The End of 500 Years of Western Power and the Rise of Multipolarity | Jeffrey Sachs

In this in-depth conversation, Professor Jeffrey Sachs argues that we are living through the end of a 500-year era of Western dominance. He traces this historic shift from Europe’s imperial rise around 1500, to America’s post–World War II hegemony, and now to the emergence of a multipolar world led by BRICS and the Global South. Sachs sharply criticizes NATO’s broken promises, U.S. arrogance after the Cold War, and Europe’s tragic return to old fears. He also calls out Israel’s ongoing policies as “genocide,” highlighting America’s complicity despite global opposition. From China-India reconciliation to the decline of the U.S. empire, Sachs offers a sweeping, provocative, and urgent view of the world’s future

Global Insight Hub, September 4, 2025

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What is happening now is, of course, the end of an era. It’s the end of actually two—a sub-era and an era. The end of the era is the end of the Western dominance over the world system. And this is a dominance that began with the European empires and then transferred to the US empire after World War II. But that dominance essentially lasted from around 1750 to around 2000. So around 250 years. You could add one more 250-year period, helpfully starting in 1500. European imperial expansion began. That’s with the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama. So the voyages both to the west and to the east from Europe led to the beginning of the European global expansion.

But Europe had its rivals, especially in the old world. In the new world, people succumbed to the old world diseases mainly. But in the old world, Asia didn’t simply succumb to Europe, but over a period of around 250 years, European powers gained their ascendancy, and Britain became the dominant of all of the European empires by the 19th century with the defeat of Napoleon.

So we all grew up in the age when it was taken for granted that Europe, and then after 1945 Europe and the US, quote, “ran the world.” And indeed in 1950, if you looked at the global landscape, the vast wealth, the financial power, the technological power, the new atomic age, everything was in this Western-led world plus the Soviet Union. But China, India, Africa, Latin America had no discernible role.

Actually, quite interestingly, the Western world also reached a peak of its share of world population, not only power, but we should remember that Europe relative to Africa and the Middle East was much more populous then than today in relative terms. Europe was a larger population than Africa and its Middle East neighborhood. Now it’s half the population of those two.

So I was born in 1954 in a European-led world. There was a Cold War, and a very dangerous one, between the Soviet Union and the United States world, but there was absolutely no doubt that this was a Western-dominated world. The main point, I think we see it in a hundred different ways, is that that is over, and it ended actually probably a quarter century ago, but it wasn’t noticed as such.

After the demise of the Soviet Union, while a new multipolar world was actually emerging, especially with the rise of China but not only the rise of China, also the economic growth of India and others, the United States was asserting something quite different, which is not only is it the Western-led world, the US now is the only superpower in the world. It became the unipolar world. And this was a great delusion and a great arrogance and very badly mistimed because people in Washington are not very clever to begin with. I can absolutely assure you it’s not a snide remark. They just absolutely don’t know what they’re doing.

But in any event, they asserted their unipolarity at precisely the time that the Western-led world was coming to an end. And so we’ve been at a clash of reality and arrogance for a quarter century where the United States, and even vestigially Europe, and within Europe I have to say Britain, which is the craziest of all in terms of the gap between reality and image or delusion, thought the West runs the world. “We can tell Putin what to do. We can tell Xi Jinping what to do. We can tell Modi what to do. We can tell Lula what to do. We can tell anyone what to do because we are the West. We are the United States.” And the reality of a world in fundamental change.

Two points about the fundamental change that I think are worth noting. First, and I find it stunning and counterintuitive because of the bubble that we live in in the West, but if you add the population of the United States, which is about 340 million people right now, the population of the European Union, the population of the UK, so that North Atlantic world, you come to something around 900 million people, slightly more than 10% of the world population. If you want, and I think it’s wrong, but if you want to say that the US-led world includes Japan and Korea, because I don’t think that will be true for long, if you want to add Australia and New Zealand, and you can add Singapore if you want and a very few other places, you get to around 12% of the world population.

Well, this should tell us something to begin with. How could 12% of the world population in today’s world, in which technology is everywhere, in which the internet is everywhere, in which capacities, nuclear weapons have spread to nine countries in the world and on and on—how could it ever be that 12% of the world thinks that it runs the world anymore? That the others don’t have a view, don’t have power, don’t have capacity to resist unilateral demands. This is the backdrop for me of everything that we’re seeing, that we are in a delusion in our English language, Western media, ignorant, politically ignorant world in which Washington, Brussels, London, Berlin, Paris think that this is the center of the world. And honestly, a hundred years ago it was, for good and for bad, but it ain’t now. Not even close.

And so we have two major groupings. You discussed them at length yesterday beautifully. The BRICS, which is nearly half the world population and half the world GDP. And that is a grouping that includes the original five—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa—but now includes Egypt and Ethiopia, Iran, the Emirates, Indonesia. And that’s a worldwide group stretching from Brazil to China. So it includes South America, it includes Africa, it includes the Middle East, it includes Russia and Asia.

And we have the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which began very much as an Asian-Eurasian group, but an East Eurasian group of China, India, Russia and the four of the five countries of Central Asia—Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan—and Belarus, added Indonesia and a number of partners, but that’s an Asian grouping. And as you said, these two are very closely related. They each have nearly half the world population, not exactly the same membership, but they have two overriding realities to them. One is they’re the fast growing part of the world economy, and that itself is worth saying something about. And second, they don’t want to be told what to do by Donald Trump.

And the best phrasing of that was by President Lula of Brazil, who said a few months ago, “We don’t need an emperor.” And this is the basic point, which is they’re not even anti-American, by the way. That is a basic fundamental misunderstanding. They’d actually like normal relations. The point I’ve been making to all of them for years is you can’t trust the United States on this because the US till today in its delusion is aiming for hegemony. Clearly, it’s not propaganda. It’s the stated policy of the United States to have what they call primacy or what the military calls full spectrum dominance. This is the idea.

I’m trying to say in Washington for 20 years, “You guys are crazy because you’re the US alone. Okay, you’re 4.2% of the world. We are not in 1945 or 1950 or even 1990. China is bigger than the US economy properly measured. That’s not a myth. That’s a reality. China is far bigger in industrial capacity.” And if you go to China, as I do several times a year, China is ahead of the United States on many technologies. Not all, but many technologies and notably technologies that the world really needs right now. It will dominate electric vehicles for 20 years to come. It will absolutely dominate solar power production of which it has essentially no rivals in the world. It will dominate zero emission ocean shipping, something of interest to Greece and interest to the world because it makes the ships. The United States doesn’t make the ships. Europe doesn’t make the ships except in much, much smaller numbers. And you could go down a long list of technologies like this.

So the point is to just realign our understanding and our delusions of grandeur that come understandably from several hundred years of actual power. Not power nicely wielded, not power responsibly wielded in my view. So I think from a moral point of view nothing very attractive about it. And as an economist I have followed Adam Smith all my life because he was an anti-imperialist, very explicitly said give up the US colonies and trade with them. You don’t need to own them. You just need to trade with them. And that’s a very good point of view.

Those who say, “Well, at least Europe spread its knowledge and science and so forth.” Well, yes, Europe did that, but it didn’t have to do that through empire and war and conquest and forced famines and many other things that went along with European Empire. It could have done that through trade, commerce, decent human relations with other countries.

So we have the world now much more equal in, of course, in literacy, in schooling, in technology, in industrial capacity, even overtaking the Western world in many different areas. And we still have in the West this idea that this is a—we’re preserving the Western-led world, but that’s over. And then we happen to have one of the most—sorry to say it—but one of the least knowledgeable conceivable presidents in the United States who, sorry, but knows nothing about any of this. He was a real estate developer. He has no training in anything of this sort. I grant that he knows how to build golf courses, I think, in many places in the world, but understanding these changes in the world actually requires something more.

Strangely, in Britain, the idea that the British Empire still exists through the US Empire and it’s going to be defended and we can use every means from MI6 and covert operations to global dominance and so forth somehow still persists. I marvel at it as you say every day. Better to take care of the national health system rather than worrying about running the world 80 years after losing the empire. But that mirage still exists, and France still has it, and God knows what’s in the German mind of Mr. Merz right now. But none of it makes any sense.

And when you come to Europe, the point of my article is precisely what you said. Europe is still battling its 19th century and 20th century delusions and wars well into the 21st century. And the idea that Russia’s greatest aim in the world is to invade Western Europe is an insanity and such a violation of any basic knowledge of history that you cannot believe a grown-up could say this, much less a grown-up in a position of any responsibility. Yet Europe is twisting itself into a pretzel that is completely useless because of fears that have no basis in reality whatsoever.

And those fears are not dispelled because Europe doesn’t understand anymore. I mean European leaders, I should say, do not understand anymore. If you want to understand the other side, pick up the phone, take a flight, invite a counterpart to sit down and have a cup of coffee. They’d actually learn something.

So bottom line, the reality is a multipolar world. You see it in the economics, you see it in the technology, you see it in the military force. The delusions are still Western dominance and within that US dominance. That gap between reality and delusion is large and extremely dangerous.

Donald Trump illustrates it almost every day by giving orders to the Chinese or to the Brazilians or to the Indians or to the Russians. Literal orders. “You must have a ceasefire unconditional by August 8,” he tells Russia. “You must stop a court case,” he tells Brazil. “You must stop buying Russian oil,” he tells India. And these are not only not put diplomatically or intelligently, they’re on a social post where he’s demanding of supposed vassals which vastly outnumber Americans. He’s telling them what to do every day.

And then he has these completely ignorant minions around him, completely ignorant, who blow up any last vestiges of diplomacy like this Peter Navarro who is—I’m sure I claim it every day—I think he’s the most incompetent person that my economics department at Harvard ever gave a PhD degree to. I do not remember the guy. I’m almost sure he could never have been in my class because of the utter nonsense that’s spouted. But this guy’s trotted out every day to make it worse in breaking up US relations with 1.5 billion people in India.

The only slight thing, Alexander, that I would take—I’d quibble with you on a point you made yesterday. You attributed a lot of this to Lindsey Graham. I agree with that. I call him, by the way—I’m sorry, I hope I don’t upset the show or anything else—but I call him absolutely the stupidest senator in the US Senate because I’ve watched him for a long time and he’s an idiot and he’s just a fool. Not only a warmonger, but an idiot.

But in any event, it’s not right to say that this is his doing, not Donald Trump’s doing. Because ultimately, I don’t agree with Truman on many things with our President Truman who needlessly dropped two atomic bombs on Japan and rather blithely did so. But he was right when he said the buck stops here in the presidency. And we need a presidency that functions, that really functions. And we don’t have it right now. And it’s just swinging in the wind every day because they don’t have even the depth of knowledge inside the White House to know what they’re doing right now.

And so, yes, you’re right. Trump is responding to these—I mean basically to the military-industrial complex which is, you know, 80 years built into the US system. He is responding to that. But it’s actually the job of the president to say no. That’s really the president’s job and he doesn’t—he can’t do it.

“That is a very good point and I accept it completely. Just a sec. Yeah. No, it’s just a little quibble. No, no. Can I take up on a few of the points that you said? Because of course I was born in 1961, an interesting year. It was the year of Gagarin’s flight. It was also the year of the Berlin crisis. And of course, the first half of my life was lived through the Cold War. And I think the thing that many people don’t understand about the Cold War is that the Cold War was ultimately a struggle for Europe. It was a contest between two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, with different ideological perspectives about Europe.

Now whether the Soviets ever really had any actual ambitious aggressive plans to take over Europe, I personally very, very much doubt. But the entire rhetoric of the time was that this was a conflict about Europe. And when we thought about the rest of the world in Europe at that time, it was always seen as part of the game about Europe. In other words, the superpowers maneuvering for advantage in the rest of the world in order ultimately to advance their objectives in Europe. So even the Cuban missile crisis, for example, was often framed by many people, perhaps rightly, perhaps probably wrongly, as being ultimately about Berlin—that Khrushchev moved his missiles to Cuba so that he could force us to make concessions about Berlin.

Now what that did was that it made us in Europe feel very important. It was very frightening but it also made us feel very important because we seemed to be right at the center of the great events in history. This is where the contest, the great contest for the future was being played out. The Cold War ends and suddenly we discover that, you know, we’re not that important after all. And the rest of the world has moved on and is continuing to move on. And that is very, very difficult for many people in Europe, particularly the political leaders to accept and understand.

So I get the sense sometimes that what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to take ourselves back to that world of the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s when the conflict was there in Europe. We continue to be important in the same way that we were. We trot out all the same rhetoric. We have the same kind of policies and things of that kind because that made us feel important.

And of course it is a colossal, a disastrous distraction from the realities of the world which you have just described far more ably and with far more knowledge than I can possibly have. And what worries me as a European—and I am one, I’m a European to my core—is that by doing that we are frittering away in Europe those things that we still have which we can bring constructively to the table that will help to shape the future in a way that I think would be positive for all of humanity because we have contributed so much in Europe. I mean I’m sometimes very critical of what the Europeans done but they’ve done amazing, extraordinary things.

So we are failing to bring that, and of course at the same time we are marginalizing ourselves. And your point about the need for a new foreign policy—it’s not just about breaking with the United States, which is absolutely something we have to do. It is also about thinking about Europe, its role, what it could constructively do. And there are so much which we could constructively do. We still have great universities, great science, extraordinary culture. All of that is being frittered away. So anyway, I was just inviting you to make some points about this.”

“No, no. Exactly right. But let me add a couple of points to this because this struggle for Europe itself needs to be unpacked. As I said, I was born in 1954, so I’m completely a Cold War baby. I grew up absolutely in the midst of this and was trained and imbibed all of the legends of the Cold War. And my wife, by the way, was born in Prague, so she was born in Soviet-dominated central and eastern Europe. We know all about that. She shook hands with Gagarin actually after his orbit as a young pioneer in Prague when he came for a heroic visit. So this was absolutely the milieu of my upbringing.

The American idea and the European idea and the NATO idea was that we faced an implacably expansionist, ungodly, totalitarian communist international movement and that we were defending freedom and democracy against the expansion of the Soviet Union. I would say that was taken as 99.9% true by Americans and Europeans at the time. And I crossed Checkpoint Charlie twice in Berlin. I saw the Berlin Wall with my own eyes as a young person, of course, on many occasions. So the world seemed to be divided and the foe on the other side seemed to be implacable.

And just to translate till today, communism is gone, Soviet Union’s gone, but the rhetoric about Russia is almost identical to the rhetoric of the Cold War period as if there’s no change. Okay? But my point is even that Cold War vision, if you grow up and spend decades studying, learning, working on both sides, working in Moscow as I have, working all over the world but especially in these two sides of Europe, the whole war narrative is a huge blunder and tragedy in its way because there’s another story to it that’s completely different from the one that you and I grew up with. And that story is the Soviet, at the time until today, the Russian search for security.

And we don’t give this one moment’s thought, and I can tell you I didn’t even hear one minute of it growing up or going through university, and I had a good university education at Harvard undergraduate and graduate school. I didn’t hear one day, not one day in my life as a student that there was another side to the Cold War story. Now, I may have taken the wrong classes, but I’m telling you what the atmosphere was, which was an implacable foe. We read Solzhenitsyn, we knew about the crimes of the Soviet Union and so forth. We never stopped to ask one moment, well, 27 million people in the Soviet Union died at Nazi hands. What is the implication of that for the aftermath of World War II? What might have been done? What were the Soviet or the Russian security concerns at the time?

Now since then I’ve spent 30 years pretty much in depth in understanding these issues, and it’s a point that I really want people to understand. When you lose 27 million lives, or China by the way with its military victory parade today—China lost a comparable number of lives in its war with Japan, which by the way we never discussed one day in my youth. The fact that China—I mean I knew that China was invaded by Japan but anything about the actual war or the scale of loss, not a moment.

Okay, coming back to Europe, the Soviets or the Russians said, “How do we protect ourselves against another invasion, against a remilitarized Germany, round three?” Because after all, the First World War was a German war in part on Russia. The Second World War was Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union. 27 million dead. And the Soviet side said, “We need a peace agreement that addresses our security interests.” And the United States essentially said no. And Britain said no.

And we know even in the spring of 1945, Mr. Churchill was already asking about the possibility of maybe just the possibility of invading the Soviet Union, our wartime ally, in Operation Unthinkable. It’s pretty much unthinkable that your ally has just lost 27 million people, and you’re asking your war command about maybe we should invade this fall because the implacable hatred of Russia went way back. And in Britain, it went back to the 1840s. And this is part of our story.

The United States absolutely rejected a core agreement made in Potsdam at the end of the Second World War for a demilitarized, unified Germany. And instead it said, “We’ll take our part, the three occupied zones by Britain, the US, and France, so-called. We’ll build that into a new Federal Republic of Germany or West Germany. We will remilitarize it, and it will join NATO, our new military organization, in 1955.”

And all of this time from ’45 onward, the Soviet Union rightly is saying, “But excuse me, what about our security? We just lost 27 million people.” That wasn’t a distant history. That was an immediate reality in which the US was remilitarizing Germany.

And if you go back now, as I have for many, many years, and look at choices that were made, we had many diplomats led by George Kennan in the United States who said, “Take the deal. A neutral, demilitarized Germany will end the Cold War.” The Soviet Union tried to prove it again and again, including most notably in Austria in 1955 when there was an agreement Austria would become neutral. It would not join NATO. The Soviet occupying forces left Eastern Austria and never bothered Austria again. They were saying to the US, do the same for Germany and the Cold War ends. But the US-UK idea was bloc mentality.

And this is why what’s happened in the last 35 years is so poignant because what President Mikhail Gorbachev at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s was about fundamentally was ending that division by ending the two military blocs. And to do it, he went first and disbanded the Warsaw Pact. And in the US and UK mentality, which is crazed in its way, I have to say, they said, “Oh, that’s not peace. We just won. We won. Now we can do all that we’ve always wanted.”

And so formally, World War II was ended in 1990 because the United States had rejected a treaty to end World War II up until the reunification of Germany. In that reunification, the US and Germany explicitly, unambiguously said that NATO would not enlarge. It should have said NATO is ended, but they said NATO will not move one inch eastward. Terribly, Gorbachev did not put it into the 4+2 treaty because he said this is a treaty not about NATO but about Germany. So there’s a reason it’s not in there. But the commitment was no more NATO.

But the American and British mentality, and I add the British—they had no weight in military terms, but in psychological terms, we were living the British imperial dream. But just as the American Empire, as soon as Germany was reunified, the United States, without losing a beat, said, “Now NATO goes eastward. We won. We are the military alliance.”

And we would never listen one moment to the Russians say, “But we’re not at war. We just disbanded. Why are you pushing NATO? Why—we’re not supposed to have any NATO enlargement.” And the US attitude was, as you absolutely know, “You are a third or fourth rate country. You count for nothing. We’d like to pump your oil for you. So we want Chevron and Exxon to be there. Other than that, you are a quote gas station with nuclear weapons. You will listen to us. You have no choice.”

And the grand puba of that theory in the 1990s was Zbigniew Brzezinski who was, by the way, to me a very nice man because I was advising Poland and he helped me in the advice, you know, to get my advice actually implemented and it worked. But when it came to Russia, he was a true Polish patriot. He hated Russia. That goes back to the 17th century. And he hated Russia. So in 1997, he laid it all out as clearly as it can be laid out. Expand NATO, expand Europe, Russia will have nothing to do but to accede because it could never join with China. That’s unthinkable. He has a whole chapter in his book about why Russia won’t sign up with China.

So we have falsehood and delusion. A complete one-sided story about the Cold War itself, which is really wrong historically. And then after 1991, we have the grandiosity of supposed unipolarity, and now we have the idea since that unipolarity didn’t exist and Russia has its security interests. Now we have the return of the most primitive kind of Russophobia imaginable.

So Europe meets as you note every two or three days in terror of Russia with these fools around the table without talking to the Russians at all. And so it is this self-fulfilling, grandiose, delusional sense of power and vulnerability together and thinking that the United States will, you know, pull them out of—bail them out—pull them out of this fire and protect them from the Russian bear.

And as you said completely rightly, this incredibly stupid set of demands, for example on India, which I think is probably the single stupidest moment of foreign policy of modern America that I know of, that was promoted by the Europeans. So you were completely right to point out that, yes, Lindsey Graham had the idea, quote unquote, Donald Trump implemented it, but the Europeans were desperate for it. Secondary tariffs, secondary sanctions, stop the Indians.

So all of it is such a bad misreading of history, of current events, of tying yourself in knots, of failing to look at a map, of failing to do the most basic arithmetic of world population or technology or industrial production or direction of trade. And if you just watch these people, they don’t know anything and they don’t want to learn anything and they don’t want to hear anything. And especially in Europe, the most desperate thing is for God’s sake, don’t talk to the other side. It may be a little annoying.

And so we actually have a spectacle of grown people like Starmer, Merz, Macron—grown people that won’t even have a discussion with President Putin. Not a talk, not an idea, not an honest exchange. Only—okay, I won’t go on. It’s a rant, but it’s so ignorant. It’s unbelievable.”

“It is unbelievable about the Cold War and the realities of it. The historian Jeff Roberts recently passed on to me an article by Joan Robinson, whom I’m sure you know, the economist, and she said at the time if the entire premise of Russian expansion is wrong then our whole policy is nonsensical.”

“That was—I don’t know that article but I look forward to reading it. But Jeffrey Roberts also wrote recently a brilliant piece on the Soviet-Finnish wars, showing another basic point by the way which people will not know unless you look. In 1939, there was the famous or the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement in which ostensibly Germany and the Soviet Union divide up Poland, and we’re told—we’re taught, and I was taught—that this proves of course the Soviet perfidy and expansionism and that this is exactly what the Cold War was all about. It actually started with a joint Hitler-Stalin agreement to eat up Poland and similarly about the Soviet war with Finland.

And then you delve a little bit more deeply into this and then you can go as deeply as you want. The story is completely, completely upside down because what had actually transpired, which the Western world and our students and I never would have learned, was that Stalin rather desperately in the late 1930s was trying to make an alliance with Britain and with France against Hitler because he understood that Hitler was going to invade his country and that Hitler was the expansionist threat to peace.

And it was the British and the French that rebuffed him completely cynically in 1939, which led to Stalin rather desperately trying to create a space to protect the Soviet Union, a space both in Finland and in Poland against what he knew to be a coming German invasion. We lost the opportunity—we, the Russian and Western world—to contain, to prevent World War II because the hatred of Russia was so high that in British elite circles, many felt better Hitlerism than communism or than Bolshevism.

And we interpret every move of the Soviet Union in the most anti-Western way because we don’t dare look at the truth, which is that we—I mean we in the, if I could put it this way, I don’t like to think of it this way—but in the West rebuffed the chance for an alliance with Russia in essence. And with Finland, Stalin knew that the Germans were going to come through the Baltic states and come through Finland and ended up doing precisely that in the siege of Leningrad and starving millions of people. And he understood that and he asked for an ability to station Soviet troops or to even change land, to swap some land areas to protect Leningrad, today St. Petersburg, and again was completely rebuffed by the Finns, and this is the origin of what happened.

So we don’t even want to look at anything from the other perspective. There’s a name for this by the way. It’s called the security dilemma for people who want to study this, which means you take the worst interpretation of the other side. It was brilliantly written by a late colleague of mine, a really brilliant, decent man named Robert Jervis at Columbia University. But the idea is you interpret everything the other side does in the absolute most negative possible light, partly for your own propaganda and partly out of your ignorance and your psychological reactions. And the way to overcome that is actually to talk to the other side to try to understand what their motives are and to see if there isn’t a modus vivendi.”

“We just to quickly add, Taylor also—A.J.P. Taylor has written very, very interestingly about that whole period of Soviet diplomacy before the Second World War, and of course Jeff Roberts absolutely has done. I want to discuss quickly because we have been talking a lot about these things, but I would like to discuss also what you’ve been writing about Israel, about its foreign policy. You’ve made some comments, some I think absolutely excellent and outstanding and very important comments, and I would like you just to touch on that before we end the program.”

“Yeah, just very, very basically, there is a semi-nasty, semi-direct theorem of mine that all problems go back to the British. I hate to say it, but in this case, the Middle East crisis and the crisis in Gaza absolutely goes back to Britain 1917, the Balfour Declaration, which attempted to entice Americans to enter World War I on the British side and other aims, but it declared the intention that Britain would own the Near East, the Levant, the Eastern Mediterranean, having anticipating a victory over the Ottoman Empire in World War I, and that there would be a Jewish homeland created.

Interestingly, we don’t have much time just to say the one Jew in the cabinet, the war cabinet in 1917, the one Jew in the cabinet opposed the Balfour Declaration, Sir Edwin Montagu. He said, ‘No, we don’t need a homeland. I have a homeland. I’m British. I happen to be Jewish, but I’m British. And if you make a homeland for the Jewish people, you’re saying that I’m less British.’ So very, very interesting and ironic.