Editor’s Notes: In this episode of Judging Freedom, Judge Andrew Napolitano sits down with Professor Jeffrey Sachs to discuss the escalating geopolitical crisis in the Middle East and its dire implications for the global economy. Sachs offers a scathing critique of current leadership, arguing that the physical destruction of energy infrastructure is pushing the world toward an irreversible financial cataclysm. The conversation explores the breakdown of rational decision-making in Washington and the potential for imminent ground operations to trigger a worldwide collapse in energy supplies. Together, they examine the urgent need for constitutional accountability and diplomatic intervention to prevent a global disaster. (March 30, 2026)
TRANSCRIPT:
“Undeclared wars are commonplace. Tragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression, with no complaints from the American people. Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government. To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected.”
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: What if sometimes to love your country you had to alter or abolish the government? What if Jefferson was right? What if that government is best which governs least? What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave? What if freedom’s greatest hour of danger is now?
Hi everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, March 30, 2026. Professor Jeffrey Sachs will be with us in just a moment on what is there to compromise.
Trump’s Contradictions: Negotiations or Threats?
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Professor Sachs, welcome here, my dear friend. Thank you for accommodating my schedule as you always do, no matter where you are on the planet. But why is Trump making up stories about productive negotiations one minute and then threatening to destroy civilian infrastructure and energy and oil fields in the next?
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Trump is flailing around because he and Netanyahu have brought the world to the brink of the greatest economic crisis of modern history. So Trump is partly delusional, of course, a non-stop liar, but a man who is trapped by his own absurdities and cruelties.
He’s a psychopath, and so is Netanyahu. And on that basis, they have been on a murder spree in Iran, dropping tens of thousands of bombs, killing innocent people, killing schoolgirls in mass murder. Israel is doing the same in Lebanon right now. And of course, none of this is leading to any of the political outcomes that were claimed. It’s just leading to a spreading war and mayhem.
The mayhem threatens to engulf the entire world. So if we end up within the next days or weeks in a global maelstrom that is just about to be irreversible, because of the mass destruction of the energy and infrastructure of the Middle East, it will be two individuals to blame: Netanyahu and Trump.
Given this, Trump struts and he preens and he lies and he confabulates and he contradicts himself within the paragraph, if not within the sentence, basically because he and his buddy Netanyahu have gotten the world into an absolutely unprecedented crisis.
The reason that this is nearly irreversible is that we’re not talking about the opening or the shutting of the Strait of Hormuz. We’re talking about the physical destruction of the energy infrastructure that houses about one third of the world’s oil supplies. And it’s completely vulnerable. These oil and gas fields and refineries and port facilities and pipelines are not built with anti-missile defense systems. They’re sitting there and they’re absolutely vulnerable to destruction.
Some have already been destroyed. Every day that passes, more are being destroyed. And that is, if not irreversible in decade-long scales, it’s irreversible for months and years to come. And it means a calamitous economic crisis worldwide, including in the United States.
Trump’s Panic and Inability to Lead
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: You’ve described Trump in a way that I would characterize as panicking.
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: He is panicking, but he’s also incapable of honesty, incapable of intellectual seriousness, incapable of planning, incapable of understanding a complex situation. And this we have seen repeatedly.
He’s the leader of a very wealthy and powerful country that can take a lot of abuse. America is taking a lot of abuse. The system still stands, but boy, is it shaking right now. Job creation has stopped. The economic well-being of the average Americans is falling.
Now, the markets don’t respond to Trump’s delusions the way that they did even weeks ago. Used to be, a president would say something, you would take it seriously, it would get priced into assets quite quickly. Now, Trump’s words are either horrifying or bemusing, depending on one’s perspective, but they are not serious. And this is our state of affairs.
Congressman Himes: The President Is Flat Out Lying
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: I’m going to play a clip from Congressman Jim Himes, a Democrat of Connecticut. The fact that he’s a Democrat is of no significance here. The significance is that he is the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. He’s a member of the so-called Gang of Eight, the Congress within the Congress under federal law. He’s one of the eight human beings on the planet to whom the administration is obliged to tell the truth before they do these things. Watch his answer to a simple question from one of the talk shows yesterday.
VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Number one, you said that the President’s not really negotiating with Iran. Is that because you haven’t been briefed as a member of Congress on the diplomacy, or you think he’s flat out lying?
CONGRESSMAN JIM HIMES: I think he’s flat out lying. Last Sunday, when he was told — and by the way, we’re in exactly the same position today — oil prices now $112 a barrel in futures, the stock market down 2%, last Sunday he realized, “Oh my God, I’ve got a financial cataclysm on Monday.” So he just made it up that they’re in negotiations with the Iranians.
Look underneath that statement. The Iranians have now realized that they have the reins. They are controlling the Strait of Hormuz.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Gasoline prices are up more than a dollar a gallon.
CONGRESSMAN JIM HIMES: And so the Iranians realize, “Holy smokes, we’ve got a lot of leverage here.”
VIDEO CLIP ENDS:
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Well, this is absolutely correct. It’s a complete confabulation. What’s interesting is the statement is made and then it’s refuted within moments. We have someone who can’t even lie cleverly to disguise his tracks an hour at a time.
What is strange, however, is the behavior of the journalists who take these questions seriously. Maybe they tried to ask a follow-up, but they don’t take seriously the fact that they are looking at someone who absolutely is lying to their face and perhaps is in a delusional state.
This is a very interesting question and I think a very important one. Is Trump simply evil, or is he completely nuts? It’s hard to tell. Serious psychologists debate this question. He clearly is what they call a Machiavellian personality, which is a nice way of saying that he never tells the truth, that he’s completely manipulative, completely untrustworthy. But a number of psychologists are now saying that he is delusional and confabulating. And admittedly, for us on the outside, it’s a little bit hard to know which of these two is the case.
But what is true is that none of these statements is true, and the situation on the ground is extraordinarily dangerous and worsening rapidly in an irreversible manner.
Again, I want to stress that unlike earlier oil supply-side crises, such as those that occurred in the 1970s when the spigot was turned off, when there was a boycott, this is a physical destruction of the infrastructure of the region, which is not hard to accomplish, actually, and is proceeding now.
Israel — I don’t think that Netanyahu is confabulating. I think he is just a fascist and absolutely ready to blow up the region, and thinks that he can keep the United States on his side. So every day or two, Israel is attacking core Iranian infrastructure. Sometimes the President says, “Well, I didn’t know about it.” That’s possible, because we have the most incurious, not intelligent person there, who probably doesn’t know. His briefings are two minutes long. We’re told he has no attention span, he has no knowledge, no awareness, and so forth.
But Israel, in a way, they know what they’re doing. They’re creating chaos is what they’re doing. They’re dragging us along with this. Trump goes along merrily, making up whatever stories need to be made up by the hour to go along with this.
Netanyahu: Escalation Without Restraint
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Is Netanyahu panicking and maybe not showing it?
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Panicking? I think just ready to continue to escalate and ready to continue to draw the United States into as big a war as possible. This has been his dream — the Great War. He’s a megalomaniac, he is a fascist, he leads a fascist government. And there is no constraint on Netanyahu.
I don’t think he’s panicking. I think he is a person without decency or any kind of restraint. And as long as the United States backs him up — which all presidents have done, but Trump does with as great an allegiance as can be imagined — Netanyahu will continue on any path of escalation.
So this is the point that we’re on. And if the world economy is destroyed in this process, so be it, if it means greater Israel.
What Is There to Negotiate?
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: I’m going to play a clip from the President, which I think you’ve seen, on Air Force One last night, in which he says that Iran has accepted most — and then he fumbles a little bit — it sounds like he may say all of the 15 points that the US has offered. This is just such a profound untruth. But I’d like you to hear it, and then I’m going to ask you: what is there to compromise? But first, this clip.
VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: You had offered that 50-point plan to Iran. Did they ever come back?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Yeah, they came back. They say they gave us most of the points.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Why wouldn’t they? You make it sound like they made some concessions. Can you identify those?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, they’re agreeing with us on the plan. I mean, we asked for 15 things, and for the most part, we’re going to be asking for a couple of other things. We’re having very good meetings, both directly and indirectly, and I think we’re getting a lot of very important points.
VIDEO CLIP ENDS:
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Any truth in what he just said?
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: No. And I think, aside from the discussions we have, every other leader in the world is watching this and seeing that this is madness. This is out of control. This is unprecedented for an American president to behave this way. There is no truth whatsoever in any of it. There’s no negotiation. There are no concessions. There is a war going on every day. There are thousands of American Marines that are reaching the region for an operation that is imminent. No, there’s not one shred of truth.
But who’s he talking to, aside from himself? Everybody can see that this is absolutely, absolutely out of control. The fantasies.
Now, what is interesting is the American situation. We have a government which is in complete breakdown. There is no process. There is no systematic vetting of alternatives, even within the security state. There is no professionalization of these actions. There is no scrutiny whatsoever by Congress. There are no plans. And the American people are dead set against every single step that is happening right now, especially the imminent land operations, where a poll that I just saw said 6% of the public supports that, if I remember the number specifically, but that’s what I recall.
In other words, we are in a breakdown of process. And these reporters shout questions and Trump gives these absurd answers, and there is no seriousness at all. Where are the rest of the grownups in Washington? Where is the 25th Amendment? Where is some control before we have a worldwide, complete, irreversible catastrophe?
The Strait of Hormuz and the American People
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: How will the continued close of the Strait of Hormuz affect the average American?
The Collapse of World Energy Supply
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: It’s a combination of the oil not flowing through the Strait of Hormuz, but even more, the destruction every day of refineries, pipelines, port facilities, gas fields, oil fields that will lead to the largest sudden decline of energy supply in history. This is happening right now, every day that this war continues, that destruction continues.
In a few weeks, the Strait of Hormuz will not be the issue because the physical production and refining facilities will be destroyed. But right now, the strait is, of course, the narrow passage through which about 20% of the world’s oil supply used to pass every day and is now basically blocked, so that the price of oil has risen from around $60 a barrel to just now about $112 a barrel, the so-called Brent price. And it’s going to go much, much higher. And every day that goes on, it will go higher.
And if Trump carries out the threats, and I think it’s very likely that we’re going to see operations by these Marines, we’re going to see continued attacks, Israel will continue to attack and be attacked. Then this cataclysm of sudden collapse of the world energy supply, both oil and gas, will lead to a major economic catastrophe worldwide.
This has happened before, but this is a bigger one than in the 1970s, because the 1970s again was simply stopping the sale and shipment of oil and gas. This time it’s actually destroying the fields, the refineries, the ports and the pipelines. And incidentally, we could have destruction of the desalination plants in a desert part of the world with the profound humanitarian consequences immediately following that, the region of the Middle East.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: How would hospitals operate without clean water?
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Well, we’re already seeing that food supplies even to famous leading cities in the United Arab Emirates are off the shelves, gone. Basic shipments of daily needs stopped. This is already happening, but the escalation is also happening by the day.
Trump on the Strait of Hormuz
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Here’s President Trump being asked if he knows about the tolls of the Strait of Hormuz. Watch this answer.
VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: The issue of the Strait of Hormuz and Iran control of it, charging tolls. What do you think about that?
DONALD TRUMP: We’ll have to find out if it’s true. You know, they’re going to do whatever they have to do. We could close that up in two minutes. We could close that up so fast your head would spin.
VIDEO CLIP ENDS:
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: The first part — how could he not know that Iran is making a fortune on the tolls? And the second part, “we could close it up so fast your head would spin,” is just schoolyard bravado. I don’t even know what he could possibly be talking about.
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Well, that would make you and the president, because he doesn’t know what he’s talking about either. Absolutely. This is made up by the moment. This is not serious. This is not adult, which is the adjective that I like to use — to think that the world should be run by adults for our survival. This is something serious and pathological that requires the attention of any adults in the room in Washington. That’s my main message.
General McCaffrey on Military Chaos in the Gulf
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Here’s retired General Barry McCaffrey with some very interesting observations about military behavior in the Gulf.
VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:
GEN. BARRY McCAFFREY: Hegseth in some ways looks like a comic book tough guy. And so I think increasingly inside the Pentagon there’s an element of chaos and hysteria to decision making. Our remaining objectives in the Gulf War are to stop the nuclear program and open the Gulf of Hormuz. Each of them are in danger.
You cannot stop a nuclear weapons program unless you have inspectors on the ground with robust rules of investigation. That’s not going to happen under the current approach by the United States or Israel.
The second thing you’ve got to do is you’ve got to open the Gulf of Hormuz. I think the Iranians can outlast us, and no US Navy war fighting vessel wants to be in the Persian Gulf. Shallow water, restricted maneuver space and subject to instant attack by mini subs, floating naval mines, cruise ballistic missiles. It’s just a nightmare of an operation. So the whole notion of forcing passage, even if the NATO allies joined us, is really tenuous. This is probably not going to work. We have to have a diplomatic solution.
VIDEO CLIP ENDS:
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Could the United States and Israel, with all of their intel and all of their — in the case of the United States, a trillion and a half dollar defense budget — not have anticipated this, not have prepared for it and not have understood it? I mean, he wants to open the Straits of Hormuz. A month ago it was open.
No Plan, No Process — A Breakdown of Basic Government
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Yes, the two aims — one, to have inspectors there and second, to have an open Strait of Hormuz — was exactly the status quo right up until Netanyahu and Trump bombed Iran last summer in the midst of negotiations. You can’t make this stuff up.
And what General McCaffrey said is really the essential point. There’s no process right now of rational decision making. This I think is extremely important to understand. We are being led by gangsters who are completely out of their depth. You look at Hegseth, or on the economic side, Lutnik or Bessent or Trump — they’re making things up because they don’t know what they’re doing. And more than that, the professionals in our government who do know what they’re doing are either crushed, forced to leave, thrown out, threatened or resign. There’s no process. This is the essential point.
We saw this in many different areas, not just this one. You could have said last year, how could they not know to derange the entire world trading system, to abuse the law to collect $150 billion from Americans illegally? How could they not know? Well, we know how that happened. A small group of incompetent grifters did this. And what they did and how they justified it was on Truth Social posts or announcements by our mad king that by the powers claimed by him, he was doing X, Y and Z in a way that made absolutely no sense.
So we see this in every area right now. We can’t keep the government functioning. We can’t keep our airports functioning. We can’t keep our planes from hitting fire trucks. We can’t keep the Strait of Hormuz open, which was open for decades, because we go in with no plan whatsoever and have it closed. This is what’s happening. It’s a breakdown of basic government.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Right.
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: And when the issue comes up — and I just, if anyone in Congress is listening — for God’s sake, you can’t say this isn’t our business. It’s your business when the government collapses this way. It’s your responsibility under the Constitution to address this.
So this is not some daredevil plan. This is no plan. This is complete improv with the world. And we should stop this. We should stop this now. This is not right for our survival and our safety. And it doesn’t have to be a spectator sport.
And to reporters who every day have the greatest inanity asking, “What will Trump do next?” — this is the wrong question. What will we do next? What will we do next in our government? Not what will Trump do? We know what Trump will do. He’ll lie, he’ll confabulate, he’ll improvise recklessly. There’s no process here.
So there needs to get under control this process by the people who are responsible for our government running according to law, and that includes the Congress, and that includes also the executive branch. We cannot operate this way — making it up every moment — and think that this is going to come out.
Presidential Fitness and the Failure of Accountability
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: The rest of the executive branch has a constitutional obligation to make sure — as absurd as this sounds — that the president is sane. That the president is of sound mind. It’s right there in black and white if you read it in the amendment.
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: That’s correct. But by the way, we had a president who was not of sound mind. The last president as well, Joe Biden, was not healthy, and his internal team knew this and hid it from the American people for two years, because our government has become all show and no substance.
And the country can move along for a while on that, but it’s going to hit the iceberg, as John Mearsheimer likes to use that metaphor. We’re doing that right now, and nobody is watching. So this is really the situation. They know how to cover up craziness. They do that because they think that government is a show, that it’s political advisors, that it’s spin. But it’s not, and not in war.
And we have this complete lack of professionalism in every possible way, even on the specifics of military planning, for heaven’s sake. And we know that the intelligence agencies have not agreed with what’s happening and that the generals have not agreed. Well, this is something quite serious. And then Congress says, “Don’t bother me. It’s not my business.” The Senate votes three times — no, we don’t want to have any responsibility about this. That’s our situation.
The 82nd Airborne Arrives — Escalation Imminent
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: In the meantime, thousands of soldiers from the U.S. Army’s elite 82nd Airborne Division — I’m reading from Reuters, Jeff — have started arriving in the Middle East. Two U.S. officials told Reuters.
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: We’re about to have an irrevocable escalation of a disaster, and it should be stopped before that happens. And on the track that we’re on, it’s not going to stop. Internationally, the few grownups of international stature in the world, including President Xi and President Putin and Prime Minister Modi, should be speaking to Donald Trump before the world faces this irrevocable disaster. This is not how we should enter into chaos.
We know better. We know better right now. And this war should stop now. And a war criminal like Netanyahu, who never should have been anywhere close to power in his own country, but anywhere close to the United States — and by the way, the Americans have finally figured this out. Israel’s been a disaster for us, and it’s drawing us into a complete disaster right now.
Pentagon Prepares for Weeks of Ground Operations in Iran
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: The Washington Post is reporting — it’s all coming out while we’re speaking, Jeff — that the Pentagon is preparing for weeks of ground operations in Iran. To achieve what?
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: To achieve a complete collapse of the world energy supply. That’s all they can achieve. And what the consequence of that will be for Americans is mass unemployment. And you think your living standards are in trouble right now? Just wait a little while. I’m sorry to tell you, we’ve been through this before. This will be a catastrophe.
The way that this is going, our government should stop. We should remember that we are a republic under a constitution. We should remember that America has representatives in Washington that urgently need to do their job. And that when the overwhelming majority of the American people say no, we don’t want to go this way — it is the responsibility of these people, however corrupted they’ve been by the campaign financing, by the military industrial complex, by the bribes, by whatever it is — it is their most basic responsibility to attend to the needs of us, the American citizens, now, before it’s too late.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Thank you, Professor Sachs. Brilliant, articulate, passionate, factual as always. As unpleasant as all this is, you always illuminate it for us. Thank you, my dear friend.
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Thanks a lot. See you next week.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Have a happy holiday to you and your family. We’ll see you next week.
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Thank you.
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