- 6/21/2025
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00:00Professor Sachs, welcome here. I want to ask you how dangerous was the deception perpetrated by
00:08President Trump on the Iranians and others. But in order to be fair to the president here,
00:15it's only about 60 seconds. Here is the core of what he said last month in Saudi Arabia.
00:22Before our eyes, a new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts of
00:27tired divisions of the past and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by
00:33commerce, not chaos. This great transformation has not come from Western intervention. The gleaming
00:42marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons, or
00:49liberal non-profits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing
00:54to develop. Cabal, Baghdad, so many other cities. Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has
01:04been brought by the people of the region themselves. In the end, the so-called nation-builders wrecked far
01:12more nations than they built, and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies
01:19that they did not even understand themselves. They told you how to do it, but they had no idea how to do
01:25it themselves. Peace, prosperity, and progress ultimately came not from a radical rejection of
01:32your heritage, but rather from embracing your national traditions and embracing that same heritage that
01:39you love so dearly. Fair to say, Professor Sachs, that as he was uttering those very words,
01:47CIA, MI6, and Mossad were preparing the dastardly and unprovoked attack that Israel visited upon Iran
01:55last week. Certainly, Mossad is in the lead. It's assassination and murder unit number one,
02:04but Mossad effectively has determined U.S. policy for decades, and Trump is falling into line.
02:13So it's quite amazing to see one president after another falls into line with the murder
02:21incorporated led by Israel. When he said those words, you and I and others on the show rejoiced.
02:29An American president condemning the neocons, an American president condemning military
02:35adventurism and intervention into foreign countries. It was a charade. It was a facade. It was a deception.
02:45We don't know exactly what happened between then and now in one sense. I think President Putin
02:53in 2017 expressed something that we all learn as well. He knew it in 2017 in an interview with
03:04Le Figaro that he gave. He said, I've dealt with many American presidents. They come into office with
03:12ideas, but then men in dark suits and briefcases wearing blue ties show up and explain to them
03:20the world the way that it will be. And so you never hear of those ideas again. So I can't peer into the
03:30inner thinking of Trump, but everything he's saying and doing today violates what he said last month.
03:38And in the end, we know that our foreign policy is governed by a deep state apparatus, the CIA, Mossad,
03:50MI6, as you said. And we know that the actions that occur, for example, Ukraine's attack on Russia's
04:01strategic nuclear bombers, had the same providence, that is the same authors as Israel's attack in Tehran last week.
04:14Same methods, same crates carrying drones inside a country to make a decapitation strike or to make a strategic
04:24strike. So Mossad was involved in both the Ukraine operation and in the Tehran operation last week.
04:34Now, we've discussed in recent weeks, what did Trump know when? I have no idea. What did the CIA know?
04:43Well, of course it knew it was involved in all of this. Who leads all of this? Mossad, I would say.
04:50It's weird, but it's actually true. America does not have an America first foreign policy, despite what
04:59Donald Trump says. America has an Israel first foreign policy. It happens that Israel's foreign policy
05:05is completely reckless, dangerous, and delusional. And it has been that way for decades. I was going
05:15to say for 30 years. That's the time span of Netanyahu, who is the current most despicable person
05:22on the planet, in my view, because he's the greatest war progenitor of them all. But it actually goes
05:29back beyond 30 years. This is a long-term plan for Israel to have its way in the Middle East. And the way
05:38that Netanyahu has explained it repeatedly for 30 years for anyone who cares to read his books and
05:44articles and watch his speeches, and it's painful, but it's actually worth doing because he tells you
05:50what his modus operandi is. And the modus operandi is that we will do what we want in the Middle East.
06:00And if any government in the region objects, we will overthrow that government. But when he says
06:08we, he's very nice. You know, it's his U.S. buddies that will do it. The U.S. will spend trillions of
06:18dollars and lives and the utter destruction of world trust in the United States to do this extremist
06:28Zionist bidding. And Netanyahu has been right. The U.S. has done his bidding up until now. We know
06:36that there was a plan already hatched decades ago, but unveiled to the former NATO commander,
06:46General Wesley Clark, in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, which said seven wars in five years.
06:55And those seven countries were Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, and Iran. And the U.S. has been
07:10engaged in six of those seven wars. Still now, a long plan, delayed, by the way, because every one of
07:19those turned into a complete debacle compared to what Bibi promised us all the time, how wonderful
07:26these wars would be. And now we're in the seventh war, finally. And Donald Trump has fallen completely
07:33into line as of today. It's amazing to watch. It's terrifying to watch. It would be nice if we had
07:41an American first foreign policy. I want to ask you about the consequences to American diplomacy
07:50of this kind of deception. But before we do, there's an interesting back and forth between a
07:56reporter, I don't know who, and President Trump on Air Force One last night. And she asks President
08:03Trump about a director of national security, Gabbard's statement under oath that the intelligence
08:10community has concluded that Iran does not have and is not building a nuclear weapon. Watch this,
08:16cut number 13. People always said that you don't believe Iran should be able to have a nuclear weapon.
08:21But how close do you personally think that they were to getting one? Because Tulsi Gabbard testified
08:27in March that the intelligence community said Iran wasn't building a nuclear weapon. The IC continues
08:33to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon. I don't care what she said. I think they were
08:36very close to having it. I don't care what she said. I think they were very close to having one.
08:48How profoundly irresponsible is a statement unsupported by any evidence like that?
08:55This is how the U.S. government acts and has acted for decades. Donald Trump is not alone in this.
09:03There was a famous interview back in around 2003, where one of the George Bush Jr. top advisors said,
09:14when he asked about the real situation, he explained to the reporter, we make our own reality,
09:19and you report on it. And this is the view of government that has become nothing more than PR
09:30and bomb. That's what the U.S. government is. They have their own narrative. They smirk when they say it.
09:38They're uninterested in anything truthful at all. And they believe that the weapons are the only
09:46determinant of reality in the end. You know, this whole approach is repeatedly put to the test.
09:57The whole idea that it is the weapons that create the truth, not the rhetoric, not the analysis,
10:06not the actual events, but the weapons that create the truth, is found to be wanting.
10:12That's been true for a long time in human history, but it's found to be wanting month after month,
10:19year after year, in our current circumstances. Netanyahu has left behind a wasteland.
10:26It's the old expression of Tacitus. They create a desert and they call it peace.
10:38This is Netanyahu. He's been the champion of overthrowing Gaddafi. Now there has been 14 years of violence and death
10:49and destruction in Libya. He was the proponent of overthrowing the governments in Sudan, in Somalia,
11:00in Lebanon, in Syria, in Iraq, and now quite explicitly in Iran. Now the wars that have occurred have been
11:11complete disasters. So this is the empirical record. They don't care about the empirical record. It doesn't
11:19touch them. These are powerful people whose families are not being bombed, whose relatives are not being
11:27killed. These are kind of, you know, underworld dons that think that violence just runs the show.
11:39So they don't care about the truth. There's no analysis here. There never is these days.
11:47There's no honesty in any statement that anybody makes. After all, you know, the day before the
11:55Israel attack, the U.S. government statements were, we're having the next round of negotiations with
12:02Iran this Sunday. This was in a context of ongoing negotiations. And then suddenly, a massive murder
12:13attack by Mossad. No one says, oh, but we were going to have negotiations. It's taken for granted.
12:21Well, that was a, I knew that, of course. What kind of behavior is this? Maybe it's a behavior of the
12:29underworld, but it's not a behavior in which the overworld can survive, frankly.
12:36Chris put together a montage. There it is. And it reminds me of that phrase from my
12:42friend, the Columbia University historian, Tom Woods, no matter who you vote for, you end up with
12:48John McCain. This has been the deep consistency. You end up with the unnamed and unknown CIA-led
12:59foreign policy. CIA-led foreign policy has the advantage that it's unaccountable. You don't have
13:08to explain it. You don't have to justify it. You don't have to review what's happened. You don't
13:13look at the record of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan. You never review it. You just
13:24move forward after all. More deaths, more killing, more regime change. We're in the middle of it right
13:31now, but it's the big one. This is a country with more than 90 million people, and it has powerful
13:40allies. And Netanyahu's madness and Trump's complicity is, yeah, sure, let's kill all the top
13:50leaders, and we'll have a happy show. Mission accomplished, like that banner just showed.
13:55How do serious diplomats like our mutual friend, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov,
14:04view this? Marco Rubio said on Thursday night when the bombs first started falling, the United States
14:12knows nothing about this. Donald Trump posted on Truth Social, yeah, we're behind it, and the Iranians
14:19deserve it. Donald Trump's speech in Saudi Arabia, the lying and deception. How do serious diplomats
14:27view this? How will they view dealing with the United States from and after these events?
14:35Of course, serious diplomats don't believe a word that the United States, Britain, France,
14:47or just about any other close ally of this cabal actually says. The Russians have gotten
14:57over that idea a very long time ago. The Chinese have gotten over it a long time ago. We attack them
15:05through projection all the time, saying they don't tell the truth. All they hear is lies from the United
15:12States. I just went to a UN Security Council session last week, at the end of the week, after Israel
15:21bombed, in an unprovoked manner, Iran. And after it had assassinated many scientists and many of the
15:33military top leaders, three days before the next round of negotiations was to take place. And I listened to
15:43the U.S. and the other so-called Western diplomats. The ambassador of Denmark was so disgraceful,
15:55idiotic, that she didn't mention in her remarks that Israel bombed Iran. All she did was threaten
16:05Iran. Of course, the French, the British talked about Israel's rights to self-defense. And the United
16:15States representative at the Security Council basically said, if any American is harmed in this,
16:27we will destroy Iran. I'm paraphrasing. But it was thuggery. That's what is called
16:34diplomacy these days. This is actually alarming, because diplomacy is a set of tools to keep
16:46the world from being destroyed. It's not a game. It's not a show. It's not a clever statement on true
16:54social. It's not a clever witticism made standing outside the UN Security Council. It's actually
17:04a set of survival tools, especially in the nuclear age. Now, that idea that diplomacy is serious is
17:13very much debunked. You know, a lot of people would say, Sachs, you're an idiot. You're naive. You're
17:21a fool. It's all about power. But in fact, survival is not all about power. If it becomes all about power,
17:31we will not survive. It has to be about cooperation, understanding, enough truth telling that if it's
17:39four days before you're to start the next round of negotiations, you don't create mass assassinations
17:47the third day before the negotiations are about to start, and then chortle about how wonderful
17:54that is. You don't say, yes, we want to negotiate. But if you don't capitulate entirely, we will destroy you,
18:04typically in big, bold letters with exclamation points attached. Thuggery is not survival. Thuggery is
18:13thuggery. And there's a difference, actually, of underworld behavior and the behavior that we actually
18:24need for survival. I know it's a little quaint, the idea that there's actually honesty, follow-through,
18:33that negotiations really mean negotiations, that we have a UN charter. I know it sounds all very quaint,
18:43but it's actually the undergirding of survival. And we are sliding, absolutely sliding rapidly now to
18:54the unprecedented world war in which it's a war with nuclear weapons.
19:01Yesterday, I interviewed a friend of yours, a professor Mohamed Mirandi in Tehran.
19:10Just an hour before the following happened at a television station in Tehran.
19:22If you hear the voice of an invader on the homeland, it is the voice of an aggressor against truth and
19:29justice. What you observed, the sound you heard, is the murky, dust-laden voice of the studio.
19:36That, of course, was the Iranian state television being destroyed on air by Israeli missiles.
19:58With Trump then thereafter saying, much, much worse is to come. Much worse is to come.
20:06We demand total capitulation.
20:09What is this, Star Wars?
20:11It is almost, it is barnyard-like. How is this viewed in Beijing, in Moscow, in India?
20:22How do other great countries in the world view this? Well, let me restate the question, Professor Sachs.
20:29Who would trust the United States in any significant negotiation after this?
20:36Nobody. These negotiations, of course, not only on life and death issues of war and peace,
20:47but even on quotidian issues like tariffs. There is no trust because the U.S. has no sense.
21:01Trump is an extreme case, but it's a general pattern. No sense of honor or responsibility for fulfillment
21:13commitment of one's word in a treaty. So I think everybody understands that what's called transactional
21:22is less than transactional. It means the immediate moment. An agreement is not a binding agreement.
21:33The full faith and credit means nothing because there is no faith and there is no credit to this.
21:43So everybody in the world right now, vis-a-vis the United States, is improvising.
21:49The Europeans in their absolutely pathetic way, which I think Trump loves. It's like watching the vulnerable mice
22:02scurrying around among your traps. He's playing games with them, and they allow themselves to be played with.
22:11China is extremely different. China, of course, knows that it is invulnerable to a U.S. attack
22:22because that would lead to the destruction of the United States. It doesn't want to put that to a test.
22:30China is an ancient civilization, and it has civilizational depth and status,
22:37and it basically doesn't respond to the minute to this, again, I can't use the word I would use,
22:49but to this show that is underway right now. But it tries to create some sense in the midst of all of this
22:59of stability. It refers daily to the U.N. charter and to the need for multilateralism. It's a valiant
23:10attempt, actually. And most countries of the world, of course, want that. But yeah, the U.S. has
23:18everybody scurrying around, but now the time horizon for decision-making has been reduced to minutes.
23:25And that by itself means that we're at the very edge of nuclear war, the doomsday clock that I often refer
23:35to as at 89 seconds to midnight. Attack Russian strategic bombers, you get closer. Make a murder
23:46assault on Iran, you get even closer. Everyone wants to play games. By the way, not everyone. I'm talking
23:55about this tiny, tiny cabal that has our lives in their hands. There's no such thing as any public
24:03scrutiny of foreign policy at all. Anywhere, by the way, right now, this is a small group of people
24:09that hold the fate of the world in their hands. And we had a constitution of the United States that
24:15aimed to do something different, but it's completely in shreds.
24:19Chris, do you have the full screen of the tweet from the senior senator from South Carolina?
24:29Two or three words. I don't want to repeat it. There it is. When this happened on Thursday night,
24:34just what you said, it's a game to him. Game on. Pray for Israel. Lindsey Graham.
24:41Most single, most despicable person in U.S. politics, I'll say.
24:47But he plays golf with and whispers into the president's ear. So this is very dangerous.
24:52Donald Trump appears to be believing whoever he spoke to last. Do you expect Trump to authorize
24:59some sort of U.S. military involvement, which God only knows how it's going to end up? We have 90,000
25:05troops on the ground within striking distance of Iran missiles. Ritter says they're not even infantry.
25:16They're support troops. They're sitting ducks. Well, I think it's likely that the U.S.,
25:24under Trump's commands right now will escalate and that this war will continue to escalate.
25:37It has been expanding for 30 years. The war is now raging across a 4,000 kilometer expanse from Libya to
25:49Iran. So nothing has put down any of this conflict. Security, this is the opposite of national security.
26:00U.S. interests, this is the opposite of U.S. interests. Israeli security, it's the opposite of Israeli security.
26:08All we do is take a step closer to the end of the world. And then, I'm sorry to say, I get emails
26:16from fundamentalists who say, read the sign of the times, Professor Sachs, the end of the world is
26:22coming as in the prophecies. Well, I have a different approach, which is that we as a human
26:28being should be working towards avoiding the end of the world. Thank you, Professor Sachs. Thank you very
26:36much for your time. As unhappy as all of this is, your analysis is spectacular and deeply appreciated.
26:45Stay well, travel safely. We'll see you next week. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Thank you.
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