Transcript of Professor Jeffrey Sachs on The Tucker Carlson Show

In other words, it was not this wasteland or this battlefield. It was an actual normal country.

Syria’s Threat Assessment

TUCKER CARLSON: Was it a threat to the United States?

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: It was no threat to the United States whatsoever, but it was deemed to be by Netanyahu a threat to Israel because of a simple reason, which is that Netanyahu wants to control all of Palestine, wants to rule over the Palestinian people, does not want a Palestinian state, and that has led to militant opposition. That’s led to Hamas. That’s led to Hezbollah. That’s led to other groups.

Netanyahu’s theory is, “well, we’re never going to allow a Palestinian state, so we have to bring down any government that supports those militant groups against us because our core aim is greater Israel.” That’s not much of a worthy cause, by the way. Having a Palestinian state next door and having peace could have saved probably a million lives by now over the last thirty years, but that’s not Netanyahu’s crazy ambition.

The Concept of “Greater Israel”

TUCKER CARLSON: What is greater Israel?

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Greater Israel means, depending on how crazy the people are, either that Israel controls not only its geographic territory, but that it essentially controls or annexes the West Bank, the Golan Heights, which they’ve just enlarged, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.

TUCKER CARLSON: Golan Heights being part of Syria historically.

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: It was part of Syria. It’s claimed by Israel and now with an expanded territory. So everything that was captured in 1967, Netanyahu explicitly said, “we’re never giving that back.”

Now there are two motivations for that. One, Netanyahu says, not safe to give it back because he doesn’t want to negotiate any kind of peace or any state of Palestine. Then there are religious zealots, I would use even stronger terms, who use the book of Joshua, which is 2,700 years ago that said, “Well, God gave us everything from the river in Egypt, meaning the Nile, to the Euphrates.” And there are zealots in Israel, and they’re in the government who believe, “yes, this is God’s ordinance. We’re going to take whatever we want.”

TUCKER CARLSON: So the Nile to the Euphrates would include what?

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Well, you take the greater view of this, it would include Lebanon, it would include Syria, it would include part of Iraq, it would include part of Egypt, and some of these people actually quote the Bible and say, “We’re going to do this.” And it’s a little sad and absolutely terribly frightening.

But I’d say the more narrow vision is what they call “from the river to the sea,” from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. That’s taken as a pro-Palestinian chant, but it’s exactly the opposite. It is the greater Israel literal vision of the government of Israel. It’s the literal idea.

There happen to be seven million Palestinians there. That’s a minor problem. Maybe they can be ethnically cleansed. Maybe they can be thrown out. Maybe they can just be ruled in a military dominant way. Of course, probably well over one hundred thousand have been killed in the most recent war by Israel. Official count, forty-five thousand of bodies claimed from the rubble, but we know that there are a lot more that have died since this war in Gaza began.

But all of this is to say this greater Israel idea says we can’t make peace with the Palestinians, so anyone that supports the Palestinians is, by definition, a mortal threat to us. And when you have a mortal threat, you must destroy it. And so this is the opposite of diplomacy. It’s war. And as Netanyahu crowed last week, it’s war to remake the Middle East.

It’s all spelled out, by the way, in very clear ways, but you have to dig for them. You have to find them. You have to understand that this is long standing. You have to understand that each president has played part of that role.

The Syrian War Timeline

So when we come back to Obama, he started the war with Syria in 2011. I can remember actually vividly the call that “Assad must go.” And I did scratch my head. I was actually I think it was on Morning Joe when it was said, and I was asked by Joe Scarborough, “what do you think?” And I said, “well, that’s pretty odd. How’s he going to do that?” Turned out it was going to be thirteen years of mass war, three hundred thousand dead, and destroying a country. That’s what it turned out to be.

But Obama signed an order called Operation Timber Sycamore. People should look it up. You can find it online, but you can’t find it in the mainstream media because it’s not discussed, but it was a so-called presidential finding that the CIA should work with Turkey, with Saudi Arabia, with others to overthrow the government of Syria. So that was the plan. We went to war.

TUCKER CARLSON: This is what led to Benghazi. Correct?

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Benghazi is Libya.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes. But it was the same time in 2000… was the reason there were so many American intel assets there was because they were moving arms from Libya to…

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Oh, sorry. Yes. If you say it that way, one of the first things was to establish a rat line, so called, from Libya to Syria. Absolutely. And Seymour Hersh wrote a terrific piece explaining all of that.

That was never explained. I mean, I worked at a news organization at the time that made a lot out of Benghazi and the death of a US ambassador and, you know, what was the Obama administration thinking? They were so negligent, but there was never any discussion about what they were doing there in the first place.

Media Silence on US Operations

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: None of this is explained. Of course, this is… it’s none of the public’s business. This is our business. We’re the war machine. You stay out of this. So none of this is explained.

Interestingly, the whole Syrian operation… I think I counted right that the New York Times mentioned Operation Timber Sycamore, I think, three times in the 2010s. So a war that cost billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives, CIA operation, covert action, links with Libya, never explained, never discussed.

And even when the government falls last week, no background given. You know, we’re supposed to have amnesia. We’re not supposed to understand that what happens is the result of long-term plans that have been pretty disastrous.

And, by the way, as I’ve said, Israel has driven so many American wars, and we say, “absolutely yes. That’s our greatest ally.” These have been a huge cost to the United States, cost of trillions of dollars, cost geopolitically, but somehow we gave away our foreign policy to Israel years and years ago, and it’s been absolutely devastating.

And it’s interesting to go back and watch Netanyahu speak to the American people. Go look at a video clip of 2001, 2002. In 2002 in October, he comes and testifies in the Senate, and there’s a nice clip of him promising how wonderful the war in Iraq is going to be because Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. He says, “a hundred percent certain.” Complete lies, by the way, and they knew that they were lies at the time.

And it’s going to be wonderful. We’re going to topple that dictator, and then dictators are going to be toppled everywhere, and the young people of Iran are going to rise up. This is his idea. Together with his US political consultants, together with neocons and the US government for the last twenty-five years, they have never apologized for dragging the United States into countless wars in the Middle East, spending trillions of dollars running up US debt, and doing what? Creating chaos.

The Seven Countries: Current Status

So just to go back to the seven countries, because it’s worth remembering. Lebanon, it barely exists as a functioning country right now. Syria, it’s going to be picked to pieces. Don’t believe…

TUCKER CARLSON: Territorial integrity?

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah. Israel’s just invaded from the southwest into deeper Syria, Turkey from the north. Russia has its area, the United States and the Kurds have their area. This place is just going to be a battlefield for years to come.

Iraq, we know what happened with Iraq. Trillions of dollars, a complete destabilization of the country. Look at the other three wars. The United States broke apart Sudan. Why? Well, Sudan was an enemy of Israel, so we have to break apart Sudan, so we supported the South Sudanese. Now we have the real trifecta, massive civil war in Sudan and massive civil war in South Sudan. In other words, we broke apart the country, and now there’s civil war in both halves of the country.

The Aftermath of Regime Change

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Somalia basically doesn’t exist as a country. Libya, it doesn’t exist. It’s a battlefield. It’s a war zone. So that’s six out of six.

And Netanyahu’s crowing. Now we go on to Iran.

The Cost of Middle East Intervention

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Who’s paid for all this? You have. I have. Of course. This is where does twenty-eight trillion dollars of debt come from?

We paid probably seven trillion dollars if you add it up according to Brown University studies, for example. Something like seven trillion dollars has gone into this. Israel couldn’t do this for one day. Israel, you know, Netanyahu, “we are lions.” Yeah, right. You are lions, but we are the ones funding you, arming you, paying for all of this. That’s the United States.

And this is weird to me because we say yes to defend our ally. No. No. No. We’re doing their foreign policy, which makes no sense, which doesn’t lead to any peace, which leads to basically a war zone across the Middle East, and we say this is good for us. Why is this good for us? What’s the United States getting out of any of this?

We haven’t gotten anything out of any of this except massive geopolitical isolation. The most recent votes in the UN, for example, put the United States alone, alone with Israel, and I shouldn’t exaggerate, we have Micronesia on our side, we have Nauru on our side with its twelve thousand people, maybe a couple of other countries. The whole rest of the world is saying, what is going on? Endless war in the Middle East. Well, this is because we’re defending someone with some seventh century BC vision of what they want their country to be.

The Syrian Conflict

TUCKER CARLSON: Were Americans involved in the overthrow of Assad last week?

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Of course they were because this has been an ongoing operation. Whether they were involved in the final days, I don’t know. They were involved in the thirteen years nonstop.

Let me tell you an interesting story, by the way. The war started in 2011. It was portrayed, as always as the CIA does, as a local uprising and the freedom fighters, and it was said this was Syrians protesting against Syria. That’s always how any CIA regime change operation works. There may also be local opposition, but the CIA is the one that provides the armaments. It provides the flow of heavy weapons. It provides the financing, it provides the training, it provides the camps, it provides the political organization.

So this started in 2011. In 2012, there was already a bloodbath underway and a lot of people dying and a lot of civilians dying and a lot of ancient historic sites because this is the Fertile Crescent. This is the birthplace of humanity itself, of civilization being destroyed.

And so a very senior global diplomat that I knew very, very well was tasked with trying to find peace. Peace, nice idea. Maybe we don’t need the bloodbath. And I met him in the spring of 2012, and he said it failed. And I said, why did it fail? He said, well, we had a full peace agreement, but it was blocked by one party alone. We had the different forces in Syria, we had the regional, but it was blocked by one.

Who was it blocked by? It was blocked by the United States government. Why? Well, because their condition was that Assad must go on the first day of the agreement rather than a political process. Everyone else agreed on a political process, but the United States said, no. No. This is regime change. Assad must go on the first day, and that was not possible. So that was the end of the attempt at peace. So we should understand this was an American operation.

TUCKER CARLSON: But I never understood and still don’t understand is why we’re all required to hate Assad. I’m not speaking for myself. I don’t have strong feelings about Assad one way or the other. Apparently, he’s protected the Christians, so I’m grateful for that as a Christian. But why am I required to hate Assad?

Tulsi Gabbard went and met with Assad. She’s been attacked ever since. Has anyone ever explained why Americans should hate Assad?

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Because every regime change operation we ever do, we have to make sure that the opponent is the worst villain since Hitler or Hitler reincarnate. Some ophthalmologist from London is a bloodthirsty dictator.

We have to say this, and this is part of the SIOPs or the info war that goes along with regime change operations. This is completely typical, and we’re told if we don’t stop him now, it’s only going to spread.

TUCKER CARLSON: He’ll be in Des Moines?

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Exactly. This is the Nicaraguans were going to be in Harlingen, Texas. Remember? This is standard fare. It’s so pedestrian, such bad script writing that you can’t believe it’s still rolling out.

Someone at the New York Times just asked the obvious question, which is why am I supposed to hate Assad exactly? Why is it somehow a test of my loyalty to the United States where I think Bashar al Assad? Like, who cares? That’s such an odd, such a core question. I’ve never heard anyone ask that.

Media Complicity

TUCKER CARLSON: Can I laugh when you mention New York Times? Because they won’t cover any historical background of any conflict at all because all of this is aimed at a free hand for the security state, a free hand for the military. But why would the New York Times be parroting the security state?

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Well, I think that’s a question that goes back decades partly because it’s staffed in part by probably people from the intelligence agencies. We’ve known that for years. The New York Times… who knows, but we know in the past that CIA just had reporters on the payroll. I mean, whether they do or not now, I have no idea, so I’m not making a current claim, but we know that that’s a historic fact.

We know historically that with very rare exceptions, The New York Times has just followed the unnamed official sources. This is the whole MO. This patriotic newspaper follows what it’s told to do, and it doesn’t ask questions. It has not asked any questions about any of these wars in recent memory, not about Ukraine, not about the wars raging throughout the Middle East.

As I said, I think there was one full page actually about Operation Timber Sycamore in 2016. You would think that something that got us into a war of thirteen years where we spent billions of dollars, where hundreds of thousands of people died. Even at this stage, there would be a kind of page or a box explaining the historical background to this, but it didn’t exist.

I actually wrote to one of the reporters saying, couldn’t you mention a little background? Said, “oh, very interesting idea, Mr. Sachs.” So I’m waiting.

TUCKER CARLSON: You wrote to a New York Times reporter.

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Well, I know these people for decades. And by the way, I not only do I know them, and some I like very much, by the way, and some have been classmates of mine long time ago, and they know things that they don’t report, and that’s also important to understand that what they will say in private is the opposite of what their newspaper says, and I mean literally the opposite.

So that’s very worrying to me because we operate foreign policy in secrecy. We do not have any kind of democratic oversight of foreign policy. There’s no explanation of it. There’s no accountability for it. It’s in very few hands. It’s not in good or reliable hands. It’s not explained.

We gave over Middle East foreign policy to Israel a long time ago, not to US interests, but to Israel’s interests, that is the Israel lobby, and we don’t hear questioning of this at all, of course not from the government, not from the Congress, not from oversight by any democratic institutions, nor does the mainstream media, which fewer and fewer people are interested in because they don’t get any facts from it, look into these issues.

What Comes Next

TUCKER CARLSON: What happens next in Syria?

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Well, there’ll be continued war, and now the drumbeat is for war with Iran. Anything is possible. Netanyahu dearly wants the US to go in and bomb Iran. Probably some of President Trump’s advisers will feel the same. The incoming administration is a mix of old school hardliners and people with a very different perspective, so there will be an internal battle for the heart and soul of the new administration, but there will be some who say, “Yeah, now’s time to carry on the war. Hezbollah and Hamas have been weakened. Syria has fallen. The air defenses are gone. Now we can fly and do in Iran.”

Of course, all of this is a profound delusion, and that’s, I think, really important to understand. We’ve had six wars so far, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, and Libya, six out of the seven that were on the list shown to Wesley Clark. Not one of them has led to stability, to peace even, much less to geopolitical interests being solved. So it’s not like we’re finding solutions to anything.

Yes. It has allowed at unbelievable cost Israel to hold on to the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and Gaza as if that’s some kind of grand strategic aim of the United States or justifiable in the face of international law and nearly global opposition to such thinking, but it doesn’t lead to any answers, and there’s no way to, quote, defeat Iran even if we went in and bombed Iran.

Iran has strong allies. Iran has Russia and China as allies. Iran is part of the BRICS. Iran has a military relationship with Russia. Of course, we have even crazier people who think we’re going to defeat Russia, but Russia has six thousand nuclear warheads, of which sixteen hundred are deployed. It has its new hypersonic Sarmat ballistic missile, which travels at Mach eleven. It has other hypersonic weapons, so yes, we have people in the US who, in their mental blindness, think about continued escalation all the way to nuclear Armageddon. They really do.

They’re very ignorant people, and they’re around in high positions. And so when you ask what comes next, what comes next is whether President Trump can change course. This is the most important question facing the United States, and there are several different factions in Washington right now that are fighting for ultimate say.

There’s a piece by Mitch McConnell, our octogenarian who is completely living in a delusional past, who has a lead article in Foreign Affairs magazine calling for America to commit to primacy, and he calls for a massive military buildup to get ready for every kind of eventuality with Russia and China. That’s the old school, and it remains very powerful, and it’s got very powerful interest because it’s the biggest business in Washington, about one point five trillion dollars of annual spending for the military machine, and Mitch McConnell absolutely represents that.

Then there are groups that say, “You know, we don’t really have any fundamental conflict with Russia, and Russia’s no real threat to us, but China’s the real threat, so we should end the war in Ukraine,” something I completely agree with, but we should do it so that we build up and get ready for the war with China. This is kind of the middle ground.

TUCKER CARLSON: A war with China. Well, a country that manufactures all of our antibiotics.

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Every everyone is talking about war with China in Washington by 2027, and it’s so weird as if we just are trying to rush headlong into complete destruction. But we have official documents, navy strategy saying we must prepare for war with China by 2027.

We had a major article in the New York Times, which I actually once upon a time read with interest. But in any event, it was a story about the Pentagon preparing for war with China. And I wrote the reporter, actually, this is another I know these people for decades. So I wrote the reporter, and I said, “Thank you for writing that story. I was happy to read it now because there’ll be no time to read it after the war. We’ll all be dead, so I’m glad that we have the story now.”

And the reporter wrote back to me right away, said, “Oh, Jeff, the editor I had put in three times that the Pentagon doesn’t want this war, but the editor took it out three times, and I don’t really know why, and I didn’t notice that in the hurrying to finish the piece.”

Do you understand that? You’re one of our world’s great journalists, a person writing a front page story about war, and she’s written three times the Pentagon doesn’t want it, and the editor takes that out all the time, and she didn’t recognize that. That’s The New York Times.

# The Geopolitical Landscape

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t even know what that means.

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Well, that’s when you quit. I mean, you can’t allow that. This is so amazing, but yes. There is a group gearing up for war with China.

It’s unbelievable. Nuclear superpower with a much larger army on their shores. I mean, the whole thing is beyond belief. Then there is a group. There actually is a group that says, hey.

We don’t need war with anybody. We’re not threatened. The United States is more secure than at any time in history and any time that a country could be secure. We have two big oceans. No one can attack us.

We have every amount of deterrence. China does not threaten us and could not threaten us. And so what are we talking about war this way? Why are we in war with Russia in Ukraine? And that is a US-Russia war as everybody should understand.

Why are we at war all over the Middle East? And that is a US war. We’ve got troops on the ground, of course, but we have forces on the ground. They’re often CIA or covert, but yes, these are our wars. We’re paying for them, we’re financing them, we’re arming them, we’re the intelligence, if you can use that word.

Why do we need a war with China? And so there are people who say, hey, why don’t we make business, advance technology, actually have some attention to our economic needs, not go bankrupt in the process, and that group is also part of the Trump incoming team. And this is probably the most consequential question that a country could face is which of these different voices will prevail in this new administration.

The Biden Administration’s Foreign Policy

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve never felt more uneasy than I have in the last few weeks during this period between the election and the inauguration, and it does seem like the outgoing administration is trying to accelerate conflict to leave the incoming administration in charge of a bunch of different wars, especially with Russia.

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah. I think the Biden administration has been the worst of our governments in modern history, and that’s saying a lot because I’m a complainer, so I don’t generally praise administrations. I think of myself as a responsible tough grader, and I haven’t given high marks to any administration from Clinton onward.

I think they’ve all been failures. But Biden’s administration has been a complete shocking disaster, which has brought us closer to nuclear war, brought us into more conflict, didn’t have one iota of diplomacy. I don’t count diplomacy meaning you go talk to a junior ally. I mean diplomacy meaning you talk to someone on the other side to figure out how not to escalate.

And we know, you know very well, and you heard it recently from the Russian foreign minister, that our secretary of state and the Russian foreign minister have not spoken at all for years.

This is the most mind-bogglingly stupid approach to our security and survival imaginable. And as far as we know, and this is what Lavrov said in his interview with you, Biden and Putin have not spoken once since February 2022. It’s just unbelievable. To not even speak, to not try to understand each other’s position, to not discuss, to not try to find a way out when now the most accurate assessment is that there are at least a million Ukrainians dead or severely wounded since February 2022, and the United States hasn’t lifted a finger, not even one time, to try to talk to the other side. So, yes, this has been a shockingly terrible government.

Biden, we don’t know really. You may know. I don’t know whether he thinks. I’m told till four in the afternoon he can still function to some extent. I don’t know if it’s true, but Jake Sullivan, Anthony Blinken, I regard as complete failures. Sullivan’s job is our security. He’s not made us any more secure. He’s made us profoundly insecure, and we’re getting closer and closer to nuclear war.

Escalating Global Tensions

And the only way we avoid that realization is to laugh away every statement, and President Putin said it again today, by the way, that we are absolutely mocking Russia’s serious red lines. Is that really for our security that we don’t have a discussion about them even? And everything, yes, is escalating. We see little fires being set all over the neighborhoods of these war zones.

And it’s not only throughout the Middle East and the drumbeat for war with Iran. It’s not only Biden authorizing the use of long distance strikes into Russia, which, as President Putin has accurately said and has not been denied by the United States, are actually US strikes on Russia. Of course. This is incredible. How would we feel if Russia were attacking the United States? Would we say—and trying to kill the president.

Yes. We are trying to kill Putin right now. Would we say that’s just fine? Don’t worry if Americans are getting a little upset about that? But that’s literally what Biden has approved.

And then we see hotspots around. You have to be, you know, really into this to be following them, but in the country of Georgia, in the South Caucasus region, there’s a little typical regime change maneuver that’s been underway in recent weeks. It will not succeed, but the aim was to destabilize that region. The hand of the US is absolutely clear in that.

We see in Romania another bizarre episode where a presidential election was in its second round, and the lead candidate was saying we should end the war with Ukraine. And the Supreme Court of Romania annulled the election, claiming Russian interference, and so that candidate that was calling for peace could not win election. We’re seeing those kinds of events all over.

The South Korean Situation

What are we seeing in South Korea? In South Korea, of course, we saw something that we don’t understand that’s also mind boggling, which was an attempted coup by the president of Korea, President Yoon, who called out the military to surround and arrest the parliament. And, ultimately, the coup failed, and the president was thrown out of office.

But why he made that coup is not absolutely clear, and the US reaction was bizarre. The US said, “We’re watching with concern.” That was all. It didn’t say anything about restore the constitutional order or we’re against the coup or anything else, and there was a glimmer of possible reason.

I don’t want to overstate any certainty on this because this is, of course, also not analyzed properly or made public, so we don’t have the information, but the week before the military action, the coup attempt, there was a visit by the Ukrainian defense minister for armaments from South Korea, something that the United States has been pushing very hard for.

The United States has been trying to get South Korea to ship arms to Ukraine because the US inventories are depleted. South Korea, under its law, cannot do so because it cannot ship arms to belligerents that are engaged in war, and the parliament opposed it. The president does not have a majority in the parliament, or the former president, and the opposition opposed the armaments.

So there’s some possible relationship with this that when Yoon declared martial law, he said that the opposition was siding with the North Koreans. That was his statement. And some read that as a way to clear the way for South Korea to enter the Ukraine war with massive arm shipments. I don’t know whether that’s the case, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s the case. Maybe we’ll find out. It happens that the acting president was my first PhD student at Harvard now, so I go back with him forty-four years, which is nice.

TUCKER CARLSON: Amazing. Yeah. Just a coincidence.

Russia and Syria

TUCKER CARLSON: I meant to ask you, why did Russia stand aside as Assad fell?

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: I think that it was, first of all, a military choice because Russia is in the midst of a very tough war along a twelve hundred kilometer front in Ukraine, and it did not want to divert any major military effort in that direction.

Second, the proximate reason why Assad fell was that the main military backing of Assad was Hezbollah forces and the Iranian guard, and they had both been—especially Hezbollah had been very badly mauled by Israel in the last month and a half and had pulled its reinforcements from Syria to reinforce Lebanese positions. And so Assad was left without the backing of Hezbollah forces, several thousand, which was the bulwark of his military.

I think a third reason is that Russia doesn’t think it’s leaving Syria, that this isn’t the end of the story. And immediately, the supposed new force in Syria, the HTS, said that it wants Russia to stay and to keep its bases in Syria. Russia has a naval base and a small one and an airfield, and Russia has redeployed its forces from within Syria to both of those bases but is probably not leaving.

So I think from probably a strategic calculus, Russia just regards this as a temporary step on a path to continued conflict, and that this was not the time to get into another major front. Yes. That would be my assessment.

The Transition Period

TUCKER CARLSON: So we’ve got a little over a month between now and the inauguration. Clearly, as noted, the Biden administration is trying to make decisions that are irrevocable and deepen the war between the United States and Russia and then all these other things. If you were the Trump people right now before the inauguration, what would you be doing?

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Well, I would first be clear. Under the constitution, Biden is president till January 20th. I think it’s right to say that Biden should not put America into further insecurity. He’s done enough damage.

And so I think it’s right for every political figure to say to Biden, you’re at the end of your term, and the world is very dangerous. You do not have a mandate to increase the danger. You should never have authorized the use of ATACMs and other US missiles in deep strikes into Russia. Stop further provocations now.

So I hope that politicians of both parties, and I think President Trump can also make this clear, it’s not to take over the government until January 20th, but Biden absolutely, in my view, is without legitimacy to further endanger us, and they should prevent any actions from abroad that threaten American security, of course, but I don’t see those happening.

I think the biggest risk right now is continued US provocations of the kind that we’ve been discussing in Ukraine, in the Middle East, in the periphery of Russia, in the Far East, stop any further provocations. The idea of somehow tying Trump’s hands is completely illegitimate constitutionally and politically, and it’s a disastrous approach. We’re not playing a game of two people or a game of two administrations. We’re trying to survive at a time of perhaps maximum global peril right now.

So just to say, most experts that look at this think we’re closer to nuclear war than we have ever been, and I refer often to the doomsday clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which is the graphic to demonstrate how close or how far we are from nuclear war, and that doomsday clock puts the clock at ninety seconds to midnight, which is the closest to nuclear Armageddon that it has ever been since the clock was first rolled out in 1947.

So I think it behooves those people who are making the decisions in the Biden administration to stop imperiling Americans at this point and to understand that their job right now is to keep things stable, to give power over to President Trump on January 20th, 2025.

Declassification and 9/11

TUCKER CARLSON: One of the promises of the new administration is massive declassification.

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Please. If it could only be—this would change so much.

TUCKER CARLSON: So one of the things that I’m interested in learning about is 9/11 because I think it’s important to understand why that happened. And I think my guess is that one of the reasons so many documents from 9/11 are still classified twenty-three years later, it’s hard to imagine why, is because they tell a more detailed story about why Al Qaeda struck the United States, and it seems clear it was a response to—and I’m not defending it, of course, obviously, but it was still cause and effect, and the cause was American foreign policy was a response to that. A, do you think that’s true? And, b, what if it is true, then how afraid should we be about future terror attacks given what we’ve been doing?

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Well, let me say something about declassification. We had one and only one close look at the CIA in its entire history of the last seventy-four years.

The Church Committee and CIA Revelations

TUCKER CARLSON: And that was actually seventy-four, seventy-five. It’ll be the fiftieth anniversary this coming year of the Church Committee.

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Yep. It was the only time that there was even a partial look inside what the CIA had been doing. What they uncovered was a viper’s nest of stupidity, evil, disaster, and, of course, unbelievable unaccountability.

They uncovered, of course, numerous assassination plots. They uncovered an absolutely shocking and awful program called MKUltra, which was a massive warped program for mind control where they took innocent people, vagrants, off the streets of Times Square and shot them up with drugs or drove them to suicide through sleep deprivation, every kind of shocking thing you can’t even make up, and that made for great movie series like the Bourne series, which is about MKUltra in fact.

Now that was 1975. We’ve gone fifty years of further secretive operations. I’d mentioned one of them, the Timber Sycamore, but that’s one of many.

Personal Witness to Covert Operations

I’ve seen many myself by accident because I’m not in the security field. I’m an economist, but I’m around lots of governments. I’m all over the world. I’ve seen coups with my own eyes. I’ve seen the US role in these coups.

I’ve seen things that are absolutely disgusting, not because people are showing me secret documents. I don’t even want to see those, by the way. I see them because I happen to be told or shown or walked around the Maidan soon after a coup overthrew Yanukovych, and people explained things to me which I found completely awful about American complicity in all of this.

I had a president in the Western Hemisphere say to me, “Jeff, they’re going to take me out,” and I said, “No. No. No. We’re going to—everything’s going to be fine,” and the CIA took them out in broad daylight.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yep.

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: And so we have no review of any of this.

We have gone to war repeatedly on false pretenses. We have gone to war repeatedly in so-called covert operations. They’re not covert to the people being affected.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that’s right.

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: But we just hear denials. We hear stupidity from The New York Times, the complete imbecility, childishness that they don’t want to ask any single question. What about the Maidan? What was the US government doing there? Well, it’s easy enough to find out. What were the decisions taken in overthrowing various regimes?

What about a number of assassinations that we have every forensic reason to know were conspiracies that the US never allowed to be understood. Whether any of this is ever found, I don’t know. But if it is, it would change the course of America back to a true republic, because what happened in this country is that we were overtaken by the security state, and we became a system of confidentiality and unaccountability, and it’s a big massive machine, and a lot of people are paid to keep quiet or to salute whatever the military-industrial complex or the intelligence agencies are doing without asking questions, because when you have one point five trillion dollars a year spent on that, you’re a pretty big business, and it has affected the universities, the think tanks, of course, the Congress, which asked no questions of any serious kind, and so major, major events of fundamental significance for our insecurity take place without any truth telling at all.

So all of this is to say it may be the most important thing that President Trump could do would be to open up the historical record so that we understand what has really happened, because we are ninety seconds to midnight. We are closer to nuclear war than ever. We have a military machine in the service of the Israel lobby or in the service of the military contractors or in the service of the deep state on its own or for whatever other crazy idea, and we just don’t have democratic deliberation or accountability about this. But we could. If we did, we would change the direction of this country.

Lack of Oversight in Government

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, the system is designed with accountability at the heart of it, and we have oversight committees in the House and the Senate that are supposed to be making certain that the intelligence community, the IC, is operating in accordance with the Constitution of the United States. That’s their job. They don’t—they obviously don’t do their job, but what they do is very interesting. Our system of government is actually rather ingenious. It’s ingenious because you can buy a piece of government at very low cost.

If the military-industrial contractors just buy off a couple committees, that’s enough because they’re the only ones that have responsibility. If the health insurers just buy off the health committees in the House and the Senate, that’s enough. If the Israel lobby just gets its hold on a couple of committees, they run American foreign policy in the Middle East.

So what I have found to be ingenious about our completely corrupted political system is how inexpensive it is to buy your corner of the story. You don’t control everything. No one controls everything. But if you want to control health care, it’s a couple committees. If you want to control military industrial machinery, that’s just a couple of committees. And so there is no oversight, and there won’t be oversight until there is public oversight. Nobody oversees themselves, and the idea that a few congressmen, and I know some of them, that they’re really constraining anything that the CIA or the intelligence community does, no way.

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: They’re puppets—they’re puppets of it. Completely, and they’re funded—they need some scrutiny. They’re funded by it. They’re puppets of it. There are almost no independent members of our Congress. Almost everyone is on the take. Rand Paul is my one exception. I think he’s the most principled member of our Congress in both houses. He really believes in honesty in small government and wants to know the truth.

The Pandemic Origins

And I’ll give an example of the complete lack of oversight and something we may know and something we talked about. Okay, where did that pandemic come from?

The evidence is now overwhelming, though still not definitive, that it was made in a US lab. This is overwhelming. Even the report of the House Committee that issued a report a couple of weeks ago says, yes, there was obviously a lot of cover up and a lot of unanswered questions and a lot of engagement of US scientists in this, and we know that the US government lied up the wazoo on all of the question of the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that made the pandemic and has lied until today. We know that the intelligence agencies know a lot that they haven’t said.

So this is another area. Could we actually have some honesty? Could we actually have some transparency? Could we actually look at something where a pandemic took perhaps twenty million lives worldwide. Where’d that come from? Especially since the evidence is now overwhelming that it was the laboratory creation with US scientists and US funding playing a huge role in this.

On Snowden and Assange

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you think the new president will pardon Edward Snowden and Julian Assange?

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Snowden is a remarkable person. Don’t know Julian Assange. I do know Edward Snowden, and he is an absolutely remarkable person. And, yes, he is a hero because he told us what the government was actually doing towards us, and of course, the security state, which really runs America, therefore, immediately branded him as the worst villain, but we found out more from Snowden about the risk to our freedom than from just about anybody else.

And Julian Assange, you know, I almost every day, I invoke a memorandum that he enabled me to see and you to see and all of us to see that explains the Ukraine war better than anything else, and Julian Assange deserves all of the credit for this.

The Ukraine War and Burns Memo

And it’s also an interesting story, if I may just say in one minute. Our current CIA director, William Burns, in 2008 was the US ambassador to Russia. And when he was US ambassador to Russia, he understood completely, perfectly that the US push to expand NATO to Ukraine was disastrous, pure provocation, crossing Russia’s red lines, likely to create a civil war inside Ukraine and a possible war between the United States and Russia.

And he wrote a memo back to Condoleezza Rice, who was our Secretary of State, and the memo said that the entire Russian political class opposes NATO enlargement and for real reasons. And that memo famously became known as “Nyet means no.” Don’t play games with this. This is real. This is a red line.

Okay. Something like this should be understood by the American people. We’ve just spent around two hundred billion dollars. We’ve just caused deaths of perhaps six or seven hundred thousand Ukrainians on completely false pretenses, on false pretenses that as the New York Times has wrongly stated unendingly, that the war in Ukraine was, quote, “unprovoked.” Not only was it provoked, the US provoked it, and not only that, our senior diplomats knew that, knew that at the time and wrote about it.

Now this memo makes this perfectly clear. Anyone can go online and type “William Burns, nyet means nyet, cable,” and you will come up with this cable, and then you can read why in 2008 we knew that the deep state push for NATO enlargement was mind-bendingly stupid, dangerous, provocative, and likely to get us into disaster, which it did.

How do we even see that memo? Do you think that a congressional committee called Condoleezza Rice and said, could we have the documentary evidence to understand the choices you’re making? Of course not. There’s no oversight when it comes to security issues. We are already in a security state that has no resemblance to democracy whatsoever, but Julian Assange enabled us to see it, so we have to express gratitude for that.

This is the truth. If you don’t want leaks, don’t have a world run where every consequential fact is hidden from the American people, and it enables one disaster after another.

The Doomsday Clock

And just to make clear how disastrous this is, Bill Clinton, who was, in my view, a completely ineffectual president in a long list of ineffectual presidents, came to office in 1993 when the doomsday clock was at seventeen minutes from midnight, meaning that it was the farthest away from nuclear war in the whole history of the nuclear age. Every single president starting with Clinton brought the doomsday clock closer to Armageddon, so we went from seventeen minutes to midnight to ninety seconds to midnight with no accountability or explanation at all.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you think it’s fair to say that anyone who opposes pardons for Ed Snowden and Julian Assange should be looked at with suspicion or is actually an enemy of the country?

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Well, I think that they may just be ignorant or don’t understand, or maybe they’re New York Times readers. You know? In other words, there are a lot of people who really don’t understand the situation right now, don’t understand how dangerous it is, don’t understand how lawless it is, don’t understand how we’re driven by these long-term aims that are absolutely disastrous.

I thank Mitch McConnell, by the way, for writing his essay that the goal is primacy. Too late. If our goal is primacy and we pursue that like this octogenarian who can barely function anymore says we should, we’ll all get blown up. We’ll move from ninety seconds to midnight to sixty seconds to midnight to thirty seconds to midnight and goodbye because we can’t have a world where the United States says we’re in charge of everything. If you aim that way, we will end up with World War Three that will not go well.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, we’re begging South Korea for munitions, so the truth is we don’t have the power to affect that anyway.

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: But, you know, this is the interesting thing. Already, you could know back in 2014, don’t overthrow the Ukrainian government. You could know in 2015, honor the Minsk agreement that would end the war. You could know in 2021, negotiate with Russia because, actually, Ukraine—I won’t even say Ukraine. The United States cannot win a war in Ukraine against Russia. We knew that, but these are not clever people.

Jake Sullivan’s not a clever person. They don’t understand. They’re, like, terrible poker players that somehow are sitting at, you know, the grand slam of poker. They don’t know what they’re doing, and they’re bluffing and they’re betting and they’re doubling down, with our money, by the way, and so, yes, you could know this primacy thing. Come on. This is—what does it even mean in a world of multiple nuclear superpowers?

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s right.

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: What does it even mean? It means we just ignore all of that till we’re all blown to smithereens? No.

Russia, NATO, and the Deep State

TUCKER CARLSON: But, you know, Mitch McConnell barely functions anymore, but he’s got the big story in foreign affairs about how we need to preserve primacy. So there’s a lot of momentum and ignorance and deep state arrogance. Who the hell are you to tell us? You don’t even read the secret files? You know? This is really where we have been for a very long time.

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Since 1991, the deep state, the CIA, and others have been trying to defeat Russia. Since 1991, Netanyahu’s been with American military remaking the Middle East. It’s been a disaster on both fronts. It’s made America drastically less secure, but they continue this group in power, and there’s a chance that President Trump could change this. This is the most promising single reality of his government if he chooses rightly.

He has to understand, he’s got a completely divided team, and he’s got a completely divided landscape in Washington, and I think he knows the deep state is not going out with a whimper. It’s going to fight for its prerogatives.

TUCKER CARLSON: Are people you know worried about a terror attack in the US?

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: I don’t know. They don’t tell me, and frankly, myself I’m more worried about World War Three.

Tulsi Gabbard and the Intelligence Community

TUCKER CARLSON: So you said the president has assembled a divided team, one person who I think is pretty close to his stated objectives on foreign policy is Tulsi Gabbard. He’s nominated her to be Director of National Intelligence. The entire Senate Intel Committee appears to be against her, like, I think every member.

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: And that shows that she is completely on the right side. Exactly right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you think she’ll make it? How important is it that she make it?

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: She’s probably—and I don’t want to jinx anything—she’s probably the most important appointment of the Trump administration.

TUCKER CARLSON: Seem that way.

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: She is incredibly intelligent, incredibly honest, incredibly committed to US security, and would do a superb job. So that’s why she’s being opposed, because the forces that are worse than mediocre, that are right now on top of a one point five trillion dollar a year machine, that have been running disastrous wars, that have been bringing us closer and closer to doom, don’t want any accountability. And what Tulsi Gabbard would represent is competence, honesty, forthrightness, and not having been a party to all these failures.

TUCKER CARLSON: So if you’re the incoming administration, how hard do you fight for her nomination?

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Well, she’s critical because this is the most important question facing the United States today. We have many important questions. We have major financial, social, political, economic, institutional questions, but the most important question facing us is, is a country that potentially is more secure than any country in the history of the world going to do itself in by a self-provoked World War III, and we’re on that course. And five presidents have been on that course through their incompetence and their obedience to an unaccountable deep state.

And President Trump is coming in saying that he’s going to change direction. He says every day that he wants to be president of peace. By the way, I think the greatest thing that could happen is four Nobel Peace Prizes for President Trump. He could end the war in Ukraine. He could end the war in the Middle East, not by bombing Iran. That would do the opposite, but by enabling a two-state solution in the Middle East, and the wars would all end. He could end the talk of the war in East Asia, which would be the utter disaster and folly, by recognizing that we shouldn’t be meddling in China’s internal affairs, and Taiwan is an internal affair of China, and he should be restoring a framework of nuclear arms control.

I give him four Nobel Peace Prizes for that. If he chooses that direction, he’ll be the most consequential president, perhaps in our history, because he will reestablish security for the American people. If he follows the hardliners, he’s just going to add yet another years of bringing us closer to doom.

Ending the Ukraine War

TUCKER CARLSON: How is the Ukraine war settled?

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: The Ukraine war is settled literally in one call just as he says because all he has to do, really all he has to do, is pick up the phone and call President Putin and say, “You know, that thirty-year effort to expand NATO to Ukraine and to Georgia was ridiculous, unacceptable, unnecessary provocation, and it’s led us to this juncture. I’m against it. I’m going to say it publicly. We’re going to end this adventurism, and you stop fighting today.”

And the fighting will stop that moment, actually. Then there will be the details, and the details are where the borders will be drawn exactly. But the war will end. The war will not end, by the way, by saying, “Let’s have a ceasefire.” That’s a meaningless statement.

As you heard repeatedly from Foreign Minister Lavrov and as I know and as anyone thinking about this knows, this isn’t about a ceasefire. This is about a cause of this war, and the cause of this war is that Russia does not want the US and its missile systems on its one thousand two hundred kilometer border with Ukraine right now, and Biden was so stupid, and I’m using the term. It’s of course, it sounds—I don’t know how it sounds, but it’s true, that he couldn’t say that and avoid the war that was obvious how to avoid this war, obvious how to avoid this war. But Biden couldn’t do it. That’s why I say he’s been such a terrible president.

And I think that President Trump wants to do it this way. Now, again, he’s got people around him of many different views. Some say, promise them, just ask for a ceasefire. Freeze the conflict. Armistice. Korean solution 1953. This is completely beside the point. Russia isn’t going to freeze the conflict. It’s actually winning on the ground. But why is it fighting?

It’s fighting because it does not want this regime, which was installed by the United States in 2014, to have US bases, NATO, US weapons, and missile systems on its border. And the fact that Biden just proved the point by saying, “Yeah. We’ll fire the missiles into Russia,” make it all the more clear why they’re concerned about this. This isn’t an idle threat. This isn’t some dumb thing. This is they’re being hit right now by US missile systems, by US personnel firing these missile systems, so it’s not an idle threat.

So people who say freeze the conflict, they don’t get it. People who say—and there was an initial statement—NATO will not enlarge for at least x years. Somebody said ten years. Somebody said twenty years. This is also completely ridiculous. Then another idea: “Well, we’ll give Russia this territory, Donetsk and Lugansk and maybe Kherson and Zaporizhzhia and Crimea, but all the rest of Ukraine will be part of NATO.” Of course not. It’s the same deal. This is ridiculous.

So if you understand what this is about, where it came from, why it continues to this moment, there is one phone call that ends it, which is get to the underlying cause of the war. The underlying cause of the war, going back to a decision that Bill Clinton made in 1994, is the decision to expand NATO to Ukraine, and, by the way, they want to expand it to the South Caucasus, to Georgia, which is also in turmoil right now.

It’s very interesting, Tucker, that Zbigniew Brzezinski spelled this out to the letter in 1997, and it’s fascinating to read his account. All wrong. He got it completely wrong, but he spelled it out. And what he said was in his book, “The Grand Chessboard” in 1997, we should expand NATO eastward. We should expand Europe eastward, and we should ask the question, what will Russia do? Russia won’t like it.

So Brzezinski spends a whole chapter, what will Russia do? And he asked the question, well, could Russia ever align with China? Nope. That’s not going to happen. Could Russia ever align with Iran? Nope. That’s not going to happen. Russia’s only choice is to accede to the US action. So in 1997, it was perfectly clearly understood. What is the strategy? What are we going to do? And what will happen? The only problem is it was wrong. This is the only problem. He got it completely wrong.

And you can go back and to his credit, he wrote his prediction. It’s wrong. But why are we still playing that game until today? Why did Biden exactly continue on that failed course? Because he’s a failure. That’s why. Because he didn’t understand. Because he’s surrounded by mediocrities at best.

Assassination Politics

TUCKER CARLSON: The Biden administration has tried to kill Vladimir Putin. That’s a fact, I think, and they funded separatist groups within Russia probably going back before Biden.

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Well, this has been, by the way, CIA ops to have separatist groups everywhere, and it’s fascinating, just if I could mention, because it’s almost humorous except that it’s so tragic. There was a—I don’t remember the exact name, but something around 1998 called the Chechnya Friendship Committee. Chechnya. Okay. Burning issue for the United States?

I dare one in a million of your listeners to know exactly where Chechnya is and its history because who knows? Who cares? But if you look at the Chechnya Friendship Committee, it was the blue ribbon committee of American neocons. Just Zbigniew Brzezinski right there. Everyone that wants the hard line.

Why? They couldn’t care for one iota of a moment about Chechnya. Of course not. They wanted to break up Russia. Everything is antagonism.

So they funded Islamic extremists. So they funded the jihadists everywhere. And by the way, it’s not even—we made Al Qaeda. I think everyone understands this. We made Osama bin Laden. We made the overthrow in Syria where they’re saying, “Oh my god. It’s HTS.” What do you think? This was what Obama tasked in 2011, 2012, jihadists.

TUCKER CARLSON: So what would happen if they succeeded in killing Putin? I mean, I don’t understand why that would be in America’s interest to have six thousand nuclear warheads unsecured floating around in a country that’s twenty percent Muslim and very complicated and, like, that seems like the last thing that you would ever want to do.

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: He’s the most pro-Western leader in Russia. Yeah. Let me address it in a little bit different way. In the last year, the leaders of Hamas wanted to make peace with Israel, and their political negotiator was a man named Haniyeh. What did Israel do when the peace feelers came out? They assassinated him to make sure that there would be no attempt by Hamas to make peace.

TUCKER CARLSON: Nasrallah of Hezbollah—

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: That for real?

TUCKER CARLSON: For real. They—that he’s the one that they killed at the inauguration of Pezeshkian.

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: I remember because he was the political negotiator for Hamas, and they wanted to try to find a peace. Israel hates the idea that there would be negotiations with Hamas. The idea is to remake the Middle East through war, not through a peaceful negotiation. Then Nasrallah in Hezbollah wanted to make peace with Israel. What did they do? They killed him, of course.

This is a basic point. Kill the peacemakers. This is very important to understand. You assassinate the people that might want to negotiate, and this was something that JFK learned, I think, the hard way.

Well, this is the modus operandi of the CIA, and it’s the modus operandi of Mossad, and it’s the modus operandi of this deep state, which is you’re not aiming for peace. You’re aiming for primacy. You’re aiming for dominance. You’re aiming to remake the region in your image. You’re resisting any call for compromise.

Yitzhak Rabin, when he wanted to make peace, he was assassinated, killed the peacemakers, but what we know is that this is state action. We know this in the United States, killed the peacemakers. We know it of Mossad, rise and kill, and they’ve done it repeatedly in front of our eyes. So it’s not the harshest enemy you try to kill. It’s the one that threatens you not with war, but with diplomacy. That’s what they dislike. They don’t want peace. They want primacy. This is really a different thing.

Where is it getting us? Since the whole thing is completely delusional, it’s getting us closer and closer to nuclear annihilation. How could anyone think you’d kill the president of a nuclear superpower? Of course, it’s the most mind-boggling, wrong-headed idea. I have no information about that. What I do have information about is the ones that they actually kill.

By the way, I also know through lots of discussions, and I can’t go into all of them because I just have been lucky to have fascinating discussions. Iran has been asking for peace and for reaching out to the Biden administration for the last two years. How do we take that? “Oh, they must be vulnerable. Now we must kill them.” That’s the idea. It’s so weird. Iran is reaching out for peace now. Iran has been for two years. There have been—I talked to an intermediary recently. I’ve talked to many diplomats in the most recent months.

By the way, there’s an astoundingly, oh my god, an astoundingly insightful episode that was reposted of PBS NewsHour with Robert McNeil interviewing Henry Kissinger and Jack Matlock in 1994. So this is the thirtieth anniversary of this show, and the show was on NATO enlargement. And Matlock, who was the US ambassador to the Soviet Union and a wonderful diplomat and a very, very smart, fine man, was saying in 1994, “Don’t provoke. We have peace now. Don’t expand NATO. We’ve said we won’t. We shouldn’t. And if Russia ever becomes belligerent again, of course, we would reconsider and take action, but right now, there’s no belligerency. There’s no reason to provoke.”

The Neoconservative Approach to Foreign Policy

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Kissinger is incoherent, actually, which is unusual, but Robert McNeil kind of can’t even fathom what Kissinger is saying until Kissinger finally stumbles out with the statement. And I won’t get it exactly right, but he says something to the effect, “If you can’t provoke Russia when they’re weak, how are we going to provoke them when they’re strong?”

And it’s just such a weird idea that there’s no moment when you could actually try to make peace because if they’re weak, definitely don’t make peace because if you try not to provoke them then, well, then you won’t be credible when they’re strong. And so the idea is you always must be aggressive. So Kissinger was saying in 1994, of course, we need to expand NATO.

And, yes, Russia won’t like it, but they’re weak now so they can’t resist. Later on, by the way, he came to understand that expanding NATO to Ukraine was just too far. He actually did reach that understanding in 2015. But watching him in 2004 is very interesting because 2004 was the year that the decision was made. And this is also something very important to understand about our foreign policy.

It’s not that a president comes in, and then we have a new foreign policy, and then another president, we have a new foreign policy. These things are very deeply set courses. These wars in the Middle East go back thirty years. This war against Russia actually goes back to 1945 at the end of World War II, but in the current version goes back to 1991 and by plan to 1994 when Clinton laid out the NATO enlargement, and then Brzezinski spelled it out for the public in 1997, but it was decisions already taken. So we can watch Kissinger in 1994 explaining, “Yeah, if Russia’s weak, take advantage of them.”

It’s this is the time to take advantage of them. This is what gets us into such unbelievable insecurity. We could be the safest people in the world in history. No one could conceivably attack us, and yet we’re ninety seconds to midnight.

Expectations for Change

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you have any expectation that will change?

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: I’m counting on President Trump to change this. I think his instinct is right. I think his sense is right. I think he doesn’t like war. I really do.

You know, he displayed that in the first term, and he said that repeatedly now. This is the best thing we have going for us. Now in his first term, he hired a lot of very irresponsible people that like war or that like duplicity or that like the deep state or that like unaccountability, like John Bolton, one of my least favorites among all of these.

TUCKER CARLSON: Fair.

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: And Trump hired them. So the question now is probably not his deep sense, which I think is absolutely right, but now his tactical sense inside the US government. Please don’t let the deep state continue on a path that it’s been on, and don’t let the normal hardliners because Washington is filled with people who have been on the payroll of the military industrial complex their whole careers. Don’t let them dominate policy.

The incoming administration is such a mix right now, and we see that the clarity of those who want to control this, how harshly they’re being opposed, like Tulsi Gabbard, or let me say Bobby Kennedy, though, his department is health, but he understands this peace side as well very clearly. These are the ones that they’re fighting because we have been for, I’d say, again, thirty years at least, and arguably basically eighty years since the end of World War II on a particular jag, which at least Mitch McConnell does us the service of naming by its name, which is primacy.

And if we continue on that course, Trump will fail and the United States will be gravely endangered, and if he reverses that course, he stands to be a great and historic president.

The National Security State

TUCKER CARLSON: Because there’s so much at stake, you sort of wonder what the people who oppose that kind of reform would do. I mean, the national security state has been willing, eager to use violence abroad again and again and again, murdering people, as I said, trying to murder Putin. Would they or are you concerned that they would be willing to use that domestically?

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: I think there’s no doubt that they’ve used assassinations at home. I’m of the view that JFK was the first clear case of that at home.

This is a long, long story. Some people roll their eyes at it, but I’ve spent much of my life reading, studying, examining this. I think it’s quite arguable for Bobby Kennedy the same way, and I don’t think that there have been scruples inside about keeping prerogatives. At the same time, the situation is better now in one regard, thirty years of failure, so it’s not as if the course that we’re on is giving us these great benefits. The United States needs to change course for our own security.

We need to change course for our own finances. We’re not in good shape in this country. When seventy-five percent or so of Americans repeatedly say America’s on the wrong track, they’re correct at that, and they say that now. That’s the latest Gallup findings, and they’re completely right.

So this is not the exuberance, and I would say the hubris, of 1991, and I was there then as an economic specialist and an advisor, unpaid and informal, but an advisor to President Gorbachev and an advisor to President Yeltsin and an advisor to Ukraine’s President Kuchma on how to stabilize their desperately destabilized economies and how to move to market systems, and the United States was not interested in peace. We had this hubris that history had ended, we had won, and now America would run the show.

Thirty Years of Failed Policy

The difference today is that we’re thirty-three years after the end of the Soviet Union. We tried the neocon approach for thirty years now. We have engaged in all of Netanyahu’s wars.

We went to war in Ukraine. Everything that was predicted has been proved wrong. The neocons failed time and again. They didn’t remake Afghanistan. They didn’t remake Iraq.

They did not remake the Middle East. They did not call Putin’s bluff and enter Ukraine with NATO. They did not enter Georgia with NATO. They completely misjudged how we would push the rest of the world into unity, as I mentioned was Brzezinski saying Russia will never side with China on this, well, of course, he got wrong the most fundamental diplomatic change of our age, the rise of China and the creation of a group that does not want US hegemony, and a group that is increasingly integrated in production, in military, in security, in diplomacy.

So we are at a time where the failures are self-evident if people open their eyes, and the American people know it, in fact.

So it’s not even convincing the American people, “Oh, it’s worse than you think.” No. They know. They want their own problems solved. They want jobs, some housing, reduced crime in my neighborhood, keep the inflation down. “Could you keep the debt from destroying American public finances?” They’re not interested in Mitch McConnell’s primacy continuing. He’s an octogenarian. Done. You’re done. It’s time for something different.

So in this sense, it’s really possible for this administration, this incoming administration to change course because it doesn’t require a massive public education. It requires honesty.

It requires seeing down the deep state internally. It requires making sure that the key appointments that want competence, honesty, and security for America actually get the job. And, of course, it requires President Trump following through on his profound main insight, which is that there is no reason for war with Russia. There’s no reason for war with China, and I want him really to know really to know there’s no reason for war with Iran. None.

The Iran Question

TUCKER CARLSON: But every week, every day, Fox News tells me that there’s some assassination attempt by Iran. They’re sending drones from their ships offshore over our country to scope it out for future attacks. I mean, Iran is presented in the US media as the aggressor trying to kill Trump, for example.

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: I don’t know if those Fox reporters have the chance to speak with the Iranian senior officials or Middle East officials.

I do. I do all the time. I am able to ask questions, to check facts, to understand circumstances. I speak to lots of people engaged all over the Middle East on these questions, and it’s simply not true. So the first thing one should do, period, in this world is talk to the other side.

And if Donald Trump has that, this would be the farthest reach, but if he has that impulse with Iran too, he will be perhaps amazed, perhaps gratified, but he would do a huge service for the American people, huge service for the American people.

TUCKER CARLSON: My sense is that a war with Iran feels inevitable. I’m obviously opposed to it, but tell us how you think that would go if it happens.

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: There’s nothing inevitable till it happens. So this is extremely important. A war with Iran will be World War III. So that’s the point. Iran is not alone, and it will not remain alone. And so if we go to war with Iran, we are expanding the war with Russia.

With Russia, we are at a possibility of peace, but we’re also at a possibility of nuclear war. They’re both very close. And if we go to war with Iran, we make nuclear war all the more likely.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you think that the people pushing us toward war with Iran understand that?

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: No. I think that they’re following a plan, “Clean Break,” 1996, and a plan, 1991, “Seven Wars in Five Years,” that has been deep set and that has been Netanyahu’s baby all the time. Netanyahu, I regard as one of the most delusional and dangerous people on the planet, and he has engaged the United States so far in six disastrous wars, and he’s aiming to engage us in yet one more.

But Netanyahu’s track record is just about the worst of any person on the planet right now in terms of damage done, and we should be able to understand that. And we have a lot of rhetoric in this country standing up for Israel.

We’re not standing up for Israel. We are engaging in war on Israel’s behalf all over the Middle East. That’s a completely different thing. I believe in Israel’s security alongside a state of Palestine, which I know completely to be possible and achievable and peaceful and ending this risk of World War III and could have prevented the million or so deaths that have come from Netanyahu’s wars up until now. And the Arab states have been saying this repeatedly since 2002.

It’s called the Arab Peace Initiative. Anybody can look it up. They repeat it basically nonstop in the last two years. The Iranians want peace. I know that as well.

And so the whole game is to make claims about the other side and to say if you talk to the other side, “Oh, you’re a traitor.” That’s what they say about Tulsi Gabbard. “She talked to Assad.” Well, what about that? Isn’t that amazing?

Questioning the Narrative

TUCKER CARLSON: But I just again, just to refer back to the core of it, I don’t understand when Assad became our enemy and why and why should I go along with that?

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: It was almost a flip because there were nice words said about him by Hillary Clinton one year, and then the next year exactly the opposite, because these are mind games that are played for reasons that are not said directly. And that have no bearing on American national security or aren’t motivated by a desire to protect the United States. There’s nothing to do with that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course not.

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Nothing that has happened in the Middle East has been for American national security. None of it. Not one of these wars. These have been Netanyahu’s wars. Watch him cheerlead.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why does I mean, it’s just amazing how few Americans—many Americans love their country and would be willing to lay down their lives for it and have, but how few are willing to say what you’ve just said?

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Because they’re told repeatedly the opposite. And you can be told anything—can be sold even—not that people believe it, by the way, but they don’t hear the correct story anywhere in the mainstream. They hear things that don’t quite make sense to them. And by the way, this is one of the points of info war.

The public didn’t believe the official narrative about JFK’s assassination. The public didn’t believe the official narrative about RFK’s assassination. The public didn’t believe the official narrative about COVID. The public didn’t believe the official narrative about Iraq. The public doesn’t believe these things, but it doesn’t hear the coherent explanation from the New York Times or MSNBC or CNN or anybody else.

No one actually tries to explain. And so what hangs out there is something completely unsatisfactory, but it doesn’t have an alternative explanation. And if you don’t have the clarity of the alternative, then this miserable, phony, info approach, it fills the space, and they’re not interested in convincing us because we don’t have any say in any of these issues. They’re interested in doing what they want to do without being stopped. That’s the difference.

TUCKER CARLSON: When was the last time you appeared or wrote for a mainstream publication or television channel here?

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: It was the day that I was on Bloomberg, and I said the US blew up Nord Stream.

TUCKER CARLSON: I remember that, and they cut you off.

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: And they cut me off and then berated me for several minutes while I was watching on the screen, but cut off, and that was the last moment. But the US did blow up Nord Stream.

The Truth About Foreign Policy Narratives

TUCKER CARLSON: Pardon me? You were telling the truth. Of course, and exactly who did it when is something that would be easy to find out in five minutes, so that’s not even hard to find out. But you haven’t appeared on any—

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Not once because—yeah, it’s not quite true. You know, if it has nothing to do with foreign policy issues, it’s just an economics question once in a while.

TUCKER CARLSON: But, the mainstream follows the security state line. But I mean and they’re acting against their own interest—this is not flattering, but it’s just true. Whenever we do an interview with you, it gets millions of views, and people love it, and we make revenue off it, and it’s like it’s good business to have you on. I happen to agree with you, and think you’re wise, but it’s not like people don’t want to hear what you’re saying. Lots of people do. We’ve proven that.

People want to hear some explanation about—

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Specifically, so you were a fixture on in different channels, NBC, for example. And so when they ban you from those channels, they’re hurting themselves because viewers want to watch you.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it’s just—I know that because I have you on. So how exactly does that order go out, do you think? Do you know the mechanics of keeping you off? Like, one day, there’s just a bulletin, you know, no more Jeffrey Sachs, or how does that work?

The Official Narrative and Media Control

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: I need to ask you because the phrasing, the official lines, kind of the stupidities and sillinesses on almost any story of the kind that we’re talking about get repeated across the mainstream space very, very quickly, and not only on the US side, but generally in the British media as well. And so there’s certainly some—there’s an official narrative, of course, so this is part of the story that senior White House briefing Jake or somebody else briefs, and that becomes the meme. That becomes what you have to defend. You have to defend your continued access.

You have to be a good, loyal citizen of this. By the way, there are lots of contracts that go out with the military industrial complex. This is a trillion and a half dollar a year business, not a small business, by the way. It’s real business. It’s lots of think tanks. It’s lots of academic centers. It’s lots of people on hire. It’s lots of contracts. It’s lots of that—all you don’t get any—I mean, I don’t want any of that, but you don’t get any of that if you’re standing outside that. None of it.

So, people make decisions. I think one of the best lines of modern history is the line of Sinclair Lewis that “you can’t convince a person to believe something when their salary depends on believing the opposite.” Yes. And that’s a real thing. People have jobs. They don’t—they just don’t want to get out of line. They don’t necessarily believe, but they don’t want to get out of line.

And it’s very worrisome, and we thought that checks and balances of the US government would be a stabilizer, and especially that we would have voices in Congress that would be able to ask real questions. And we have in the past. We had Frank Church. We had J. William Fulbright, who was not only brilliant and a critic of American foreign policy, was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Who do we have now? Well, we have Rand Paul, but and we had Tulsi in Congress, but basically almost nobody now. They’re scared, or they don’t want to talk, or they’re paid for by, who knows, Raytheon or Northrop Grumman or General Dynamics or Boeing or somebody, so they don’t even ask questions. This is the reality.

TUCKER CARLSON: Professor Sachs, thank you very much.

PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Great to be with you as always.

TUCKER CARLSON: Great to be with you. Thank you.

A Note to Our Viewers

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