Editor’s Notes: In this episode of Judging Freedom, Judge Andrew Napolitano welcomes Professor Jeffrey Sachs to discuss the profound geopolitical implications of “America First” policies and recent escalations regarding Iran. Professor Sachs argues that current administration strategies are less about true national interest and more about a continuation of long-standing, interventionist traditions influenced by external lobbies and “swamp” politics. They examine the humanitarian and economic toll of these conflicts, the role of international voices in urging restraint, and the potential domestic fallout for the average American. This conversation provides a critical look at the “global cost” of these political shifts and the urgent need for transparency and diplomacy to avoid catastrophic outcomes. (Feb 3, 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. Reject it.”
Opening Remarks
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 Tuesday, February 3, 2026. Professor Jeffrey Sachs will be with us in just a moment. How did America first come to mean destroying other countries?
Professor Sachs, welcome here, my dear friend. Thank you for accommodating our schedule. How did America first come to mean destroying other countries?
The Continuation of Interventionist Tradition
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Well, the destruction of other countries is a long-standing American tradition. It’s just that Trump hasn’t changed anything and in recent months he’s become rather unhinged, I would say. So America first didn’t invent anything and it didn’t change anything.
The U.S. has been engaged in wars of choice, especially Israel’s wars of choice and in regime change operations for decades. The CIA has been the most important powerful agent of the U.S. Government. It has been a disaster time and again in my view.
One of the reasons why it gets away with disaster is that it’s basically unaccountable. It just walks away from one disaster after another without anybody scrutinizing the CIA. CIA hasn’t had a proper overview by the public and Congress since 1975, more than 50 years ago in the Church committee.
So what’s happening is just a continuation of our politics. It’s alarming. It’s been a massive failure. It continues to be a massive failure. It’s very heavily driven by the Zionist lobby when it comes to the Middle East. And we’re on the verge of war with Iran because of all of this. And that could be another devastating mistake.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: What do you think Trump’s strategy is? Or that’s the wrong word. What do you think Trump’s—
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Call a sentence that says Trump strategy is the wrong phrase.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Right?
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Right. There is no strategy.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Oxymoronic.
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: It’s improvisation.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: But is it whatever Netanyahu wants? Is it the destruction and breakup of Iran?
Netanyahu’s Long-Standing Agenda
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Of course, the goal of Netanyahu, not exactly a secret, going back 30 years. And it’s exactly 30 years to 1996 when Netanyahu and his American and Israeli political advisors brought out a document that should be better understood and known called “Clean Break,” which is a document essentially calling for Israeli hegemony over the Middle East, overthrowing any government that opposes Israel’s control over the Palestinians.
The goal from the start was the mother lode from the start was overthrowing the Iranian government. And of course, the U.S. has been party to one covert operation after another. Assassinations, economic warfare, and last summer in June, the direct bombing of Iran.
Remember how Trump chortled after the bombing that, “Well, this ended Iran’s nuclear program.” Now we hear, “Well, we have to go to war because there’s a nuclear program.” This is typical Trump nonsense in all directions. There’s no consistency at all.
But the one consistent point is that Netanyahu has been urging the United States to go to war with a powerful country with a lot of powerful friends in the most explosive region of the world. And that urging has been going on basically since the mid-1990s. And every year of that period, Netanyahu said Iran’s about to get a nuclear bomb. That’s been the non-stop pattern.
The truth is that for the last dozen years, intensively, Iran has been trying to negotiate with the United States, and indeed it did negotiate with the United States. And it reached an agreement with the entire permanent five countries of the Security Council plus Germany in a program that would absolutely have controlled Iran’s nuclear energy to ensure that it could not be diverted into nuclear weapons.
That was agreed. It was voted unanimously by the UN Security Council Resolution 2231 in 2015. And Trump ripped it up when he came into office in the first term because Netanyahu told him to rip it up.
So here we are. Trump says, “You got to negotiate.” They have negotiated. Last year, when they negotiated, he bombed them. So this is a really dark, dangerous, stupid, typically stupid game of the Israelis, and Trump is their agent. There’s no space between what Netanyahu wants and what Trump delivers.
The Threat of Iranian Retaliation
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Is Netanyahu fearful of an Iranian attack on Israel in response to an American attack on Iran? And if he is, is that a realistic fear?
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Well, he should be afraid, of course, but he’s counting on the United States to go all in. So he’s counting on a full-fledged war that would knock out Iran.
This is delusional in my view, but Netanyahu is delusional and he has a delusional partner, Trump.
You know, Netanyahu was the one that told us how wonderful each of these wars would be. He came to Congress in the fall of 2002 to say, “Go to war with Iraq. It’ll be the greatest thing you ever did. It’s going to make peace and security throughout the region. It’s going to overthrow the regime in Iran,” he said, “because it’s going to show how wonderful all of this is.”
This is what we’ve had for years and years. And it’s quite clear that the hold of this on U.S. Policy has been stunning. And I think we’re beginning to see the pieces put together with the Epstein file. Because what we’re seeing from the Epstein file is not even so much about the sex and the parties on the island, but about Epstein’s network of influence across the Israeli government, the U.S. Government, the British government, on all sorts of issues, including these security issues.
So there’s something going on that is being exposed because all of us have wondered, how does the Zionist lobby have such a hold on U.S. Politics? And of course, money and campaign finance is part of it, but there has been more to it than that, and I think it’s starting to be uncovered.
The Neocon Agenda: Power as Policy
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Do the neocons want war in order to divert the public, American public’s attention from the disastrous domestic policies at home? Whether it’s ICE agents murdering innocents in the streets of Minneapolis or the revelations about Epstein and the President?
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: I don’t think it’s diversion. I think that we’re seeing two sides of the same coin. This is a group in power that believes in power as the answer to anything. Wars abroad and military crackdowns at home.
So I think that Stephen Miller really represents this view. It’s not a trick, it’s not a distraction. It’s the same idea. Miller wants militarization of American society, and he wants force to be the principal instrument of American policy abroad. And apparently, he’s the one that Trump listens to most, and he’s part of this whole story.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: How is the average American harmed by the public policies of the Iranian government?
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Not at all. Not at all. Not at all. Not threatened at all, not harmed at all. And especially what the Iranians have been saying. And you and I were in the room when we heard the President of Iran basically beg, “We want peace. We want to negotiate.”
That’s taken as a sign of weakness by the people in Washington, not as a measure of responsibility and an opportunity to avoid war. That’s the problem with these people, our people. I mean, they hear the other side wants to negotiate, they say, “Oh, good, let’s kill them.” That’s actually how they think, which is, if they want to negotiate, boy, they must be weak. Don’t they understand that the only reality is power?
The Economic Cost of War
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Let me ask the flip side of that question. How will the average American be affected if the result of Trump’s attack on Iran is a closing of the Straits of Hormuz and gas and energy prices go through the roof?
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Look, the American people have paid trillions and trillions of dollars for Bibi Netanyahu’s wars. And the fact that the American political class fights them on behalf of these extremists, and the result of that is massive budget deficits, so that we now live day by day with government that is completely dysfunctional doesn’t work at all.
I just was in an American airport as I was traveling from yesterday till today. I didn’t even realize, I’m sorry to say, that the government was shut down so that it was usual confusion. We don’t have functioning government right now. We have a budget crisis that is out of control.
Trump wants to spend another half a trillion dollars on the military as part of this. And the costs of all of these wars are completely out of sight. And so we end up with completely dysfunctional government going broke. And nothing works in America right now, I’m sorry to say, not very well, except raids by paramilitaries on American streets and infrastructure that doesn’t function and government that shut down half the time.
International Pressure and Regional Opposition
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: So there are rumors this morning in the Western, actually the European alternative media, I’ve gotten this from our friends in Europe that the Russians made their extreme displeasure known in no uncertain terms to American negotiators at Abu Dhabi about the President’s persistent threats on Iran, whether those rumors are true or not. How do you think Russia and China would react to an American attack, whether it’s a full-blown attack or one of these in and out things that Trump seems to favor?
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Well, let me just step back for one moment. U.S. policy for years has been predicated on the idea that the Arab world would support an all-out attack on Iran. And that basically the division supposed between Iran and the Arab countries could be exploited to Israel’s benefit because the Arab countries would support the overthrow of the Iranian government. This is clearly false.
What’s happening right now, and it’s in line with this story, which I don’t know whether it’s true or not, about Russia making these statements, is that the countries of the region, the region of Iran, the countries of the Middle East are undoubtedly telling Trump, “What are you doing? Do not do this.”
You think that Dubai, a great trading and financial center of the world, wants a war right there? You think Doha wants to be bombed again? You think that Saudi Arabia’s highest aspiration is a full-blown war in the Middle East or that Turkey would support this?
So what is absolutely the case is that Trump is hearing from important countries in the region. Don’t do this. Of course he’s hearing from his campaign paymasters do it. But he’s hearing from the Saudis, he’s hearing from Turkey, from President Erdogan, he’s hearing from throughout the Gulf region. Don’t do this. I’m sure that is causing some pause.
The idea that he would be hearing this from President Putin makes perfect sense. I hope he’s hearing it from President Putin. That wouldn’t be a Russian threat to the United States. It would be the best possible advice that Russia could give to President Trump, which is don’t step on this landmine, don’t cause a new explosion in the world right now.
So this is why we’re hanging in the balance. And there is clearly some last-ditch attempt at diplomacy to head off a war. People know that if the war comes, it’s not going to be a 12-day affair. It’s going to go on and it’s going to be extraordinarily dangerous and it’s going to escalate in a horrifying way. And so this is what people are trying to tell Trump. Whether he understands these things or not, I don’t know.
Now, it’s interesting. Witkoff is in Israel today meeting Mossad and meeting Netanyahu. God knows whether he’s getting instructions or maybe telling them that this isn’t a good idea. Who knows what’s really going on right now? We’re not privy to this.
The Voice of the War Hawks
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Here’s the pitiful sight of a United States senator begging the President of the United States to invade Iran.
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Don’t tell me it’s Lindsey.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Oh, yes. Sorry to ruin your afternoon.
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: No, you entertain us all, because Lindsey Graham is the biggest fool in Washington. So let’s see what he says. Number five, Chris.
The Influence of External Lobbies
VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:
LINDSEY GRAHAM: If this regime falls, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, they all go. It’d be the biggest change since the fall of the Berlin Wall. But here’s one thing. Donald Trump is Ronald Reagan plus, in my mind, Venezuela assumed Cuba. The one thing you can’t do as president, talk like Reagan and act like Obama. There’s no deal to be done here. These people are not trustworthy.
The protesters in the street are not protesting for a better nuclear deal. They’re protesting for a better life. And if they win the day, we have a chance to have friends with the people of Iran. Ayatollah will never be our friend. He’s a religious Nazi. President Trump, you said help is on the way. That has to be real. It has to be real soon. Do it.
Mr. President, the people of Iran are begging you to be on their side. You have done it so good. You are Reagan plus. This is the defining moment in your presidency. Stand by the people. I tell you, Ayatollah falls, the region changes bigger than the fall of the Berlin Wall. No more international terrorists. This regime has American blood on its hands since 1979. You got the Houthis, you got Hezbollah killing Americans.
Bring this regime down because the people want it down. You don’t have to invade the country, but help on the way means military strikes against the infrastructure that is killing the Iranian people. Does he get this stuff?
VIDEO CLIP ENDS:
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: No. I know where he gets it, because he’s been a broken record. Biggest disaster in United States politics. He’s a fool. He’s an idiot, and he’s been wrong on everything. But let me mention one point which we’ve discussed. He talks about the crackdowns on protests. The man’s such an ignoramus, this senator, that he doesn’t even listen or care to hear that it was the United States that brought those people out onto the streets by crushing the Iranian economy.
And that’s not Mr. Sachs saying so, that’s Treasury Secretary Bessent saying so. And this is very important for people to understand. The United States and Israel are playing a game. The game is crush the Iranian economy, bring people out onto the streets and then say, “You see how terrible the Iranian government is. People are out on the streets protesting.” It’s a simple minded, absolutely vicious game.
And let me just read again what Bessent said, because people should listen to the actual words that these gangsters in our government use. Bessent said on January 20, 2026 on Fox News, same show that we just saw Mr. Graham: “President Trump ordered Treasury and our Office of Foreign Asset Control to put maximum pressure on Iran. And it’s worked because in December their economy collapsed. We saw a major bank go under. The central bank has started to print money. There is a dollar shortage. They are not able to get imports. And this is why the people took to the streets. So this is economic statecraft, no shots fired. And things are moving in a very positive way here.”
That’s Bessent talking surprisingly too much, but explaining that America brought people to the streets by crushing the Iranian economy. I don’t know if Lindsey Graham understands anything. I don’t know if he’s been wrong on everything. He is an absolute disastrous warmonger that has gotten the United States into one mess after another.
But the point is, the United States is engaged in a war against Iran. It is an economic war. It’s a shooting war. It’s a bombing war. It’s not in America’s interest at all. It’s a game played for Bibi Netanyahu. And it’s absolutely against everything about America first and America’s interests.
Intelligence Agency Operations
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Here’s another one of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s good friends, former Secretary of State and Director of the CIA Mike Pompeo. Not in the administration, but some of this is ominous, Professor Sachs. Well, you tell me what you think of this. But it’s almost as if he thinks more CIA, MI6, Mossad behavior in the streets is coming. Take a listen. Number seven, Chris.
VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: President Trump said help is underway. Iranian went to the street, but help didn’t come. Do you think till now the Trump administration lost an opportunity for a regime change during this uprising?
MIKE POMPEO: No, I don’t think so. By the way, help did come. Lots of help came. You may not see it all, we may not know about it all, but I’m very confident that the United States is actively trying to do all that it can to support the Iranian people.
VIDEO CLIP ENDS:
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: That’s Channel 13 in Tel Aviv, obviously an Israeli program and interrogator. I don’t know why he would say that, but it leads me to believe that those intelligence agencies which failed miserably three weeks ago are still there. Why are we playing Israel’s game?
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: This is the central question. Let’s review the Epstein files again about all his political manipulations, about the relations with the top people in the US Government, in the treasury, in Israel, in the UK because we are locked into such a disaster right now.
And there’s Pompeo talking on Israeli television about, “Don’t worry, we’re all in there together. We’re going to do this all together. No, we didn’t miss a chance for regime change.” And he’s probably right that all of this war continues. It’s just radically against the interests of you and me and the American people. And it’s completely the opposite of America first or MAGA. Completely the opposite. It’s the worst of the swamp. It is the US being run for purposes that have nothing to do with America’s interests.
The Need for International Voices of Reason
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Very sad state of affairs, Professor. I’m very worrisome, I know, and you are wise and courageous to articulate it as carefully and precisely as you have. I just fear that Trump is surrounded by people like Stephen Miller and emboldened by people like Lindsey Graham, and that something catastrophic is going to happen and innocents will die.
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: We absolutely have to hope that the grownups around, especially President Putin, especially President Erdogan, especially the leaders of Saudi Arabia and others, explain to Trump this is completely reckless. It is no favor for your own politics, Mr. President. It’s the opposite. But it could be a disaster for the whole world. And those are the most important voices right now, to tell the truth to President Trump, who knows what he understands or what he hears, but he needs to hear the truth.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Professor Sachs, thank you very much. Great stuff. Terrifying, but needs to be stated. All the best. Safe travels to you. We’ll look forward to seeing you next week.
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: See you next week. Bye bye.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Thank you. Thank you. Coming up later this afternoon, more of all of this. At 1 o’clock, Aaron Maté. At 2 o’clock, Matt Hoh. At 3 o’clock, Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski. At 4 o’clock, batting cleanup, Scott Ritter. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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