Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : Did Trump Just Start WWIII ?

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1:03Undeclared wars are commonplace. Gradually, 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 and rejected. 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? The end of the day. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.

2:06Today is Monday, March 2nd, 2026. Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins us now. Professor Sachs, thank you very much for your time and for accommodating my schedule. Before we get to the ramifications of an undeclared war and the murder of a religious leader who was also the head of state, your thoughts, big picture on this Israeli and U.S. invasion of Iran. I think Netanyahu confirmed what I've been saying for many, many years. He says, this is my dream come true for 40 years. I had put it at 30 years because he's been Prime Minister for 30 years. This is a long-term plan. This is a Mossad CIA plan for American control of the Middle East and the Israeli military

3:08hegemony in the Middle East that has been underway since 1996. It is involved wars across the Middle East. It has left rivers of blood from Libya to Sudan, Somalia, the genocide in Gaza, the annexation of the West Bank, the bombing, including today of Beirut and the destruction of Lebanon, the destruction of Syria, the destruction of Iraq in the Iraq War, the destruction of Yemen as a functioning country. And the goal of Netanyahu since 1996, he says it's 40 years. I have put it at 30 years, is the destruction of Iran. This is madness. This is murderous delusion.

4:10And this is what is underway right now. This is not some short-term issue. These are the famous seven wars and five years that Wesley Clark told us about a long time ago. This is clean-break doctrine of Netanyahu. He's a madman and the madman in charge in the United States have brought us into this. They are systematically destroying our country as they are destroying the Middle East. It's very, very serious. If you ask why do the roads not work and the bridges not work in the United States, why is infrastructure following it to pieces, why are living standards stagnant or declining? It's because we spend trillions of dollars in war. Why is China advancing so rapidly, so effectively?

5:10Why does the United States have not one mile of fast rail? China just completed its 50,000th kilometer, approximately 30,000 miles, of fast rail. Because China doesn't go to war, the United States is in non-stop war. And so this is just adding to the destruction of our country. It's like you're leading every day, Judge, about the undeclared wars, about the cost to our society, the loss of freedom of being ruled by a military state, which we are, of being in partnership with an absolutely rogue, murderous nation, which is Israel, which thinks a little bit beyond its means, because it thinks it has the United States to do all of its work for it. But that country of 10 million people thinks that it is going to run

6:17the Middle East, and the United States has been duly following orders coming from Mr. Netanyahu for 30 years, and we're at it again. Trump, let me add, is an utter disgrace to our nation. Other disgrace, he lied to us every word about America first. His whole premise was we're not going to do this. And he did exactly the opposite of what he said. He did exactly the opposite of what the American people say. Of course, Congress is dead for all intents and purposes. It doesn't matter whether it's Johnson or Schumer, they're U.S., these people. They're all in desionist lobby payroll. They have squandered our wealth. They have squandered our strength. They

7:25have diverted our attention from our elevators and our escalators and our roads and our power grid and all the things that make life viable for us, our housing stock, everything to divert our trillions of dollars to this madness that is underway right now. It's been a 30-year project of madness that has cost us trillions and trillions of dollars. And it's a kind of psychopathy because they're killing people wantonly. They're killing schoolgirls. No one even pauses 150 schoolgirls bomb by Israel. No one even mentions these things. It's absolutely shocking, disgraceful, dangerous, bankrupting our country and Trump lied. Lied every word of what he was going to do.

8:28How do you think this will affect relations with Russia? I mean, who would negotiate with America again? This is the second time in eight months. No one wanted the law. Iran into a false sense of security believing that they were engaged in legitimate negotiations, whereas the decision for war was made before the negotiations started. The United States does not negotiate. It cheats. That's been true for a long time, by the way. That is the mentality of the CIA-led security state, which is they can do what it wants. The war in Ukraine came because of the US push for NATO to go to Russia's border. But that itself was a lie because there were negotiations with Gorbachev in February 1990 in the context of German reunification, where the United States and Germany told

9:36the Soviet Union in no uncertain terms, NATO would not move eastward. The litany of lies is nonstop. But Trump can't even open his mouth to say a truthful word, not once. So there, there's nothing to do. What's novel right now is that if you negotiate with the United States, they kill you. That's the new thing. They used to just lie. Now they kill you. Because if you negotiate, it means you're weak. Anyone that would negotiate is weak, so we can kill you. And then Trump, by the way, says, oh, they want to negotiate what with us. And Mr. Ali Larigiani, who is responsible now in Iran, explains that is a complete delusion. And that is a delusion that it's partly, of course, just Trump's PR to say whatever he wants to say.

10:43But he says that all over the place about who wants to negotiate. And nobody does because nobody trusts the United States for one moment. Has Trump or has the Secretary of Defense, of course, himself the Secretary of War, articulated a clear goal or a militarily achievable purpose as the law requires? Of course not. There is no law here. And this is a war full scale, as they explain to us by the hour now, that only Congress has the right to declare. This was not in response to an imminent emergency where the President invokes authority as Commander-in-Chief. This is a war, a war of choice

11:45that under our constitutional system, which admittedly is defunct, but under our supposed constitutional system is the prerogative of Congress and Congress only. Again, our Congress is so corrupted by Israel that I don't think anything good comes out of it. But under our system, what is happening can only come from the Congress. Why do you think, and this has been reported, I don't know if you accept this, but we've seen it in a number of places, Professor Sachs. The Trump administration reached out to the Italian foreign ministry and asked them to ask the Iranian foreign ministry for a ceasefire, and the Iranian foreign ministry said, no, and hell, no. If true, why would the Trump administration have done that? Do they know already they bid off more than they can chew?

12:48I have no idea. I have not heard this account until this moment because I'm a lot of meetings these days. Sure. But all I can say, I have no idea whether such a report is true, but we can say the following. Iran is shooting missiles that cost maybe a hundred or two hundred thousand dollars, and they are being intercepted by anti-missile systems when they are intercepted that cost two million dollars or more. The U.S. stockpile of such systems is depleted in any event because of the Ukraine war, and past wars, Israel's defense, including last summer. The U.S. cannot

13:49sustain what it's doing for more than some period of weeks. I am not close to being the military expert that you have on the show, so we'll listen to them. But the fact of the matter is that this is not something that the United States can sustain, and they surely know that. They think that Iran will capitulate. They thought that killing the religious leader, which is so grotesque, it's just hard to know even where to start on this, but they thought that that would perhaps change everything. These are madmen, people of extraordinary ignorance and vulgarity, who think that murder is their business, and think that murdering the religious leader

14:54of a faith is somehow going to bring people crawling to the U.S. for relief. This is a profoundly evil, but also, in my view, a profound miscalculation. Isn't perpetual war Netanyahu's only means to stay in office and out of jail? It could be, but I think his delusions are bigger than that. He believes that Israel rules in the same way that our ambassador to Israel said last week. Netanyahu believes so does Ambassador Huckabee. For all I know, so does Donald Trump. For all I know, so does the CIA, who knows in our country anymore. But Netanyahu believes that Israel should rule the Middle East.

15:58And many of his gangster accolades believe that that's God's promise and that's what Huckabee believes as well. And so you've got a lot of things going on here. It's not just a calculation about staying out of jail. It's a calculation that goes back 30 or 40 years to the belief that Israel with the America's trillions of dollars and nonstop war will rule the Middle East. Let me try and expand this by playing a clip from President Macron of France terrifying in its tone and for Chris number 21. I have ordered that we increase the number of nuclear warheads on our arsenal in order to put pay to any speculation. We will no longer

17:06communicate on the figures regarding our nuclear arsenal country to pass practice. In order to be free therefore we must be feared and in order to be feared we have to be powerful. This increase in our arsenal reflects that approach. But in order to be powerful, and this is the second part of my intervention, we have to be united and I'm going to speak about Europe. As Trump just started World War III, there's a good chance of that. Macron was not responding specifically to this war, but he was expressing a mindset which is insane. And the mindset is the only way to be safe in this world is to instill fear in others. And the way to instill fear in others is to build up one's armaments to a maximum

18:11extent. You teach even four year olds that this is not the way to be safe. This is not the way to play with others. Now Macron has an approval rating of about 10%. I regard that as rounding to zero because in any survey some people will even mistakenly answer something. He has no support. The European leaders in general have no support. Trump's support is plummeting and will continue to plummet. We're in the hands of gangsters. We're not in at the hands of a constitutional system. We're in the hands of a broken, corrupted gangster-led system. I'm sorry, I don't mean to be rude or hyperbolic. But how can we have wars like this declared by Trump and Hegseth? And this is how we behave in the context of what was supposedly negotiations,

19:18which the mediator said was making great progress and would meet again the following Monday. This is not even remotely in the category of normal. This is just gangsterism. The people don't buy it because we're becoming more and more endangered. None of this is bringing us any security at all. None of this is bringing us any security at all. Here is the Iranian foreign minister on the negotiations and having been duped. Chris cut number nine. We negotiated with the United States twice in the past 12 months and in both cases they attacked us in the middle of negotiation. And that has become a very bitter experience for us. In last June we were negotiating. We had five rounds of negotiations and we had

20:19already fixed the sixth round for 15 June when the Israeli attacked us and then the US joined to attack. And this time we had three rounds. Last Thursday we had a very good discussion, very good talks in Geneva. The both Iranian and the US delegation were happy at the end of seven hours of negotiations. Some other differences were left for the next meeting and we decided to go for Vienna to send our technical teams to Vienna on Monday which means tomorrow to go to the IAEA and with the help of the International Atomic Energy Organization try to find technical solutions for the political problems. When they understood that diplomacy is going on well they decided to spoil it and they created the build up in the media against the Islamic Republic of Iran. They convinced President Trump to attack us, unprovoked and unwarranted.

21:24Of course it was all a charade and all predictably so. Iran has wanted to negotiate for 15 years. It's tried repeatedly. It signed an agreement with the United States in 2015 the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. That was an agreement reached with the United States, Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany and then it was ratified unanimously by the UN Security Council and Iran abided by the agreement. It opened up to inspections. It kept the activities strictly within the bounds of the agreement and then Trump ripped up the agreement. Trump not only ripped up the agreement but then Israel and the United States proceeded to

22:34assassinate Iranian leaders and scientists to attack Iranian facilities and to show there will be no negotiations. When these negotiations started a year ago it was quite clear this was in bad fate but then it was proved with the bombing. The Iranians are nice people. They actually wanted to believe well that was then we really got to try but the war was set when Netanyahu was not a nice person. It came to see Trump a few weeks ago and this war was set then. So this is all a charade and it is a charade in the interest of Netanyahu's ardent desire. Now I know it's 40 years. I stand corrected. I used to say 30 years. His ardent desire to take over the Middle East. It's

23:36insanity. It's putting us all in extreme danger. Why is Trump doing this? Well I think there are maybe three things that can be said. One is the CIA runs our country. The security apparatus runs the country. Second, Trump is a weak unstable individual and BB seems to own him. Third, there may be more whether in the Epstein files or elsewhere that account for this kind of behavior. But what we can say without question judge is that this is contrary to the American interest. This is America last. This is endangering everybody. This will absolutely do great economic

24:45damage to the people that voted for Mr. Trump and the ramifications of an expanding war are very great. I can also add another point that I think is important. Countries that house US military facilities like Bahrain or Qatar or Saudi Arabia or France and Britain or Denmark are basically vassals of the United States. The CIA operates out of those military bases. These countries are subordinate to the US imperial designs. That's why Europe cannot utter one single word of honesty about what's happening right now. We shouldn't hold our breath for it. It won't

25:47happen. They're all attacking Iran. They're attacking Iran for escalating not the United States and Israel for attacking Iran. The one exception to this is the Spanish government and all kudos to the president prime minister Pedro Sanchez for speaking honestly. All the rest are just vassals useless. They don't tell the truth at all. I was at the UN Security Council meeting emergency session on Saturday. There is the Danish ambassador attacking Iran under the circumstances of after Iran was attacked and bombed and this ambassador thinks that somebody's going to come to Denmark's rescue when the United States invades Greenland. No principles at all because they're all

26:48occupied countries and it's really very dangerous for this reason because we don't get honest discussion. So CNN and Al Jazeera reporting 18 American casualties. I don't know if that means deaths or just injuries. Usually if you say casualties it combines injuries and deaths so we know a four that are dead and that would leave 14 that are injured. I mean how do you see this ending? I see it escalating and spreading and I think it's extraordinarily, extraordinarily out of control because we do not have any safety in the US leadership structure right now. It's extremely

27:48dangerous. It's all based on lies and it's all based on violence and this it's hard to see. It's not going to end in some victory. It's going to continue with the escalation and death and we're wondering where if any are there any grownups in the United States in positions of responsibility that will speak truthfully about this. I don't see almost any. There are a few voices in Congress. Rand Paul is one of them. Congressman Massey is another. These are real patriots because they truly understand the Constitution. They truly understand the danger of the kind of security state that governs our country and they know how disastrous this can be but there are very few others

28:55and this is what's very very alarming. Professor Sax, thank you very much. I've taken a lot of the time. I appreciate it immensely. Safe travels. We'll look forward to seeing you again, my friend. Okay. Thanks very much. Thank you. Bye. If you're watching us live in 30 minutes, three o'clock this afternoon, one of our relatively new but for me, longtime colleague, CIA veteran analysts, what is the intelligence community have to do with all of this? John Kiriaku. Judge the Paul Tana for judging for him.