peace with your boss.” And five weeks later, the partial nuclear test ban treaty was signed. And about four months after that, in my opinion, the CIA killed Kennedy for that and for other crimes of trying to make peace.

# The Fear of Making Peace

Maybe that explains the military industrial complex as much as anything. Maybe our leaders are just afraid. They’re afraid to make peace. They’re afraid to step out of line. Maybe it is true as some have said that since John F. Kennedy, there hasn’t been a president really that has been an independent actor in the American scene. I think it’s an arguably correct point.

Nixon is another partial example and he may have paid the price as well by an inside job to help bring him down. I think it’s arguable that they’re just afraid. If they’re not afraid of that, maybe they’re afraid of Mossad, or maybe they’re bought, or maybe they don’t understand, or maybe they read the New York Times. It’s a little hard to understand why it is that we are in this mess of war after war that cost trillions of dollars, and that do nothing but worsen our security.

# The Doomsday Clock

I happen to be a fan of the Doomsday Clock, which is the graphic of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists unveiled in 1947, which tries to alert us with a considered opinion of how close or far we are from nuclear war and nuclear Armageddon.

And as people who follow the Doomsday Clock will know that when it was unveiled in 1947, it was seven minutes from midnight. It went closer to midnight during the height of the Cold War. Then as some measure of détente and Kennedy’s initiatives came to fruition, it was moved away from midnight, then it came closer to midnight. Then the Cold War ended in December 1991, or so we thought.

And the clock was reset at seventeen minutes away from midnight, the farthest away. Every president since 1991 has been in a period in which the clock has moved closer to midnight. I would argue that every president since 1991, Clinton, Bush Junior, Obama, Trump One, Biden, have moved us closer to disaster. That this isn’t just an accident of their term.

# The Missed Opportunity of 1991

We had all of the ability to make peace in 1991. We chose not to. We chose not to consciously the military industrial complex and the lobbies, the Israel lobby and others chose not to. They chose not to because they said after 1991, “We are all powerful and now we can do what we want.” And some of our so-called leaders and strategists put it exactly in those terms, Wolfowitz and others who had the doctrine that now we can do whatever we want. We can go to war anywhere we want. We can overthrow any government anywhere we want.

I had a bit of a front row seat in those days because I fruitlessly was trying to get the United States to actually help the Soviet Union actively in 1990 and then to help Russia in 1991 and 1992 with financial assistance because of an urgent financial crisis that engulfed not randomly, but a failed economic system. But when a system fails and the society is in distress, I believe you help so that you don’t get into worse trouble.

# Witnessing the End of the Soviet Union

So I had a front row seat, I was part of an effort with as an advisor to President Gorbachev to try to enlist US support for financial stabilization in a very deep crisis. Then I was asked by President Yeltsin. And I mention this. I actually was in the Kremlin on December, I think it’s December 13. I haven’t been able to absolutely confirm the specific date, but it was around December 13, 1991 when President Yeltsin walked across the room and sat in front of me because I was a young kid, but happened to be head of the delegation.

And he said, “Gentlemen,” because it was all men, “I want to tell you the Soviet Union is over.” That’s pretty interesting to hear that in the Kremlin. I kind of pinch myself, and then it was my turn to speak and I said, “Mr. President, this is one of the greatest days in modern history. And I am sure, I am sure that my country will come to your assistance to give you help, to help you stabilize because I know how extreme the financial crisis is. I’m a financial economist. I’ve helped stabilize a number of hyperinflations.”

“You need some urgent help even just a standstill on debt service payments because you don’t have foreign exchange reserves. This is a revolution. You need help to stabilize. But Mr. President, I’m sure that this will happen.”

Incidentally, without digressing, I had said the same thing as Poland’s advisor two years earlier. And when I made those recommendations as a technical economist, Brent Scowcroft, General Scowcroft delivered within eight hours the recommendations that I made and Senator Dole. So I thought I’m a pretty good economist, very convincing, and they’ll do the same. Nothing of the sort.

Then I got blamed for the lack of stabilization in Russia by many people, though it was exactly the opposite of what I had been saying because we refused to provide any help whatsoever. And honestly, I could not quite figure it out. I knew that the people weren’t very clever. But I still couldn’t figure out why.

# The Continuation of the Cold War

To summarize, the reason why is that the Cold War did not end in December 1991. It was only midway. Because the idea which actually goes back to the British, I would date it to 1840, was to destroy Russia, then to destroy the Soviet Union, and then back again now we’ll destroy Russia.

And Brzezinski spelled it out of course in his book in 1997, “The Grand Chessboard,” opining that a NATO expansion eastward would be inevitable that Russia would exceed. What could it do? He actually has a whole chapter reasoning that Russia would never side with China. Impossible, Zbig told us. And I liked Zbig because he was a nice man who helped me when I was helping Poland. But he had his designs. We’re going to break Russia. And that’s what the military industrial complex went after 1991.

# Netanyahu’s Role

Another not so gentle gentleman joined the scene in 1996. Another disaster of our time and that’s Benjamin Netanyahu. One of the most vile misguided criminals on our planet as far as I’m concerned. Maybe you’ll give me fifty-eight standing ovations like Congress gave Netanyahu fifty-eight standing ovations.

But Netanyahu’s idea was at a smaller scale while the military industrial complex of Wolfowitz and Feith and all these extraordinarily naive and ignorant people thought the US would run the world. Israel decided of course it would control the Middle East and it would do so on our tab and with our military and with our support.

And so Netanyahu said, “We’re not going to make any compromises.” It’s even a funny term if you know the history of Zionism that it’s a compromise. “We come in, you should leave,” is the basic summary, but not even “We’ll divide the house.” “It was your house, we’ll divide the house. We’ll take seventy-eight percent, you can have twenty-two percent.” No. “We’ll take a hundred percent and there’s a lot of places you can move to. What are you complaining about? You ingrate?” That’s the basis of the idea.

And then the point is that a lot of people won’t like that. There will be a militant reaction. And then Netanyahu’s idea is you don’t fight the militants, you fight the governments that back them. So we know, of course, from Wesley Clark, the famous story that he visited the Pentagon a week after 9/11 and he was shown the list of the seven wars in five years, which was a neocon Israel concoction combined. “We’re going to take out all those governments” and that is Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, and Libya. You know what?

The Path to Peace: Ending America’s Endless Wars

We’ve been at war with all seven of them. It didn’t quite go to plan of seven wars in five years because we got bogged down in each one. It didn’t go to plan because it made a wasteland of several thousand kilometers from Libya to Iran. But that’s been a plan and that’s part of this same disaster. It solves nothing.

We have solved nothing. And to this day, these maniacs who are murderous genocideurs and killing in mass murder. To this day, they have the backing of the United States government. Not even a murmur of opposition. Sixty thousand dead, twenty thousand of them children, eighteen thousand by the official count children, names listed in the Washington Post recently.

People showing up starving at food depots to be shot at, all caught on TikTok. Ben Gavir saying “we’re going to take everything” again yesterday, not a murmur from our government. Who runs it? What is going on? The American people at least two to one against Israel in this in the opinion surveys because the American public is revolted by what’s happening.

So this is why we’re here. And yesterday was at least a glimmer of hope. It’s just a glimmer. There’s a battle going on obviously in Washington and in London. London is even worse than Washington by the way because they had centuries of insanity.

If anyone’s here from Britain, my apologies. But it’s unbelievable. It shows you can lose your empire eighty years ago and still think you have it, and still think you run the world, and still think that America’s your junior partner doing your mischief. MI6 is an absolute reckless out of control disaster and you look at Starmer. Oh my god.

Don’t get me started. Do not get me started because I will not get off the podium.

Remembering the Monroe Doctrine

We had a doctrine issued two hundred years ago which is not remembered properly. The Monroe Doctrine. And I do want to remember it because it’s sometimes taken as a bogeyman or sometimes taken as a statement of American foreign policy, but it’s not taken correctly.

And the idea of the Monroe Doctrine was that in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and the declaration of independence of the other states in the Western Hemisphere in the early years of the eighteen twenties, the United States said to the European powers “do not interfere in our hemisphere.” Okay. Little bold by the way of the US at the time. We were not exactly the strapping empire of the world compared to the European empires.

But there was actually a very important part of it that I want to recall, and I want to read it. And I quote, it’s from the message to Congress of President Monroe, December second eighteen twenty three. With this part written by the Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams. He said “our policy in regard to Europe, which was adopted at an early stage of the wars that have so long agitated that quarter of the globe, nevertheless remains the same, which is not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers.”

It was a reciprocal commitment. Stay out of our lane, we’ll stay out of your lane. This is really smart advice. Even smarter in a nuclear armed world. Don’t go to provoke. Don’t think you run the world. Don’t expand NATO eastward to Russia’s border for god’s sake.

After you have said repeatedly, explicitly, not ambiguously to president Gorbachev and to other Soviet and Russian leaders that NATO would not move one inch eastward. And if you think it’s a myth, go to the National Security Archive of George Washington University and pull out the dozens of documents or the clips of Hans Dietrich Genscher saying explicitly “this doesn’t refer to a promise within Germany. This is in general. We’re not going to move eastward.” That’s what the Monroe Doctrine really says.

The Ukraine Crisis: NATO Expansion and Broken Promises

What are we doing trying to push NATO to Ukraine and to Georgia? Well, I’ll tell you what we’re doing. We’re doing what Lord Palmerston tried to do in eighteen fifty three in the Crimean War, which was to surround Russia and banish Russia from the Black Sea. That’s the idea.

And immediately after the Maidan coup, which my colleague Victoria Nuland was a very competent sponsor of, she now teaches diplomacy at Columbia University. You cannot make this up. Even George Orwell did not imagine such a thing. Anyway, she teaches diplomacy together with Hillary Clinton. It’s so weird.

Anyway, the coup came, and immediately, the post coup government said, “we don’t think the Russians should be in Crimea.” That is their naval base for the last hundred from seventeen eighty three. I won’t calculate the number of years. That was the idea. It was Palmerston’s idea. It was Brzezinski’s idea.

That’s not the Monroe Doctrine. That is “we will be in your face right up to your face. We will annoy you. We will,” as the Rand Corporation wrote in twenty nineteen in one of the most absurd, dangerous, ridiculous exemplars of American foreign policy, “we will extend you.” Extending Russia, a document of a think tank, how to annoy Russia in twenty seven different ways.

Is this really what we pay them for? How to provoke the other nuclear superpower with six thousand nuclear weapons and then wonder why the hand of the doomsday clock is eighty nine seconds to midnight? These people are crazy. Honestly, it’s very very dangerous.

So I know nobody told me how long to speak and I tend to speak about six hours. So I’m going to stop very shortly.

Simple Solutions to Complex Conflicts

Let me just say that all the major conflicts can be ended straightforwardly. Ukraine war, the causes of the Ukraine war is NATO enlargement, US coup, CIA operations all over Ukraine. Even the New York Times reported that one a couple of months ago. We’ve got to stop being in Russia’s face.

They know it. They know all of it. They were so kind as to post Victoria Nuland’s call with Jeffrey Piat choosing the next government. Thank you. They know all of it. They know who paid for the Maidan demonstrators. They’ve got everything. We’ve got to stop the provocations.

And, yes, by the way, there was no Russian demand for territory of any kind. Crimea, they wanted a twenty five year lease, which they negotiated, president Putin and president Yanukovych. Not territory, not a claim. Even after the coup, Russia took back Crimea. “No, NATO. You’re not getting that base.”

But even when it came to the Donbas, they just said autonomy in this post coup anti Russia regime. The United States said no to that one too.

And incidentally, I’ll share with you just one moment. In twenty twenty one, the war could have been avoided easily by president Biden saying to president Putin, “NATO will not expand to Ukraine, and I will say so.” And I called Jake Sullivan. He teaches at Harvard. It’s all consistent after you fail in Washington.

And I said, “Jake, avoid a war. Stop NATO enlargement. It’s ridiculous. It’s useless. Would you like it on the Rio Grande in Mexico, a Russian military base?” Said, “Jeff, we have an open door policy for NATO.” Said, “Jake, give me a break. Open door policy.” I repeated the Monroe Doctrine to no effect.

And I said, “Jake, stop the NATO enlargement.” He said to me, “Jeff, NATO’s not going to enlarge to Ukraine.” I said, “Jake, we’re going to have a war over something that’s not going to happen. Why don’t you say so?” He said to me, “don’t worry. There’s not going to be a war.”

Honestly, these people are not clever. They’re not clever. What they’re doing makes no sense. They don’t know what they’re doing. We don’t know when Biden checked out, maybe already then. But in any event, they’re not smart. They’re getting us into trouble.

So we could make peace in Ukraine. Tomorrow was yesterday was a hint of it, but you could see the president is so everything about our media, about the congress, about the military industrial complex. Whether he has the skill or not, I don’t know. But if he were a communicator and had the guts and what he should stand up and explain to the American people “this was about NATO enlargement, we’re not going to do it.” That would be the end. But he can’t quite he says it privately, I’m sure, but not publicly. Why? Because we’re still trapped. We’re trapped as Eisenhower told us we’re trapped.

The Propaganda Machine

And all these think tanks up and down the East Coast are bought the same way. It’s all phony. Everything you hear about the data there was a report recently about Russia’s casualties being x times that of Ukraine by one of the Washington think tanks. So I looked at it was absurd. So I looked at the footnote. Where’d that come from? The footnote came from the Ministry of Defense of Britain. I was already suspicious.

So then I went to the Ministry of Defense of Britain and after a little maneuver and tracked down its source. It was Ukraine. Oh my god. They get paid for this. Of course, it’s paid propaganda.

Okay. Ukraine can be stopped when the president of the United States says publicly, “NATO will not enlarge.” He could add parentheses, “it was a bad idea.” If he wants, he could say, “it wasn’t my idea. Was their terrible ideas.” He could say “Obama did the coup.” Whatever he wants to say. But if he told the truth, the war will end.

The Middle East Solution

When it comes to the Middle East. Oh, God. Practically speaking, we should vote today, tomorrow, Monday in the UN Security Council for a state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel. You’d have a hundred nine. You would have a hundred ninety two votes and Israel would not have a veto, and it would be implemented.

And I speak with top leaders across the world in my job, including throughout the Middle East, all of the governments with Iran, with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, with presidents of Islamic majority countries all over the world, Indonesia, Malaysia, throughout Africa, everybody’s ready for peace except the zealots in Israel and the Israel lobby here in the United States. That’s it.

And peace could come the moment we tell the truth and tell them to stop the genocide and we stop being complicit in the genocide too. It’s not even complicated.

China: The Myth of Military Expansion

And finally, we are preparing for war with China now. If you want the worst idea on the whole planet in all of history, that’s it. Unbelievable that the thought could even be uttered.

Let me tell you something about China’s overseas military adventures. It’s easy. I’m going to give you two thousand years of China’s overseas military adventures. I’m done. There have never been Chinese overseas military adventures.

China never invaded Japan once in two thousand years. With the following footnote, if anyone challenges me when you repeat that and they say “Sachs is an idiot, doesn’t he know that China invaded Japan in twelve seventy four AD and twelve eighty one AD?” And you remind them, “no, no, that was the Mongols, not the Chinese.” Okay?

China never invaded Korea once in two thousand years except in nineteen fifty when Douglas MacArthur threatened nuclear war on China. Other than that, never.

And, yes, I did get an email from a very nice Vietnamese correspondent who said “Mr. Sachs you underestimate we’ve been at war with China for two thousand years Vietnam.” I had to remind him that the actual war ended one thousand fifty years ago. And that there were two wars in the last thousand years, it’s true. China did invade a northern province of Vietnam in fourteen ten AD. And the war lasted for seventeen years to fourteen twenty seven at which point the Chinese were defeated by the Vietnamese and by malaria, which is one of the reasons why they never did it.

There is a disease zone and a tropical forest zone and a mountain zone, and they invaded Vietnam one month in nineteen seventy nine after Vietnam had toppled their ally next door in Cambodia was one month. Other than that, a thousand years.

China’s not going to invade the United States. It can’t. It won’t. It’s not going to invade any place. And if there would be an invasion even of Taiwan, which is a province of China, it would be because the United States is unilaterally arming Taiwan against our diplomacy, our treaties, against our nineteen eighty two communicate, which said we would phase out arming Taiwan.

The biggest risk we face is turning Taiwan into Ukraine. And we’re way on the way to doing that because the same thought processes in Washington are at work in East Asia. It’s just that the consequences would be even more devastating. First for Taiwan, second for the United States, and third for the entire world.

A Blueprint for Reform

So let me end by saying not only could all these conflicts easily be resolved, easily be resolved, but we should also look just a bit at the process and I just want to mention a few quick points.

First, it was already recognized by President Truman in nineteen sixty three publicly soon after Kennedy’s assassination and already known before that that the biggest mistake we made in nineteen forty seven was to give the CIA two jobs. One intelligence, which we need. And two, covert operations which is absolutely deadly for our security and for world peace. We should end all CIA covert operations. Period.

Second, obviously, from the news that we’ve seen recently and from what we know, need to depoliticize the CIA and the intelligence agencies. We need intelligence. We don’t need politics in those agencies.

Third, we need to close our overseas military bases. They serve they are hundreds of billions of dollars in eighty countries, seven hundred fifty to eight hundred overseas military bases that only suborn politics all over the world, support covert operations, and create terrible expense and terrible crises. We need diplomacy to return.

JD Vance explained what he called the Trump doctrine. I just want to say he got part of it right and one major part wrong. Or, I mean, the doctrine is part right and a major part wrong. Vance said that the Trump doctrine is first articulate a clear American interest. Good. Second, aggressively seek a diplomatic solution. Good. Then the third, if diplomacy fails, use overwhelming military force to solve the issues and then withdraw before it becomes an extended conflict.

The Iran Absurdity and Trump Doctrine

That is the Iran absurdity at play. By the way, if that was aggressive diplomacy, you announce your next meeting is on Sunday and you bomb on Friday. And that that’s really going to solve your problems or enhance diplomacy. So the Trump doctrine, if that’s really what it is, urgently needs to be rethought.

And finally, most importantly, we need public understanding. We need public awareness. We need the public to understand what America’s real interests are. We need brave congressmen like congressman Duncan who told his constituency that these wars make no sense, that they are not for American security. We need the Ron Paul Institute. We need our favorite judge Napolitano.

Thank you very much.

Live Broadcast Introduction

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: So welcome everyone to this special live broadcast of judging freedom. As you can see at the dais with us is professor Sachs, and you can see colonel Douglas MacGregor. I’ve been privileged to have started this little podcast called judging freedom with which many of you may be familiar. But by the way, we’re waiting for the Blumenthals, which happens on live television as well.

The largest reason for the success of judging freedom is the two gentlemen sitting at the podium right now. We were going to talk about the depravity of American foreign policy about which you heard a great deal in the very excellent and articulate lecture from professor Sachs, but we would be remiss if we did not discuss the events of yesterday as far as we understand them.

Analysis of the Alaska Meeting

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: So, colonel MacGregor, even though I didn’t tell you I was going to ask you this, I will start with you. What the hell happened yesterday in Anchorage, Alaska? Doesn’t he look like Douglas MacArthur?

COL DOUGLAS MACGREGOR: Except that I haven’t urged nuclear war lately, so I think that’s where the similarity ends. I didn’t hear the beginning of your presentation, so I don’t know, Jeff, what you had to say. I think on the positive side, we had the leaders of two important powers in the world. I say that instead of saying a superpower and something else because that’s all nonsense now. And they met and they talked.

And it was amicable. That was obvious. And I think president Trump and his team were finally convinced after the meeting was over that the Russians are very consistent in their aims, consistent in what they want, and they are not going to deviate from those positions. And I think Donald Trump was surprised that his personal charm, charisma, and so forth was not extraordinarily important to the Russian team.

Having said that, I thought the best part was the end where, Mr. Putin said, “Well, you should come to Moscow.” And, of course, president Trump said, “Sure. Oh, I’m going to get heat for that.” And I’d say that’s the biggest problem right now with president Trump, and I like him personally, but there seems to be an acute absence of courage and backbone to step away from all the nonsense and lead. Anyway, what do you think?

Trump’s Neocon Problem

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Professor Sachs, has president Trump succumbed to the neocon control around him?

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Yes. Yes. Yeah. I also picked up on those last words that Trump clearly has in mind the Washington bubble rather than the issues of the conflict. My guess is knowing most of the negotiators on both sides and the rehashing of issues for many years that they get it and that Trump just can’t figure out how to get out of this exactly.

On the US side, it’s not so hard because he has the American people on his side. So this isn’t trying to convey a message that is somehow contrary to American opinion. Americans would love to hear nothing more from our president than “We’re not still involved in this war, and we’re improving our relations with Russia.”

He seems, for reasons I do not fully understand, and Doug would know more than I or can help us on this, he seems to care about what Lindsey Graham thinks, for example.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Oh, good lord.

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Exactly. Why would anyone care? Or Blumenthal, another rather disgraceful member of the senate. Pure warmongers. No ideas. No strategy. No nothing other than to continue the war. So I thought that those last few words, “Oh, I’m going to take heat for that if I go to Moscow,” really showed a lot, actually. It really showed something much bigger than to quit.

Trump’s Role in Ukraine

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Colonel, isn’t this as much Donald Trump’s war as Joe Biden’s? Didn’t Donald Trump arm Ukraine to the teeth during his first presidency?

COL DOUGLAS MACGREGOR: I think that’s indisputable. And, of course, you’ve heard him also say on more than one occasion, “I’m responsible for providing the javelin missile systems that were so important at the outset of this war.” He’s a schizophrenic. He doesn’t know which way to go.

But the biggest problem right now, and I got to be frank about this, is the American people. And now that I see Nassim Taleb, mister no skin in the game, who’s just walked in here, I think it’s important that everybody understand that too few Americans have any skin in the game.

So what’s it all about? The war and soldiering. Well, I hear it all the time. “Well, no Americans have died. Therefore, what difference does it make?” And, of course, millions of people have had their lives destroyed by all of this. Millions have been killed and wounded. Ukraine is effectively prepared to go out of existence at this stage. That’s what people in the United States don’t understand. The lopsided exchange ratio is overwhelming. You can’t even begin to imagine it.

The American Problem

So what’s wrong with Americans? Well, Americans, if it doesn’t affect them personally, then they don’t pay much attention. And the same problem extends to finance. By the way, Mr. Nassim Taleb is also gold is now the reserve currency, which I happen to agree with a hundred percent. And I wish everybody else would come to terms with that reality as well. I’m saying these things upfront so you don’t have anything to say when you get here.

Now in all seriousness, it’s a big problem. How do you get Americans mobilized to do something? And I go back to World War one when the British asked the French, “How many troops do you need at the outbreak of a war with Germany?” And they said, “Just send one, and we’ll make sure he’s killed instantly.” Because that was the hook as far as they were concerned.

Sadly, I think that’s where we are. And Americans are about to wake up over the next few months and be shocked at what occurs financially, economically, socially, because they haven’t paid much attention. They just haven’t.

Ukraine Security Concerns

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Professor Sachs, I heard the president use a phrase yesterday that terrified me. “Ukraine security.” Good god. And the neocons back to that where the United States would provide some sort of assurance, military assurance for the security of Ukraine? Are we all the way back to where we were in two thousand and fourteen under Donald Trump because he doesn’t understand what’s going on and he doesn’t know how we got there? I suggest, I wasn’t in the room, that he heard a lecture on the history of Ukraine from Vladimir Putin, which blew him away. Jeff?

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Ukraine’s security, I think, would be assured by Ukraine’s neutrality. And that’s what was protecting Ukraine before two thousand and fourteen. It was the huge disaster and blunder of the United States strategy going back to, as I said, nineteen ninety one or nineteen forty five, take your pick, but we weren’t stopping with neutrality.

People will any history buffs would enjoy rereading in Thucydides the Melian dialogue. The Melian dialogue is a part of the Peloponnesian war where the Athenian tells the people of Milos, “You cannot be neutral. If you are neutral, we will kill you.” And the Melian said, “But we just want to be friends with both sides. We don’t need anything bad.” And the Athenians say, “No. We will kill you if you proclaim your neutrality.”

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Sachs, I have to—

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Just to say, because you will show all our other allies that they could be neutral also, and we don’t want that to happen. The United States hates the idea of neutrality, not because it weakens those countries. It protects them, but it hates that idea like the Athenians did in four sixteen BC.

And just to say to my mind, if I may one more historical analog, in nineteen fifty five, Austria declared neutrality in an agreement with the Soviet Union where the Soviet Union left Eastern Austria, which it had occupied since nineteen forty five on the basis of neutrality. Austria became rich, prosperous, happy, never bothered again either by the Soviet Union or by Russia by their neutrality. And this is what we have blown in Ukraine. They don’t need our guarantees. They just need to be neutral.

New Panel Members Join

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: So we are joined now, now because of traffic issues, but happily joined by two of the most articulate and courageous investigative reporters in the United States of America, Max Blumenthal and Anya Parampil. Also reasons for the popularity of Judging Freedom.

Max, I’ll go to you. We were going to talk in general terms about the depravity of American foreign policy, and you were going to opine on Israel. Professor Sachs has covered that in his talk earlier today. Your view, your take on what the hell happened yesterday in Alaska.

Max Blumenthal’s Analysis

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, first of all, we had babysitter issues because you wanted both of us. Usually, we get to kind of trade off.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: I demanded both of you.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: It’s like the president and the vice president can’t be in the same place at the same time, but I don’t know what the hell happened yesterday. It looked like a photo op to me, very good photo op for Putin that legitimized him, that legitimized Russia’s military campaign, that signaled that the US understands that they’re winning, but I don’t know what actually took place or what will take place or where they will meet next and the forces, the preponderance of force on Trump from the neoconservative camp.

I mean I felt for so long throughout ever since January that we’re witnessing the third coming of Bush’s first term. I refer to Trump as Orange McCain these days, so I don’t actually know where this is going to go, and I would like to weigh in quickly on what’s happening with Israel because Israel has damaged the credibility of the US everywhere on the world stage to the point where it’s no longer taken very seriously and reduces Trump’s ability to make a deal anywhere.

The Collapse of the Rules-Based Order

The world the rules based order has completely collapsed. The US is supposed to be this nation that represents global liberalism in the post World War two order, and we are supporting an ethno supremacist colony as it enters the final stage of what it began in nineteen forty eight, which is a campaign of ethnic cleansing for basically racial purity. And every faction in congress supports it. The entire power structure supports it.

You see on your way here to this ballroom, military contractor after military contractor. Our economy feasts off of it. This is like the corridor of death out here. Microsoft. Microsoft’s offices are right down the road in Reston. They have two giant skyscrapers dedicated to them and we just learned through Israeli reporters that Microsoft’s Azure cloud is hosting Israel’s database of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip because they had run out of their own cloud space and that is the database they use to determine targeting for their AI gospel system, in other words their automated AI genocide system, and Microsoft is hosting it.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Wow.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: So this is we’re witnessing a complete collapse of the rules based order, and it starts here. It moves through Tel Aviv, and what we witnessed was merely a photo op.

Venezuela and Latin America Policy

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Anya, to your field of specialty, which is Latin America, why did the state department put a fifty million dollar bounty on the popularly elected president of Venezuela two weeks ago?

ANYA PARAMPIL: Well, this is a fun question. And to look at the follies of the Trump policy in Latin America, I think it’s most illustrative to compare the way the United States under Trump has treated Venezuela, which is probably considered the great enemy in the region versus its great ally or the one leader who has come from Latin America to celebrate with MAGA repeatedly and that’s Javier Milei in Argentina.

So there are probably a lot of people in this room that might be a fan of Javier Milei even though my friend Daniel McAdams called him out very early and said “Watch this guy because he’s branded as a libertarian but it might not be that simple” and what I just want to emphasize with these two cases is that yes libertarianism, it might be a brand that you can use in Argentina but really what he’s implemented is just your standard IMF prescribed neo liberal package of privatization slashing of public spending and did you know by the way that in his effort to privatize Argentina’s water supply that an Israeli company stands to benefit and may actually gain control of Argentina’s water system.

Argentina’s Sovereignty Issues

So I think it’s important for libertarians especially to consider national sovereignty sometimes when thinking about these policies because yes it might look like he’s cutting the budget and doing something very libertarian but another example of how Milei has given up Argentina’s sovereignty and I’ll come back to Venezuela to contrast in just a moment but is that last year it was actually reported in the Argentine press that a significant amount of Argentina’s sovereign gold supply was shipped abroad and nobody knows where it went.

The Gold Standard: A Tale of Two Nations

ANYA PARAMPIL: Milei has acknowledged that he did this but will not say where the gold was sent. Now contrast that with Venezuela, the cookie man of the region, which, yes, the judge just mentioned, the United States slapped a fifty million dollars reward, which I think I can claim because he’s in the presidential offices, Maduro, he’s working in Mirafore’s palace, so I think I know where he is or should be able to claim that ultimate reward.

In reality, this reward came down the same week that the Trump administration actually approved Chevron operating in Venezuela. US companies have been restricted from developing and shipping Venezuelan oil to the United States since twenty nineteen when Trump began this coup of recognizing a shadow government. Does the Trump administration still think that that grad student in Miami is the true president of Venezuela? They recognized a few other people since then, but in reality, they did send Richard Grenell down there to negotiate with the president.

And now this reward is something that I think was done to appease figures like Rubio in the cabinet, needing to look like they’re being very aggressive towards Venezuela, while they moved to normalize. And just the last point I wanted to make on that point was that I talked about Malay shipping his gold reserves abroad, well, five months before the United States recognized Juan Guaido, this now Miami grad student as the president of Venezuela, the Venezuelan government under Maduro actually lodged an official repatriation request with the Bank of England asking to bring back their sovereign gold supply.

So how convenient that five months later, the US and London recognized a government that allowed them to say “well actually we don’t know who is the rightful owner of this gold we have to keep it here in our Bank of England indefinitely while we figure this out” even though there’s no question of who runs the central bank in Caracas. So I just wanted to compare those two in the brief time. I think the gold is a way of illustrating what it means.

If you’re an enemy of the United States, you might have some sovereign claim to your resources, and that’s the issue. Whereas if you’re friends with the United States, you can just sell your country off to international finance and be very pro Israel along the way. And that’s kind of what Milei has done to win favor in Washington. Thank you, Anya.

The Military Industrial Complex: 850 Bases and Counting

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Colonel McGregor, what are the dangers of seven hundred and fifty military installations around the world in eighty different countries owned, operated, manned, and funded by the Pentagon?

COL DOUGLAS MACGREGOR: Well, I hate to correct you, but I think it’s a little over eight hundred and fifty at this point.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Happy to be corrected.

COL DOUGLAS MACGREGOR: Well, I can’t add too much more to what Jeff Sachs has said, and his point is accurate. In most cases, these things are a legacy of the Cold War. And if you go back and look at the original executive order signed by the president at the time, it talked explicitly about maintaining the necessary logistical lines of communication and support basis so that we could, in fact, respond to the Soviet threat or the threat of, at that point, what people thought was global communism wherever it manifested itself.

So if you go back and look at those original bases, some of those can still be justified at least in terms of if you want to logistically try and support yourself. But you go to a place like the Pacific, there are only two or three places where you can stockpile a great deal of fuel and ammunition, water, and so forth. All three, with one exception, there are two that are islands. The other is a very large body of landmass. I don’t want to tell you where they are because in theory, I would be violating some important security information.

But if you look at those three locations, they could be annihilated in the first opening minutes of any war that you might fight with anybody, in which case the entire fleet can’t operate. People don’t understand that in nineteen forty one after Pearl Harbor, the whole US fleet, which according to the war plans, was supposed to move decisively east in the direction of the Philippines withdrew everywhere. Well, we only had eleven refuelers in the fleet. Eleven tankers effectively that could refuel the fleet. And the chief of naval operations says, “we don’t have enough. We can’t do it.”

What I’m trying to tell you is that we can’t do most of what we have planned to do today because the world has changed. Precision, guided missiles, overhead surveillance, all of these things militate against the style of warfare that we like, which is or we think we like, which is World War two. But most people don’t even know what happened during the second World War, where they would rethink their assumptions. So most of those bases can be eliminated very quickly without any loss of security.

Some you will want to retain. There’s no question about it. And the countries in which they sit in many cases may be happy to have them. But the point is, it’s time to sit down and look at the eight hundred and fifty. And I’d be very surprised if you couldn’t cut that down to about a hundred and twenty personally. That’s the best I can do.

Stopping the Slaughter: Arms Embargos and Foreign Agents

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Max, what would it take to stop Netanyahu’s slaughter?

MAX BLUMENTHAL: It would take a total arms embargo when it would happen tomorrow. And what we’re hearing is from the Europeans, statehood for the Palestinians. Where is the state going to be when Gaza is fully ethnically cleansed in the West Bank?

The Israelis are just authorizing settlement activity in E1, which will fully close off any part of East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state. So it’s empty bluster. We’ll give the Palestinian authority more power on this in the UN perhaps. And then we see Bernie Sanders actually finally offering putting forward an arms embargo. Ro Khanna is doing it in the house.

They’re getting very little support that I think twenty three democrats supported it. The rest of the senate opposed it. And, long term, it will take registering AIPAC as a foreign agent, which Thomas Massey is pushing. What we need to do because this isn’t about Netanyahu, it’s about the Zionist movement and it’s about a foreign bribery network in the capital as Grant Smith has documented. AIPAC grew out of the American Zionist Council which was itself funded by the Jewish Agency which is an Israeli institution, foreign money, and they circumvented the Foreign Agent Registration Act.

The Fulbright Committee was basically shut down with JFK’s assassination. We just released an interesting piece about James Angleton and not only his involvement in handling Oswald, but also his involvement in basically setting up the Mossad and helping Israel steal nuclear secrets. So what we need is a bipartisan coalition to shut down AIPAC. It’s understood on both sides that this is really the heart of the issue. The Democrats are afraid to touch this.

Massey, look at who he’s going up against. Who’s putting up the money for the super PAC? It’s Miriam Adelson and Paul Singer, two of the top Zionist billionaire donors in the country. So it’s clear what the stakes are. This is about money and shutting down the financial feeding tube of Israel and the US. We’ll end this program overnight, but it starts also with an arms embargo.

Personal Stakes and Professional Risks

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Anya, what is it like being married to somebody who risks his life every day to get the truth out?

ANYA PARAMPIL: It’s fun. Ask Max’s new friend congressman Fine, the poor congressman Fine who openly said starvation is a legitimate weapon of war as if that isn’t a war criminal in the making. As if he’s ever missed a meal.

Mossad and American Leadership

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Professor Sachs, does Mossad spy on the president of the United States? Does Mossad buy the president? Spy. I said spy, but buy might be another question that you can answer.

PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Buy, spy, suborn, and blackmail, probably all of them. I don’t think that there’s a single instrument necessarily that’s decisive. There others here would probably know better, but they’re all over this. No question. And it is a murder inc institution first and foremost.

Final Thoughts: Two Minutes on American Foreign Policy

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: I’m going to give you each two minutes to say whatever you’d like. The freedom the Judging Freedom audience is enormous. This audience is very appreciative. We are running a little bit over, and I’m getting sort of these. If he were Italian, it’ll be called Malocchio, but it’s coming from McAdams. “You got to stop, judge. You got to stop.” But two minutes to each of you on the depravity of American foreign policy starting with Anya.

# Hope in Multipolarity

ANYA PARAMPIL: Well, right now, it’s definitely not great, but I try to remain hopeful because one area that I focused on in my reporting, in fact two years ago when I was here, I think I discussed my trip to the BRICS Summit in South Africa. And while I was there, I was speaking with the officials who represented South Africa, India, China, Russia. Of course, I’m probably forgetting one of the BRICS nations at that. But they were actually open to the United States when I would ask them and they were talking about their goals of multipolarity and cooperation, whether or not they could ever imagine the United States joining a group like BRICS.

And I think if we got over some of our ties to our imperial mentality and decided to cooperate with the world like an adult that we would find that these organizations and these groups aren’t actually formed in opposition to us, but just to create a different kind of world that we could participate in viewing other countries like China, Russia, India, South Africa as equals or partners. And so I just like to try and emphasize as much as they will all emphasize where we’re going wrong I want to also say that there’s hope the rest of the world doesn’t want to just cast the United States aside we’re always going to be a powerful influential nation but it’s I think it’s time that we did something positive with that and actually move toward cooperation and peace. But I’ll let the other three just trash the policy.

# Industrial Grade Espionage and Permanent War

MAX BLUMENTHAL: This is going to sound worse than it is. I’ve never really been a two minute man, but I’ll try.

I’m just looking at a POLITICO headline just to follow-up on your question to Jeff. “Israel accused of planting mysterious spy devices near the White House.” This Politico twenty nineteen. Remember that? I mean, some of you probably don’t remember because it wasn’t a scandal. The scandal was Trump, Putin, Putin, Russia, Trump. It was just that nonstop.

Israel spies on this country more than any other country. It’s industrial grade spying. And another reason that many politicians, elected officials are afraid of taking this on is the fear of assassination. Let’s face it, especially an executive. Beyond that, look at what the US has done in Syria.

You want to talk about depravity? Look at the slaughter of the Druze, the slaughter of the Alawites, over ten thousand massacred in just a week by Al Qaeda bandits, many of them from Uzbekistan and Chechnya and other countries. And the US then sends in lobbyists to try to arrange the normalization of Syria’s Al Qaeda government with Israel and legitimizes HTS in the midst of this massacre. And you know who’s next? It’s the Christians.

And we are signing off on that entire campaign all because Syria has been neutralized as a potential threat to Israel, and they’re starting to arrest Palestinian resistance leaders. And Israel’s still bombing Syria. We are pushing Lebanon towards civil war right now, demanding Hezbollah disarm. They will not do so. The United States government wants Syria Lebanon in a civil war.

And I was just interviewing an analyst who’s a friend of ours from Iran and Tehran yesterday, and everyone there is bracing for another round in which Israel will inevitably drag the United States into another military conflict with Iran. They consider it absolutely inevitable. It could happen by the end of this month or September. How does this serve us? How does this advance American interests in any way?

Why aren’t we even having that debate? We’re not. And this is just talking about one region. Going back to your initial question just to wrap up about this summit in Alaska. Well, if there had been a peace deal, a durable peace deal, it would have been done with the consent of the military leadership and the intelligence apparatus so that the US could move on to Iran and then China.

And that’s the depravity there is that we are in a state of permanent war until we face a real political revolution in this country. The kind of revolution that, while I’m not a libertarian, I still carry my communist card. The kind of revolution that Ron Paul was putting forward in his presidential campaigns on foreign policy. I don’t really have a card.

# Financial Collapse as the Only Solution

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Colonel, is Donald Trump free to do something against the will of the deep state?

COL DOUGLAS MACGREGOR: Short answer is no. And I would say I agree with everything that’s being said, but I would point out that I do not expect anything to change dramatically in any particularly positive direction until the financial system collapses and we go into a serious crisis. That’s simple truth. That’s it. It all runs on money.

When the fake money runs out, then things will change because we’ll pull everything overseas back to the United States and we will focus internally. I don’t know what the answer is. Are we going to become embroiled in a larger scale war that will involve Russia and China as well as Iran and potentially other states before the collapse? Because if that happens, that’s unfortunate. I would prefer to see the collapse first because the collapse would then prevent us from committing suicide.

The Need for a Peace Party

PROFESSOR SACHS: But I see no evidence right now for anything changing without that particular event.

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Professor Sachs, when you were talking about the absurdity of suggesting war with China, I thought of my former Fox colleague who runs the Department of Defense standing in Japan three weeks ago shaking his fist at China almost welcoming war. Why do they do that?

PROFESSOR SACHS: I’ll ask you. I’m not going to answer that. I have no clue.

Maybe, ladies and gentlemen, we need – I know it’s naive, but we do need a peace party. The politics we have will not solve this, neither party.

We need a peace party because that would have a very strong majority of the American people. They would understand it. They would understand that this would make us safer. They would understand that as Doug is saying, we are a hundred percent of GDP in debt with a trajectory which is mind boggling and we’ve just raised the budget deficit another percentage point, so it’ll be seven percent of GDP in this coming fiscal year.

We can’t afford what we’re doing. It’s not safe. It’s not prudent. It’s not moral. It’s not practical. It gains us no benefits whatsoever.

And what you’ve heard from everybody is that it’s not even hard to stop these conflicts. In fact, we’ve all used the expression “in a day,” and it’s literally true because these are artificially prolonged conflicts. These are not conflicts that have some existential unbendable will. These are choices that are terrible choices made for particular interests and for particular reasons that don’t serve the American people.

Let me – I don’t love financial crises. I used to make my career working in places with hyperinflation, you are right about the dangers, but I wouldn’t relish it. I’d hope we could get to this before we hit that stage. So I’m still hoping that we could figure out a way, you guys figure it out.

So how could we have a true political movement of peace? Because if you go through that optic, all the rest can fall into place. Thank you.

Closing Remarks

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: You will hear later today from Anya Parampil, Max Blumenthal, and, of course, Colonel MacGregor. But let me thank my superb and excellent panel. They are all professional colleagues and personal friends, and they are top of the line when it comes to intellectual honesty and personal courage.

The Judging Freedom live audience at this moment is truly enormous, and I thank those of you who are watching live. We will continue to livestream the balance of the program because I’ll be on a plane, but I’m dying to hear what the great Colonel MacGregor – doesn’t he look like Douglas MacArthur? – that the great Colonel MacGregor will have to say this afternoon.

God love you. Thank you very much.

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