Read the full transcript of American economist and public policy analyst Jeffrey Sachs’ interview on The Tucker Carlson Show episode titled “Tulsi Gabbard’s Confirmation, and the Dangerous Global Chess Game Trump Is Winning”. [Feb 18, 2025]
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
TUCKER CARLSON: Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce someone who I consider one of the smartest people I know and whose understanding of the world is matched only by his ability to synthesize huge themes and illustrate them with precise detail. Someone who traveled the world for forty years, a man who not only writes about the leaders of the world but knows them personally, Professor Jeffrey Sachs. Thank you. Thank you very much, Jeff.
JEFFREY SACHS: Thank you.
TUCKER CARLSON: So, you were telling me backstage. I didn’t realize this. For those who enjoyed Prime Minister Orban, I’m one of them. Tell us when you first met the Prime Minister.
JEFFREY SACHS: We met thirty-six years ago, in 1989. He was just getting out of jail at that point.
TUCKER CARLSON: No?
JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah. They were just opening up, and this young guy was starting a political party. He gave me a call, and we sat in my backyard in Boston for a few hours. I thought, okay, this guy’s going to be Prime Minister for most of the next thirty-six years.
TUCKER CARLSON: Very impressive then. So, very impressive now. You said that you saw in him, and it’s not just about him, but what are the markers of enduring leadership? What makes this politician impressive while most of them are not impressive? What did you see in him? What do you see in leaders like him who have been successful?
The Rise of Viktor Orban
JEFFREY SACHS: This was 1989. It was even before the Berlin Wall fell, but Hungary had cut the barbed wire. So people were – that was the beginning of the end in 1989 of the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. And this young guy said, “I’m going to make a political party, and I’m going to be a leader, and I’m going to make a new Hungary.” And what he showed was vision. That, look, we’re a great country. We’ve been held back for the last forty-five years. I’m going to help lead the way. And it was Fidesz, Young Democrats, I think was the translation of it, and he just had the idea. We’re going to move forward. He was a kid, and we were all kids then. And you could see that there was energy, vision, foresight, and it proved right. And a toughness.
TUCKER CARLSON: So you heard his analysis, I think, of where we are with the war in Ukraine, election of Trump on the basis in part of his promise to try to end this if he can. You saw the new Secretary of Defense say, no, we’re not going to support Ukraine’s entry into NATO. Where are we now?
The NATO Expansion Project
JEFFREY SACHS: You know, yesterday was the most important day for peace in maybe decades, actually. This war in Ukraine resulted from a very bad idea of the United States taken in 1994. It’s a project. The project was a project to expand NATO forever anywhere. Just keep moving east. Keep moving not only to the first wave which was the Prime Minister’s country Hungary, Czech Republic, and Slovakia, but then move eastward closer to the former Soviet Union, into the former Soviet Union, surround Russia in the Black Sea region, go all the way to a little country in the South Caucasus, Georgia. It was mind-boggling.
Clinton signed on to that in 1994. It became what we call the deep state project, meaning it didn’t really matter who the president was. Each president would come and basically would be informed: NATO’s moving eastward. You’re part of that process. So Clinton started it in 1994. And as Prime Minister Orban said, he mentioned briefly, on February 9, 1990, in unequivocal, clear as can be terms, the United States had said to President Mikhail Gorbachev, NATO will not move one inch eastward. And if you have any doubt about it, all the documents are now online, available. You can scrutinize everything.
Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the German Foreign Minister, said the same thing, same day. He’s on tape actually explaining, “No. No. I don’t just mean within Eastern Germany. I mean anywhere to the east.”
Clinton, being Clinton, and the US deep state being the US deep state, started this project in 1994. They already had the idea, by the way, in 1991, ’92 as soon as the Soviet Union ended. Now we move. Now we move eastward. Now we control everything. Now we are the sole superpower. So this has gone on for thirty years.
NATO’s Eastward Expansion
And each president got into it. Under George W. Bush, seven more countries were added: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, and Romania in 2004. Then in 2007, President Putin said at the summit that’s taking place right now, the Munich Security Summit, said stop. You told us no expansion, not an eastward expansion, even an inch, you said. You’ve now done ten countries. Stop. Perfectly reasonable. Stop.
I don’t think our President Donald Trump would much like to see China and Russia building their military bases up from Central America. You know, this was how the Russians saw this. Why are you coming to our border when you told us you weren’t going to move?
And there was one other thing that was very important in this, which is probably the most decisive thing and almost not even recognized. In 2002, the US did something really, really destabilizing, and that is it unilaterally left the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. That was a core strategy to stop a nuclear war between the two superpowers because what ABM had done for thirty years was to say, we each have deterrence. If you strike us, we can strike back. We’ll limit our anti-ballistic missiles so that both sides maintain deterrence.
In 2002, the United States unilaterally, unprovoked, walked out of the ABM, said, “No.
We’re not going to do it anymore. We’re going to put anti-ballistic missile systems into Russia’s bordering territories.” The Russians said, “Are you kidding?” The US said, “What’s your problem? We do what we want.”
The Ukraine Situation
So in 2007, Putin stopped already. In 2008, George W. Bush doubled down as Americans typically do and said, “Okay. Now we’re moving to Ukraine and to Georgia.” That was why this war occurred. But Ukraine had one more sliver of life, and that was that they elected a president in 2010 that didn’t want to be part of NATO. And the public didn’t want to be part of NATO. Why? Because they knew this is very dangerous. Why get into this provocative situation?
His name was Viktor Yanukovych. Americans don’t like neutrality, but Yanukovych was trying to be neutral between the two sides. And the US played a rather unfortunate role on February 22, 2014, in a violent overthrow of this person. And that’s when the war started. And it’s been now ten years and no president has told the truth until yesterday, by the way.
A Historic Phone Call
Yesterday is a historic day because a call took place between President Putin and President Trump. It was the first call. We don’t know if there had been a short call beforehand between the two of them, but there was no call by Biden and Putin with war going on for three years. No call. And now there was a call and the readout from the American side was excellent.
What President Trump said in the call was we respect Russia. We hear Russia’s concerns. We fought on the same side in World War II. Nice point by the way. True. Russia lost – Soviet Union lost 27 million people in World War II and was an ally of the United States. The fact that wasn’t mentioned for years and years by President Biden.
And then the Defense Secretary, Hetseff, the new Defense Secretary, said yesterday the truth for the first time that Ukraine is not going to join NATO. This is the basis for peace. This is absolutely the basis for peace, and they couldn’t tell the truth for three decades.
The Global Power Game
They could not admit what any of us knew because I’ve been around this region for thirty-six years in detail. I sat with Boris Yeltsin. I sat with Mikhail Gorbachev, but the Americans would not tell the truth publicly until yesterday. That this was so provocative. It was a game. They thought they’d win the game.
I don’t know how many people here play or played in their childhood the game of Risk. The game of Risk was a big game for me. You wanted your piece on every part of the world map. That was the game when you took over the whole world, world hegemony we now call it. You won. They’re playing that game until this administration.
Recent Developments
So the two most important – three important things have happened in my view in this administration so far. First, our new Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the fundamental truth. We are in a multi-polar world. First time the sentence was uttered. He told the truth. What does it mean? The American mindset for thirty years was we run the show. Marco Rubio said, well, we don’t run the show. We live with other powerful countries. Great start.
Second and third were the two events yesterday. So I’m feeling about peace that this is really something that happened yesterday. If they follow through, we know what Washington is like. There’s every crazy idea swarming still. A project of thirty years doesn’t go down necessarily in one phone call or one statement by the Secretary of Defense, but it’s pretty important that it was said so publicly and so visibly.
Europe’s Reaction
And of course Europe is in a tizzy because Europe signed on to the US project. All these politicians in Europe are there where they are because they were part of the US project. And now the US is reversing its project, and you didn’t tell us, and what are we supposed to do? We’re way out there. And so they’re completely befuddled.
And I have to say, I told them personally, many of these leaders, and I mean personally, one by one for years, you are going to get trapped this way because this project doesn’t work. It doesn’t make sense. It’s a game for the Americans, but it’s life and death for the Russians. So it cannot be won by the American side. It’s impossible.
And I tried to tell them, and nobody in Europe either had the clarity or the guts to see it except the person that preceded me in this seat, Prime Minister Orban, because he was completely clear about this from the first day. Now others are starting, but even till today, the Europeans can’t get it because they’re so deeply invested in something that makes no sense. They should have said Russia’s big. It lives near us. Let’s cooperate. That’s how you do it.
TUCKER CARLSON: I think one of the reasons we went up in this position, we mean in the United States, but also Europe, is there’s a habit of speech which reflects a habit of mind, which is an unwillingness to engage with ideas and instead resort immediately to attacking the other person on the basis of motive.
The Challenge of Rational Discourse
TUCKER CARLSON: You saw this with Orban, you’re a Russian stooge or whatever and it was especially hilarious that he explained, you know, it’s the opposite of a Russian stooge. Of course, lifelong. This country was occupied by the Russians. But you do see it also in the United States, and it makes it kind of impossible to have a rational conversation about any – I know you’ve been the butt of this too, not whining about it, but it’s like – Yeah. Is there even a culture in our foreign policy establishment of having rational conversations to the point where we can solve problems like this?
JEFFREY SACHS: You know we’ve talked about I think an uncle of yours who’s one of my favorite politicians of American history, J. William Fulbright. And he wrote a book in the 1960s called “The Arrogance of Power” and I was a kid then and I read that book like it was the coolest thing imaginable. This was the chairman of the U.S. Foreign Relations Committee saying we’re too arrogant to think clearly. That was amazing. He was an amazing person.
Now I think that’s the fundamental problem. I’m not sure we’re properly over it, but I have to say that, in 1990-1991 we had the chance for global peace, really for global peace. That doomsday clock of the atomic scientists which I like to refer to so much, which measures how close or far we are from nuclear war, was the farthest away it was ever in its history because the Cold War had ended.
Personal Experience in Economic Stabilization
So I was there as a young economist who actually knew something about economic stabilization and I made proposals and, interestingly just as a footnote, I advised the Polish government in 1989. I just – long story, but suddenly as a kid, I happened to be there and I helped write their plan.
And everything I recommended for Poland was immediately accepted by the White House. It’s a very odd thing. In fact, I went one day. I had an idea of mobilizing some finance to help Poland stabilize, and I called the Polish finance minister said, “Do you mind if I try to raise a billion dollars for you today?” Which was a lot of money in those days and, he said, “If you raise a billion dollars that would be great.”
So I called Bob Dole, our Senate Majority Leader whom I knew because of the Poland work that I was doing and he invited me immediately into his office and he said come back in an hour. So I came back in an hour. This was September 1989. And who was sitting there? General Brent Scowcroft. Oh, okay.
He was the general who was our National Security Adviser. I was a kid. So it was a little bit, interesting moment. And Senator Dole said to me, “Explain to General Scowcroft your idea.” So I handed him the paper.
This is how you do financial stabilization, and here’s how you stabilize the currency. And Scowcroft looked at it and said, “Well, will this work?” And I said, “General, this will work.” And, Dole led me out of the office and said, “Call me back, later in the day.” So at 5 PM, I called and Dole said, “Did the White House just call? You have to tell your friends you have the one billion.” So I raised a billion dollars that day. It was good. No. No. No. It had nothing to do with me. Because, it was the right idea. The Polish zloty stabilized. I did a good thing. I was a technically equipped, sophisticated manager of a financial stabilization or not manager, but advisor on the financial stabilization.
Rejected Proposal for Soviet Stabilization
Okay. Then in 1991, I recommended the same thing for Gorbachev and for this creaking collapsing Soviet Union. Gorbachev wanted to have elections in all of the republics, and he wanted to democratize and stabilize. So okay. I know something about that, Mr. President. And so we met, in the Harvard Kennedy School, and, there were, one, two, three, four, five of us, a little team. One of them was the chief economic adviser of Gorbachev, Grigoriy Yablinski. One was the dean of the Kennedy School. One became a very senior diplomat, Bob Blackwill. One was a very senior economist at MIT, Stanley Fischer. We wrote a plan for how the Soviet Union could stabilize, and I did the chapter on the financing. Basically, the same thing that I had said for Poland.
Okay. It was completely rejected within about twelve hours in Washington. Okay. I hated this for the next thirty years I have to tell you because we just could not take yes for an answer. Couple of months ago someone sent me from the archives the first time that I’d ever seen it – the National Security Council minutes rejecting the proposal. Fascinating to read because that’s your life before your eyes watching this. There was a guy named Dick Darman who was a former colleague of mine.
The technical term I don’t think I can say it in mixed company actually. So I won’t say what I would say about him. But it’s an unpleasant English word. It’s really nasty. Too nasty for polite company.
He says in this thing, we should do the minimum necessary so that there’s not a collapse, but nothing more. And, he quotes Machiavelli and, you know, we’re not interested and we’re not going to do this. And it’s really watching stupid people taking important stupid decisions. Fools. By the way, they never called to say, can we discuss stabilization?
This guy knew nothing. They don’t understand anything. They don’t care. So what were they doing? They actually reached the conclusion at the end of the meeting. We’re going to do the minimum possible. I mean, minimum, minimum. It’s not our business to help. We’re not going to do any of that. That’s arrogance of power.
The Arrogance of Power
We don’t have to do anything. Why? We’re the United States. We don’t have to do anything. They didn’t even look. The stakes for the world were very high. You could have a thirty-minute phone call to understand financial stabilization. You could say in history, when countries are destabilized this way, here’s how stability has worked. That was my specialty. That’s what I knew and taught at Harvard and knew a lot about.
But they’re so arrogant that it’s not even to discuss for a half an hour any of this, and they didn’t. And they took a terrible decision. And by the way, my point is not that that led on to this and this and this. No. They took terrible decisions for the next thirty-five years.
This could have been stopped at any moment. Not one thing led to the next thing. No. One stupid decision, then the next one, then the next one, then the next one. You have to learn to behave. The way you behave in this world is mutual respect. The way you behave is thinking you’re not going to be more secure if they’re completely destabilized. That’s what you have to understand. And that is not so hard to understand. We teach it to our kids.
At age four, we start teaching that. And then suddenly, if you want your passport to Washington, you have to forget it at age forty or something. And that’s how they behave. So that’s my feeling about this that it’s just a kind of arrogance and you can see it in this writing which I find fascinating to go back and watch this tragedy unfold.
The Grand Chess Board
1997, another wonderful moment if you want to just watch hubris and tragedy. Very good book. Good in that it’s insightful. Terrible book in that it’s all wrong by Zbigniew Brzezinski. And many of you have probably read it called “The Grand Chess Board.” And he could have called it the game of Risk. It would have been a little bit more accurate, but it was about how to make American dominance in the world. And he has a chapter about expanding NATO to Ukraine. Exactly that. He’s and he talks about Europe and NATO expanding eastward. And the question that he asked in 1997 is, what can the Russians do about it?
Because they’re weak. And he answers meticulously. He considers, would Russia ever ally with China? Impossible. He – That’ll that’ll never happen. That’ll never happen. Could Russia ever ally with Iran? No. Impossible. That will never happen.
So you watch like we watch now, ChatGPT thinking out loud. It’s all there. It’s all wrong, and it was all American policy for the next twenty-five years. That’s tragedy.
TUCKER CARLSON: May I ask a question though? Like a kind of thematic fundamental question. So, great empire, one of it you know, empires tend to be arrogant. I think that’s a feature of empires. That is it. But an enduring empire shows stability. Its goal is stability. And it because it understands exactly what you said I thought so nicely. It doesn’t help you if your neighbors are in chaos. It doesn’t it doesn’t help you. It’s against your own interests.
So that’s such an obvious insight. The Roman Empire was based on it. The British Empire was based on it. Ours is the only empire I’m aware of that has kind of intentionally sowed chaos, and I don’t understand where that thinking comes from. Leaving aside, the moral question is, is it right or wrong? It doesn’t work for you. So why have we done it?
Lessons from History
JEFFREY SACHS: You know, the Roman Empire is always a great story for us and I compare the Ukraine war to the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest which is AD 9. Yep. And in AD 9, the Roman empire reached its limits, on the Rhine. It never – it tried to conquer the Germanic tribes, in 9 AD. They were defeated, under Augustus. And, there were sporadic border things from then on, but they never tried again. They had hundreds of years where that just wasn’t wasn’t wasn’t their business. It was very, very smart.
Hadrian, in the first, second century AD was the emperor at the maximum extent of the Roman empire, and he basically wanted stability across the border lines. And this was the prudence of the empire. It wasn’t Alexander, you know, was very different. Three, four hundred years earlier, he wanted to conquer the whole world. There was no limit. Finally, his soldiers told him if you go any further, we’re killing you. We’ve got to go home because they were already at the beyond the Indus River. But the Romans said, no. We’re going to put some boundaries. We’re going to keep the borders, and we’re going to not go beyond our means or our needs.
I hope what happened yesterday was a good example of that. What Trump and Hegseth did yesterday, if they follow through, if the deep state doesn’t undermine it, if some crazy thing doesn’t happen, said we don’t need to be in Ukraine with NATO. We don’t need to be. It’s for us. It’s nothing. And it doesn’t mean that Russia is now going to invade Western Europe. That’s crazy. This was a project going the other direction. So it’s basic prudence, and that’s what a great power should show. Prudence.
TUCKER CARLSON: What are the chances that some – you said unless the deep state doesn’t make some crazy thing happen. I would note that for a good part of the presidential campaign, the deep state was telling the candidate Donald Trump that the state of Iran is trying to kill you, which as far as I know was totally untrue, by the way. But they were telling him that in order to prepare him to attack Iran, which they’re still trying to do. So we know that this kind of deception is just a feature of it. How hard will people invested in the Ukraine war go?
The Role of the U.S. President in Foreign Policy
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. What to what lengths will they go to continue this, do you think?
JEFFREY SACHS: First of all, the main job of the U.S. president, of a successful U.S. president, is to put the foot on the brake. This is if you look in history, the good presidents know when to stop. Eisenhower was such. Kennedy was such. Reagan understood this, and all our recent presidents did not up until now, basically. Well, Truman in Korea, George H. W. Bush in Kuwait. I mean, also true. No. That they fought too many wars in my opinion. But they did stop. No. But they stopped, but they made too many – Iraq 2003. I mean, there were just too many wars.
So the question is, can we learn, and can the president keep the foot on the brake? If he does, he will have an extremely successful administration. He, I think, understands that all of Netanyahu’s pleading – and this has been thirty years also, this another project to go for the U.S. to go to war with Iran is just the worst idea imaginable, would be a disaster. And so I think President Trump understands that. I think he understands that a war with China would be a complete disaster, which it would be.
Though there’s a lot of war party around on that. The funny thing about our time right now, not funny, the wonderful thing about our time right now is that we’re in the midst of the biggest technological boom in the history of the world. So so many good things could happen in the next ten to twenty years. President Trump has used the expression which I fully subscribe to, a golden age. We could have it.
A golden age is not war, a golden age is investing in all this wonderful technology so that we can have health care that works, education systems that work, infrastructure that works. It would be nice if the United States even had one kilometer of fast rail just saying. China just completed its 50,000 kilometer of fast rail. We don’t have one. I can’t even take the train reliably from New York to actually from Washington to New York.
Last time I took the Acela, it broke down in the middle, and I had to change to a local in New Jersey, which does not happen between Shanghai and Beijing, by the way. Just saying.
TUCKER CARLSON: But you miss the countryside. I mean, that is part of it, though. That’s it. Not a lot of incentive to stop in New Jersey, and now they’re giving you one.
JEFFREY SACHS: There I was. I felt so privileged. Right. And there was the local right on the next –
TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. Waiting for us.
JEFFREY SACHS: And you wouldn’t have been in Passaic otherwise.
TUCKER CARLSON: So Exactly. Lucky you. You count your blessings. Right?
The Trump Administration’s New Approach
TUCKER CARLSON: It does feel I’m glad that you are saying this because it does feel like we’re not even a month into the Trump administration. I don’t think anybody agrees with, you know, everything of anyone else’s program, but, clearly, this is a massive departure from what we had, much more than I thought. I feel like I watch pretty closely. I’m amazed by the ambition of what they’re doing, and it does feel like the only way to stop this. Tulsi Gabbard just confirmed yesterday as the Director of National Intelligence. Very big deal.
JEFFREY SACHS: It’s unbelievable. It’s a very big deal.
TUCKER CARLSON: Tulsi Gabbard’s writing the president’s daily brief. Tulsi Gabbard is in charge of a lot of declassification efforts. Like, the whole thing is unbelievable. The only way to stop this is with a war. I mean, that’s my kind of simple reading of it. Do you agree with that?
JEFFREY SACHS: I think that is exactly entirely the point. And if, and we had news today, please, that, the ceasefire will continue on Saturday because more hostages will be released, more exchanges will take place, and there won’t be a return. Really, inshallah, if it happens and an outbreak of war is stopped because it has to be stopped, this will be such a blessing not only for this region, but I have to say for our country too, the United States. I agree.
And so this is really the key moment, and I think Trump’s instincts are there. And what he says, we didn’t even hear Biden or other presidents say, President Trump says many times about Ukraine, too many people are dying. You didn’t even hear those words. I mean, the idea that war involve, by the way maybe a million Ukrainians dead or seriously wounded we’re going to find out in the next months because finally we’ll see what reality is not what the propaganda is but it’s horrible what’s happened. So that instinct is essential and there are several places where everything could be derailed. This region is one of them, Ukraine is another, South China and East China Sea is the third. And if the president gets it and has the basic idea, we live together in respect with other countries. The golden age will come.
The Role of Steve Witkoff in Diplomacy
TUCKER CARLSON: I think and I’d love your view of this. I think of all the amazing things I’ve seen in the last three and a half weeks, maybe the most amazing is the emergence of Steve Witkoff. Who I I just I will say I know personally and and liked enormously, but who was a real estate guy. Okay? All of a sudden, Trump appoints him an envoy sort of over and above massive stable diplomats. We have professional diplomats at the State Department to go do, you know, effective ceasefire here in this region and then sends him over to Russia, and he winds up meeting Yeah. With Putin, apparently, for several hours. And then all this stuff happens. You’ve been around diplomats your entire life. You’ve functioned as a diplomat. What do you think of that?
JEFFREY SACHS: Look. He did the single coolest thing since this administration started, I have to say, which was, Trump made this ceasefire. There’s no question about it. Biden would never – I mean, he didn’t make the ceasefire because we don’t know where Biden was mentally anyway, but his team was completely incompetent. Horrible. I’m sorry to say it. It’s very terrible.
TUCKER CARLSON: A lot of the rest of us did notice that. Yes. It it wasn’t a completely – it wasn’t a completely closely held secret, let’s say.
JEFFREY SACHS: So Trump said, we got to have the ceasefire before my inauguration. And he sent Witkoff. And, Witkoff said to Netanyahu, I’m coming to meet you tomorrow. And, Netanyahu said, no. No. No. Tomorrow is, Saturday. I can’t meet you. And Witkoff said, I’ll be in your office tomorrow at one, and, told him, I don’t care anything. I’m there. We’re going to have a discussion. And out of that meeting came the ceasefire. Now the ceasefire looks maybe like it will hold this weekend.
Believe me. In Israel, they want war everywhere for a lot of reasons. But the president’s job from my point of view of American interest and the world interest and this region’s interest, everybody’s interest, no more war. Stop this now. So if Witkoff can keep that track record, that would be the heroic success.
TUCKER CARLSON: But what does it tell you that Steve Witkoff, who I will say, again, I’m biased because I really like him. He’s got a great personality, super energetic, very straightforward, believable, but zero training in any of this. Like, none. He’s a real estate guy. And he pulls this off? Like, what does that tell you about a professional diplomatic corps?
JEFFREY SACHS: I’ll tell you one thing it tells you. Trump can make peace if he wants to make peace. I mean, he needs a capable guy that can go and read the riot act and say this is no joke and we’re going to have it. And that is basically what good diplomacy is.
And again, in the U.S. system, of course, we’ve got the deep state who tell presidents what to do. We’ve got lobbies. We’ve got all sorts of things, but a president’s true job is to lead. And if you don’t have a president compos mentis, like I think we didn’t have in the United States, you get war breaking out everywhere like we had, in the last two years. Or if you have a president that is poorly directed or poorly, you know, really doesn’t get it and Clinton was an inconsequential president in my opinion because he is so easily swayed. He lets – he just made so many lousy decisions. George Bush Junior listened to Cheney who was really a non-stop warmonger and so on.
If a president gets the idea, I want peace because this war is really destructive of everything else I’m trying to do, then you can have peace actually. It’s possible. No one is going to attack the United States. So peace depends on us. No one is attacking us. China is not about to invade the United States. Russia’s not going to attack the United States. Mexico and Canada are not going to attack the United States. Panama is not going to attack the United States. Greenland’s not going to attack the United States.
TUCKER CARLSON: Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah.
JEFFREY SACHS: I’m sorry to make – I don’t want to go the whole list, but I’m just confident about this. So if the president wants peace, he’ll get it. If he gets peace, believe me, he’ll get all the other things that he wants, like low inflation, being able to pass the budget that he wants, getting his tax policies that he wants. But if there’s war, he ain’t going to get any of it. That’s the basic point.
Reflections on Recent Administrations
And, you know, I voted Democratic in 2020. I voted for Biden. And Biden – I’ve had a lot of experience with governments over the last forty-five years, so I watched them, and I think I understand a lot of them. And Biden, in the first days, said stupid things about foreign policy. The world was divided between this and this and blah blah blah. And he’d say, oh my god. What is the guy – he doesn’t get it. And in fact, he didn’t get it at all.
And I told many Democratic leaders when they still talk to me. Now if they don’t talk to me and I don’t talk to them, you’re going to – you’re going to do something completely almost impossible in American politics, which is you’re going to lose on the basis of foreign policy because Americans don’t vote on foreign policy. And I said, your foreign policy is so bad, this is going to bring you down. And in fact, the Democrats lost their heads in this, and they were so intent on defeating Trump that no matter what, Biden said, well, we have to back him up a hundred percent as he led them off to war and complicity in the war here and the Ukraine war and tensions with China and all the rest. And they created a milieu of so much unhappiness in the United States, anxiety, higher inflation, big budget deficits, that the public said, no.
Changing Political Landscape
TUCKER CARLSON: We don’t like this. This is so they did really the impossible. But they brought Liz Cheney over to the coalition.
JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah. Exactly. And then what’s ironic is, you know, this wonderful person who was confirmed yesterday for the head of, Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who’s really smart by the way, very honest, very meticulous. I know her extremely well over many, many years. Totally up and up, so I’m delighted she’s going to be briefing the president each day. I couldn’t think of a better person. All the Democrats voted against her. This is crazy. She was their colleague for decades. She stood up for things that they should be applauding her for. Every one of them voted against her. She was the vice chairman of the DNC.
TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. Seven, eight years ago.
JEFFREY SACHS: Exactly.
TUCKER CARLSON: So, I guess the question is the opposition you’ve alluded to the deep state, but there’s also the out in the open state. You know, the congress, for example, the other party, the Democratic party, does Trump’s success, not just in the election winning the popular vote, but in affecting peace, which is actually popular with people, does that change their views on foreign policy? Like, does he bring people with him, or does he stand alone between the two parties as he did in the first time?
The Potential for Policy Shifts
JEFFREY SACHS: Look. This is very early days because we’re just a little over three weeks into this. But if yesterday turns into policy, which it could, and the Ukraine war ends soon, which it could, you’re going to see everybody changing their views. “Oh, I didn’t support that. Peace is great.” The European leaders are going to be saying the opposite of what they’re saying right now. Look. In a hundred politicians, anyway, three think. The rest line up somewhere tactically.
So, yes, they will change their view. They’ll complain about other things. That’s their job. They’re in the opposition, but this war was a disastrous, stupid project that went awry, should have ended, makes no sense. And if Trump pulls it off as he can, if he’s resolute now and clear-minded and Witkoff does his work because he’ll be the one to do it, it looks like, and he does his work, then this won’t be talked about or complained about. This will pass into history as just another one of those blunders.
I mean, we don’t talk about the 2003 Iraq war or the twenty years waste in Afghanistan or so many – Libya, so many completely ridiculous projects that America has been involved in for no conceivable reason other than these weird game of Risk ideas. We got to own that space on the board. Turns out the world and that game board are rather different.
Economic Challenges and Global Shifts
But if Trump pulls this off, what he needs, I think, and what we need to understand is the American scene, it ain’t great in general. The budget deficit is enormous. The fragility of society is actually quite significant. There is lots of depression, lots of violence, lots of problems that haven’t been addressed for thirty years. Big big budget deficit, huge, can’t be solved. With all due respect to Elon, it’s not the budget deficit has very little to do with the size of the civil service.
That’s not where the budget deficit comes from. That’s not where the spending comes from. Spending comes from 750 overseas military bases, from wars, from massive outlays, of course on pensions, on health care, on interest payments, on the debt, and so forth. So war derails all of that. We’re not with a buffer. We’re not where the US dollar is king forever. It’s almost the opposite, by the way, although it’s not so clear to people.
But ten years from now, it’s going to be completely different international monetary scene from the one that we have now because the renminbi can play a completely different role. And the way that international settlements will be done is completely different. You can if you watch like I do, you see all of the stitching together of a new system taking shape.
So the US does not have this great room for maneuver and it’s all a game and we can do this and we can do that. The president needs to be really accurate right now, really accurate and understand Also, don’t overplay the hand. The world’s not desperately waiting to get into the US market as I think he thinks, that these tariffs give all this leverage. No. The US is not the big deal that maybe some people imagine right now.
So we got to get our act together, and you can’t get your act together in war. That’s the bottom line.
TUCKER CARLSON: Professor Jeffrey Sachs, thank you very much.
JEFFREY SACHS: Great to be with you, Steve. Thanks.
TUCKER CARLSON: Thank you. That was great. Thanks.
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