Transcription
Uh, I was saying, uh, it was the most pathetic meeting imaginable. It even outdid Davos, I have to say. I haven't been to Davos in a long time, but Davos turned sickening. This was sickening so much I could not even watch any of these talks or speeches for more than a couple minutes.
And it's a group that is also really a little pathetic because the Munich Security Conference is not about the world. It's about a small part of the world right now. Uh, the US and Europe is 10% of the world population and, um, they don't understand anything about what's going on in the wider world. So it was a completely solipsistic meeting. We'll talk to ourselves as if we are the world. Everything that was said was either nonsensical or obnoxious or a combination of the two. Rubio's speech said outright, "Hey, Western domination is great and that's our purpose to keep Western domination." Well, good luck with that, little Marco, but sorry, this is absolutely obscene. That's the purpose of the Western world to keep Western domination. Come on.
So I have to say, you have to take it seriously because these people can do a lot of harm. But there wasn't one moment of smart ideas or analysis that I heard from the conference. Nobody on the margins, no one objecting, no one saying it should be done this way. It was only, "How should we go to war? Who should we fight? How evil is Putin? Evil. No, no, no. Very evil. No. Very, very, very evil." So, this is, uh, the level of discourse right now. If they didn't have 1,600 nuclear weapons in, in the case of the United States and some sprinkling of the, the rest, you just wouldn't even care to listen to this garbage. This is unfortunately the point.
By the way, Europe hasn't made sense for years. But this was an especially egregious meeting. I just got, by the way, Giannis, an email about signing up to listen to all the experts talk about the results of the Munich Security Conference. In other words, to pay for a list of experts on this speaker bureau payroll. And it's the most extreme right-wing people that you wouldn't even sit in a room with for the next five minutes, much less pay to hear them ramble on about what was a completely awful meeting to begin with. But this is the way that our solipsistic world is right now in Europe, in the United States. Why don't we talk to ourselves? Nonsense.
>> Yeah. Well, it's great to see you again, Jeff. Uh, thank you for joining us. You know, I think that most people who are watching us now have followed your narrative, your analysis, your incisive critique of both the, uh, traditional, uh, positions of the centrist Republicans as well as the Democrats. The way in which essentially they have railroaded Europe into, um, a new form of depravity, a new form of, uh, um, paralysis. But allow me, can, can I, because, you know, I've been reading you as, you know, and we have been discussing now for years and we've worked together. We've seen Europe, um, at its heart, uh, failing to even conceptualize what it needs to do in order to be sovereign.
>> Exactly. Uh, but if I may, and then I will let you go on and do your thing because...
>> Rant a little bit.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah, I'll rant a little bit to see.
>> No, no, you rant, but I'll rant. What? But anyway, let's try to figure out what's going on.
>> My is all about, you know, why is Europe so incapable of understanding what it would take to be sovereign? Uh, they, they now understand that they should be sovereign, but there's a collective action problem. They understand that, but they have no capacity of doing anything about it. So where is the root of this failure? That's my, uh, what my soliloquy will be about. Yeah.
Now, as a Greek who fought, fought, demonstrated in the streets of Athens in the 1970s against NATO and against the entry of the Europe into the European Union because we could see that the European Union was not really what it said on the tin. It was, uh, let's, let's not forget that to get into, into the European Union, which was presented as a union that offered the hope of a sovereign Europe, a Europe sovereign both from the Soviet Union but also from the United States, that that was really all a facade to get into Nate, into into the EU. You had to get first into NATO. Spain, Greece, uh, later North Macedonia. It goes a long way. So it was the EU was always tethered to the United States. That's not new. Okay. Uh, it was a prerequisite for joining the EU to go into NATO, ensuring American military hegemony in the European continent. That was standard practice under the Cold War, and you've done, and you, and John Mearsheimer, and others have explained this magnificently. The ruling classes, the elites of the United States and Europe, um, were aligned along two lines. There was a common need for a security zone, as you put it in a recent article, as opposed to an influence zone, uh, vis-à-vis the, the Soviet Union. Uh, and at the same time, that's one line. The second line, it was during Bretton Woods, the '50s and '60s, Europe was, Europe played a very significant role as a recycler of American surpluses while America had trade surpluses, and then after Bretton Woods, a recycler of America's deficits. This was important. These, so there was alignment. In 2008, uh, we have a shift of both these lines of alignment. From where I'm standing, the Americans, the American administration no longer feared Russia after they crashed it. And you have explained brilliantly in the past how the United States in the early 1990s chose to crash Russia. Uh, but they needed NATO expansion to extend American hegemony over Europe and Germany in particular. So they pushed Russia, um, you know, essentially pressurized it, um, poked the bear, as they say, through NATO expansion. Now, Germany doesn't fear Russia either in that period, but it, because it has become by the 1990s fully dependent on American trade deficits for its mercantilist business model. It goes along with NATO expansion, and this expansion shifts NATO eastwards. And now we have something really interesting. You know, everybody knows, you more than anyone, that we used to have a North-South divide in the European Union. With this expansion eastwards, we, we suddenly had an East-West divide because the Baltics, for instance, but also Poland to some extent, they, they realized as ruling elites that they could within the European Union punch above their weight by being close to the United States, close to the project of NATO, hyper-expansion. And thus they managed to achieve, you know, take Estonia, take Latvia, a lot more influence within Brussels by helping the United States cause friction with Russia and at the same time jeopardizing also, in the interests of several American administrations, the strength of the German-French axis. Now, from a Europe divided, I, in northwest, North-South, now we are also East-West. And when we have 2008 and 2009, and we have Wall Street collapsing, and then the Franco-German banks, um, going pear-shaped, and then we have the domino effect with the PIIGS, as the Irish and so on, um, the response by Europe, given that its business model was mercantilist and it depended on American trade deficits to sell Mercedes-Benz from Germany to the United States. We have hyper-austerity. We have debt breaks. We have bailouts, um, leading Europe to the huge slump. And at that point, remember 2013, 2014, the Obama, Nuland, um, administration, let's put it in terms of Eastern Europe, um, is keep pushing for NATO expansion to leverage American hegemony vis-à-vis Berlin and Paris. I remember, you know, your friend Jack Lew telling me in uncertain terms that Berlin must stop import-exporting deflation to the United States. This was, you know, back then when you and I first met. And this was a time with the Maidan coup that you have explained brilliantly again, um, something that Merkel realized it was not in Germany's interest, and the way in which the Minsk Accords were gutted against her, her, um, own agenda. So we, we, we, we have a situation where by the late 2010s, we have a Europe that is becoming more austerian, more stagnant. It loses, it misses every opportunity to consolidate, to create proper fiscal union and political union. And in 2019 comes in with a Green Deal that was, that never was, that never really existed. It was a figment of her imagination. That is not the engine of growth that is necessary. And the result now is that we have 25 years of negative net net investment, including in Germany. We have de-industrialization. The East-West chasm is deepening ever since the war, not the first one in 2014, but especially the second one in 2022, with an increase in energy prices. Effectively, the United States became the energy supplier, uh, from fracked natural gas and oil, natural gas mainly, of Europe. And our elites in Europe suddenly have no plan. Their last silver lining is to convert Volkswagen factories that no longer are capable of producing cars because of the lack of investment of those years that can compete with BYD, with even, um, American cars like Tesla. And they pass on these factories, these production lines to Rheinmetall to produce Leopard tanks in order to minimize the rate of industrialization. Uh, and that's how the peace project becomes a war union. That, that, that's my rant, uh, as to why is it that they are incapable of even having the conversation that they must have in order to even make imaginable the notion of European sovereignty.
Well, I think, uh, that's, uh, brilliant and correct. And let me just add a few, uh, few points around that. I think, um, we need to go back to, uh, uh, April 12, 1945, to to start. Um, that's the day that Franklin Roosevelt died.
>> Yep.
>> He actually had a different idea about the world. Uh, he was, uh, the only really great, great leader of the United States in the 20th century, and he had the idea that, um, Kennedy could have been, by the way, had they not murdered him in the CIA. But Roosevelt really was. And he had the idea that there could be global cooperation, and that he could get along with Joe Stalin, and he could get along with Chiang Kai-shek. But if Mao came to power, he would have gotten along with Mao too, because he was a person who thought that the world needed cooperation and peace. Well, when he died, uh, the new, and, uh, about to become US security state took over and explained to Mr. Truman, who was a nice man, completely not ready for that job, that we were in a struggle for survival with communism, and that this was the great, great challenge, and the United States embarked on a global hegemonic aspiration to defeat global communism and to run the world. And that was the policy rather than a cooperative approach. We're going to divide the world as long as it takes, in order to prevail in a struggle for survival. And, uh, in 1947, the CIA was created out of the OSS to carry forward that mission. And the CIA is our most important foreign policy agency in the US, and it has been since 1947 because it's completely unaccountable. It's secret. You can do a lot. You can have long-term plans. Failure doesn't matter. Uh, there's no accountability. And basically, the CIA led the aspiration for US global hegemony with the difficult point that there was a, first, a country with atomic bombs in 1949, and then thermonuclear weapons a few years later. So there was a real competitor from a military point of view. By the way, that did not stop many American leaders from saying we should have a first strike against the Soviet Union. Even in, even in the context of mass nuclear war, we had crazy people in charge. And that's a very important point to remember about the United States. This is barely a sane country, uh, much of the time. And we went on a mission in the United States, and the, the mission was global domination. At the time, that seemed to mean the US and, uh, Europe and Russia were the, the domain or the theater of interest. All the rest, China, India, Africa, impoverished, not to be thought about much. Perhaps you need some uranium from Africa or some other minerals, but otherwise nothing much to worry about. The, the world was the US, Europe, Soviet Union, and the struggle was over over that. And the US became, uh, in, in imperium, uh, and, uh, basically run by, uh, what Eisenhower told us, the military-industrial complex. And important, uh, that idea that there's a military-industrial complex. Okay, it's a P because that was first, uh, alerted 64 years ago in Eisenhower's farewell address. But I, to this moment, find it astounding that our lead general, he was the Supreme Allied Commander of World War II, is the one that told the American people, "Watch out. Watch what's really here." Because he knew, he knew that there was trouble. He could barely keep his control over a civilian government, even as the Supreme Allied Commander. He could barely keep control over his own government at that point. The CIA was already out of control. And he was trying, by the way, in the last year of his administration, to find some way out of the nuclear arms race with Khrushchev. And the CIA botched, I mean, either subverted it or botched it with the U-2 spy mission when Eisenhower said, "Don't do that. I'm going to a summit with Khrushchev." And Allen Dulles, who was one of the darkest figures of American history, said to Eisenhower, "Don't worry, Mr. President. If they ever would shoot down a U-2," which they can't, a spy plane, it's designed to disintegrate. So there'll be nothing left. Uh, the pilot could never survive. And if the pilot were by some strange fluke to survive, he's carrying a cyanide pill, and he would die. So the U-2 was shot down. Eisenhower came out and said, "Well, the Soviets said we shot down a spy plane." Eisenhower came out and said, "Uh, no, that was a weather plane from a weather station in Turkey that went off course." And then the, the Soviets produced Gary Powers alive. They produced the U-2 wreckage. They showed that Eisenhower had blatantly lied to the world. Okay, I say all of this because by 1961, the US government was out of control of civilian administration. We were already in imperium. We had already gone from the republican era of the Roman Republic to the imperial age. But on the surface, just like, by the way, in Rome in 27 BC, when Augustus just declared himself a princeps, we're still there. It looked to the United States like we still had our republican form of government. But we did not anymore. And when Kennedy, after mishap after mishap with the US invasion of Cuba 1961, and then almost nuclear Armageddon in October 1962 in the Cuban Missile Crisis, said, "I've got to get this under control." And said that the CIA should be ripped up in a thousand pieces. They killed him. Uh, they killed him in November 1963. And we now know, because it dribbles out over a 60-year period, oh, isn't that surprising, that the CIA head of counterintelligence was running Lee Harvey Oswald as an agent for years. They just didn't mention that to the American people for 60 years. So, this is what happened in the United States. We've not really had civilian control of, uh, our foreign policy side for decades.
Now, in 1989, the Soviet system peacefully came to an end because Gorbachev was the greatest statesman of our age, and he said, "Our system doesn't work. We don't have to unilaterally, uh, uh, end it, but we will, we'll do it peacefully because we'll make a cooperative move. We'll end the Warsaw Pact military alliance. We'll allow for German reunification. All we want is peace. We just want normalcy." I happened to get involved as a young man many years ago with Gorbachev's team because I said, "Let's help these people. There's a financial crisis." With a financial crisis, you help, especially when you have the one-in-a-century offer of peace from the other side. So with Grigory Yavlinsky, who was Gorbachev's economic adviser, I suggested a, a financing plan, always in my inspiration, inspired by Keynes's warnings about the Versailles Treaty. And that has been my whole life's, uh, uh, truth, which is, do not screw up an opportunity for peace, and don't allow suffering to happen because suffering can go terribly wrong. In any event, uh, Giannis, you know, you probably know, I think I may have sent it to you a year ago. I, for everything I recommended was rejected.
>> Of course.
>> And then somebody sent me last year the minutes of the meeting in the White House when it was rejected.
>> Yeah.
>> And it was my colleagues, goddamn it, from Harvard who were sitting as director of the Office of Management and Budget that did the rejecting, Richard Darman. And it's grotesque minutes of this meeting. He says, "We don't have to give them anything. Reform can't work anyway. Gorbachev's a showman. We need a PR package," says Richard Darman. This is what passes for minimal intelligence in the United States. These people are idiots. Honest to God, idiots.
So, the point is, okay, no peace. We don't want peace. We want dominance. Comes 1990. Helmut Kohl wisely, tactically, strategically says, "Our moment of unification has come. The Berlin Wall has fallen." Gorbachev allowed to happen. And so they say to Gorbachev, "Allow us to unify because we need the Soviet permission. There was no treaty at the end of World War II. There was only a Cold War." The US had rejected a neutral, demilitarized Germany in the immediate aftermath of the Nazi onslaught. They rejected that in order to build up Germany, create NATO, and prepare for war with the Soviet Union. So in 1990, in February 1990, Kohl says to Gorbachev, "We want to unify. NATO won't move eastward." Period. Of course, all these genius lawyers in the United States on the payroll of the military-industrial complex twist themselves in pretzels to say, "No, they never said that." Well, they said that. They said that absolutely, as clearly, as vividly, and as repeatedly as possible to Gorbachev, "We will unify. We will not take advantage of your situation. We will not move NATO eastward." And by the way, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the foreign minister, whom I also knew, has a video where he's standing in Washington and a reporter asks him, "Does that mean just in East Germany?" He says, "No, that means in Eastern Europe, we will not move eastward."
Okay. Now, when, uh, the Soviet Union ended, that was December 1991. I, I was literally in the room at the Kremlin, sitting across from Boris Yeltsin because he asked me for help the same way Gorbachev was gone. Yegor Gaidar, the new economic adviser, called, said, "Jeff, you got to come to Moscow. Help us. We have no reserves. We've run out of cash." You know the situation very well. So I said, I said, "Look, these crazy people wouldn't help Gorbachev because the Soviet Union, blah, blah, blah, they can't think straight, they don't understand history, they don't understand peace. But how could they refuse you, President Yeltsin, democracy, the end of the communist era, the end of the Soviet Union? How could they resist?" What word did Yeltsin use to me personally 20 times in that discussion? "We want to be normal, normal, normal. All we want is normal." And I said, "President Yeltsin, I'm going to get you that emergency funding. You need this. You have no reserves. The currency is collapsing and so forth." I went back to Washington, spoke to Dick Herring, who was the deputy managing director of the IMF. He said, "Jeffrey, it's not going to happen." I said, "Dick, what do you mean it's not going to happen? You know, you need this. This is the most basic stabilization. What are you talking?" Straight face. Wouldn't answer. Dick. What's going on? This is crazy. You know what I'm saying makes sense. No answer. Okay. A few weeks later, the Secretary of State, Lawrence Eagleburger, said to me, "Jeff, listen to me. I'm telling you something. I want you to listen. Even if I agree with your economic analysis, it's not going to happen." Any kind of financial assistance. Okay? You know me, Giannis, I am happy to run into the wall 50 times if I think it's the right idea. And I spent the next two years running into the wall 50 times thinking they're going to open the door at some moment. This is so crazy. They never did. It took me honestly many years because I'm naive. I thought we were discussing economics. I thought we were discussing what to do by 1992.
>> But you remember when we were together in those corridors of supposed power, it was never about economics discussion.
>> I know nothing to them. It was all about power politics.
>> So I could not understand why they weren't listening to my brilliant advice. Uh, and, uh, I'm putting that in with a smile and quotation marks, but honest to God, it was awful. And here was peace on a platter.
>> They didn't want peace.
>> They had won. What they wanted was now fulfilling the global dominance.
>> And the dominance of Europe.
>> That was the, of course, I mean, Europe is a sideshow. Europe. We, the main goal of the United States was to make sure that there would not be a German-Russian economic relationship, for sure, because otherwise, what would the United States do on the other side of the ocean? So they, from the beginning, said the most natural fit in the world of complimentary economies is Russia and Germany. And I said so every day when I was trying to help the Russians just make these connections. You've got all these wonderful factories, you're going to build commercial aircraft, you're going to be doing all these things.
>> And they would. Okay, so to come to the point, the US wanted hegemony from 1947.
>> Mhm.
>> Between 1947 and 1991, it, uh, had its Cold War instead of every opportunity for peace. Then, because the Cold War was not necessary, it could have ended at any time, based on neutrality and security, collective security in Europe, which of course the United States rejected. Then the US won, in quotation marks. Now we can run the whole world. No one's there for decades who could possibly come to challenge us. The arrogance was completely astounding. And by the way, I just read a speech of Joseph Chamberlain, the great, uh, the great, uh, British imperialist, that he gave in 1897. And one of the sentences is, "There's no way that anyone can challenge the British Empire for as far in the future as we can see." And then, of course, a half-century later, it was completely gone. So these people are just born mindless of reality. They don't understand the world does not want to be led by a, a few crazy Americans. Okay. So to cut the story short.
>> Jeff, can I, can I interrupt you here? Is it that they don't understand?
>> Because my, my understanding is that, you know, German business people do understand.
>> They understand.
>> They understand. They understand what they would like. They understand the political constraints, the CIA,
>> Yeah.
>> NATO, and in that context, within those constraints, they think that, well, our best bet is to continue plowing, uh, aggregate demand from the American trade deficit. So, you know, they can blow up Nord Stream. Our cost will go up. We hate it. We know who did it. Uh, it was the CIA that did it with the Ukraine, but they were, because we don't want to lose access to the American.
>> Okay. So now, now let's try to get to the, get, get to the actual mechanics of this, which are indeed, uh, a little complicated and opaque to me, at least, because exactly how this works is a question. The, the core question for me is Germany, because actually there were German leaders who were real figures. Brandt, he did not listen to the United States. He didn't, uh, he didn't go to, go to, go to battle with the US, but he believed in Ostpolitik and he meant it. And that's why they planted a, a so-called spy at his office to get rid of,
>> Of course, they got rid of him.
>> Then came Helmut Schmidt. He was a serious person. Schroeder understood all of this. And then you come to Helmut Kohl, whom I knew was actually a very capable, capable person. So was Angela Merkel, whom I knew. And now what happened? You can almost put it to the date, and you did give the date, 2008, the Munich, uh, I'm sorry, the Bucharest NATO summit, and the memoirs of Merkel are very poignant. The Germans knew, they actually wanted normal relations with Russia. That was good business. That was a good peaceful future. That was the right way to go. Russia wasn't threatening them with anything. And we know how Vladimir Putin came to the Bundestag, just when he came to power, spoke in German because he had been a spy in East Germany, after all. Spoke in German saying, "We want cooperation with you." And he meant it. And he, of course, went all over Europe saying, "We want cooperation." And he meant it completely. So they knew, on, in this sense, they knew. And on the first day of the Bucharest summit, Bush says, "NATO is going to enlarge to Ukraine and Georgia." And the Europeans are pretty pissed off, by the way, because they, according to one head of state that I've spoken to at length about this, Bush had promised them, "We're not doing anything like that." Uh, and then they rather, uh, sprung it on the, uh, on the Europeans. And on the first day of the Bucharest summit, Merkel pushed back. And the US wanted a timeline, what was called a, a map, membership action plan. Uh, but whatever it was, she pushed back. The French pushed back. I know other governments that pushed back. And on the second day, she gave in. And she gave in and said, "Okay, we can announce, we can announce that Ukraine and Georgia will become part of NATO." And that, to my mind, was the end of Europe. That moment. Because if she had said, "No, George, you screwed up in Iraq, you have made a mess. We're not making another mess on the European continent." She would have carried the day. The United States would not have bombed Germany. They just wouldn't have announced NATO enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia. To understand why they were, the US was so insistent on this, it's useful to, and it's very important, actually, to read Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, and an article that he wrote in Foreign Affairs, both in 1997, where he explained, "We will surround Russia in the Black Sea." By the way, he was not very original. This was Lord Palmerston's plan in 1853. This is the second Crimean War that we're fighting. The first Crimean War was to kick Russia out of its Sevastopol naval base. Uh, and the second Crimean War, the one that's underway now, had exactly the same objective. And Brzezinski spelled it out. They wanted to surround Russia with Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia, all of the countries that would block Russia's access to the Mediterranean.
>> And this is, uh, Merkel first day said no, second day said yes, and the rest is basically history. Except the Ukrainians didn't want the US plan. The Ukrainians wanted neutrality because they understood, first of all, half of them were Russian, you know, Russophiles anyway, and and they didn't want to be pulled to pieces. And Yanukovych was a very correct and clever, uh, politician who understood, "We're in the middle of this war between the US and Russia. Just leave us out of this." And of course, uh, it's like the Melian Dialogue in Thucydides. Ukraine says, "We just want to be left neutral." And the United States says, "The hell with that. You're our ally." And the Ukrainians say, "Thank you. We'd like to be neutral." Like the Athenians did with the Melians. They said, "We'll kill you if you remain neutral." So the United States didn't kill Yanukovych. It just overthrew him. My colleague Victoria Nuland was the point person. She now is my colleague at Columbia University. They call it our diplomacy department. I think it's our war department. But whatever it is, I think they're teaching the kids there how to do regime change operations because, uh, Hillary and, uh, and, uh, Victoria Nuland is key to the department. All of this is to say, uh, Europe lost it, and since then is completely incoherent. Completely incoherent.
>> If I can just cut, cut in there for a second.
>> Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sorry.
>> On that point. No, I think that that's that's very, very good context because Europe lost it. Um, and now, if I can bring it back to to Munich, because that's where you're seeing exactly these dynamics playing out in very dangerous ways. And I'd like, I'd like to ask you, I'd like to ask you both. Maybe we can start with you, Janice. I mean, there's been a lot of discussion in Munich about this, um, this idea of Europe being, uh, having strategic autonomy, strategic independence. Is that really feasible, doable under current arrangements, or is it?
>> No, absolutely not.
>> Absolutely not. And also, they don't mean it. They're lying through their teeth. All the, what these, what these people want to do, like, you know, Mark Rutte, the former Dutch prime minister and head of NATO today, Secretary General of NATO, he wants daddy to take him back to embrace him. What their project is all about is, uh, to be reintegrated into an aggressive stance within Europe, which gives them an opportunity to cultivate the tensions with Russia, to continue what they want to, what they want is a forever war. They want it to be simmering. They don't want, you know, massive changes in the front line because they know that that would go in Russia's way. They want it to keep simmering in order to maintain this, uh, effective, what I call military Keynesianism, right? And, and, but of course, this is a crazy plan. And I think that to connect it, Jeff, to what you said, I think that to understand the catastrophic collapse in strategic thinking in Europe, uh, you need to focus on two countries, Finland and Sweden. Two countries that prospered magnificently during the Cold War, courtesy of being neutral. If they hadn't been neutral, they would have been far less democratic, social democratic, and prosperous. And now you can see...
>> You can add Austria into this, but, but those two join NATO.
>> Yes.
>> You can see there is a new regime in Finland and in Sweden, a far-right turn, aesthetically, politically, ideologically, um, philosophically, uh, also a massive increase in inequality. You know, some American friends of mine, think democratic socialists, think that, you know, they remain social democratic paradises. They are not. They are worse in terms of inequality than most of the, the rest of Europe. And they are celebrating the fact that they are no longer neutral. Look at that Bozo, the president of Finland, whom you and I know very well, I won't even dare to mention his name. Whereas, to answer the question that, um, that Marin said, "Okay, if you really want to be sovereign, you need to be non-aligned." It is the only way. It's exactly what they don't want because their business model is kaput. They know it's kaput, and they're simply trying to extend it a little bit into the future. So it's, it's, it's like, you know, an a multiple generation model where the older generation just want maximum power for themselves now and let the place burn for the next generations.
Yeah, I want to pick up on that because the people in Europe are not, uh, in this line. So this is not in any way a reflection of democratic ideas, small 'd' democratic ideas of the public, what it wants, what young people want, what the future should be. Every one of these politicians has a vanishingly small approval rating. You know it, you, you can't even find a, a heartbeat of Macron. Merz is in freefall. Starmer is, uh, the most amazing non-entity, uh, imaginable with a, also an approval rating of around 10%. Macron, around 10%. Merz, a little bit higher because you start higher and then you decline. So he's just been there, uh, uh, still long enough, but he'll, he'll reach that soon enough. So, the public actually is really unhappy. They're not following this line. None of this cheerleading for war is is really working. So, the question is, where does this come from and how is this maintained? And I think it, uh, requires us to understand, uh, again, the underlying tactical side of it. When it comes to Sweden, I fell in love with Swedish social democracy as a, as a student. I thought that this was the greatest thing on the planet and loved it. But I can tell you already by the 1990s,
>> Because I was working in the Russian context, it was already...
>> Turned to the right.
>> Now, what do I understand now much more than I did?
>> Of course, the security services killed Olof Palme, and his murder was as consequential for Swedish politics as JFK's murder was for American politics because after that,
>> Government didn't matter. It was the security apparatus that ran the show in these countries. You have to kill off peacemakers, and they killed Olof Palme, and that changed, uh, Sweden decisively. I knew some very nice, uh, smart, uh, Finnish leaders, and they would be very sensible. The current leader, when I said to him, "Why are you warning the Ukrainians against neutrality when under neutrality, you became rich and not just happy, but the happiest country in the world according to the Gallup, the Gallup life satisfaction polls?"
>> He turned around and said, "You're barking up the wrong tree, Mr. Sachs." And he walked away. In other words, there's no discussion of these issues. This is...
>> He attacked me on Twitter when I was talking about exactly that, that that effectively his accusation, personal accusation on Twitter was that by advocating that Finland was very well off under neutrality, I was, uh, mansplaining, or west-splaining, I should say, to him, to an Eastern, Northeastern European, um, what it takes to feel genuine national pride, and not being able to join NATO was detrimental to their pride.
>> So, so...
>> I mean, I grew up in a fascist NATO country. Okay. I grew up in a fascist dictatorship in NATO.
>> Look, I, you know, every one of these places, something really soured, and it is the CIA, the left-behind armies, the intelligence agencies that that did this job. That's why I say that's what has run American foreign policy for decades. You look at Norway, another country I know well from experience. And like many people, and Gro Harlem Brundtland for me was a, a true global statesperson and did a wonderful job, and I had the honor to work for her when she was Director-General of the World Health Organization. But now we know, look at the Epstein files, by the way, uh, how completely subverted and suborned that country's elite was.
>> Yeah.
>> How many games were being played? I had a, a weird experience in 2009 when, uh, Gro Harlem Brundtland, who was former prime minister of Norway and foreign minister and head of the Council of Europe and so forth, berated me in a, uh, in a public gathering for not being sufficiently pro-American. And now he's all over the Epstein files. He's charged with, uh, you know, he's charged with corruption on, uh, on many fronts. All I knew then was what a nasty sob. But now I can see, yes, very professionally so, he was on the take, on the pay, whatever it was, I don't know exactly. But we ruined normal places. Europe actually did figure out a lot of good things about social democracy, but it has been ruined by this US hegemony and the selection of generations of politicians by the United States because you could not be a successful politician in Europe without clearing the mark of the United States and its hegemonic project for decades. Aside from the few cases that I mentioned, if you were de Gaulle, okay, if you were, uh, if you were Willy Brandt, I mean, these were substantial people, but that has gone away.
>> But von der Leyen, oh my god, come on. Are you? No, I mean, are you kidding? What are we doing?
>> Well, she was chosen precisely because...
>> Yes.
>> She poses absolutely no danger to the orchestrated irrationality which is ruling the whole thing. Yes. Uh, I want to add, however, you absolutely, I mean, our regimes have always been totally corrupted by the CIA, totally corrupted by, uh, you know, the fossil fuel industry. It's, it's always been like that, but it's a little bit more than that because, you know, Jeff, speaking as a political economist now...
>> I, I need to bring into again...
>> The decision of, uh, European Union, uh, grandfathers or fathers, you know, people like Helmut Kohl and, uh, earlier than that, Richard von Weizsäcker, but primarily, uh, Macron, who decided to federate our money system, uh, in a manner which essentially took the Bundesbank and turned it into the central bank that was controlling austerity and dissing out, dishing out austerity. And we, in combination with the capacity, huge capacity, a very powerful central bank that could create liquidity for the money men and stagnation for the many, and that put us into a 20-year, 25-year trajectory of stagnation, which, you know, just like in, you know, the economic consequences of the peace that you were referring to in the 1920s and '30s, Keynes's analysis has created the circumstances for the outer right, for fascism, and for militarism to aid and abet the military-industrial complex and the, um, you know, the warmongers who are trying to extend, prolong their rent-seeking capacities through extending the war in Ukraine. And, you know, when they talk about, uh, the coalition of the willing to go there and, and, you know, police the line of control if there is a deal, what on earth are they talking about? Are they going to do in Ukraine what the Americans did in Korea? The Americans, they had a war there, and the whole point there, the demilitarized zone is not, it's exactly the opposite, it's militarized. The whole point is, you know, to, to do in Korea what they did in 1945 in Germany, as you so correctly were describing it. They want, wanted to keep pushing. What are the, who are the Europeans going to push with 20,000, you know, um, troops, the Russians? And what happens if the Russians take them? Are they going to start the Second World War? By the way, one, one of the things that Brzezinski writes in 1997 when he explains, "We're going to push eastward for American dominance," and he says, "What will Russia be able to do, uh, in the end?" He has a whole chapter on this in The Grand Chessboard. He says, "Russia will have to fall into line." This is the only thing he says. The option, for example, that Russia would align with China, unthinkable, absurd. And he says, "Of course, no American policy would ever be so self-destructive as pushing Russia and China together as well." Okay, everything Brzezinski said in that book described actual American policy, and was wrong, both of them. And so this, this is the, um, you know, this is a group that has also profoundly miscalculated on everything. And the Europeans went along with the project because they were cultivated to do so, because they thought that this was maybe their only security blanket, which is absurd, because Russia is not going to invade Europe. So if you just put aside, for a moment, the paranoia, there is no great security need for the United States right now. The last thing in the world that's going to happen is that Russia is going to invade Europe. This is absurd. Unless we continue with this war on Russia, by the way, but even so, it's not going to happen. But it is a cultivation of a failed, America-dependent group who literally got their upbringing in American-paid-for, uh, think tanks and fellowships and everything else as the requirement for how you rise in European politics anyway. And if you are not part of the Atlantic Council or the German Marshall Fund or a fellowship at SAIS or something else, well, you have no chance in your national politics anyway. And if by some way you really make it and you become, you know, a charismatic leading voice for peace, then there are other means. Uh, if you've somehow escaped the net, they have other means, uh, to, uh, to do this enforcement. And today, oh god, there isn't any un. And by the way, and a final point, it's, I think it's been expressed, but I think it needs to be made explicit. The United States absolutely for three decades made sure that Europe was no competition to the US economy. And so if ever a high-tech firm came up, you grab it or you control it. You know, Europe produces the, the only extreme ultraviolet lithography, ASML, the only one. It's a US firm, for God's sake. Uh, in effective foreign policy, the Dutch couldn't even begin to say, "Hey, that's ours." The Europeans couldn't tell the United States, "You want chips? We make the chips. You don't make the chips. We and TSMC make the chips." Not you. If Europe had sense, they would do that. But they have no sense at all. Every good European firm is either wrecked or bought out by the United States. One of the two.
>> Could I ask you guys, because we're at the top of the hour, but do you have hard stops, or can you go on for a little longer?
>> I, I can go on for about 10 more minutes.
>> Yeah.
>> Janice, are we okay?
>> Well, I, I'd just like to ask you about the future. Um, maybe Jeffrey, we can start with you. What do you think that this push for militarization will mean for Europe's economy and politics over the next decade?
>> Look, what I hope it means, really hope it means, is that these politicians fall from power and that somebody arises, just one sane voice in a major country of Europe to say, "Are you kidding? There's a better way." So again, I'm naive. I admit it. I always say if it's so stupid,
>> It should stop.
>> And this is absurd that you can't find one voice. And you have four, three and a half European leaders in the sense of of Starmer. Let's count him as a half. But the British are the most insane of all. They've been rapidly, insanely, aggressively Russophobic for 180 years. Uh, and they'll never get over that. They're just crazy. And they've been run by MI6 longer than the US has been run by the CIA. So, this is, you know, they have no empire left, but it's like the Monty Python skit where the knight has lost all his limbs, but we're fighting on. Everything is great. So, the, the, the British are completely unbearable, um, unbearable. Okay. But then you have Germany, France, and Italy. And we just need one, one German chancellor that says, "I'm picking up the phone and calling President Putin, and everything could look different. Everything." One German chancellor like Schroeder, or or any of the ones in the past that said, "Hey, our industry depended on that pipeline. We're not suicidal. We want that pipeline opened up again. That's all it takes. It may open up."
>> I promise you the US...
>> May be opened up if Trump owns it and and gets his cut.
>> It's true. It's true. People should understand the US is completely incoherent itself right now. Politically unstable. President Trump is not strong. He's not popular. He's stupid, uh, intellectually. He has no path for success. This is important to understand. And the fact of the matter is, uh, the, the fact of the matter is that Europe doesn't have to really worry about the United States. If it found its voice, made peace with Russia, uh, said, "We can settle this, have collective security on our continent," things could look completely different. By the way, I'm just discovering I actually do have to get off.
>> Just one hour. One quick one. One quick one. And thank you so much for being with us. Uh, the small difference we have is that I just, in my older age, perhaps because of a historical accent that got me involved in politics, I don't do what you say. We say, well, you know, rationality must win. It won't win because there's...
>> So the difference is, and this is how I want to let you go. Um, we're, you know, we're a movement. We're doing things. We are not simply waiting for something good to happen. You're doing things, but you're doing it as a, as a, as a lone ranger who offers us enormous insights, and you are superbly useful to us. But I want to invite everyone who's watching to be in London on the 24th of March at the Troxy Theatre. There will be all of us there, including Brian Eno, and Jeremy Corbyn, and Zach Polonsky, the leader of the Greens, many others. Um, Grace Blakeley will be there. We are going to be on stage. Come to Troxy on the 24th of March.
>> And if you are there, Jeff, by the way, it's my birthday, too. So you're invited.
>> I'm in Beijing that day. But it sounds phenomenal, that what a gathering. Phenomenal.
>> Well, I'm sure there will be others that you can attend. Um, guys, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. It's been a fascinating discussion. Uh, just so you know, if you'd like to join DM25, go to dm25.org/join to support us/support. Also, there's the Stop Rearm campaign that I should mention, which DM25 works with, which can address some of the issues we've been discussing here. Thank you again to you, Jeffrey, and to Janice. See you. Thank you. We'll see you guys out there the same time, same place, two weeks from now. Take care.