Here is the full transcript of American economist and public policy analyst Prof. Jeffrey Sachs’ interview: “The West’s Dangerous Miscalculation: Why Underestimating Russia Prolongs the Ukraine War”, on Judging Freedom Podcast with host Judge Andrew Napolitano, December 9, 2025.
Brief Notes: Economist and foreign policy expert Prof. Jeffrey Sachs joins Judge Andrew Napolitano on Judging Freedom to argue that Washington and its allies are dangerously underestimating Russia’s resilience and power. He explains why Western sanctions have failed to collapse the Russian economy, how Moscow has deepened ties with BRICS and the Global South, and why this miscalculation has prolonged the Ukraine war at terrible human cost. Sachs also warns that treating Russia as a weak, isolated actor rather than a major nuclear and industrial power risks further escalation and undermines any realistic path to diplomacy and peace.
Introduction
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: I’m not hearing for some reason.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Can you hear me now?
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: I do.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Okay. Apologies, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, December 9, 2025. Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins us now. Apologies for the late start, apologies for the problem with audio, but I think we have all of our issues resolved.
Professor Sachs, I want to talk to you about underestimating Russia. But before we do, a couple of other items in the news about which I’d like to pick your brain. Our good friend and colleague Alistair Crooke is reporting that the Israeli press is reporting that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is threatening Israeli President Herzog unless he issues a pardon, even though Israeli law requires an admission of guilt prior to a pardon. Netanyahu has thumbed his nose at that. Does any of this surprise you?
Israel’s Lawlessness and Netanyahu’s War Crimes
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Nothing about Israel surprises me right now. It is a lawless state led by a lawless, reckless, murderous individual, Benjamin Netanyahu. So we could hear anything. I would find it believable. I have not heard independently any of this.
But the recklessness of the government of Israel, its absolute disdain for the rule of law, the whole idea of a pardon of a war criminal like this—this is all par for the course these days. Very, very sad. But Israel is a rogue state.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: The Financial Times is reporting this morning that Trump has been persuaded by some of his Arab allies to reject former British Prime Minister Tony Blair as a member of the so-called peace board. And I have to try and say this with a straight face as the Governor General of Gaza. Does this surprise you?
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Oh, God help us. You know, Blair’s another war criminal. Well, just to say I have a theorem that all problems in the world go back to the British. It’s not completely literal, but it’s not such a stretch. Certainly all of the problems in the Middle East go back to the British right now.
Britain created this mess that we have in the Middle East and it doubles down on this. Can we escape from this curse? I hope so. I hope this rumor is right. The Arab countries have swallowed a lot, but asking them to swallow a British Governor General of Gaza would be really asking a lot. We’d have to get David Lean to come in and make a new remake of Lawrence of Arabia.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Oh, boy. Is Israel abiding the so-called ceasefire?
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: No. Israel is hunkering down for a permanent occupation in Gaza. Of course it continues killings, destruction of buildings and infrastructure, aiming for ethnic expulsion of the people of Gaza.
The intention of the Israeli government remains to ethnically cleanse Gaza, to annex the West Bank de facto or de jure, but of course, heading towards de jure annexation, and to rule over Greater Israel. This is an unchanged policy. And the United States has not clearly to this moment said no to all of this recklessness. The US hasn’t said yes, but it hasn’t said no either.
Why NATO Should Have Ended With the Warsaw Pact
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Switching gears. When the Kremlin left the Warsaw Pact, why didn’t the United States leave NATO?
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Well, the United States should have just disbanded NATO. The Soviet Union didn’t leave the Warsaw Pact. It ended the Warsaw Pact. Mikhail Gorbachev said, the Cold War is over. There is and should be a common European home stretching from Rotterdam to Vladivostok. There’s no reason for a Warsaw Pact, which was the Soviet counterpart to NATO, and NATO should have been ended at that point.
What in fact was absolutely explicitly and repeatedly committed was that NATO would not move one inch eastward to take advantage of what the Soviet Union was doing, which was a unilateral end of its military alliance in the interests of peace. Of course, in the end, the US reneged. This is the whole story of why we are at war.
Because instead of taking peace, which was on offer, the United States said, “Ah, you’re weak, we’re strong, we win. We win by taking all the squares on the board that you are vacating.” Contrary to what was the entire purpose and spirit in February 1990, when the US and Germany made the commitment to President Gorbachev very explicitly and repeatedly, we will not take advantage. And the Soviet Union on its part said, in that case, we agree, which was needed from the point of view of international law to Germany’s reunification. And that’s what happened in 1990. And then the United States immediately reneged on its promises.
But the purpose of NATO was to defend Western Europe against an invasion by the Soviet Union. This was no longer even remotely feasible or something that needed to be defended. And then in December 1991, the Soviet Union itself ended. It was disbanded into 15 successor states, of which Russia was one, Ukraine another, Belarus, and 15 in total.
There was no more Soviet Union. The purpose of NATO was over.
Russia had zero intention, interest, or capacity to invade Europe. By the way, something that I would say is true today in terms of intention—there is no intention by Russia to invade the European Union. This is absurd. But what Russia has said dating back to 1990 is we do not want the US military on our border. That’s NATO. That means a tripwire to nuclear war. That means the temptations of the United States to decapitation strikes, or to covert regime change operations and other kinds of meddling. We don’t accept that.
Perfectly clear, perfectly plain, perfectly in line with what the United States says about our own hemisphere. Nothing unusual about it, nothing untoward about it, nothing perfidious about it. Very straightforward. But the United States doesn’t take reciprocity and fairness and honesty for an answer. It cheats. Sorry. This is the history. This is why there’s a war.
The Reality of Russia’s Resilient Economy
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: There’s no reason to be sorry. You’re being intellectually honest. You’re sorry because people don’t want to hear that. But they need to know the truth. What is the truth of the current state of the Russian economy? And talk to us about whether or not Trump, who claims he hates BRICS, can stop BRICS.
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah. The Russian economy is a large, sophisticated, diverse economy that did a lot of trading with Europe. But in the course of events over the last 14 years, since the coup that the US backed in Ukraine, has been more and more cut off from its absolutely normal markets with Europe.
By normal, I mean a basic economic fact, which is countries trade with their neighbors. It’s geography. We even have a term for it. We call it the gravity theory of trade. Gravity, because the force of gravity operates inversely to the distance of the two objects to the square of the distance, technically. And that means similarly with trade, you trade more with your neighbors, and as they get farther and farther away, you trade less.
But what’s happened is an artificial divide that Europe and the United States imposed to Europe’s great cost. But Russia is a sophisticated and flexible economy. So as the European market cut itself off from Russia to Europe’s own harm, Russia shifted to China, to India, to Southeast Asia, to Central Asia, to Africa, to other places in the world. And that’s why President Putin has friends all over the world.
Contrary to what was once claimed in the US media that Russia is isolated—no, Europe isolated itself from Russia. And now we see deindustrialization in Germany because the Russian connection in trade was vital for Germany’s international competitiveness on many grounds, not the least of which was low-cost natural gas coming from Russia, which fueled a lot of German heavy industry. But it was Germany that cut itself off.
Incidentally, the United States, a very cynical player in all of this, which is much more interested in American dominance than it is in American well-being, by the way. So it sacrifices American well-being to try to take advantage of other countries. The United States never wanted Europe and Russia to form the natural trade relations. So when the pipeline of gas was first proposed, the various Nord Stream pipelines, the US was against that. Why? Well, typical US thinking—that would strengthen the bonds of Europe and Russia and that would somehow weaken our role in all of this.
And so the US campaigned for years that the Russian-European relations should break. Now Europe is very poorly governed, it’s very poorly led. It’s led by politicians that were cultivated by the CIA for decades. So they were brought up and raised and promoted basically because they abided by the US line. And so they did a lot of self-harm in Europe by saying, “Yes, we’ll follow the US diktat to cut off relations with Russia.”
Now what’s very interesting and bizarre, I have to say, and honestly Judge, I don’t know anyone who really has an explanation for this—now that Trump is actually offering a true off-ramp to this conflict because Trump wants to do business: golf courses, minerals, strategic assets, natural resources and so forth. It’s Europe that’s saying, “No, no, no, we will never accept that we’re permanently divided from Russia.” And this is absurd. And the European economy is not just stagnant, it’s in outright decline right now. Self-imposed, very weird.
Europe’s Failed Leadership and the Zelensky Meetings
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: So if you and I had been a fly on the wall at 10 Downing Street yesterday when President Zelensky met with Prime Minister Starmer, President Macron, and Chancellor Merz, I mean, what would we have heard? What can they give him? They can’t raise taxes, they can’t borrow money, and Belgium won’t let them steal the Russian bank accounts. What are they going to do for him?
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Let’s first start from the situation with Merz, Macron, and Starmer. I just looked at the most recent posted approval ratings. Merz is at 29%. Starmer, I think it was 23%. Macron, 12%. That is rounding error to zero, by the way.
So these are three failed politicians who spend their time meeting Zelensky. Unbelievable. All three of them have a domestic economic crisis that they refuse to attend to because of their warmongering. And all three of them are proclaiming all sorts of aims that they have absolutely no way to achieve.
Now their last gambit is that since they don’t have the money and they don’t have the arms, they are going to confiscate or steal Russia’s financial assets which were in an account in a Belgian-based institution called Euroclear. And they will take that money and they will use it to buy weapons from the United States so that Ukrainians can continue to die for the next year or two until Russia crushes all of this. This is their so-called plan. It’s wrong in every single regard.
But I would say the following. If President Trump simply follows through right now and says, “Look, this is crazy, it’s wrong in every regard, it’s illegal, it’s completely irrational in that it can’t work, Ukraine will do nothing but die and lose even more territory and lives in this process. So the United States will not sell arms in any event, even if the money is there, we’re not going to be party to a continuation of this war.” Then the war ends. Period.
So if Donald Trump follows through on the logic of the situation, it doesn’t matter what Macron, Merz, and Starmer and Zelensky say at 10 Downing Street. It just doesn’t matter at all. What has happened in the past though, is that because of pressure from Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal and other senators on the take from the military contractors, Trump has in his way said, “Okay, I’m not putting any US money in, but if someone wants to buy, I’m always, always ready to sell armaments.”
But that itself is very destructive and dangerous. Actually it doesn’t even work because most of these weapons systems, the major ones, either the US doesn’t have the stockpiles anymore or it would require actual active US engagement in targeting and using and maintaining these weapons.
The United States should say this war from the US point of view is coming to an end. That means that it has to come to an end, even from the European and Ukrainian point of view. And there could be normal terms on the table reflecting realities on the battlefield. Yes, but that’s actually what happens in wars, that the battlefield outcomes matter.
But the core of this issue should be, and has been all along, that NATO will not enlarge to Ukraine, period. That Ukraine will be a neutral state and that Europe will have its security because there will be a neutral Ukraine and nobody will be on each other’s borders of the major powers. That would be very desirable.
Trump’s Potential Break With Europe
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: You’ll be happy to know that about two hours ago, or less, actually, the Guardian of London posted the following. I’m just going to read the first sentence. “Donald Trump has hinted he could walk away from supporting Ukraine as he doubled down on his administration’s recent criticism of Europe, describing it as weak and decaying and claiming it was destroying itself through immigration.” I don’t want to get into the immigration aspect, but the fact that he stated publicly these harsh criticisms of Europe and that the United States might walk away from Ukraine—that’s probably the best thing he could do.
The Human Cost of Prolonging the War
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: It is the best thing for Ukraine. First of all, contrary to what one might think, you know, in a casual way, it would save Ukrainian lives. By the way, in the spring of 2022, after I had said the war could have been avoided entirely had we been clear about NATO and neutrality, but in the spring of 2022, I said, stop the fighting. Make the peace on the basis that was almost agreed before the US blocked it in a Ukraine-Russia agreement mediated by the government of Turkey in Istanbul. Do that and you’ll save a lot of lives.
The evidence is, though we don’t have a precise count, that probably 2 million, 2 million Ukrainians since then have been killed or gravely wounded. And when I said that, of course, so many people in the mainstream media jumped up and down and said, “Oh, Sachs is anti-Ukraine.” You know, saving 2 million lives is not anti-Ukraine, it’s pro-Ukraine. Keeping this war going is not pro-Ukraine, it’s anti-Ukraine.
The Europeans are absolutely bizarre in thinking that they’re helping the Ukrainian people. And Zelensky, just to be absolutely clear, does not represent the Ukrainian people. He rules by martial law over a corrupt regime. There have not been elections. And as best we can tell, which admittedly is hard from Gallup and from other opinion surveys, the overwhelming majority of the Ukrainian people want a negotiated peace. So what Europe is doing is not pro-Ukrainian.
Zelensky’s Unrealistic Demands
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: When he walked out of 10 Downing Street with the President of France, the Chancellor of Germany, and of course, the Prime Minister of Great Britain with him, he announced that he would not cede the territory now occupied by, liberated by, the Russian military. He really is out of his mind. Unless this is made, this kind of a bizarre statement, it’s made for some domestic political purposes.
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: You know, there are other things to do. I’m not at all privy to these discussions. Even if Ukraine doesn’t, quote, “cede the territory,” it can.
And by the way, again, if Trump just holds firm, the war is going to end, period. But Ukraine could recognize that it will be neutral, that NATO will not enlarge. It could say, “This territory we regarded as ours, but we will not use force in any way.” So it becomes a de facto point, not a de jure or legal point. Whereas I think the United States can go further and say, “We recognize this, we’re not going to do more.”
But the point is, what we don’t have from any of these European leaders or from Zelensky is any single constructive sentence, not one, of how actually to stop the fighting. It’s baloney. So if they have alternatives, if they have technical ways to say “we don’t cede it, but we understand that the fighting is stopping,” okay, put something on the table.
Europe’s Warmongering and NATO’s Future
But instead, what we hear from Zelensky is “we demand the right to join NATO.” If the Europeans continue on that line, believe me, NATO will end completely because the United States is not going to be a party to this. The American people do not want the European approach, which is complete continued hostility to Russia. Why is that in America’s interest?
So if the Europeans are so warmongering, what they will end up doing is destroying NATO entirely. Because Americans will say, “What is this about? Why are…” It’s not even about who bears the cost, but why would we get into a war with a warmongering Europe that doesn’t make peace with its neighbor?
So unless Europe shows that it’s possible to sit down and have real diplomacy with Russia, not with Zelensky, with Russia, they’re going to destroy NATO. They’re going to destroy even the remnants of American interest in defending a region that doesn’t want to make peace. So the Europeans have to show that they have some interest in peace. They don’t show it, right?
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: No, they don’t. They don’t show it. And of course, there is that. Chris, do we have that statement by President Putin in which he says, “We have nothing against Europe, but if they want to…” We don’t have it, or he made that statement. I think you’ve seen it.
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Yes.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: He said, he says, “If you’re going to attack us, the war is going to be over very quickly. Don’t even think about it.”
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: No.
He said, as I’ve said endlessly, I don’t know if he said a thousand times or something like that, “We’re not going to attack Europe, but if you make war on us, we’ll fight you.” And then all the Europeans said, “You see what warmongers they are.” Exactly the opposite of the sentiment of the statement.
Trump’s Diplomatic Approach
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: I’m surprised that he sat down with Trump’s two favorite for five hours, with Trump’s two favorite real estate agents, as opposed to senior diplomats and senior diplomats, Lavrov and his team and Rubio and his team.
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: No, because I think that President Putin is very pragmatic and he is trying to find a way to stop the fighting. Nobody wants the fighting to continue. Russia doesn’t want the fighting to continue. Everybody sensible would like this fighting to stop. But what Russia is saying is “we’ll continue for our aims unless there’s a negotiated outcome.”
So, no, I’m not surprised because President Trump sent these two as his emissaries and envoys and fine, talk with them. And it was several hours of discussion. So clearly they went point by point over many different issues. But what amazes me, you know, I keep… I know, I’m sorry. For listeners, I repeat myself, the Europeans haven’t sent anybody. They just whine, “Oh, you must include us in the negotiations.”
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Yeah.
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Why don’t you actually pick up a phone or make a Zoom call or take a flight or invite your counterpart to a discussion? Wouldn’t be very hard.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Professor Sachs, thank you very much. I love it and everybody loves it when you are passionate about these things. You needn’t apologize for repeating yourself. You’re a great teacher and we all learn from you. Thank you very much for accommodating my schedule today. We look forward to seeing you again soon.
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: See you next week.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: All right. All the best. Thank you.
PROF. JEFFREY SACHS: Thanks a lot.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Thank you, Jeff. Coming up later today at 1:00 this afternoon, Professor John Mearsheimer. At 2:00 this afternoon, Matt Hoh. At 3:00 this afternoon, Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, Judge Napolitano. For Judging Freedom.
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