Editor’s Notes: In this urgent discussion, Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins Glenn Diesen to analyze the sudden and escalating military conflict between the U.S., Israel, and Iran. Sachs characterizes the attacks as a premeditated campaign for regional and global hegemony rather than a response to an imminent threat. He warns that this “regime change operation” bypasses constitutional authority and risks igniting a catastrophic world war. Ultimately, Sachs argues that the path to stability lies not in military force, but in the international community upholding the fundamental principles of the UN Charter. (Feb 28, 2026)
TRANSCRIPT:
Introduction
GLENN DIESEN: Welcome back. We are joined today by Professor Jeffrey Sachs to discuss the war being launched in Iran. We see that CNN reported that a deal was within reach and then a few hours later Israel and the US attacked Iran.
Well, attacks are reported to have been carried out across Iran and Iran is now retaliating in a very big way, hitting American military bases and targets across the region. We see attacks on Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Iraq, perhaps Saudi Arabia and of course striking several cities in Israel.
I was wondering how you read the situation and what are the objectives of the United States and how do you explain the, I guess, fierce response from the Iranians?
Israel’s Long-Term Plan and US Global Hegemony
JEFFREY SACHS: Well, the objective is stated — it’s regime change. This has been an Israeli dream for 30 years. Israel has caused war across the Middle East using the US and using its effective ownership of Washington, which Israel does own for a variety of reasons. In wars that stretch from Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen — and Iran has always been the big prize.
So this is part of a long-term plan of Israel. The plan is Israeli military hegemony in the region backed by the United States. The basic goal is Israeli dominance through its nuclear arms and the backing of the United States, the suppression of the Arab world and effectively the expulsion of Russia and China from the region. So this is a geopolitical move.
This is of course an attempt to overthrow Iran, but it’s part of a larger picture. The United States is fighting to this moment for global hegemony. Have no doubt about it. This is part of a world war that the US is waging — and the war comes in Venezuela. The war is going to come to Cuba or is already in Cuba. Yesterday the President said that the US would make a friendly takeover of Cuba. The war is in the Middle East. Europe is already a vassal region of the United States.
So this is the US attempting, even in what is actually a multipolar world, to maintain its global hegemony. Of course, when you operate with such extraordinary violence, recklessness, lies and delusion, the results can be completely catastrophic. So we’re in the first hours of something that will have chain reactions across the world.
I don’t believe this will go well. I think that this is extraordinarily dangerous. By the way, the United States is a non-constitutional regime ruled by a small gang — by Trump and the gang. There’s no congressional authorization, there’s no legal basis for any of this. Israel is itself near civil war. The Arab states are unpopular, let’s put it that way. European governments are all unpopular with leaders that command 10 to 20% approval ratings.
So this is a war with a tremendous amount of political instability in the warring nations. Things can crack anywhere.
My point is this is not for any of the reasons alleged — that there was some imminent threat from Iran. Exactly the opposite. As the Omani mediator said repeatedly, including after the launch of the war, the negotiations were proceeding, making progress and proceeding in an orderly way. I speak frequently with the Iranians. They were not only ready to negotiate, they already negotiated 10 years ago, all of these arrangements.
So this is nothing about imminent threat, provocations or nuclear weapons. Actually, this is just about hegemony and regime change. Regional hegemony by Israel and global hegemony by the United States.
The Wizard of Oz: American Propaganda Exposed
GLENN DIESEN: Yes. All these comments about Iran — the threat, nuclear weapons, helping protesters, freedom. You probably saw Trump’s war speech this morning. It’s quite extraordinary because it does say a lot about what Marco Rubio spoke recently about — the need to restore the dominance of the West. And I think you’re spot on. There’s a lot of uncertainty and insecurity at the moment with relative decline. So, but the negotiation—
JEFFREY SACHS: If I might just add — there’s an old movie, I’m sure a lot of people have seen it, The Wizard of Oz, a famous movie where at the end of the movie the great wizard is exposed as the little dog pulls the curtain back and shows that it’s just an old man speaking into a megaphone.
The odd part about American propaganda these days is that the curtain was pulled back long ago. In fact, last month, our treasury secretary, who’s a kind of a thug, explained that the aim of US policy last year was to crush the Iranian economy and bring people out onto the streets. He explained it step by step. He said last March, Trump gave an order for maximal pressure. The idea was to bring down the currency, he said. In December, this worked. Banks failed, there was a dollar shortage, the currency collapsed. People were suffering. They came out on the streets and he said, “Things are going in a very good direction.”
So the curtain was pulled back. This isn’t protests against a regime. This is an American regime change operation. The propaganda is so brazen, they don’t care whether they are believed or not really. They just care that they have a narrative. And this is the situation that we’re in right now.
There was no threat.
There has been an attempt to bring the regime to its knees economically. The negotiations were phony because both last year and this year, when the negotiations were making progress, the US attacked. This is a premeditated aggression without any justification of the kind that the US government gave.
It doesn’t even have the moral veneer of being a covert regime change operation. Most of the time the United States acts violently, repulsively, but it pretends that it’s not the US that’s doing it. So most US regime change operations are covert. Here, they don’t care.
The brazenness — maybe it’s Trump’s megalomania and personal psychological instability. It may be the need for the United States to feel that it has to reset dominance. But it’s not hidden. And every explanation given is a transparent lie.
The explanation is clear — that Israel is supposed to run the Middle East, dominated by Greater Israel. Our own ambassador to the Middle East, Mike Huckabee, who represents the Christian Zionists in the United States — the roughly 20% of Americans who are fundamentalist evangelical Protestants — said, “It’s all Israel’s to take. God gave it to them.” So this is another part of the story. Was he reprimanded for saying that? No. I’m sure there were cheers in the White House for that. No reprimands whatsoever.
The Arab world is very sad in this. The Arab world has been essentially under imperial rule since 1517, since the Ottoman conquests of Arab lands. And so the Arabs were under Ottoman rule for centuries. Then they were under British rule. Now they’re under US and Israeli rule. They’re pretty much supine. They don’t dare speak. They have American military bases all over their territories. They’re occupied lands, basically. And they just go along with this. It’s all very dangerous and very sad.
Consequences of Failure: A Fuse Has Been Lit
GLENN DIESEN: But what do you see being possible — the wide ramifications then? Because, well, you mentioned Huckabee. He can state openly that Israel can take half the Middle East if he wants to. That’s okay. I mean, this is a country that’s essentially the security provider for all these countries which are now threatened by that same power. And now we see US allies across the region being attacked. This is not great for American credibility — the idea that it’s all powerful.
If America fails in this endeavor to destroy Iran or regime change, this could be the same thing. Well, what are the consequences? Because these efforts to restore US dominance — it appears that you spent everything on it. What happens if it fails? Because there’s a lot of things that can go wrong here.
JEFFREY SACHS: It will fail one way or another because 4% of the world cannot run the world. And so the premise of this is the same premise as the British Empire at the end of the 19th century. I recently read a speech given by Joseph Chamberlain, who was head of the colonial office in 1897, saying that Britain would dominate the world as far as the eye can see. And of course, 50 years later, there was no British Empire anymore. This will happen with the United States.
This is an end game. It’s not a true assertion of global hegemony, but it’s the same arrogance today. And generally these wars — and this has a very good chance of becoming a world war in effect — God help us if it turns nuclear, because that’s the end of the world. But a world war, by some accounts it’s already happening, because there are interconnected wars in all regions of the world right now where the United States is meddling.
But again, the US cannot run the world. It has neither the economic nor technological nor military dominance to do that. Nor does the rest of the world want to be run by the United States. There’s no way that the United States can impose a stable pro-US regime in Iran. It’s not possible. We’re not in 1953 when the MI6 and CIA did that and imposed a police state in Iran.
This will not happen. Iran, internally — its own civil society, whether they back the current government or not, doesn’t matter. This is a country of a hundred million people, a 5,000-year history, and it’s not going to be run by the United States or Israel with no boots on the ground, by a proxy from thousands of miles away.
So the US has stepped into s* today, if I could put it bluntly. And we don’t know what will transpire. Maybe they’ll kill a lot of people in the next few days and declare a great success. Reportedly they’ve killed 40 schoolgirls already in a bombing outside of Tehran. But there’s no way that it can actually achieve strategic objectives in the long term.
The United States itself is not stable enough to achieve that. Trump is a highly unpopular figure — of course, a profoundly polarizing figure. His approval rating will fall for sure in the coming months, though sometimes with an attack it blips up. I don’t even think that will happen here because the American public was steadfastly against this.
We’re entering our own elections in November that Trump may try to subvert, because he is openly talking about federalizing or nationalizing the elections, which would mean massive fraud. And so this is very unstable.
And a fuse was lit that will have consequences of war in many regions of the world. Think of also Pakistan — a nuclear power in open war with Afghanistan right now. What does that mean? Where did that come from? What is the US role in this? I would suspect the US role is quite real in this, in fact.
So I think that there is a lot that is very destabilizing in this. And the idea that this is a 12-day war and a new Iranian regime comes in that loves Israel and the United States is a fantasy.
Where Are America’s Allies? Where Is International Law?
GLENN DIESEN: How do you view the response by America’s allies? Because only a short time ago we saw the Prime Minister of Canada, Carney, say that the rules-based order was always a bit of a fraud — that is, we have a several set of rules and we seem to apply whatever we want. Essentially growing a spine to stand up to the US. Not so much anymore. He seems to be all on board with this war.
We have the European Union — they’ve been tweeting out nothing that can even be interpreted as a criticism of the United States. Not one critical comment. And this is again after the US also has its eyes set on EU territory.
How do you make sense of this? Is this just pure obedience or is this hatred for Iran — or where are the principles? Where are the rules? Where is the international law? This was supposed to be the benefit we were told after the Cold War about the hegemony of the West — that we were going to have international rules, principles, values elevated above brutal power politics. Yet here we are. Not one critical comment.
The Western World’s Response and Global Implications
JEFFREY SACHS: No, I haven’t seen a critical comment yet. Kayakalis exposes Brussels again as almost fascistic. By the way, the attack is on Iran, not on the United States for launching a premeditated aggression. Not a word about that. Carney, frankly shocks me today. Extremely disappointing. Of course, I’ve only read one statement. I don’t know the full context, but from what I read at least, Carney backed the United States. Australia backed the United States.
Now I think what is true is that if you add up the populations of the United States and Canada and Britain and European Union and Australia, we can do it. 380, 450, another 450, 900. It’s maybe a billion people that you reach in the count of the white person’s world, if I could put it that way. The Western world, which is all enthusiastic in its attack on Iran today, that’s about 12 and a half percent of the world population. So we hear that because this is our Western world, the Western world dominates the media, especially the English language media. But I don’t think that it is at all representative of the world opinion.
But it is shocking. It is the basic idea of the United States that Europe is a vassal region and doesn’t have to be worried about. And Von der Leyen and Kallas are vassals. They’re useless spokespeople for US interests. Canada had shown a glimmer of independence, but apparently it lost that again today. Australia, it doesn’t surprise me. This is part of the British world. And that really doesn’t surprise me. There’s a lot of anti-Muslim hatred, there’s a lot of anti-Iran hatred. Maybe it goes back to Herodotus and the Persian wars. But these are stereotypes that are absolutely grotesque but real.
There’s a lot of ignorance in the white world about the rest of the world, and that’s what we’re seeing right now. There’s also a very strong Zionist hold over these governments. These governments are suborned by Israel, they’re blackmailed by Israel, they’re bribed by Israel. They have weapon systems and intelligence activities with Israel. They use Pegasus and other spy materials. So there’s a military industrial alliance that is at work here that’s also very powerful, in which Israel is actually a protagonist, not just another member of the US hegemonic club.
So part of this is pro-Israel and it’s the domestic politics. When Trump gave his State of the Union speech, there was one standing ovation in the Congress and that’s when he talked about how evil Iran was. The US Congress is owned and operated by the Zionist lobby. That’s not an exaggeration, that’s just a literal fact. Every congressman can explain it to you. If they deviate from the lobby, they will face retribution, they will face primary opponents, they will face vilification. If they go with the Israel lobby, they get treats and trips and benefits and campaign contributions and the like.
And it’s linked to the CIA, Mossad and the military industrial complex, which is pervasively powerful. It runs the United States. Actually, we don’t have a democratic constitutional system. We have a military industrial complex which runs American foreign policy in the world and that’s deeply integrated with Israel. And this is another reason for what we’re observing right now.
But the shock that you get — a brazen, premeditated, extraordinarily violent and vulgar attack on Iran — and Europe jumps up and says, “Right on.” And Canada and Australia and I’m sure a few others. It shows the kind of world that we’re in right now. There is apparently no principle. And Trump also wants to prove that this is the world of gangsters and he wants to be gangster number one.
Could This Spiral Into World War Three?
GLENN DIESEN: So how severe is it though? I mean, you say internationally, obviously this could set the whole world on fire, given that this impacts every corner of the world, it seems. But what will it do within the United States as well? There’s already a division between the MAGA crowd who don’t like that Israel is put before America — Israel first instead of America first. A failed and humiliating war in Iran would definitely play into this. Even a successful one would, but it would be very difficult to absorb a failure, it seems. But on the international level, could this spiral out of control into World War Three? It’s too early, of course. The war only began a few hours ago. But what are the possible pathways you see here?
JEFFREY SACHS: The theory is that Iran will be decapitated. The massive attacks will subdue Iran in short order and all will be quiet. Soon Trump will declare a triumph, he will be a hero and things will go on. That’s the US view. It’s possible, you might put that at 5% or 10%. No operation that the US has undertaken of this sort has been like that anywhere for decades.
This is the theory of the US overthrowing Assad in 2011. It actually lasted 15 years. This is the theory of the US overthrowing Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 — that civil war continues till today. This is the theory of overthrowing the Sudanese government that now has two civil wars, one in Sudan and one in South Sudan. This is the theory of the Iraq war, that shock and awe would lead to quiet. And it did — “Mission accomplished,” remember? And then it led to years and years of instability. This is the theory of the occupation of Afghanistan, which lasted 20 years in failure.
This time there are not even plans to be troops on the ground. How is the United States going to run Iran from afar? There is no answer to that. So we will have the usual differences of very short-term triumphant announcements in the next 48 hours. And then we’ll hear a lot of propaganda in the next two weeks and then we’ll see repercussions of this for many, many years.
The repercussions, I think, are bound to be destabilizing. I don’t see how this can possibly be stabilizing in any way. I don’t see how the objectives could actually be fulfilled in any way. I give almost zero probability to a strategic objective win. Again, the strategic win from a US point of view and an Israel point of view would be installing a new Shah of Iran, a new police state in Iran, as was installed between 1953 and 1979. But I think the chance of that is zero.
Democracy, Empire, and the Fuse That Has Been Lit
GLENN DIESEN: Let’s talk about freedom and democracy. Given that we just installed Jolani and his ISIS henchmen in Syria, it’s not very good.
JEFFREY SACHS: But I think we should be very clear. There’s not even a pretense about democracy. This has nothing to do with democracy. We don’t have it in the United States, we don’t have it in Israel. We don’t have it really in the Western world anymore. We have some trappings of democracy, but we’ve already become militarized states. And in the United States, this is certainly true. Our system of government is constitutional. It says Congress has the power to declare war. We just had a war declared by one person in the middle of the night against public opinion. So we are not a democracy. We have trappings of that. But so too did the Roman Empire. They still had senators in togas, but it was an empire and it was not a republic. And so this is the reality that we’re in right now.
But by the way, this is not a stable imperium in the United States. It’s very unstable, and the divisions internally are very large. So again, the time horizon is critical here. What happens in days or weeks can be very different from what happens over the course of a few years. But Trump lit a fuse which is completely explosive, and it will explode in many places in the world, and it’s not going to come back to stability in a day or a month.
No matter what happens in the very short term, Trump lit a fuse that will absolutely end with the end of the US as it is right now in its hegemony, and I think probably eventually the end of Israel as it is also within the next decade or two. This is an explosion that was set off today that is very big and is not going to be put down in some quick decapitation strike in a regime change operation.
No Strategy, No Pathway to Success
GLENN DIESEN: Yeah, I was on Judge Napolitano last night, and he was asking me whether or not I think the war would happen. And I said there were strong arguments for why it would happen because the US sent too many assets to be just simply pulled back. There had been too much chest beating to simply pull back. And of course, Israel wouldn’t permit a peace which would allow Iran to essentially have the pressure removed.
But on the other hand, I was making the point that the case for peace would be that there’s no pathway here. It’s too crazy. There’s no strategy, no story you can tell of how this is going to be a success. Essentially, it would predictably set the world on fire. And this was my argument for why perhaps this war might not happen. But I guess I was wrong on this — it did happen. But it doesn’t make any sense. That’s why I had a hard time believing you’d actually go through with this.
JEFFREY SACHS: I mean, you and I and people who think with reason and consequences would say, “No, this could not exist.” When I woke up this morning in New York, I turned on the news, I was dumbfounded the same way, even with the timing, with the Omani mediator saying late last night, “Good progress being made, we’ll meet in Vienna next week.”
But I think the war machine in the United States and Israel is extremely powerful. This is a kind of fascism with a different face, but it’s very powerful. And the only president in my whole lifetime that tried to stop it was President Kennedy in 1963, and the CIA killed him after that. And that’s one message also to presidents that has lasted since then. This is a war machine. You are a temporary occupant of office. And you just watch yourself.
The Only Hope: The Rest of the World Must Raise Its Voice
GLENN DIESEN: Well, Jeffrey Sachs, thank you as always for taking the time. I really hope that Trump will see that this is a massive failure and just make the claim that Iran called, they’re ready to do new serious negotiations — some BS which he is usually good at — and get an early stop to this.
JEFFREY SACHS: Yes, and Glenn, even more than Trump, who I give no hope for, if the rest of the world would raise their voice on the basic principle that war can end everything. And that the reason we have the United Nations and Article Two, Paragraph Four, that says that it is illegal to threaten the use of force or to use force against any UN member state — if they would abide by that principle, which was established in 1945 to prevent what just happened and to stop it after it happens. This is our hope.
The hope is not Trump. The hope is not Netanyahu. The hope is not from inside the United States. The hope is that most of the world — maybe not the vassal states of the United States, but most of the world — will say this is completely outrageous, dangerous and illegal. I know it seems like a vain hope, but it’s the one that I think is the only path right now to getting this turned off.
GLENN DIESEN: Well, don’t expect a peep from the Europeans, at least. I know this is quite new levels of spinelessness and lack of principles day by day. So indeed, thank you very much for taking the time. And let’s hope this does not get out of control. Thank you.
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