World-renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs tells Imran Garda he doesn’t trust the US — its intentions, foreign policy, or direction — no matter the administration. He says that the United States is steering the world toward disaster.
As he castigates America, the Columbia University professor denies that this has made him an apologist for countries like China and Russia.
Rather than Israel being an extension of US policy in the region, Sachs provocatively declares that Benjamin Netanyahu is steering American policy with Israel’s wars in Gaza, Lebanon and even had a hand in earlier wars such as Iraq.
He also argues that western countries, led by the US, and not Vladimir Putin, are ultimately to blame for starting Russia’s war in Ukraine.
An advisor to UN Secretaries General and governments around the world, Sachs gives us some personal insights into his own experience of what he says was a CIA orchestrated coup in Haiti, and how he decodes the intentions of those he is certain are taking us ever closer to global nuclear catastrophe.
Pubished on January 13, 2025 on TRT World YouTube Channel
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IMRAN GARDA: Jeffrey Sachs is a well-renowned economist and a professor at Columbia University. He’s been crucial in shaping the Sustainable Development Goals, the Millennium Development Goals, and has been an adviser to UN Secretaries-General and heads of state around the world. If you checked social media recently, you’d see he’s been quite passionate, maybe a little angry at the West—particularly the United States. So, he says, edging us closer to nuclear catastrophe. But does that mean he’s also become an apologist for autocrats and dictators? Up next on The Interview, I’ll ask Jeffrey Sachs all of that and more.
Professor Jeffrey Sachs, thanks for joining us on The Inner View.
JEFFREY SACHS: Great to be with you.
IMRAN GARDA: Thank you, good to be here in… Your apartment on the Upper West Side—it’s lovely. I’ve been, uh, perusing your books on your bookshelf. I noticed quite a few on nuclear war. I see Annie Jacobson’s there over your shoulder, Nuclear War, a couple of others. Tell me why it’s so urgent for you, when it doesn’t seem to be urgent for others, particularly those in power.
JEFFREY SACHS: Let me start with something called the Doomsday Clock. The Doomsday Clock is what the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists started putting out in 1947 at the start of the atomic age. Now, of course, we’re in the thermonuclear era. But they said, “We’re close to disaster. We could destroy all of humanity. We could blow up the world.” And they put forward a clock as a graphic: how close or how far are we from nuclear disaster?
When the Doomsday Clock was first unveiled in 1947, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists—these experts in the atomic age—put the minute hand at 7 minutes away from midnight.
Oh my God—midnight being nuclear Armageddon. Seven minutes. They were telling us a message: that we’re in the Cold War, we have the beginnings of a nuclear arms race because Russia was about to get the bomb too, and then there was going to be a huge arms race, and then came the H-bomb, so-called, and so forth.
Now, what has happened in the last, uh, 30 years, basically? We went farther away during periods of détente; we went closer during periods of crisis. But since 1992, every U.S. president, in my view—and according to the clock—has been in an administration where, by the end of the term, the minute hand or the second hand is closer to nuclear Armageddon than it was when the president came into office.
Where are we today, according to the Doomsday Clock? 90 seconds from midnight. This means, according to this expert view—with which I concur—we are closer to nuclear war than we have ever been in human history.
You mentioned Annie Jacobson’s book, Nuclear War: A Scenario. This is a short book about a short war. It takes about two hours for the world to end in this technical scenario that this superb reporter lays out meticulously, second by second. She interviewed all the atomic scientists who would talk on the record. She interviewed former Pentagon officials, former CIA officials, and so forth.
What are the plans? What are the plans for fighting a nuclear war? What is known? What could happen? And in her terrifying book—and by the way, I listened to it as an audiobook, with her narrating it—oh, in this meticulous, clipped language, the world comes to an end in two hours. And this is the realistic scenario as understood by U.S. leaders.
Now, I’ve been around for some decades. I’ve advised dozens and dozens of heads of state and Secretaries-General of the UN. And I know a lot of these people—some have been my students. I’m not overwhelmed at their intelligence and their prudence, at their ability to keep us away from disaster. In fact, to a significant extent, I am not only underwhelmed.
I watch U.S. foreign policy very close up. I watch it not only from the perspective of an expert in the United States but from my peregrinations around the world, which is non-stop because my job is around the world. And I don’t trust the United States at all. I don’t trust the judgment. I don’t trust how they act. I don’t trust U.S. policies, and I think they are bringing us more and more to disaster. Why? Because there’s a certain arrogance. And I learned about this as a kid, when J. William Fulbright, who was a great senator of the United States and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the 1960s during the Vietnam War—stupidity and debacle of the United States—wrote a book called The Arrogance of Power.
I remember holding it to this moment as a kid. And he said, “Our government—the U.S.” (he was the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee)—”are so arrogant that they’re creating wars and that they’re creating bigger and bigger risks.”
Well, I guess I absorbed that message. That was more than 50 years ago, by the way—basically, uh, 60 years ago just now. And I’ve watched closely, and I have studied these issues, I’d say, pretty meticulously. I’ve read and spoken and discussed with people—with heads of state. I don’t trust the United States. That’s the basic point.
IMRAN GARDA: But if we say that the United States—if we go with, say, a gangster analogy—as the superpower with all this imperial hubris, yes, they are responsible for a lot of crimes, a lot of downstream effects. They have been for decades. (I hope they don’t revoke my visa for what I’m saying!)
JEFFREY SACHS: I don’t know about your visa—what about me?
IMRAN GARDA: But what about the other gangsters? Because there are other gangsters. They might be smaller gangsters. Maybe they have fewer crimes because of lack of opportunity rather than because of a greater morality than the United States, perhaps.
When you focus on the crimes of the superpower—and you’ve been accused of this—does it make you an apologist for the Chinese, an apologist for the Russians? Tell me, tell me why we shouldn’t also focus on their very well-documented crimes and the effects of those as well.
JEFFREY SACHS: First, if we look at things quantitatively, the biggest gangster of the 19th century was Britain. By far. They just loved their empire, and they commanded around 25% of the world’s territory at the height of the British Empire. There is a well-known, semi-humorous but quite serious book documenting the 23 countries that Britain never invaded, meaning that Britain invaded almost the whole world. Britain made provocations; Britain made wars everywhere.
I feel the United States learned, you know, sitting on Britain’s knee. Everything we know about empire, we learned from Britain. And there was almost a handover of the baton from Britain to the United States—from Churchill, basically, to Truman, I would say, at the end of World War II. And the megalomania took a big jump in the United States.
Dean Acheson, one of our top diplomats, wrote his memoirs called Present at the Creation. Okay, well, it’s a little bit of the mindset—“the creation.” This was, of course, what it meant: the beginning of the American-led world.
Quantitatively, the U.S. absolutely is different and absolutely has a foreign policy that is different from all other countries. What other country has 750 overseas military bases?
IMRAN GARDA: Why did they put their countries next to the U.S. bases?
JEFFREY SACHS: That’s exactly right! You look at that map of China surrounded by the U.S. military bases with that question practically coming out of the map.
The military bases are everywhere. That’s distinctive. The country number two, by the way, with the most military bases to this day? It’s not China or Russia—these big, populous countries. It’s Britain. Because of legacy. Britain still owns, still runs all these islands where they have naval bases, listening systems, and so forth around the world. Of course, it’s not a great power anymore, but it still has more than 100 overseas military bases.
How many overseas military bases does China have? It’s debated. There’s one for sure—in Djibouti, a kind of naval repair base. It’s argued there might be two or three or four, possibly.
The U.S.? 750.
So this is quantitatively something different. The U.S. exercises its power in a unique way: covert regime change. Covert regime change is basically CIA operations. The CIA was created in 1947. There’s an excellent book by a scholar named Lindsay O’Rourke at Boston College, written in 2017. She’s a student of our great political scientist John Mearsheimer, and she counts 64 covert regime change operations between 1947 and 1989.
She stops at the end of the—well, the purported end of the Cold War. (We now know it never ended.) But she stops in 1989 because she says, “I can get the documentary record till then.” I happen to know firsthand many others, and we know of many others since then. What other country does that at this scale? It’s unbelievable.
IMRAN GARDA: Can’t two things be true at the same time? So, we can say that the CIA helped overthrow the Shah, for example, in Iran. But that doesn’t mean—
JEFFREY SACHS: By the way, one thing that’s interesting to just say about it… These are covert regime change operations. A little weird, of course—the regime change is obvious. Of course, the moment it happens, everyone says, “The United States.” So, what’s covert about it? What’s covert about it is the United States says, “No, we didn’t do it.”
IMRAN GARDA: No responsibility.
JEFFREY SACHS: “We didn’t do it.” And then everyone looks around and says, “Well, we’re pretty sure you did it, but we can’t say you did it.”
“We can’t prove you did it.”
Or even if you can prove it, “we better not say you did it.”
So, there’s nothing really covert about it. Sometimes it’s so absurd. It’s so tragic.
I’ll give you an example. There was a president of Haiti that I liked, Aristide. He said to me in 2001, as I was in his office in Port-au-Prince, Haiti:
“Jeff, they’re going to get me.”
I’m always a little naive, so I said, “No, Mr. President, they’re not going to get you, and I’m going to help you, and everything’s going to be fine.”
Then, in 2002–2003, you watch the Bush Administration:
- No IMF loans for Haiti.
- No World Bank loans for Haiti.
- Turn off the Inter-American Development Bank.
This is the way you start tightening. Add sanctions. Squeeze the finances. Then the economy is cratering. But he stays in power—he’s got a strong political base.
One day, literally, the U.S. ambassador walks to his house and says:
“I need to save your life because otherwise your life is at risk. There’s an insurrection underway. So come with me.”
And they guide him to an unmarked plane—no tail markings. They put him on the plane. Twenty-three hours later, he’s in the Central African Republic.
Ah, so there’s a coup in broad daylight.
I called a New York Times reporter, and I said:
“Could you cover this? You know, the U.S. just overthrew the Haitian government.”
The reporter on the beat said:
“Jeff, my editor is not interested in it.”
So, this is a game, and it’s a very, very serious game. And it’s getting us closer and closer to annihilation. Because Haiti is one thing. Ukraine is another thing.
In Ukraine, we know that in late January 2014, you have Victoria Nuland—now my colleague at Columbia University—on the phone with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt (who is still a senior State Department official).
“Okay, who’s the new government going to be?”
“Yeah, maybe Klitsch? No, not Klitsch, he should stay out. I think Yats… Yatsenyuk. Yatsenyuk, he’s the guy.”
They discuss who they’re going to put in for the new government. And on February 22nd, a few weeks later, it’s Yats. It’s Yatsenyuk. He becomes the new prime minister.
The U.S. is part of yet another coup. And by the way, that’s the start of the Ukraine war. That’s literally the start of the Ukraine war.
The war didn’t start February 2022. It started in 2014.
IMRAN GARDA: But there are still thousands of Ukrainians who say, “We had very legitimate reasons to go to Maidan against Yanukovych. We were there because we… yeah, we didn’t like our government.”
JEFFREY SACHS: That’s correct.
IMRAN GARDA: So the point being that two things could be true at the same time, right?
JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah, but you know, my view is that the United States should have nothing to do with overthrowing another government. Period.
And if you’re overthrowing another government because you have a plan to put your military in that country—which has been the U.S. plan since 1994—it raises the stakes a little more.
And if you’re putting in a military base next to the other nuclear superpower, you might say, “Not the best idea.”
If you do that, knowing—as I do—how many senior diplomats told the politicians:
“Don’t do that. Don’t do that. This could be a disaster. This could lead to war.”
And not just run-of-the-mill people. I’m talking about:
- George Kennan saying this in 1997, in 1998: “This could be the most consequential disaster.”
- Jack Matlock, who was U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union.
- Bill Perry, who was Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense.
I know these people. And they know:
“Do not overthrow a Ukrainian government so that you can move NATO forward and expect you’re going to have a good outcome.”
So that’s why I say: I don’t trust the Americans.
IMRAN GARDA: No, and that’s very clear. I want to come back to this through Netanyahu and Israel. Do you want him to face accountability for the crimes in Gaza—the bombing, the slaughter of thousands of people?
JEFFREY SACHS: Of course. And it is brave and right of the International Criminal Court to have indicted him. Absolutely.
IMRAN GARDA: And do you see him as an extension of U.S. policy in the region?
JEFFREY SACHS: No, I see the U.S. as an extension of Netanyahu’s policy.
IMRAN GARDA: You’re lucky you’re Jewish—they’d call you an anti-Semite.
JEFFREY SACHS: Well, they can call me anything they want, but I can tell you the truth. And I’ll tell you the truth, by the way. The truth is that Netanyahu said in 1996, in a book which I recently reread called Fighting Terrorism, he laid out the whole plan. And this, by the way, is quite interesting. It’s just advice to any listeners: usually, when there are terrible plans, they don’t hide them.
Hitler wrote Mein Kampf. And I’m not meaning to make simplistic comparisons—I’m just making the point that people say what they’re going to do.
And in a different sphere—and again, please don’t misunderstand, because every time you say one, it’s a kerfuffle that people misunderstand—but Netanyahu wrote in 1996 his plan for how he was going to make Israel safe.
Brzezinski wrote in 1997 a different book called The Grand Chessboard, about how he was going to make the United States the world’s unipolar power. So, they write the story, and you can go back and evaluate:
- Did they know what they were talking about?
- Are they full of BS?
- Did they cause a lot of trouble?
On Two Points:
- Brzezinski in 1997 says:
“The U.S. can expand NATO. Russia will have no choice but to accede. What’s Russia going to do? Is it going to become an ally of China? No way,” says Brzezinski.
Okay, interesting—didn’t quite get that one right, Brzezinski. - Netanyahu has a different idea.
And it’s coherent, but it’s kind of madness.
His idea is:
“We captured the Palestinian lands in 1967, and we’re never going to give them back.”
There are really two schools of thought among the extremists in Israel. I don’t think Netanyahu—I don’t know what his religious views are, actually, and I don’t care. But anyway, his position is:
“I’m not going to give it back because it would be unsafe for Israel to give it back. So we’re just going to rule over the Palestinians.”
There’s a second take, which says:
“We’re not going to give it back because God, in the year 700 BC—or in the year 1,000 BC, but written in a book (The Book of Joshua) in the year 700 BC—told us it’s ours.”
And there are people that absolutely believe that as well.
Both of these groups are now in an alliance in this most extremist Israeli government.
But going back to 1996, Netanyahu spells out very clearly the following story:
He says, “We’re going to keep the land. There will be resistance—Hamas, Hezbollah, other militant resistance. What will we do about it? You can’t really fight the terrorists,” he says. “You have to fight the states that back the terrorists.”
IMRAN GARDA: And Iran is the central one in his mind.
JEFFREY SACHS: But interestingly for Netanyahu, he lays it out one by one. Yes, of course, Iran is the central one in his mind, but so too is Iraq under Saddam—he supported Hamas. So too is Bashar al-Assad in Syria. So too is Somalia. So too is Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. So too is the government in Sudan. So too is Lebanon.
He laid it out. He, at various times, named and listed the countries.
One list that showed up in the Pentagon just after 9/11 was seven countries: Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, and Libya.
And you know what the plan was? Seven wars in five years.
Is this the U.S. using Israel? No, no, no—this is Israel using the U.S. as if our military is in their hands, which in effect it is. You take Wolfowitz, you take Feith, you take these neocons, and you take Netanyahu—they game-planned the whole thing out.
I regard Netanyahu as having been our greatest disastrous president of the 21st century because he ran American foreign policy for 20 years, and he cost us trillions of dollars.
And where is the Middle East today?
War in Syria.
War in Lebanon.
War in Palestine.
Unrest in Iraq.
The war in Yemen.
Chaos in Sudan.
Chaos in Somalia.
Chaos in Libya.
Great job, Bibi. You did a terrific job!
To my mind, this is what it’s all about. These people have ideas, and these ideas are absolutely dangerous.
IMRAN GARDA: We’re running out of time, so I want to keep this brief. But you’re not willing to accept Netanyahu’s justification for what he’s doing in Gaza? Willing to accept that he’s fighting Hamas and he’s fighting terrorism?
JEFFREY SACHS: By the way, what I believe in—since Resolution 242 in the fall of 1967—is a state of Palestine living alongside a state of Israel.
IMRAN GARDA: You want a two-state solution.
JEFFREY SACHS: Yes.
IMRAN GARDA: You’re not willing to take Netanyahu’s justifications for massacres and war crimes, possibly even genocide. Why does it seem as if you’re willing to take the justifications of Putin vis-à-vis Ukraine, of China in Xinjiang and the Uyghurs, or of Bashar al-Assad saying he’s fighting terrorism while he’s barrel-bombing Syrian people? Why are you so partial to their justifications but not Netanyahu’s?
JEFFREY SACHS: First of all, because I know that most of these things—like Xinjiang—are Western blah, blah, blah narrative.
IMRAN GARDA: What do you mean by that?
JEFFREY SACHS: What I mean by that is that there are tens of thousands of people being slaughtered in Gaza, and there is not even one story about murders in Xinjiang.
IMRAN GARDA: But you accept that some bad things are happening?
JEFFREY SACHS: It could be bad things. But to call that a genocide, while an actual genocide is being made in Gaza, is a game of Western narratives.
You take our current story in the United States of warlike China. How many wars has China been in over the last 40 years? Let me count them: Zero. Not one war in 40 years.
When was the most recent war that China was in? January 16 to February 16, 1979. One month in a conflict with Vietnam, which had to do, actually, with Vietnam overthrowing a government in Cambodia. One month.
We are not at dire risk from China. China is not mass-murdering its population, but we are gearing up in the United States for war with China. Why?
Once again, people actually wrote why. You have to know where to look, but if you look at the Council on Foreign Relations, an article by a former colleague of mine, Robert Blackwill, and Ashley Tellis in 2015, they say:
“China has become so powerful that it threatens American primacy. China’s rise is no longer in America’s interest.”
And so, you watch this mentality in the U.S. go into effect. Suddenly, because China is economically successful—they’re not just economically successful, they’re the enemy. So everything becomes rhetoric.
In the case of Ukraine, which I have followed from 1990 as an advisor not only to Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin but also as an advisor to President Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine—I was advising the Ukrainian government in 1994—I’m not against Ukraine in any way.
I’m against using Ukraine and Ukrainians being slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands because the United States wants to move another piece on the board to have its military bases on the border of Russia.
And why, by the way? Because, again, there’s a whole telltale line of reasoning: just like the Soviet Union broke up, we can induce Russia to break up along ethnic lines. This is a meme of Washington. These people are out of their minds to be provoking us toward nuclear war this way.
IMRAN GARDA: Professor Jeffrey Sachs, we didn’t even get to talk about the world economy. Maybe next time.
JEFFREY SACHS: I hope we can sometime.
IMRAN GARDA: PThank you so much for joining us.
JEFFREY SACHS: Thanks a lot.
IMRAN GARDA: Much appreciated.
