Transcript of Jeffrey Sachs’ Interview on The Tucker Carlson Show

It has lost territory, it has had the country destroyed, it has had its economy brought to ruins. Nothing of the last three years has been any help whatsoever to Ukraine.

So when I said three years ago, I also said it five years ago and before even Russia’s invasion in February 2022, that there didn’t have to be a war, that the war could easily be avoided. When I said in March and April of 2022, you could stop Russia right now and end the war, not only was that right, it was, if I could put it this way, pro Ukraine. Of course, it was attacked at the time as being anti Ukraine.

This is the craziest thing. The friends of Ukraine, so called, are the ones that are completely destroying Ukraine. The friends of Ukraine, so called, are the ones that tell Ukraine to fight on, to fight on. It’s like being, I guess the coach in a boxing match and your guy is being bloodied and being hit and being destroyed in the battle and you say, go, I’m on your side. Go out there and hit him again until they get smashed one more time. And they’re brought to their side of the ring and again you tell them, go out and fight. because I’m your buddy.

And this is the disaster that the so called friends of Ukraine, whether it is all that we saw during the Biden administration or that we hear every day from Starmer, the Prime Minister of UK or Merz, the new Chancellor of Germany, or Macron from France, and of course from Zelensky, who is now running, I’m sorry to put it this way, but a little dictatorship because he runs by martial law, he doesn’t run by public support. But they’re all the ones telling their young people, go out to the front lines, go get killed. And this has been going on for years.

The Real Target: Weakening Russia

So the question you ask is why? This isn’t for Ukraine, this is destroying Ukraine. So what is it for? Well, I think it’s quite obvious and it’s been obvious for many years, the American push to Ukraine to fight on, don’t accept neutrality and so forth. This has been a project of the American deep state of the military industrial complex dating back decades. And the target has nothing to do with Ukraine at all. Destroying Ukraine. The target is to quote, weaken Russia. This is the point.

TUCKER CARLSON: But why would you want to weaken Russia?

JEFFREY SACHS: That’s an even longer story.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean no one wants to weaken India.

JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah, it’s a very good point. And someday when India succeeds, we will want to weaken India. So that’s probably sooner rather than later. It’s actually quite interesting. Maybe you’ll make me digress. Right at the start, in the early years of this century, in 2000, 2001, 2002, the US relationship with China was just kind of normal. Even keel, we had good business with China. And one of my dear friends, with whom I somewhat disagree on some things and agree vociferously on other things, John Mearsheimer, the great political scientist, wrote a famous book called the Tragedy of Great Power Politics. This is his magnum opus.

And in it he says at the beginning of the book, in around 2000, he said, the relations with China are quiet now, but when China gains power, we will go into conflict with China. And so this is to answer your question, why would John Mearsheimer say that? Not because of anything China would have done, but because a big power will generate a reaction from the United States. That’s his theory, that we’re on an almost inevitable collision course the great powers.

I’m not so pessimistic, although I’d say Mearsheimer is empirically more right in a way. So he somewhat accurately describes things, but he also labeled his book the tragedy of Great Power politics. And I don’t want tragedy all the time. I’d like a little comedy, actually. A little normal relations.

The Pattern of Great Power Opposition

So to answer your question, what do we have against Russia? The fact of the matter is Russia is big. Russia is powerful. And for that reason, and that reason alone or sufficiently, the US would oppose Russia just like the US opposes China. Now, of course, maybe people listening to this are saying, that’s crazy. We oppose China because of all the terrible things they do. Or we oppose Russia because of all of the terrible things they do.

I would take a different view of this, which is we make up stories about why we oppose big powers, but the basic reason we oppose big powers is that they are big. They are an affront to our desire for what the political scientists, in a fancy word, call primacy or call hegemony, or call full spectrum dominance, in other words, is an affront to our ability to dictate circumstances.

China certainly is an affront to the US ability to dictate circumstances in Asia. For that reason alone, we, for me, it’s fine, you know, I understand there are many powers in the world. That’s how the world is. But for the powers that be in Washington, that’s completely antithetical to the American strategic purpose, which explicitly, for many, many years has been full spectrum dominance or primacy. In other words, our purpose stated by the establishment, by the military industrial complex is one. We must be the unrivaled number one.

So if you ask, why do we hate Russia? Because Russia stands in the way of us being the unrivaled number one. Now you could say, well, it’s because of all the terrible things that they do. But it’s a little more complicated than that.

The Evolution of Anti-Russian Sentiment

During the cold war, from 1945 to 1991, we hated Russia because it was communist. Yes. Okay. I happen to be quite deeply involved at the end of that period as an economic adviser when they were trying to get out of that horrible system. And I advised President Gorbachev in 1990, 91, and I advised President Yeltsin in 1992 and 93. They — Yeltsin said, we don’t want any of this communism anymore. We want to be a normal country.

So the United States came up with other reasons to hate Russia. So I watched with my own eyes that the reason that had been given was not the real reason. It was maybe the believed reason, but it was the Narrative reason. We hate Russia because it is a godless Communist country. Now it is a Russian Orthodox, non communist country, and we still hate Russia. Same deal.

Historical Parallels: The British Empire and Russia

And by the way, what’s absolutely fascinating is if you go back to 180 years ago, and I’m not kidding, to 1840, our precursor as world hegemon. That was the British Empire. They hated Russia, too. And why? For no reason. It was a little before the Bolshevik Revolution, by the way. It was before any ostensible reason. But the British elite hated Russia.

Okay. And shows an interesting answer to your question. A historian named Gleason in 1950 tried to answer the question, how did Britain come to hate Russia? Why is it that by 1840, the British hated the Russians so much that 13 years later, in 1853, the British went to war against Russia, a war of choice in the Crimean War?

So this historian did an amazing job because it was before AI and being able to ask all these good questions. He went through all the archives, he went through all the speeches by British leaders, all the speeches in the House of Commons, all the articles written in the intellectual magazines from 1850 onward, and he posed the question. He said, we were allies of Russia in 1815 in defeating Napoleon. Yes, we were allies then. Just 25 years later, we’re enemies. What happened?

So he goes through all of the speeches, everything. His conclusion in the end is remarkable. Nothing happened. There was no reason why Britain came to hate Russia, except Russia was big and therefore was an affront to the British Empire. And of course, the British concocted an idea which was a completely bizarre idea, and that was that the Tsar was going to invade British India through the Khyber Pass. This became known as the Great Game afterwards. This was a crazy idea. The thought never even crossed the minds of these czars.

TUCKER CARLSON: The idea to march across Afghanistan.

JEFFREY SACHS: To march across Afghanistan and into India, into the Indian subcontinent to fight the British empires and Looney Tunes. But the British elite came to view Russia as the great threat to the British Empire, the threat to India, the crown jewel of the Empire. So much so that by 1840, Britain was rabidly Russophobic. And then by 1853, Lord Palmerston totally concocted a pretext to go to war with Russia. The Crimean War.

TUCKER CARLSON: Charge of the Light Brigade.

The Crimean War: A Concocted Conflict

JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah, yeah. Charge of the Light Brigade. And the Crimean War was a concocted showdown between the British Empire and the Russian Empire, concocted because the Russians said, we don’t want to fight you. You know, day and night, challenged. The Russians had challenged the Ottoman Turks and put some troops in Wallachia at the mouth of the Danube, because the Ottomans had given some privileges to France that the Russians thought belonged to them. And then the British and the French threatened the Russians and the Russians retreated.

This is the prelude to the Crimean War. The Russians retreated. And then when the Russians retreated, the British said, we now fight on. In other words, the pretext was gone. But they wanted that war. Why did they want the war? They wanted the war because the British idea was to banish Russia from the Black Sea region.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

JEFFREY SACHS: Remember, the Black Sea is Russia’s warm water port till today, by the way. It was created as a warm water port in 1783 by the Empress Catherine the Great and it has been Russia’s warm water port since then.

TUCKER CARLSON: Crimea.

The Black Sea Strategy: Then and Now

JEFFREY SACHS: Palmerston in Crimea, in Sevastopol. Precisely. Which was besieged by the British and the French during the Crimean War. The Russians eventually surrendered. And in the Treaty of Paris in 1856, the Russians agreed to scrap their Black Sea fleet. It remained scrapped for about 20 years, actually. And then as history always shows, the French went running back to the Russians ally with us because the Germans are rising in power. And so suddenly the enemy became the friend because you needed a new friend to fight the new enemy and so on. It’s kind of crazy European politics, but the idea of Lord Palmerston was banish Russia from the Black Sea and you reduce Russia to a third rate power.

Now all of this is fascinating because first of all, the Russophobia was a concocted hatred. Second, the war between Britain and France on one side and Russia in 1853 was concocted. But third, we’re replaying that almost to the same script today and almost with exactly the same plot line, which is so weird but true.

From Cold War to Post-Soviet Hostility

And why I say that is the United States quote, or the inside deep state. The CIA and its apparatus and the rest of the military industrial complexes hated the Soviet Union since 1945, even though they were our ally in defeating Hitler. It turned to preparing for war against our ally within a few months of the end of World War II. This is by itself a very important point. And then from 1945 to 1991, we had the Cold War, ostensibly against communism and against international communism.

Then in December 1991, the Soviet Union ended. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it to you before. I was in the Kremlin that day, literally that hour, sitting next in front of Boris Yeltsin, or I was in front of him, and he said to me and to my Colleagues, gentlemen, I want to tell you the Soviet Union is over. I heard it probably first in the world directly from President Yeltsin in December 1991.

The Deep State’s Long-Term Strategy Against Russia

JEFFREY SACHS: And Yeltsin said at the time, I want us to be a normal country. We want a normal economy, Mr. Sachs. We want a normal democratic political system. We want to be friends with the United States. And I in my naivete, said to him, President Yeltsin, I can assure you the American people will want to partner with Russia to have a future of peace and economic cooperation. And I was completely convinced of it. I thought this is the most historic moment imagined was pinching myself. Can you believe you’re sitting in the Kremlin hearing from the President of Russia the end of the Soviet Union? And I had that blessing. It was unbelievable. I was wrong.

Because as soon as the Soviet Union ended, what did the deep state say? Well, they said, this is great. Now we need to dismember Russia too. Just like the Soviet Union broke apart on its ethnic lines, Russia is fragile. Maybe his big Brzezinski opined, maybe it’ll be three different parts. Maybe there’ll be a European part, a Siberian part and a Far east part. Did. The arrogance, the hubris is unbelievable on the American side. But the idea was cold War over. That’s ridiculous. Now we go on to surround Russia. Now we go on to chip apart Russia. One of the favorite phrases in Washington used to be to decolonize Russia. It meant that we can break away different regions of Russia, Chechnya or this region or that region. Why? It’s a big power. We’re the only big power that should be on the planet.

And incidentally, in 1992, I can absolutely assure you no one had China on the radar screen. Yes, in Washington at all. China was rice growing, villages, maybe, you know, a counterpoint to help weaken Russia or as it was used in this triangulation to weaken the Soviet Union. But it wasn’t on anybody’s radar screen as potentially a competitor or a threat or anything else. So the focus was on Russia and it remained on Russia.

The Birth of Neoconservative Unipolarity

And we know that the US Deep state. And again, by that I don’t mean just a figment of our imagination or metaphor. I mean the CIA, I mean the rest of the intelligence agencies, I mean the Pentagon, I mean the Armed Services Committees of the Congress, I mean the military contractors. They already, by 1992, had the idea of unchallenged primacy of the United States. And this became called neoconservatism afterwards. But it was early on and of course Cheney was our defense secretary in 1992 and Wolfowitz was his deputy. And all of the familiar figures that we came to know in the Iraq War and afterwards were on the scene. This was the end of Bush Sr. And they already concocted the idea of US unipolarity or primacy or full spectrum dominance or hegemony, whatever term one wants to use.

Then comes Clinton into office. And Clinton’s a — He’s a kind of inconsequential, inexperienced, I think, just not a serious person and didn’t become one, unfortunately, during his presidency. And the deep state explains to him this is the way it is. And he also hears from Central Europe countries that I was advising, but not advising on this for sure. Oh, we need NATO. Why? Why do you need NATO? NATO was supposed to protect you against the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union doesn’t exist anymore. Russia is not threatening anybody. It’s barely surviving financial crisis, but it doesn’t have its eyes on Prague or on Warsaw or on Budapest. Nothing of the sort. But the idea of unipolarity is we need to put our bases on every part of the board. This is the game of risk. We need to put our pieces everywhere.

NATO Expansion Despite Promises

And so the idea of NATO enlargement is worked out in 1993, and there’s bureaucratic opposition inside by smart diplomats who say, why are we doing this? The Cold War is over. But two, the deep state. The Cold War was not over. It was just revving up because we got to get rid of Russia in its current form as well. So by the beginning of 1994, President Clinton already in a speech in January 1994, endorses the eastward expansion of NATO.

And if I could just put a parentheses around that, the US had promised unequivocally to the Soviet Union in the context of German reunification as of February 2000 — February, sorry, 1990. 1990. Excuse me. Yes. That NATO would not move one inch eastward. This remains, by the way, highly contested to this day. But if anyone wants the information, you go on something called the National Security Archive of George Washington University, and you can read the dozens and dozens of statements and all of the archival material making completely, absolutely, unequivocally clear that the United States and Germany promised that NATO would not move one inch eastward. So the record is absolutely clear.

But Clinton being Clinton in the way that he governed, was told by the deep state, now we start moving eastward. And Clinton thought that was good domestic politics also with the Polish American vote, Czech American vote, and so forth. And he was also told by friends like Vaclav Havel in Czech Republic and so forth, this is a good idea. So he starts the NATO enlargement eastward.

Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard Strategy

And in 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski explains basically the Lord Palmerston strategy. We, we will surround Russia in the Black Sea region and we will render Russia a third rate power. And why not? It’s so low cost, we’re so powerful, what could stop us? We’re unchallenged anyway. They’re weak, they depend on us. So there was no, it wasn’t even heatedly debated. But Brzezinski’s absolutely clear about this. And like so many learned volumes, I must say his book, the Grand Chessboard is very well written and fundamentally wrong.

And fundamentally wrong in that he has a whole, essentially chapter, long chapter saying NATO will move eastward, Europe, meaning the European Union, will move eastward, and what will Russia be able to do about it? And he goes into a long analysis saying, could Russia turn to China? No, never. Could Russia turn to Iran? No, never. Russia’s only vocation is the European vocation. So Russia’s going to have to swallow hard and accept this.

The point, Tucker, is what we’re witnessing is not short term decisions of presidents. We’re watching a long term consistent strategy, of course, built into the mindsets of senators and congressmen, and more than the mindsets built into their campaign contributions as well. So this is built into the Armed Services Committee. This is built into the Intelligence Committee. This is why Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal stand up every day saying we must fight the Russians and so on. This is not short term claims based on current politics. This is a project that, that dates back more than 30 years. It’s a stupid project.

The Inevitable Disaster

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, the verdict is in, though, so interesting. Ultimately, the project reaches its inevitable conclusion, which is including Russia’s largest and most important neighbor, Ukraine, in NATO. They announced that in February at the Munich security conference of 2022. And then almost immediately after Russia rolls across into Ukraine and then the war commences. And it’s a disaster for everybody, especially the United States, I would argue. And it does what Brzezinski said it wouldn’t do, which is drive Russia right into China, into what’s now a permanent alliance. So it’s a disaster, right?

Seven months ago, Donald Trump gets elected on the claim, this is a disaster. I’m going to fix it. And seven months later, it’s still not fixed, despite his, I think, sincere efforts to fix it.

JEFFREY SACHS: I agree with you.

TUCKER CARLSON: So what? Why isn’t this fixed?

The Insanity of Georgian NATO Membership

JEFFREY SACHS: Let me just say, in terms of chronology, one more piece to add, just to add to the historical note, the decision to invite Ukraine. And even more crazy, by the way, the country of Georgia, which is in the South Caucasus. People should take out a map and look at this region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea and ask themselves a question. Can you? Is that the North Atlantic because NATO is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or is that the soft underbelly of Russia in the Caucasus Mountains? This is insane.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s more Asian than European, but in.

The Strategic Encirclement of Russia

JEFFREY SACHS: Some ways, well, it’s literally Asia, because the European demarcation is the crescent line of the Grand Caucasus. So we’re inviting an Asian country, Georgia, into NATO, Stalin’s home nation. And fascinating. Why Georgia? Because look at the map also. Not only is it Asia, not only is it not the North Atlantic, but it completes the encirclement of Russia in the Black Sea. So it’s not a random choice. It’s Palmerston 1853, brought to life by Brzezinski, 1997, and lived out by George Bush Jr. In 2008, they announced this. Putin says, no, this is not going to be. This is craziness.

In the meantime, also remember that in this incredible hubris of the United States, this mad arrogance, in 2002, the US unilaterally walked out of the Anti Ballistic Missile treaty, so the US destabilized the nuclear arms control framework fundamentally, in 2002. This is not sufficiently appreciated because from Russia’s point of view until today, and literally on a strike on strategic bombers last week, Russia believes that the United States has killed the nuclear arms framework. So we’re talking about not vague national security concerns, we’re talking about fundamental national and world survival terms. Because from Russia’s point of view, and understandably so, the United States doesn’t want to play by any single rules whatsoever.

The 2014 Ukrainian Coup

So I just want to say that this project Ukraine not only goes back to the 1990s, but the invitation was in 2008, the Russians said no. So in 2010, a pro neutral president, Viktor Yanukovych, is elected. He comes to power on the basis of no NATO enlargement, because he knows how dangerous that is for his country being between east and West. He says, stay away to both sides. And we will keep calm.

In February 2014, the United States conspires in a coup that overthrows Yanukovych. And that was a coup in which the US was deeply engaged. My colleague at Columbia University, my colleague now, Victoria Nuland, was the point person on the, on the ground. Geoffrey Pyatt, who was a senior official for Biden back in 2014. He was Ambassador in fact to Ukraine and then became a senior State Department official in the Biden administration afterwards. Senators, Lindsey Graham, he was out there. John McCain. This was a typical US regime change operation.

What do I mean by that? It means Yanukovych is in the way of our plan. We need to get him out of the way because we need to expand NATO. And so Yanukovych is overthrown on February 22, 2014, violently, within a nanosecond. Rather than saying, hey, the President should come back, a violent group overtook the government buildings. President Obama recognizes the new government within a nanosecond because this is a US game. This is the whole point. If you were a serious country that believed in democracy, President Obama would have said, we don’t accept mobs entering our buildings and overthrowing our government. President Yanukovych is the elected president and he is the one we recognize. No, within a nanosecond, Obama recognized the new post coup regime, the one that Zelensky leads today.

The Crimea Crisis and War’s Beginning

And amazingly, you know, according to script, honest to God, one of the first things that this new regime, this regime brought to power by an American participation in a coup, not only Americans, there were Ukrainian right wing forces also, but America played its active role. What is one of the first things they say? They say we think Russia should exit from Crimea. What does that mean? We think the Russian military base needs to leave Crimea now. It was interesting under Yanukovych’s term, Yanukovych and Putin had negotiated not territorial annexation of Crimea, but rather a 25 year lease, thank you very much. That Russia will keep its naval base in Crimean Sevastopol. But immediately the post coup regime reads the script and says, we don’t think Russia should be in Crimea. In other words, subscript NATO is going to take over the military base in the Black Sea. That’s when Russia immediately organizes a referendum and Crimea is taken into Russian hands.

This wasn’t an innocent event. This was part of the playbook of the United States. The war started in February 2014. It didn’t start with the invasion by Russia in February 2022. That was a major escalation. But the war started in February 2014, it escalated. The US built up the Ukrainian military to be the largest standing army of Europe.

The Failed Peace Negotiations

In fact, by 2021, when Biden came into office, Putin tried one more time, would you commit or we call on you to commit to not enlarge NATO to Ukraine. And we’ve talked about it. I begged Jake Sullivan in a phone call in December 2021, check. Take the agreement. Are you kidding? Avoid the war. No, no, we can’t do that. NATO open door, so called. In other words, we’re determined to move NATO into Ukraine. And Jeff, don’t worry, there won’t be a war. Another brilliant utterance of Professor Jake Sullivan got everything wrong from beginning to end as far as I’m concerned.

So then Russia invaded on February 24, 2022. And what was the point of that invasion in our hopeless mainstream media, which is again, New York Times I’ll use as a reference point, phony, from morning till night, it was to take over Ukraine. No, it was not to take over Ukraine. It was to push Ukraine to accept neutrality. This was the point of the invasion. And it was absolutely clear because within seven days, Zelensky said, okay, okay, okay, okay, we can be neutral. And within a couple of weeks, the Ukrainians had submitted a paper to the Russians to say, we, why don’t we just have neutrality? And the Russians took that paper to President Putin and Putin said, okay, look, let’s negotiate and we can find a resolution of this.

The Istanbul Peace Process

And that’s when the so called Istanbul process began. The Turkish government said, we will be a mediator. I went and talked at length to the Turkish negotiators to understand all the details about this. But the fact of the matter is, in March 2022, as I was saying earlier, there were very rapid advances of a peace agreement. By March 28, 2022, there was actually a joint communique between Russia and Ukraine saying, we have reached a framework for peace. This is forgotten completely today. Then just two weeks later, specifically April 15, there was a draft agreement on the table. Not everything was agreed. There were some important points, but basically there was an agreement and serious negotiators would have completed the work.

That’s when the United States told the Ukrainians, no, no, you fight on. Now this comes to your question. Why did the US Say that then and why does the war continue now, even though clearly President Trump wants this war to end? Well, it continued then because it was undoubtedly the deep state idea. And I spoke to US Government officials. A few of them still spoke to me at the time I knew senior officials, they absolutely believed that the economic sanctions would bring Russia to its knees.

The Failed Sanctions Strategy

For example, there was once upon a time that cutting Russia out from SWIFT was called the nuclear option. Kind of a mind boggling ignorance and delusion that America runs everything. So if we put sanctions on Russia, that will crush the Russian economy. They didn’t factor in the fact that Russia happens to sell commodities that are easily fungible and that not so hard to direct to India, by the way, which then can resell to Europe. So it’s a little bit more costly. It’s stupid. It’s scratching your left ear with your right arm. You know, it’s not the most direct way to do things. We make everything more expensive, less efficient. But Europe still buys all this stuff. The Indians are middlemen, of course. They buy a lot of oil for their own refining. China buys gas and oil and so forth. So Russia isn’t brought to its knees, but they believed it then. Okay, fast.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, not only has Russia on brought to its knees, would you rather have the Russian economy or the American economy right now?

The Persistence of War Despite Presidential Intent

JEFFREY SACHS: That’s an interesting question. Let me come to that in a moment because I want to address the question why, why this persists. Okay, so they really believed that there would be victory in short order. And if it wasn’t the nuclear option, God, I hate the term because we’re close to nuclear war. But if it weren’t the nuclear option so called of cutting Russia out of the swift banking system, it would be the HIMARS, it would be the ATACMS. Or it was the idea that Putin will never mobilize because that would be so unpopular, it would bring him down. Or it was the idea that there would be an internal coup, Prigozhin or some other concocted event and so on. Okay, this was delusion, morning till night, very typical of American foreign policy.

In comes President Trump. President Trump understands clearly this is really screwed up. This is not helping Ukraine. Ukraine cannot win on the battlefield. More war means more deaths by the hundreds of thousands, more, not less loss of territory. And the whole idea, what are we fighting over this NATO enlargement, Eh, I’m not interested. This is President Trump’s very accurate view of the situation and I think he gets it. This is a stupid war. This is an unnecessary war. This is a costly war. This diverts American attention. This costs tens or hundreds of billions of dollars depending on how long this goes on. And so he says the war should end completely. Right? And he enunciates an absolutely basic point clearly. Which is NATO should not expand. This is stupid. This is the cause of this whole thing. That is the basis for ending this war. We’re not far from it.

The Complexity of Waging Peace

But here’s the sad fact. Waging peace actually is as complicated as waging war. And that is a paradox. It seems not right. Why doesn’t peace just come when you say you don’t want to fight? And the reason is that the forces that want war are really powerful. Yeah. They don’t just stop. They don’t stop because the President opines that the war should end. The war has a lot of supporters. Why? Because from the American point of view, the project continues. We can defeat Russia and why not have more war? The war is good on many, many counts. It weakens Russia. We get to test our weapon systems as a. I can’t even stand it. But as many of our senators from Blumenthal and Romney and others have vulgarly said, this is great. No, Americans are dying as if more than a million Ukrainian casualties means nothing. And according to our politicians, to them, to American politicians, it means absolutely nothing. It doesn’t mean anything.

You never hear them, you hear them talk about their bravery. You don’t hear them talk about the kinds of emails that I receive, including one that I just received from somebody who said, Mr. Sachs, they’re about to send me off to die. Someone from Ukraine who just found my email publicly and he said I’m 48 years old and they’re sending me to the front lines. 48 years old, yes. So I’m sending a message that I know I’m about to die. And it’s true. They send these middle aged people, disabled people, kids grabbed off the streets, delivery boys off of bicycles, grabbed by these so called recruiters who are thugs who pull them into vans and then they’re sent off to the front lines and they’re dying under the drones.

The Deep State Network

So for the American deep state, they don’t care, they don’t count that they. The war is okay. Then in Europe we brought in a. The CIA has of course created a European wide security system, largely out of view. But whatever the CIA does here, think of the MI6 in Britain operating in the same way. Even more disastrously, think of BND in Germany actually, which if you go back to 1945, not to go into too many details, has its Nazi roots. But the CIA created it after 1945 with the former Nazi intelligence agents to fight against the Soviet Union, taking him straight out of Hitler’s intelligence into U.S. intelligence back in 1945. So called Galen operation. Anyway, we have this whole network and this network is still going.

So the reason you have to wage peace is the President. He’s just the president. After all, he faces throughout the US Government. He faces the Lindsey Graham’s and the Richard Blumenthals. He faces the CIA operations. He faces these pathetic politicians. They’re pathetic because they don’t represent their national interests at all. They represent this deep state approach. Starmer, who seems to do nothing more than parrot MI6 lines, Macron in France, Mertz in Germany. They’re all warmongers.

And Zelensky, who is Zelensky? Zelensky was put in by. He’s part of a regime. Put in by a coup. He won an election, but an election in this post coup regime. He is way over his due date from his electoral mandate. As everybody knows, he rules by martial law. He’s surrounded by complete hardliners. And I’ve been told, I don’t know if it’s true or not, but the senior people in Ukraine have said, well, he has no choice. He’ll get knocked off by his own side if he. This could be completely true. But he’s not representing the Ukrainian people who he’s killing. He’s representing a clique that’s in power right now.

Trump’s Peace Efforts and Deep State Opposition

So this is actually Trump’s world. To bring the war to a close requires a lot of coordinated activity. It requires an absolutely unified team. But remember, in Washington, everyone’s partly bought out by someone else by the military industrial complex. And so you hear lots of cacophony, you hear lots of confusion, you hear lots of ultimatums given. But President Trump’s really trying to bring about peace.

Now what has happened is Trump has said, I want peace. He’s faced this mountain of deep state or this chorus of deep state and European and Zelensky opposition. No, no, we want war. We want war. We don’t want peace. We’ll never give in. And he has. President Trump has usefully tried to maneuver both sides to the negotiating table and that we should give him all our support and all credit for doing that.

But this system is not tamped down in any way because just before the recent round of this one hour second meeting of the Russians and Ukrainians, the Ukrainian sbu, the secret the intelligence agency, launched two attacks deep inside Russia. One, a straightforward terrorist attack, blowing up a civilian railroad, killing a large number of children and people going off for holidays, by blowing up a railroad and a railroad bridge inside Russia.

Operation Spiderweb: A Dangerous Escalation

The second operation was profoundly more dangerous. They have Zelensky proudly gave it the name afterwards of Operation Spiderweb, which should tell you a lot. And that was a drone attack on several military bases hundreds or thousands of kilometers inside Russia’s territory on Russia’s strategic bomber fleet, meaning the air force that carries nuclear weapons. I’m sorry, this is no joke. This is no small matter to attack.

TUCKER CARLSON: Could the Ukrainians have done that without Western intelligence help?

JEFFREY SACHS: Of course not.

TUCKER CARLSON: This is a Western intelligence operation.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, then how?

JEFFREY SACHS: Without question.

TUCKER CARLSON: But the White House wasn’t, as far as I know, and I think this is right. The White House didn’t know it was coming.

CIA Independence and Democratic Accountability

JEFFREY SACHS: First of all, the CIA does not tell this White House a lot of things, no doubt.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, how can that be?

JEFFREY SACHS: Because partly it is a tradition the.

TUCKER CARLSON: CIA works for the President.

JEFFREY SACHS: Partly it is a tradition of deniability. So the CIA, for decades and decades has done very, very dangerous things, not telling the President on the grounds that, well, better that the President doesn’t quite know this because we need the President to be able to, to deny this. Partly because it’s not just that, but also because the CIA is, is a self protecting, self operating organization that has not had accountability for 50 years. And so it is an out of control organization, in my opinion.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, how can you have a democracy if you’ve got a paramilitary and intelligence gathering force that has no civilian control?

JEFFREY SACHS: Our democracy is a democracy in form, but not in substance. On many, many points, obviously our foreign policy is not democratically determined. Most of what the United States does is never explained or justified or voted by the American people. So there’s nothing democratic about American foreign policy, especially when we go to war. We go to war nonstop, either without saying anything to the American people or on the basis of outright lies. And so there’s nothing democratic about it at all. Congress doesn’t vote the wars. We don’t appropriate the funds. It’s done on contingency funding that is completely without public scrutiny, without public explanation.

Now, on this particular event, of course, we’ve not heard anything except the White House declaring and saying to President Putin, we didn’t know about it. The fact of the matter is two alarming points. One is whether or not the White House knew the operation itself is completely reckless and alarming because attacking part of the nuclear triad in this way is a step towards nuclear Armageddon. Absolutely, provocatively, recklessly dangerous. And for the the White House to say we didn’t know is horrifying. Either they’re lying or they’re telling the truth. If they’re lying, that’s one thing. If they’re telling the truth, it’s also horrifying. What the hell’s going on? Are you kidding?

Nuclear Escalation Risks

TUCKER CARLSON: So what’s the thinking? I mean, an act like that could. Could trigger a nuclear exchange.

JEFFREY SACHS: Absolutely.

TUCKER CARLSON: So why would you do it?

JEFFREY SACHS: Because it’s always been the case that desperate regimes like the Ukrainian regime will gamble the world for their own survival. It’s our job to understand that American foreign policy is not to support a reckless Ukrainian regime.

TUCKER CARLSON: Given the number of leaders we’ve taken out, couped, assassinated, overthrown and color revolutions, whatever, same effect, regime change, why not do that to Zelensky?

JEFFREY SACHS: What I believe we should do is very simple, and that is have a direct, clear, unambiguous negotiation with Russia over security issues. And in the end, we can’t control Ukraine. But they can’t fight without the United States. And because we have operated in this kind of ambiguous zone in the first months of the Trump administration, there is the ever present effort of the deep state to turn the President. And they know the President’s turn. They know they can do this. If they’re persistent enough, they know they can keep up these operations. They know or they think they know that eventually the combined voices of Lindsey Graham and other warmongers in Congress and the Europeans and Zelensky and pounding this and the New York Times with its, with its idiotic editorializing and all the rest will tell the president, don’t be an appeaser, don’t give in, fight Russia. You know how evil they are. And so they believe that they’ll ultimately win the fight. President Trump has not put an end to that, I have to say so.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that, I mean, and he’s obviously.

The Deep State Challenge

JEFFREY SACHS: He’s not Putin, he can’t put an end to people saying it, but he does have the constitutional authority to put an end to it from the point of view of the substance of U.S. foreign policy. And that’s the difference. What he’s wanted to do is to try to bring these groups along. He’s tried to say, yeah, we’ll push the Russians. He turns every couple of weeks, you know, against Putin in a post and so forth. It’s clear what he wants to do, which is to end the war, to extricate the United States from this. But he’s trying to have it both ways. My own personal view is you can’t.

President Trump has to understand, I’m sure he does, how deep the deep state is, how far down this goes, how. This is not, by the way, only Biden’s losing war. It’s also Obama’s losing war. It’s also Bush Jr. It’s, it goes back to Clinton. This is a long story. And Trump is trying to put an end to the story because it’s a failure. And he understands it’s a complete failure. And he’s completely right when he says they don’t have the, you know, we don’t have the cards or Biden didn’t have the cards. He didn’t know how to do this. Completely correct.

But what he can’t do is leave everything ambiguous because the way our system works is that the war machine is revving all the time. All the time. It’s a big operation. It’s more than a trillion dollars a year war machine after all, you know, if you count everything, probably $1.5 trillion. And that’s just the US part of it. Then look at all the military contractors in Europe and all, all the rest that is faced.

Trump’s Path to Ending the War

So President Trump needs to, to close down that part by really ending the war. And the way to end the war, sad to say, it’s not by negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, because we use these terms, Ukraine, but what is Ukraine when it negotiates its Zelensky and a small number of people in military rule, okay, they have their own personal interests, maybe financial, maybe their heads, maybe they’re not Ukraine.

So what can President Trump do. He can say clearly, unambiguously, a few points. Sit down with President Putin, because these are the two superpowers involved in this war, and say, we absolutely agree, NATO will not enlarge because this is a US Military alliance, and we, by treaty, agree that that will stop, because that’s part of our mutual security arrangement with you. We recognize Crimea as Russian because we understand that this goes back to 1783, it goes back to 1856, it goes back to 1997, it goes back to 2014. We don’t want to play that game anymore.

On this basis, Starmer and Macron and Mertz and Tusk, and they can all jump up and down, but they can’t do anything anymore. And Lindsey Graham can’t do anything anymore on this. The war will stop. This is really. We’re close, by the way. It’s not far from that. But the point is, what Trump has been saying is, I want the Ukrainians to agree, but they have a different agenda, and it’s not the agenda for Ukraine. President Trump is speaking more for the Ukrainian people than Zelensky is. This is the point.

TUCKER CARLSON: So I think the status quo, as I understand it, as of right now, which is Monday, June 9, is that negotiation, you know, that it’s hard to negotiate your way out. And I don’t think the president, you know, he didn’t start this war. He’s frustrated. He doesn’t want to take credit for it. He doesn’t. So the current view, and I think he said this in public, is, you know, I’m backing off. You guys fight it out. What are the risks in that?

Direct US-Russia Negotiations

JEFFREY SACHS: I would go further, which is, I would say the US And Russia have real security issues. And they became even more dramatic after MI6, CIA, SBU attacked the Russian strategic triad.

TUCKER CARLSON: The bomber fleet.

JEFFREY SACHS: The bomber fleet. So we need to sit down with the Russians and it’s just the two of us negotiating. We don’t have Starmer there, we don’t have Macron there, we don’t have Zelensky there. This, after all, is between the two leading nuclear superpowers of the world. That we not go any farther than that?

President Trump can say, I’m concerned about what our own intelligence agencies may have been doing. How could it be that for 18 months this was being planned and they didn’t know? If that’s the truth, that is a level of incompetence beyond imagining. We have to clean up our shop. Or if they did know and they didn’t tell me, that is a level of recklessness that we have to clean up because it’s completely unacceptable for the security of the American people.

And in the meantime, I and President Putin have some real discussions to do. What they would come up with would be clear demarcations that would keep the two superpowers from each other’s neck. Like the Ukrainian attack, which is completely unacceptable, endangers the entire world, and is preventable by the President of the United States on that basis, then I would say after that, if Ukraine wants to continue to fight on without any of our support, any of our weapons, not buying weapons, by the way, not anything, period. Okay, they can do so, but we’re done being endangered by this recklessness. I resent completely that Zelensky endangered my family last week. I agree completely, but it’s not.

The Role of Intelligence Services

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, you’re describing a scenario where this war is being run by three intelligence services in your description, CIA, MI6 and SBU, without Democratic input, without control by elected leaders, including President of the United States, and without the interest of the nations at heart. Can you just define sort of a little more precisely what’s going on? And let’s start with MI6. What is MI6 and what’s their role?

JEFFREY SACHS: Just. Just to say the war is being fought with Ukrainian troops dying and with a flow of armaments that has been in the pipeline, that pipeline can stop and then the war will stop. So it’s not. I don’t want to imply that the CIA, MI6, BND, SBU can fight the war on their own. They can’t. The pipeline exists because it still is the Biden pipeline. It still is. Whatever Europe is, is managing. But that pipeline of armaments and finance is basically coming to an end, and Trump should end it definitively. And then Ukrainians literally can’t fight.

Of course, Europe would try little bits here and there. And if they’re stupider and more reckless than one can imagine, they might. They may try more stunts like the ones that they did a couple of weeks ago, which endangered the whole world, but they cannot fight a war afterwards. At that point, you know what would happen? What would happen is either Russia, indeed takes over, essentially Ukraine in terms of military occupation, or a peace is reached. One of the two things happens. But that’s how to stop the war is to stop the pipeline of funding.

When I talk about the deep state role, they are the cheerleaders, they are the managers, they are the designers. We’re not at a stage where they appropriate their own funds. So I don’t want to be misunderstood in that way, they cannot continue the war. But they’re very powerful in the US System. And in the US System, this war has not been an unpopular war for the U.S. it’s been a deep state project for more than 30 years. And the idea was to shield the American people from it. Mainly secret once in a while. Like, we had the story about how the CIA was operating all over Ukraine that the New York Times ran one day. You hear bits and pieces, but the idea is to shield the American people from these wars. The main way we do it is that we don’t have our boots on.

TUCKER CARLSON: The ground, just lack of information.

JEFFREY SACHS: It’s the Ukrainians dying. And so there’s no. No body bags coming home to us. The body bags, if they go back at all, they go back to Ukraine. So the idea is not that they are the ones that can make the war happen. They are the main lobbyists for the war. They are the main protagonists. They are the deep strategists of what should be done. Of course, there’s a military component also. Not only the intelligence system, but both are playing their role. But the president can stop this. All I’m saying is that it’s a lot of political effort to stop it. And he is facing a wall of this deep state opposition.

And the way out of that is actually not the tactic that he’s been pursuing of getting the Ukrainians to agree. Because from the Ukrainian option, the better thing is run around to the CIA, to MI6, to all the other agencies, run around to the European leaders, run to everyone to try to turn Donald Trump. And I’m saying what President Trump has is two things. One is he has constitutional authority, and the second, he and he alone has the direct line to President Putin. And the two superpowers are the protagonists in this fundamental.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s right.

JEFFREY SACHS: And they can end the war between the two of them. Not to stop the Ukrainians from fighting, but to stop Ukraine from having the means to fight. Right. The Ukrainians can’t fight one day without US Intelligence, by the way. Not just the armaments, but without the intelligence.

Presidential Control Over the CIA

TUCKER CARLSON: But if President Trump gave that order, would it be affected? I mean, who was the last president to control the CIA? The last U.S. president who had actual control over CIA?

JEFFREY SACHS: No one had actual control over the CIA, ever. Ever. Because most of the time, with one pertinent, horrible example, presidents have gone along with the CIA. Of course, the one horrible, shocking, disgusting example is John F. Kennedy, who famously said that he would like to take the CIA and tear it into a thousand pieces and maybe those were his last words in essence.

TUCKER CARLSON: So if you look big picture at the United States, you don’t have a real country as long as the CIA. I mean everything since November of 63 has been post coup.

The Unaccountable Security State

JEFFREY SACHS: I believe that we have not brought this absolutely dangerous part of our government under any effective control for a half century. The last time that there was any slight measure of control and accountability was 1975, 50 years ago with the Church Committee. Frank Church from Idaho, uniquely in the whole history of the CIA since 1947, did a real investigation. Of course, as soon as they looked under the covers, it was horrifying. Horrifying what they found. They found recklessness, assassinations, coups, regime change operations, MKUltra, the shocking CIA attempts to create assassins and Manchurian candidates, so called. And experimentation with hallucinogens for the sake of intelligence operations. Really vulgar, disgusting, awful stuff. That was 1975. That’s the last time there has been an actual accounting of what the CIA has done.

Let me give just the most pertinent example of what we’re talking about. What actually happened in the so called Maidan in the coup in 2014. Do we know every point? I happen to know certain things. Just because I saw certain things with my own eyes. I was told certain things. But has anything been explained in a single day? Once. Has the New York Times ever run an honest story? Of course not. Has the government ever been called to account even once? Of course not. Has there been a public hearing in the Senate even once of an event that affects our security? Absolutely. Fundamentally? Of course not.

And I could go on with 50 examples like this where the deep state is unaccountable, where there are no answers, where nothing is heard. Yesterday we heard about Area 51, you know, we heard about how the U.S. military concocted phony stories which lived for decades in order to hide secret weapons development programs. Our government lies every day the security state. And the danger of that is that. Don’t call that national security. This is national insecurity. We have never been more endangered than we are today.

It’s so weird. We should be the safest country in the history of the world. And we would be if it were not for the risk of nuclear war. And yet we’re closer to that than at any time because of the stupidity, I have to say, of these deep state, unexamined, unaccountable strategies of going up against other major powers in the most reckless ways. And I use the language because we’re just a few days after an absolutely disgusting, unacceptable Intelligence agency operation attacking strategic bombers deep inside Russia.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, how long before there’s, like, an attack that Russia can’t ignore and that does lead? I mean, yes, it seems like all the incentives are in place for the Ukrainians working with MI6 and CIA to push us into a global conflict with Russia.

The Deep State’s War Machine

JEFFREY SACHS: Absolutely. And if it’s not Ukraine, it’s Israel or someone else. There’s so many. Our foreign policy is so suborned, so much not in America’s interest, so much used by the military, industrial state, or particular lobbies in favor of particular places. We could be yanked into war for absolutely no consequential reasons whatsoever when we should be enjoying the height of our national security. And in 1991, I witnessed it with my own eyes. We had everything we could have ever dreamt. Our erstwhile foe. And that’s another long story, why they were the foe, but our erstwhile foe of the Cold War said, we don’t want to be an enemy, we want to be friends. We want to open up, we want to reform, we want to be with you. In fact, of course, famously, Putin said, we want to be part of NATO. He did, and it’s no joke. And when Putin came in, by the way, he was completely pro American and pro European. I know, completely.

TUCKER CARLSON: He still is the most pro Western leader that country will ever have again.

JEFFREY SACHS: No, it’s unbelievable. We can’t accept peace for an answer. But that’s why the President of the United States has to stop the war.

The Iran Conflict and Netanyahu’s Strategy

TUCKER CARLSON: Machine to the second conflict raging that, as you just said, has the potential to engulf the world. And that’s the. Then that’s Iran, which is obviously connected to a bunch of other conflicts around that region. Where are we in averting a war with Iran right now?

JEFFREY SACHS: Good news, of course, is that President Trump is negotiating. He’s resisting Netanyahu’s constant call for the US to go to war with Iran. And that call by Bibi for yet another war in the Middle east is yet another of these long term, deep state projects. This is an Israeli project primarily, but the US has been a party to Netanyahu’s wars going back essentially 30 years. Netanyahu came to office as Prime Minister of Israel first in 1996. He did it with the backing of U.S. political advisers, many of whom became senior U.S. officials. And he did it on the basis of a strategy, political strategy, called Clean break back in 1996. And what clean Break meant was a clean break with the idea of the two State solution. So the two state solution means that there should be a state of Israel and a state of Palestine living side by side. That goes back to The United Nations 1947 partition plan idea. Netanyahu leads a political party, the Likud, and a political alliance which holds that Israel should dominate all of the lands of that region, including Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, but also into Lebanon and Syria and borders undefined, but a very expansive view of what Israel’s rule should be. That’s a quite outlandish and outrageous idea to most of the world. And I would say to most Americans who say, look, just make peace and get on with it. And the palestinians, who are 8 million people, should have their place, and the Israelis, who are 8 million people, should have their place and get on with it. But this idea of the clean break is, no, we don’t want to get on with it. We want to control everything. And Netanyahu’s philosophy, or not philosophy, but his strategy, because it isn’t just tactics, it’s strategy. The strategy is we know there’ll be a lot of resistance, our domination over the Palestinian people, apartheid regime, ethnic cleansing, when we can get away with it, and so forth. So we’re going to face opposition. We will face even militant opposition, Hamas or Hezbollah and so forth. But Netanyahu pointed out something which is actually correct. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he says these militants basically don’t operate on their own. That’s true in general of these groups that we fight. They are state backed. And it has been true that Hezbollah and Hamas, for example, were backed by Iran for most of this period. And so the idea of Netanyahu is don’t make peace. We want to win. We want all the territory. We don’t accept two states, we don’t accept Palestinian rights and so forth. We will win, but we don’t win by defeating militant groups. We win by destroying the governments that support those groups. And that means war, and it really means endless wars.

The Pentagon’s War List

And the US Became the complicit party to this because of the US Deep state vision that Israel is our battleship or aircraft carrier in the Middle east, that it is our strategic asset in the Middle east, and because of the Zionist lobby, which is itself a complicated political concoction in the United States. But in any event, the US Completely bought into the Netanyahu idea, which is war after war after war. And it’s not well understood, but it should be, because we’ve been told pretty clearly by no less than General Wesley Clark for Example, who was the commander of NATO forces that the Pentagon has had a list of wars to prosecute. That essentially is Netanyahu’s list. Actually, after nine, 11 in particular, that went into overdrive. The US, as Wesley Clark was told, and as he subsequently explained to us, and as others have also explained to us, an Air Force commander named Dennis Fritz, who wrote a very important book called Deadly Betrayal in 2024, telling the same story.

In essence, the Pentagon had a list which the neoconservatives or the deep state of the US would carry out, which was we would take out the regimes in opposition to Israel and those regimes included. It’s a long list. Of course, not only the Palestinians, that’s the point, but also Syria. That was the regime of Bashar Al Assad, which was viewed by Netanyahu and by the US Deep state as an Iranian client. So Syria would be one, Lebanon would be another. Iraq under Saddam Hussein would be another. The Iranian regime would, would be a fourth. And then, believe it or not, three countries in Africa, which are Islamic countries that supported the Palestinian cause, and that was Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya. That was Somalia on the Horn of Africa, and that was Sudan, which was a Sharia state in the 1990s. Well, God damn, we’ve been to war with all of them except Iran. And not by accident. The list is literally the guide in, in this case. And again, it’s not simple for Americans to connect the dots because these stories are not told, they’re not explained, they’re not debated, they’re not voted. These are presidential actions, by and large, one after another.

The Iraq War Deception

So let’s go through them step by step. One is the Iraq war, 2003, we now know not only was it under wrong pretenses, weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist, it was under completely phony, concocted, false pretenses. And in 2002, the Pentagon actually did a PR analysis of how to sell the war to the American people, a unit by a guy named Abe Schulsky, and he came up with a PR strategy, literally public relations, that the right narrative was weapons of mass destruction. So this is not, as it was subsequently told to us, oh, we made a mistake. We didn’t know that Saddam didn’t have them. This was a concocted narrative in 2002 to justify a war in 2003 to take away a regime that Netanyahu deemed to be hostile to Israel.

The Syria Operation

Then in 2011, again, something very basic but not understood by the American people, because again, the government lies and cheats and doesn’t explain the US Went to war in Syria. Now, this was not a declared war. There was never a presidential speech. But the president said. President Obama said, Assad must go. Okay? Every time you hear an American president say, some other leader must go say, oh, my gosh, here we go again. And the president signed a presidential finding called Operation Timber Sycamore, assigning the CIA with the task of organizing, training, financing, and arming an insurgency to overthrow Assad that came to fruition just in recent months. That’s how the new government came in. Yes, Unfortunately.

TUCKER CARLSON: December of 2024.

JEFFREY SACHS: Yes, unfortunately. Very much unfortunately. It was after 13 years of war that killed hundreds of thousands of people and destroyed sites in Syria that date back thousands of years. In other words, it was a destruction of one of the heritage sites of humanity because Netanyahu said, that guy’s too close to Iran. We need to take him out. Then.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wait, can I ask you to pause? Yes, so. And by the way, and flooded Europe with migrants, too. That’s completely destabilized Europe forever.

JEFFREY SACHS: Another fascinating story as all these migrants came in and wrecked European politics, and not one politician in Europe said, oh, the United States shouldn’t be engaged in an overthrow of Syria. They can’t connect the goddamn dots because everything’s a lie. All the narratives are narratives. So what’s.

The Assad Must Go Moment

TUCKER CARLSON: So when Obama comes out and says, assad must go, which I think in retrospect, was a pivot point in modern history like that, because Syria is not Yemen. It’s on the Mediterranean.

JEFFREY SACHS: I mean, by the way Syria was viewed, you know, up until then. There’s an IMF report, which I like to cite, of 2009, praising the authorities on their growth strategy and reform. This is crazy. This is deciding to overthrow a country, and without an iota of public discussion.

TUCKER CARLSON: This is, Hillary, this country, a civilized country with, you know, lots of doctors and accountants and scientists and like, it’s a real place.

JEFFREY SACHS: And of course, you paint the dictator to be the worst evil ever.

TUCKER CARLSON: His wife had just appeared on the cover of Vogue when.

JEFFREY SACHS: Right. But whatever one says about Assad and so forth, the United States should not be overthrowing the government through a CIA operation and hundreds of thousands dead.

TUCKER CARLSON: And it was a. It was a domino that led to greater human suffering and the destabilizing of Europe itself. So it was a really, really big deal. I just want to go back and linger for a second on why.

JEFFREY SACHS: Why?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, why? I mean, it was sort of a non sequitur. All of a sudden, Obama stands up as Like Assad must go. Assad who? Why do we care about Assad?

JEFFREY SACHS: Syria’s on the list. It’s Iranian influence. We gotta take out Assad.

TUCKER CARLSON: It was purely for Israel, you’re saying?

The Pentagon Papers Revelation

JEFFREY SACHS: I think, very substantially. I’ll tell you again, Dennis Franklin, Fritz, very interesting. He’s a very smart former Air Force commander who, strangely enough, resigned from the Air Force in 2003 because he couldn’t get a clear explanation of why we were fighting Iraq. And he’s a very nice man. And he said, I can’t lead my troops if I can’t explain. And he was told from above. Well, because we have. The orders to. This order came from White. Do it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

JEFFREY SACHS: And so he said, I don’t. I can’t lead troops under these circumstances. So he resigned. Then he was called back in 2005 to the Pentagon for a remarkable reason, and that was the Douglas Fife, who was a senior Pentagon official, a neocon close to Netanyahu, the whole shebang said, we want to declassify papers around the Iraq war. And okay, so Fife came back because he was an expert on classification and security issues and so forth. Why did Fife want to do that? Because he was writing his memoirs, and so he wanted to include documents in his book. So he hired Fife, and Fife hired Dennis Fritz, and Fritz got to read everything. Where’d this war come from? What are all the communications? So he’s a little bit like Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers. Suddenly he’s sitting there in 2005 reading all the files, and he only wrote about this 20 years later in this book, Deadly Betrayal. And I got to speak with him at length and interviewed him. He’s a wonderful, gentle soul. And he said he was shocked by what he read because he’s reading it and he realizes this is Bibi’s war. We’re going to war because Israel said so. And Fife was Bibi’s man in the Pentagon.

TUCKER CARLSON: But how could Douglas Fyth, who’s an American citizen and an American official at the American Pentagon, do the bidding of a foreign government like that?

JEFFREY SACHS: Well, because America has been doing Israel’s bidding for 30 years for. Because of the Israel lobby, because of the concocted idea that this is US.

TUCKER CARLSON: Security but sending young people to die, I mean, that’s pretty. That’s a pretty heavy thing to do.

The Iraq War and American Foreign Policy Failures

JEFFREY SACHS: As long as it’s not American people to die. Well, in that case. In that case, it was more heavy. But actually, I apologize for that statement because most of the wars, we don’t send our own Americans, we send their young people to die. But in the Iraq war, if you ask how we could do it. Okay, it’s a good question. That war, I can’t use the proper word that I would like to use because it’s absolutely obscene. But that war was so phony, so completely unjustified, so reckless. That was a real turning point because it was so brazenly wrong headed.

And who was the great cheerleader of that war in the fall of 2002. And I encourage people go online and watch it on tape, watch Bibi Netanyahu say how wonderful this war will be because Saddam will fall and that will lead to a chain reaction across the Middle east of bringing down the tyrants. Bibi Netanyahu is full of. And I also won’t say it, but this is how he’s been for 30 years and the US has done his bidding. And in that case. And again, I apologize for my slip. Yes, we sent our own to die out of complete phony, phony pretenses. Not wrong, not mistaken, not an illusion, but because of a prison exercise to fight a war.

Because we must understand that behind everything we’re talking about, whether it’s expanding NATO, whether it’s bringing down Russia, whether it is fighting and bringing down Saddam or Assad or Gaddafi. The arrogance in Washington is the first point of reference. They don’t believe this is hard. They don’t believe it’s costly, they don’t believe it will go wrong. They screw up every time, they fail every time. And they get promoted every time. They don’t go away when they lose. Look at Lindsey Graham. He’s been wrong on every single war, on every single piece of American foreign policy, and he’s still standing up there and telling us what to do. Because there’s no accountability, but also no.

TUCKER CARLSON: Shame or inner compass. I mean, you would think, oh, of course, no shame. But don’t you feel shame when you’re wrong, especially when you try to be right?

JEFFREY SACHS: Absolutely.

TUCKER CARLSON: Your bad decisions hurt people.

Syria and Libya: The Pattern of Intervention

JEFFREY SACHS: I mean, gosh, well, we don’t have that. We don’t have any reflection or accountability. And that is literally the case on all of this. When you go back to bringing down Assad in Operation Timber Sycamore, I think I’ve checked a couple of times. I think the New York Times, again, I refer to that because it used to be the paper I read. I think they mentioned it three times from 2012 onward. That’s all. So how can the American people understand any of it?

And interestingly, amazingly, Russia came into the Syrian conflict in 2015. And what was our reaction? How dare Russia interfere? You know, in other words, the phoniest narrative, that there goes Putin again, when we have been inside for four years militarily trying to overthrow the other government. Then came just after that, by the way, after Assad must go. Then they took out Gaddafi. That was a NATO operation in which the U.S. france, and the United States.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m sorry, Jeff, I’m going to have to stop you.

JEFFREY SACHS: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: There was a NATO opera. I know that NATO is a defensive alliance.

JEFFREY SACHS: That’s. Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: So why would. Right. Defending the North Atlantic. Why would NATO be killing leaders in Africa?

JEFFREY SACHS: Because we needed to have the French, the British, and the Americans together to murder the leader of Libya and overthrow the government. That’s why. And so did Libya get a lot better? Libya has been in nonstop war since then. Again, profound destruction, massive loss of life, and ongoing civil war. And if. Since I know many, many leaders around the world, I’ve asked them repeatedly, why Gaddafi in 2011? And you know what they tell me? The leaders who are as close as can be to this. We don’t know. Maybe Sarkozy hated him. Maybe Gaddafi funded Sarkozy’s campaign. We don’t know what this was really about. I’ve talked to recently an African president very close to the scene, a very senior former African president, who said to me, jeff, I can’t give you the answer to that question I’ve asked. He’s been involved.

I’ll tell you another thing quite interesting, by the way, about these wars. In 2012, after the Syrian war broke out, because of the United States, by the way, they say no, it was the Syrian people, the Free Syrian army and so forth. Yes, yes, yes. Tell me about it. Who armed them? Who paid for them, who trained them, who gave them military bases? Of course this is a CIA operation. Stop talking romantically about this domestic insurrection. This was a government operation, okay?

After it started, the UN tried to stop the war, because failing to stop it, there would be massive death and destruction. And in fact, there have been hundreds of thousands of deaths after the fact. So a person I absolutely loved, Kofi Annan, the former Secretary General of the un, went as the special envoy of the Secretary General to Syria, and he met all the parties. And Kofi Annan was a brilliant personality and a brilliant statesman. And he told me just before resigning in the spring of 2012, Jeff, there was a negotiated agreement. Peace could have come. But there was one party that said no, and that was the United States. And I asked why did the United States block the peace agreement? He said, because the United States insisted that the only agreement it would sign would be one in which Assad would leave the first day. And Kofi Annan said to me, when I tried to say to the Americans that, well, there will be a process and under the agreement there will be elections and so forth. So there’ll be a process. Said, no, no, we will only agree if it’s the first day.

So this is how American arrogance works. How you end up with 500,000 dead, how you end up with this, whatever this regime is in Syria right now. It took 14 years. It didn’t come out of the blue. It was an American operation from the start. It then morphed in several ways. But this is a long term story. And all of this is to say, and I mentioned not just Libya, but also Somalia, also Sudan, where the United States, it did an absolutely amazing thing. It supported an insurgency in South Sudan, what was then Southern Sudan, to break apart Sudan because Sudan was an Islamist state supporting Palestine, blah, blah, blah. So we had to destroy Sudan and they funded an insurgency for a long time. And then the United States, quote, brokered a peace to give independence to South Sudan. Okay? The American geniuses have created an instability so great that we not only have two Sudans, Sudan and South Sudan, we have civil wars in both Sudans. So this is ongoing, non stop massive deaths through another concoction of Clean Break BB the Deep State. This is a disaster.

Iran: The Next Target

TUCKER CARLSON: But it all goes back to the same route. And the last country on that list, as you said at the outset, is Iran.

JEFFREY SACHS: That’s it.

TUCKER CARLSON: We were hearing this week that Iran is just weeks away from building a nuclear weapon. And so we need to take out the nuclear sites. We need to effect regime change in Iran. I feel like I’ve been hearing that Iran is weeks away from nuclear weapon. For at least 25 years.

JEFFREY SACHS: Yes, for at least a decade and for longer in substance, yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Is Iran weeks away from building a nuclear weapon? Does Iran want a nuclear weapon? Will Iran get a nuclear weapon? What is the truth about Iran?

The Reality About Iran’s Nuclear Program

JEFFREY SACHS: Iran does not want a nuclear weapon. Iran’s neighbors, like the Saudis and others in the Gulf, do not want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Iran’s major ally, Russia, does not want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. And Iran doesn’t want a nuclear weapon. But Iran does not want to be defeated militarily by Israel, does not want to be bombed to hell by Israel, and does not want to be sanctioned to death economically by the United States, which the US has been doing now for endless years.

So Iran has said for 10 years, 11 years, 12 years, unequivocally, we don’t want a nuclear weapon. We want an agreement with you. We want you to lift sanctions. And we want a no nuclear system and with all verifications and monitoring and safety as well. We want to have our nuclear power plants. We want our own military. We’re not going to disarm in a region where Israel attacks every country in the region and by the way, where we have other enemies as well. So we are not going to unilaterally disarm in our region, but we do not want a nuclear weapon. The truth is that has been known for a dozen years in detail at the highest levels. And so what’s the problem?

TUCKER CARLSON: That seems like a pretty good basis for an agreement.

JEFFREY SACHS: The problem, there is no problem in reaching a sound agreement. And by the way, with the nuclear power plants, which are in dozens of countries, the iaea, the International Atomic Energy Agency, has and has successfully monitored and set up absolutely rigorous monitoring. And Iran is open to that and has said so repeatedly and has said it would work with the neighbors on the fuel supply chains and all the rest. There is no obstacle to this. What? And I think we’re close to an agreement with Iran, in fact, thanks to President Trump, because Netanyahu says, no, we need to bomb the hell out of them. We need to defeat them like we defeated Saddam and Assad and Gaddafi. We need to take out this evil regime. That’s his line.

TUCKER CARLSON: So it’s not about nukes, what you’re saying. You’re saying it’s not about nukes. It’s about regime change, I think, for sure.

JEFFREY SACHS: And that’s been true all along.

The Media Narrative vs. Reality

TUCKER CARLSON: Iran. So why not just say that? Why lie? Why does Fox News tell me everything? Not that I have a tv, but I hear, yes, Fox News is telling everyone every day they’re moments away from nuclear. We cannot allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon day after day after day. Why not just say, I think, by.

JEFFREY SACHS: The way, that’s true, and Iran would agree with that. Okay, yes, that’s what we’re saying.

TUCKER CARLSON: But if you went on television right now, if you were back on your old perch in Morning Joe and you said, actually, Ron doesn’t want a nuclear weapon, they would accuse you immediately of being an agent of Iran.

JEFFREY SACHS: They might, because maybe someone would tell them in their little earpiece to say that, because that’s how it works.

TUCKER CARLSON: But you’re saying that’s true. I mean, you’re acting like that’s like a non controversial statement. Iran doesn’t want to bomb. They’ve said they don’t, they just don’t want to get attacked.

JEFFREY SACHS: They have said for years, remove our sanctions, normalize relations, stop trying to overthrow us. Tell your bulldog Israel to stop threatening us with war and we can have perfectly normal relations. And we don’t want a nuclear weapon. It’s a much bigger headache than we want. We don’t want it.

TUCKER CARLSON: That is not the story that any American news channel tells ever.

JEFFREY SACHS: I’m shocked. We live in the world of narratives. You know, for many years, for many years, the Iranians were asking, how do we reach the Biden White House? How do we want to open up channels? We want to negotiate. Of course they wouldn’t talk to them. It was, we know the President now. I mean, we knew then, but now it’s confirmed. The President wasn’t in any shape to talk to anybody. And the administration was the biggest foreign policy failure of one can imagine. But the Iranians have been saying all along we want to negotiate. And as soon as President Trump was elected, at least I got inquiries. Do you know anyone in the White House? Do you know anyone in the President’s team? How can we make contact? That’s not the behavior you make if you’re relentlessly trying to go to a nuclear bomb.

Iran’s True Intentions

TUCKER CARLSON: So what about the story that you hear endlessly that Iran is planning to nuke the United States? That that’s on their agenda, huh? Yeah, right. So you consider that like insane.

JEFFREY SACHS: I consider that so bewildering. If a grown up says that we need to have a long heart, heart, talk about a lot of facts, but that is simply the most absurd imaginable idea. Iran, by the way, is a civilization of, by usual count, 5,200 years. Persia is the usual name given for.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oldest continuous in the world.

JEFFREY SACHS: Iran. Yes, it’s arguably the longest continuous civilization, though many jump up and say no, we are. Maybe the Georgians say it or the Egyptians say it. So I won’t get into arguments among my friends, except this is actually a great civilization that has lasted for 5,000 years. They’re not going to bring it to an end by bombing the United States and having Persia or Iran disappear from the world map, literally, physically, by atom, by atom, by such an attack. So it’s not.

The Iranian Threat and Historical Context

TUCKER CARLSON: So why are we going through all this? I mean, the attention, the full attention of huge parts of the US Government, Billions and billions and billions and. But trillions over the years of American tax dollars have gone to responding to this threat. We have bases all around the region all focused on Iran, which we maintain, including a huge one in Qatar, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All of this effort by the United States focused on this Iranian threat that you claim doesn’t exist.

JEFFREY SACHS: Remember that Iran was a. First of all, Iran was a democratic country. In 1953, the Prime Minister at the time named Mossadegh had this absolutely outlandish idea, which was that the oil under their ground belonged to Iranians. This was a very weird idea because the British knew it belonged to the British. The Americans expected that it belonged to the Americans in the new age. And so CIA and MI6 overthrew the Iranian democracy. Then we installed a police state known as the Shah of Iran and SAVAK, it’s supposed intelligence and enforcement authority from, from 1953 to 1978 when the Shah was dying of cancer and he was a hated figure in Iran, Jimmy Carter was talked into taking him into American, into, into the United States. And that provoked the reaction and the taking of hostages by American hostages in Iran. And the Iranian revolution was taken badly by the United States. But Iran had been our fortress. And why Iran? Because this was part of our anti Soviet effort. This was part of our Cold War effort. So Iran turned from police state ally to America’s foe and Israel’s foe. And by the way, in 1980, the United States and 1981 in particular, the United States armed Saddam Hussein massively to go kill Iranians. So we told Iraq, go invade Iran. And we supported an absolutely bloody, disastrous war between Iraq and Iran. We loved it. It was the two scorpions fighting in the bottle, killing each other.

TUCKER CARLSON: Fought in part by children.

JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah, on the American dime. So our position towards Iran has been an aggression since 1953, actually. Remember, the American deep state doesn’t care about any other people at all, whatever happens to them. It doesn’t care about the Ukrainian people, it doesn’t care about the people we’re quote, saving. It cares about whatever fight it’s in. The fight might be against Russia, in which case the Ukrainians are used. The fight might be for Israel, in which case some other jihadists are used. Whatever. Or the Kurds. The Kurds, or whoever is convenient at the time. So Iran is kind of amazingly incurring this for 75 years and for the last dozen years saying, peace, come on, make peace. President Trump is close to it right now. Again, as in all the other cases we have been discussing, the deep state narrative is deep. It’s long standing. It’s not shallow. It’s pretty much empty. It’s pretty much concocted, but it’s deep. And so in order to overcome the deep state, in this case, it’s the Israel or Zionist lobby, because it’s got a pretty complicated domestic heritage and base. In order to overcome what has been 20 years of wars of choice in the Middle east, and to stop them, it requires a lot of political capital and attention by President Trump in just like in Ukraine, he’s absolutely on the right track, but he’s getting attacked by everybody for being on the right track, and he’s trying to express America’s real interest. America cannot have a war with Iran, by the way. It would lead to a regional war. It would be costly, bloody, threatening. And on January 17th of this year, Iran signed a security agreement with Russia. So it would just open up another front of potential nuclear war. President Trump’s smart. He’s trying to avoid this. Everyone’s shouting at him, don’t avoid it. Go to war. And for the president to prevail, he has all the authority he needs. But this noise is incessant. And the arrogance of a Lindsey Graham or the. The American Congress that thinks we can do whatever we want, wherever we want and win whenever we want, when everything has been trillions of dollars of cost in one disaster after another, that arrogance actually continues until today. It’s not fear, it’s arrogance. That’s the fundamental driver in the face of.

America’s Military Track Record

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, they haven’t won a war in 80 years, so the US military has not won a war in 80 years. So I’m not attacking anyone. I say that with sadness, but I don’t understand on what basis this optimism arises.

JEFFREY SACHS: The optimism is misplaced, let us say, because these people have gotten us into one debacle after another. And if, you know, when Lindsey. I’m going to pick on Lindsey Graham again, because he’s been the biggest warmonger in the Senate. If, when he speaks, if there were little logos on the screen, Iraq war supporter, this word. If people understood, okay, this guy’s told you the wrong thing five wars in a row, then, okay, then we let him speak and let everyone understand. This guy gets it wrong every single time. And that’s true of most of these warmongers. But I think, you know, just to. Just to say this will continue, unfortunately, as long as we don’t have peace a little bit further to the west of Iran, and that is we need Israel and Palestine, two states living in peace, and not this plan. That is the clean break that is breaking us. That goes back 30 years. In other words, the harder work even than avoiding the war with Iran is, Is the United States finally telling Israel, come on, there’s a limit. You reached it, you exceeded it. Those words need to be uttered, and they haven’t been uttered to this day. 53 million deaths of women and children. And everyone else, the United States needs to say, you crossed the line.

TUCKER CARLSON: Say that to the Prime Minister of.

JEFFREY SACHS: Israel, says that to the Israeli people and to the Prime Minister, we no longer support this. And that’s hard in American politics.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why?

The Middle East Peace Solution

JEFFREY SACHS: It’s hard, again, because the narrative for decades has been the opposite. Because Americans don’t understand how much we have paid for these terrible, absurd, deadly Israeli led or provoked or desired wars. And because there are deep beliefs and misunderstandings about the region that are just reproduced and replicated over time. Again, just like Iran, I deal every day with diplomats from around the world. It’s my privilege and, and good luck that I speak with leaders all over the Middle East. For example, in Egypt, in Saudi, in Jordan, in Turkey, in, in Iran.

TUCKER CARLSON: All.

JEFFREY SACHS: Over the Middle East. They have said to me for years and years and years, if there is a state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel, we normalize relations with Israel. We of course, support the mutual security of the two states. We do business, we do everything. And they have said that not only privately, to me, at length, explaining the situation, but publicly in what’s called the Arab Peace Initiative, which goes back to 2002. So it’s been 23 years where the Arab states have been saying, clearly, when Israel says there’s no one to talk to, there’s everyone to talk to. Everyone wants peace, quiet and economic development, believe it or not. They want to live their lives. They want their children to grow up. They actually want to have building, construction. They’re worried about their physical lives, their jobs, everything. And they want peace. And they know that there can’t be economic development unless there’s peace. So if you ask, why is it? There is no deep reason why there isn’t two states living peacefully side by side. The idea that Hamas, Hamas, this is a, this is a narrative, this is a gimmick, this is a lie. Hamas would go the first day in a. If the United States said, yes, we support a Palestinian state, but it’s got to be peaceful, it’s got to be disarmed, that’s fine. Everyone agrees with this, no one disagrees with this. But what we don’t hear and get an explanation of, and this is what people need to understand Netanyahu’s completely uninterested in that. Totally, Totally uninterested in that. He doesn’t say, oh, we need to defeat Hamas, then there can be a Palestinian state. No, of course not. Because that’s fundamentally not the idea. Fundamentally. The idea is we defeat Hamas. We rule. Of course we rule. This is ours.

The Practical Reality on the Ground

TUCKER CARLSON: But the problem is, leaving aside, you know, who’s right, who’s wrong, the philosophical and moral justifications for this or that policy, you have millions of people living there.

JEFFREY SACHS: Well, but that’s the point. Exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right? So as a practical matter, what do you do with them? I mean, even people get caught up in, like, 1947 and, you know, settlers from Eastern Europe and they’re mad about this. You could ignore all history and folk, just pretend the world started January 1, 2025, and you’ve got millions of people living there. What are you going to do with them? I don’t understand.

JEFFREY SACHS: You are so correct. There are 8 million Jews, there are 8 million Palestinian Arabs.

TUCKER CARLSON: So what’s the plan? I just want to know what the plan is.

JEFFREY SACHS: The plan?

TUCKER CARLSON: You can’t get to the plan the second you ask. It’s like, oh, you’re working for Qatar.

JEFFREY SACHS: The answer is simple. The plan is something else. The answer is simple. Two places, one for the Palestinians, one for the Israelis. That’s simple and it’s not even hard. And I’ve had generals from Israel recently telling me, no, it’s not even a security issue. And here’s how the borders go and all the rest. The plan is, how do you overcome the remaining US Complete intransigence on this. That’s the.

America’s National Interest

TUCKER CARLSON: But why do we care? It’s in our interest. So that’s what’s confusing. We don’t have an inherent national interest there. There’s no oil there for, for example. It’s not like it’s an energy concern for us. So why do we care and what are the options? What do you do with 8 million people? You can’t send them somewhere. Like, I don’t like, what are they thinking?

JEFFREY SACHS: You said the magic word. And I hope that President Trump gets this, because it’s his core philosophy. Peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians is America’s interest. Again, not even on moral grounds, just the most practical grounds. Keep us out of nuclear war, keep us out of regional war, have economic development, build, have business, everything. No more 9, 11 normalizations.

TUCKER CARLSON: Osama bin Laden said that he planned 9, 11 in part because of what was happening between Israel and the Palestinians and America’s Support for Israel. Now, no one wanted to hear that. They called you names if you said it. I’m not on Osama bin Laden’s side, obviously. I totally disapprove of Osama bin Laden, but that’s a fact. So why would we want to expose ourselves to more of that? Why not try and get this fixed?

JEFFREY SACHS: This is the key to every issue we’re talking about. What is America’s national interest in the context of Ukraine and Russia? Is it for Ukraine to be blowing up Russian strategic bombers, or is it for Ukraine to be a neutral country without NATO? It’s the second. What is America’s national interest vis a vis Iran? It is no nuclear weapons in Iran and peace, no war. What is America’s interest in Israel and Palestine? It is 8 million Palestinians for Palestine and 8 million Israelis living in Israel in peace. And please, if I could say it this way, shut up a little bit. No more wars that were dragged into you guys. Just live. That’s America’s real interest.

So if the President follows through on America’s national interest, not on the grandiosity that we can do anything we want, anywhere we want, because we are the United States of America and our mission is to defeat Russia, or our mission is to defeat Iran, or our mission is greater Israel, if we follow the American national interest, it’s absolutely straightforward what to do. It is no war with Iran and negotiated treaty. It is two states, Israel and Palestine. It is a neutral Ukraine. President Trump has all of that close, close at hand, but everyone requires his attention. This is hard because every one of them confronts a narrative that’s 30 years old or 50 years old, that is deeply entrenched, that is fundamentally based on the premise that America can do what it wants anywhere in the world because it’s all powerful.

At the core of everything, Tucker, is a kind of arrogance of power that has been proved to be wrong from Vietnam, Afghanistan, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Iraq. It’s not that we’re hopeless and helpless. And I’m not defeatist in that way. I’m saying that if you choose the wrong battles, you don’t. You can’t win those battles. If you choose battles that are not in America’s interest, you’ll go away because they’re not. Afghanistan wasn’t fundamentally in America’s interest, or Iraq wasn’t fundamentally in America’s interest, or Ukraine wasn’t fundamentally in America’s interest. And by the way, that’s also not isolationism. That’s just being smart, prudent, normal, and also recognizing don’t be so afraid. Our only risk in the United States, honestly. Now we know it’s not the UFOs that was a concocted thing of the Air Force. Our only risk is a nuclear war. Stay clear of a nuclear war, please. Stay clear of these ultimate confrontations. Don’t fight Russia to the end. It’s a great power. You can live side by side with it. Same with China. Come on, just be normal and we can have secure, prosperous lives for all of us.

TUCKER CARLSON: When you overstate your power, your power evaporates. The US is so much less powerful than it was before the invasion.

The Current State of Global Risk

JEFFREY SACHS: We are so much more risk objectively than we were before. And anyone that measures risk, I often refer to this Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which says we’re closer to nuclear Armageddon than ever before in human history. This is crazy. We should be as far away. I was there. As I said in the Kremlin in December 1991, the Doomsday Clock was 17 minutes away from midnight because we have peace. Now we’re 89 seconds to midnight. Are you kidding? How did we squander this? Because we did so many Israeli provoked wars because we had to expand NATO to Russia’s border, blah, blah, blah. None of this is for America’s interest. No. And it’s objectively the case.

Qatar’s Role in American Media and Politics

TUCKER CARLSON: Let me ask you one last question. You said that most of the storylines, the narratives are 30 years old, and I think that’s exactly right. It does feel like it could be 1995 again. But there is one new one, and that is that Qatar. Qatar, Qatar. Very small Gulf state, wholly within Saudi, I think the largest natural gas field in the world, biggest American air base in the region. That that country is like a powerful enemy of the United States and is controlling America’s media, controlling America’s higher education system and that most bad things and all bad opinions come from Qatar and Qatari propaganda. Are you familiar with this argument?

JEFFREY SACHS: Not quite, but I am familiar with Qatar, yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: So what do you assess Qatar’s role in the United States? Are they controlling our media, do you think?

JEFFREY SACHS: I don’t lose sleep over it, to tell you the truth. I haven’t heard it put exactly that way, but you got to get on the Internet. I know. I’ve been going to Qatar for a while. They gave the President a nice plane and it’s not a danger to the American people. You know, if we were to calm down a little bit, we actually could have all the safety in the world we want. This is really, this is actually the truth. If we drop our angst on big bad Russia, actually we didn’t have a chance to talk about it this time. Maybe another time.

Big bad China, which is also not going to invade the United States, not going to threaten us, not going to go to war with us. They got their, they’re trying to deal with aging and they’ve got their declining population and many other things. Not that they’re falling apart. It’s a very impressive civilization, but they’re not a threat to the United States, honestly. And Iran is not a threat. And now I’ll add another country that’s not threat. Qatar. And by the way, there are 193 UN member states and I would say 192 of them are not threats to the United States if we just behave with some prudence and don’t get ourselves edging towards the nuclear war.

TUCKER CARLSON: Jeffrey Sachs, thank you very much.

JEFFREY SACHS: Great to be with.

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