Transcription
[Music]
[Music]
Tonight's guest is University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed the Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He's been special adviser to three United Nations Secretaries General and currently serves as a Sustainable Development Goals Advocate under Secretary General Antonio Guterres. He has received 42 honorary doctorates, and his recent awards include the 2022 Tang Prize in Sustainable Development and the Order of the Cross from the President of Estonia.
He'll be beginning with a short speech on whether there can ever truly be a liberal international order. Please give a warm welcome to Professor Jeffrey Sachs.
[Applause]
What did you say? I'm going to talk about whether there can ever be a liberal international order. Thank you. Good. I absolutely refused to hear the question before I entered the room. So, uh, that’s a good topic: what kind of international order or disorder we're going to have. Thank you for having me and my wife here this evening; I'm looking forward to a great discussion.
We are in a period of huge change and very dangerous change right now, and I'm here to tell you, uh, to help lead a safe way out of this. For some reason, the generation of politicians running the world right now is not very prudent, very wise, and is not leading us to safety.
We're in an extraordinarily dangerous time, and that is not intrinsic to our circumstances at all because we could view, with the same conditions that we have, our situation as wonderfully promising, exciting— a time when the whole world could be achieving very big things. We could understand, which we don't yet, that we are not in a game of who's number one or who's ahead, or who runs the world; we're all blessedly stuck together on this planet, and we're all G to have pretty much the same outcome: either a good outcome or a disaster.
The old ideas that it's very important who sets the rules and really important who wins the wars are very outmoded, and they're outmoded for two fundamental reasons. One, we just can't go on with the kind of wars that we have that threaten our very survival every day because we are in the nuclear age, and we have conflicts among nuclear powers that threaten our very survival.
This is something new in history. We were, as a species, one could even say, we seem to be very prone to war, and war has been part of human existence, but things are different now. Actually, one of the wonderful lines of President John F. Kennedy and his speechwriter Theodore Sorensen, which I like so much, are his words from the inaugural address when he said: “for our times are very different; we hold in our mortal hands the ability to end all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.” This was 1961, and this remains our most significant issue, which is that we are so close to disaster every day because we are not properly led and because our ideas about the international order are way out of date.
Now, the second reason, as I mentioned of the two, is that we're so interconnected now that the whole idea that there can be winners and losers on a completely interconnected planet really makes no sense. Maybe it made sense, and it was immoral before, but now it really does not make sense to think that there will be a way, on a planet with so much interaction every day, with complex global scale interactions, and with the climate and environmental stress that is potentially disastrous for every part of the world, that somehow we're going to be able to do well while half the world is struggling to survive.
That is an old idea. In fact, one of the old ideas, quite disastrous, which actually came from England in 1798, was Thomas Malthus, who was very clever. He posed a real problem; he got the wrong answer, but he posed a real problem. He basically said there’s not enough to go around, so we're condemned to poverty. If not at all times, at least any time we are able to lift our head above poverty, we'll be driven back down to poverty by population increase, and we'll never really be able to surmount subsistence.
Charles Darwin had aaha when he read the Principles of Population and said, "Aha! That's where natural selection comes from. It comes from the fact that there are always more organisms than can be supported in their physical environment." That was then taken by others further and said, "Well, that's our struggle for survival on this planet as human beings and as nations against nations, or as races against races. We're in a struggle for survival," and that is social Darwinism.
It's even more extreme versions of this idea that are wrong, and it's wrong for understandable and identifiable reasons that would take a long time to discuss fully. But suffice it to say, one, two peculiar things that Malthus got wrong. He thought that richer people would have more surviving children because children would survive in a higher income context, and therefore there would always be above-subsistence a survival rate of children that would increase the population.
But what he didn't foresee was modern contraceptives and changing culture, so that at higher incomes, people have fewer children. In fact, they don't even have enough to replace the adult generation. In the high income world, fertility rates are now, in many places, each mother having on average or each ten mothers having seven daughters that will replace them in the next generation, meaning a declining population.
So he didn't understand that, and he didn't understand the benefits of technological advance because that was about to explode after 1798 in ways that he didn't envision. But the legacy of that idea is that we're in a struggle, and it's us or them. Of course, the worst horrific vision of that was Hitler’s, which is that we need living room, Lebensraum, because otherwise the German Aryan people will not survive.
So we need to conquer the lands of the Slavs to the East, and that was a real idea, by the way, that he picked up from German scientists, who had picked it up from social Darwinists in this country, who had picked it up from Darwin, who had picked it up from Malthus.
And it's actually a set of ideas. It's not just insanity; it was a set of ideas widely circulating among German social thinkers and among German scientists, in fact, in the early 1900s. Well thank goodness it's wrong! We're not in a struggle between the U.S. and China; there's no basis for this. We're not in any intrinsic war between the U.S. and Russia.
And Russia, by the way, despite everything that's said every single day, truly, really does not want more land. It's already 11 time zones. The last thing that they need or want is more land. The war is about completely different things than everything you and I read about in our newspapers every day because our newspapers are telling us stories that ultimately come back to narratives conceived in the U.S. defense department and the CIA, and that are completely bogus.
So what about this international order? The international order is extremely dangerous because we're packed to the gills with nuclear weapons; we are at a brink of environmental disaster; we are led by—to put it politely—well, I can't put it; I need to put it politely, but leaders who are not quite up to the challenge we face and are not properly addressing the challenge. Personally, it's a little bit of a relief for me to be here because yesterday when I was at the Oxford Union, I could only think about Boris Johnson being president of the Oxford Union.
And here, I can think about KES being president of the Cambridge Union. I feel so much better and so much more at home in that regard, although I loved the event yesterday and Bojo wasn't there. But he was there in spirit in my remarks because he's an example of one of the most disastrous politicians of our age and has done a profound disservice in the world and continues to be a danger for all of us.
And I don't say it lightly, and I don't say it in a partisan way. I just say it that, um, people like that are extremely dangerous and how casual they throw around our lives.
So the question, and I'll sit down in a moment so we can have a discussion, uh, the question: could we have an international order that is peaceful, secure, ordered, improving the well-being of people around the world? The answer is absolutely yes.
Is that what we have right now? The answer is absolutely not. Do we have the makings of what it could be? My answer has been for most of my professional life, yes, we could make the United Nations actually fulfill its purpose.
That's why I have devoted the last 25 years to the UN in pretty much volunteer work every day because I think it's our best hope for making a global order that truly is what we want and need. It's not working right now. It doesn't make me cynical; it makes me worried. It makes me sad because I think I can see why it doesn't work.
It was set up in 1945 so that the great powers would have a veto, and that is certainly the single most debilitating aspect of the UN because if we had a system where the General Assembly, as flawed as it is, actually had enforceable legal remit, if you look at the decisions of the General Assembly over the years, they're actually very, very good. And the world would be a lot better if we were guided by that rather than by the great power vetoes.
So all of this is to say, I don't think we're so far from a vision of what we could have. Of course, we just had a summit of the future at the UN, which put forward a lot of ideas for UN reform that are very good. So we can reform what we have. But I think the idea of an international governance system that is based on peace, sustainable development, and human rights is really a good and smart one, and it's not so far from implementation.
Except we need, in my view, the main job that I feel is trying to help my former students and friends and colleagues and teachers in Washington real so that they understand that we're in a different world and that we do not need U.S. leadership at all. What we just need is U.S. decency and cooperation.
So that's all I wanted to start by saying. Thank you for the question, and we'll get [Applause] started.
Thank you so much for that. I thought that was really fascinating.
Um, so what we're going to do now is I'm going to ask a few questions for this next little bit of the talk, and then after that, I'm going to open it up to questions from anyone in the audience.
So I just wanted to start ding things back a bit towards your sort of academic background in development, and I wanted to ask you: Why do you think it is since 2008 in particular, and continuing towards today, that foreign aid has lost ground in the conversation in a lot of Western countries, particularly in the UK, where we've reduced it down to 0.5% of GDP? What would you say is behind that, and why is there a reluctance to accept the importance of foreign aid relative to changing government structures in developing countries?
Yeah, great. Um, you know, I trained as an economist in international finance, actually not in development, and my greatest influence on me then, and I would say until today, was John Maynard Keynes.
Not so much his macroeconomics though I loved that; when I first learned it, I thought, "That is the coolest thing in the world that you can turn the dials and get the economy to operate and stay at full employment." You could solve the model to know how much the dial should be turned. It was so much fun, and I loved it from the first moment.
But what really influenced me was The Economic Consequences of the Peace in 1919, which is Keynes's remarkable essay as a very unhappy disgruntled member of the British delegation to the Treaty of Versailles negotiations.
Of course, the whole book was saying, “What you, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau, and Woodrow Wilson have agreed in the Treaty of Versailles is going to create chaos: inter-Allied debts, war debts, war reparations. It’s going to create chaos.” And of course, Keynes proved to be prophetic in that; he said in 1919 that by imposing this harsh peace, this Carthaginian peace, the monsters would arise in the next generation with a vengeance that we couldn't even imagine.
The quotations are marvelous because he was also such a great writer and such a great stylist, but he called it right, and it made a huge impression on me.
So I started out in finance, and when I began to be active in problem-solving—and that came because some former students of mine in Bolivia came back to the campus at Harvard and said, “We have a hyperinflation.” It was a very good moment in my life because these Bolivian students, the former students, called the faculty to come to discuss the Bolivian hyperinflation, and I was the only one that showed up.
I didn’t know anything, but anyway, thank goodness the ones that really knew something didn’t show up, so I had my shot, and I think there was another senior person. But I stood up in the middle of it and I said, “That is actually not how hyperinflation works.” You know, I knew all the theoretical paper, so I wrote something on the blackboard, and a voice from the back of the room said, “If you're so smart, you should come to Bolivia.”
And secret: I had to go home to look on a map where Bolivia was; I had no idea. I knew it was pretty sure it was in the Americas, but I didn't really know where it was. And then I found out, and I decided that I would go.
In any event, Keynes really influenced me because I got there, and it was an impoverished place and was, at the time, the seventh highest hyperinflation that had occurred on the planet. There have been several more since then, and I was able to use standard monetary economics to end the hyperinflation.
And as soon as it ended, then the IMF said, “Okay, now Bolivia has to start paying debt that it hasn’t been paying up until now,” and I said, “No, that's going to blow up this beautiful stabilization. Look how poor these people are. Let them go; let them get on with things.”
And Keynes said, "Don't be mean. Don't be vindictive. Be nice to people that are in need." I ended up because I found a wonderful senior gentleman in the IMF who took me under his protective wing because I didn’t know what I was doing. I was a kid in all intents and purposes.
He said, “Sachs is right; why don't we try to forgive some of this debt?” And in the end, Bolivia got a big debt relief, and the stabilization held. And that was good also for me professionally because then many other countries said, “Well, help us get rid of our debt,” which I did over the coming years, including in Central Europe and the former Soviet Union after the revolution of 1989 and the end of the Soviet Union in 1991.
And that's how I got involved in Russian and Ukrainian issues back then. But my idea all along was: be nice to people in need because otherwise things come back to haunt you.
When you're very rich, you don't even notice. I mean, Bolivia's debt was nothing. And by the way, the whole developing country debt was quite manageable if it was viewed in a decent way.
I was also schooled in Winston Churchill's not exactly correct saying about the Marshall Plan that it was the most unsorted event in history. I believe the Marshall Plan was a completely altruistic wonderful act of the United States after World War II to rebuild Europe, and that's how I was raised and how I was taught.
In fact, it's much more complicated because it was a Cold War instrument of policy, and there’s a lot of dark side to it; it helped fund CIA operations, and it did many other things, so it's not a completely unsorted act, but it was an effective act anyway, and it helped to restart the European economies.
So all of this is to say I believed, "What’s wrong with a little transfer from a very rich world to poor people?" And I basically believed that all my life. I’ve tried— for a long time I tried to raise development assistance, and I worked with Bono in 2005 at Gleneagles for Make Poverty History.
And we were going to get aid up to 0.7%, which was the UN standard that every rich country should give 0.7% of its aid and so on. I wrote The End of Poverty in 2005 based on the idea: “Still, be nice. Come on, we're rich; help poor people. It's a trap. Get them out of the trap, then they can go on with their own development.”
It's not all charity; it’s just a little bit of helping to overcome this extreme condition when you’re poor, so you have no money to invest in the things that would make you not poor. So there is a trap, and it still applies to many places in the world.
And if it's not literally a trap of poverty, if poor countries can find their way out, they could find their way out much faster and with much less suffering and with much more productive lives if we helped.
So I worked on that for a long time, but over time I discovered a lot of the deep dark truths of American foreign policy that I did not appreciate, did not understand, growing up. I knew things weren't right because I marched against the Vietnam War in the 1960s as a high school student, and I was never but I did not appreciate the darkness of much of American foreign policy and British Imperial policy and Britain’s cheerleading of American foreign policy.
That grew on me over time. Plus, it's a little complicated, so it's actually worth just explaining one thing. In operant conditioning, when you're conditioning a rat to press a lever, or you're conditioning a human being to press a button to do something, if you wanted decondition—take away the stimulus response, you can go cold turkey, and then the response doesn't work.
There is fadeout over time, but if you give a victory every once in a while still to pressing the lever, it prolongs the agony of phasing out the conditioning for a very long time.
I mentioned this because in my career, every once in a while, the U.S. would do a nice thing. So I came to believe that if I was persistent enough, I was pretty persuasive, and I could always convince them to do the right thing.
So there were a few successes along the way and lots of frustrations, but the few successes just made me absolutely sure that one more conversation, one more debate, one more argument with another president or a secretary of state or his advisor would be enough to turn the tide.
It took me a long time to stop pressing that lever because there’s really a lot of nastiness, and I stopped going to Washington and talking about development aid in Washington probably about 10 years ago, I would say.
Imagine we’re not in 19th-century Britain ruling the seas, which was a basis for British hegemony in the 19th century.
So he says, and I say to him, “China’s not able to defeat us. The only risk we face from China, the only risk we face from China, is nuclear war. So stay away from nuclear war. Stop playing with Taiwan the way you’re doing. Sorry, it’s stupid. Stop provoking things.”
And footnote: we provoked the war in Ukraine.
I could go go on for about 8 hours on that, and maybe it’s worth 5 minutes, but we provoked the war in Ukraine absolutely surely, and we’ll do the same with Taiwan, and we’ll lose any war that happens. But maybe the world will end also over this stupidity.
The people in Washington are stupid; I’m telling you, I know them. This is not my surmise, and I just read an unbelievably stupid article in an unbelievably awful journal called Foreign Affairs by—what’s her name? First name, I don’t remember; Carlin is her second name.
Oh my God! It’s about how we have to prepare for the next war. Not—I don’t think the word “diplomacy” is mentioned one time.
So the first thing is John says, Professor Mishan says, “Yeah, China can’t defeat us. We can’t defeat China, but China could annoy us, and it will annoy us more if China’s the hegemon of East Asia, so we have to prevent China from being the hegemon of East Asia.”
So that the United States is the only hegemon in the world, the only regional hegemon. What a thing to do! That could provoke nuclear war, and I said, “But John, that could lead to war between the U.S. and China.”
“Yeah, yeah. It’s actually likely or it’s possible,” he says. “Maybe we could avoid it, but it’s quite possible.” He says, “No, you take the expected value of total annihilation. It’s got a big negative sign; it’s minus infinity as far as I’m concerned.”
And so you don’t do that. You don’t put any positive probability on something like that.
So this is the first point of disagreement. The second point of disagreement is essentially about game theory. Everyone here knows the prisoner’s dilemma. The prisoner’s dilemma is a situation where it pays to cooperate, but the dominant strategy for each player is to not cooperate because if the other side cooperates, you cheat and you win.
If the other side doesn’t cooperate, you certainly don’t play the sucker. And so you end up non-cooperative, non-cooperative, and you’re off to the races in war, and that’s game theory.
And that’s what’s taught at Rand, and that’s what these people in Washington think, and that’s how they play, and that’s how they talk.
The fact is though you put real people—and I mean non-economic students, real people—into an experimental game, and they cooperate half the time, three-quarters of the time.
Then, wonder of wonders, you let the two people talk beforehand—not to make a binding agreement, just to chat. “Hey, why don’t we both cooperate?” For example, no signed contract. In game theory, that’s called cheap talk; it should have no effect on the equilibrium.
But in real human practice, if you put two normal people in a prisoner’s dilemma game, they cooperate half the time. If you let them have pre-play communication, they cooperate more than 90% of the time. They’re human beings.
So my advice is, “Hey, why doesn’t President Biden or somebody that actually can function as a president in the future actually talk to President Putin? You know, actually understand President Putin’s point of view? Why is this war going on? Discuss it! You know, cooperation could rise enormously.”
There’s a second point of game theory which is very important called the folk theorem, which is that if you’re in repeated play of the prisoner’s dilemma and there’s no set terminal date, then you should cooperate so you don’t mess up trust of the two sides because you’re playing also against future actions, and you want to show, “I’m trustworthy, we can gain from cooperation period after period.”
That’s another way to sustain the good outcome in a prisoner’s dilemma. So I view international relations theory, realist theory, as essentially being the prisoner’s dilemma or the Hsian dilemma of nation-states in an anarchic environment, and my argument is it’s not so anarchic; it’s not so threatening.
The only real threat is nuclear war, so stay away from that. That’s the bright red line for all of us. Cooperation is just not so hard, and I look to many examples in history where cooperation worked.
I wrote a book in 2013 about one such episode because I found it completely amazing when I learned about it, and that was the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis when, first of all, Kennedy rejected the advice of all his advisers except one because they all said, “Go bomb these sites in Cuba.” Now, in retrospect, we almost surely would not be here talking today had we gone on to do that.
But Kennedy was much more cautious, and he spent all the days of the crisis asking, “What’s going through Khrushchev’s mind? He’s a human being. What’s he doing?” He finally came to the realization, “You know, this is not meant by Khrushchev to be the end of the world; this is not meant, this is—we can both pull back.”
And that’s what they ended up doing. That was October 1962, and in 1963, Kennedy made a campaign for peace that culminated in the partial nuclear test ban treaty, which was signed with the Soviet Union in July 1963, and it culminated, I think, in Kennedy's assassination because there were enough people in the U.S. government that didn’t like his peace initiatives, and so I think it was an inside job.
I think the evidence grows all the time that it was. In any event, Kennedy’s idea was the two sides can make peace. When he said that, and he said it in the most beautiful terms—his speechwriter was a gifted, gifted person named Theodore Sorensen that I got to know, luckily because he lived in our neighborhood when I came to Columbia University, and I got to know him—he said it in the most eloquent and beautiful words imaginable.
“We can make peace even with the Soviet Union, even at the height of the Cold War.” And he said it so beautifully that when Khrushchev heard the speech, he immediately called the American envoy, Al Herman, and said, “I want to make peace with your president” because he was inspired by the words, actually, and they made peace.
That treaty lasted, and it led to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty five years later. It changed the world, and so that’s the optimistic side: go for peace instead.
This awful president of ours, when he could function still, he was terrible—Biden, all he could do was insult Putin every moment.
How are you going to make peace if all you do is throw insults at the one who heads a country with 6,000 nuclear warheads? This is crazy; it’s reckless. The whole place in Washington is filled with these people—people who are playing game theory, who know just what Putin’s going to do, who know we have no alternative but to increase our military.
This woman, Carlin, who was a senior official under Biden in the Defense Department that wrote this article, says we have no choice but to deter through building our military. She doesn’t even mention the idea that there could be diplomacy with China.
This woman’s an ignoramus. I’m sorry, I’ve been to China 100 times at least. There’s no intrinsic battle with China; none whatsoever. China’s not out to defeat the U.S. and couldn’t do so in a million years anyway; we’d all perish.
And China never, by the way, even once invaded a country overseas in its whole history of 2,245 years since 221 B.C. when the Qin Empire unified China. Did they ever invade Japan? Not once. Did they ever invade Korea? Not once. Did they ever invade Vietnam? Yes, 17 years in that 2,000 years, for actually 17 years and one month, 1420 to 1436, and then one month in 1979.
And the United States? We've never been at peace. All we do is war.
You know what the truth is? We learned it from here because the British Empire was the most militarized society imaginable, and unfortunately, the leaders of this country—and it turns out not to matter which party, because Starmer is as bad as Boris Johnson—all they know is military.
It's unbelievable. What’s the first thing that Starmer does when he becomes Prime Minister? He goes to Kiev to pledge the endless support of the—uh, by the way, because Britain doesn’t do anything— the endless support of the United States to the defeat of Russia. Then he flies across the Atlantic to try to convince Biden to authorize—what authorized means is for the U.S. military to enable deep strikes inside Russia.
That’s really a clever thing to do, especially because Putin said, "Well then, we’d be at war with each other, and we'd be forced to reconsider our nuclear strategy."
Then we have our CIA director, and this would be great for the West End theater, by the way, because it’s a kind of parody. The CIA director meets with the MI6 director on stage recently here and says, “Oh, don’t worry about Putin’s bluff.”
Well, my advice is if you’re going to say that, say that before we're all annihilated because no one’s going to hear you after we’re all annihilated.
How do we know he's bluffing? He’s not bluffing if Russia is fundamentally threatened.
So that's—I don’t remember what you asked me, but that’s my answer. Thank you very much.
Um, we're going to try and have some time for a few audience questions. I appreciate we're running into L, but if you just stick your hand up, I already see lots around. Just wait until you get a microphone and ask a question.
We’ll go here in the suit in the second row.
Me? Yeah, stand up, please. Do. Thank you.
Thank you very much, that was quite remarkable. It definitely isn’t sort of the mainstream opinion, I guess.
Um, so you talked about how there isn't this kind of struggle with China and how the United States, the U.S. Empire, doesn't need to position itself as kind of a leader, but there is kind of a struggle, if not between us and China, between democracy and dictatorship in various countries, various economies, various circles.
Um, and the United States is at the forefront of that, at least in economic terms.
Um, and of course, with dictatorships now becoming a lot more sustainable, you know, they’re not kind of obsessed with this self-substance; they’re all trading with each other.
Um, is there any way in which there is still a fight on our hands when it comes to politics?
Well, I’d love for the United States to be a functioning democracy and to be a good example for other countries.
I don’t believe the U.S. has any right or any ability to put in place a democracy in any other country, nor do I believe, by the way, that American democracy functions as a real democracy anymore on the life-and-death issues.
Nobody has asked the American people anything about all these wars for decades. And by the way, I can tell you, and I’m telling you authoritatively and truly, they lie about every goddamn thing about these wars, and so that’s not democracy. That’s not democracy either; everything is phony; everything is narrative and so on.
The war and peace issues, the public has no say at all. And if you were to ask the American people now—and in fact, Gallup does—do you support Biden’s foreign policy?
I think the support is—you can look it up—25 to 35%, perhaps. I don’t even think it reaches 35%. Where's the democracy in this?
It's a game; this is the Deep State, and they have their wars, and every war has been phony.
Some wars, the American people are basically never told about. For example, the war in Syria, and you may actually hear from grown-up reporters who are lying through their teeth or ignorant beyond imagining that "Oh, the war in Syria, yes, Russia intervened in Syria."
Well, do you know that Obama tasked the CIA to overthrow the Syrian government starting four years before Russia intervened? What kind of nonsense is that?
And how many times did the New York Times report on Operation Timber Sycamore, which was the presidential order to the CIA to overthrow Bashar al-Assad? Three times in 10 years.
This is not democracy; this is a game, and it's a game of narrative. Why did the U.S. invade Iraq in 2003?
Well, first of all, it was completely phony pretenses. It wasn’t, “Oh, we were so wrong. They didn’t have weapons of mass destruction.” They actually did focus groups in the fall of 2002 to find out what would sell that war to the American people.
Abe Shulsky, if you want to know the name of the PR genius, they did focus groups on the war. They wanted the war all the time. They had to figure out how to sell the war to the American people, how to scare the hell out of the American people.
It was a phony war. Where did that war come from? You know what? It’s quite surprising; that war came from Netanyahu, actually. You know that?
It’s weird, and the way it is, is that Netanyahu had, from 1995 onward, the theory that the only way we’re going to get rid of Hamas and Hezbollah is by toppling the governments that support them— that's Iraq, Syria, and Iran.
And the guy’s nothing if not obsessive, and we—he’s still trying to get us to fight Iran this day, this week.
He’s a deep dark son of a—sorry to tell you—because he’s gotten us into endless wars, and because of the power of all of this in U.S. politics, he’s gotten his way. But that war was totally phony.
So what is this democracy versus dictatorship? Come on, these are not even sensible terms.
And even if they were sensible terms, under the UN Charter, we can have our democracy; you do what you want. It happens to be the case that China has had a centralized administrative state for 2,245 years.
Ever since Emperor Qin Shi Huang unified the Qin Dynasty, there have been a few periods of disintegration of the dynasties, but if you look through the Qin, the Han, the Tang, the Song, the Ming, the Qing, till today, till the PRC—this is the same structure, by the way; this is an administrative state ruling over almost the same region, by the way, for more than 2,000 years.
And it, by the way, has been wondrously effective for a long time at keeping the internal peace. China’s only wars were nomadic invasions from the steppes in the north and then one crazed—well, then the Mongols invading part of that, and one absolutely crazed shogun in the 1590s trying to take over China, and he made it as far as Korea and was killed.
Other than that, this has been exceptional statecraft until Britain had the genius idea of fighting a war to sell opium in China in 1839. One of the most noble efforts imaginable, uh, and that started the modern era of China.
So I don’t buy it at all, but even if it were true, it’s illegal under international law, unwise.
You know, look at the great accomplishment of pouring in, I don’t know how many hundreds of billions of dollars into Afghanistan for 20 years to get from the Taliban regime to the Taliban regime.
This is American genius at democracy promotion. They don’t care at all about democracy, by the way, at all; they topple governments they don’t like that won’t do their bidding. They topple democracies if they don’t like them; they’ll topple anybody that they don’t like!
That’s how it’s worked all along. They never said, “Oh, we can’t topple Mossadegh in 1953; he’s a democratic government.”
No, they toppled a democratic government in Iran and put in a police state, which led to wonderful long-term relations with Iran because they really love the American people for that.
So this is not about democracy; this is a game, and it's a terrible game, and it’s a secret game, and it’s played by the CIA, which is the most important agency in the United States because they have complete secrecy, complete unaccountability.
There was one review of the CIA 49 years ago, the Church Committee, and nothing since then. And as one of our CIA directors, they’re all, I was going to say one of the worst, but they’re all the same by the time they get there or by the time they leave there because the agency takes them over.
Pompeo said, as he was proudly explaining the role of the CIA to some Texas students a few years ago—and you can find it online—he said, “What do we teach at the CIA? To lie, cheat, and steal.”
And that's a pretty good encapsulation of the methodology, and that is a very dangerous world being created that way.
So China is not going to turn the U.S. into a dictatorship; maybe the U.S. will turn into a dictatorship.
Maybe it will just turn into a plain old plutocracy; maybe it will turn into a military industrial state as the complete dominance. I don't know, but it’s not going to come from China; it’s going to come from inside.
That’s where our risk is.
Let’s go to the orange jumper.
Thank you.
Uh, I have a very simple question. What is your view on the upcoming U.S. election, and who do you think will further—let’s say—will make the situation better for all of us?
Thank you.
Somebody else, um, uh, I’m a firm non-voter in November, sorry to say. That's not the high principled view; everyone’s supposed to vote and cherish their vote, but I will not vote for a candidate that doesn’t meet the minimum threshold for being President of the United States, and we have two candidates, lead candidates, that don't.
And so I decided I’m not voting; period.
I want a candidate that actually has some possibility of doing something. Now, maybe they will, but not based on what they say every day is a profession of love for Israel's murderous reign in the Middle East.
Okay? By itself, I wouldn't support that. That’s enough for me because Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, and it's sickening, and it's obvious, and we see it every day. If a candidate can’t figure out to say something about that, I can’t support them; period.
But then Kamala Harris, who would normally be my candidate because I was a lifelong Democratic Party voter, although with great disappointment— whether they won or lost, because when they won, I was disappointed with what they did; when they lost, I was disappointed that my candidate lost.
So I’ve never been happy for a while about U.S. politics. It’s been five miserable presidents as far as I’m concerned: from Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden—awful! All of them brought us to the brink of nuclear war. I can’t forgive him for that kind of recklessness.
But when it comes to Ukraine, Harris says, “We stand with Ukraine.” Just everybody understands, what does it mean to stand with Ukraine? Like Boris Johnson stands with Ukraine? It means 2,000 Ukrainians killed or wounded severely every single day.
That's not standing with Ukraine; that is standing with the destruction of Ukraine! It's exactly the opposite, and so that's a purely Orwellian idea that we’re standing with Ukraine by continuing this war, and that's what she says because she doesn’t seem to have any idea other than what she’s told to say or she says her ideas.
And either way, I can’t vote for her, and with Trump, don't even get me started!
So the answer is, I don’t see either of them, based on what they're saying right now, doing much. But I think there’s another point that is important in this.
I’m not without hope for quite a different reason, and that is that our politics is not determined by American Presidents. Our politics is determined by the security state apparatus, and what is happening right now is not in America’s security interest.
So they could change their mind. And President Putin said something actually very interesting in an interview in 2017, I think, in Figaro, by the time that he had had three presidents as his counterparts—Bush, Obama, and Trump—and he said to this reporter, a French reporter, in 2017, he said, “You know, I’ve dealt with three American presidents now. They come into office with ideas, but then men in dark suits and blue ties come to tell them how the real situation is, and you never hear of those ideas again.”
This is from a very tough-minded leader who was himself KGB; he understands how the American system works very well. He understands what the CIA means for American foreign policy; he understands that American foreign policy is very deeply rooted.
It's not this one wins, then Obama changes everything, and then Trump comes in and changes nothing. It’s been a consistent foreign policy, arguably since 19 certainly since 1991 and arguably since 1945.
And by the way, British foreign policy is the same, and I would say arguably British foreign policy, vis-a-vis Russia, goes back to 1840.
It was around 1840 that the British government got the idea that Russia was a threat to Britain, to the British Empire, through Central Asia.
And the idea that Britain was going to—that Russia was going to invade India through the Kyber Pass became an eday fix, and it became the basis for the Crimean War in 1853 to 1856.
Russophobia basically never abated. Of course, at two junctures, Britain aligned with the Soviet Union or aligned with Russia in World War I and aligned with the Soviet Union in World War II, and the Soviet Union, of course, with 27 million dead broke the back of Hitler's army: not Britain or the United States, which take all the credit for it!
They can’t even remember; they don’t even invite the Russian leaders when Russia bore the whole brunt of fighting the vermin.
But then, as soon as— you know, in the middle of 1945 after 27 million dead in the Soviet Union and an alliance with the Soviet Union, Churchill asked the war office to consider, “What about invading the Soviet Union now, Operation Unthinkable?”
In other words, let’s continue the war; Germany just surrendered. Now we should go invade the Soviet Union! That was not put as a defensive war game; that was an actual idea of Churchill in the summer of 1945, and the United States said, “No. Actually, let’s not have another war right now.”
But that’s a kind of—that's a little weird, by the way, but that’s how Britain has thought.
So my point is these are very deep, consistent trends, and Britain taught the United States everything it knows, and we continue on the same deep trend.
And so when you ask me what the election's going to mean, what we need is that the Pentagon and the CIA and the other intelligence agencies come to understand: we’re in a multipolar world; we face a nuclear superpower in China, a nuclear superpower in Russia.
There is no meaning of victory; tragedy is not an option as far as I’m concerned for a policy. So we need a different strategy, and then somebody in a dark suit and a blue tie will come to tell whoever's president that we’re doing it differently now, and that’s what we can hope for.
Wonderful!
I think we have time for one more question, potentially two if this one is a shorter one.
But we will go—we’ll go over there in the scarf in the fifth row.
Thank you for coming to speak here today. I think a lot of what you said is the truth, and it’s refreshing to hear it.
Um, I just wondered: how would you go about dismantling these institutions of power in U.S. foreign policy? I know AIPAC, in particular, has a huge influence over not only who comes and who's elected but what they do once they are.
How would you ever go about persuading officials to cut those ties?
Yeah, so I think AIPAC, of course, is the Israel lobby. It's been extremely influential for decades; it's a significant campaign funder.
But it’s also one of the paradoxes of American power, which is that a few hundred million dollars buys tens of billions of dollars in U.S. response. Basically, our Congress sells itself for very cheap. If you have, you know, a few hundred million dollars, you too can buy American foreign policy.
So, uh, this is, uh, the ironic part of this.
What to do? My view is that this will change, actually, but I want it to change fast because the danger is very high and literally every day Netanyahu is trying to provoke a war with Iran right now, which could quickly escalate into something absolutely awful.
I think two things can change this. One is American public opinion, which I say doesn't count for very much in these issues, but is absolutely against what Israel is doing.
And this has been a shocking period. It's so vulgar; it's so out there. The bombing is so relentless. The viciousness of it is so terrible that it has shocked the American people, especially young people.
But actually, the few times I've said that on air, lots of older people have written to me indignantly saying, “I’m against Israel too! What it’s doing is terrible!”
So it’s actually a pretty widespread view.
The second thing is that world opinion is shocked, and not only world political opinion worldwide. So I hang out at the UN; Israel has no backing at the UN for what it’s doing. What it has is the U.S. veto and Europe, as usual, hiding behind the U.S. or abstaining in votes.
Even the European Union is divided because it’s so awful what’s going on that Ireland and Spain and Norway and others are recognizing the state of Palestine despite the U.S. saying, “Don’t do that!”
But on resolution after resolution, there is an overwhelming majority against Israel’s actions. There was this July an International Court of Justice ruling on the illegality of Israel’s occupation.
I think there’s likely to be an ICJ ruling in the coming months that will find, I believe, Israel to be in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention.
That also will be a shocking moment, and I think it’s likely, although you can only imagine the lobbying pressure that is being put on right now.
So these are two forces that are at play. My idea specifically is I’m urging, actually quite actively, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Arab League to put forward a specific plan now.
I believe based on international law that the only way forward that can possibly become established is a state of Palestine agreed on international law alongside a state of Israel, and that the two-state solution, which goes back to the 1947 partition plan, is enmeshed in countless UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions and the ICJ ruling, which talks about the border of the 4th of June 1967 before the Six-Day War.
So what I am urging and hoping for is that the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which is 57 Islamic majority nations, and the Arab League specifically put forward a plan for a two-state solution: peace, UN Security Council oversight of armed forces to keep the two sides apart.
I think more than normal peacekeepers, but really stationing troops basically to keep the two sides apart, and Iran saying, “Yes, we stop our aid to Hezbollah and to Hamas in the context of a state of Palestine being achieved, and the U.S. says we drop the sanctions against Iran at the same moment.”
So we put all the pieces together and say, “Voila! This is something that is of mutual benefit for everybody.”
The only one that opposes this, in my view, is the extremists in Israel represented by Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, and the other extremists in this utterly obnoxious and genocidal government that is in power in Israel right now.
And, uh, it's just one vote away, in my estimation, which is the U.S. veto.
I believe that if the security state in the United States looks honestly and dispassionately at this, if the American people understand how many wars Netanyahu has led the American people into and what a disaster this has been, that actually it's possible to change.
It's not a sure deal by any means, but I want the rest of the world to say to the United States: “You, not Israel, you are the obstacle to peace, the only obstacle remaining, because we don't need Israel's approval for this.”
Why should Israel have a veto over a state of Palestine? Of course, it has no veto in international law; it's you, the United States, that's using the veto, and I want the world to say that clearly with a plan and to be able to say to the Israeli people: “This is not about squandering your safety; it’s about actually your safety in the most fundamental way.”
Okay, I think we have time for one very quick final question.
Um, we’ll go to you on the front row there in the blue shell, the left. Thank you so much, Professor Sachs.
Uh, by your logic of nuclear war having an expected value of negative infinity, it seems that the U.S. should never interfere when a nuclear power is doing something bad.
Extending this logic, one could argue that if Nazi Germany had nuclear weapons, we should have just let them walk all over Europe.
Is there a case in which the U.S. should militarily intervene even if there is some chance of nuclear war?
The U.S. should intervene if we are attacked—that’s different.
We should not intervene to provoke. And that’s the big difference.
So let me just explain in two minutes the Ukraine war. This is not an attack by Putin on Ukraine in the way that we are told every day.
This started in 1990—February 9, 1990—James Baker III, our Secretary of State, said to M. Gorbachev: “NATO will not move one inch eastward,” if you agree to German unification, basically ending World War II.
And uh, Gorbachev said, “That’s very important. Yes, NATO doesn’t move.” And we agreed to German unification. The U.S. then cheated on this already starting in 1994 when Clinton signed off on a basically a plan to expand NATO all the way to Ukraine.
This is when the so-called neocons took power, and Clinton was the first agent of this. The expansion of NATO started in 1999 with Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic. At that point, Russia didn’t much care; there was no border other than with Kaliningrad.
But other than that, there was no direct threat. Then the U.S. led the bombing of Serbia in 1999.
That was, by the way, because that was a use of NATO to bomb a European capital, Belgrade, for 78 straight days to break the country apart.
The Russians didn’t like that very much, but Putin became president; they swallowed it. They complained, but even Putin started out pro-European, pro-American, actually asked, “Maybe we should join NATO?” when there was still the idea of some kind of mutually respectful relationship.
Then 9/11 came; then came Afghanistan. The Russians said, “Yeah, we’ll support you. We understand to root out terror,” but then came two other decisive actions.
In 2002, the United States unilaterally walked out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
This was probably the most decisive event never discussed in this context. But what it did was trigger the U.S. putting in missile systems in Eastern Europe that Russia views as a dire direct threat to national security by making possible a decapitation strike of missiles that are a few minutes away from Moscow.
And we put in two Aegis missile systems and say it’s defense. Russia says, “How do we know it’s not Tomahawk nuclear-tipped missiles in your silos?”
You told us we have nothing to do with this. And so we walked out of the ABM treaty unilaterally in 2002.
In 2003, we invaded Iraq on completely phony pretenses.
As I’ve explained in 2004 or 5, we engaged in a soft regime change operation in Ukraine—the so-called first color revolution, and it put in office somebody that I knew and I was friends with— and I’m kind of distantly friends with the president, Yushchenko, because I was an adviser to the Ukrainian government in 1993.
Then the U.S. had its dirty hands in this. It should not meddle in other countries’ elections, but in 2009 Yanukovych won the election and became president.
In 2010, on the basis of neutrality for Ukraine, that calmed things down, because the U.S. was pushing NATO, but the people of Ukraine, on the opinion polls, didn’t even want to be NATO; they knew that the country is divided between ethnic Ukrainian and ethnic Russian. What do we want with this?
We want to stay away from your problems.
So on February 22, 2014, the United States participated actively in the overthrow of Yanukovych—a typical U.S. regime change operation; have no doubt about it!
And the Russians did us a favor; they intercepted a really ugly call between Victoria Nuland, my colleague at Columbia University now, uh—and if you know her name and what she's done, have sympathy for me—really, between her and the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, who’s a senior State Department official till today.
And they talked about regime change; they said, “Who’s going to be the next government?”
“Oh, why don’t we pick this one? No, Klitschko shouldn’t go in; it should be Yatsenyuk.”
“Oh yes! It was Yatsenyuk, and we’ll get the big guy, Biden, to come in and do an attaboy!” They say, “You know, pat him on the back. It’s great.”
So they made the new government, and I happened to be invited to go there soon after that, not knowing any of the background.
Then some of it was in a very ugly way explained to me after I arrived how the U.S. had participated in this.
All of this is to say the U.S. then said, “Okay, now NATO is really going to enlarge,” and Putin kept saying, “Stop! You promised no NATO enlargement!”
It’s been—and by the way, I forgot to mention in 2004, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, seven more countries—not one inch eastward!
Then, okay, it’s a long story. But the U.S. kept rejecting the basic idea: “Don’t expand NATO to Russia’s border in a context where we’re putting in goddamn missile systems there after breaking a treaty.”
In 2019, we walked out of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty.
In 2017, we walked out of the JCPOA, the treaty with Iran.
This is the trust building! In other words, it’s completely reckless U.S. foreign policy.
On December 15, 2021, Putin put on the table a draft Russia-U.S. security agreement; you can find it online.
The basis of it is: “No NATO enlargement.” I called the White House that next week after that, begging them to take the negotiations. Putin’s offered something. Avoid this war!
“Oh Jeff, there’s not going to be a war. Announce that NATO’s not going to enlarge.”
“Oh don’t worry, NATO’s not going to enlarge!”
I said, “Oh, you’re going to have a war over something that’s not going to happen? Why don’t you announce that?”
He said, “No, no. Our policy is an open door. This is Jake Sullivan. Our policy is an open door policy. An open door for NATO enlargement.”
That is under the category of, by the way, you don’t have your right to put your military bases anywhere you want and expect peace in this world!
You have to have some prudence. There’s no such thing as an open door that we’re going to be there, and we’re going to put our missile systems there, and that’s our right!
There’s no right to that!
We declared in 1823: “Europeans, don’t come to the Western Hemisphere." That’s the Monroe Doctrine, the whole western hemisphere after all!
Okay? Anyway, they turned down the negotiations. Then the special military operation started, and five days later, Zelensky says, “Okay, okay, neutrality!”
Then the Turks said, “We’ll mediate this,” and I flew to Ankara to discuss it with the Turkish negotiators because I wanted to hear exactly what was going on.
So what was going on was they reached an agreement with a few odds and ends, and then the United States and Britain said, “No way! You guys fight on; we’ve got your back.”
We don’t have your front; you’re all going to die, but we’ve got your back. As we kept pushing them into the front lines— that’s 600,000 deaths now of Ukrainians since Boris Johnson flew to Kiev to tell them to be brave.
Absolutely ghastly!
So when you think about your question, we have to understand we’re not dealing with, as we’re told every day, with this madman like Hitler coming at us and violating this and violating that and he’s going to take over Europe!
This is complete bogus fake history that is a purely PR narrative of the U.S. government, and it doesn’t stand up at all to anyone that knows anything.
And if you try to say a word of this, I got completely cut out of the New York Times back in 2022 after writing my whole life columns for them.
Oh, I sent this.
And by the way, online—it's not even space; you know there’s no limit! They can publish 700 words; they would not publish since then 700 words for me about what I saw with my own eyes about what this war is about. They won’t do it!
We’re playing games here.
So God forbid, a nuclear power comes at us; I don’t know what’s going to happen.
The way to get out of that situation is not only to stay out of each other’s red lines but also to disarm.
We’ve got to get back to nuclear arms control.
We have a treaty to eliminate nuclear arms signed by, I think now, it’s 100 countries, and ratified by nearly 100 countries, and many others have signed, but not one nuclear power so far.
But that’s the right answer: we have to get out of this, what President Kennedy called "the Sword of Damocles"—nuclear sword of Damocles hanging over our heads, which is really the greatest risk that we face of all.
Thank you.
That is sadly—we have time for... I'll have a couple more things to say in a second, but first, I hope you all will join me in saying thank you to Professor Sachs for such an interesting [Applause]
[Music]