Read the full transcript of economist and public policy analyst Prof. Jeffrey Sachs’ interview on Judging Freedom Podcast with host Judge Napolitano on “Al-Qaeda at the UN”, September 25, 2025.
Opening Monologue
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: What if the Constitution no longer applied? What if the whole purpose of the Constitution was to limit the government? What if Congress’s enumerated powers in the Constitution no longer limited Congress but were actually used as a justification to extend Congress’s authority over every realm of human life? What if the right to keep and bear arms only applied to the government? What if posse comitatus, the federal law that prohibits our military from occupying our streets, were no longer in effect?
What if the government could send you to your death and your innocence meant nothing so long as the government’s procedures were followed? What if you could love your country but hate what the government has done to it? What if Jefferson was right? What if that government is best? Which governs least? What if I’m right? What if 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.
Introduction
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Hi everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, September 25, 2025. Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins us now. That clip was part of a comments I made 12 and 13 years ago, which we found and have posted under Videos under Judging Freedom.
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: How relevant today.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Thank you. Thank you, my dear friend. Well, we were at lunch together today and now you’re 5,000 miles away.
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: God bless you.
Trump’s Ukraine Statements
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: But thank you very much for joining us. We’ll talk about the meeting we had yesterday, which was where we were invited by the president of Iran. In a couple of minutes. We will also talk about what you observed at the UN this week. And before we get to either of them, how do you read President Trump’s statements on Tuesday this week that Russia is a paper tiger and that Ukraine can somehow win back the Crimea and the Donbas?
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Well, as a substantive matter, the statements were ludicrous. In terms of the purpose, there are two theories. One, that it was a ludicrous statement, and second, that it was a clever way of the president to push the issue away from the United States and over to Europe.
Frankly, on either reading, I don’t like presidents making statements that are so absurd and vacuous. And I have heard, though, as you say, I’m 5,000 miles away at this point, that they’ve walked back. The paper tiger reference whether Trump was playing a game to say to the Europeans, look, yeah, it’s easy. You go win, it’s all yours, which is how the Europeans are actually interpreting it, almost in a panic today.
Or that General Kellogg, who I think believes this was the last one to whisper into the president’s ear. We don’t know, because frankly, there’s no stability in any messages from the president or from Washington. It’s a blur and it’s a confusion. Some people think this is tactically smart. I view it as very disturbing.
I don’t think government can operate with this kind of persistent confusion, whether deliberate or not deliberate. We need clarity, and we’re not getting clarity in any of the messages about Ukraine or about the Middle east or about China or about international trade or about almost anything else. And I feel that this is dangerous and debilitating. Even if it’s meant to be tactical, isn’t.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Isn’t it disturbing also because it articulates something that is inconceivable. Inconceivable that Russia could win back Crimea or the.
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: That Ukraine could.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: You mean that Ukraine. I’m sorry, that Ukraine could win that back?
The Reality of Crimea
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Yes. It’s not going to happen. And Ukraine is not going to win back Crimea. And this has been known and understood basically for a dozen years, or basically since I should be more precise, 2014, when the US helped to promote a coup that overthrew a neutral government and brought in a pro NATO government.
And Russia saw that its naval base in Crimea was about to be grabbed by NATO and it said, no, that’s not going to happen. So it organized a referendum and took back Crimea. It’s not going back or it’s not going back to Ukraine. The US Caused Ukraine’s loss of Crimea.
It’s interesting in the Yanukovych government of Ukraine, that is the one that the US Helped to overthrow Yanukovych. And President Putin had negotiated actually a lease arrangement where Crimea was certainly Ukrainian and Russia wasn’t demanding ownership of Ukraine, it was just negotiating a lease for its naval base for the period to 2042, in fact, with some possibilities of extension in beyond that.
And then the United States came in and messed up everything from the point of view of Ukraine and Crimea because it helped to provoke a coup. And that goes badly. The United States does this incessantly, but it did it in Ukraine. And that’s when Russia said, well, we’re taking back Crimea.
It was in Ukraine’s hands only for another weird footnote of history reason, which is that in 1954, when there was one country, the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, on the 300th anniversary of Ukraine becoming part of the Russian empire, in effect becoming protected by the Russian empire, made a gesture of transferring Crimea to Ukraine.
It didn’t mean anything because it was in one country at the time, but the naval fleet of the Soviet Union then at that point, and of Russia has been in Sevastopol, Crimea since 1783. And Russia has no intention of it ever slipping into NATO hands.
NATO had its eye on it. Actually, the British had their eye on it in the Crimean War in 1853 and 1856.
So this is an old story, but bottom line, no, Ukraine is not getting Crimea back. Everybody knows this. Everybody, every European leader knows this. Unless Zelensky is more deluded than we could ever imagine, he full well knows this. And our problem in our world today is that these politicians, for various reasons, simply do not tell the truth.
Trump’s UN Address and Arab Leaders Meeting
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: President Trump apparently met with a group of Arab leaders, prime ministers and a few heads of state and ambassadors to the UN privately at the UN Shortly after he addressed the General Assembly. By the way, were you there when he addressed the General Assembly?
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Of course, I was sitting in amazement with the whole hall because there was hardly a 10 second interval that wasn’t filled with bloviation and lies. So it was an extraordinary speech.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: I thought it was embarrassing, but. But anyway, apparently afterwards he met with these group of, this group of Arab leaders and two of them revealed to the press that he said he was opposed to the Israeli annexation of the west bank and would make sure it didn’t happen. How’s he going to do that?
US Power Over Israel
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Well, he can do that because Israel’s survival depends on the backing of the United States. To put it another way, Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza is with US complicity. So Donald Trump could end the genocide today if he said so. He doesn’t say so. This is really a very serious matter because it makes the United States government complicit in an ongoing genocide.
But he could end it because Israel cannot take a step forward without the financing, without the armaments, without the intelligence and without the diplomatic protection of the United States. So Israel could commit a kind of political suicide? Yes, it could do something that is completely opposed by the United States and is a real US Red line, if there are such things vis a vis Israel. But if it did so, it would be a kind of political suicide. Israel depends on the United States for its basic national security.
And this means that the mass starvation of 2 million people underway right now can be ended by the United States. They’ve chosen not to do it till now. Many things could happen. There could be a Palestinian state in the UN in an hour if the United States said that it will end its protection of Israel, lift its veto in the UN Security Council, which is the only barrier to a state of Palestine as the 194th UN member state.
And when I say an hour, I mean literally an hour, because the UN Security Council would meet and they would vote a resolution that the United States vetoed last year and Palestine would be a state in the United Nations. So all of this can happen. The problem is that the US Government, under all administrations, but Trump has been perhaps the most egregious in this, simply has followed what Israel has said up until now.
According to what we’ve heard in the last 24 hours. There is a glimmer now of the United States actually adopting a US Foreign policy rather than an Israel made foreign policy. We’ll see.
Meeting with Iranian Leadership
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: What was your impression of the President of Iran in particular and the Iranian leadership in general, with whom you and I and Scott Ritter and Max Blumenthal and a few other of our friends were privileged to meet yesterday? My own impression was that they get Netanyahu, they get the Zionists, they’re ready for what’s coming and they’re not afraid of them.
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Well, I think the starting point is that Iran has wanted normal relations with the United States for a quarter century plus, but Israel has wanted to topple the Iranian government and the US has followed Netanyahu’s lead. Netanyahu, basically since the mid-1990s when he first became prime minister, has had its sights on a U. S. Iran war that would overthrow the Iranian government. And he has persisted in this. Now it’s 29 years of persisting in this.
And he was delighted to pull the US into an attack on Iran just some weeks ago, the so called 12 Day War that could be a prelude to another Israeli attack on Iran. What we heard from President Pezeshkian, and I’ve heard it from Iranian officials for many, many years, is they want peace and normalization. They find it extraordinary that it has been practically impossible. Let me put it more clearly. It has been impossible in practice is what I really mean to say. It has been impossible to negotiate with the United States.
And they negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the JCPOA, which would have definitively ended any question of Iran moving to a nuclear weapon in return for a lifting of US Sanctions. But when it was signed and when it was blessed by the United nations, when Donald Trump came into office in his first term, essentially the first thing that he did was rip up a negotiated agreement. And that set the course for what has happened since then.
Then Israel has repeatedly attacked Iran because it’s trying to provoke a response that then leads to a US War against Iran. And there have been repeated episodes. And now when Trump came in this year, the claim was that he will return to negotiations. And over the nuclear issue, that Trump pulled the rug out from under back in 2017 when he ripped up the JCPOA.
Well, those negotiations started. We heard reports from both sides over several rounds that the negotiations were making progress. And then one fine day, we were told that the sixth round of negotiation would take place the following Sunday. And the United States bombed Iran that Friday. Well, what kind of negotiation is this?
This is really the issue. The United States is utterly unable, it seems, to follow through on diplomatic approaches to issues without resort to cheating, to trickery and to violence, without ripping up accords, following through on real diplomacy. I’m hoping that this can change. But we are enmeshed in wars in Ukraine, in the Middle east, elsewhere in the world, because we don’t have diplomacy. We rip up agreements or view them as tactical devices to lure the other side into some somnolence or belief that they’re making headway.
Now, this is what we heard from President Pezeshkian because he said that Iran wants peace. It wants a negotiated outcome. But I think they were, all the leadership there was saying, but what can we do? We negotiate. And then it turns into an attack on us. It turns into Israeli assassinations. And that was the conundrum that they face.
President Pezeshkian’s UN Address
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Here’s President Pezeshkian yesterday. You might have been there for this. It was shortly after our lunch meeting with him. It’s a brief clip of him, and it is pretty much what he told us at the private luncheon. Here he is at the General assembly yesterday.
VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:
PRESIDENT PEZESHKIAN: I hereby declare once more before this assembly that Iran has never sought and will never seek to build a nuclear bomb. We do not seek nuclear weapons. This is our belief based on on the edict issued by the Supreme Leader and by religious authorities. Therefore, we never sought weapons of mass destruction, nor will we ever seek them.
Whereas those who disturb the peace and stability in the region lies in Israel. But Iran is the one that is being punished for those actions. There is a poem that roughly says something to the effect that someone in one side of the world does something to disturb the peace and someone else is punished for those actions.
VIDEO CLIP ENDS:
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Your colleague and our colleague, John Mearsheimer is of the view that the allegation that Iran wants to make nuclear weapons and that’s a threat to Israel is a facade that in reality, Netanyahu wants to turn Iran into another Syria.
Netanyahu’s 30-Year Doctrine of Regional War
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Well, this is literally what Netanyahu has said for nearly 30 years. This is a doctrine that goes back to 1996, devised with American neoconservative close advisors of Netanyahu. A doctrine called “Clean Break.”
The idea of Clean Break is there should never be a Palestinian state because we will never have a Palestinian state. There will be a militant opposition to Israel that will be supported by countries in our region, and we should therefore be prepared to topple those governments that support a pro-Palestinian militancy.
It is a very twisted line, but the idea starts with what we have discussed so often. Netanyahu and his colleagues are opposed to a Palestinian state. Everything else follows from that. The ongoing wars follow from that.
Israel’s trying to assert military political control not only over the 8 million Palestinians, but parts of other countries in the region. And to do so with impunity because Israel believes the United States will follow along.
Netanyahu’s War Promotion Record
That’s why Netanyahu was the great cheerleader for the Iraq war. That was a war that Netanyahu did a tremendous amount to spur. It was a war on false pretenses, not mistaken pretenses. False pretenses to overthrow a regime that Netanyahu didn’t like.
The US war on Syria, which began in 2011 under Obama, was promoted by Netanyahu. Netanyahu has promoted the war against Iran. Netanyahu has promoted wars all over his region for almost 30 years.
Because as long as there is no state of Palestine, there will be no peace. But Netanyahu’s proposition is we will crush forever a state of Palestine. And just yesterday or the day before, I’ve lost track because of the long airplane flight, Netanyahu said there will never be a state of Palestine west of the Jordan River.
International Law vs. Israeli Policy
Now the rest of the world begs to differ. International law, the International Court of Justice begs to differ. We had 10 countries recognize Palestine, bringing the list to well over 150 countries, with the vast majority of the world population saying, of course there needs to be a state of Palestine living side by side with the State of Israel in peace on the borders of 4 June 1967 and with its capital in East Jerusalem.
This is international law. This is straightforward. Netanyahu wants the United States to fight endless wars. Netanyahu is committing genocide in order for that not to happen. And the United States is complicit in that genocide.
The Iranians are caught up in this because the Iranians have supported the Palestinian cause. And from Netanyahu’s point of view, that means that Israel needs the United States to go to war with Iran instead of the real obvious legal right solution, which is a state of Palestine that puts all of this bloodshed to an end.
Trump’s Position and Global Consensus
That’s the straightforward point. Now Trump’s still not there, unbelievably, the whole world is. Other than Israel is saying one thing: end the wars, end the violence, end the starvation, end the atrocities, release the hostages, demilitarize Hamas, everyone saying that with a state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel.
Trump won’t say it. It seems that’s the Zionist lobby in the United States perhaps. Or Trump’s utter confusion because he’s confused on almost everything, but he just can’t find himself to say it.
And Trump could actually make peace because if you said it properly, there’s no alternative for Israel. It would then happen. And the real outcome of this week is that the world said absolutely clearly no to genocide, yes to the two-state solution.
A Disturbing UN Exchange
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Switching gears before we go, here’s a very difficult to watch clip because of the fawning nature of this once formidable and prominent American official. You’ll know who these two people are in a minute. This was not in front of the General Assembly, but this too happened at the United Nations yesterday.
VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:
GENERAL PETRAEUS: As you know, Mr. President, I spent over 37 years in the US Army and I was a soldier, not a diplomat. So I hope you’ll forgive me if I speak with the directness of the old soldier that I am, as I get the first question out of the way, because the fact is that we were on different sides when I was commanding the surge in Iraq, you were of course, detained by US Forces for some five years, including again when I was the four-star there.
And here you are now as the president of Syria, I just want to tell you, really, on behalf of all the people who are here, that this conversation has truly filled me with enormous hope. It has been very, very heartening and illuminating. Your vision is powerful and clear. Your demeanor itself is very impressive as well.
How are you holding up under all this pressure? Are you getting enough sleep at night again? I’ve been there and it is so very, very hard. And your many fans, and I am one of them, we do have worries.
VIDEO CLIP ENDS:
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Questioner, of course, is General Petraeus. The person next to him, of course, is somebody who cuts people, who has cut people’s heads and hands off in front of their relatives.
The Problem with US Regime Change Operations
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Petraeus doesn’t get very many things right, I’m sad to say. He told us how wonderful the Ukrainian counteroffensive would be in 2023, a complete terrible debacle in which so many Ukrainians lost their lives. So I’m not very impressed as a general matter, double entendre. But I’m not impressed by General Petraeus as a matter of our recent history.
But also this approach, again, just makes a nonsense of what has happened. What happened in Syria is that in 2011, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton decided, to a significant extent, pushed by Netanyahu, to overthrow a government. That’s it. This is called US regime change operations. It’s not complicated.
And it resulted in 14 years of disaster. And ultimately, in this new government, whatever it is, which already is seeing a lot of bloodshed and division inside Syria.
A Pattern of Failed Interventions
But the narrative that Petraeus told is absurd. The United States should stop overthrowing governments. This is the bottom line. It should never have overthrown the government in Ukraine in 2014. It should never have launched what was a 14-year devastating war to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian leader.
It should never have invaded Iraq in 2003 to overthrow Saddam Hussein. It should never have bombed Libya to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi. The United States has been engaged in dozens of blatantly disastrous, blatantly illegal regime change operations, thinking that it can overthrow governments right and left and that something good will come of it in the Middle East.
These have to a significant extent been at the behest of Netanyahu, who wants us to continue this with Iran. Except Iran’s a big powerful country with a 5,000-year civilizational history, we should recall. And so Netanyahu is utterly delusional, period.
But the US foreign policy is a policy of overthrows rather than negotiations. And that’s why you have a general who has been part of all of this, who has spouted such nonsense over the years. And that’s why we see the kind of fawning demonstration that you just showed us.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Professor Sachs, thank you very much. Thanks for letting me go across the board on all these topics. As usual, you’re so gracious. And I know you just traveled 5,000 miles since we had our lunch yesterday. I didn’t realize you are where you are, but I don’t know how you do it. Thank you. And we look forward to seeing you again next week, my dear friend.
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Wonderful. Very good. Thanks so much. Take care.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Thank you. We did post if you go to Judging Freedom under videos, a video that I taped back in my Fox days, and then my analysis of the troubles with the United States in 2012, just as relevant today, if you want to check it out there.
Tomorrow, the Intelligence Community Roundtable, 4:30 in the afternoon. Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson will be here. Ray and I, along with Scott Ritter and Congressman Kucinich and my friend Gerald Celente, will be together on Saturday at the Peace and Freedom Rally. Saturday, this Saturday, September 27th, in Kingston, New York, starting at 2:00 in the afternoon.
Usually draws between four and five hundred people. It’s a very festive event and you’ll see those of us who are speaking there as our unbridled, unrestrained selves. Thank you for watching. We’ll see you at the roundtable tomorrow. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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