Read the full transcript of Judge Napolitano of Judging Freedom Podcast in conversation with Prof. Jeffrey Sachs on “War For War’s Sake”, June 13, 2025.
Listen to the audio version here:
War For War’s Sake: A Conversation with Professor Jeffrey Sachs
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Friday, June 13th, 2025. Welcome to this special edition of Judging Freedom. Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins us for the second time this week. Professor Sachs, always a pleasure. Who better to talk to than one of the smartest minds in the world on geopolitics and foreign policy? Your take on what happened last night.
The Collapse of Diplomacy
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: I don’t know how smart because I am frankly a bit amazed at what happened and surprised. There were supposed to be another round of negotiations between the United States and Iran this weekend on the nuclear issues. Instead, Israel, clearly together with the United States in advance, opened a war with Iran despite the ongoing negotiations. There is no diplomacy in our world today. There is only war and force and I find it extraordinarily depressing, frankly.
The US reaction, Trump’s reaction, makes clear this was absolutely a joint Israel-US action. Trump says, “You see, Israel can destroy you. It’s going to kill all of you. You have to agree with me.” This is what’s called negotiations, US style. This is the kind of fascism is what it is, which is that we will kill you unless you agree with the way we see things. I find this actually a bit surprising in how extreme it is. It does put to a lie every word that Trump has said about the peace president. Well, yes, peace with the threat, “We will kill you.
Well, we’ve been in this kind of world before. It ended up in World War II last time we were in this kind of world. We’re heading for World War III, certainly the way that we’re going.
Mossad Operations and Regional War
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: I think one notable fact that or at least surmise that has just come up is that in Israel it’s being reported that the methods used were that Israel had smuggled in drones into Iran for over a period of years and that these drones were then unleashed yesterday. This sounds both credible and boy, it sounds like what Ukraine did a couple of weeks ago. So my guess is that what we’ve heard is that this was a Mossad operation together with the SBU in Ukraine attacking Russian strategic bombers and a Mossad operation in Iran to decapitate the Iranian military leadership and to strike inside Iran.
So we’re probably seeing a CIA Mossad operation that is ongoing. It has extended war across Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen and now Iran. So the whole Middle East is in war led by the U.S. and Israel and we’re heading in a very bad way in my view.
Contradictory Government Statements
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: The Secretary of State of the United States is perpetrating a myth that the United States had nothing to do with it. Here’s what he said last night, Marco Rubio, “Tonight Israel took unilateral action against Iran. We are not involved in strikes against Iran and our top priority is protecting American forces in the region. Israel advised us that they believe this action was necessary for self-defense. President Trump and the administration have taken all necessary steps to protect our forces and remain in close contact with our regional partners. Let me be clear, Iran should not target U.S. interests or personnel.”
This is the exact opposite of what the President said on Truth Social, which I’ll read in just a minute. You can put it up, Chris.
[VIDEO CLIP]
Donald Trump this morning, an hour and a half ago, “I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal. I told them in the strongest of words to just do it. But no matter how hard they tried, no matter how close they got, they just couldn’t get it done. I told them it would be much worse than anything they know, anticipated, or were told. That the United States makes the best and most lethal military equipment anywhere in the world by far, in caps. And that Israel has a lot of it with much more to come and they know how to use it. Certain Iranian hardliners spoke bravely but they didn’t know what was about to happen. They’re all dead in caps now and it will only get worse. There has already been great death and destruction but there is still time to make this slaughter with the next already planned attacks being even more brutal come to an end. Iran must make a deal even before there is nothing left and save what was once known as the Iranian Empire. No more death, no more destruction, just do it before it’s too late. God bless you, President Donald J. Trump.”
Who would negotiate with the United States of America knowing that it’s planning an attack while the negotiation is going on?
The End of Trust in American Diplomacy
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Look, President Trump explained this was a U.S.-Israeli operation. Marco Rubio never tells the truth anyway. Our government never tells the truth. It’s useless to listen to these spokespeople. Incidentally, Matt Miller, who was the spokesman of the Biden administration a couple of weeks ago, said, “Yes, what I said at the podium of the State Department was a lie, but your job when you speak is to represent your government, not to tell the truth.” So we should, I don’t know, we listen to this. It is Orwellian.
President Trump at least lets us in on the little joke that “We’re going to kill you all if you don’t abide by us. I tried to tell you we’re going to kill you all. We have the most lethal weapons. We can destroy you. We will destroy you. Oh, but we have nothing to do with it.” It’s amazing. Somehow they think that this is going to be the way that the world will function, that we have no diplomacy, that negotiations are a charade, that basically, yes, we will negotiate with you, but know that if you don’t agree with us, we kill you all. And this is what President Trump has said.
The most pro-war, you could say bloodthirsty, member of the United States Senate thinks this is a game. Senator Lindsey Graham, “Game on. Pray for Israel,” 14 million views. Yeah, well, this is the United States as it really is. We have a government that is in nonstop war. It is a war machine. It is more than a trillion-dollar-a-year operation. It is run by a completely unaccountable, secret, and pervasively lying set of institutions. The CIA, the Mossad, MI6, the security agencies, so-called, or intelligence agencies, so-called I should say, are the secret army that actually calls the shots. And the rest is verbiage. The rest is completely empty.
The Neocon Triumph
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: I guess we know now, we thought for a while, Professor Sachs, that President Trump would be leaning away from the neocons and toward the concept, so-called concept of America first, meaning leave other countries to do their own bidding. But it’s clear that the neocons are triumphant. This is a magnificent triumph for the neocon takeover of the foreign policy of the United States. It’s also clear that President Trump, unlike perhaps the drone attack by Ukraine in Russia, actually knew about this all along and was lying all along and misleading Ukraine all along. Professor Sachs, who would trust the President of the United States in international diplomacy after this?
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: I don’t think there was much trustworthiness before, but I think the idea of trust is viewed by these people as naive, all that counts is power, all that counts is lethality, all that counts is that we can kill you. I was speaking to diplomats yesterday who thought that there were actual negotiations going on. I apologize for my naivete. We have a negotiator in Oman right now. This is negotiations. Well, they think that they can bludgeon the world at the threat of mass death.
The fact of the matter is that Israel is engaged in an open genocide, as well as with these wars, all to the cheers of the people in the U.S. Congress. You have to wonder. I certainly don’t have an answer to this. Does Mossad have a compromise on everybody? Is this a blackmail operation? Is it a bribery operation? Is it that these people are greater idiots than we can imagine? It’s hard to tell. But the dangers for us in this kind of world are extraordinary. I resent it. U.S. security took another major hit in the last 12 hours because we stepped back once again from diplomacy. You think the United States is the only one that can kill people in this world? Well, one day we’re going to find out to our regret that that’s not quite the case.
On January 20th, here’s what the president had to say about his anti-war views and what
PROFESSOR SACHS: would be the public policy of his administration. “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.” That’s a farce. This is not an anti-war president. He’s financing genocide in Gaza at a greater rate than Joe Biden. He’s continuing to finance a useless, fruitless war in Ukraine. And now his government participated in, orchestrated, and paid for this attack last night. We are in an expanding war and in the same context of a collapsing global diplomacy.
Interestingly, I just saw a statement by the French government which said that Israel has the right to defend itself. This is quite an interesting idea of defense. But it’s the same words, same line being used across this group of countries that are part of this war alliance. It’s U.S.-led. It is Israeli-operated. It is supported by Germany with its history, by France, with Britain. This is the war alliance. It will create World War III the way we’re going.
The Real Goal: Regime Change
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Do you think that the true goal here is not the destruction of the Iranian nuclear capabilities, because most of them are indestructible, according to Ritter, without using nuclear weapons as the instrument of destruction. But the real goal here is regime change in Iran, something Trump condemned, the concept of it, repeatedly during the campaign.
PROFESSOR SACHS: I’m sure that that’s the goal here. Again, one thing about foreign policy is that there’s an underlying deep consistency that stretches for decades. What we’re seeing in Ukraine is playing out of a CIA fantasy from the 1990s. What we’re seeing playing out in Iran in the last 12 hours is a Netanyahu U.S. plan unveiled in 1996 called Clean Break, and with a list of war targets that we have talked about on several occasions, seven countries that were on a list that was a list that was created already back in the 1990s and brought into actual operation in the early 2000s.
And the one country that was left without the open war was Iran. Now that war has started. So the wars in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, and the seventh, Iran, the list is complete. This is a long-term strategy. Presidents come and go, but they don’t control things. They were told what to do. In any event, Trump, who knows what he does or doesn’t think or know, it’s almost irrelevant actually. The fact of the matter is this is a long-term U.S. policy and it is playing out and it is a complete disaster.
The entire Middle East has been profoundly destabilized by this ultra-Zionist alliance of Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal and Tom Cotton and the CIA and Mossad and who else one can add to the list. But we have war raging across North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and the Middle East, a genocide in Gaza, and now a war in Iran that is part of this so-called clean break strategy. I don’t know. I am really left in despair, I have to say, this morning.
We have all of this happening while supposedly there were negotiations taking place and then President Trump explains, yes, this is what we mean by negotiations. You agree with us or we kill you. And when we kill you, we gloat about killing you. We have the most lethal weapons in the world and Israel has lots of them and there’s lots more death and destruction to come. This is a president of the United States, for God’s sake.
Netanyahu’s Statements
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Prime Minister, not to ruin your breakfast, Prime Minister Netanyahu made many statements overnight. Here is more or less the seminal one. Some of these statements are outrageous and I’ve never heard them before, but here’s what he said. Chris, cut number eight.
[VIDEO CLIP STARTS]
NETANYAHU: Iran is now working on what it calls the new plan to destroy Israel. You see, the old plan failed. Iran and its proxies tried to encircle Israel with a ring of fire and to attack us with the horrible attack of October 7th. But the people of Israel, the soldiers of Israel rose like lions to defend our country. We crushed Hamas, we devastated Hezbollah, we hit Iranian proxies in Syria and Yemen. And when Iran directly attacked us twice last year, we struck back inside Iran itself.
Yet in defending ourselves, we also defend others. We defend our Arab neighbors. They too have suffered from Iran’s campaign of chaos and carnage. Our actions against Iran’s proxy Hezbollah led to the establishment of a new government in Lebanon and the collapse of Assad’s murderous regime in Syria. The peoples of those two countries now have a chance for a different future, a better future. So too do the brave people of Iran.
And I have a message for them. Our fight is not with you. Our fight is with the brutal dictatorship that has oppressed you for 46 years. I believe that the day of your liberation is near. And when that happens, the great friendship between our two ancient peoples will flourish once again.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Grotesque Politics and Dangerous Delusions
He could very well have been talking about himself and his own regime. Every attribute he claimed exists in the Iranians, he manifests in the extreme.
PROFESSOR SACHS: I think he’s bringing Israel to destruction at some point because Israel is a lawless fascistic government that is committing mass murder. And it’s getting worse. And George Orwell could have written that script. It’s mind-boggling in its arrogance, in its impudence in Israel, a country of 8 million people telling the Iranians, we save you, a country of 100 million people, and Israel’s going to save them. It’s so fantastical, so delusional, so fascistic. We will remake the Middle East in our image by war. This is the message.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Do you think other countries will finally get involved? Egypt, which has a huge military? Turkey, which has a huge military?
PROFESSOR SACHS: No, I don’t. I don’t think they will get involved. But I think that Israel’s actions over time will lead to such hatred and despair and rejection that in some way, at some point, the effects on Israel itself will be devastating. It’s just grotesque what has happened to the politics of that country, nothing short of grotesque.
Conclusion
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Professor Sachs, thank you very much. Thanks for coming on twice this week. Thank you for coming on at this hour. Thank you for your very candid analysis of all this, whatever happens in the world. It’s a joy to be able to interact with you, and we’ll look forward to seeing you next week.
PROFESSOR SACHS: Very good. All right. Thank you.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: You’re welcome. Coming up later today at 2 o’clock this afternoon on All of These Things, Professor John Mearsheimer. At 4 o’clock this afternoon on All of These Things, the Intelligence Community Roundtable with Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson. And at 4:30 this afternoon on All of These Things, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. I’m Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson.
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