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Trump Admits Failure, Chooses A Path To Peace Through Iran! Jeffrey Sachs.
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00:00Credible news reports surfaced indicating that Iran has withdrawn from negotiations with the United States.
00:10Is this any surprise to you, given that the U.S. has attacked Iran during a so-called ceasefire
00:17and Israel is continuing to slaughter innocents in Lebanon?
00:22Well, I've been saying for weeks that I think the fighting can end without any kind of formal agreement.
00:31The United States made a bad mistake to launch a war against Iran.
00:37It was predicated on a totally delusional idea that the war would last one day,
00:44that the U.S. would take out the leadership of Iran and put in the leadership that it wanted.
00:50It's something like what the U.S. did in Venezuela, but Iran is not Venezuela and Iran is not the
01:00U.S. neighborhood.
01:01And the whole idea was a complete botch up.
01:07So the U.S. made a terrible mistake.
01:10Since then, Trump has been making one demand after another that the Iranians just say no to because the United
01:19States can't compel Iran to any of these U.S. demands.
01:25The U.S. could not accomplish what Trump said it would accomplish.
01:30Given that, we've been in the same situation now for three months, basically,
01:36which is that the U.S. can escalate, in which case a lot of the Middle East is likely to
01:43get blown up
01:44with a profound consequence for the whole world.
01:49Not a good one.
01:50Or the U.S. can basically wrap it up and go home because it did a stupid thing and doubling
01:58down on a stupid thing is twice a stupid thing.
02:01It's time to go home.
02:02The American people would tell you this by a very large majority.
02:08Trump hasn't been able to just accept the fact that the whole thing went kablooey.
02:16So he makes demands.
02:19He says that we're close to reaching agreements.
02:22The whole thing is nonsense because every day that he says we're close to an agreement,
02:27the Iranians have said we don't have anything close to an agreement.
02:31And now, basically, Israel, which is a completely lawless state,
02:39which is invading Lebanon, murdering people right and left, deciding to level neighborhoods of Beirut,
02:51just a completely vulgar, lawless state, has been continuing, even though for weeks the idea of the so-called ceasefire
03:04that supposedly had been negotiated was that Israel would stop this abuse.
03:10Just minutes ago was also said that Trump has gotten Israel and Hezbollah to agree to stop the fighting.
03:19I doubt it.
03:21Israel doesn't stop the fighting until the United States really insists.
03:28And Trump is incapable, it seems to me, of having a consistent idea or policy for even a 15-minute
03:39span.
03:40So all of this is to say it is perfectly plain why Iran would say,
03:46what are we even talking about?
03:48But I would say we don't have to be completely pessimistic about it,
03:56because there's a better alternative than a negotiated agreement,
04:03which is unrealistic the way it's going.
04:06And that is the United States should just stop what it's doing and go home.
04:13And understand the most basic point.
04:16If the U.S. goes home, Iran is going to open the Strait of Hormuz
04:23and there's going to be some normalization of the world energy markets.
04:28Why?
04:29Because it's overwhelmingly in Iran's interest to do so.
04:33And it's overwhelmingly in the interest of Iran's supporters, Russia and China, for Iran to do so.
04:42And it's overwhelmingly in the interest of Iran and its neighbors in the Gulf to get on with life
04:50that was very gravely disrupted by Israel and the United States.
04:55So if the U.S. just leaves, it'll be well enough.
05:02Things will go back to normal.
05:04Donald Trump can find some other thing to do.
05:07And our lives in this country could be improved, safer.
05:13The price at the gas pump would come down.
05:16Lo and behold, Trump might do something that the American people actually would like.
05:22Aren't you giving him more credit than he deserves?
05:25Can you just imagine him saying, OK, we made a mistake.
05:29We're going home.
05:30That's just not him.
05:31I don't even want him to say anything.
05:33He could say, I made the greatest victory in the history of the universe because I am God and we're
05:40going home.
05:40I don't care.
05:41Who cares what he says?
05:43We're in a clown act right now.
05:47Sorry.
05:47Yeah, we are.
05:48We're not going to get serious, mature behavior out of him unless he has a hook on which to hang
05:56that victory hat.
05:58He can say whatever he wants.
06:00He's actually pretty good at saying whatever he wants.
06:04But there's no other thing to do.
06:08And this is the most basic point.
06:10And when he says, by the way, I don't he says, I don't care about the midterms.
06:17OK, if you don't, basically what you're saying is you don't care at all about the American people, which I
06:26think is pretty close to being true.
06:28And why his approval rating is down to 34 percent and the disapproval rating up to 60 percent.
06:34No, he doesn't care about this.
06:36By the way, there is a whole group of Americans that don't care about the American people.
06:43Silicon Valley tech titans are testing their weapons.
06:48They probably like this war well enough because they're they're doing their AI testing and surveillance and showing how their
06:57systems work.
06:59And, you know, of course, we have the Israel lobby and all the rest.
07:04It's just interesting.
07:06The American people are sick of all of this.
07:10But in one respect, Professor Sachs.
07:14Aren't the negotiations pointless without a restraint on Israel?
07:21Well, if you're asking, could we get some kind of deep settlement with Iran on many issues on regional security,
07:34on the nuclear brief, on peace, on the straits?
07:39It's it's impossible right now.
07:42Anyway, there's no way to get such an agreement.
07:46We don't even have negotiators.
07:49Kushner, Witkoff.
07:51Are you kidding?
07:51We don't have people that can negotiate the nuclear issues, not even technically with the capacity to do this, much
08:01less the distrust.
08:02They keep killing the negotiators and all the rest.
08:05So I don't think that there is any scope for any kind of detailed agreement.
08:12I don't know, you know, what Donald Trump understands, but negotiating is a professional business.
08:19It's it's not a joke and a game on true social.
08:23It actually requires detailed work, not Kushner flying in for a morning on God knows what purpose.
08:35And so it's not going to happen at all.
08:38And with Israel, again, it's rather simple.
08:44Israel is a violent, rogue state that is on a murder spree because it's trying to build what it calls
08:55greater Israel, which means controlling all of Palestine, controlling Gaza, controlling the West Bank, controlling East Jerusalem and parts of
09:07Syria.
09:08And parts of Lebanon and God knows where else they want to go.
09:14And this is a madness.
09:15And it means that they have to engage in nonstop murder of people, which is what they're doing right now.
09:22Now, could the United States stop this?
09:26Depends what you mean by could.
09:28In a moment, the United States president could stop it by saying we're not supporting that, not another penny, no
09:39more ammunition, no more diplomatic cover.
09:42You're done.
09:43Israel has absolutely no capacity to continue without the U.S. backing.
09:50Then you say, well, would the U.S. do this, given all of the lobbying and all the rest?
09:58I think the answer of the American people is, please do.
10:03We don't like this.
10:05This is not American foreign policy.
10:08This is Israel's policy.
10:10Right.
10:10That is pulling us out of shape.
10:13And so I think, again, the odd part of all of this is the right decisions are the popular decisions,
10:21actually.
10:22Which is odd, but yes, yes.
10:24This might veer us into your other field of expertise, which is the economy.
10:30But I think when Trump says things like he might resume the bombing, Iran is begging us, Iran doesn't want
10:38a deal, Iran is close to a deal, he's doing that to move the markets.
10:42And he's shown a remarkable success at doing that, albeit for short periods of time.
10:48But somebody, some group of people, cashes in every time he does that.
10:53I think there are two things going on.
10:55One is the short-term market moves and the betting markets and so forth.
11:01And no doubt there is inside news and inside information and front-running the market.
11:08These are grifters.
11:10And there are so many anomalies that show up in the technical literature about trades beforehand, big trades.
11:19We know that there's a lot of crookedness in all of it.
11:24Then there's another element, which is more generally trying to say to the public, we're going to reach some kind
11:35of agreement because Trump wants to keep the oil prices in the spot market as low as possible,
11:45to keep the gasoline prices to some extent under control.
11:50And if it is assumed that this stalemate or an escalated war is going to happen in the future, then
12:00holders of petroleum are going to hoard it.
12:03They're going to hold back in anticipation of higher future prices.
12:06So he's trying to say at one level, everything's fine.
12:11Get that oil price under $100 a barrel.
12:14What we know, though, is that the reserves are being run down.
12:21The stocks are being run down.
12:23They're being run down maybe because some people think, well, this is going to resolve one way or another.
12:29Maybe Trump's just going to leave, like I would urge him to do for his own good and for the
12:33world's good.
12:34But in any event, he is trying to keep the oil price from spiking in anticipation of extreme shortages in
12:45the future.
12:46Now, if it's all a bunch of bunkum, there is no agreement.
12:50No agreement's going to be reached.
12:52And he's not smart enough just to leave.
12:55We're going to have a massive shortage in weeks because these stocks of oil supplies are being run down to
13:05nothing, basically.
13:06In other words, people are using the remaining amounts of oil that they have in hand.
13:15And then they're going to turn in a scramble to world markets that don't have the oil.
13:22And so, yes, the price today is under $100 a barrel.
13:26But if we continue more weeks of what we have right now, there's going to be a huge jump in
13:34prices of petroleum.
13:35And then whatever pain is being felt right now, which is a lot, it's going to get much, much worse
13:43in a few weeks.
13:45They must understand this somehow in the White House.
13:49Unless I'm giving them a tip to avoid it, go home, announce your victory, do whatever you want.
13:57Don't expect a negotiated agreement because you're making crazy demands.
14:01Just go home and then the strait will open up.
14:05By the way, they're having a complete fit on the idea that Iran might charge a dollar a barrel for
14:14oil going through the strait.
14:16This is also pretty cheeky of the U.S. authorities.
14:25The U.S. has confiscated billions, arguably tens of billions of dollars of Iranian assets, illegally confiscated it, I would
14:37argue.
14:38The U.S. has destroyed tens of billions of dollars of Iranian infrastructure, not to mention killing vast numbers of
14:48people.
14:49And then they say, no, you can't collect a dollar per barrel of oil going through the strait, which, by
14:57the way, would be maybe seven or eight billion dollars a year and would take many years even to make
15:04up the cost that the United States has imposed in just a few weeks.
15:10And Bessent, who I consider our thug in chief, he has no attributes of a Treasury secretary that I see.
15:19He knows nothing about the U.S. economy, cares nothing about the U.S. economy.
15:23He's just an enforcer of sanctions, crushing currencies, punishing others.
15:30He says, how dare they even consider having a toll?
15:36Give me a break.
15:37How about not bombing this place in the first place and killing all these people or confiscating their reserves?
15:45Or, as Bessent said in Davos this year, using, quote, economic statecraft, that was a nice euphemism, to mean crushing
15:57the Iranian currency so that people would come out onto the streets.
16:03I mean, this is American policy.
16:05It's thuggery.
16:06It's just thuggishness.
16:08Do you think the people that make these decisions, whether it's Bessent at Treasury or Ratcliffe at CIA or Rubio
16:18at State or Hegseth at Defense or Trump himself, have the remotest understanding of Iranian history, culture, way of thinking?
16:31Of course not.
16:32And more than that, our side has no culture at all other than a kind of gangsterism.
16:43And their view of Iran, which is completely bizarre, completely ignorant, is some medieval state that we're going to crush
16:59under our demands.
17:01And their motivation, to a very large extent, is revenge.
17:06What revenge?
17:08Well, Iran was part of the American empire after 1953 because the CIA made a coup.
17:15It installed a police state.
17:18That police state under U.S. authority lasted 26 years.
17:22The Iranian people threw it off in 1979.
17:26And I'll tell you, empires hate when a nation throws off the imperial yoke.
17:37And so the U.S. is out for revenge institutionally.
17:40We're going to teach them.
17:42They got away from us in 1979, but not for good.
17:46We're back.
17:47That's what they think.
17:48It's not going to work.
17:50But that's what they think.
17:52You and I often discuss matters that implicate the First Amendment, something we both rely on for our work.
18:04We do.
18:05About an hour ago, the Secretary of Defense, who calls himself the Secretary of War, issued an edict classifying the
18:13press office at the Pentagon as a classified place, meaning you cannot go into the press room without a top
18:22-secret classified security clearance, which, of course, none of the press has.
18:27What are they afraid of?
18:31Yeah, that's what I was going to say.
18:32They're afraid of the truth.
18:35This is the basic point.
18:37We're at war all over the world.
18:41We're running a war machine.
18:44Trump is asking for one and a half trillion dollars for this war machine in the upcoming budget.
18:51It's a big bucks.
18:54It's part of the AI boom because all these big tech companies from Palantir and SpaceX and all your favorite
19:06companies have huge Pentagon budgets and they're making a lot of money.
19:12But the reasons for these wars are completely phony.
19:16Just like we once went to war with Iraq when our government knew absolutely there were no weapons of mass
19:25destruction, but they had tested it, that that would be some kind of explanation that they could at least fool
19:38some part of the American public.
19:40They had actually focus grouped using WMD as the quote-unquote explanation or justification for the Iraq war.
19:50They lie for a living because the American people don't want these wars.
19:54We don't want these trillions of dollars spent on the military contractors and the profiteers and all the rest.
20:03We don't want to have people killed by the tens of thousands in the American name as is happening in
20:10Gaza or the thousands dying in Lebanon or the thousands dying in Iran right now.
20:16The American people don't want that.
20:18So our government has to lie.
20:22It has to do one of two things.
20:24One, it has to make up a story like it did about Iran, that you can't negotiate.
20:31We have to stop them from getting a nuclear weapon.
20:34Well, there's just no end to that particular Trump idiocy, since he's the one that ripped up the agreement that
20:45would have stopped Iran clearly from any path to a nuclear weapon,
20:51because Iran put itself under the scrutiny of the International Atomic Energy Agency, rigorous scrutiny, and held to it.
20:59And then Trump ripped it up anyway.
21:01So they make up a story.
21:03That's one thing that they do.
21:05And that's what they're doing right now.
21:07And then the second thing they do is they hide what they're really doing.
21:12So they act covertly or they make some plot for regime change or something else.
21:18But the truth, no thank you, if we really had the truth, the American people would say, are you kidding?
21:26We don't want that.
21:29That's the point.
21:30Let's see.
21:31Under the JCPOA, the Iranian nuclear enrichment was capped at 3.67% with international inspection.
21:41And at the time, the Strait of Hormuz was over.
21:45Thanks to Donald Trump, the Strait of Hormuz opened.
21:49The Strait of Hormuz is not fully open.
21:52And Iranian nuclear enrichment is up to 60%.
21:55And by the way, the reason...
21:56What does he think he's accomplishing?
21:58The reason it went to 60% was that they ripped up the agreement in which Iran was scrupulously following
22:07these limits.
22:08They ripped it up, and then they went in and they assassinated Iranians, Iranian leaders, and they bombed Iranian facilities.
22:20This is how they act.
22:24They had an agreement in hand.
22:26But, you know, again, Netanyahu is really a thug.
22:30And Trump is a fool.
22:33And it's a great combination, the two.
22:36So they brought us exactly to this juncture.
22:40What happened at the UN the other day that the Israeli ambassador publicly and vociferously denounced the secretary general and
22:53said the Israeli government will not deal with him?
22:55What happened?
22:56Oh, my.
22:57I was away in either Asia or Brazil traveling last week, so I don't even know the specifics.
23:06But this is an ambassador that has ripped up the UN charter, that has denounced the whole world as anti
23:13-Semitic.
23:14No, I mean, that has been vulgar to the entire world system of law for basically for as long as
23:27they've been in power.
23:28So this is a completely abusive government.
23:31There's a ruling of the International Court of Justice that told Israel, absolutely, your borders are the borders of the
23:414th of June, 1967.
23:45Your occupation of Gaza and the West Bank and East Jerusalem are illegal.
23:51Go home.
23:53Very clear.
23:54But Israel can't stand the truth either.
23:58They have a different objective.
23:59Their objective is we're going to control everything, period, no matter what anyone says.
24:07And the UN represents international law.
24:11The UN actually, as a general assembly, voted to enforce the ruling of the International Court of Justice.
24:21Of course, then Trump intervened to block everything he created.
24:26It is it's not even absurd.
24:29It's a profoundly cynical board of peace, which has nothing to do with peace.
24:34It has nothing to do with a board of anything.
24:36And it has no money in it.
24:38It's just a diversion yet again from the rights of the Palestinian people.
24:43But I don't know exactly what Israel said last week, but Israel's on a murder spree and the UN says
24:51you're on a murder spree.
24:52And so Israel lashes back by saying, you know, this is a hate filled institution and all the rest.
25:00Somehow it's tragic.
25:03But Israel lost the complete ability to look inward at what it's doing.
25:10It's a really, really tragic situation.
25:14Of course, mostly tragic for the Palestinian people and the Lebanese people, but also tragic for the people of Israel.
25:21And one last topic, if I might, is President Putin, I'm obviously diverting to Ukraine, morally and legally free, in
25:32your view, to attack munitions plants in the EU that are supplying weapons to Ukraine that are being used to
25:42kill Russians?
25:46The war in Ukraine could easily turn into a European war.
25:52Yes, it would be a disaster.
25:56And the Europeans are so bereft of common sense right now and limit for a number of reasons.
26:05But mainly they have turned their politics and rhetoric over to the most russophobic states of the European Union.
26:14The foreign policy spokesman of the European Union is Estonian and she's absolutely hate filled with Russia and their defense
26:26commissioner is also from the Baltic states.
26:31Lithuania, if I remember correctly, and their economics commissioner, also from the Baltic states.
26:39So you have a complete Russian hatred and that is leading the Europeans to reckless escalation.
26:49They're openly assisting attacks deep in Russia.
26:54They're chortling about these attacks when a girl's school was recently hit.
27:02And just like in Iran, the same circumstance that many schoolgirls were were killed by this Ukrainian drone strike.
27:13The Europeans couldn't breathe one word of human decency.
27:18And so what's happening is a dramatic escalation of the hate language in Europe and the actual attacks inside Russia,
27:31including attacks on Moscow and other attacks on civilians and so forth.
27:38And I wrote a letter because of this to Chancellor Mertz published an open letter in the Berliner Zeitung last
27:46week saying, Mr. Chancellor, you are absolutely key right now to prevent a European war.
27:58That's your job.
28:00Actually, you are Chancellor of Germany, Germany cheated on the agreement that it had reached with Soviet Union and Russia
28:08about NATO cheated.
28:10Germany cheated on the Minsk agreement that could have ended this conflict back in 2015.
28:19You have a responsibility to stop this slide into a European war.
28:27So what I want to say is not about who's got rights and not rights.
28:32What I want to say is that Europe is on the verge of a complete disaster.
28:39And the European Commission is bereft of any any capacity internally to stop it because they're filled with warmongers.
28:52And unfortunately, the German chancellor has done no better.
28:56But he individually, by dint of being the leader of the most powerful country of Europe and the one that
29:05has the most direct responsibility towards Russia for having gotten us all into this terrible mess,
29:13has a responsibility to at least pick up the phone and speak to his counterpart before all hell breaks loose.
29:22This is the point of my open letter to him.
29:26Before you have war, you better make at least a phone call to start talking to the other side.
29:35Professor Sachs, thank you very much.
29:36Thanks for letting me go all across the globe, almost literally, on all of these topics.
29:42Deeply appreciated.
29:43Have a great week.
29:44Maybe we'll do another segment on Friday morning.
29:47Okay, great.
29:47You've been so well received and look forward to seeing you again soon.
29:51Thanks.
29:51Thanks a lot.
29:52Sure.
29:52All the best.