Professor Jeffrey Sachs discusses the profound geopolitical implications of the fall of the Assad government in Syria, emphasizing that it leads to increased chaos, instability, and the risk of wider conflict. He argues that this instability is a result of long-standing U.S. and Israeli policies aimed at toppling governments in the Middle East. The collapse of Assad’s regime not only affects Syria but also exacerbates turmoil in Gaza, Lebanon, and other neighboring regions. Sachs warns that while some in Israel, such as Netanyahu and his allies, may view this as a strategic win, it ultimately undermines regional security and creates a volatile environment that benefits no one.
Sachs also critiques the United States for supporting jihadist groups and pursuing regime changes, which have left the Middle East in ruins. He points out that Iran’s role in the region is now uncertain, particularly regarding its potential pursuit of nuclear weapons. Despite Iran’s repeated attempts to negotiate peace and ease sanctions, these overtures have been rejected, largely due to pressure from Israel and the neoconservatives in the U.S. Sachs highlights that this pattern of perpetual conflict reflects a deep-seated foreign policy agenda that transcends administrations, driven by interests that prioritize dominance over peace and stability.
Published on December 9, 2024 [YouTube]
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Andrew Napolitano: Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, December 9th, 2024. Professor Jeffrey Sachs will be with us in just a moment on the grand geopolitical ramifications of the fall of the Assad government in Syria.
Professor Sachs, welcome back to the show. Always a pleasure, my dear friend. So let me start at what would have been my last question—I’ll ask it first. What are the geopolitical ramifications of the fall of the Assad regime? And then we’ll get into how it happened and the role of the United States and Israel.
Jeffrey Sachs: Of course, the main implication is more chaos, more uncertainty, more chances of escalation to World War. Nothing is over with the fall of the Assad government. It is likely that Syria will have continued internal warfare, and there’s a lot of instability to come. This is the basic point. We now have, of course, complete chaos in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon, in Syria, and in other neighboring countries—across the way in Libya, in Somalia, in Sudan. This is a region of widening instability that results, in my opinion, from U.S. and Israeli policy deliberately to overthrow one government after another. It has left a wasteland—and not just a wasteland, but a massive zone of instability. And this is the only thing we can say definitively at this moment.
Andrew Napolitano: What does this say for the idea of a Palestinian state?
Jeffrey Sachs: Again, everything is hard to assess right now. If you take a very superficial view, this would be against the Palestinian cause in that, ostensibly, what has happened is a client state of Iran has been overthrown in a long-term war that Israel, the United States, and others, including Turkey, have waged on Syria at least since 2011—and in fact, beforehand.
On the surface, if the idea is that pressure on Israel would lead to a Palestinian state, this relieves the pressure on Israel in the very immediate term. And no doubt some in Israel will say, well, now that Iran is weakened—because its clients in Lebanon, especially Hezbollah, its client in the Palestinian occupied lands, Hamas, and its client state of Syria are now all defeated—now we can do what we want.
And we hear voices in Israel among the extremists of an outright annexation of the Palestinian lands. Of course, we hear voices for ethnic cleansing, and we have an ongoing genocide, in fact, taking place in Gaza that is not yet juridically established. But my view is that the International Court of Justice will rule that Israel is committing genocide. It’s in violation, that is, of the 1948 Genocide Convention.
Now, if you take a look beyond this, the mass instability is to nobody’s real benefit. Israel is not made more secure by now having a jihadist-led revolt that has toppled its neighbor to the northeast. Israel is more at threat. The reaction of Iran to all of this is open to question because Iran, we know, is close to developing a nuclear weapon. It says it doesn’t want one, but if pushed to the wall, I think that the hardliners in Iran that do call for this will prevail.
So there are many uncertainties, and there is enormous hubris of Israel and the Zionist backers in the United States—the neocons, the Israel lobby—that keep getting this wrong. They have toppled one government after another, and it doesn’t lead to peace. It just leads to a widening arc of unrest and mass death.
And so, I think it’s too early—far too early—to say what this means for the Palestinians. But I’m sure that Israelis are celebrating right now. By Israelis, I mean Netanyahu and his cronies, like the zealots Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, who are expulsions, annexationists, Greater Israel advocates. I think they think this is a victory, but there are no victories in chaos.
Andrew Napolitano: Why did Russia not bring military support in for Assad?
Jeffrey Sachs: I think it’s right to say that the collapse of the Assad regime in a two-week period was a shock to all of the actors in the region. Turkey was promoting the jihadists to take over the northern city of Aleppo. But I think it’s right to say that Turkey did not expect that even a victory in Aleppo, as rapid as it was, would lead to the collapse of the regime.
What clearly happened—and it’s a conclusion in retrospect—is that the Assad government in Syria was backed more by Hezbollah, which is the Iranian-backed militia based in Lebanon, but in fact backing the Syrian government even more than by the Syrian Army itself. And with Israel’s war on Hezbollah in the last month, Hezbollah withdrew forces from Syria. Hezbollah was badly mauled in Lebanon; Hezbollah’s leaders were assassinated by Israel. And what I think nobody fully recognized was that Hezbollah was the military bulwark of the Assad regime.
And so, with Hezbollah dramatically weakened, really after having faced an Israeli assault, the road was open to Damascus in a way that nobody imagined. The Russians, of course, were overtaken by events the same way the Iranians were, the same way obviously that the Syrian government was. And so, events moved so quickly that the realization was made that this was not a salvageable situation. There was no way for Iran to backstop Hezbollah. Hezbollah was weakened, wounded.
And when the Iranians said that they were going to reinforce Hezbollah, the Israelis came and bombed the supply routes. And so, this was an operation supported by Turkey, the United States, and Israel. And I think in this context, with Russia fighting in Ukraine—fighting the United States in a proxy war in Ukraine—with Hezbollah very much weakened, with the practical ability for resupplies very small, with the Assad Army not fighting, just peeling away (perhaps having been bribed or suborned or turned by Israeli and U.S. CIA and Turkish intelligence, which we don’t know at this point), for all these reasons, not only Russia but also Iran basically said, there’s nothing we can do at the moment.
However, I think it’s also important to understand—and this would be another basic point—we’re not at the end of the story regarding Russia, Iran, and Syria. Who’s going to govern? Will there be a Syria, and will it remain in one piece? Will it be fragmented? Will the new powers in Syria side with Iran in part or with Russia, or enable Russia to keep its airfield and its port? These are absolutely uncertain issues at this moment.
Andrew Napolitano: I think that the behavior of the United States of America was particularly reprehensible, Jeff. I mean, Jolani, the head of this terrorist group, has a bounty on his head posted by the State Department, and the group itself has been denominated as a terrorist organization. It’s a felony to provide material assistance to a terrorist organization. Last time I checked, that applied to the CIA as well. But of course, the CIA doesn’t get prosecuted when it does that. Does Netanyahu have fear because he doesn’t know what these fanatics in Damascus may do?
Jeffrey Sachs: Let’s, of course, understand that the Sunni jihadists have been backed by the United States since 1979—not on every occasion, but on multiple occasions: in the Balkans, in Chechnya, in the Middle East, and in Afghanistan starting in 1979.
I think everybody should understand by now that Osama Bin Laden was a U.S. creation. Of course, we don’t trumpet truth in our country. We don’t have inquests and honest reports. We don’t have CIA misdeeds examined. We haven’t had a review of the CIA for 49 years since the Church Committee in 1975.
So the CIA, in my view, is a disastrous, lawless organization that absolutely doesn’t have any scruples about law, truth, honesty, or ex post review of massive failures.
The U.S. backs jihadists, and this goes back to 2011 in the case of Syria, when Obama ordered the overthrow of Assad. The overthrow of Saddam was ordered eight years previously to that, in 2003—also a U.S.-Israel operation, I have to add.
But the order by Obama for Assad’s overthrow tasked the CIA with supporting jihadists—period. This is not something new.
And I think it is very important for everybody to understand that the U.S. has been essentially in perpetual war in the Middle East since 2001 at Israel’s behest, based on a list that was already known in 2001. And I don’t mean a metaphorical list—I mean a literal list. The list was explained to the American people by General Wesley Clark, the former Supreme Commander of NATO Forces.
Andrew Napolitano: We have that explanation you provided us. The tape is from 2023, but he’s talking about a time period before that. Eye-opening and terrifying. Clark said:
“I just got this down from upstairs, meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office, today. And he said, ‘This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years—starting with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off with Iran.’
I said, ‘Is it classified?’
He said, ‘Yes, sir.’
I said, ‘Well, don’t show it to me.'”
If you were Iran, you’d probably believe that you were already at war with the United States anyway, since we’ve asserted that their government needs regime change. We’ve asked Congress to appropriate $75 million to do it, and we are supporting terrorist groups who are infiltrating and blowing up things inside Iraq and Iran. And if we’re not doing it, let’s put it this way—we’re probably cognizant of it and encouraging it.
So it’s not surprising that we’re moving to a point of confrontation and crisis with Iran.
Andrew Napolitano: I’m going to guess that none of this surprises you, Professor Sachs.
Jeffrey Sachs: Well, I think the hard part that we don’t really discuss in America—and that is not understood in America—is that our foreign policy is deeply entrained at the scale of decades. What one observes is not because Obama came in, or Trump came in, or Biden came in. We have a deep state. The CIA is the main continuation agency of that deep state, and it carries a basic foreign policy.
The foreign policy of the United States since 1945 was to destroy the Soviet Union. And then after 1991, to try to do the same with Russia—and if not destroy it, to fundamentally weaken it. In the case of the Middle East, the list that General Wesley Clark provided is a list that Israel—more specifically, Netanyahu and his U.S. backers like Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle—set out already in the 1990s. They said: Our job is to overthrow all of those governments.
We’ve been at that for more than 20 years. This is continuity. This is not about Democrats and Republicans, Bush versus Obama. It’s a little boring, frankly. You know, we get all this excitement about who’s going to win—but that’s not how foreign policy is made. Foreign policy is made in the longer term.
Now, think of the seven countries that he named: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Libya, Sudan, and Somalia. I want people to understand that the United States or its proxies have launched wars in six of those seven countries.
That was a list agreed upon in 2001, based on a list from 1996 when Netanyahu came into office. His theory was that Israel needs to be able to do what it wants to dominate the Palestinian people. So, we need to overthrow all governments that support the Palestinians—especially those that support them in militancy through Hamas or Hezbollah—rather than negotiating with the Palestinians for a Palestinian state.
We will overthrow seven countries. Now, that’s what has happened. There’s one left on that list—that’s Iran. But six of them have now been the object of U.S. war.
It started with Iraq in 2003. There was a fig leaf of legality in the Iraq Liberation Act that Clinton and Congress signed in 1998, making it official U.S. policy to overthrow Saddam Hussein—not after 9/11, but back in 1998.
Then, after 9/11, this list that Wesley Clark was shown became actual war doctrine for the Pentagon. The idea was: go into Iraq, then we’ll go into Syria, then Lebanon, then Iran, Somalia, Sudan, and Libya.
What happened? The U.S. got tied down in Iraq for several years due to the insurgency. So these seven wars in five years did not pan out on the timeline. But then Obama came in and was given the instructions: Mr. President, your job is next—that’s Syria.
In 2011, Obama launched CIA operations to overthrow Assad at the behest of Israel. The United States backed Ethiopia to invade Somalia. The United States backed rebels to break Sudan into pieces, and now there are wars raging with millions suffering in Sudan and South Sudan—thanks to the handiwork of the United States.
In 2011, Obama sent in NATO to bomb Libya. That’s another 13 years of war. The one that Netanyahu wants—the big prize—is Iran. But that hasn’t happened yet. He’s trying every which way to get the United States to go to war with Iran.
It’s six out of seven right now. And not one of those six is stable and peaceful—not one. This is a devastation that the U.S. has unleashed at the behest of Israel. This is all part of Netanyahu’s crazy idea that since he won’t compromise with the Palestinians, it’s better to destroy half the Middle East. That’s the idea.
The question for me is: Does President Trump know that the U.S. does not have an independent foreign policy at this stage? Is President Trump just going to go along with the Israel Lobby the same way? That’s the big campaign backers—that’s the normal thing. Is he just going to keep American foreign policy in the hands of Netanyahu, or is President Trump going to do what an American president should do and say: U.S. foreign policy is for the U.S.—it’s not for Israel. No more wars on Israel’s behalf. $7 trillion into this.
Andrew Napolitano: If he does that, he’ll be the first president since 1948 to have done so. And of course, he has a million-dollar debt to Mrs. Adelson. Before I ask you about Iran, you mentioned Iraq and you mentioned Netanyahu’s involvement in encouraging the ill-fated American invasion of Iraq. Here’s Netanyahu committing perjury—lying under oath to the Congress of the United States:
“There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking, and is working, and is advancing towards the development of nuclear weapons. No question whatsoever.”
Andrew Napolitano: Yet, there was zero evidence of that. And we now know that what Bibi said was not true.
Jeffrey Sachs: He is one of the supreme liars of our age and has gotten America into more trouble than any U.S. president has done. And yet, our Congress gives him 58 standing ovations.
Now, Netanyahu is indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court—something that the United States political circles don’t even want to mention. But the fact of the matter is that Netanyahu was the chief cheerleader and chief promoter of the war in Iraq on completely fictitious terms.
We know that they knew, in the fall of 2002, there were no weapons of mass destruction. And by the way, Netanyahu kept saying “certain, certain, certain,” and it was all lies. But it was partly focus-grouped: What can we tell the American people to scare the wits out of them so that they back Israel’s war against Iraq? That was the idea.
We know there was a special operations group in the Pentagon, led by a person named Abe Shulsky, who looked around for the best PR to sell a war on false pretenses. But there was Netanyahu in October 2002, selling the American people a war that turned out to be one of the great disasters of our age. And it happened. He did it. It was a complete disaster, based on outright lies. And the guy is still prime minister, leading us to the next war, and the next war, and the next war.
Andrew Napolitano: There he is at the UN…
Jeffrey Sachs: …explaining exactly what just happened. “We will take down Syria.” That’s the curse. And he’s hoping that we’ll go eastward on that map with the countries in black. The one that’s most eastward there is Iran. That’s his most fervent hope—that the United States will go to war with Iran.
Andrew Napolitano: What does Iran do now, in your view, Professor Sachs, in light of the collapse of the Assad government? Do they ramp up their efforts to obtain a nuclear weapon? What do they do? Do they come to Washington and say to President Trump: We want to trade with you. Get rid of the sanctions. We want to work with you and be at peace?
Jeffrey Sachs: I also want to explain to people something that is not reported and not understood. During the past two years, Iran has been repeatedly reaching out to the Biden administration, saying:
“We want peace. We want to negotiate. We don’t want a nuclear weapon. We absolutely can find a way to peace in the Middle East. We can find a way to resolve the nuclear issue because we don’t want nuclear weapons.”
The U.S. turned to Israel and said: “Well, what do you think?” And Israel’s response was: “They’re weak. They’re obviously weak. They’re obviously suffering. Turn up the pressure. Turn the screws on them.”
In other words, we don’t know how to take ‘yes’ for an answer in this country—especially the neocons and especially Israel. Israel doesn’t want peace. Israel wants military victory, and it has made a wasteland as a result. It’s unbelievable.
But I have, by myself, spoken with leading senior Iranian officials. I have been in meetings at the United Nations with the President of Iran and heard him call for peace. I have had it explained to me by top intermediaries how Iran has reached out for peace.
The Biden administration has been absolutely dreadful—period. On foreign policy, just awful. But one of the things it has been awful on is completely rejecting the attempts to find a negotiating path forward that Iran has tried repeatedly to initiate.
This is the big question again for President Trump: Will an American president do something completely different? Netanyahu is after something that is not in America’s interest. I don’t think it’s in Israel’s interest either. It is a matter of zealotry and extremism—not in Israel’s interest at all. But what it has done is create chaos, and Netanyahu wants more chaos through a war with Iran.
Andrew Napolitano: Let me ask you one more topic—and that’s Russia. President Trump, over the weekend, posted on Truth Social a statement to the effect that the Assad regime collapsed because its patron abandoned it. He referred to Vladimir Putin as the patron. Probably not a very good diplomatic move, but is there any truth in what Trump said?
Jeffrey Sachs: Well, I think the Russians supported the Assad government, that’s for sure. But they were not the patron. In fact, from a military point of view, it’s clear that Hezbollah was the main defender of the Assad government.
By the way, Assad, from every account, made countless blunders and mistakes that led to his ruin. That should be noted. But it’s a ruin that was the target of the U.S. and Israel for 13 years—through the CIA, Israel, Turkey, bombing, sanctions, and the U.S. grabbing Syria’s oil fields. Everything you can imagine to weaken them.
On the military side, the main backer was Iran and Hezbollah.
Andrew Napolitano: Professor Sachs, thank you very much for your unique and gifted analysis of all this. It’s been a hectic day for us here, and I know for you as you try to get information from various sources as to what happened. If you come up with more information…
Jeffrey Sachs: …of course, we’re watching very, very closely.
Andrew Napolitano: Thank you. Please come back to us. Thank you, Professor. All the best.
