Who Really Runs the World – Jeffrey Sachs on Fidias Podcast (Transcript)

We trade with each other. My saving might be invested in a mutual fund, my retirement account, and that may be making investments in companies all over the world. And of course, the savers in other parts of the world are making investments that end up in the United States or Europe. Companies have subsidiaries, they have branches, they have global value chains. We’re interconnected. That’s starting point number one.

Second, just like power, the economy is also very unequal and uneven around the world. It used to be more uneven than it is today. But the way that world economic history evolved from roughly 1700 until now, so three centuries, was that a certain part of the world, mainly Europe and the United States, industrialized and had higher output per person, higher living standards per person than the rest of the world.

So the world divided between the so-called developed and developing countries. These are terms that are a little bit ugly and also a little bit vague. But there became a big differentiation in the 19th century. That differentiation also meant that the difference of economic might was translated into geopolitical imperial power.

The Era of Empire and Economic Divergence

So Britain industrialized first and then went overseas and kicked the shit out of the rest of the world. Basically, it completely colonized the Indian subcontinent. It invaded China in 1839. After gin and tonic was invented, with tonic water quinine protective against malaria, Britain went in and took over much of Africa.

Before gin and tonic, before quinine, it was too dangerous to go inland. So Europeans just traded in slaves. But afterwards they went and they ate up all of Africa, basically after 1885.

And so the 19th century was incredibly unequal economically and geopolitically. And the first rule of empire is you extract from your colonies. You take what you can, you keep them poor, you take the resources away, and you keep them uneducated also. And since education is the main route to economic development, colonies everywhere just fell farther and farther behind.

Because in the rich countries, there was mass education spreading. First primary and then up to secondary in the 20th century, and then university degrees becoming more and more general. Whereas in the colonies in the 19th and 20th centuries, a tiny fraction even became literate in most of these places.

And so the gap of output per person and the gap of power widened from 1800 to 1950. We call it the era of economic divergence: growing gap.

Post-War Independence and the Age of Convergence

Then Europe had two devastating civil wars, basically World War I and World War II. The period from 1914 to 1945 was two bloodbaths, with the Great Depression in between. And by 1945, Europe was exhausted. Germany had committed a mass genocide. The deaths and destruction were so vast that every energy was towards rebuilding rather than colonies.

So one by one, the colonies became independent. Some because independence was granted, and others because they fought wars of liberation. But between 1945, basically in the 1970s, most of the European empires vanished.

And one very important thing happened when that occurred. You now had independent nations. And just about the first thing that they did was introduce mass literacy and mass education, usually at primary level, but then started to move up. Suddenly those economies were able to start developing. They were able to do things that their imperial masters had prevented them from doing.

So as technology had improved in Europe and the United States, it had not really improved in the colonies. There, it was plantations and mining, extracting resources, not building industry or advanced services like the financial industry, for example, based on improved skills and education.

But after World War II, what had been that age of divergence gradually turned into an age of convergence, where poorer countries that were now independent, free from the yoke of Britain and the yoke of France and the yoke of the U.S., though that’s a little bit more complicated, were able to start developing.

Asia’s Economic Rise

And Asia was the center of that. East Asia especially. And in the 1950s, Japan, which had industrialized actually alone of the Asian countries in the 19th century and then became fascist and launched the war against China and the war in the Pacific region, rebuilt after World War II very rapidly.

And then after Japan came Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, called the Asian Tigers. And they just started very simple labor-intensive assembly operations. And then a little bit more sophisticated, more sophisticated until they’re producing semiconductors, for God’s sake. And that was the diffusion of knowledge, technology, skills and rising incomes.

China’s Transformation

And then the mother of all transformations economically was China, which after independence did certain things right, some basic literacy, education and so on, but had a lot of turmoil in the 1950s and 1960s, Cultural Revolution and so on.

And it was starting in 1978, so 20 years later than other places in the region, they opened up the economy, said, “We’ll do what Korea’s done, we’ll do what Japan’s done, we’ll do what Hong Kong and Singapore have been doing.”

And my God, for 40 years, it was the fastest growing country in the world, achieving 10% per year economic growth, which is unreal for a country of 1.4 billion people. Completely transformative of China and of the world.

And I got to watch a lot of that because I first went to China in 1981. So it’s been 44 years.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: You are so old.

JEFFREY SACHS: I am a very old man. And China was very impoverished then. And I watched with my own eyes China’s rise and now reaching absolute cutting-edge technologies and innovation.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: You were very poor that time that you went, oh, my God.

The Economic Transformation of China and the Developing World

JEFFREY SACHS: The first time we went, of course there were no private automobiles at all. Everybody was in a Mao suit. There was no color around. There was nothing in the shops. This place was impoverished. And that was the American vision of China also, because the American policy types, the strategists, said we have to worry about Soviet Union. They’re a competitor. But China, China is an impoverished country of rice villages. They could never do anything.

And that was the American attitude, I’d say, until 15 years ago, basically. So American strategists didn’t see China coming. They don’t understand economics anyway. They don’t understand compound growth rates for us who study those things. We could see China’s rise along the way.

But from an American president or CIA director’s point of view, China’s an impoverished place. They’re going to make our telephones, they’re going to make our iPhones, but they’re never going to pose a threat to us. So you do this convergence now for basically 80 years, and the world’s completely different from what it was at the end of World War II.

And now the big word is multipolar. Everyone says we’re in a multipolar world, but what it means economically is Europe and the US are not alone anymore. And if you go to China, it is super sophisticated. If you go to a place I go to very often, Shenzhen, China, which is the city of now 30 million people next door to Hong Kong, it’s more dynamic, more amazing than Silicon Valley. It’s now the number one innovation cluster of the whole world.

So this is the economic side. It’s not the case, alas, that every poor country achieved this, but a lot have done so. And India started about 15 years after China. And now India’s growing not at China’s torrid 10% rate, but at 6 or 7% per year, which means you double your income every 10 years. If you’re at 7% per year, that’s another country of 1.5 billion people.

So the world is changing. And that’s a lot of the explanation of why the US is so weird right now, because the US leadership had the idea basically forever, even from the first arrivals of the Puritans on American shore. We are the exceptional country. What we do is the greatest. No one could possibly rival us.

And that idea pervaded American thought from the 1600s, after America became a country in basically, you could say 1776, or you could say with our Constitution, 1789. Whatever you want to say about the United States, their idea was, well, we’ll take over all of North America, and when they finish that, now we’ll go basically dominate the world.

And what’s happened now is how that happened, how is China a larger economy than the United States, which it is, if you measure it properly at purchasing power prices, how come China produces much more manufactured and industrial output than the United States? And so there’s a lot of anxiety in Washington, less in the rest of the country.

But the rest of the country is also stoked by Washington. And the Washington view is we got enemies. Russia’s an enemy, China’s an enemy. They’re big, they’re powerful. We have to somehow keep them in their place because we need to be number one in the world. And Europe looks at the US and says, “Please protect us, save us from all these nasty people, Daddy, please.” And this is, unfortunately—

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: You’re making too much fun of the European Union now.

JEFFREY SACHS: Maybe problem with you? No, no, no. But I’m telling you, Mr. Rute, how could you say this? How can you have this attitude? Because that is not right. It’s not true and it’s not right, but it’s in the mind.

The Future of Global Power Dynamics

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: So we’re going to come in the European Union, but so you don’t see Africa playing a game on this. And also to explain us how do you think the future will be? You think Russia and China will be closer together and what role will play India and United States? And also with the nuclear powers and all this stuff and the future of artificial intelligence and all this stuff, how do you imagine a world? Do you see this as a dangerous looking forward in the future?

JEFFREY SACHS: So we’ve had this pretty fundamental change of the world that what was a European imperial led world became a European US dominated world and now is a US, Europe, Russia, China, India, and I’ll mention Africa in a moment, multipolar world. So that’s the first big thing.

Second is we’re in a huge period of change that is accelerating partly the technology. We can’t even believe or keep up with how the technology is changing month to month, year to year. And of course AI and the large language models have changed everything and will continue to change things.

We’re in an environmental catastrophe because the world economy has now expanded so much, more than 100 times what it was two centuries ago. But the Earth stayed the same. And so you put all of that production and use of energy and land use and a population which grew basically 10 times from the end of the 18th century till today, from something like 900 million people in the year 1800 to 8.1 billion people today.

All that pressure means every environmental crisis we could concoct is happening right now at very serious rate. So we have the climate crisis, we have the deforestation crisis, we have the pollution crisis. And all of that really needs to be addressed.

So geopolitical change, economic change, technological change, environmental change, and one should add demographic change. And here comes the African situation.

Africa’s Historical Challenges and Future Potential

Africa has been the poorest region of the world for basically two millennia long. Interesting story. Why that is, one basic point is that because of the very intense tropical conditions, there was a lot of disease, and it wasn’t fit for the most important vehicle of 2000 years, the horse.

So the horse made the great empires of the classical age. The horse made the Alexander’s empire, the cavalry, the Roman Empire, all of the empires from China, the Mongols and so forth were based on what was the tank. The ability to move goods at fast speed. The communications network, which was—they didn’t have horses, and Africa didn’t have horses south of just the northern strip of Africa because they don’t survive, actually, because—

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: Too hot.

JEFFREY SACHS: It’s the disease. It is hot. The climate is not good. They are not tropical animals. They’re dryland, what’s called steppe region animals. They like grasslands, but they don’t like the heavy tropical climate.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: You wouldn’t expect that the horse will make civilization.

JEFFREY SACHS: Oh, it’s so important. Okay. It’s really—you couldn’t have an empire. You could not have a global conflict. And by the way, it also played its role in the Americas, because the horse was actually an American species originally, even I’m talking 50 million years ago.

And when the Asians arrived to the Americas 15,000 years ago on a land bridge that connected what’s today Russia and today Alaska and North America, what’s called Beringia because the sea level was much lower. There were glaciers, and they took water away from the oceans. So people walked across from Asia to the Americas.

There were horses everywhere in the Great Plains of the United States, and they hunted them to extinction around 10,000 years ago, which was a really bad move. It shows, you know, if you hunt horses to extinction, you end up walking for 10,000 years instead of riding. And there were no pack animals except some llamas and alpacas in the high Andean region. But in, say, North America—

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: I didn’t expect an evolution talk today.

JEFFREY SACHS: No, no. But it’s so deep and it’s so real. So when the Europeans arrived in 1492 with Columbus, they had horses, they were conquistadores, but the local populations didn’t have them. This was part of the incredible military advantage that the Europeans brought when they came and they slaughtered and they dominated the indigenous populations. They also brought germs, by the way, which killed a lot of the native indigenous American population.

The Colonial Legacy in Africa

Okay. Africa was poor by objective indicators and measures, for 2000 years of the historical period. And it was really ravaged by slavery starting in the 1600s by European and Arab slave traders. And as I said, it was colonized in the end of the 19th century by the European powers who were once they could protect themselves against malaria with this drug, which is an essence of a Peruvian bark called cinchona.

And you make quinine out of it, or quinine, we say in America, put it in your tonic water with your gin. That became sipping your gin and tonic on the veranda is what enabled Britain to make its African empire starting around 1890.

So Africa fell under a completely brutal European rule. The Europeans were not nice. Germany committed a genocide in West Africa, Europe, in the first decade of the 20th century. That was Germany’s first genocide. It was followed by the second genocide in World War II. The British were God awful. The European powers in general were God awful.

The Belgians, of course, we know King Leopold was mad. And the Belgians chopped off the hands of thousands and thousands of Congolese who they accused of whatever petty crime and so forth. So it was a very, very brutal period.

And Africa remained impoverished up through the middle of the 20th century. Literacy rates in 1950, 5%, all that empire. They didn’t want to give schools. They didn’t want to educate anybody. So Africa became independent in some countries with four or five people with a high school education out of millions.

The Portuguese were maybe the worst at this because Portugal was pretty poorly educated at home. And it did nothing in its colonies in Africa and Mozambique or Angola and other places. But in general, the European imperialists were completely nasty and dreadful.

And Africa was impoverished at the time, same start. It was also a rather small population. Africa had about 9% of the world population in 1950, and health conditions were miserable. Mortality rates of infants extraordinarily high.

Then came independence, came the beginnings of literacy, came the beginnings of health care, came the beginnings of malaria control and so forth. Child survival rose. And that meant that population started to grow. And Africa’s population went from 9% of the world in 1950 to about 18% today.

That’s actually getting there, because Africa, if you add up the 55 countries of the African Union, that’s about 1.5 billion people, same size as India, same size as China. The big difference is that the imperial powers divided Africa into 55 little countries, not one of which can thrive on its own, whereas India and China, because of the history, remained unified countries afterwards.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: I think this will change in the future. They will unite.

Africa’s Demographic Future and Economic Potential

JEFFREY SACHS: They have to. So I tell them every single time I have the opportunity that the African Union is the key. As 55, you can’t make it. But as one African continental economy, you can make it.

So what’s happening now is Africa’s population is continuing to rise. It’s the only place in the world with rapid population growth.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: And all the other are declining.

JEFFREY SACHS: Everyone else has peaked or just about to peak or actually beginning a decline. Africa’s population today is 1.5 billion. By 2050, it’ll be 2.5 billion. That’s a lot. Adding a billion people in the next quarter century.

If you go even farther and just try to extrapolate based on current trends, Africa’s population reaches about 3.5 billion. And according to the UN most recent forecast, 3.7 billion by the end of the 21st century. And Africa goes from being 9% of the world population to being more than 30% of the world population. It’s going to be completely different world.

What do I say to African leaders every time I have the chance? First, be Africa wide. Second, get on quickly with mass education because that is the key to the economic development. Third, look at what China did. Follow that model. How they grew, how they grew 10% per year. And Africa, starting at this low base could actually do that if it gets really well organized.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: If they play it well, they could be the dominant power in 200 years from now.

JEFFREY SACHS: Yes, 200 years, no question. And if they play it well, what we don’t even talk about now in the world economy, Africa, except that it produces coltan or produces cobalt, or it produces copper or diamonds. We’re going to talk about Africa’s core part of the world economy.

Without question, I would say, and I’m very optimistic about that. But the big, big change will be 50 years from now because it’s getting a whole generation through schooling, through turning Africa into an innovator, a technology power. But it can all happen. There’s no barrier to that.

So there will be Africa as an absolutely major part of the scene. But that’s the drama right now. I tell them, look, China started in 1980, India roughly around 2000, 20, 25, take off. This is your time. Get moving and understand that you have a real opportunity right now. Follow that model. A very rapid out of—

Technology as a Catalyst for Development

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: Since we’re on Africa, I went when I was a YouTuber before, like two years ago I went to Africa to Burundi, which is the poorest country in the world in the terms that they use. And I went to—we did with—it was like around €30,000 that it cost us. And we put solar panels in an orphanage.

JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah, yeah.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: And we put computers and Internet. So, and these kids, when they have access to Internet, they have everything. So they can skip all the parts that took China so much time if they have access to the Internet.

China’s Economic Influence in Africa

JEFFREY SACHS: You got it. There’s no barrier right now to just incredible leapfrogging. You don’t have to go through 250 years of economics to get it right right now. And what you said is completely right. You need connectivity and a solar panel and you’ve got a device, and that ain’t expensive. And this is actually going to happen at a very large scale.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: And now it’s startling as well that you can put in rural areas and all this stuff. It’s very interesting. So now in Africa, since we’re on the topic, who you think has more power out of the United States and China, who has a bit more?

JEFFREY SACHS: Definitely China, China, Europe. And the problem is actually China, there probably are a million to 2 million Chinese living in Africa right now. First of all, Americans are so racist. You don’t find that. Okay. And this is really a deep part of America. America’s basically a racist society, or it grew up as a racist society.

So Africa, from Trump’s point of view, he already labeled, he said “shithole countries.” He’s a racist. There’s no doubt about it. It goes way back in his family, and it goes to him. Chinese, they’re completely pragmatic. They’re making business, they’re making investments. They’ve got much better diplomacy than the United States.

The US is having a fit because, “oh, China, you’re doing all these terrible things to Africa. Neo imperialism.” Bullshit. It’s business and it’s… I go to, like you went to rural areas. For example, I was in Ethiopia last year. Rural Ethiopia, very poor. But suddenly we were taken to farmer after farmers making money and building a second or third floor to their house and doing all sorts of things.

What’s going on here? Ah, the Chinese built a big dam on the Nile, actually hydropower, so they have electricity for the first time. And they built a railroad, fast rail from Addis to Djibouti. And so these farmers, what are they doing? They’re growing avocados. Now that they get on the train, they get to Dubai for breakfast in some resort hotel and a value chain that was completely unimaginable five years ago or 10 years ago. And that’s because of China.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: And that’s the way that China is trying to influence countries. They are trying to, in a quote unquote, help them.

JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah, they’re China’s…

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: What’s the kind of trick of… Because I understand you give China the best foreign policy, diplomacy and all this stuff out of all the countries in the world, as I understand. Right. You agree with this statement that China is the best in foreign policy?

China’s Economic Strategy: Saving and Investment

JEFFREY SACHS: So this all gets quite complicated, but I think China’s best, the best at rapid catching up growth. What they did was smart, fair, incredibly successful. That’s number one.

Second, they are investing now all over the world. They save a lot. So this is important to understand. Americans don’t save anything. They love consumption. So the personal saving rate in the United States, how much do you save out of your disposable income? It varies between 0 and 4%. It’s nothing at a national level.

If you ask of all the national output, how much does America put aside for the future versus current spending? It’s maybe 15% growth, what we call growth saving. But you take off depreciation of capital which you have to replace, and you’re down to again, a few percentage points of national income put aside for the future.

If you look at China, it’s 40% of their national income going towards the future. Households are frugal, they’re saving for the future.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: Why does that matter?

JEFFREY SACHS: It matters because when you save, you put money in the bank. The bank lends to an enterprise, the enterprise builds its factories, or you lend to a local government, and the local government builds the roads, builds the infrastructure. So the national saving translates into investment. And investment means you’re building up the assets to make the economy more productive. And China’s doing that at a huge scale.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: And you think that’s going to keep half of their growth?

JEFFREY SACHS: That if you just look at how countries are ranked in their growth rates, you find a couple of things very important. The poorer you start, if you’re not at war or subject to imperial domination, the poor you are, the faster you can grow because you’re catching up. You get electricity, you get education, poof. So you can really grow fast from a very low base.

Second, the more you invest, the faster you grow. Two factors, and that accounts for a lot. Now, if you measure it really well and count education as part of the investment because you’re investing in the mind, human capital, then you really explain basically why some countries grow fast and others grow slowly.

Then you have to unravel it. Well, why is this place investing so much in education and this one not? And that can be because of inequalities of power. It was because of the imperialism of Europe, which didn’t want to educate the subjects of the imperial power and so on.

But investment in education, in infrastructure, which means energy, digital, roads, water, sanitation, social housing, and so forth. And in business, those three categories. Boom. You explain why some countries are growing fast and others growing slowly.

Nuclear Weapons as Deterrents

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: Okay, so I asked you before about the future, and I asked you also about nuclear weapons, and I read some books, including Mearsheimer’s book that he wrote on this topic, and he says, “thank God,” in a way, that we have nuclear weapons. In a nutshell, this is kind of because that prevents us. We are afraid of each other. That’s why we don’t attack. If we didn’t have nuclear weapons, we’re going to have more wars. So do you agree with this kind of mindset? It’s a bit weird to think about.

JEFFREY SACHS: Yes. So nuclear is another big dimension of power. Of course. We have nine countries in the world that have nuclear weapons. So you have the United States, you have Britain, you have France, you have Russia, you have China, you have India, you have Pakistan, you have North Korea, you have Israel. Nine that we know of. And probably that’s a real count.

That gives those countries something actual, which is the United States is not going to invade North Korea. It might want to. Trump’s mentality would be, “I hate that guy. Let’s go, invade.” But no, it is a deterrent. Absolutely.

But you ask, okay, it’s a deterrent. Does that make us safer to have these weapons? Of course not. Because we’re humans, that means we’re at least stupid part of the time. And we have come very close to nuclear war on a number of occasions, mostly from complete idiocy and stupidity, sometimes from premeditated stupidity, of which America absolutely excels, but also from accidental stupidity, not knowing how stupid we are.

And so I can just mention a few points. America, of course, became the first country with atomic weapons in 1945, and it used them twice against Japan, knowing at the top that we didn’t have to use them to end the war. This is something very important, completely denied by the official American narrative, but confirmed by all careful historian research.

Basically, Japan was ready to surrender, and the United States bombed them twice in any event. And the question is why? And the most likely explanation is we were proving something to Mr. Stalin. It wasn’t really to get Japan to surrender. That could have happened other ways. We wanted to show the Soviet Union, “look at us. You better be careful. Don’t fool around.” It was the beginning of the Cold War mentality.

Look, many people will disagree with what I just said, but I would defend that with a lot of strong evidence. So can’t dwell on every piece of it. But I think the atomic bomb was used twice for no real reason other than the bravado of power.

Then of course the US thought well, the Soviets won’t have the bomb for 25 or 30 years, but it took four years. This is a typical US mistake. It’s the same thing they said about China. “China’s a rice growing village economy” and suddenly it’s a peer competitor in advanced technology. Americans can’t quite understand this, but the Soviets got the bomb in four years. Great physics, great spies. The combination of the two helped them.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: Great physics, great spies.

JEFFREY SACHS: Exactly. Both. Both of those certainly played a role.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: Spies play a big role in the war.

The CIA as a Presidential Army

JEFFREY SACHS: Bigger than spies. The intelligence agencies play a big role, but not because they spy, but because they’re armies.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: So I don’t know what you mean.

JEFFREY SACHS: CIA is a private army of the President. So the CIA is not mainly in its effect in history an intelligence agency, it’s mainly a personal army of the President of the United States.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: It’s weird to hear.

JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: So what? Can you explain us what you mean?

JEFFREY SACHS: Obama wanted to overthrow the Syrian president Bashar Al Assad. Why? No good reason by the way. I think it’s because Bibi Netanyahu told him to, but no real good reason. So what did he do? Signed an order in 2011 and 2012 that CIA should work with the other countries in the region to overthrow the government of Syria. That’s the most typical US foreign policy there is.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: That never works to overthrow a government.

JEFFREY SACHS: It doesn’t solve anything. But it did overthrow Assad. But after 15 years of war and hundreds of thousands dead. But the CIA has a track record of dozens of coups, assassinations, overthrows of governments of other countries. That’s its main role.

Utterly stupid. It solves nothing. You cannot solve political problems, geopolitical problems, global power problems by assassinating other leaders or overthrowing their governments. But that’s what I mean by the CIA.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: All the countries also China has the same kind of… And Russia and other countries.

The History of CIA Interventions

JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah, but the US is the ones that invented the worldwide system of… This was the British for sure. The US learned everything about imperialism from Britain. Common language. And we teamed up for example in 1953, CIA and MI6, to overthrow the Prime Minister of Iran, Mosaddegh. Another completely asinine move.

Why did they do that? Because Mossadegh did something absolutely outrageous, which was that he said that the oil under the sand of Iran belonged to the Iranian people. How can you make such an outlandish statement? It clearly belonged to the British Empire.

So the British said to the Americans, “time to overthrow this guy.” And so in 1953, they overthrew Iran, put in a police state with Savak as the secret service and so forth in the Shah of Iran. And lo and behold, after 25 years of that police state, basically the Iranians didn’t love the Americans, by the way.

And so there was revolution in 1979 and they shouted “death to the Americans” and took some hostages. After 25 years of a police state and the United States had taken in an ailing Shah into an American hospital. The whole thing was crazy.

So what did the United States do? It provided armaments to Iraq to go kill hundreds of thousands of Iranians in a war between Iraq and Iran. For the first half of the 1980s, typical CIA is all over this.

CIA was all over arming the Mujahideen, so called the Islamic Resistance fighters in Afghanistan. And they hired a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden and created a resistance movement. And lo and behold, that turned into Al Qaeda. This is America, American foreign policy.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: And the same they did with Ukraine. Right. So similar mindset.

JEFFREY SACHS: The mindset when you’re the dominant imperial power is you get to choose who governs where. That’s the main mindset. The difference of American empire and say the British Empire was the British Empire went and own the territory. America fancied itself as even anti-imperial. But what it did fancy itself was we get to choose.

We don’t like the President of Guatemala, boom. We don’t like Castro, we should try to assassinate him. We really don’t like Patrice Lumumba, who was a gifted young Congolese politician bringing the most brutalized colony of Africa, what became the Democratic Republic of Congo, into independence.

And Eisenhower one day says, “get rid of him,” because they thought he would be a Soviet, side with the Soviets. And out went some completely crazed CIA guy with toothpaste to poison Lumumba. That didn’t work. The CIA ended up helping to capture him and probably some Belgians put a bullet through his head.

But murder of those who you don’t like is the mentality of the US approach to empire.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: I can…

The Reality of US-Backed Coups

JEFFREY SACHS: I’ve seen it actually shockingly close up. It’s really awful and ugly. I was advising the President of Haiti many decades ago, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. And he said to me one day, this was in the early 2000s, said, “Jeff, they’re going to come after me.” So what do you mean the US is going to take me out? I’m a little naive. You hear that from a president, even a president of a small, impoverished state. I said, “No, no, we’re going to make this work. You know, this is okay.”

“No, no, they’re going to take me out.” And sure enough, first the US turned off the tap of the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank and the IMF. So you turn the financial screws and you create unrest. But Aristide was popular, so he resisted, although the economy was crumbling.

Then the US sent mercenaries who cross the border from the Dominican Republic and are coming to the capitol. And then they sent the most typical thing, they sent the US ambassador to his house one day and said, “Quick, get in the plane. We’ll save your life.” And they put him in a plane with an unmarked tail that means a CIA plane. And they flew him, I think it was 23 hours, landing in the Central African Republic. They just took him out in broad daylight. So that’s how a coup works.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: He died.

JEFFREY SACHS: He didn’t die, but he was ousted from power. Haiti went from instability to instability to instability. The US does not like strong leaders, by the way. They want leaders that will say daddy to them. This is the basic point. And so they didn’t want a popular figure in Haiti that they could have worked with, that could have actually had a development strategy and so forth. So they took him out.

The Ukraine Coup and American Interference

In Ukraine, they did a similar thing. It wasn’t exactly that method, but what they did was stir up unrest, build upon a protest that came in the end of 2013, but paid a lot of money and made a lot of effort to build a protest big enough to overthrow a president of Ukraine. That’s what started the Ukraine war.

The Europeans don’t want to look at this. I happen to see again some of it with my own eyes. I know money was changing hands from America to the demonstrations to the Maidan. This great revolution of dignity was paid and operated with strong American funding. Ugly, you think the Russians don’t know it? Of course the Russians know it.

They watch a violent coup. They watch a president who didn’t want NATO thrown out with the US active support. And they say, “We don’t like this because this is so typical of American operations. They want to own Ukraine so they can put their missile systems and their military bases and everything on our border.”

And the New York Times reported six months or a year ago about the mass extensive CIA operations all through Ukraine to spy on Russia, to try to undermine Russia, to weaken Russia. This is how you get endless wars.

The Pattern of Regime Change Operations

So this is the point to come back to the nuclear. In such a world where you have this kind of instability, where you have America overthrowing governments left and right, and I mean literally leftist governments and rightist governments, they want subservient governments, by the way. They don’t want democracies, they want subservience.

Sometimes that could be a democracy because democracies are easy to manipulate. Sometimes it could be a dictatorship because the democracy turned out wrong, it elected the wrong person. But what the US wants is subservience, and it gets it a lot of the time.

There’s a terrific book written by political scientist named Lindsay O’Rourke written in 2017 called “Covert Regime Change.” And she studied 64 secret or covert regime change operations, most led by the CIA of the United States between 1947 and 1989. So she went carefully through them one by one, and she picked that earlier period because things had been declassified, or she could interview people about events that were 20 years earlier.

64 regime change operations, that’s a lot of meddling all over the world. That was the CIA’s main role and it has destabilized the world.

The Nuclear Threat

And I want to link it back to the nuclear weapons. You do this long enough, we’re going to have a nuke go off and we’re going to have a terrible, terrible accident. And in a very powerful, very terrifying book that came out in 2024 by excellent reporter named Annie Jacobson, a book called “Nuclear War: A Scenario,” she starts out with a nuclear attack on the United States, two missiles shot from North Korea and one hits California and one hits Washington.

And she describes step by step, in a very realistic scenario, how not only are those two completely devastating, the one in Washington wipes out everything, the US Government and all the chain of command and everything else. But because of accidents and misunderstandings and the fact that you have one minute to make a decision, do you launch or not launch? It ends up in a full nuclear war between Russia and the United States. And the world ends basically in 2 hours and 10 minutes of the time to read the book.

And I’ve been watching this close up. I’ve been watching governments close up for 40 years. I’ve been watching the Ukraine war close up for the 11 years since it started in February 2014 with this US backed coup. And dammit, we’re close to disaster. And we’ve come close on many, many occasions.

And we’re so prone to mistakes. We’re so prone to stupid people. We’re so prone to people out of control. We had a General Douglas MacArthur. He was the favorite hero of the United States. He wanted to go nuke China. That’s why Truman had to fire him.

In the early 1950s, we had an absolutely crazy man as head of the US Air Force named Curtis LeMay. And the movie “Dr. Strangelove” was inspired a bit by Curtis LeMay. If Curtis LeMay had had his way, we would have had a complete nuclear end of the world, probably, but we would have had a massive nuclear war.

The Cuban Missile Crisis

In the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, which was a cascade of stupid moves by the United States and by the Soviet Union, both sides doing really totally stupid things, including the United States invading Cuba in 1961 to overthrow Castro, what’s called the Bay of Pigs invasion or disaster, and then Khrushchev the next year to kind of teach America a lesson, putting in nuclear armed missiles in Cuba. We came close in October 1962 to a nuclear war and closer than anyone in the world understood for decades after that event, until the real story was finally told decades later.

And it’s worth people understanding. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, we nearly came to a deliberate nuclear war because the United States almost decided, except for President Kennedy’s genius at saving humanity, almost decided to bomb Cuba. And most likely that would have led to a preemptive nuclear war by Soviet missiles that were almost surely ready to be launched.

That didn’t happen. Kennedy and Khrushchev reached an agreement. The agreement had some secret parts and public parts, but basically the agreement was Soviet Union would take away its missiles, the United States would take away its missiles from Turkey, close to the Soviet border, and that would calm both sides. And the United States promised never again to try to invade Cuba. That was how the Cuban Missile Crisis ended, except for one footnote.

Arkhipov: The Man Who Saved the World

Which is that there was a Soviet submarine in the Caribbean as part of a squadron of seven submarines that was sent because of the crisis. And it was disabled and it was sitting far below the surface and the temperatures had risen to 45 or 50 degrees inside, I don’t remember a centigrade, about 120 degrees Fahrenheit. And the sailors were dropping dead. And this submarine had to surface.

And so as the submarine surfaced, the US Navy and Air Force was above and they start dropping not depth charges, but live hand grenades on the submarine. It’s kind of having fun. Instead of a depth charge, which is an explosion, but not to damage the sub, some jackass started dropping hand grenades, live hand grenades.

And the captain of the submarine said, “We’re under attack, there’s a war going on on the surface.” And it happened that in this squadron, this was the one submarine that had nuclear tipped torpedoes. All the rest did not, the other six, but this one did. And he ordered the nuclear tipped torpedo to be put into the torpedo bay to fire at an American vessel.

The American doctrine in 1962, pushed by Curtis LeMay and others, was that any attack by a nuclear weapon from the other side would unleash the full nuclear arsenal of the United States. If that nuclear tipped torpedo had been fired, there’s a good chance that there would have been a complete launch of the American nuclear triad, the submarines and the land based missile systems and the Strategic Air Command and so forth.

At the moment he ordered it. But it happened because this was kind of the lead submarine of the squadron. There was one person senior to him, a party official that was on that sub. Not by coincidence, it was the same reason it had those submarines. It was the lead of the squadron. And this guy said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea, I think we should surface.” And he overruled the captain and saved the world.

And who knows his name? Almost nobody in the world knows. The person who literally saved the world, not figuratively literally saved the world. His name is Arkhipov. And yes, he went back home. He was reprimanded. Not for that action. He was reprimanded because the submarine was disabled. Whatever it was, it took, I think if I understand correctly, it took about 30 years till people realized, holy shit, he saved the goddamn world. And he finally got honors in the 1990s, I think in the Gorbachev period.

Near Misses and Human Error

But this, this is how close we came. You can read. If you get steeped in this, as I’ve been for decades, you just cannot believe or you can believe how goddamn stupid we can be. This was an example.

Another example was somebody put a training tape into then a computer console when you had to put in the cassette and it was a training tape for training NORAD, the Northern Command, to understand what to do when missiles came. And the guy sitting there thought that this was an actual attack by the Soviet Union. And he called up the line and somebody realized this doesn’t seem right. And they discovered that this was a training attack.

There’s another one. When some I think it’s geese or some other birds fly across radar and are picked up as looking like incoming missiles. We’re not so smart.

The Current Danger

And the line in Europe in the last three years definitely not so smart is, “Oh, don’t listen to Putin about nuclear weapons. He’s just bluffing.” You know, when the world ends, you won’t be able to say, “You ahole, he wasn’t bluffing.” The whole world’s going to end before you get to say to this person, “How did you know he was bluffing?” Maybe he wasn’t bluffing.

So the way we treat this issue is completely reckless relative to the reality of living in a nuclear armed world where there are thousands and thousands of nuclear warheads. And right now, as we speak, Ukraine is using American and British long range missiles to attack inside Russia. And we think that’s smart. And the European leaders say, “Yeah, more of that.”

By the way, in the ranking of stupidity, I put the British number one because they have the worst imperial mentality of any country in the world. They were at it the longest. They still think they run the world and they’re fools. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s Bojo, Boris Johnson or Starmer, it’s one after another recklessly playing with our lives this way. And it’s really bad.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: So what are the chances you think that we’re going to have this catastrophe that you’re describing? 10%? 5%, 20%, 50%?

JEFFREY SACHS: You know, there are reports in the press, I don’t know whether they’re right. Thank God I have no intelligence information. I have no class.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: Why is he in class?

JEFFREY SACHS: Because I don’t want anyone ever to give me any classified documents, period. Ever. Please. No.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: Thank you.

JEFFREY SACHS: Just to be absolutely clear, I don’t want to hear anything about classified documents from anybody. I want to figure out with myself as best I can from what I’m observing. That’s all.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: Because you are afraid. Because no classified.

The Nuclear Threat and Biden’s Warning

JEFFREY SACHS: I don’t want anyone to say, oh, he’s holding classified information or anything else, because I would never do and have no interest in it. I don’t even believe it’s intelligent intelligence. So in any event. But the point I’m making is when I say that it’s reported in the press that there was a fear in this earth. Fear, I don’t know. But calculation in the CIA in the fall of 2022 that the chance of a nuclear attack by Russia had reached something like 20%, I think is what the number is.

You could put 20% times chance of ending the whole goddamn world. And what I do recall about that moment was that in an unguarded moment, Biden was speaking to donors, which is what our politicians do for a living, is speak to rich people. And he was taped by somebody and he was saying, you know, we have to watch out about nuclear Armageddon. We have to avoid nuclear Armageddon.

And that was reported. And what happened in the United States, across the so-called mainstream media, he was attacked. How can a president talk that way? A president should never use that language. A president should never talk about nuclear attack and so forth. Because the idea of our militarized state is keep the public stupid.

Don’t. If you want to scare them, you scare them on your own account, not by some truth telling by the president of the United States. You scare them in the way you want to manipulate them. And so in Europe and the US the most common refrain during this whole period is we can defeat Russia. They’re not going to use nuclear weapons. What if they were on the verge of defeat? No, that’s a bluff.

Yeah, until the world ends. Tell me about it. I know how the United States would act to coming close to some kind of defeat. I know how many American military leaders have thought about using preemptive nuclear war. For heaven’s sake. These are not smart people and prudent people.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: So to summarize what I understood, never underestimate human stupidity.

The Case for Ukrainian Neutrality

JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah, that’s a good starting point. Second, be careful. Stay away from the red lines of other countries. This is my whole basic point. I really, really give serious advice to China and to Mexico and to Russia. If you’re Mexico, don’t host a Russian military base on the US border. Don’t host a Chinese military base.

Of course the Mexicans are not so crazy to do it, but the Ukrainians are. I’m sorry to say they’re not really so crazy. But the one that was prudent was overthrown in a U.S. backed coup. So they put in a regime that said NATO, come on, we want you. And now they’re lobbing missiles into Russia and saying nothing to worry about.

My view is completely different, which is that if you’re Ukraine, you’d be neutral and it’s your neutrality that protects you, protects Europe and protects Russia. It’s what’s called indivisible security. A neutral Ukraine is the safest possible thing for Ukraine to start with, but it also protects Europe. It also protects Russia.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: So just to summarize for some people to understand, so you’re saying Ukraine, even—

JEFFREY SACHS: If the people want, absolutely.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: They should not have the right to have NATO bases there next to Russia. So even if the people want—

JEFFREY SACHS: Absolutely. Because what is NATO—

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: That’s not how the world works.

JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah. What is—

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: You have big power.

JEFFREY SACHS: NATO was saying to the US, come here. Put your missiles here. Put your military base here. That’s what it is. How dumb is that? And if the Ukrainian people say it, you say, no, it’s not a great idea. It’s not so safe for you. It’s not so safe for us. You explain why it’s bad.

Now, the interesting thing about Ukraine is that there was opposition, pretty much overwhelming opposition to NATO coming to Ukraine until the coup in February 2014. And you look it up in the polls, you can look it up online. Until the coup, the public was against Yanukovych, who was the president overthrown in this U.S. backed coup, knew this is not smart for us. If we go down that road, we’re going to be a war zone.

So the Ukrainians can ask. But if the Americans had any sense at all, they would sit down, go have a coffee with their Ukrainian counterparts and explain, it’s just not a good idea. And the Europeans should know this. And the Europeans should—are even more warmongers than the Americans right now. It’s craziness.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: We are buying the weapons from the American.

JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah, buying American weapons to feed a war that is threatening Europe’s survival with nuclear attack. Rather than understanding and Ukraine is not—

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: In Europe, in the European Union.

JEFFREY SACHS: Ukraine is not in the European Union. Ukraine, first and foremost is being destroyed because we led them into this disaster. As my friend John Mearsheimer—I’m checking.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: Just one second. Just everything is okay? Yeah. Continue.

JEFFREY SACHS: All right.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: Okay. Everything good.

JEFFREY SACHS: As my friend John Mearsheimer at University of Chicago says, we led Ukraine down the primrose path, by the way. Not by convincing them, but by a coup, which is an American way. But we told them, don’t worry, we have your back.

The European Parliament’s Blind Spot

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: And now, so all my friends in the European parliament, because these are people who are 720 members of the European parliament. So what is the—why they keep voting to keep the funding of the Ukraine and to keep sending weapons. They say they are attacked by Russia and they have their right to defend themselves and we need to help them do that. This is kind of—which is very noble thought to do.

But you think on the surface you don’t see the big picture, that you are hurting yourself and you are having a lot more dangers to your people as well. So explain a bit.

JEFFREY SACHS: It’s so sad because these people should learn something. They should know some history, they should understand something. How did this start? It started because in the 1990s, people like Zbigniew Brzezinski in the United States said, we can surround Russia, we can weaken Russia, we can make Russia fall into pieces.

He literally wrote in 1997, oh, there’ll be a confederation of three weak states. European Russia, Siberian Russia, Far East Russia. Okay, if you’re writing science fiction, if you’re writing—this was a senior advisor to the US. They decided 30 years ago, we’re going to surround Russia in the Black Sea, we’re going to weaken Russia, we’re going to put our military all around Russia.

They broke, by they, I mean the United States. They broke the nuclear balance and nuclear arms control framework in 2002. This was the worst move of all, by the way. Really the worst. It’s hardly even recognized. But the United States walked out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. And the Russians said, oh, you want to have a first strike? You’ll attack us in a decapitation strike and then you’ll use your anti-ballistic missile system to prevent deterrence.

The whole idea of the ABM Treaty was to ensure deterrence, that neither side could block a deterrent response to a first strike by the other side. And therefore you keep this dangerous but balanced.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: I’m a bit confused. Explain again simply this.

The ABM Treaty and Mutually Assured Destruction

JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah, the idea of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which was signed in 1972, was both sides will have only a few anti-ballistic missiles. They won’t really be able to defend themselves against a nuclear strike by the other side. And each side will maintain enough invulnerable forces so that if one side strikes first, the other side will be able to strike back and not be blocked by a defense system, an anti-ballistic system.

So this is what was called Mutually Assured Destruction. You attack us, you’ll be destroyed. Okay, it’s horrible, but it is the way in a nuclear age, not the best way, but it’s a way to not have attack. The best way is disarmament, which is promised by nuclear powers in the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty says not only that nuclear weapons shouldn’t spread to other states, but that those countries that have nuclear weapons should be on a path of denuclearization. And of course they don’t abide by that. But the point is, in 2002, the United States just walked out of the ABM treaty and the Russians said, excuse me, what the hell are you doing? This is our balance.

And it came in the context of NATO enlargement. It came in the context of the United States bombing Belgrade for 78 straight days in 1999 to break Serbia in two, and then not only to break Serbia in two, but in Kosovo, that region broken apart from Serbia, to put the largest NATO military base in southeastern Europe, Bondsteel in that base.

So the Russians are saying, are you kidding? You bomb Belgrade, you expand NATO even though you promise not to do so, you walk out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty, the list goes on and on. You attack Iraq on completely phony pretenses. You launch a CIA operation to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, you send NATO to overthrow Gaddafi late in 2011, and you say, NATO’s going to expand to Ukraine and to Georgia. Great. How we doing?

And then you blame Russia for this. This was an America drunk with its power, saying we can do anything we want and with a plan. And the plan was to turn Russia into a third rate or fourth rate or fifth rate country or to break it apart. Do the people in the European parliament know any of this? Are they paying any attention at all to the reality of what happened from 1992? I have no idea. But you never hear it.

The 2014 Coup in Ukraine

And then if they knew anything, they would look at what happened on February 21, 2014. February 22, 2014. Because on February 21, 2014, three foreign ministers of the European Union negotiated with Mr. Yanukovych that he would stay in power and that there would be elections eight months later. And this was also agreed with president Putin.

The next morning, a U.S. backed coup violently overthrew Yanukovych. And it took the United States a nanosecond to say, we support the new government. And Europe, because it’s so filled with principles, said, no, no, no, Yanukovych is president. No, of course it didn’t say that. It said whatever daddy said.

So daddy said that it’s now a new government brought in by a coup, and Europe suddenly couldn’t even remember 24 hours, that it negotiated an agreement with Yanukovych that he would stay in power. And they said, no, no, he resigned. And Yanukovych is saying, excuse me, I didn’t resign. I was thrown out in a violent coup. I’m still president.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: President.

The Evolution of the Ukraine Crisis

JEFFREY SACHS: So this is how things evolved. And then there’s another little detail, which is that violence broke out in the Russian region of eastern Ukraine. Russia took back Crimea where its naval bases. And that’s a story in and of itself because the story, as soon as the post-coup government came in, they say part of the plan, “Oh, we don’t think Russia should stay in Crimea anymore.”

It’s been Russia’s naval fleet since 1783. The coup is not a coincidence. The coup is to get Russia out of Sevastopol. That’s the point. It was the reason why there was a Crimean War in 1853 when Britain and France said get Russia out of the Black Sea. It was Brzezinski’s idea in 1997.

So 2014, Russia takes back Crimea saying no way this is falling into NATO hands. You have the war starting in eastern Ukraine. The US and actually Russia in nations says we need to not have this violence escalate. And the US and France and Germany and Russia and Ukraine all agree, okay, give after this coup, give the Russian ethnic region of the Donbas autonomy.

Remarkable idea, no? A very European idea. By the way, where did it come from, that idea of autonomy? Literally, not figuratively, not remotely literally. From Italy, from South Tyrol. South Tyrol is a German speaking region, Bolzano in northern Italy that has autonomy under Italy’s constitution. Chancellor Merkel knew all about it because she would visit the German politicians in Tyrol, South Tyrol. She said, “This is a good model.”

So an agreement was reached, the Minsk II agreement to end the war then, not, by the way, to take the Donbass out of Ukraine. That was not at all the claim. It was to give it autonomy for the Russian speakers, Russian Orthodox faith and so forth.

And what does the United States do? Of course, it says with this coup-delivered government, “Nah, you don’t have to do that.” An agreement that was ratified by the UN Security Council. The US tells them, blow it off. And Poroshenko, the President of Ukraine, blow it off. “We don’t want autonomy for this. We want to retake that region by force.”

And when Trump comes in in the first term, the US pours in the military aid and builds up a million person army, the largest in Europe, actually. That’s Trump one. So where are the members of parliament that say, “Oh, this is just Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia.”

The war started in February 2014. It could have ended in 2015. It could have been avoided entirely without the coup had Europe just persevered to say, “We have a deal, not a coup.” But no, Europe doesn’t say that. It could have ended in 2015, it could have ended in 2021 by the United States and Europe saying NATO won’t expand. Terrible idea against everything we promised to you, by the way.

In 2019, the stakes went even higher because the United States walked out of the Intermediate Nuclear Force Treaty, another breakdown of the nuclear arms control framework. You think Russia’s not watching this and worried? Of course it is. And so the war could have been avoided in 2021.

The Failed Peace Negotiations

And then what happened when Russia invaded in February 24, 2022? Within about a week, Zelensky said, “Okay, we can be neutral. We can be neutral.” And the Ukrainians sent a note to the Russians, neutral. “We don’t need the NATO invasion. You stop fighting, we’ll declare neutrality.”

I know in detail this story because I talked to the negotiators at length and to the Turkish mediators, because a process started in Istanbul to have Ukraine-Russia sit down with each other. And on April 15, they initialed a document which was almost complete. Not every detail was complete, but it was a peace agreement and the fighting based on Ukraine’s neutrality.

What happened? The United States and Britain walked in and told the Ukrainians, “No, you continue fighting.” Are the members of Parliament aware of any of this? I don’t know. Because the European mainstream media blocks the most basic facts on all of this, and that’s this war could have ended so many times. It could have been avoided entirely.

And now Europe is in this unbelievable warmongering period led by the German Chancellor of all people and all countries, absolutely unpleasant. Merz, Macron, Starmer. And by the way, just to mention, in 2023, I had a conversation with President Macron. And I said, “Mr. President, this war came from NATO enlargement.” He said, “You’re absolutely right.” I said, “Mr. President, this war could end if NATO would just be clear that it’s not going to enlarge Ukraine.” “You’re absolutely right.” Yes. Nice conversation. He said exactly the opposite in public, and until today, says exactly the opposite.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: So they do it because they want to weaken Russia, kind of. They do it. They want to work in Russia. But it’s like, for me, just so basically, we are buying weapons from United States. We are weakening ourselves as Europe, we’re weakening Russia because we’re in war. So who is the winner here? The United States. And we are both losers.

So this is not in our interest. And that’s why, because this is not a common narrative. That’s why when you came in the European Parliament, this talk that you did, it got like 300 million views. Because it was, because people need to hear this. People are hungry.

And also, I went to Russia with other members of the European Parliament, and we met with the President of Douma. And they are hungry for some diplomacy. They are hungry. They want to speak, they want to negotiate, they want to.

JEFFREY SACHS: They’re hungry for diplomacy. And we don’t.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: We are not. We want to keep the war going.

Europe’s Diplomatic Failure

JEFFREY SACHS: So do you remember when Kaja Kallas, the high representative for external affairs, do you remember when she met with Sergey Lavrov? She never did, not once. Can you imagine the European top diplomat never once met with her Russian counterpart. But she knows that there must be war and escalation. Is this unbelievable? You remember when Lavrov is making…

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: A joke about this? When they see me in the corridors, they run.

JEFFREY SACHS: I know that because I was in, I don’t know if I told you this story, but I was asked online to present to the foreign ministers of the G20 in 2023, when they met in Bali, when Indonesia was hosting the G20. I’m pretty sure it was 2023 and great honor. So I got to speak to all the G20 foreign ministers.

They were not even shaking hands with Lavrov. They weren’t talking with him. They wouldn’t allow a photo opportunity. They had flown all the way to Bali, but they wouldn’t talk at all. It’s worse than children. Children actually, even if you’re five years old and you fought in the sandbox, you actually within an hour are playing together again. They couldn’t even talk. These are supposed grown ups. And they’re not. They don’t act like grown ups.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: Look at it.

JEFFREY SACHS: Also incredibly weird to me, Germany is not an insignificant country. Germany is a very important country. Germany elects a new chancellor. You would think that the new chancellor, who’s new to his position, would say, “Well, before I decide anything, I want to at least sit down and talk with my Russian counterpart.”

But Merz declared, “No, nothing to talk about. I’m not going to talk to him.” And that’s how it is until now. You look at the approval rating of these people, their publics have no confidence at all. In Starmer, in Merz, in Macron. And I can see why. It’s unbelievable.

They want war, but they don’t even try to understand why we’re in the situation we’re in, how to get out of it. And by the way, with Zelensky, I know that he was about to sign an agreement until the United States told him not to. Now what does he do? He now rules by decree, he rules by martial law.

We don’t really know in depth the attitudes in Ukraine, but we have opinion polls, including a Gallup survey which said that something like 70% of Ukrainians want this war to end at the negotiating table. All right, but where’s Zelensky?

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: He’s not, it’s not in America’s interest.

JEFFREY SACHS: What’s that?

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: It’s not in America’s interest.

JEFFREY SACHS: And in America, I mean, we got a president who’s completely bizarre, doesn’t have the attention span to do any of this, but actually is less warmongering than the Europeans.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: Yeah.

JEFFREY SACHS: And the Europeans are, instead of saying, “Okay, well maybe there’s a way we could actually discuss something.” “Oh my God, look at Trump. He’s actually talking to Putin.” And the Europeans say we need a seat at the table, but they don’t try to reach out to the Russians.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: They want a seat, but they don’t.

JEFFREY SACHS: They think that they can’t talk to Russia other than through daddy. What is it? What is the mentality? Europe has 450 million people. It’s a big, smart, intelligent place. Its history is 10 times longer than the United States of America. It’s right in the neighborhood of Russia. They think they need the permission of the United States to talk to Russia. What is this attitude actually?

Russia and Europe’s Future

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: So I will make a question. Do we want Russia inside Europe? We should try to have, not even stopped the war, to tie this problem. Not going to happen. But do we want to have so good relationship and for it’s in Europe interest to bring Russia together and we are inside Europe. Maybe in the future.

JEFFREY SACHS: Look, I was advisor to Gorbachev and I was an advisor to Yeltsin back in 1990, 1991, 1992. What did they say? What did they say to me? What did they say publicly all the time? A common European home, a common space of peace and prosperity from Rotterdam to Vladivostok. They meant it.

They wanted to get out of the 75 years of effect of the Bolshevik revolution. They wanted to move on to something better. They knew it and they had no means anyway to make power demands. Anything else. They wanted actually just normal relations.

And the US attitude was great. Not “We’ll have normal relations,” but “You will be subservient. We will break you up, we will surround you.” There’s an incredible, it’s really worth watching because it’s so bizarre. An interview in 1994, 31 years ago, on what was then, when we had intelligent news hours in the United States.

We had a great reporter named Robert McNeil and he interviewed Kissinger and the last U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, a wonderful gentleman named Jack Matlock. And this was 1994. And the issue was about NATO expansion.

And recall that in February 1990, in the context of the diplomacy over German reunification, the US and Germany explicitly, unambiguously promised Gorbachev no NATO enlargement, no eastward movement of NATO. So, of course, the US cheats, as it always does. And Clinton starts saying, “Well, maybe there should be NATO enlargement,” not taking care of any promises that were made.

And so this debate is on television where Ambassador Matlock says, “Why should we have NATO enlargement? Russia’s not threatening us. It’s not a threat. It has disbanded the Warsaw Pact, which was its military alliance, its military industrial complex. In collapses is the Russian economy. There’s no threat whatsoever. And we’re trying to establish normal relations after decades of Cold War.” And so he says, “No, there shouldn’t be NATO enlargement.”

So then McNeil asked Kissinger, and Kissinger says, “Yes, NATO should enlarge.” And McNeil is puzzled, says, “Why, Mr. Kissinger? Are they a threat?” “No, no, no, no, Russia’s not a threat.” “Well, are they threatening any of their neighbors?” “No, no, no, no, no, no. Russia’s not threatening any of its neighbors.”

But Ambassador Matlock says this would aggravate the Russians badly. And Kissinger says, “Well, if you can’t aggravate them when they’re weak, what are you going to do when they’re strong?” And that’s the American idea. Always take advantage if they’re weak, aggravate them. Why not? Instead of saying, “Okay, maybe we can have normal relations.” They couldn’t imagine that.

He even spits out the word neutralism. He says, “Oh, Central and Eastern Europe. It’s a no man’s land.” Now, what does it mean, a no man’s land? It has to be occupied by somebody. What does he even mean? He says, “That’s neutralism,” because that’s also imperial mentality. You’re either with us or you’re against us. Not you’re just neutral.

So the answer to your question is, of course Europe should have normal relationship with Russia.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: And maybe Russia inside Europe.

The Military Industrial State

JEFFREY SACHS: There was even a time when Putin said, “I want to be part of NATO.” And Clinton said, “That’s interesting.” And then in the afternoon, Clinton said, “No, no, no, no, you’re not going to be part of NATO.” Because the CIA told him, “No, no, no, no, that’s not how it works.”

And in 2017, Putin said something very, very interesting, which was, by then, he had dealt with Clinton, he had dealt with Obama, and he had dealt with Trump. And he said, in this famous interview in Le Figaro that he’s now dealt with three American presidents. He said they come into office with interesting ideas, but then the men in the dark suits and the suitcases and the blue ties come to visit them and they explain to these presidents how things really are. And then the presidents, you never hear of those ideas again.

And of course what he was talking about is the military industrial state. That’s who runs the United States and that’s what we have right now. And so Putin learned a long time ago this hostility is deeply, deeply entrained in the US side.

And then what’s all the propaganda in Europe and the US? “Unprovoked aggression by Russia. Unprovoked. Nothing happened. We didn’t do anything.” Over a 30 year period. It’s so willful.

The Military-Industrial Complex and American Foreign Policy

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: So you said about the military, the military industrial complex. You think this is what’s behind everything?

JEFFREY SACHS: This is the fundamental point. The US is not a democracy. Europe is not democratic. Really at its core, this is a security apparatus. The CIA is, as I’ve explained, at the core of American foreign policy. Because as a security state, the idea is we will overthrow other countries’ governments. And that is how the US has operated basically since the 1940s.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: And because they fund the politicians, the politicians cannot stand up against them or they are too powerful that they can tell the President what to do.

The Assassination of JFK and the End of Presidential Control

JEFFREY SACHS: There’s a very interesting theory, by the way, that everything got… Well, there are two dates that are probably notable. One is November 22, 1963, when Kennedy was assassinated. I believe that Kennedy was killed by CIA actions and that’s not a crazy idea to most Americans. And that he was killed because he was making peace, peace with the Soviet Union. The nuclear, the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty which was signed in the summer of 1963. His desire to get out of Vietnam, which he told his associates he would do, he was starting to draw down American troops from Vietnam. He actually was starting to make informal approaches to Castro that we have to find a modus operandi.

And I think the CIA or parts of the CIA, Angleton and others had him killed. So one theory is since then, presidents don’t have the guts. They’re basically under the control of forces they don’t actually control.

Another interesting theory that I’m reading now by an Italian sociologist is that another crucial step was 1973 when the military draft ended and the US became an all paid army. It became a business. This is business also. You make money and you need to test your weapons systems. So these wars are actually great for defense stocks. They’re not defense.

Even Trump, I give him credit. I give him credit in quotation marks. He changed the name to the Department of War because what is a defense industry? It’s a war industry. So at least Trump is obnoxious enough to say the truth. It doesn’t stop him from making the wars, but they make a lot of money.

Ukraine as a Weapons Testing Ground

And there is literally a program in Ukraine that, if you heard it, you’d say it’s a comedian’s joke, sick joke. It’s a test your weapons here program. It’s a formal program of the Ukraine government. Bring your new drones, bring your AI systems, bring your autonomous weapons. You can test them in real time in real battlefield conditions. This is real. It’s so sick. It’s unimaginable, but it’s not imagination. It’s real.

And the same companies that are operating in the slaughter in Gaza are the companies operating in Ukraine. And it’s our big tech industry, by the way. This is our first AI wars. We’ve got drones, we’ve got AI sensing, we’ve got all the sophisticated digital stuff, and they’re trying out their weapons right now.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: So it’s in their interest to keep things going so they can advance militarily.

JEFFREY SACHS: I think this is basically… It’s big money and it’s…

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: And it’s also weakened the weapons and also weakens Europe as well.

JEFFREY SACHS: You know, we had two senators, probably many more, but I only noticed two quotations. One was Mitt Romney from Utah, and one was Richard Blumenthal from Connecticut. They literally said… Because maybe they thought no one was listening or no one would care, they said, “This is the greatest money we can spend because no Americans are dying.” Can you actually have a human being say this?

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: Ukrainians are.

JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah, Ukraine, probably. When the war is over and the dead and the gravely wounded are counted, 2 million, maybe more dead and seriously wounded.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: They have people and they have wives, children.

The Human Cost of War

JEFFREY SACHS: Yes. And you never hear this from the Europeans. “We must stand with Ukraine.” Is standing with Ukraine, sending to their death in the front line. Rather than racking your brains, how could this war end in a way which makes us safe and Russia safe and Ukraine safe. That’s the question to ask. But they don’t even ask that question.

And they literally say, “We’re standing with Ukraine.” When the opinion surveys show clearly that overwhelmingly the Ukrainians want the war to stop because they’re being dragged to the front lines to die.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: Can you answer the question that you said, what’s that? You answer. Can you answer the question that you said how we end this war with us being saved and Russia?

A Path to Peace in Ukraine

JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah, it’s a one piece is a little unpleasant, but absolutely part of this war ending. And the rest is so mainstream and so obvious that it shouldn’t even bear…

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: Need.

JEFFREY SACHS: But it obviously does. First, the obvious, the absolute obvious, is Ukraine is neutral and there’s not a Western military in Ukraine and there’s no Russia militarily close to Ukraine. That’s all. So Ukraine’s neutral and Europe says that’s a lot of territory they’d have to cross to get to us. That’s safe for everybody. That’s the starting point. You’re right. President Putin, because he is right. This adventure, this misadventure, this reckless bid to expand NATO to Ukraine was a bad mistake. Dreadful. That’s the first point.

Second point, Crimea is going to stay with Russia. That was at the core of this gambit. And that goes back not to our war, which is the second Crimean War, but to the first Crimean War. And you can read all about it what Palmerston or Napoleon III or Brzezinski had in mind. No, Russia’s going to have its naval fleet in the Black Sea and it’s going to do its business in the Black Sea and that’s how it’s going to be. And it was just fine. And by the way, if anyone wants to remember, Russia had no territorial demand on Crimea before the coup. All Russia had with Ukraine was a 25 year lease for its naval base. Thank you. So that’s the second.

The third piece is that Ukraine is going to cede some territory because it lost on the battlefield. And if the Europeans had a moment of reflection and honesty, they would have understood that’s completely, that was completely avoidable because it was not Russia’s demand, actually until November 2022, because Russia was just saying no NATO enlargement. That was the first. And then after that, Minsk 2 agreement, then after that, in November 2022, I think it is, could be September, but I think it’s November. The annexation of these oblasts and then instead of ending this war, another million to 2 million dead and wounded between now and then and Ukraine losing on the battlefield.

And remember, well, the whole idea was we will defeat Russia, they will crumble, they will cave in. And the one thing for sure, Brzezinski said, don’t worry, they’ll never side with China. Every proposition wrong.

The Need for Diplomatic Engagement

But the main point, I would say, is the Europeans should sit down with the Russians and discuss this. And the main thing that the Europeans should ask is to the Russians face to face is how do we end this so that there’s not a new invasion of Ukraine? How do we end this so that you don’t invade the Baltic states? How do we end this so you don’t invade Poland, so you don’t invade Germany and so forth. It’s not going to happen. But ask the Russians the question. Ask them. That’s what diplomacy is. That’s what you discover, discuss.

You don’t say, we can never discuss with them. We must have war. You ask, you come up with solutions. And they’re not even trying. And Ukraine is the victim, the one they pretend to save.

European Union Enlargement and Spheres of Influence

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: So there is a lot of talk now about Europe, European Union enlargement. And I was hearing you recently that you should be careful about the other person, sphere of influence, about not the other person, other countries’ sphere of influence. So when it’s okay to expand, like Europe and all this stuff, and when it’s not okay and where, like for example, me as a member of the European Parliament, should I vote yes for Ukraine to be inside Europe? Should I vote yes for, I don’t know, Georgia to be inside Europe, Should I vote yes for Moldova to be inside Europe? So I want your opinion about this.

JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah, it’s absolutely superb and important and important question. Once upon a time, Europe was a political and social and economic venture, not a military venture. And when it was that European enlargement was not a threat to the national security of other countries.

By the way, the thing that made Yanukovych, in the fall of 2013 just delay, not deny, but delay signing a partnership agreement with Europe was that Russia said, but we have a customs union with you. So if you enter into a customs union with Europe, our economic relations are in question. So we need to be part of that discussion. By the way, perfectly sensible.

Yanukovych said, I delay because I have this. And by the way, because the IMF was also making crazy pressures on Ukraine. At the same time, he said, I delay and then everyone comes out into the streets in a maneuver heavily manipulated by the United States.

Economic Expansion and Trade Relations

But the point is, even the expansion of a trade area involves others. So you need to think about that. The idea is not to expand your trade at the expense of others. It’s to avoid what we economists call trade diversion so that, yes, Russia has concerns, so discuss them, rules of origin and how are you going to keep the mutual trade going.

But Europe so incompetent by the way, wouldn’t even acknowledge that that trade issue should include Russia discussion. That’s not crazy. That’s normal. That’s not at all crazy. But Europe couldn’t get it. Oh, that’s terrible. And he delayed. He didn’t refuse EU partnership, he delayed it. And then that’s the cause of a revolution. It’s crazy. It was a provocation by the US. It was a game.

But anyway, so even when it’s just economic expansion, your question’s a good one, which is, are you hurting someone else inadvertently? What should you do? Are you making a new Berlin Wall but a thousand miles to the east? What about a trade relationship with Russia? Maybe they’re not members. But make sure that there’s something compatible about open trade. All of that is what would be kind of the bread and butter of normal economic relations.

So when Europe was basically this political, economic and social side, I would have said, yeah, keep expanding. Don’t stop necessarily at the Russian border, or if you stop at the Russian border, in terms of membership, at least have open trade and good relations with Russia, so you’re not penalizing the one on your border.

And Europe used to have what they called a neighborhood policy because they understood also North Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, these are areas of interest that you don’t screw up. Your relationships with. Europe forgot all about this because it’s obsessed with. It’s Russophobia right now.

The Militarization of the European Union

So now the problem with Europe is it’s become a militarized enterprise right now. So does expanding the EU mean expanding a military operation? Well, almost. That needs to be clarified. What is Europe? Europe is so tied with NATO right now, Europe can’t find the words to say, okay, we would expand the EU, but not NATO. Which European leaders say this? Well, a few do, like Viktor Orban, but then they’re yelled at as being wild and Fico as being wild anti Europe, because van der Leyen doesn’t know what job she wants. She really wants to be Secretary General of NATO, not of the European Union. She tried for it, in fact.

So NATO and the EU got so completely intertwined that I can’t completely answer your question until that is disentangled. The question is, is Europe a security state right now, a military state? Does Ukraine joining mean European military in Ukraine? Well, the Europeans say yes. They literally say yes. And then Russia is going to say no. So that’s the answer, which is, economically, there would be a lot of flexibility. Militarily, this is a different issue.

The Concept of Sphere of Security

And so I have a concept that I am trying to develop and popularize. There’s this idea of sphere of influence, which is a kind of dirty phrase, pejorative phrase, which means you can’t come close to Ukraine because that’s Russia’s. And it means that Russia can interfere and so forth. And the United States sphere of influence says, we can demand what we want in Mexico or in the Caribbean or in Venezuela and so forth. Well, that’s an ugly idea and we should put it aside.

But I am promoting a concept called sphere of security. And by sphere of security, it means a major power has the right to say that other major powers, other nuclear powers, should not come into that zone because that is directly destabilizing of security. That doesn’t mean you can’t trade. That doesn’t mean that you’re going to interfere in the internal operations of that other country. It’s mainly a message to the other big powers.

So I believe Russia’s sphere of security definitely includes Ukraine. Not that Russia has the right to tell Ukraine what to do in economy or other things, but that Russia has the right to tell the United States and Europe, keep your military away from our border.

And the United States has said that for 202 years. It’s called the Monroe Doctrine, which is to Europe, you stay out of our neighborhood, not economically, not in trade, not in investment, but militarily, you do not come with your weapon systems to our neighborhood. That’s a sphere of security. It’s legitimate.

The Helsinki Final Act and European Security

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: So you are talking that we need to sign treaties and all this stuff based on this idea.

JEFFREY SACHS: Yes, very straightforward. And there is a treaty signed. It’s called the Helsinki Final Act. And if Europe, if European leaders honestly remembered it, they’d go to the clause that says that security is indivisible, that you cannot gain your security at the expense of your neighbors. It’s a basic, wonderful concept. Helsinki Final Act. It’s the basis of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. But NATO blasted that away.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: So just to summarize, you are saying, so first of all, to answer the enlargement question, we need to identify what is Europe. So if it’s a military, this is what they’re trying to do right now to rearm and do all this stuff, then we should not expand into Ukraine. So I should vote no in the expansion of Ukraine. But where do you draw the line? It’s okay to expand in Moldova?

JEFFREY SACHS: I would first of all have diplomacy, not a one way discussion. If Russia said “Yes, but this Aegis missile system takes six minutes to reach us, and that’s why you should not do the following here,” I’d like to hear that, frankly. This is what diplomacy is. And it’s a legitimate question, by the way, just to put it, how crazy the double standards are.

Trump has demanded that a Hong Kong trading company, Hutchinson, which owns two port service operations in the Panama Canal Zone, get away because it’s China and all they do. It’s not military, it’s nothing. It’s just port services. And it’s not mainland China, it’s Hong Kong. And actually the patriarch of Hutchinson, Li Ka Sheng, is a Canadian citizen. The whole thing’s bizarre.

But Trump says not even company with port services in Panama, but it says it’s okay for US missiles in Ukraine to be shot into Russia. Could we at least have a standard called the Golden Rule that one people probably remember: do not do to Russia which you would not have Russia do to you, because that would also help inform how we can stay alive in this world.

The Cyprus Question

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: You remember you came to Cyprus?

JEFFREY SACHS: I remember.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: And it was amazing. People in Cyprus loved you. But we asked you a lot of questions about Turkey, you remember? And you said that you are not 100% familiar exactly. You gave some answers on some topics that we discussed. So you said, I told you that when we’re going to do this again in eight months.

JEFFREY SACHS: We would talk about Cyprus.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: Talk about, briefly about Cyprus. Tell me about Turkey. Yeah, Turkey invaded my country Cyprus 52 years ago. So we need…

JEFFREY SACHS: I wanted to have this conversation.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: Yes. What changed? Did you figure some things out?

JEFFREY SACHS: You have great news. Absolutely great news, which is that the Turkish Cypriots voted for a leader last week who said we should have a binational solution. Perfect peace. This is exactly what’s needed.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: Do you think Turkey will be wanting this?

JEFFREY SACHS: Ah, the question always is, let’s talk. I would say this is great news. First, I would talk with our, I would have the Greek Cypriots talk with the Turkish Cypriots and say, “Wonderful, congratulations on your election. Very exciting, what you’re saying. Very promising. Could we discuss a bit and maybe we go together and speak to President Erdogan and see how that goes?” Because maybe we have a solution here and I’d love to join that discussion, because I would love to say in Turkey, and I’d love to say in Cyprus, make peace. It’s going to be mutually, hugely beneficial.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: Do you think it will be beneficial for Turkey?

JEFFREY SACHS: Hugely beneficial. The tourism, the peace and not having this terrible distraction coming. This is a boon for Turkey. Turkey needs, by the way, it needs tourism. A lot of investment in Cyprus could be two way. There’d be a normalization of relations. This would be phenomenal. And by the way, it would also make it possible…

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: But why didn’t happen 51 years, 52 years now? Because it’s not the same with, because we are talking about great powers. It’s not the same that happened. Nothing provoked too much.

The Failed Referendum and Path Forward

JEFFREY SACHS: No, the sad part is when the referendum came, the Turkish Cypriots voted for the binational state and the Greek Cypriots voted against it. That was everybody’s shock. You know, when the referendum was made on a reunification of the island, everybody said, “Look, the Turkish Cypriots have to support this because otherwise it’s going to block Cyprus accession to the European Union.” Because the European Union said if we don’t have both sides unified, Cyprus is not going to enter the EU.

And so the whole drama of that referendum was, what are the Turkish Cypriots going to do? What are the Turkish Cypriots going to do? Lo and behold, what happened. The Turkish Cypriots voted for reunification. The Greek Cypriots voted against it. Everyone was shocked.

Europe immediately said, “Doesn’t matter, we’ll take Cyprus in.” Nonetheless, it was a typical move rather than saying, “Hey guys, Greek Cypriots, you need to get this done properly.” Cyprus was just admitted. And then all the charge was, it’s the Turks that are blocking this. But Turkey was supporting the referendum, I believe at the time, until it failed on the Greek side.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: But to the defense, I was 4 years old, so to the defense of the people of the Greek Cypriots, it was the terms of that, they say that it was going to be a dysfunctional state.

JEFFREY SACHS: You know, I don’t want to revisit the referendum. I just want to say that the Turkish Cypriots were not the obstacle. That’s all I want to say. And so the fact that they have voted right now for a binational solution is great. And the main point I wanted to make was, and it’s not outstanding the way that the Turkish part of Cyprus has been thinking even back to then. So I think there’s something very promising possible right now, I think so.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: I want your thoughts about the European role on this, what the European Union should do with Turkey. Should we pressure with, I don’t know, for them to have a solution and with what mechanism? Because now we are buying some weapons from Turkey. We’re having good relationships, the European Union with Turkey. We’re in NATO as well. Turkey. So, yeah, what should be the role of the European Union?

JEFFREY SACHS: I think the start is for the government in Nicosia, the Greek Cypriot government, to sit down with the Turkish Cypriots with this new leader and say, “This is very interesting.” I really believe in general, start local and talk. And this is very promising because this was a campaign in the Turkish side that pitted him against someone who was demanding independence backed by Turkey.

And so this fellow won a real political campaign on the central issue. Talk to the guy and then say, “Oh, you know what? We have the makings of a real solution here.” Then on that basis, I think both should go talk to President Erdogan, go talk to Greece. Very responsible Prime Minister Mitsotakis say, “Look, we can actually resolve this thing, make the package, go to Brussels, say, bless us.” That’s all. We don’t need you to go…

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: You don’t think we need the help of European Union? We should do that ourselves?

JEFFREY SACHS: I definitely would start with diplomacy. I always believe in sitting down and trying.

Sanctions Versus Diplomacy

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: Okay, so a lot of, I want to explain you a bit. I’m in a weird situation as a member of the European Parliament because of the conflict. 30% of the island is occupied by Turkey. A lot of the people in Cyprus warned us and they think with their brain that putting sanctions as European Union in Turkey and putting pressure will help. So I wanted to hear your thoughts. If this you think could help or if this will damage.

JEFFREY SACHS: Damage.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: So please explain because currently I’m voting for sanctions.

JEFFREY SACHS: So, yeah, this is a standard issue of human beings in general, not only about Turkey’s division. When you’re in what we call a strategic dilemma, a strategic dilemma is a situation where if we cooperate, we both gain. If we both fail to cooperate, we both lose. But if you’re soft and I’m tough, I gained some advantage over you.

And this leads to a kind of perversity which is in our lives every single day. We’re always looking, “Oh, are they tricking me? Are they going to take advantage of me? I don’t really trust you.” And since I don’t trust you, I’m not going to be nice. I’m going to have to be hard. It’s only being tough.

It’s like when I mentioned Kissinger saying, “If you can’t aggravate them when they’re weak, what are you going to do when they’re strong?” He didn’t have the idea that maybe you don’t aggravate them at all. It didn’t even cross his mind. Maybe you cooperate with them.

So in these kind of strategic dilemmas, as we call them in economics or in game theory, the question is, how do you achieve cooperation in such a situation? And the general answer is, well, it’s not a one time game. If you cooperate now, you build trust, you cooperate in the future, you continue to gain, gain, gain. Whereas if you break cooperation, then you have this terrible hostility which persists and both sides lose.

So then comes the question, “Aha, okay, I see, Mr. Sachs, you’re a little naive, but you think we could cooperate and build trust over time. But how do I know? You know, maybe I’m going to be cheated in this.”

And the answer, the best practical answer that’s been found in strategic interactions is in, and now I’m turning to formal economics, game theory is called tit for tat. And that is, if we’re in this kind of dilemma, do we cooperate? Do we cheat? In the first round, we should cooperate. If the other side cheats on us, well, we’re not going to be a sucker the second time around.

But it’s a very bad strategy with a new face to face to say, “I start hard,” because they’re going to say, “All right, ahole, I’m not going to deal with you. You’re just, you’re out to get me.”

Here you have a newly elected leader who won on the basis of finding a solution. To my mind, the idea that you would start with sanctions against this is completely wrong. You say, “Congratulations, my hand is out, let’s sit down.” You don’t start on the hard line on the first encounter.

By the way, Trump does. Trump is a nasty SOB. So he thinks, “Okay, we’re going to bargain. First thing, I’m going to slug you in the face. I’m going to weaken you, I’m going to pummel you, I’m going to bloody your nose, then I’m going to say, oh, we could be great friends, let’s talk.” That’s a kind of thuggery. It is an approach. It’s a kind of gangsterism, but it actually doesn’t lead to good results.

Trump isn’t winning the world or recovering the United States. He’s making enemies all over the world. If you want peace on Cyprus, don’t start with sanctions. Start with trying diplomacy.

Mearsheimer’s Realism Versus Cooperation

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: But we’ve been trying for a long time now, not so much with diplomacy. But I want to push back a bit because if it was here, Professor Mearsheimer, we’re going to maybe have the debate of detaining a power. So maybe you can do everything to your that you can to make the power less strong. Because this is kind of how the word works. So if I say this argument, what do you answer?

JEFFREY SACHS: I love John Mearsheimer. I think he’s a great political scientist.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: By the way, you are my two mentors. Yeah, I listen to you very often.

JEFFREY SACHS: I have only one complaint, not a complaint against John, but I have my main point, which is his magnum opus, his great book from a quarter century ago is called “The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.” So John explains tragedy. I’m trying to overcome tragedy.

And I’m saying, if you want to overcome tragedy, you start out nice with the other side. John says, “Oh, you’re going to be cheated maybe one round, then we’ll know.” But I’m saying there’s actually a lot of cooperation possible. I’m not so pessimistic about human nature. And especially when a politician has just run a campaign on making peace, you don’t start out presuming that they’re out to make conflict. You have something new.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: So basically you are saying, try it. Yes, give diplomacy a chance. Try everything you can possible to give. But if you get cheated, you can follow the detainment method.

The Munich Agreement and the Lessons of Negotiation

JEFFREY SACHS: That’s what tit for tat is, which is you cheat me the next round, I don’t cooperate. I’m not going to be suckered, not twice.

By the way, I don’t want to digress in a long discussion, but maybe it bears two minutes of saying there is one episode of modern history which is taken in Europe as the case for not talking with the other side, and that is in the fall of 1938, when the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain negotiated with Adolf Hitler in Munich. And in Munich, the British made some concessions to Hitler, especially over territory in Czechoslovakia. And within months, Hitler broke every agreement and Europe fell into war.

And that episode is taken since then as a case: don’t talk to the other side. That’s appeasement is what it’s called. And I think it’s a complete misreading of history and a complete abuse of history. And it’s first of all an abuse of history because it is not true that every adversary is Adolf Hitler. And pretending that is what warmongers do. I’ve grown up my whole life hearing that every adversary of the United States is Adolf Hitler, whether it’s Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi or whoever. This is exactly an abuse.

But there’s a second, even more pertinent point, which is that even in 1938, subject to one important proviso, it was not wrong to try to negotiate with Hitler. I think there was only one mistake made, actually, and that was Chamberlain said, “We have peace in our time.” So he’s remembered for gullibility, but the idea that he negotiated was not wrong.

What he should have done was said Hitler is pretty despicable, clearly very militarist, making unacceptable demands. We are trying to avoid war, we have made an agreement, but we’re going to be watching every single move that this man makes and we’re going to be holding him to this. And I don’t know whether it’s going to hold or not hold, but we’re going to try a last time to do this and if it doesn’t work, it’s going to be war. That’s what Chamberlain should have said. Instead, he declared “peace in our time.” So he’s remembered as being completely naive, but the negotiation was not wrong.

And incidentally, again, this is a big digression. It deserves for people who care, it deserves a big discussion. But Munich 1938 was not the decisive failure of the west and of the anti-Hitler view. And there are important historians, Richard Overy among them, who said, actually Hitler regarded it as a great disaster for Hitler. Why? Well, Hitler said it delayed my launching the war by a year. That’s what he told his aide, Martin Bormann in 1945. He said, it was my biggest mistake. They tricked me into diplomacy. So from Hitler’s point of view, it was his mistake, not Chamberlain’s.

But the second thing that’s really important and relevant for today is Hitler exposed himself as someone completely, totally impossible to negotiate, completely untrustworthy, and he made the whole world see it and he made possible Winston Churchill. Because Churchill took power in May 1940, Chamberlain fell. Because of this debacle, the war started on September 1, 1939. Chamberlain fell, Churchill came to power.

And in the first days of May 1940, Churchill faced, inside the British Cabinet, people who said we should negotiate with Hitler. And Churchill said, you cannot negotiate with Hitler. Look at what happened. And this is why the House of Commons backed Churchill and said, no, we’re not going to negotiate with Hitler, because Hitler had exposed himself as completely incapable of negotiating.

This is why it’s so wrong to say I can’t negotiate with that person. Put them to the test, expose them. If you say that they won’t live up to something, get them to sign and when they don’t live up to it, you’ve made your case. But the way that it works now, for example, with Putin, where I think it’s completely false, by the way, in substance is Europe says, oh, we can’t negotiate with him, but the whole rest of the world, which I know very well because that’s where I spend my time, doesn’t view Putin as the aggressor, views the US as the aggressor.

Turkish Diplomacy and Negotiation

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: What about Erdoğan? Is he capable of negotiation?

JEFFREY SACHS: Of course he is. Everyone’s capable. Put them to the test.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: No, but I mean, because you know.

JEFFREY SACHS: Erdoğan, I know you have a…

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: Very good relationship with Turkey. Diplomat. So do you think they are trustworthy among the world?

JEFFREY SACHS: Absolutely.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: So you think you’re worth a shot?

JEFFREY SACHS: I would absolutely try diplomacy. In fact, by the way, I don’t know how popular or unpopular it is to say, but I have a lot of experience with Turkish diplomacy. I think it’s first rate. I know the Turkish diplomats, I know the ambassadors around the world. I know the foreign minister. They’re extremely professional, sophisticated people. This is not some third rate operation.

Of course, it was an empire for centuries. They know diplomacy, they’re very well trained and you can have very serious negotiations. And that’s why the Istanbul process was so effective till the US blew it up. That you could bring Ukraine and Russia together. That required the skill of Turkish diplomacy.

Direct Democracy and Political Innovation

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: Okay, I want for the last thing to say that, I don’t know if you heard, but I started the political party.

JEFFREY SACHS: All right, good, good.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: So I made sense. I was elected as an independent with 20% and the highest party was 24%. But I did it in a unique way. I just put a clown nose and I launched my party in a funny way. The new generation kind of worked.

JEFFREY SACHS: You’re making everyone think is what you’re doing.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: So the goal of this party, I wanted to kind of get your thoughts on this, is direct democracy is the name and is to practice kind of what Switzerland is doing sometimes to put through an application, vote with you can verify.

JEFFREY SACHS: Oh, have some lights. Great justice of the party’s getting born.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: You have the best life in the world. So, yes. So the people first of all will vote for their representatives. Yes, yes. It’s good. He’s asking about the life. So through an app. So now I need to decide the 56 members that will be on the ballot for the parliament elections. And I will not decide them. Anyone can put and they can make campaign and the people will vote with them in there.

And some policies, we will ask the people what. I do it sometimes also in the European Parliament, I ask the people and they vote what should I vote sometimes. For example, about sanctions to Russia. So they voted that Cyprus people by 85% they don’t want to sanction Russia as Europe. So, and this is kind of the concept, and I’m curious to hear your thoughts.

JEFFREY SACHS: Great thoughts. Great. I mean, not great thoughts, great thoughts of you and great ideas. And basically the way that our parliamentary democracies evolved was from the 18th century. And in the 18th century, I know my country, the United States, if you wanted to get to Washington, it would take several weeks, and there was absolutely no way to canvass the public on the hundred things that had to be voted on. So it had to be representative democracy.

And those representatives had to actually be physically present. And that was a long, arduous journey. And the whole idea of representative democracy is that these people should represent our interests. And if you’re a big place, you can’t really have direct participation. You need somehow to have somebody doing this business for you.

In the digital age, we should be innovating all over the place. Everyone can participate. I’d like someone to ask me my opinion. Frankly, why do I leave it to corrupt Washington officials who are on the take getting collectively $16 billion or so with the President and the Congress from rich lobbyists to run their election campaign, and they don’t ask me my opinion. I’m happy to get online and make my votes and make my views known. And we can do this systematically now.

So I think we need to do exactly what you’re saying. I don’t know how to do it exactly.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: I don’t know as well. I talked to the people that it will be the first test. So, people, for now, you will have verification of the passport. We can verify that you are Cypriot citizen and all this stuff.

JEFFREY SACHS: So try it. So if this works, try it. And try to get the public voice heard and try to make it as representative as possible so that it’s not just a few people who are going and logging on the system, but really heard. Because I know in my own country, in the United States, I think I side with the majority opinion on just about everything.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: By the way, I think the wisdom of the count is very good.

JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah. You know, the Americans, they want the Ukraine war to stop. They want a state of Palestine, they want, they hate what Israel is doing. They want to tax the rich, they want their privacy. They don’t want the military industrial complex. It’s all good. And it’s just about every issue. They want climate action. They don’t believe when Trump says this is a hoax.

The American people are very sensible on almost every issue. It’s 60-40 on the right side, sometimes 70-30. But the policies nonstop are against the majority. Nonstop because they’re owned by the lobbies. And so why do we need to pay these people and have these $16 billion election rounds when everyone can get on free and be heard?

Now, I admit there are things to think about and there are ways to do this, a lot of things, but let’s do it now. We should be innovative in our politics.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: Because politics stayed the same for the last 50, 100 years. There’s not a lot of innovation. Exactly. So we need to. And it’s hard to innovate politics because it’s hard to get in the system because of the way it only allows certain types of people to be in the system. So, anyways, I just wanted to hear your thoughts about this.

JEFFREY SACHS: I’m all in favor of the experiment.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: Good. How did you enjoy our time?

JEFFREY SACHS: I love talking with you and so I thank you. That was, you pulled out for me a lot, I hope. Some of which I hope is of interest, but it was great. Thank you.

FIDIAS PANAYIOTOU: I flew all the way to Italy just for this, guys. He’s amazing. Thank you guys for watching until the end. We love you. Bye. Bye.

JEFFREY SACHS: Amazing. Amazing. Wow.

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