Read the full transcript of Professor Jeffrey Sachs’ interview on Judging Freedom podcast, June 1, 2026.
Editor’s Note: In this episode of Judging Freedom, Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins Judge Andrew Napolitano to analyze the failures of U.S. foreign policy and the escalating tensions in the Middle East. Sachs argues that the U.S. strategy regarding Iran has been fundamentally flawed and suggests that immediate de-escalation is necessary to avoid a wider conflict.
Iran Withdraws from Negotiations
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, June 1st, 2026. Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins us now. Professor Sachs, thank you as always for accommodating my schedule.
About 3 hours ago, credible news reports surfaced indicating that Iran has withdrawn from negotiations with the United States. Is this any surprise to you, given that the US has attacked Iran during a so-called ceasefire and Israel is continuing to slaughter innocents in Lebanon?
The US Made a Terrible Mistake
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Well, I’ve been saying for weeks that I think the fighting can end without any kind of formal agreement. The United States made a bad mistake to launch a war against Iran. It was predicated on a totally delusional idea that the war would last one day, that the U.S. would take out the leadership of Iran and put in the leadership that it wanted. Something like what the US did in Venezuela. But Iran is not Venezuela, and Iran is not the US neighborhood, and the whole idea was a complete botch-up.
So the US made a terrible mistake. Since then, Trump has been making one demand after another that the Iranians just say no to, because the United States can’t compel Iran to any of these US demands. The US could not accomplish what Trump said it would accomplish.
Given that, we’ve been in the same situation now for 3 months, basically, which is that the US can escalate, in which case a lot of the Middle East is likely to get blown up, with a profound consequence for the whole world, not a good one. Or the US can basically wrap it up and go home, because it did a stupid thing, and doubling down on a stupid thing is twice a stupid thing. It’s time to go home. The American people would tell you this by a very large majority.
Trump hasn’t been able to just accept the fact that the whole thing went kablooey. So he makes demands, he says that we’re close to reaching agreements. The whole thing is nonsense, because every day that he says we’re close to an agreement, the Iranians have said we don’t have anything close to an agreement.
And now, basically, Israel, which is a completely lawless state, which is invading Lebanon, murdering people right and left, deciding to level neighborhoods of Beirut, just a completely vulgar, lawless state, has been continuing even though for weeks, the idea of the so-called ceasefire that supposedly had been negotiated was that Israel would stop this abuse.
Just minutes ago was also said that Trump has gotten Israel and Hezbollah to agree to stop the fighting. I doubt it. Israel doesn’t stop the fighting until the United States really insists, and Trump is incapable, it seems to me, of having a consistent idea or policy for even a 15-minute span.
The Better Alternative: Just Go Home
So all of this is to say, it is perfectly plain why Iran would say, what are we even talking about? But I would say, we don’t have to be completely pessimistic about it, because there’s a better alternative than a negotiated agreement, which is unrealistic the way it’s going. And that is the United States should just stop what it’s doing and go home.
And understand the most basic point. If the US goes home, Iran is going to open the Strait of Hormuz, and there’s going to be some normalization of the world energy markets. Why? Because it’s overwhelmingly in Iran’s interest to do so, and it’s overwhelmingly in the interest of Iran’s supporters, Russia and China, for Iran to do so. And it’s overwhelmingly in the interest of Iran and its neighbors in the Gulf to get on with life.
That was very gravely disrupted by Israel and the United States. So if the US just leaves, it’ll be well enough. Things will go back to normal. Donald Trump can find some other thing to do, and our lives in this country could be improved, safer. The price at the gas pump would come down. Lo and behold, Trump might do something that the American people actually would like.
Trump’s Inability to Admit Mistakes
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Aren’t you giving him more credit than he deserves? Can you just imagine him saying, okay, we made a mistake, we’re going home? That’s just not him.
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: I don’t even want him to say anything. He could say, “I made the greatest victory in the history of the universe because I am God and we’re going home.” I don’t care. Who cares what he says? We’re in a clown act right now.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Sorry.
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah, we are.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: This is— we are. We’re not going to get serious, mature behavior out of him unless he has a hook on which to hang that victory hat.
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: He can say whatever he wants. He’s actually pretty good at saying whatever he wants, but there’s no other thing to do. And this is the most basic point.
And when he says, by the way, “I don’t care about the midterms.” Okay. If you don’t, basically what you’re saying is you don’t care at all about the American people, which I think is pretty close to being true. And why his approval rating is down to 34% and the disapproval rating up to 60%. No, he doesn’t care about this.
By the way, there is a whole group of Americans that don’t care about the American people.
Silicon Valley tech titans are testing their weapons. They probably like this war well enough because they’re doing their AI testing and surveillance and showing how their systems work. And of course, we have the Israel lobby and all the rest. It’s just interesting. The American people are sick of all of this.
Negotiations Are Pointless Without Restraining Israel
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: But in one respect, Professor Sachs, aren’t the negotiations pointless without a restraint on Israel?
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Well, if you’re asking, could we get some kind of deep settlement with Iran on many issues, on regional security, on the nuclear brief, on peace on the Straits — it’s impossible right now anyway. There’s no way to get such an agreement. We don’t even have negotiators. Kushner, Witkoff — are you kidding? We don’t have people that can negotiate the nuclear issues, not even technically, with the capacity to do this, much less the distrust. They keep killing the negotiators and all the rest.
So I don’t think that there is any scope for any kind of detailed agreement. I don’t know what Donald Trump understands, but negotiating is a professional business. It’s not a joke and a game on Truth Social. It actually requires detailed work, not Kushner flying in for a morning on God knows what purpose. And so it’s not going to happen at all.
And with Israel, again, it’s rather simple. Israel is a violent rogue state that is on a murder spree, because it’s trying to build what it calls Greater Israel, which means controlling all of Palestine, controlling Gaza, controlling the West Bank, controlling East Jerusalem, and parts of Syria and parts of Lebanon, and God knows where else they want to go. And this is a madness. And it means that they have to engage in nonstop murder of people, which is what they’re doing right now.
Now, could the United States stop this? Depends what you mean by could. In a moment, the United States president could stop it by saying, “We’re not supporting that, not another penny, no more ammunition, no more diplomatic cover. You’re done.” Israel has absolutely no capacity to continue without the US backing.
Then you say, well, would the US do this, given all of the lobbying and all the rest? I think the answer of the American people is, please do. We don’t like this. This is not American foreign policy. This is Israel’s policy that is pulling us out of shape. And so I think, again, the odd part of all of this is the right decisions are the popular decisions, actually, which is odd.
Trump Moving the Markets
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: But yes, this might veer us into your other field of expertise, which is the economy. But I think when Trump says things like he might resume the bombing, Iran is begging us, Iran doesn’t want a deal, Iran is close to a deal — he’s doing that to move the markets, and he’s shown a remarkable success at doing that, albeit for short periods of time. But somebody, some group of people, cashes in every time he does that.
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: I think there are two things going on. One is the short-term market moves and the betting markets and so forth. And no doubt there is inside news and inside information and front-running the market. These are grifters. And there are so many anomalies that show up in the technical literature about trades beforehand, big trades. We know that there’s a lot of crookedness in all of it.
Then there’s another element, which is more generally trying to say to the public, we’re going to reach some kind of agreement. Because Trump wants to keep the oil prices in the spot market as low as possible to keep the gasoline prices to some extent under control. And if it is assumed that this stalemate or an escalated war is going to happen in the future, then holders of petroleum are going to hoard it. They’re going to hold back in anticipation of higher future prices. So he’s trying to say at one level, everything’s fine, get that oil price under $100 a barrel.
The Risk of a Massive Oil Shortage
What we know though is that the reserves are being run down, the stocks are being run down. They’re being run down maybe because some people think, well, this is going to resolve one way or another. Maybe Trump’s just going to leave, like I would urge him to do for his own good and for the world’s good. But in any event, he is trying to keep the oil price from spiking in anticipation of extreme shortages in the future.
Now, if it’s all a bunch of bunkum, there is no agreement, no agreement’s going to be reached, and he’s not smart enough just to leave, we’re going to have a massive shortage in weeks because these stocks of oil supplies are being run down to nothing, basically. In other words, people are using the remaining amounts of oil that they have in hand, and then they’re going to turn in a scramble to world markets that don’t have the oil.
And so yes, the price today is under $100 a barrel, but if we continue more weeks of what we have right now, there’s going to be a huge jump in prices of petroleum. And then whatever pain is being felt right now, which is a lot, it’s going to get much, much worse in a few weeks. They must understand this somehow in the White House. I’m giving them a tip to avoid it. Go home, announce your victory, do whatever you want. Don’t expect a negotiated agreement because you’re making crazy demands. Just go home. And then the Strait will open up.
Bessant and American Thuggery
By the way, they’re having a complete fit on the idea that Iran might charge $1 a barrel for oil going through the Strait. This is also pretty cheeky of the US authorities. The US has confiscated billions, arguably tens of billions of dollars of Iranian assets, illegally confiscated it, I would argue. The US has destroyed tens of billions of dollars of Iranian infrastructure, not to mention killing vast numbers of people. And then they say, no, you can’t collect a dollar per barrel of oil going through the strait, which, by the way, would be maybe $7 or $8 billion a year and would take many years even to make up the cost that the United States has imposed in just a few weeks.
And Bessant, who I consider our thug-in-chief — he has no attributes of a Treasury Secretary that I see. He knows nothing about the US economy, cares nothing about the US economy. He’s just an enforcer, of sanctions, crushing currencies, punishing others. He says, “How dare they even consider having a toll.” Give me a break. How about not bombing this place in the first place and killing all these people, or confiscating their reserves, or as Bessant said in Davos this year, using “economic statecraft” — that was a nice euphemism to mean crushing the Iranian currency so that people would come out onto the streets. I mean, this is American policy. It’s thuggery. It’s just thuggishness.
Do US Decision-Makers Understand Iran?
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Do you think the people that make these decisions, whether it’s Bessant at Treasury or Ratcliffe at CIA or Rubio at State or Hegseth at Defense or Trump himself, have the remotest understanding of Iranian history, culture, way of thinking?
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Of course not. And more than that, our side has no culture at all, other than a kind of gangsterism. And their view of Iran, which is completely bizarre, completely ignorant, is some medieval state that we’re going to crush under our demands.
And their motivation, to a very large extent, is revenge. What revenge? Well, Iran was part of the American Empire after 1953 because the CIA made a coup. It installed a police state. That police state under US authority lasted 26 years. The Iranian people threw it off in 1979. And I’ll tell you, empires hate when a nation throws off the imperial yoke. And so the US is out for revenge institutionally. “We’re going to teach them, they got away from us in 1979, but not for good. We’re back.” That’s what they think. It’s not going to work. But that’s what they think.
The Pentagon Classifies Its Own Press Room
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: You and I often discuss matters that implicate the First Amendment, something we both rely on for our work.
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: We do.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: About an hour ago, the Secretary of Defense, who calls himself the Secretary of War, issued an edict classifying the press office at the Pentagon as a classified place, meaning you cannot go into the press room without a top-secret classified security clearance, which of course none of the press has. What are they afraid of?
The War Machine and the Lies That Sustain It
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. They’re afraid of the truth. This is the basic point: we’re at war all over the world. We’re running a war machine. Trump is asking for $1.5 trillion for this war machine in the upcoming budget. It’s big bucks. It’s part of the AI boom because all these big tech companies from Palantir and SpaceX and all your favorite companies have huge Pentagon budgets. And they’re making a lot of money.
But the reasons for these wars are completely phony. Just like we once went to war with Iraq, when our government knew absolutely there were no weapons of mass destruction, but they had tested it, that that would be some kind of explanation that they could at least fool some part of the American public. They had actually focus grouped using WMD as the “explanation” or “justification” for the Iraq War.
They lie for a living because the American people don’t want these wars. We don’t want these trillions of dollars spent on the military contractors and the profiteers and all the rest. We don’t want to have people killed by the tens of thousands in the American name, as is happening in Gaza, or the thousands dying in Lebanon, or the thousands dying in Iran right now. The American people don’t want that. So our government has to lie.
It has to do one of two things. One, it has to make up a story like it did about Iran — that you can’t negotiate, that we have to stop them from getting a nuclear weapon. Well, there’s just no end to that particular Trump idiocy, since he’s the one that ripped up the agreement that would have stopped Iran clearly from any path to a nuclear weapon, because Iran put itself under the scrutiny of the International Atomic Energy Agency, rigorous scrutiny, and held to it. And then Trump ripped it up anyway.
So they make up a story. That’s one thing that they do. And that’s what they’re doing right now. And then the second thing they do is they hide what they’re really doing. So they act covertly, or they make some plot for regime change or something else. But the truth? No, thank you. If we really had the truth, the American people would say, “Are you kidding? We don’t want that.” That’s the point.
The JCPOA and the Consequences of Its Collapse
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Let’s see, under the JCPOA, the Iranian nuclear enrichment was capped at 3.67% with international inspection, and at the time, the Strait of Hormuz was open. Thanks to Donald Trump, the Strait of Hormuz is not fully open, and Iranian nuclear enrichment is up to 60%.
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: And by the way, the reason—
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: What does he think he’s accomplishing?
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: The reason it went to 60% was that they ripped up the agreement in which Iran was scrupulously following these limits. They ripped it up. And then they went in and they assassinated Iranians, Iranian leaders, and they bombed Iranian facilities. This is how they act. They had an agreement in hand. But, again, Netanyahu is really a thug, and Trump is a fool, and it’s a great combination, the two. So they brought us exactly to this juncture.
Israel, the UN, and the Rejection of International Law
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: What happened at the UN the other day, that the Israeli ambassador publicly and vociferously denounced the Secretary General and said the Israeli government will not deal with him?
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: I was away in either Asia or Brazil traveling last week, so I don’t even know the specifics. But this is an ambassador that has ripped up the UN Charter, that has denounced the whole world as antisemitic, that has been vulgar to the entire world system of law for basically as long as they’ve been in power. So this is a completely abusive government.
There’s a ruling of the International Court of Justice that told Israel, absolutely, your borders are the borders of the 4th of June, 1967. Your occupation of Gaza and the West Bank and East Jerusalem are illegal. Go home. Very clear. But Israel can’t stand the truth either. They have a different objective. Their objective is: “We’re going to control everything, period, no matter what anyone says.”
The UN represents international law. The UN, as a General Assembly, voted to enforce the ruling of the International Court of Justice. Of course, then Trump intervened to block everything. It’s not even absurd — it’s profoundly cynical. “Board of Peace,” which has nothing to do with peace. It has nothing to do with the board of anything, and it has no money in it. It’s just a diversion yet again from the rights of the Palestinian people.
But I don’t know exactly what Israel said last week. Israel’s on a murder spree, and the UN says, “You’re on a murder spree.” And so Israel lashes back by saying this is a hate-filled institution and all the rest. Somehow, it’s tragic, but Israel has lost the complete ability to look inward at what it’s doing. It’s a really, really tragic situation. Of course, mostly tragic for the Palestinian people and the Lebanese people, but also tragic for the people of Israel.
Europe on the Brink: Ukraine and the Risk of a Wider War
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: One last topic, if I might. Is President Putin — I’m obviously diverting to Ukraine — morally and legally free, in your view, to attack munitions plants in the EU that are supplying weapons to Ukraine that are being used to kill Russians?
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: The war in Ukraine could easily turn into a European war.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Yes.
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: It would be a disaster, and the Europeans are so bereft of common sense right now, mainly because they have turned their politics and rhetoric over to the most Russophobic states of the European Union. The foreign policy spokesman of the European Union is Estonian, and she’s absolutely hate-filled with Russia. Their defense commissioner is also from the Baltic States — Lithuania, if I remember correctly — and their economics commissioner also from the Baltic States. So you have a complete Russian hatred, and that is leading the Europeans to reckless escalation.
They’re openly assisting attacks deep in Russia. They’re chortling about these attacks when a girls’ school was recently hit. Just like in Iran, same circumstance, many schoolgirls were killed by a Ukrainian drone strike. The Europeans couldn’t breathe one word of human decency. And so what’s happening is a dramatic escalation of the hate language in Europe and the actual attacks inside Russia, including attacks on Moscow and other attacks on civilians.
I wrote a letter because of this to Chancellor Merz — published an open letter in the Berliner Zeitung last week — saying, “Mr. Chancellor, you are absolutely key right now to prevent a European war. That’s your job, actually. You are Chancellor of Germany. Germany cheated on the agreement that it had reached with the Soviet Union and Russia about NATO. Cheated. Germany cheated on the Minsk agreement that could have ended this conflict back in 2015. You have a responsibility to stop this slide into a European war.”
So what I want to say is not about who’s got rights and not rights. What I want to say is that Europe is on the verge of a complete disaster. And the European Commission is bereft of any capacity internally to stop it because they’re filled with warmongers. And unfortunately, the German Chancellor has done no better. But he individually, by dint of being the leader of the most powerful country of Europe and the one that has the most direct responsibility towards Russia for having gotten us all into this terrible mess, has a responsibility to at least pick up the phone and speak to his counterpart before all hell breaks loose. This is the point of my open letter to him: before you have war, you better make at least a phone call to start talking to the other side.
Closing Remarks
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Professor Sachs, thank you very much. Thanks for letting me go all across the globe, almost literally, on all of these topics. Deeply appreciated. Have a great week. Maybe we’ll do another segment on Friday morning.
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Okay, great.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: You’ve been so well received and look forward to seeing you again soon.
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Thank you. Thanks a lot.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: All the best. Coming up tomorrow, Tuesday at 8 in the morning, Ambassador Chas Freeman. At 9 in the morning, Professor John Mearsheimer. At 10 in the morning, Colonel Bill Astori. At 2 in the afternoon, Matt Ho. At 3 in the afternoon, Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski. Just the Paul tunnel for Judging Freedom.
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