It is becoming increasingly difficult to define American foreign policy according to established, well-respected, and recognised international standards. American foreign policy has become not only unpredictable, but also unacceptable, incomprehensible, or uninterpretable based on the political and strategic determinants that govern relations between States.
On this topic, Judge Andrew Napolitano hosted on his podcast Judging Freedom on 29 July American economist and public policy analyst, Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs. Their talk was titled “How Depraved is US Foreign Policy?” An authority on the matter, Professor Sachs is a regular on Judge Napolitano’s podcast. I am printing excerpts from this interview.
Judge Napolitano: Let’s begin with the President yesterday sitting next to Sir Keir Starmer, threatening President Putin if the war in Ukraine isn’t over in 10 to 12 days, the President is going to impose secondary tariffs on Russia. What kind of diplomacy is that?
“Well, a failure. Nothing is going to work of that sort. The President can’t just say the war ends in 10 days. The biggest most precise adjective for American foreign policy is ‘delusional’, because American foreign policy under Trump, like under Biden and under previous US Presidents, is based on an extraordinary arrogance of power. The arrogance to say the war ends in 10 days on my terms, or the Middle East ends on my terms, or the war with Iran ends on my terms, or the conflict with China ends on my terms. This is the pattern; this is Trump’s pattern, but it goes beyond Trump. Trump makes it very plain and very crude, but this is basically the idea that diplomacy doesn’t matter.”
Is there any significance to the statement by French President Macron that France will soon recognise a Palestinian State, and a similar though in a less certain statement by Prime Minister Starmer that Britain will recognise a Palestinian State if the starvation and the war are not abated by September?
“I think it is actually quite significant that there be the membership of Palestine as the 194th UN member State to tell this murderous genocide in Israel, no, you are not going to have permanent control for murder, genocide, ethnic expulsion, apartheid, or whatever you plan over the Palestinian people. So I do think that it is significant, that even these last complicit holdouts in the West other than the United States are at least responding to the extraordinary situation that we have of a genocide before our eyes taking place; the US will be the last to respond… What is happening is so gross, so extreme, so clear, so vulgar, so violent that even the UK and France, if I could put it that way, are having to acknowledge it… There are many reasons why the United States is absolutely blind to its complicity at the political level, but the American people are completely on to it. The most recent survey shows that 60 per cent or more of Americans support the Palestinians in this conflict, 30 per cent are dropping like a stone the Israelis. In other words, American policy runs against American public opinion by a very wide margin. But that’s not surprising; we do not have democratic institutions functioning in the United States. We have rule by a small clique, by essentially CIA Mossad operation that’s been going on for quite a while. The politicians are in line for reasons that again we can surmise.”
Judge Napolitano seemed hopeless when he said: We don’t have a popular government; the people that run the government are ideologically committed and have such power behind the scenes like CIA, MI6 and Mossad. He then recalled: It’s almost hopeless when Prime Minister Netanyahu received an absurd number of 56 standing ovations in 58 minutes.
“This is an indictment of the American political class in Washington. It is the Trump administration, the Biden administration, it was the Obama administration. This goes back a long time; it is our deep State… People should understand we have democracy in form, but we don’t have democracy in spirit or in the sense of deliberation and public opinion mattering in the United States… We have institutions that remain; we have Congress, we have the Supreme Court. But it doesn’t really add up to democracy anymore. The President doesn’t explain anything in speeches. Congress doesn’t hold hearings and have deliberations. We don’t have debates in Congress. The Supreme Court itself basically makes the court system useless in the face of one person rule… So, will democracy survive? We don’t have democracy other than in the most formulistic sense, and between elections; public opinion counts for nothing.”
Does the Ukraine Russia conflict end before Christmas of 2025?
“The war could end quickly if the US had a foreign policy that was clear, transparent, honest, and that was conveyed publicly. Clearly, the war in Ukraine was provoked by the United States first and foremost by a decision taken around 1994, made very visible in 2008 and pursued ever since then to expand NATO and US military bases and US weapon systems to Ukraine… The underlying cause of the war is the coup in which the United States actively supported extremist paramilitaries to overthrow a legitimate government that wanted neutrality. The underlying cause of the war was the US rejection of the Minsk 2 agreement which could have ended the conflict by giving autonomy to the eastern Ukraine so that it would have stayed within Ukraine. The underlying cause of the war was the US rejection of diplomatic negotiations with Russia at the end of 2021. And of course, when Blinken told his counterpart, Foreign Minister Lavrov in January 2022 that the US reserves the right to put in missile systems into Ukraine, that it was not going to self-limit itself. If we had a President that had the aptitude and the interest and the capacity to explain these basic facts, we would have peace on terms that make sense for Ukraine, for Russia, for Europe and the United States. But we don’t hear any of this. We hear demands for a ceasefire. For what? On what terms? On what basis? Well, this isn’t going to work, and our foreign policy doesn’t exist. Basically, making demands on Truth Social or in a statement like this, is not a foreign policy. It’s a route to disaster. You’d think that we could have some coherence in foreign policy. You’d think that our leaders could behave better than children. They behave worse than children. But no, we don’t have any of that right now. This is why the world is so dangerous. This isn’t the public demanding war; this is a few people playing games and the rest of us watching in stunned worry and alarm and amazement at how utterly childish, duplicitous and ineffective all of this is.”
Watani International
15 August 2025
