Read the full transcript of American economist and public policy analyst Prof. Jeffrey Sachs in conversation with Judge Napolitano of Judging Freedom podcast on “Trump’s Dangerous Moves”, August 4, 2025.
INTRODUCTION
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Hi everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, August 4, 2025. Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins us now. Professor Sachs, always a pleasure, my dear friend.
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Great to be with you.
The Origins of American Hostility Toward China
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Thank you. I want to spend a little time with you seeking your analysis on some rather dangerous things the President of the United States has done and said lately. But before we get there, I have an interest in this and I know you do, and I know it’s one of your fields of expertise and I know viewers are interested in it. What are the origins of American hostility toward China? Why this hostility rather than compatibility?
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Well, we had compatibility up until 10 years ago and then a conscious decision was made to move to hostility. This was actually a contrived move to try to stop China’s successful economic development.
The origins of it are that from the 1970s to around 2010, China was viewed as both a constructive partner, a trade partner and geopolitically helpful to the United States for quite a while. Remember when Richard Nixon went to China, the idea was a kind of triangulation that there was the US Cold War with the Soviet Union by the US warming up with China. This would help to put more pressure, it was thought, on the Soviet Union, so that it was an instrumental idea that the US would get closer to China.
Starting in 1978, China undertook remarkable economic reforms, arguably the most successful economic reforms in world history because China went from being an impoverished economy in 1978 to being one of the most successful dynamic, arguably currently the most successful economy in the world today during a period of just a bit over 40 years.
Now, during that time, US China economic and political relations were good for most of the period. Actually a lot of Americans were making a lot of money by selling things to China or making investments in China or integrating Chinese companies into global supply chains. And America on the whole benefited enormously from China’s economic growth. Though some places in America faced intense import competition from China and suffered, but others boomed. California boomed, no question, as a result of the growing US China trade. Probably places in the industrial Midwest were hit by the increasing competition from China. But net, net the US China relations were very positive.
Now, starting around 2010, American strategists, I use that, I think it’s a euphemism because I think they’re idiots basically. I don’t think that they’re strategists at all.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: But anyway, who’s the president in this time period?
The Deep State’s Strategy of Primacy
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: That’s Obama, but it doesn’t matter. This is another point of American foreign policy. All this idea that, oh, we’ll see if it’s Clinton or Bush Jr. or Obama or Trump 1 or Biden or Trump 2. This is not actually how foreign policy works. It’s the Pentagon, the CIA, the deep state, the military industrial complex.
And starting around 2010, these strategists said, “Oh my God, China’s too successful. We need to do something.” In 2015, a very interesting article, horrible on one level because I think it’s foolishness to the maximum, but insightful also to the maximum, was written by a former colleague of mine, Ambassador Robert Blackwill, who was a professor at Harvard, then a senior US diplomat and another leading specialist, Ashley Telles. The paper in 2015 was written for the Council on Foreign Relations. You could put a link to it because I believe it’s openly available.
And it declares bluntly that America’s goal or its grand strategy is primacy. In other words, the grand strategy of the United States is to be number one. And China’s rise, these authors say, is a threat to America being number one. They don’t say China’s evil, they don’t say China’s done something terrible. They don’t say that China is a threat to US national security or prosperity. They say that China’s success is a threat to the American grand strategy of being number one.
Okay, if you’re in a high school clique, maybe that’s your goal. If you’re grown ups in a world where there are dangers of nuclear war, where you need cooperation, where there’s mutual gains from trade, the idea that being number one is a meaningful idea when you’re 4% of the world population and the idea that the success of another country is harmful to you because they’re successful, not because of what they’re doing, but because of their successful is to my mind, so mind bogglingly wrongheaded. But that became the core of American policy.
And in this very interesting paper, which I really would like people to read with their own eyes because it’s incredible, it says we must stop China. It’s no longer in our interest for China to be successful. And they list all the things we should do. For example, one of the incredibly stupid ideas was we should have a trade arrangement for the US and Asian countries that excludes China. It’s like kids on it. You take a map, we put an X over China, but we trade with all the others, not noticing that all the others have their main trading partner, China.
But Obama really tried to do that. He tried to launch something called the Trans Pacific Partnership, which was a trade group that would exclude China. Okay, this was another one of these ideas that belongs in the dustbin of history and it did never materialize. But the list goes on. We should stop exporting technology.
We should break relations. We should increase our military bases around China’s rimlands. We should do other things. Restrictions on investments, trade barriers. Why? Because America needs to be number one. So we have to do whatever we can to harm China’s economy.
Now, today I was just reading the typical columnists of the Washington Post and the New York Times and Financial Times, and every one of them treats China like an enemy. Just naturally. We have to prepare for war. They’re an enemy. We have to be smarter in our trade policy than Trump because China’s going to take an advantage. Everything is not about American interests or American well being or the American people. It’s about this game, like it’s a board game.
So you ask me, why do we hate China? Because we were told to, starting 10 years ago, because it became the strategy of the United States to harm China. By the way, how do you think Chinese officials and government and business feel about this? That another country is overtly aiming to harm them? Is that conducive to peace, to goodwill, to normal behavior, to the security of the United States of America? Of course not. We’re provoking. But it’s so clear from this article, people should read it.
So this is the basic point. And I’ve been, I just have to add, I’ve been visiting China since 1981, so 44 years. I’ve toured all parts of the country. I’ve studied Chinese history extensively. I published about China. I’ve written very extensively about the Chinese reforms. China is not an enemy. China’s not doing anything to threaten American security. There is no reason for the United States to view China’s well being as harmful to America’s interest. Nor did China’s rise hurt the United States.
But our political system is so broken that if major parts of the US benefit, but one part, say the industrial Midwest, say in Ohio or Indiana, hurts, we don’t have a policy to help those people. Our policy is to attack China, even though the overall relationship is mutually beneficial. So by the way, every day there’s a drumbeat of war right now on our side. I was in China, by the way, recently, just a couple of weeks ago. They just look on in amazement. “What is going on in your country? What is it? What is this hostility? Why does the President fulminate every day about us?” That’s what they ask.
The Warmongering Continues
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: I wish the President listen to you. I wish the Congress could listen to you. Professor Sachs, two months ago the Secretary of Defense who has his own issues was in Japan and was threatening China.
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: They’re all threatening every day. And these incredibly awful columnist Max Boot today, I’ll name names in the Washington Post. It’s just pure warmongering. Now of course, he supported every war we’ve been in because that’s our columnists. They’re just warmongers. But the next war they want is with China. Good luck with that. What is the matter with our country? Can we just get along with somebody?
The Economics of Trade with China
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Is there any reason, from an economic perspective, one of your other fields of expertise, Professor Sachs, that we can’t just have an open trading policy with China? They can sell us what they want and we can buy what we want and we can sell whatever they want to buy from us, of course.
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: And when they out compete us in certain areas, like they are doing right now in electric vehicles, it’s because the United States has no policy. You know, Trump just pulled the plug literally on electric vehicles and on the incentives and so forth. Okay, we handed China the world market for electric vehicles and then we say, “Oh, they’ve got over capacity in electric vehicles because they’re selling electric vehicles all over the world.” Then we have to put up tariff barriers because we have no sensible industrial policy whatsoever.
And so this is not China’s fault. China’s just diligently following the future, developing new efficient energy sources, 5G technology, open source AI, fourth generation nuclear power. I toured factories recently. Incredible. Integration of artificial intelligence systems and robotics in highly sophisticated solar module factories. Incredible what I saw. And we complain. They’re just doing a good job in manufacturing.
What is Trump doing? Trump is attacking the universities, cutting the research budgets, driving scientists from the United States to China or to other parts of the world, and then whining about all those terrible things the other countries are doing to us, all that unfairness.
Shooting the Messenger
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Well, Professor Sachs, President Trump shoots the messenger. If you’re the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the statistics are bad for a month and you reveal them and he doesn’t like what you reveal, even though what you revealed is based on an algorithm, you’re fired. That’s the mentality we’re dealing with.
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: But by the way, Trump, okay, that is like a five year old. I don’t like the news. So I just throw everything into turmoil. But what’s amazing is not that, that we might have expected. What is amazing is the silence in Washington. This is how our country is supposed to be, that you get a month of bad data and then you fire the person in charge of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And by the way, there always are revisions to the data. This is a core and systematic and scientific part of how to measure a complex 30 trillion dollar economy.
But what struck me first was the silence. Where are the Congress people saying, “No, we can’t run a country on the most shoddy whims.” But then the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers comes out and defends the firing of the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Yes, honestly, we are completely destroying our institutions before our eyes.
The only word that characterizes Washington, and I’m speaking beyond Trump himself, is pathetic. Nobody speaks the truth. No one says that this completely erratic and dangerous behavior is very damaging to our national security. We had the president shooting off about nuclear this and that in the last few days. Just unbelievable.
Nuclear Provocations
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Here’s what he said. And this is in response to a tweet based on the highly provocative statements of the former president. Chris, can you put it up? “Based on the highly provocative statements of the former President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, who is now the Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, I have ordered two nuclear submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions just in case. These foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that. Words are very important and can often lead to unintended consequences. I hope this will not be one of those instances. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
Talk about being foolish with words. Why would you do this? And why would you announce it? And why would you provoke another nuclear power that has three or four times the number of nuclear submarines that we do?
Trump’s Ultimatum to Russia and the Failure of Diplomacy
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: And the reason that this unbelievable posting occurred was in response to a posting by Medvedev, which was in response to an ultimatum delivered by Trump to President Putin that if you don’t have a ceasefire in 10 days, I impose the sanctions on all countries in the world that are dealing with you.
Ultimatum to Russia rather than actual diplomacy. Good luck with that. Ultimatum. An ultimatum. You know, the problem is Trump is, of course, he has no attention span, maybe no understanding, no knowledge of what he’s doing. But the fact of the matter is there’s no diplomacy taking place right now because the war in Ukraine that he promised to end in 24 hours, which, by the way, could have been ended in 24 hours.
Not on the basis of an ultimatum or declaring you must have a ceasefire, but on the basis of solving the underlying issue that led us to this war. And this war, as every analyst you talk to says, and as everyone who has looked clearly into this understands, came because we pushed NATO up to Russia’s borders, because we overthrew a government in Ukraine so that that new government would support NATO, because the government we overthrew wanted neutrality, which is a no, no in American eyes, and because the United States resisted every attempt at diplomacy to avoid the war.
And then to end the war, we absolutely threw out the agreement at the UN called the Minsk II agreement that would have avoided this war, telling the Ukrainians, you don’t have to abide by the UN Security Council and an agreement that the Ukraine itself had signed. And then when there was a peace agreement reached just about to be reached in April 2022, the US government told the Ukrainians, no, you fight on. We don’t want you neutral. We want you on our side. No neutrality.
So Trump now gives an ultimatum that doesn’t get to any of the root causes of this conflict. Of course, the ultimatum is not going to be observed, but he’s giving an ultimatum to a nuclear superpower. But more than that, he’s telling China, India, Brazil and all the other countries of the world that the United States demands that they stop trading with Russia as well.
Oh, fancy that. You think that’s going to work? That the United States. That the President of the United States can just dictate to the whole world what to do? No, that is not how conflicts are resolved. That’s not how diplomacy works. That’s not, and this is the most important point, that’s not how American security is achieved.
Trump is driving America into the greatest insecurity that we have had in decades, certainly since the worst moments of the Cold War, if not worse than that, right now, by this obstreperous, vituperative, unstable, non or anti diplomacy that we’re engaged in. Sit and talk and resolve serious issues like grownups. Not this shooting off in the most provocative possible ways, but again, I have to emphasize, Trump does it. It’s disgusting and it’s shocking. But in Washington, no one says anything else because it’s as if the rest of the constitutional order has disappeared in the United States.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Professor Sachs, did the United States government in the past two weeks announced that it had just completed the delivery of nuclear weapons to NATO countries.
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: I can’t tell you. Actually, I can’t tell you authoritatively, and I don’t know authoritatively on such a crucial question, but I know you have many interlocutors who can give an authoritative answer.
The New York Times and the Myth of Military Victory
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: I appreciate your candor there. Tomorrow’s New York Times has an article by the New York Times bureau chief in Jerusalem. It’s highly critical of Prime Minister Netanyahu. But the opening line is so curious. “When Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, led the country to a military victory over Iran in June,” what military victory over Iran in June is the New York Times talking about?
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Every day I decide to cancel my subscription to the New York Times and every day I pull back just because I need at least to see the foolishness so that I understand what others are hearing. Of course, there was no military victory. We are in a much deeper crisis than we were before the so called 12 Day War. The IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency was pushed out of Iran. There is no diplomacy.
You see, everything Judge, is coming from the basic point that the American delusion, and it’s not just Trump, although he has his particular way, the American delusion, let me just add, say Lindsey Graham or Richard Blumenthal, but it’s everywhere, that the United States can dictate all terms to all of the rest of the world. And that is true whether it’s In Iran, this 12 day war. We bomb when we want, we make demands of diplomacy when we want. Or true in Ukraine, or true vis a vis China, or true vis a vis India’s trade with Russia, you name it.
You know, the one leader in the world who said it most clearly, just very succinctly because he’s a brilliant leader and communicator, is Brazil’s President Lula, who said very matter of factly, “we don’t need an emperor.” And he was referring, of course, to all the threats that Trump had made against Brazil. Trump, Trump telling the independent Brazilian judiciary to stop a court case, if you can imagine. And Lula said, “we don’t need an emperor,” but we have, we have, we have an emperor right now. And we don’t have a constitutional order. And we have growing crises all over the world.
The Collapse of Constitutional Order
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: And the biggest culprit is a supine Congress that does nothing, lets the president impose taxes, looks the other way, doesn’t complain about anything. As you pointed out earlier, the silence from Congress, I just don’t get it.
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: We used to know of senators who were personalities and would speak to the country and actually advise the nation about the right way forward. We had debates in Washington, sometimes very heated Debates, but sometimes very illuminating debates. We have nothing right now. We have executive orders where one person declares emergencies. We have silence from the Congress as if it doesn’t exist at all. We have a Supreme Court that basically shades its eyes and turns away and lets this destruction of the constitutional order proceed.
We have spokespeople completely unqualified, knowing nothing, opining on the gravest matters of international relations because they’re in the White House without any responsibility. I don’t even want to name names. It’s so ugly, the things that have been coming out of the White House in the last few days and the idiocy of it, of people who know nothing about the world except that they’re making the world far more dangerous every single day.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Not to raise your blood pressure, but I believe that shortly before we came on air, the Israeli government announced the firing of the Attorney General of Israel, who was the principal prosecutor of Netanyahu. Now this will obviously go before the Israeli Supreme Court and there’ll be another Israeli constitutional crisis.
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah. Whether Israel survives all of this, we don’t know because it is in the process of self destructing, undermining the most, most basic legitimacy of the state in an orgy of murder, in an orgy of the genocide, where the ministers of the government have left any even slightest compunction about talking about genocide openly. And the United States is completely complicit in this. Completely. And again, Trump’s our president, so he’s complicit in it, but it goes far beyond Trump. It is the completely compromised American political class.
The Palestinian State Recognition Movement
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Mike Huckabee, my former colleague at Fox News. Every time you turn around, there’s somebody that used to work at Fox being given a significant position in the government, was allowed to visit Gaza. And of course the person he spoke to was healthy, happy, well dressed, and said all the right things to him. And he came on and repeated that. I don’t know how any of this ends.
Professor Sachs, Trump has only been in office for eight months. I share every one of your criticisms against them, except that people are dying, dying horrible, horrific deaths, and nothing seems to come of it. What will come of Great Britain, France, Canada, a few other countries? I think Spain, maybe Portugal recognizing a Palestinian state. I don’t think anything until the UN Security Council does it. Am I right?
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Well, we have right now 150 countries that have recognized the state of Palestine. They represent around 90% of the world population. I need to do an update of the arithmetic. But basically 90 plus percent of the world Population says there needs to be a state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel.
There was a declaration by the Arab countries saying that Hamas would be disarmed, that there would be a normalization of relations on the basis of a state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel. Of course, Israel rejected that. This is what’s important for everybody to understand. Israel is not looking for peace. Israel is looking for domination.
This government and much of Israeli society is absolutely content on mass murder and on ethnic cleansing, so that Israel retains control over 100% of what was the so called British Mandatory Palestine. In other words, the land that Britain in its typical imperialistic way promised to everybody, to the Arabs, to the Jews, to the French, to everybody, and the Zionists said will take it all. And they don’t want peace based on two states. They want everything.
And since there just happened to be some millions of Arabs living there, they’re just going to have to leave or starve to death or be killed or submit to apartheid rule. That’s all that’s going on. There is no attempt at, in the United States and or Israel to actually make peace. But for 90% of the world, what’s happening is abhorrent. And for most of American citizens, who of course play no role in our government, in foreign policy whatsoever, no voice, no say, no reflection of our attitudes, we are revolted by Israel’s extraordinarily cruel. I don’t, I lose the words, but it is a genocide.
And just to say we’re, it’s two countries now and you ask, will something come of this? Yes, in the end, there will be a state of Palestine. How many people die beforehand is the real question. But there absolutely will be a state of Palestine. There is a question, will there be a state of Israel? Because if Israel is so shockingly, disgustingly brazen in this mass murder, how is Israel going to go on among the community of nations? That’s the real question.
Senators Kaine and Rubio on Palestinian Recognition
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Here’s Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia who agrees with you, and regrettably, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who does not. Chris, back to back two and three.
VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:
TIM KAINE: , the international community, including the United States, made a promise in 1947 that there would be a state of Israel and a state for Arabs, Palestine. In this space, one promise has been met. Nearly 80 years later, one promise has not been met. More than 100 nations have done a recognition. They’ve said, look, we need to meet. The promise that the international community made, but needs to be conditions based.
And I think the most important condition is recognizing a Palestine when they are able to peacefully coexist with their neighbors, including Israel.
MARCO RUBIO: And so as I read what the nations are saying, it’s not an immediate recognition, no questions asked in September, it’s establishing conditions that when they are met, Palestine would be recognized. The UK is like, well, if Israel doesn’t agree to a ceasefire by September, we’re going to recognize the Palestinian state. So if I’m Hamas, I say, you know what, let’s not allow there to be a ceasefire.
If Hamas refuses to agree to a ceasefire, it guarantees the Palestinian state will be recognized by all these countries in September. So they’re not going to agree to a ceasefire.
VIDEO CLIP ENDS:
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: I mean, it’s so clumsy. It’s hard to know whether these people like Rubio are so dense that they don’t understand anything or so vulgar that they obfuscate everything. But Rubio is not working towards a two state solution.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: No.
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: What’s his complaint? Do your diplomacy. That’s your job, Mr. Secretary of State. Do your diplomacy. But you’re not doing any diplomacy. So who are you to say what other countries should do? Because you and your administration is not engaged in diplomacy, it’s engaged in war. War is not diplomacy. Diplomacy is finding a way to peace.
What are you doing, Mr. Rubio, to find a way to peace and a two state solution? Nothing. So every word that Rubio utters is either this measure of how dense he might be or how much he wants to obfuscate. The most basic point, that we are complicit in a genocide and do not find words for diplomacy which 150 other countries have easily recognized.
And by the way, that’s 150 that have recognized Palestine. More than 180 have repeatedly voted for Palestinian right to political self determination at the UN Year after year that I know the count because I’ve done the arithmetic. It’s 95% of the world population.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Do you think that the arguments that you’ve made are even articulated in the White House?
The Military Industrial State’s Control
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: No. I think the military industrial state which runs our country lives in a delusion of being all powerful and thinking that whenever there’s resistance, all they have to do is escalate more arms, more military, more war, so that they can dictate.
This has been like this for a long time. Again, I don’t find anything particular with Trump except how obnoxious things are put. But Biden was terrible. Trump won. Same way Obama terrible. Bush terrible, Bush Jr. This is why none of these problems get solved. It’s not just that Trump’s not solving them.
The military industrial state, as Eisenhower told us, took over our country by the mid-1960s, probably with the coup in which President Kennedy was assassinated. And since then, we don’t have public opinion on foreign policy. We don’t have American security interests. We just have war. And the war is based on a delusion that we’re the most powerful so that we can dictate terms to everyone else.
The Absence of Real Debate
So, no, I don’t think that these arguments are discussed or debated because there is no discussion or debate in Washington. None. By the way, there’s an article today of some senators saying how unhappy they are in the Senate. And they say there’s no debate in the Senate anymore. There isn’t.
I used to work in the Senate a long time ago, 50, 52 years ago. When I was a kid, I saw real debate. There’s no debate right now. So, no, the things we’re discussing, they’re not discussed at all. They’re too arrogant and too ignorant even to have the discussion.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Professor Sachs, even when you’re angry, you are over the top, articulate and so informative. Thank you very much for all of this. I didn’t mean to raise your blood pressure, but God bless you. Thank you for your understanding and your ability to explain that understanding to all of us. And we look forward to seeing you again soon.
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: See you next week. Thanks. Bye. Bye.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Fabulous. Coming up tomorrow, Tuesday at 8 in the morning, Ambassador Charles Freeman at 2 in the afternoon, Aaron Mate at 3 in the afternoon, Colonel Karen Kwakowski, Judge Napolitano for judging Freedom.
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