Blackmail, Bribes and Fear: Netanyahu Claims He Controls Trump and America!

A growing global bloc is uniting against America: our future is in peril!

On 2 October 2025, Tucker Carlson interviewed Professor Jeffrey Sachs.

TUCKER: "A lot of the conversation is about Israel. Israel a tiny country in the Middle East not critical to our national security by the way but the conversation the bandwidth is consumed by questions of Israel. So wherever you stand on Israel, whether you're on one of the two sides just described or neither one of them, you know in your gut that this is bad.

If a country like ours, supposedly the most powerful in the world, is devoting all of its time internally to conversations about Israel, it's probably not going in a good direction. There's probably a lot being neglected in favor of this very specific boutique conversation about this tiny little country. It's just not good for anybody, including Israel, by the way. 

So, what's the antidote to this? How do you fix it? Here are four things you can do to make the conversation about Israel and the relationship with Israel a lot healthier than it currently is...

Israel, this is not an insult, merely an observation, by contrast, is a tiny and inherently insignificant country, at least geopolitically, in that it has only 9 million people and no natural resources, no meaningful natural resources. So, it is insignificant. It is also physically tiny. It's about the size of New Jersey, famously, but it has a much smaller GDP than New Jersey. It is a much smaller economy than the state of New Jersey. It's an economy about the size of the state of Arizona and almost half the economy of the state of Massachusetts or Illinois... It's tiny. It's got the population of Burundi. It's got a smaller population than Belgium.

Like, what is this anyway? And yet, despite its objective insignificance, it is the focus of the conversation, but it's also the focus of the spending. So, right now, as we speak tonight, there are two THAAD missile batteries in Israel. That's one quarter of the world's total supply of THAD missile batteries. The THA missile battery is an American made, very high tech missile battery that takes incoming missiles out of the sky. And one quarter of the world's entire supply of these is in Israel right now manned by US troops by Americans in uniform or not. They are American military personnel and they are manning these batteries to protect Israel. 

And that shouldn't surprise you because since October 7th, 2023, which is a little less than two years ago, the United States has spent at minimum $30 billion defending Israel. Huge.

And for some perspective, the entire Israeli military budget before October 7th was about 25 billion. So the United States has put at least 30 billion into defending Israel in less than 2 years. 

Over the course of its existence, a little less than 80 years, the United States has put 300 billion at least, those are just the on books numbers into supporting Israel. 300 billion. Israel is by far, no one comes close, the largest recipient of US aid over time and currently.

So, anyone who says, "Oh, it's just a drop in the bucket. It's totally insignificant," is lying or doesn't know the numbers. By the way, number two is Egypt. So, why are we spending so much money on Egypt? Well, we're doing it at the request of Israel. So, you could probably add that to the tally. 

It's not an attack. It's merely perspective. We are spending our time, our money, and we're taking enormous risks on behalf of a country that geopolitically is not significant at all. The interesting thing is most Americans have no idea that this is true. They don't know how disproportionate our attention to Israel and our spending on Israel is relative to the rest of the world.

And if you want some sense of how disproportionate India and China combined, neither of which is a strong ally at the moment combined represent more than a third of the entire world's population. Both our rivals economically, both our rivals militarily, at least potentially. 

And our relationship with them has gotten worse or has at the very least languished because of our relationship with Israel, because of the bandwidth consumed by tending to it and also because of some of the inevitable conflicts that have arisen because of our support for Israel, which is engaged in an extremely controversial which is to say hated war in Gaza, which is not even really a war, it's a massive displacement of people and killing on a grand scale of unarmed people, of unarmed combatants, of civilians, of women and children. 

And the world sees this and the world rejects it and the world hates it. And so Israel's really last remaining ally of size other than the UK is the United States."

JEFFREY: "The Jews in in the United States completely divided on this issue, as our non-Jews. This is not about Jews. This is about a state and what it's doing right now. Its history and American interest...

Netanyahu is absolutely intent and he has been intent for nearly 30 years. It's nearly 30 years since he first became prime minister in 1996 in dragging the United States into a prolonged war with Iran. And he dragged the United States and it's a shame that the United States government went along with it. But he dragged the United States into a war with Iran just recently and it's extremely dangerous and of course he wants to do it again.

It's been part of Netanyahu's policy to pull the United States into repeated wars. This is why this whole relationship is so completely dysfunctional. Netanyahu, back in 1996, with American political advisers actually came up with a document called 'Clean Break.' 'Clean Break' is a very strange but very clear statement of what has trapped the United States for nearly 30 years.

'Clean Break' says, 'Well, Israel's never going to compromise with its Palestinian Arab population in its midst and in the Palestinian lands. It's going to control all of those lands and it's going to control or expel or kill or ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population and that's going to create unrest and it's going to create a militant reaction and then what 'Clean Break' says is yes that's going to happen and we will go to war against any other country in the region that supports opposition to greater Israel, that is Israel's control over all of Palestine. 

And there's just one footnote to that. When Netanyahu said we will go to war, what he meant was the United States will go to war for us. So Netanyahu has been the great champion of pushing America into endless wars for the last three decades.

He was the big cheerleader of the Iraq war. People may remember that or they can refresh their memories. A devastatingly wrong war sold on completely phony pretenses that Netanyahu cheerled. And one can even go online and find his testimony to Congress in October 2002 about how wonderful this war is going to be and how it's going to lead to a breakout of freedom throughout the Middle East. He's full of it and he's been full of it for nearly 30 years. But he has had many wars in sight that he has actually dragged the United States into.

The war in Syria which goes on and started with Obama in 2011 ordering the or assigning the CIA the task to overthrow the Syrian government was again at Netanyahu's and Israel's behest. Absolutely extraordinary the ongoing wars in Lebanon, in Syria, in Iraq, the recent so-called 12-day war with Iran, which was a disgrace and a great danger. Even the wars in in East Africa, in Sudan, in Somalia, and in Libya were pushed by Netanyahu as needing to that we need to overthrow regimes that support opposition to Israel's control over the Palestinians. 

And in 2011, just to take another case, because Obama did double duty that year, he went to war with Syria in a completely weird way of assigning the CIA the overthrow, but he also launched a war against Libya to overthrow Moammar Gaddafi. This was the Obama Hillary Clinton teamwork to drag America into more wars. 

This has its roots in Netanyahu's doctrine which is we will control all of Palestine. This will lead to unrest. It will lead to militancy. It will lead to suffering of the Palestinian people. So what? But it will lead to challenges to Israel and we will confront those by overthrowing the governments that support the militancy against Israel's control over Palestine. And the US has played along until today.

And I have to say, even though we saw just that tape of President Trump saying that no, Israel will not annex the West Bank. First of all, don't hold your breath because we've not yet seen an American president for 30 years that has resisted Israel. And I am still fearful that Trump is the same because frankly what we have right now and Netanyahu said so. Israel is involved in seven wars right now. It's disgusting. 

They're all over the Middle East in war. They're in war in Gaza. They're in war in the West Bank. They're in war in Lebanon. They're in war with Syria. They're in war with Iraq. They're in war with Iran. They're at war with Yemen. And so far, the United States has funded, armed, and diplomatically supported all of this. And the United States has absolutely not. And in this government, and it's true of the previous ones as well, not said a word about the state of Palestine, which is absolutely key to peace.

There needs to be a state for the Palestinian people alongside a state for the Israelis. This is international law. It's absolutely obvious to almost every country in the whole world. But the United States listens to Netanyahu. And by United States, I don't mean the people. Because just as you said, the American people are against all of this. 

By the way, by large majorities, this is not being driven by American public opinion. This is our American political class telling Americans what to believe, not what Americans actually believe. Americans want the United States to recognize the state of Palestine. The United States public opposes what Israel is doing by large majorities. This is the political class. 

But unfortunately, it includes the White House and it includes the Congress and it hasn't stopped yet. And the situation in the Middle East is explosive and Netanyahu is working overtime to pull us into yet another war."

TUCKER: Can may I ask you, you said a moment ago that no American president has ever constrained Israel in a meaningful way... Why do you think that is? Why is a country of 9 million people able to dictate terms to a country of 350 million people?"

JEFFREY: "Well, first of all, there's no legitimate reason for that. In other words, there's no intrinsic US interest in any way, whether it's military or security or economic for this to be the case. There's no moral reason for this to be the case. In other words, one could support Israel without supporting Israel's reckless extremism and militarism and all its wars. And so there's no reason for the United States government to have given a blank check, actually handed our military and our intelligence over to Israel to tell us what to do. There's no legitimate reason for this. 

The question why this is the case is, of course, I think to all of us, even no matter how much on the inside we are or how many decades we've watched this, a bit of a mystery. Yes.

And because I've seen this close up for more than 50 years and if you ask me am I really sure why Netanyahu who is a absolutely disgusting warmonger who has dragged us into terrible wars who is committing massive war crimes. why he gets 57 standing ovations in the US Congress. 

If you ask me in my heart, do I really understand that? Is it the AIPAC lobby, the Israel lobby? Well, partly is it blackmail by Israel? because there's no doubt a lot of credible claims of Epstein and more about blackmail. Is it that, is it direct bribes? Is it fear of American politicians? Is it the mainstream media which for a lot of reasons owned by a lot of billionaires that tend to be rather arted Zionists? Is it the large Christian Zionist vote base which is also a real thing? To tell you the truth, none of it really adds up..."

TUCKER: "I agree in full."

JEFFREY: "... because this is not in America's interest. It's not in America's interest to be isolated in the world together with a murderous rogue state, which is sad to say what the Israeli government has become. It is the most lawless state in the whole world right now. It's committing massive war crimes. It is, as Netanyahu said, at war in seven fronts.

If you're at war in seven fronts, that's pretty weird. That shows you don't have diplomacy. You have war as a policy. And of course, Netanyahu does have war as a policy. 

And you know, Tucker, I am at the UN a lot, so I am in the UN Security Council a lot. Listening or participating in UN sessions and the UN, the Israeli politicians come and they yell at the whole rest of the world and they yell at them in the most vulgar, stupid prayer and absolutely imbalanced an irrational way and then the US representative says 'yes, yes, yes, we, we are with Israel,' so, if you ask me why this is fundamentally first, it's disgusting: second it is no rational basis, and third: if it is the money, the lobbying, the mass media propaganda, the really strange beliefs of some people.

Whatever it is, even all of that, for my mind, doesn't add up, because a President of the United States should be able to figure this out a little bit better. That this is absolutely not in America's interest. And we do not have a military that is to be handed out to another country to do whatever reckless things that country is doing. And, right now, Israel is not only doing reckless things, it is committing a genocide. And that is not my opinion. That is the opinion pervasively of both scholars and specialists in this matter and in Israeli human rights organizations in countless observers inside Israel and observers all over the world.

So, the US is actually, and I'm sorry to say it, complicit in genocide right now. A president should be able to figure this out. And they don't. And so, when you ask me this question, I can give you a list of answers, but somehow it doesn't add up for me because this is not so hard to figure out that we are on a terribly wrong track."