On 4 July, the US celebrated its Independence Day, commemorating, as in every year, the great national legacy established by its Founding Fathers. On 4 July 1776, thirteen states on the American East Coast formed an alliance that initiated the United States of America. Historical remembrance aside, this year’s 4th of July celebration could not distract the world from today’s reality. Over the last three decades, the world has disturbingly witnessed the decline of the US and the consequences of its prolonged global leadership and dominance as the sole world superpower since the end of WWII in 1945. This decline, and the involvement of the US in igniting and inflaming global conflicts, are widely acknowledged by observers, scholars, and political analysts who monitor and track mounting global crises, the involvement of the US in such crises, and the impact of these crises on global peace.
“Why the US is in decline” was the topic of a recent episode of Judge Andrew Napolitano’s podcast Judging Freedom. On 14 July, Judge Napolitano hosted American economist and public policy analyst, Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs to discuss the issue. I today present excerpts of this interview.
Judge Napolitano: What do you believe was Trump’s purpose in bombing the mountains in Iran, and did he achieve it?
Professor Sachs: “The purpose supposedly was to stop the nuclear activities of Iran. No, he didn’t achieve it. I think all expert views concur that nothing much happened except Iran realising that it could not negotiate with the United States, and withdrawing from monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency. This was a debacle of the first order.”
And the International Atomic Energy Agency turned out to be an asset of Mossad, did it not?
“It played into Israel’s hands in a very stupid way. So, it played its role. What we’ve seen here is the CIA / Mossad operations operating through the international system and operating through the US military. Once again, all to no achieved purposes. That’s also standard operating procedure for the US military-industrial complex. We’ve been at this for decades, nothing comes of it except people making money in the military sector and increasing insecurity for the world.”
If the purpose of the bombing was to degrade Iran, or terrify Iran, or bring about regime change. It obviously had the opposite effect. How could Mossad and CIA have been so wrong in their guesstimate as to what this bombing would bring about?
“Which genius forecast of the CIA are you referring to in the last 30 years? The one about remaking Afghanistan as a democracy? The one of American soldiers being greeted with flowers in Iraq? The one about the pushover of Bashar al-Assad in 2011? The one about removing Moammar Gaddafi and leading to ‘new stability’ in Libya? These people are completely unaccountable. They have no knowledge of the world other than assassinations, coups, and military operations. The world does not settle down that way; the world becomes more dangerous and unstable. These ‘geniuses’ in quotation marks have done the most remarkable thing in the world; they have absolutely degraded the security of Americans from a position of basically complete security.”
What do you think President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu were discussing last week?
“They met in private three times while Netanyahu was in Washington. I don’t know specifically what they were talking about, but we once had the idea that there would be a ceasefire, a peace and a resolution of the unending wars in the Middle East. And that kind of talk is basically gone. That talk is also gone in the case of Ukraine. That talk is gone all over the world. Trump is basically proving to be absolutely incapable of solving any problem and he is proving to be the extension of the Biden administration because the Biden administration was nothing more than the military-industrial complex. We’re basically stuck with a militarised undemocratic system. Presidents come and go, but the system remains. It does anything Israel wants, to an extent it’s actually run by Israel, which is shocking… Whatever it is, we have a permanent State that does not respond to the public will, does not respond to American security, does not respond to the public interest, does not respond to budgetary realities.”
Judge Napolitano put on the show an excerpt of a 2017 interview given by Russian President Vladimir Putin to Le Figaro. Despite being said eight years ago, President Putin’s words still ring true as pointed out by Judge Napolitano. Professor Sachs quoted President Putin: “‘I’ve dealt with three presidents and they actually come in with ideas, but then those ideas disappear because the men in the dark suits and the briefcases’—that’s the CIA, the Pentagon, the Armed Services Committees and so forth, that’s the big donors— ‘they come in and they say: No, no, no, Mr President, you do it this way.’ Now, we’ve just witnessed this exactly happening with Donald Trump. And Donald Trump ran on a campaign of making peace. He was going to make peace here and there… But he certainly doesn’t have the guts to make peace. Because to make peace, you have to go against the CIA. You have to go against the military-industrial complex… We are run by the military-industrial complex. Trump is a sideshow. What Trump has done in recent weeks with Ukraine, the Middle East, China, Epstein tapes, with all of it is just fall into line as presidents are supposed to do. ‘MAGA’ turns out to be a campaign slogan. Of course, it’s nothing new; it’s a continuation of the deep State. And the deep State has led us to one war after another.”
How close are we to World War III?
“We may already be in it. The problem with WWIII is that there will be no historians alive afterwards to understand when it really started. But if we were in a conventional era with conventional weapons and there would be a world war and it would be devastating, but there would be a history afterward, maybe the historians would say WWIII started in 2014 or maybe 2019 or maybe 2022. Maybe we’re in it already… There’s no will in the political class to talk about peace. You don’t hear peace anywhere… We don’t have a serious policy of diplomacy of negotiation that gets to the core issues of why these conflicts exist.”
Watani International
1 August 2025
