This being the unofficial Jeffrey Sachs Fan Club, first up is another interview of Jeffrey Sachs, with the Kaliningrad topic about 3/4 of the way through, then my comment, then some backgrounders on Kaliningrad. Also, the smelly meeting of NATO in "Kyiv."
JUDGE- Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, October 5th, 2026. Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins us now. Professor Sachs, thank you very much for accommodating my schedule. Does President Trump appear to you to be enthralled by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?
SACHS- Well, President Trump appears to me to be, inconsequent, a bit delusional, sometimes, enthralled with Netanyahu, sometimes yelling at him, but basically, unfortunately, a bit incoherent, I think, is the main the main situation we face, which is we don't have a coherent US foreign policy or I might add a coherent US domestic policy. We are just in improvisation-land on almost everything.
JUDGE- Does it appear that Trump and Netanyahu are preparing a ramp up in the war in Iran for after November 3rd, the midterm elections here in the US?
SACHS- I think a renewed war is the most likely scenario. I don't think it has much to do with Netanyahu. Actually, in this case, we have a very basic issue here.
It's really very fundamental. The United States under Trump launched a war that was illegal, unnecessary, reckless and both tactically and strategically a failure. The war was launched on February 28th with the very explicit idea that the US Trump would murder most of the leadership of Iran and then Trump, as he himself explained, would declare the next government of Iran.
It was based on an analogy with Venezuela where the United States government kidnapped the president of Venezuela and through some kind of deal with the now acting president, whether it was bribery or threats or cajoling or some other kind of deal, would essentially run the show after the kidnapping of President Maduro and Trump in an extraordinarily naive way thought that the same thing would happen with Iran. The differences were everywhere to be seen. But Trump, not being very bright or very consequential, didn't see any of it. He explained the whole case of the war and it all fell apart within the first 48 hours.
Now having said that, Trump has a another deep failing, which is a US failing more generally, but also for Trump a very personal thing, which is the United States can never admit a mistake can never show any kind of limit to its power. This is a belief that the United States always has to be seen as all powerful and in Trump's mind maybe he believes that, but he's also a showman and a con man, but the point is he can't agree to anything structurally where somebody says oh, that shows the US power is limited, he probably tried to do that with Iran to sign an agreement, which we did, but then he reneged on it immediately when it was criticized by the media and by others in Washington as showing weakness. So, this is a second reason. Trump doesn't know how to cut his losses. He likes to squash his opponents, but in this case, he can't. So this is really the structural issue. I've given him good advice on your show every week which is just go home and declare victory.
Don't reach a negotiated agreement because yes, that would display the fact, the reality that America's not all powerful. It would highlight the fact that yes, this was a blunder of the first order. It was also an enormously reckless, illegal and immoral action as well. It led even on the very first day to the mass murder of 150 school girls in Minab, Iran, because of the not-so-artificial intelligence of the Palantir AI system which targeted a girl's school and killed 150 girls, which by the way the United States has never acknowledged or apologized for, which is part of this syndrome that I'm saying, which is the United States is incapable, incapable politically, of just living with other countries and acknowledging the limits of power. Given all of this, my view is that we will have continued war in some sense because Trump seems not to be intelligent enough just to leave.
He could care less, as he has been explicit about the American public's views of all of this. He said he could care less about the elections. He rules as a tyrant in the classical meaning, which is he rules as one person rule. He's told us that the only thing that limits his power is his own morality, whatever that means, and his own will. But not law, not the Constitution, not international law. And since he needs psychologically and politically to project unlimited power to show that the world is terrorized at Trump's feet, I think he can't reach an actual negotiated agreement with Iran because they're not quivering. They're not terrified, are not going to sell away their country. Just one more point to add, Judge, which is that the US is literally trying to starve Iranians to death and to kill them with the quarantine of medicines and other emergency needs. So, we have two kinds of war underway, what is euphemistically called kinetic action, which means you murder people with the missiles and drones and bombs, and we have economic warfare underway which is euphemistically called "statecraft," believe it or not, that's the term that is used. Both are trying to kill Iranians and to terrorize Iranians into submission. Neither is likely to work.
Both are cruel, illegal, and display every day the limits of American power. But Trump is likely to resume kinetic action. That is outright war at an increased scale sometime very soon. Whether it awaits the US elections or not probably is not a decisive factor. And when Trump says wait till after the elections, usually he's lying. It means it's something coming around the corner just in the next days. So I don't think we can tell the timing of any of this.
But my view has been from the beginning there will not be a negotiated agreement because the US is what's called negotiation-incapable because a negotiated agreement means limits on both parties to an agreement and for this image issue of the United States, it's very important to try to depict a country of unlimited power.
JUDGE- Here's someone who agrees entirely with you. Professor Timothy Snyder, Emeritus at Yale, now at the University of Toronto. Chris cut number six.
SNYDER (in video)- The term that I came up with when I was trying to capture all this is superpower suicide. I just can't see an example of a country, a major country losing so much power so quickly as the United States under Trump. And that has the alliances are part of it. We've encouraged our enemies and we've made our allies not trust us. But there are other parts of it as well, like that we've shown that we are incompetent with the basic with the basic instruments of state power. We're incompetent with trade and we're also incompetent with war. We've managed to decisively lose a war to a middle power in a matter of 3 days or 4 days or 5 days or six on the outside. We may not realize that because we're trapped in an American nationalist media bubble, but the rest of the world realizes that we lost a war to, we lost a laughably conceived and ridiculously badly executed war, to a middle power in a matter of days.
JUDGE- Incompetent with state power, incompetent with trade, incompetent with war. Let's go to trade, your other field of expertise. How has Trump diminished the United States of America in the area of trade?
SACHS- Well, Trump went into a trade war against the rest of the world on an absurdly illiterate basis, meaning without the slightest conception of the real economics involved. Trump and maybe some of his advisers who are really economically deliberate, had the idea that the US trade deficit with another country reflects the fact that somehow that other country is cheating the United States. What it reflects is something quite different, which is the United States overspends our national income by quite a wide margin because we run a budget deficit of nearly 7% of our gross domestic product. So we have what are called the twin deficits. We have a huge budget deficit. That's like a credit card for the nation.
We give tax cuts that are unaffordable. We give them to the richest people, and we spend government money on wars that we don't have, we borrow on this national credit card which has driven up the debt to 130% of gross domestic product in total about $40 trillion and then Trump blames the excess spending on somehow the perfidiousness of other countries. It's really weird. I made the analogy last year. It's as if you, your credit card and you, run around to all the stores in your neighborhood buying much more than you have the income to buy, And when your debt increases, it turns out you've run a trade deficit with all of those stores. And you say, "Look at how unfair all those merchants are. They've tricked me." That's essentially Trump's pretty limited mentality on this. Now, this has had no effect on anything good.
Trump promised again, with no understanding of the issues, that he would bring back jobs to American manufacturing and of course nothing of the sort has happened whatsoever, and nothing will happen with the completely haphazard strategy that Trump has. So all of this has also absolutely made the rest of the world understand the US is completely unreliable. It doesn't follow rules because Trump claimed powers that he does not have. He claimed them again after the Supreme Court knocked down the first claim. He claimed new powers that he doesn't have. But he also violated all of the terms of international trade rules under the World Trade Organization, which I have to add, the United States was the main country to set up because we wanted all countries to play by the rules. Once upon a time, Trump wants to play by nobody's rules except his own. So trade is a complete debacle. It solves nothing. It has worsened America's economic position and incidentally, just to add on the future of technology whether it's low-cost solar power, low-cost wind turbines, whether it's electric vehicles, battery supply chains, hydrogen in industry, Trump is so incoherent he's basically closed all of that green tech or green stack down, and left it to China. Okay, China's providing all of that now and it will be a booming market for decades to come. In fact, because those are technologies the world needs. And as part of Trump's strategy, he said, "No, we're going to double down on dirty energy and on internal combustion engine vehicles." So Trump's a man of the past as well as an economic illiterate.
JUDGE- Well, how, how dangerous is this mentality for freedom and security in the west?
SACHS- Well, there is no security right now because wars are raging. Absolutely irresponsible wars. The war in Ukraine continues to rage even though Trump campaigned on the promise that he would end it in 24 hours. The reason he couldn't end it is again, there's a straightforward way to end the Ukraine war. Very straightforward. I've been spelling it out for years and I recently wrote to senior officials in Europe about this. NATO has to abide by a promise that it gave 36 years ago very explicitly that NATO will not expand eastward. Well, we cheated, cheated, cheated, cheated, cheated. But Russia said, "Don't come to our border." So NATO has to say it's not going to Ukraine. That's all it has to say. Ukraine will be neutral. We will not settle remaining territorial disputes by force, but by diplomacy. There will be an armistice line. These are basic points that would end this war. But again, even though I think actually, surprisingly, Trump had some instincts in this direction actually, at the beginning, and said certain things to the Russians like, yeah, NATO enlargement, not a great idea.
But Trump cannot say these things publicly. Maybe he doesn't understand them well enough to explain them to the American people. That's what a good president does is he takes his nation along with him in a shared concept through explanation, through documentation, through evidence, not through Truth Social posts that are more bizarre than anything else. But Trump doesn't do that. The second point though, is to end the war in Ukraine, it requires the United States and Europe to say very clearly NATO will not expand to Ukraine. But to say that is to acknowledge a limit on the United States. Now what kind of limit? I'm told by European diplomats that I met last week at the General Assembly, oh, but we have an open door policy. NATO can go anywhere that a qualifying country wants. And I said, "Oh, do we have an open door policy in the Western Hemisphere that if Mexico wants to host a Chinese military base, we say in Washington, "Oh, that's an open door. Sure, they can do that." Of course, we don't say that. For 203 years, we've said exactly the opposite.
We've said to outside powers, stay out of the Americas. And by the way, not just in our neighborhood, but anywhere in the Americas. It's called the Monroe Doctrine. Donald Trump knows about it full well. What he doesn't seem to understand is something called the Golden Rule. That you do to others what you would have them do to you, and you don't do to others what you would not have them do to you. Jesus put it very, very nicely. Thank you, in the Gospels.
But Trump doesn't seem to understand this and he's unable to annunciate publicly the thing that would stop the war in Ukraine, which is the US has limits. It cannot put a military base in Ukraine for the same reason Russia cannot put a military base in Mexico or in Venezuela or in Cuba or in Canada without incurring the wrath of the United States.
JUDGE- Do you think when Trump threatened to annihilate the Islamic Republic of Iran, he was talking about nuclear weapons in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki vein?
SACHS- I don't know if Trump knows what he's talking about most of the time. His statement certainly left that idea in the air. What Trump really means about anything is very hard to fathom, and I'm not sure that he really knows. But what I do know unequivocally is that around the world, the president of the United States was heard at the UN General Assembly, at the institution created by the United States by Franklin Roosevelt in 1945 to end the scourge of war, at the podium in front of all the world leaders declaring that he's considering annihilating a country of around a 100 million people, that was heard everywhere. That hearing will never be unheard again. This was a disgrace to the United States of America. And a very painful one and a very costly one that just does not get unheard. It was no joke. It was no quip. It was grotesque and every place in the world heard it.
JUDGE- Last subject matter, Kaliningrad. Yes. Why are some of the European leaders threatening or giving the impression that they're threatening this Russian exclave? This part of Russia that's not, there you see it on the map, surrounded by NATO but not contiguous to the Russian mainland. Why the threat, just provocation?
SACHS- Yes. To show the map. We can help people to understand this. Before the end of 1991, Lithuania, Belarus and the countries to the north, the Latvia and Estonia, the Baltic states were all part of the Soviet Union. So, Kaliningrad was contiguous inside the Soviet Union. With the end of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the Baltic States and Belarus became independent countries. And so Kaliningrad, which was part of the Russian Federation after World War II, it was East Prussia under Hitler. After the Soviet Union bore the brunt of defeating Hitler, it became part of the Soviet Union and it was contiguous within the Soviet Union. Now it's not contiguous with Russia because the dissolution of the Soviet Union left it as an exclave.
Why anybody would threaten Russia at all in its territorial integrity is beyond me. Anyone who knows the history of Ukraine and says, "Well, Professor Sachs, you, Russia did exactly that to Ukraine," doesn't understand that for 36 years, or I should say 36 years ago, the United States and Germany in the context of German reunification told the Russian leadership in no uncertain terms and no ambiguity and the Soviet leadership in no uncertain terms and no ambiguity, that NATO would not move eastward and threaten Russia's security. We cheated. We lied. We helped to bring in a pro-NATO government through a coup in February 2014.
The Russians have been making the same point for 36 years. Do not threaten us. We don't want to threaten you. Which is exactly what President Putin said last week in a widely reported statement but not reported properly. The statement was, we do not want to threaten Europe but Russia has security interests, and that is true. All countries have security interests. And it was the United States and Germany that cheated on that core topic. And our top diplomats knew all along that the cheating by the United States to break the commitment of no NATO enlargement would be terrible trouble. But the ones that cheated thought the US is so powerful, so invincible, so irresistible that it could cheat and get away with it. They did not expect this war. Actually, just like Trump did not expect an ongoing war with Iran.
They exaggerated American power vastly. They didn't listen to the Russians. And now until today, these Europeans, and I helped many of these countries over the years, many of them, Estonia and Poland and many countries in the region including Ukraine, they are not thinking straight and they're going to provoke a disaster unless they understand the real history of this conflict and back off so that Russia can have its security and these countries can have their security. But if they provoke, this will be a bloody disaster.
JUDGE- I'm going to play two clips for you. One is General Christopher Donahue, then the head of CENTCOM, this is a year ago about Kaliningrad, and one is President Putin two days ago on Kaliningrad. So Chris, back to back cut number seven, and then cut number one.
GEN. DONAHUE (in video)- "If you look at Kaliningrad at it's, you know, you can argue back and forth, but it's about 47 miles wide, surrounded by NATO on all sides. There's absolutely no reason why that A2AB bubble to deter Russia, we cannot take that down from the ground in a time frame that is unheard of and faster than we've ever been able to do. We've already planned that. We've already developed it."
Pres. PUTIN (in video)- "If it comes to a direct attack on the Russian Federation, specifically targeting Kaliningrad or perhaps other territories, then the question of the Russian Federation using all the weaponry at its disposal will inevitably and immediately appear on the agenda."
SACHS- Are is are human beings suicidal? This is really the issue,
JUDGE- Right?
SACHS- Do we not understand? Don't have a nuclear war. How complicated is that really? Really, how complicated is that?
In in my view, it's very straightforward. Russia should not trespass American red lines and we should not trespass Russian red lines. This is so straightforward. I want this world to survive for my children and grandchildren. I don't want it to be blown up over Kaliningrad. And this blustering and bolstering and war planning and game planning is grotesque. It's much more important that we just understand all sides need security and we should respect the security interests of other powers, especially other nuclear powers, just as we expect them to respect our security as well. It's mutual. It's the Golden Rule. It's the way to survive on this planet. JUDGE- Professor Sachs, thank you very much. I know you're on the other side of the world. Thank you for your time. Safe travels, my dear friend. We'll look forward to seeing you next week.
SACHS- See you next week. Thanks a lot. Sure.
JUDGE- Thank you. What a great man.
§Has the U.S. been defeated in Iran? Yes and no. It has lost yet another battle, but the evil of the empire operates at many levels of depth, all around the world. One defeat in one area has no effect on the beast as a whole. Mentioned in the Sachs interview is CENTCOM, one of many U.S. "Military Commands" which rule their area of the world. They actually send their representatives to talk with the vassal nations in their Command area. In the included video above, Gen. Donahue was describing how this Empire had already planned out how they would take out Kaliningrad: "We've already planned that. We've already developed it." They have such plans for every part of every nation all around the world. Their "Targets" database has images of every built structure all around the world from satellite imagery, probably including your house, with a description of its threat value. BTW, the school in Minab, Iran, was already identified as a school in this military database in 2016, but Hegseth removed all target restrictions. NATO's threats against Kaliningrad are mentioned in the first few minutes of Pascal Lottaz's interview of Stas Krapivnik: NATO Threatens Kaliningrad: Worst Mistake Yet | Stas Krapivnik | Neutrality Studies | Oct 5, 2026, telling about the Brits actually putting on a TV show with real politicians and simulated an attack on Kaliningrad. Really stupid!
The military reps of ALL NATO countries just went to a big meeting in "Kyiv" - as if this was legitimate expense for their home country, flying to Poland then the train to "Kyiv" to prove to the world that Ukraine is NATO property. This is EXACTLY the wrong action for ending this war, as Prof. Sachs has repeatedly said.
The odor from the NATO Military Committee meeting in "Kyiv" demonstrates the core issue in this war - Ukraine alignment with NATO (and the EU Elites). As well, it dispels any notion of this being merely Russia beating up on poor little Ukraine. It is 100% a proxy war. Like Iran, Ukraine is one of the "pivot states" in Brzezinski's doctrine, still in play to this day. A backgrounder on Kaliningrad is in this 15-minute video on history of Kaliningrad:
"Why is there a piece of Russia sitting between Poland and Lithuania, completely separated from the rest of the country?
This is Kaliningrad, one of the strangest and most strategically important territories in Europe.
But for most of its history, it was not Russian at all. It was Königsberg, a German city with roots stretching back to the Teutonic Order, Prussia, and the rise of modern Germany.
In this documentary, we follow the full story of how Königsberg became Kaliningrad, from its medieval origins to the destruction of the Second World War, the Potsdam settlement, Soviet rule, and the collapse of the USSR. We also look at why Kaliningrad matters so much today.
The region sits between NATO members Poland and Lithuania, hosts important Russian air, missile and naval infrastructure, and lies beside the Suwalki Gap, one of the most closely watched pieces of geography in the Baltic region. Russia has recently warned NATO against attempts to isolate Kaliningrad, while NATO says its posture is defensive and has rejected Moscow's nuclear rhetoric. -Reuters
This is the story of a city that stayed in the same place while the political world around it changed again and again.
Topics covered: Königsberg, Teutonic Order, Prussia, East Prussia, World War II, Potsdam Conference, Soviet Union, Kaliningrad, NATO expansion, Suwalki Gap, Baltic Sea, Russia-NATO tensions."
On October 1, Scott Ritter released a 2-minute video from his visit to the port of Baltik: Scott Ritter visits Baltik, the seaport of Kaliningrad, home to Russia's Baltic Fleet:
"I paid a visit to the port city of Baltik, the western-most populated center of Russia that serves as the heart of the Russian military contingent in the Kaliningrad Okrug. Contrary to European and NATO claims that Russia is preparing for war, what I witnessed was a military community going about business as usual on a peaceful September afternoon. I know what a military base preparing for conflict looks like; this was not it."
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