NAPOLITANO: Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for a Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday September 2nd, 2025. Professor Jeffrey Sachs will be here in just a minute on this intriguing question. Should the United Nations expel war criminals?
Professor Sachs, welcome here, my dear friend, and thank you for accommodating my schedule. Um, on Saturday, excuse me, on Friday of last week when we spoke last, the , State Department had banned Palestinian officials from entering the United States. Now, it’s banned all Palestinians. We’ll get to that in a minute. Before we get to it, I have to prevail on your other area of expertise, which is, economics. How has Donald Trump’s behavior specifically toward India enhanced the stability of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS? How has the president’s basic ignorance of economics 101 helped these international organizations that he’s condemned?
SACHS: Well, one could say that Donald Trump is uniting the world but against the Trump administration. What Donald Trump is doing is making enemies of the entire world. And one of the enemies that he’s made absolutely extraordinarily is India. India is the most populous country in the world. 1.5 billion people. It is a wonderful country, in many ways a rapidly developing country, and the United States has been building a stronger relationship with India for many years and somehow Donald Trump got it into his head to wreck that relationship I think decisively. What he did was even after his summit meeting in Alaska with President Putin where he said that he was not putting on extra sanctions because we were aiming to negotiate a peace agreement over Ukraine. He nonetheless imposed punitive tariffs of 25 percentage points on Indian goods because India is buying oil from Russia and so are a lot of other countries by the way and the United States buys uranium from Russia and Europe buys natural gas from Russia but Donald Trump and one of his advisers Peter Navarro went after India and they went after India in the most aggressive and obnoxious and ignorant way with insults and trying to isolate India and castigate India for funding Russia’s wars and suddenly I was shocked by the ineptitude of this honestly. But what Trump did was break to pieces actually years of diplomacy. Now I have to say that I warned my Indian friends and senior Indian officials when I was in India this spring that the United States government especially under Trump is completely unreliable and that one would not expect and India should not build a long-term alliance with the United States because the US is not really an ally. It uses other countries and now it uses them for extraordinarily short-term cynical purposes. Trump’s interest was to use India somehow to attack Russia or to use India against China. Well, the Indians saw all of this. I’ve been in discussions with many Indian officials and also in watching closely the Indian media and having discussions and interviews with the Indian media outlets. The whole country is completely totally furious because what has happened hurts hard. It’s completely arbitrary. It’s been accompanied by completely nasty and gratuitous disgusting thoughts about India. And the end of this is what we saw a few days ago, the warm embrace of President Putin and President Xi Jinping of China and Prime Minister Modi in Tanzhin, China at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Now, I want to say I don’t begrudge cooperation among these countries at all. So, I don’t regard this as what what some hardliners in the US would do as a catastrophe. I’m happy that they’re cooperative. What I’m not happy about is that we are driving all of these countries to be outright enemies of the United States for no reason other than a complete incompetence. There’s actually no tactics, no ideology. It’s ignorance. I’m sorry to say. I’ve never seen anything like it. But it’s complete ignorance of these people in the White House right now. And there we have it.
NAPOLITANO: And there we have it will produce an economy and again correct me if I’m wrong. You’re you’re the scholar on economics, Professor Sachs, which will now allow this economy to be independent of the United States and ignore the United States dollar. Is that effectively correct? Whether you call it Shanghai Cooperation Organization or whether you call it BRICS, it’s almost the same people. But they can trade in among themselves without having to buy and sell dollars.
SACHS: They’re going in that direction anyway because the dollar we regard as the way we buy and sell things. But the United States government came to regard it as the way we punish other countries. We punish them by putting on whatever penalties or sanctions we want and we tell those other countries “if you don’t follow what we say we will cut your banks off from the dollar-based settlement system.” So it’s not that we’re selling them more or doing something different. We’re telling them “we’re unilaterally going to stop you from using this payments mechanism.” Well, I can also tell you it it actually happens to be one of my specialties from way back when in my economics professional life that you can make alternative payments mechanisms. I helped to design other countries currencies that were introduced. You don’t have to pay in dollars. You can pay in rubles. You can pay in renminbi. You can create all sorts of ways to get around these sanctions which the United States unilaterally and arbitrarily imposes on others. Not as part of rules of the game or agreements or negotiations, but because Trump thinks of it one day because Peter Navarro has told him something. And so these other countries are saying “first of all we don’t need the United States for our trade. They we have things they need like rare earth magnets which if we stop exporting them to the US will shut down US industry. They don’t have what shuts us down.”
So they realize that all of this bluster about the trade war has just put the US into a corner that it put itself into. Trump’s losing the trade war badly and he’s uniting the rest of the world and he is isolating the US geopolitically and economically. He’s making the US economy less competitive and he is driving the rest of the world away from the US dollar. And one of the implications of that is interest rates in the US are rising. The 30-year rate is today it’s it rose again and it’s about 5 percentage points. It’s risen very significantly. And this of course is another crimp on the US economy and on its role internationally. China’s interest rates are about 2%. We are facing big budget deficits and rising interest rates because others don’t want to hold US government assets anymore. They don’t want to hold dollars anymore because they get taken away or they get confiscated. They get punished somehow. So this is very self-defeating or it’s not self-defeating. Trump is defeating the United States is what I mean to say.
NAPOLITANO: Right. Right. Switching topics, how does the United States gain by barring all holders of Palestinian passports from entering the US?
SACHS: This is another aspect of US isolating itself. I don’t mean isolationism in the sense that we’re not trying to throw our weight around in the world. That’s not what I mean. I mean that we are just absenting ourselves from the normal behavior of nations. We have a great privilege in the United States to host the United Nations. That’s because the UN was the brilliant brainchild of Franklin Roosevelt. And so it’s at the East River and the world’s leaders come here to discuss world events. Now we’re saying no, you can’t even come to discuss one of the most important events in the planet now, which is Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Because this White House doesn’t want to hear the truth, doesn’t want to hear the bad news, and doesn’t want other countries to hear the bad news. It has told the Palestinian authorities, “No, you can’t even come to discuss these issues.”
By the way, this is happening just as the International Association of Genocide Scholars, which are the experts on this, in a very important statement, said, “Yes, have no doubt this is a genocide that Israel is committing,” but “oh, we can’t let anyone hear about the genocide because we’re partners with Israel. So, let’s keep the Palestinians away.” Is this going to accomplish anything but further isolating the United States from the rest of the world? Of course, it isn’t. And today, , Belgium announced that it too, and I think completely rightly, will recognize the state of Palestine when it comes to the UN next month. I expect many countries to do so, perhaps dozens to do so. Even Trump, by the way, who looks at a genocide and thinks PR, said in a statement this weekend that Israel’s losing the PR game. What a way to discuss the starvation of two million people. But, you know, Trump is obsessed with how things seem, how the day goes, how he is seen. And so he tells the Israelis, “You’re losing the PR game” when they’re starving 2 million people to death. Maybe he should think not about the PR, but about the reality of which the US is a complicit nation.
NAPOLITANO: Can the United Nations meet in Geneva so that this ban on Palestinians does not affect the ability of their observers to be physically present and speak at the general assembly?
SACHS: I think the UN is going to meet on schedule in New York. The Palestinians will come in to the extent that they can by by by video so they won’t be absent. But the entire meeting because of this is likely to be about Palestine and about Israel’s genocide. On September 22nd, there will be a high-level summit on exactly this issue. I expect the world basically in unison with the exclusion of Israel and the United States to speak the truth that genocide is unacceptable, unforgivable, abhorrent and absolutely needs now to stop forth with no possible excuses for starving two million people. None.
NAPOLITANO: Here’s an official at the UN commenting on the State Department’s ban. This is August 29th, so 3 days ago.
We are we we are going to discuss this with the State Department. I mean the the headquarters agreement deserves to be read notably I think sections 11 and 12. We obviously hope that this will be resolved. It is important that all member states, permanent observers be able to be represented, especially I think in this case with the as we know the upcoming two-state solution meeting that France and Saudi Arabia will host at the beginning of the G8.
Would the secretary general like the US government to revoke this decision?
Well, it’s like obviously we would like to see all diplomats and delegates who are entitled to come here to be able to travel freely.
SACHS: This is he’s he’s referring to an agreement part of international law that says because the UN is here, the United States is the host country and it is obligated to issue visas for the officials coming to the UN. It’s not complicated.
NAPOLITANO: Right. Right. Even Castro with with all of the American efforts to demonize and stigmatize and starve to death Cuban Island. Even he spoke at the UN.
SACHS: Basically, everybody has been able to come with almost no exception. And this is the first time a delegation has been blocked. And you’d think this is the delegation representing a people who are suffering a genocide. You’d think that there would be some idea that they should be heard, perhaps heard more urgently than anybody else on the planet right now.
NAPOLITANO: But other than pleasing the donor class, I don’t even get why Secretary Rubio would do this. There’s nothing in it to help the United States of America. It doesn’t move the ball forward. It further stigmatizes the United States as being under the thumb of Benjamin Netanyahu.
SACHS: The US is completely alone in its complicity in this genocide with Israel. That’s it. There are the two of them. And if you look as I do every day and speak to diplomats all over the world, there are no other supporters of this. So the US and Israel are locked together for reasons we can’t even fully figure out honestly because at this stage it’s so shocking what’s happening. is it the Epstein list? We don’t know. Is it blackmail? , is it the Mossad and CIA? What exactly is it? We don’t know. But the US is completely isolated from the rest of the world in this. Somehow Rubio in his inexperience thinks that an action like stopping the Palestinian delegates to come spares the US from the opprobrium of being a genocidaire that is complicit in a genocide and being completely isolated in this.
And by the way, our government is isolated from the American people because the American people in every opinion survey are saying they are overwhelmingly opposed to Israel’s brutality and they are overwhelmingly in favor of every nation, including ours, recognizing the state of Palestine and getting on with a solution for peace, not with an ongoing genocide.
NAPOLITANO: Can the United Nations ban or expel a delegation that is committing mass murder?
SACHS: Well, it can suspend a country. It suspended and that means basically depriving the country of a vote. And it suspended South Africa during the apartheid era and it could choose by a two-thirds present and voting majority to suspend Israel for a current present ongoing documented genocide. So this is one of the many steps that could be taken. There are several others of course that are absolutely, actually so necessary at this moment because of the imminence of mass starvation that that they too need to be taken. We’re we’re not anymore at the stage of calling names or making symbolic actions. We need to save people who are starving to death.
NAPOLITANO: Can the United Nations arrest Benjamin Netanyahu when he arrives there because he is wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court and dispatch him to the Hague?
SACHS: I doubt it because the United States does not recognize the ICC. But what the ICC did in indicting Benjamin Netanyahu was absolutely in accordance with everything we are knowing and learning about Israel’s actions and with everything we are knowing and learning about international law and again the genocide scholars who are the people who study genocides. What a tough, tough profession, tough life. But the historians and the international law experts have just written and people should download it. AGS, a absolutely stark, brutally stark statement that yes, this is a violation of the 1948 genocide convention, not only in the mass murder that is being committed, but in the brazen declarations of intention to do this very thing by the Israeli officials. That’s why the ICC issued these warrants. It’s why the International Court of Justice, the ICJ, has heard a very powerful case that it has not yet decided on the question of whether Israel is committing a genocide. But I think now it’s absolutely clear we’re going to have a very horrible power. Horrible… I mean, it’s just so painful, but a a very accurate judgment that will go down in history that Israel became a genocidal nation.
NAPOLITANO: Here is, you may know this woman, Sarah Leah Winston, executive director of democracy for the Arab World Now, speaking very strongly and articulately about what the State Department has done. This is also three days ago.
What’s astonishing is the extent to which the Trump administration is willing to use its political capital, its force, its sanctions, its threats against every state around the world, not for something that is in America’s own interest, but is in the interests of Israel. This is really quite baffling, I think, to many in President Trump’s own electoral base, which are increasingly questioning why President Trump continues to put the United States at the front of a defense for this genocidal state that is massacring children every day. It’s very hopeful that the international community will reject this bullying and intimidation. The notion that they are imposing conditions on the Palestinian Authority in order to be entitled to a visa that the United States is legally obligated to provide is just an absurd level of intimidation.
SACHS: Exactly right. And and and it is I think she’s also right. I also said the same thing. There is a mystery to this. There is really a mystery. What is it that has drawn or compelled the United States to become an agent of genocide? What is it that to this moment with mass starvation, mass killing, destruction of all infrastructure has Donald Trump described this as a PR problem? When his own base, when the American people, more importantly than any base, are also shouting as loudly as we can. We do not support this. We oppose this with all our moral fervor and all our practicality. We should not be supporting a genocide. We should be stopping a genocide.
NAPOLITANO: Why won’t the Netanyahu government respond, respond to the most recent ceasefire offer offered by Steve Woff accepted by Hamas and once offered by Israel itself? And why is there no pressure from the US to get them to respond?
SACHS: Israel does not want peace. Israel wants full control. Israel’s government is filled with mass murderers who say so openly that food should be deprived to the people that people should leave ethnic cleansing and if they don’t leave that’s their fault because what Israel wants and these are partly zealots partly simply fascists, it depends on who’s who, but some are a kind of cultists who believe that this is God’s calling to murder these people. They do. And there are others who believe that for whatever reason, Israel needs to keep control over everything. So if everyone among the Gazans or the West Bank Palestinians is killed or forced to leave, so be it. This is an openly expressed attitude. Now you asked again, how can the United States government for one moment put up with this? We all see it. This isn’t subtle. This isn’t about Hamas. This isn’t about October 7. This is about mass murder. And this is about the United States blocking the known solution to this which is a state of Palestine on the borders of the 4th of June 1967 which more than 90% of the world’s population supports or lives in, I should say precisely, lives in countries where governments have voted for this and are calling for is. And so, just to be clear, you could easily get more than 180 votes, probably 192 votes in the United Nations out of 193. That is all but Israel to support international law, morality, and the established principles, the decisions of the International Court of Justice to end all of this bloodshed by two states. And we’re going to hear almost this nonstop in a couple of weeks. And anything Marco Rubio has done is only going to make it even more understood and heard even more loudly because of their stupid idea of trying to suppress the discussion by keeping the Palestinians away.
NAPOLITANO: Professor Sachs, thank you very much. Thanks for letting me go across the board on all of these issues.
SACHS: Of course.
NAPOLITANO: Thank you for accommodating my schedule. We’ll look forward to seeing you again next week. All the best.
SACHS: See you soon. Thanks. Thanks a lot.
NAPOLITANO: Thank you.
