Professor Jeffrey Sachs + Q&A at Cambridge Union | Transcript

Professor Jeffrey Sachs delivers a speech and Q&A at 6pm in the Debating Chamber on Tuesday 22nd October 2024.

Jeffrey gives a short speech about “whether there can ever truly be a liberal international order?” followed by a few questions from Speakers Officer Alex Mitchell and then further questions from members of the audience.

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ALEX MITCHELL: Tonight’s guest is a University professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He directed the Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He has been a special adviser to three United Nations Secretaries-General and currently serves as a Sustainable Development Goals Advocate under Secretary-General António 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 will begin 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]

Can there ever truly be a liberal international order?

SACHS: What did you say I’m going to talk about?

ALEX MITCHELL: Whether there can ever be a liberal international order?

SACHS: Thank you. Good. I absolutely refused to hear the question before I entered the room, so that’s a good topic. What kind of international order or disorder are we 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 and very dangerous change right now, and I’m here to tell you about the need to lead a safe way out of this. For some reason, the current generation of politicians running the world is not very prudent, not very wise, and is not leading us to safety. We’re in an extraordinarily dangerous time, but this is not intrinsic to our circumstances. With the same conditions, we could view our situation as wonderfully promising and exciting—a time when the whole world could achieve very big things. We need to 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 are bound to have pretty much the same outcome: either a good outcome or a disaster. The old ideas that it’s really important who sets the rules or who wins the wars are very outmoded. They’re outmoded for two fundamental reasons.

1) We simply cannot go on with the kind of wars that we have, which threaten our very survival every day. We are in the nuclear age, with conflicts among nuclear powers that put us at risk of annihilation. This is unprecedented in human history. As a species, we seem prone to war—it has been a part of human existence. But things are different now. President John F. Kennedy, in his inaugural address, famously said, “We hold in our mortal hands the ability to end all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.” That was 1961, but this remains our most significant issue today. Every day we are perilously close to disaster because we are not properly led, and our ideas about the international order are hopelessly outdated.

2) We are so interconnected now that the idea of winners and losers on a planet like ours makes no sense. Perhaps it made sense in earlier eras, even if it was immoral, but today it’s simply untenable. With so much daily interaction across the globe, and with complex global-scale interactions and environmental stresses threatening disaster for everyone, it is impossible for half the world to thrive while the other half struggles to survive. This is an old idea that must be discarded.

One of the older, more disastrous ideas originated in England in 1798 with Thomas Malthus. He posed a real problem but came to the wrong conclusion. He argued there wasn’t enough to go around, and that humanity was doomed to poverty. His theory suggested that anytime we climbed above subsistence, population growth would drive us back down. Charles Darwin found inspiration in Malthus’ Principles of Population, which led to the concept of natural selection. This thinking evolved into social Darwinism, fostering the notion of nations or races in constant struggle for survival.

This idea is fundamentally wrong, and we can pinpoint the reasons. Malthus assumed that wealthier people would have more surviving children due to improved living conditions. However, he failed to anticipate modern contraceptives and cultural shifts. In high-income societies, higher incomes correlate with lower fertility rates, often below the replacement level. In fact, in many places today, ten mothers collectively have only seven daughters, leading to declining populations.

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 he couldn’t envision. The legacy of that idea, however, is that we are in a struggle—it’s us or them. The most horrific vision of this came from Hitler, who believed in the need for “Lebensraum” (living space) because otherwise, the German Aryan people would not survive. His idea was that Germany needed to conquer the lands of the Slavs to the east.

This wasn’t just madness; it was a structured ideology, widely circulated among German social thinkers and scientists in the early 1900s. Hitler picked it up from German scientists, who had picked it up from social Darwinists in the United States, who had in turn derived it from Darwin, who was influenced by Malthus. This lineage of ideas, while wrong, shaped dangerous and destructive policies.

Thank goodness this is wrong. We are not in a struggle between the US and China—there’s no basis for it. We’re not in an intrinsic war between the US and Russia either. Russia, despite what is often said, truly does not want more land—it already spans 11 time zones. The war is about entirely different issues than what is reported in newspapers every day. These narratives often originate from US defense and intelligence establishments and are completely misleading.

The international order is extremely dangerous right now. We are packed with nuclear weapons, on the brink of environmental disaster, and led by individuals who, to put it politely, are not up to the challenges we face. They are failing to properly address the crises before us.

On a lighter note, being here is a bit of a relief for me. Yesterday, at the Oxford Union, I couldn’t help but think about Boris Johnson having been its president. But here, at the Cambridge Union, I feel much more at home, especially under Keynes’s presidency. That said, Boris Johnson represents one of the most disastrous political figures of our age. He has done profound disservice to the world and continues to pose a danger. This isn’t a partisan statement; it’s a reflection on how recklessly some leaders play with our lives.

To answer the question, can we have an international order that is peaceful, secure, and improves global well-being? The answer is absolutely yes. Is that what we have right now? Absolutely not. Do we have the means to achieve it? Yes, we do.

For most of my professional life, I’ve believed we could make the United Nations fulfill its purpose. That’s why I’ve devoted the last 25 years to working with the UN, mostly on a voluntary basis. I believe it’s our best hope for creating a global order that is peaceful, sustainable, and equitable.

Right now, the UN isn’t working. This doesn’t make me cynical, but it does make me sad. I understand why it doesn’t work: it was set up in 1945 with the great powers having a veto. This remains the most debilitating feature of the UN. If the General Assembly, flawed as it is, had enforceable legal authority, the world would be in a much better place.

Reforming the UN is achievable, and the recent Summit of the Future at the UN has put forward promising ideas for reform. I firmly believe in a system of international governance based on peace, sustainable development, and human rights. It’s not an unattainable dream; we are closer than it might seem.

The main challenge, as I see it, is helping leaders in Washington understand that we are in a different world. We don’t need US leadership in the sense of dominance; we need US decency and cooperation.

That’s all I wanted to say to begin with. Thank you for the question.

[Applause]

Jeffrey Sachs in conversation with Alex Mitchell

ALEX MITCHELL: Thank you so much for that. I thought it was really fascinating. What we’re going to do now is I’ll ask a few questions, and then we’ll open it up to the audience.

To start, I wanted to ask about your academic background in development. Why do you think foreign aid has lost prominence in discussions since 2008, particularly in Western countries like the UK, where it has been reduced to 0.5% of GDP? Why is there such reluctance to recognize its importance compared to changing governmental structures in developing countries?

SACHS: Great question. I trained as an economist in international finance, not specifically in development. The greatest influence on me—and it remains so—was John Maynard Keynes. Not so much his macroeconomics, though I loved that when I first learned it. It was thrilling to think you could turn the dials to keep the economy at full employment. But what really shaped my thinking was his Economic Consequences of the Peace in 1919.

That remarkable essay was written when Keynes was an unhappy member of the British delegation to the Treaty of Versailles negotiations. In the book, he argued that the harsh terms of the treaty—war reparations, inter-Allied debts—would create chaos. Keynes was prophetic. He predicted that imposing this ‘Carthaginian peace’ would lead to the rise of monsters in the next generation.

His insights were powerful, and his writing was brilliant. It made a lasting impression on me.

So, I started out in finance, and when I began to be active in problem-solving, 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.

I think there was another senior person, but I stood up in the middle of it and said, “That’s actually not how hyperinflation works.” You know, I knew all the theoretical papers, 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.”

Secretly, I had to go home to look on a map where Bolivia was. I had no idea. I knew—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. At the time, it had the seventh-highest hyperinflation that had occurred on the planet—there have been several more since then. I was able to use standard monetary economics to end the hyperinflation, and as soon as it ended, the IMF said, “Okay, now Bolivia has to start paying debt that it hasn’t been paying up until now.”

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.” Keynes said, “Don’t be mean. Don’t be vindictive. Be nice to people that are in need.”

I ended up finding 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, to all intents and purposes. He said, “Sachs is right. Why don’t we try to forgive some of this debt?” In the end, Bolivia got a big debt relief, and the stabilization held.

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.

That’s how I got involved in Russian and Ukrainian issues back then. But my idea all along was to 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 unsordid event in history. I believed the Marshall Plan was a completely altruistic, wonderful act of the United States after World War II to rebuild Europe. 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 a dark side to it. It helped to fund CIA operations and did many other things, so it’s not a completely unsordid act. But it was an effective act anyway, and it helped to restart the European economies.

All of this is to say, I believed: what’s wrong with a little transfer from a very rich world to poor people? I basically believed that all my life. For a long time, I tried to raise development assistance. I worked with Bono in 2005 at Gleneagles for the Make Poverty History campaign, 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.

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, and then they can go on with their own development. It’s not all charity; it’s just a little bit of help 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.

There is a trap, and it still applies to many places in the world. Even if it’s not literally a trap of poverty, poor countries could find their way out much faster, with much less suffering, and with much more productive lives if we helped.

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 or understand growing up. I knew things weren’t right because I marched against the Vietnam War in the 1960s as a high school student. But I did not appreciate the darkness of much of American foreign policy, 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 want to decondition—to take away the stimulus-response—you can go cold turkey, and then the response doesn’t work. There is fade-out 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 mention this because, in my career, every once in a while, the US 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. I stopped going to Washington and talking about development aid in Washington probably about 10 years ago.

Imagine—we’re not in 19th-century Britain ruling the seas, which was the 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 on for about eight hours on that—and maybe it’s worth five minutes—but we provoked the war in Ukraine, absolutely, surely. 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. 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. I don’t think the word diplomacy is mentioned one time.

So, the first thing is, John says—Professor Mearsheimer 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 US and China.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he says. “It’s actually likely, or it’s possible. Maybe we could avoid it, but it’s quite possible.”

He said, “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 not to cooperate. If the other side cooperates, you cheat and you win. If the other side doesn’t cooperate, you certainly don’t play the sucker. So, you end up with non-cooperative, non-cooperative outcomes, and you’re off to the races in war. That’s Game Theory.

This is what’s taught at RAND. This is what the people in Washington think. That’s how they play, and that’s how they talk. The fact is, though, if you put real people—non-economics students, real people—into an experimental game, they cooperate half the time, three-quarters of the time. And then, wonder of wonders, you let the two people talk beforehand—not to make a binding agreement, just to chat, like, “Hey, why don’t we both cooperate?” 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 who can actually function as a president in the future—actually talk to President Putin? 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 in Game Theory that’s very important, called the Folk Theorem. It states that if you’re in repeated play of the Prisoner’s Dilemma and there’s no set terminal date, then you should cooperate. Why? Because you don’t want to mess up trust between the two sides. You’re also playing against future actions, and you want to show that you’re trustworthy and can gain from cooperation period after period. That’s another way to sustain a good outcome in a Prisoner’s Dilemma.

I view international relations theory, realist theory, as essentially being the Prisoner’s Dilemma—or the Hobbesian Dilemma—of nation-states in an anarchic environment. 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.

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. That was the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

First of all, Kennedy rejected the advice of all his advisers except one. They all said, “Go bomb these sites in Cuba.” In retrospect, we almost surely would not be here talking today had we done that. But Kennedy was much more cautious. 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 for disaster. We can both pull back. And that’s what they ended up doing.

That was October 1962. In 1963, Kennedy launched a campaign for peace that led to the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, signed with the Soviet Union in July 1963. I believe it culminated in Kennedy’s assassination. There were enough people in the U.S. government who didn’t like his peace initiatives. I think it was an inside job, and I think the evidence grows all the time to support that.

But in any event, Kennedy’s idea was: The two sides can make peace. When he said that, he said it in the most beautiful terms. His speechwriter was a gifted, gifted person named Theodore Sorensen. I was lucky enough to get to know Sorensen because he lived in our neighborhood when I came to Columbia University.

Sorensen’s words were eloquent and beautiful—beyond imagination. We can make peace—even with the Soviet Union—even at the height of the Cold War. Kennedy expressed this so beautifully that when Khrushchev heard the speech, he immediately called the American envoy, Averell Harriman, and said, “I want to make peace with your president,” because he was inspired by Kennedy’s words. And they made peace. That treaty lasted, and it led to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty five years later. It changed the world.

That’s the optimistic side—go for peace.

Instead, this awful president of ours, when he could still function, was terrible. Biden. All he could do was insult Putin at every moment. How are you going to make peace if all you do is throw insults at the leader of a country with 6,000 nuclear warheads? This is crazy. It’s reckless.

Washington is filled with people like this—people playing Game Theory, convinced they know exactly what Putin is going to do, and who think we have no alternative but to increase our military. This woman, Carlin, who was a senior official under Biden in the Defense Department and wrote that article, says, “We have no choice but to deter through building our military.” She doesn’t even mention the idea of diplomacy with China.

This woman is an ignoramus. I’m sorry. I’ve been to China at least 100 times. There’s no intrinsic battle with China—none whatsoever. China isn’t out to defeat the U.S., and it couldn’t do so in a million years anyway. We’d all perish.

China has never, not even once, invaded a country overseas in its entire history of 2,245 years since the Qin Empire unified China in 221 BCE. Did they ever invade Japan? Not once. Did they ever invade Korea? Not once. Did they ever invade Vietnam? Yes—17 years out of 2,000 years: 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—the British Empire—the most militarized society imaginable. Unfortunately, the leaders of this country—whether it’s the U.S. or Britain—don’t seem to understand anything else. And it doesn’t matter which party is in power. Starmer is as bad as Boris Johnson. All they know is military solutions.

It’s unbelievable. What’s the first thing Starmer does when he becomes Prime Minister? He goes to Kyiv to pledge the endless support of the U.S.—because Britain doesn’t do anything on its own—for the defeat of Russia. Then he flies across the Atlantic to try to convince Biden to authorize deep strikes inside Russia.

That’s really a clever thing to do, especially since Putin has already said, “If that happens, we’d be at war with each other, and we’d be forced to reconsider our nuclear strategy.”

And then we have our CIA director. This would be great material for the West End theater, by the way, because it’s pure parody. The CIA director meets with the MI6 director on stage recently and says, “Oh, don’t worry about Putin’s bluff.”

Well, my advice is this: If you’re going to say that, say it 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 my answer. I don’t even remember what you asked me, but there it is.

Audience Q&A

ALEX MITCHELL: Thank you very much. We’re going to try and have some time for a few audience questions. I appreciate we’re running into late time, but if you just stick your hand up—I already see lots around—just wait until you get a microphone and ask your question.

“Here in the suit in the second row?”

“Yes, please stand up.”

QUESTION #1: “Thank you. Thank you very much. That was quite remarkable. It definitely isn’t sort of the mainstream opinion, I guess. 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 a leader. But there is kind of a struggle—not between us and China, but between democracy and dictatorship in various countries, economies, and circles. The United States is at the forefront of that, at least in economic terms.

And of course, with dictatorships now becoming a lot more sustainable—they’re not obsessed with self-subsistence anymore, they’re all trading with each other—is there any way in which there is still a fight on our hands when it comes to politics?”

SACHS: 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—authoritatively and truly—they lie about every goddamn thing about these wars. So, that’s not democracy either. Everything is phony. Everything is narrative.

On the war-and-peace issues, the public has no say at all. 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. 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. 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 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 ten 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 under 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, ran those focus groups.

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 them. It was a phony war.

Where did that war come from? It’s quite surprising. That war came from Netanyahu, actually. You know that? It’s weird, but the way it happened is that Netanyahu had, from 1995 onward, the theory that the only way to get rid of Hamas and Hezbollah was by toppling the governments that support them: Iraq, Syria, and Iran.

The guy’s nothing if not obsessive. And he’s still trying to get us to fight Iran to this day—this week. He’s a deep, dark son of a bitch, sorry to tell you, because he’s gotten us into endless wars. And because of his influence on U.S. politics, he’s gotten his way.

That war was totally phony.

So, what is this “democracy versus dictatorship”? Come on. These are not even sensible terms. Even if they were, under the UN Charter, we can have our democracy, and you can 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 between dynasties, but if you look through the Qin, the Han, the Tang, the Song, the Ming, the Qing, and today’s PRC, it’s the same structure. By the way, this is an administrative state ruling over almost the same region for more than 2,000 years.

And, by the way, it has been wondrously effective for a long time at keeping internal peace. China’s only wars were nomadic invasions from the steppes in the north—then the Mongols invading part of that—and one absolutely crazed shogun in the 1590s trying to take over China. He made it as far as Korea before being 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. That started the modern era of China.

So, I don’t buy this “democracy versus dictatorship” framing at all. But even if it were true, it’s illegal under international law, unwise, and laughably hypocritical. Look at the great accomplishment of pouring 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.

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They don’t care about democracy at all. They topple governments they don’t like—whether democratic or not. They’ll topple anyone who doesn’t do their bidding. That’s how it has always worked. They didn’t hesitate in 1953 to topple Mohammad Mosaddegh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran. They overthrew a democracy and installed a police state, leading to a wonderfully warm relationship with Iran for decades afterward. The Iranian people, of course, just love America for that.

This is not about democracy. It’s a game—a terrible, secretive game—played by the CIA, which is the most important agency in the United States because it operates with complete secrecy and unaccountability. There was one review of the CIA, 49 years ago, by the Church Committee. Nothing since then.

And as one of our CIA directors—who I was going to call “one of the worst,” but they’re all the same by the time they get there, or by the time they leave—Mike Pompeo, proudly explaining the role of the CIA to some Texas students a few years ago, said (and you can find this online): “What do we teach at the CIA? To lie, cheat, and steal.”

And that’s a pretty good encapsulation of the methodology. That approach is creating a very dangerous world.

China is not going to turn the U.S. into a dictatorship. If the U.S. becomes a dictatorship—or turns into a plutocracy or a full-fledged military-industrial state—it’s not going to come from China. It’s going to come from inside. That’s where the real risk is.

ALEX MITCHELL: “Let’s go there, in the orange jumper.”

QUESTION #2: Thank you. I have a very simple question: What is your view on the upcoming U.S. election, and who do you think will, let’s say, make the situation better for all of us?. Thank you.

SACHS: Somebody else might answer differently, but I’m a firm non-voter in November. Sorry to say, that’s not the high-principled view everyone is supposed to have—you know, “cherish your vote” and all that—but I will not vote for a candidate that doesn’t meet the minimum threshold for being President of the United States.

We have two lead candidates, and neither of them meets that threshold. So, I’ve decided I’m not voting. Period. I want a candidate who actually has some possibility of doing something meaningful. Maybe they will, but not based on what they say every day. Every day, it’s just a profession of love for Israel’s murderous reign in the Middle East.

By itself, that’s enough for me not to support them. Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. It’s sickening, it’s obvious, and we see it every day. If a candidate can’t figure out how to say something about that, I can’t support them. Period.

Then there’s Kamala Harris, who would normally be my candidate because I’ve been a lifelong Democratic Party voter—although with great disappointment, whether they win or lose. When they win, I’m disappointed with what they do. When they lose, I’m disappointed that my candidate lost.

I haven’t been happy with U.S. politics for a long time. It’s been five miserable presidents as far as I’m concerned: Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden. Awful—all of them. They’ve brought us to the brink of nuclear war. I can’t forgive them for that kind of recklessness.

But when it comes to Ukraine, Harris says, “We stand with Ukraine.” Just so everybody understands, what does it mean to “stand with Ukraine,” like Boris Johnson stands with Ukraine? It means 2,000 Ukrainians killed or severely wounded every single day.

That’s not standing with Ukraine—that is standing with the destruction of Ukraine. It’s exactly the opposite. This is a purely Orwellian idea, that we’re “standing with Ukraine” by continuing this war. That’s what Kamala Harris says, because she doesn’t seem to have any idea other than what she’s told to say—or she says her own ideas, and either way, I can’t vote for her.

And 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’s important here. I’m not without hope, and for a very different reason. Our politics is not determined by American presidents. It’s determined by the security state apparatus. What’s happening right now is not in America’s security interest, and so they could change their mind.

President Putin said something very interesting in an interview in 2017—I think it was in Le Figaro. By that time, he had dealt with three American presidents: Bush, Obama, and Trump. He said to this French reporter, “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 comes 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 a case of one president winning, then Obama comes in and changes everything, and then Trump comes in and changes it again. Nothing like that.

By the way, this has been a consistent foreign policy arguably since 1991, and certainly since 1945. And British foreign policy is the same. In fact, arguably, British foreign policy toward Russia goes back to 1840.

Around 1840, the British government got the idea that Russia was a threat to the British Empire through Central Asia—the notion that Russia was going to invade India through the Khyber Pass. This became an idée fixe and the basis for the Crimean War of 1853–1856. Russophobia never really abated.

Of course, there were two major junctures when Britain aligned with Russia or the Soviet Union: World War I and World War II. In World War II, the Soviet Union, with 27 million dead, broke the back of Hitler’s army—not Britain or the United States, which take all the credit. They don’t even remember; they don’t even invite Russian leaders to commemorations. Russia bore the entire brunt of fighting the Wehrmacht.

But then, as soon as the war was nearing its end, 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? He proposed Operation Unthinkable. In other words, “Let’s continue the war. Germany just surrendered, now we should invade the Soviet Union.”

That wasn’t just a defensive war game—it was an actual idea Churchill had in the summer of 1945. The United States said, “No, actually, let’s not have another war right now.”

But that’s the kind of thinking we’re dealing with. And it’s a little weird, to say the least. That’s how Britain has thought for centuries.

So, my point is, these are very deep, consistent trends. Britain taught the United States everything it knows, and we continue along the same deep trend.

When you ask me what the election is going to mean, my answer is: What we need is for the Pentagon, the CIA, and the other intelligence agencies to understand that we’re in a multipolar world. We face a nuclear superpower in China and a nuclear superpower in Russia. There is no such thing as “victory” in this context. Tragedy is not an option, as far as I’m concerned, for a policy.

We need a different strategy. Then, someone in a dark suit and a blue tie will come to tell whoever is president that we’re doing it differently now. That’s what we can hope for.

ALEX MITCHELL: Wonderful. I think we have time for one more question—potentially two, if this one is a shorter one. Let’s go over there, in the scarf, in the fifth row.

QUESTION #3: Thank you for coming to speak here today. I think a lot of what you’ve said is the truth, and it’s refreshing to hear it. 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—not only over who gets elected, but also what they do once they’re in office. How would you ever go about persuading officials to cut those ties?”

SACHS: 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: a few hundred million dollars buys tens of billions of dollars of U.S. response.

Basically, our Congress sells itself very cheaply. If you have a few hundred million dollars, you too can buy American foreign policy. That’s the ironic part of this.

What to do? My view is that this will change eventually, but I want it to change fast because the danger is very high. 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, while it doesn’t count for very much on these issues, is absolutely against what Israel is doing. This has been a shocking period—it’s so vulgar, so out there. The bombing is so relentless, the viciousness so terrible, that it has shocked the American people, especially young people.

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.” So, it’s actually a pretty widespread view.

The second thing is that world opinion is shocked—not just public opinion, but political opinion worldwide. I spend a lot of time 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 the situation is so awful. Ireland, Spain, Norway, and others are recognizing the State of Palestine despite U.S. objections.

On resolution after resolution, there’s an overwhelming majority against Israel’s actions. In July, the International Court of Justice ruled on the illegality of Israel’s occupation. I think we’re likely to see another ICJ ruling in the coming months, one that I believe will find Israel in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention. That will be a shocking moment, although you can only imagine the lobbying pressure being put on right now.

These are two forces at play. My idea, specifically, is that I’m actively urging the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Arab League to put forward a specific plan.

I believe, based on international law, that the only way forward is the establishment of a State of Palestine alongside a State of Israel, as agreed upon in the 1947 partition plan. This two-state solution is enshrined in countless UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions and the ICJ ruling that refers to the borders as they were on June 4, 1967, before the Six-Day War.

What I am urging is for the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, comprising 57 Islamic-majority nations, and the Arab League to propose a plan for a two-state solution. This would involve UN Security Council oversight of armed forces to keep the two sides apart—not just normal peacekeepers, but troops stationed to enforce separation.

Iran would stop its aid to Hezbollah and Hamas in the context of a State of Palestine being achieved, and the U.S. would lift its sanctions on Iran at the same moment. This approach puts all the pieces together in a way that offers mutual benefit for everyone.

The only opposition to this, in my view, comes from the extremists in Israel—Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, and the rest of this utterly obnoxious and genocidal government in power right now. This is one vote away, in my estimation—the U.S. veto.

If the U.S. security state looked honestly and dispassionately at the situation, and if the American people understood how many wars Netanyahu has led them into and how disastrous these have been, I believe it’s possible to change.

It’s not a sure thing by any means, but I want the rest of the world to say to the United States: You, not Israel, are the obstacle to peace. The only obstacle remaining.

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 under international law. It’s the United States using its veto. I want the world to say this clearly and with a plan, so the Israeli people can understand this is not about squandering their safety—it’s about actually ensuring their safety in the most fundamental way.

ALEX MITCHELL: Okay, I think we have time for one very quick final question. We’ll go to you in the front row, in the blue shirt on the left.

QUESTION #4: Thank you so much, Professor Sachs. By your logic of nuclear war having an expected value of negative infinity, it seems 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?”

SACHS: The U.S. should intervene if we are attacked—that’s different. We should not intervene to provoke, and that’s the big difference.

Let me just explain in two minutes the Ukraine war. This is not an attack by Putin on Ukraine in the way we are told every day. This started in 1990. On February 9, 1990, James Baker III, our Secretary of State, said to Mikhail Gorbachev: “NATO will not move one inch eastward if you agree to German unification,” basically ending World War II.

Gorbachev said, “That’s very important. Yes, NATO doesn’t move.” And we agreed to German unification.

The U.S. then cheated on this, starting in 1994, when Clinton signed off on a plan to expand NATO all the way to Ukraine. This was when the so-called neocons took power, and Clinton was the first agent of this. The expansion of NATO began in 1999 with Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. At that point, Russia didn’t care much—there was no direct border threat, other than with Kaliningrad.

Then in 1999, the U.S. led the bombing of Serbia. That was bad because it was the use of NATO to bomb a European capital—Belgrade—for 78 straight days, breaking the country apart. The Russians didn’t like that very much.

When Putin became president, Russia swallowed it. They complained, but even Putin started out pro-European and pro-American. He actually asked if Russia could join NATO when there was still some idea of a mutually respectful relationship.

Then came 9/11 and Afghanistan. The Russians said, “Yeah, we’ll support you. We understand the need to root out terror.” But then came two decisive actions.

In 2002, the U.S. unilaterally walked out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. This was probably the most decisive event—never discussed in this context. What it did was trigger the U.S. placing missile systems in Eastern Europe, which Russia views as a dire and direct threat to its national security. These systems make possible a decapitation strike, with missiles just minutes away from Moscow.

The U.S. installed two Aegis missile systems, claiming they were for defense. Russia said, “How do we know these aren’t Tomahawk missiles with nuclear warheads in your silos? You’ve told us we have nothing to do with this.”

So, we walked out of the ABM Treaty unilaterally in 2002.

Then in 2003, we invaded Iraq on completely phony pretenses, as I’ve explained.

In 2004 and 2005, we engaged in a soft regime change operation in Ukraine—the so-called first “color revolution.” It installed a government led by Viktor Yushchenko, someone I knew personally and was friends with. I was an adviser to the Ukrainian government in 1993, 1994, and 1995.

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 a platform of neutrality for Ukraine. That calmed things down because the U.S. was pushing NATO, but the people of Ukraine, according to opinion polls, didn’t even want to be in NATO. They understood that the country is divided between ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Russians. What did they want with this? To stay away from these problems.

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.

The Russians did the U.S. a favor by intercepting a very ugly call between Victoria Nuland—my colleague at Columbia University now, and if you know her name and what she’s done, have sympathy for me—and Jeffrey Pyatt, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and a senior State Department official to this day.

They talked about regime change, openly discussing who would be in the next government: “Ah, why don’t we pick this one? No, Klitschko shouldn’t go in—it should be Yatsenyuk. Ah yes, it was Yatsenyuk. And we’ll get the big guy, Biden, to come in and do an attaboy.” They were casually picking Ukraine’s next government.

Soon after, I was invited to Ukraine, not knowing any of this background. Some of it was explained to me in a very ugly way after I arrived, including how the U.S. had participated in this regime change.

After this, the U.S. said, “Okay, now NATO is really going to enlarge.” Putin kept saying, “Stop. You promised no NATO enlargement.”

Let’s not forget: in 2004, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia—all seven countries—joined NATO. This was after the U.S. had promised “not one inch eastward.”

The U.S. kept rejecting the basic idea: don’t expand NATO to Russia’s border, especially in a context where we’re putting in goddamn missile systems after breaking treaties. In 2019, we walked out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. In 2017, we walked out of the JCPOA, the treaty with Iran. This is the trust-building partner we’re talking about—a 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 was simple: no NATO enlargement.

I called the White House the next week, begging them, “Take the negotiations. Putin’s offered something. Avoid this war.”

“Oh, Jeff, there’s not going to be a war,” they told me.

“Announce that NATO’s not going to enlarge,” I said.

“Oh, don’t worry. NATO’s not going to enlarge.”

I said, “You’re going to have a war over something that’s not going to happen. Why don’t you just announce it?”

“No, no,” they said. “Our policy is an open door.” This is Jake Sullivan. “Our policy is an open-door policy—open door for NATO enlargement.”

This falls under the category of bullshit. You don’t have the 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 to putting missile systems on another country’s border and expecting no repercussions.

We declared in 1823 that Europeans don’t come to the Western Hemisphere—that’s the Monroe Doctrine. The entire Western Hemisphere was considered off-limits to European powers. And yet, we think it’s fine to encroach on Russia’s border.

Anyway, they turned down the negotiations. Then the “special military operation” started. Five days later, Zelensky said, “Okay, okay, neutrality.”

And then the Turks said, “We’ll mediate this.”

I flew to Ankara to discuss the situation with the Turkish negotiators because I wanted to hear exactly what was going on. What I learned was that they had reached an agreement with just a few odds and ends to work out. Then the United States and Britain stepped in and said, “No way. You guys fight on. We’ve got your back.”

Of course, we didn’t have their front. They were all going to die, but we had their back. We kept pushing them into the front lines. That’s 600,000 Ukrainian deaths now, since Boris Johnson flew to Kyiv to tell them to “be brave.” It’s absolutely ghastly.

When you think about your question, we need to understand: we’re not dealing with the madman-Hitler narrative we hear every day—that Putin is coming at us, violating this and that, and planning to take over Europe. That’s complete bogus, fake history. It’s a purely PR narrative of the U.S. government, and it doesn’t stand up at all to anyone who knows anything.

And if you try to say a word about this? I got completely cut out of The New York Times back in 2022 after writing columns for them my entire life. I submitted pieces—700 words, not even a space issue, because it’s all online—and they wouldn’t publish a single one about what I saw with my own eyes and what this war is really 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, but we came at them. And we should stop going after China and Taiwan—it’s not our goddamn business.

Taiwan is part of China. The Taiwanese said it under the Republic of China. The People’s Republic of China said it. We agreed to it in countless communiqués when we established diplomatic relations with China. So what the hell are we doing sending armaments to Taiwan, unilaterally having Speakers of the House visit Taiwan, and inviting disaster in the future?

Look at the Navy’s recent plans—it’s worth examining. Just three weeks ago, the Navy issued a report saying we have to prepare for war with China by 2027. It doesn’t say we’ll have a war with China; it says we have to prepare for one.

We are not playing a video game. They are playing with your futures. It’s completely unbelievable to me.

China isn’t threatening anybody abroad—anybody. Even the disputes in the South China Sea over these rocks where China is putting armaments aren’t about the rocks themselves. If you read the first page of U.S. military doctrine, it’s about creating choke points in China’s sea lanes. China doesn’t care about the rocks; it cares about not having the U.S. block its sea lanes.

We need to understand the most basic points: stay out of each other’s lanes so we don’t all end up dead. It’s not so hard.

And if you study another game theory structure, it’s quite interesting. For formal analysts, if you study the Hawk-Dove game, or the game of chicken, it becomes clear: don’t play chicken with nuclear arms.

The Hawk-Dove game says that if the other side threatens nuclear war, you don’t respond with nuclear war. If they’re being foolish, you might threaten to scare them, but if both sides collide, you get nuclear Armageddon.

If you formally analyze the payoff structure of this game, and you put—as I suggest—a minus infinity in the quadrant for Hawk-Hawk, the equilibrium solution is Dove-Dove. The mixed strategy is to put zero probability on playing Hawk. Why? Because when you multiply minus infinity by any finite, positive probability, you still get minus infinity.

The logic is simple: don’t play chicken with nuclear arms. Don’t.

And to the CIA director, I say: don’t tell me whether Putin is bluffing or not. I read your memo from 2008 about how concerned Russia is about NATO enlargement to Ukraine. That memo was leaked by Julian Assange, by the way. The same guy who is now our CIA director was the U.S. ambassador to Russia then.

In 2008, he wrote a memo called Nyet Means Nyet, which explained how it’s not just Putin—it’s the entire Russian political class that opposes NATO in Ukraine. And now he tells us, “Don’t worry about it.” They’re playing games with you and me, and I really resent it.

If we someday face this catastrophe you’re presenting, there won’t be a good answer.

By the way, President Kennedy, in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, made a side remark. He said, “I’d rather have my daughter be red than dead,” when the bumper sticker slogan at the time was, “Better dead than red.” He said the opposite. You know, he was a human being—a wonderful human being.

I don’t know what the answer to the question is, God forbid we ever get to that point. But we’re not in that situation right now. The way to avoid it 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. There’s already a treaty to eliminate nuclear arms, signed by nearly 100 countries and ratified by many. But not one nuclear power has joined so far.

Still, that’s the right answer. We have to get out of what President Kennedy called the nuclear Sword of Damocles hanging over our heads. It’s the greatest risk we face of all.

ALEX MITCHELL: Thank you. “That is, sadly, all we have time for. I’ll have a couple more things to say in a second, but first, I hope you’ll all join me in saying thank you to Professor Sachs for such an interesting talk.”

[Applause]

* * *

PROFESSOR JEFFREY D. SACHS

Jeffrey D. Sachs 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 is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, Co-Chair of the Council of Engineers for the Energy Transition, Commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development, academician of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences at the Vatican, and Tan Sri Jeffrey Cheah Honorary Distinguished Professor at Sunway University.

He has been Special Advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary General António Guterres.

He spent over twenty years as a professor at Harvard University, where he received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees. Sachs has received 42 honorary doctorates, and his recent awards include the 2022 Tang Prize in Sustainable Development, the Legion of Honor by decree of the President of the Republic of France, and the Order of the Cross from the President of Estonia.

His most recent books are The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions (2020) and Ethics in Action for Sustainable Development (2022).