Transcription
Credible news reports surfaced indicating that Iran has withdrawn from negotiations with the United States. Is this any surprise to you given that the US has attacked Iran during a so-called ceasefire and Israel is continuing to slaughter innocents in Lebanon?
Well, I've been saying for weeks that I think the fighting can end without any kind of formal agreement. The United States made a bad mistake to launch a war against Iran. It was predicated on a totally delusional idea that the war would last one day, that the US would take out the leadership of Iran and put in the leadership that it wanted. Something like what the US did in Venezuela, but Iran is not Venezuela and Iran is not the US neighborhood. And the whole idea was a complete botchup. So the US made a terrible mistake.
Uh, since then, Trump has been making one demand after another that the Iranians just say no to because the United States can't compel Iran to any of these US demands. The US could not accomplish what Trump said it would accomplish. Given that we've been in the same situation now for three months basically, which is that the US can escalate, in which case a lot of the Middle East is likely to get blown up with a profound consequence for the whole world, not a good one. Or the US can basically wrap it up and go home because it did a stupid thing, and doubling down on a stupid thing is twice a stupid thing. It's time to go home. The American people would tell you this by a very large majority.
Trump hasn't been able to just accept the fact that the whole thing went kabooy. So he makes demands. He says that we're close to reaching agreements. The whole thing is nonsense because every day that he says we're close to an agreement, the Iranians have said we don't have anything close to an agreement. And now basically Israel, which is a completely lawless state, which is invading Lebanon, murdering people right and left, deciding to level neighborhoods of Beirut, just a completely vulgar, lawless state, has been continuing even though for weeks the idea of the so-called ceasefire that supposedly had been negotiated was that Israel would stop this abuse.
Just minutes ago was also said that Trump has gotten Israel and Hezbollah to agree to stop the fighting. I doubt it. Israel doesn't stop the fighting until the United States really insists, and Trump is incapable, it seems to me, of having a consistent idea or policy for even a fifteen-minute span. So all of this is to say it is perfectly plain why Iran would say, "What are we even talking about?"
But I would say we don't have to be completely pessimistic about it because there's a better alternative than a negotiated agreement, which is unrealistic the way it's going. And that is the United States should just stop what it's doing and go home and understand the most basic point. If the US goes home, Iran is going to open the Strait of Hormuz, and there's going to be some normalization of the world energy markets. Why? Because it's overwhelmingly in Iran's interest to do so. And it's overwhelmingly in the interest of Iran's supporters, Russia and China, for Iran to do so. And it's overwhelmingly in the interest of Iran and its neighbors in the Gulf to get on with life that was very gravely disrupted by Israel and the United States. So if the US just leaves, it'll be well enough. Things will go back to normal. Donald Trump can find some other thing to do, and our lives in this country could be improved, safer, the price at the gas pump would come down. Lo and behold, Trump might do something that the American people actually would like.
>> Aren't you giving him more credit than he deserves? Can you just imagine him saying, "Okay, we made a mistake. We're going home." That's just not him.
>> I don't even want him to say anything. He could say, "I made the greatest victory in the history of the universe because I am God, and we're going home." I don't care. Who cares what he says? We're in a clown act right now. Sorry.
>> Yeah, we are. This makes... We're not going to get serious, mature behavior out of him unless he has a hook on which to hang that victory hat.
>> He can say whatever he wants. He's pretty good at saying whatever he wants, but there's no other thing to do. And this is the most basic point.
>> And when he says, by the way, I don't... He says, "I don't care about the midterms." Okay, if you don't, basically what you're saying is you don't care at all about the American people, which I think is pretty close to being true. And why his approval rating is down to 34% and the disapproval rating up to 60%. No, he doesn't care about this. By the way, there is a whole group of Americans that don't care about the American people. Silicon Valley tech titans are testing their weapons. They probably like this war well enough because they're doing their AI testing and surveillance and showing how their systems work. And you know, of course, we have the Israel lobby and all the rest. It's just interesting. The American people are sick of all of this.
But in one respect, Professor Sachs, aren't the negotiations pointless without a restraint on Israel?
>> Well, if you're asking, could we get some kind of deep settlement with Iran on many issues, on regional security, on the nuclear brief, on peace, on the straits? It's impossible right now anyway. There's no way to get such an agreement. We don't even have negotiators. Kushner, Witkoff, are you kidding? We don't have people that can negotiate the nuclear issues, not even technically, with the capacity to do this, much less the distrust. They keep killing the negotiators and all the rest. So I don't think that there is any scope for any kind of detailed agreement. I don't know, you know, what Donald Trump understands, but negotiating is a professional business. It's not a joke and a game on True Social. It actually requires detailed work, not Kushner flying in for a warning on God knows what purpose. And so, it's not going to happen at all.
And with Israel, again, it's rather simple. Israel is a violent rogue state that is on a murder spree because it's trying to build what it calls Greater Israel, which means controlling all of Palestine, controlling Gaza, controlling the West Bank, controlling East Jerusalem, and parts of Syria and parts of Lebanon and God knows where else they want to go. And this is a madness, and it means that they have to engage in nonstop murder of people, which is what they're doing right now.
Now, could the United States stop this? Depends what you mean by "could." In a moment, the United States president could stop it by saying, "We're not supporting that. Not another penny. No more ammunition. No more diplomatic cover. You're done." Israel has absolutely no capacity to continue without the US backing. Then you say, well, would the US do this given all of the lobbying and all the rest? I think the answer of the American people is, "Please do. We don't like this. This is not American foreign policy. This is Israel's policy."
>> That is pulling us out of shape. And so I think again, the odd part of all of this is...
>> The right decisions are the popular decisions. Actually, this is odd, but yes. Yes.
Uh, this might veer us into your other field of expertise, which is the economy. But I think when Trump says things like he might resume the bombing, "Iran is begging us," "Iran doesn't want a deal," "Iran is close to a deal," he's doing that to move the markets. And he's shown a remarkable success at doing that, albeit for short periods of time, but somebody, some group of people cashes in every time he does that.
>> I think there are two things going on. One is the short-term market moves and the betting markets and so forth. And no doubt there is inside news and inside information and front-running the market. These are grifters, and it's... There are so many anomalies that show up in the technical literature about trades beforehand, big trades. We know that there's a lot of crookedness in all of it.
Then there's another element, which is more generally trying to say to the public, "We're going to reach some kind of agreement" because Trump wants to keep the oil prices in the spot market as low as possible to keep the gasoline prices to some extent under control. And if it is assumed that this stalemate or an escalated war is going to happen in the future, then holders of petroleum are going to hoard it. They're going to hold back in anticipation of higher future prices. So he's trying to say, at one level, "Everything's fine. Get that oil price under $100 a barrel."
What we know, though, is that the reserves are being run down. The stocks are being run down. They're being run down maybe because some people think, well, this is going to resolve one way or another. Maybe Trump's just going to leave, like I would urge him to do for his own good and for the world's good. But in any event, he is trying to keep the oil price from spiking in anticipation of extreme shortages in the future.
Now, if it's all a bunch of bunkum, there is no agreement, no agreement's going to be reached, and he's not smart enough just to leave, we're going to have a massive shortage in weeks because these stocks of oil supplies are being run down to nothing, basically. In other words, people are using the remaining amounts of oil that they have in hand, and then they're going to turn in a scramble to world markets that don't have the oil. And so, yes, the price today is under $100 a barrel, but if we continue more weeks of what we have right now, there's going to be a huge jump in prices of petroleum. And then whatever pain is being felt right now, which is a lot, it's going to get much, much worse in a few weeks.
They must understand this somehow in the White House. I'm giving them a tip to avoid it. Go home, announce your victory, do whatever you want. Don't expect a negotiated agreement because you're making crazy demands. Just go home, and then the strait will open up.
By the way, they're having a complete fit on the idea that Iran might charge a dollar a barrel for oil going through the strait. This is also pretty cheeky of the US authorities. The US has confiscated billions, arguably tens of billions of dollars of Iranian assets, illegally confiscated it. I would argue the US has destroyed tens of billions of dollars of Iranian infrastructure, not to mention killing vast numbers of people. And then they say, "No, you can't collect a dollar per barrel of oil going through the strait," which by the way would be maybe seven or eight billion dollars a year and would take many years even to make up the cost that the United States has imposed in just a few weeks. And Bessant, who I consider our thugin chief, he has no attributes of a Treasury Secretary that I see. He knows nothing about the US economy, cares nothing about the US economy. He's just an enforcer of sanctions, crushing currencies, punishing others. He says, "How dare they even consider having a toll." Give me a break.
>> How about not bombing this place in the first place and killing all these people or confiscating their reserves or, as Bessant said in Davos this year, using "economic statecraft"? That was a nice euphemism to mean crushing the Iranian currency so that people would come out onto the streets. I mean, this is American policy. It's thuggery. It's just thuggishness.
>> Do you think the people that make these decisions, whether it's Bessant at Treasury or Ratcliffe at CIA or Rubio at State or Heg Seth at Defense or Trump himself, have the remotest understanding of Iranian history, culture, way of thinking?
>> Of course not. And more than that, our side has no culture at all, other than kind of gangsterism. And their view of Iran, which is completely bizarre, completely ignorant, is some medieval state that we're going to crush under our demands. And their motivation to a very large extent is revenge. What revenge? Well, Iran was part of the American Empire after 1953 because the CIA made a coup. It installed a police state. That police state under US authority lasted 26 years. The Iranian people threw it off in 1979. And I'll tell you, empires hate when a nation throws off the imperial yoke. And so the US is out for revenge institutionally. "We're going to teach them. They got away from us in 1979, but not for good. We're back." That's what they think. It's not going to work, but that's what they think.
Uh, you and I often discuss matters that implicate the First Amendment, something we both rely on for our work.
>> We do. Uh, about an hour ago, the Secretary of Defense, who calls himself the Secretary of War, issued an edict classifying the press office at the Pentagon as a classified place, meaning you cannot go into the press room without a top-secret classified security clearance, which of course none of the press has. What are they afraid of?
>> Yeah, that's what I was going to say. They're afraid of the truth. This is the basic point. We're at war all over the world. We're running a war machine. Trump is asking for $1.5 trillion for this war machine in the upcoming budget. It's big bucks. It's part of the AI boom because all these big tech companies from Palantir and SpaceX and all your favorite companies have huge Pentagon budgets, and they're making a lot of money. But the reasons for these wars are completely phony. Just like we once went to war with Iraq when our government knew absolutely there were no weapons of mass destruction. But they had tested that that would be some kind of explanation that they could at least fool some part of the American public. They had actually focus-grouped using WMD as the explanation or justification for the Iraq war. They lie for a living because the American people don't want these wars. We don't want these trillions of dollars spent on the military contractors and the profiteers and all the rest. We don't want to have people killed by the tens of thousands in the American name, as is happening in Gaza, or the thousands dying in Lebanon, or the thousands dying in Iran right now. The American people don't want that.
So our government has to lie. It has to do one of two things. One, it has to make up a story like it did about Iran, that you can't negotiate. "We have to stop them from getting a nuclear weapon." Well, there's just no end to that particular Trump idiocy, since he's the one that ripped up the agreement that would have stopped Iran clearly from any path to a nuclear weapon, because Iran put itself under the scrutiny of the International Atomic Energy Agency, rigorous scrutiny, and held to it, and then Trump ripped it up anyway. So they make up a story. That's one thing that they do, and that's what they're doing right now.
And then the second thing they do is they hide what they're really doing. So they act covertly, or they make some plot for regime change or something else. But the truth? No, thank you. If we really had the truth, the American people would say, "Are you kidding? We don't want that." That's the point.
Let's see. Under the JCPOA, the Iranian nuclear enrichment was capped at 3.67% with international inspection. And at the time, the Strait of Hormuz was open. Thanks to Donald Trump, the Strait of Hormuz is open. The Strait of Hormuz is not fully open. And Iranian nuclear enrichment is up to 60%.
>> And by the way, the reason... What does he think he's accomplishing?
>> The reason it went to 60% was that they ripped up the agreement in which Iran was scrupulously following these limits. They ripped it up, and then they went in and they assassinated Iranians, Iranian leaders, and they bombed Iranian facilities. This is how they act. They had an agreement in hand, but you know, again, Netanyahu, he's really a thug, and Trump is a fool. And it's a great combination, the two.
>> So, they brought us exactly to this to this juncture. What happened at the UN the other day that the Israeli ambassador publicly and vociferously denounced the Secretary General and said the Israeli government will not deal with him? What happened?
>> Oh my. I was away in either Asia or Brazil traveling last week, so I don't even know the specifics, but this is an ambassador that has ripped up the UN Charter, that has denounced the whole world as anti-Semitic, that has no... I mean, that has been vulgar to the entire world system of law for basically for as long as they've been in power. So, this is a completely abusive government.
There's a ruling of the International Court of Justice that told Israel, "Absolutely, your borders are the borders of June 4th, 1967. Your occupation of Gaza and the West Bank and East Jerusalem are illegal. Go home." Very clear. But Israel can't stand the truth either. They have a different objective. Their objective is, "We're going to control everything. Period. No matter what anyone says." And the UN represents international law. The UN General Assembly voted to enforce the ruling of the International Court of Justice. Of course, then Trump intervened to block everything. He created... It's not even absurd. It's a profoundly cynical board of peace, which has nothing to do with peace. It has nothing to do with a board of anything, and it has no money in it. It's just a diversion yet again from the rights of the Palestinian people.
But I don't know exactly what Israel said last week, but Israel's on a murder spree. And the UN says, "You're on a murder spree." And so Israel lashes back by saying, you know, "This is a hate-filled institution," and all the rest. Somehow it's tragic, but Israel lost the complete ability to look inward at what it's doing. It's a really, really tragic situation. Of course, mostly tragic for the Palestinian people and the Lebanese people, but also tragic for the people of Israel.
One last topic, if I might. Is President Putin, I'm obviously diverting to Ukraine, morally and legally free in your view to attack munitions plants in the EU that are supplying weapons to Ukraine that are being used to kill Russians? The war in Ukraine could easily turn into a European war.
>> Yes. It would be a disaster. And the Europeans are so bereft of common sense right now, for a number of reasons, but mainly they have turned their politics and rhetoric over to the most Russophobic states of the European Union. The foreign policy spokesman of the European Union is Estonian, and she's absolutely hate-filled with Russia. And their defense commissioner is also from the Baltic states, Lithuania, I'm if I remember correctly, and their economics commissioner also from the Baltic states. So you have a complete Russian hatred, and that is leading the Europeans to reckless escalation. They're openly assisting attacks deep in Russia. They're chortling about these attacks. When a girls' school was recently hit, and just like in Iran, same circumstance, that many schoolgirls were killed by this Ukrainian drone strike, the Europeans couldn't breathe one word of human decency.
And so what's happening is a dramatic escalation of the hate language in Europe and the actual attacks inside Russia, including attacks on Moscow and other attacks on civilians and so forth. And I wrote a letter because of this to Chancellor Merz, published an open letter in the Berliner Zeitung last week, saying, "Mr. Chancellor, you are absolutely key right now to prevent a European war. That's your job. Actually, you are Chancellor of Germany. Germany cheated on the agreement that it had reached with the Soviet Union and Russia about NATO. Cheated. Germany cheated on the Minsk agreement that could have ended this conflict back in 2015. You have a responsibility to stop this slide into a European..."