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TRANSCRIPT: Jeffrey Sachs on the Geopolitics of Peace in the European Parliament
Pangambam S
56–71 minutes
Read the full transcript of Professor Jeffrey Sachs' speech in the European Parliament at an event titled "The Geopolitics of Peace", hosted by former UN Assistant Secretary General and current BSW MEP Michael von der Schulenburg, on February 19, 2025.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Michael, thank you so much, and thanks to all of you for the chance to be together and to think together.
This is indeed a complicated and fast-changing time and a very dangerous one. So we really need clarity of thought. I'm especially interested in our conversation, so I'll try to be as succinct and clear as I can be. I've watched the events very close-up in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Russia, very closely for the last 36 years. I was an adviser to the Polish government in 1989, to President Gorbachev in 1990 and 1991, to President Yeltsin in 1991 to 1993, to President Kuchma of Ukraine in 1993, 1994.
I helped introduce the Estonian currency. I helped several countries in former Yugoslavia, especially Slovenia. I've watched the events very close-up for 36 years. After the Maidan, I was asked by the new government to come to Kyiv, and I was taken around the Maidan, and I learned a lot of things firsthand. I've been in touch with Russian leaders for more than 30 years.
I know the American political leadership close-up. Our previous Secretary of Treasury was my macroeconomics teacher 51 years ago. Here just to give you an idea. So, we were very close friends for a half century. I know all of these people.
I want to say this because what I want to explain in my point of view is not secondhand. It's not ideology. It's what I've seen with my own eyes and experienced during this period. In my understanding of the events that have befallen Europe in many contexts, and I'll include not only the Ukraine crisis, but Serbia 1999, the wars in the Middle East, including Iraq, Syria, the wars in Africa, including Sudan, Somalia, Libya. These are to a very significant extent that would surprise you, perhaps, and would be denounced about what I'm about to say.
U.S. Foreign Policy
These are wars that the United States led and caused. And this has been true for more than 40 years now. What happened, more than 30 years, I should say, to be more precise. The United States came to the view, especially in 1990, 1991, and then with the end of the Soviet Union, that the US now ran the world and that the US did not have to heed anybody's views, red lines, concerns, security viewpoints, or any international obligations or any UN framework. I'm sorry to put it so plainly, but I do want you to understand.
I tried very hard in 1991 to get help for Gorbachev, who I think was the greatest statesman of our modern time. I recently read the archived memo of the National Security Council discussion of my proposal, how they completely dismissed it and laughed it off the table when I said that the United States should help the Soviet Union in financial stabilization and in making its reforms. And the memo documents, including some of my former colleagues at Harvard in particular, saying we will do the minimum that we will do to prevent disaster, but the minimum. It's not our job to help. Quite the contrary.
It's not our interest to help. When the Soviet Union ended in 1991, the view became even more exaggerated. And I can name chapter and verse, but the view was we run the show. Cheney, Wolfowitz, and many other names that you will have come to know literally believed this is now a US world, and we will do as we want. We will clean up from the former Soviet Union.
We will take out any remaining allies. Countries like Iraq, Syria, and so forth will go. And we've been experiencing this foreign policy for now essentially 33 years. Europe has paid a heavy price for this because Europe has not had any foreign policy during this period that I can figure out. No voice, no unity, no clarity, no European interests, only American loyalty.
There were moments where there were disagreements and very, I think, wonderful disagreements, especially in the last time of significance was 2003 in the Iraq war when France and Germany said we don't support the United States going around the UN Security Council for this war. That war, by the way, was directly concocted by Netanyahu and his colleagues in the US Pentagon. I'm not saying that it was a link or mutuality. I'm saying it was a direct war. That was a war carried out for Israel.
It was a war that Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Fife coordinated with Netanyahu. And that was the last time that Europe had a voice. And I spoke with European leaders then, and they were very clear, and it was quite wonderful. Europe lost its voice entirely after that, but especially in 2008. Now what happened after 1991 to get to 2008 is that the United States decided that unipolarity meant that NATO would enlarge somewhere from Brussels to Vladivostok, step by step.
NATO Expansion
There would be no end to eastward enlargement of NATO. This would be the US unipolar world. If you play the game of risk as a child like I did, this is the US idea to have the piece on every part of the board. Any place without a US military base is an enemy, basically. Neutrality is a dirty word in the US political lexicon.
Perhaps the dirtiest word, at least if you're an enemy. We know you're an enemy. If you are neutral, you're subversive, because then you're really against us because you're not telling us. You're pretending to be neutral. So this was the mindset, and the decision was taken formally in 1994 when President Clinton signed off on NATO enlargement to the east.
You will recall that on February 7, 1991, Hans-Dietrich Genscher and James Baker III spoke with Gorbachev. Genscher gave a press conference afterwards where he explained, NATO will not move eastward. We will not take advantage of the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. And understand that was in a juridical context, not a casual context. This was the end of World War II being negotiated for German reunification.
And an agreement was made that NATO will not move one inch eastward. And it was explicit, and it is in countless documents. And just look up National Security Archive of George Washington University, and you can get dozens of documents. It's a website called "What Gorbachev Heard About NATO." Take a look because everything you're told by the US is a lie about this, but the archives are perfectly clear.
So the decision was taken in 1994 to expand NATO all the way to Ukraine. This is a project. This is not one administration or another. This is a US government project that started more than 30 years ago. In 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote "The Grand Chessboard."
That is not just musings of Mr. Brzezinski. That is the presentation of the decisions of the United States government explained to the public, which is how these books work. And the book describes the eastward enlargement of Europe and of NATO as simultaneous events. And there's a good chapter in that book that says, what will Russia do as Europe and NATO expand eastward? And I knew Zbig Brzezinski personally.
He was very nice to me. I was advising Poland. He was a big help. He was a very nice and smart man, and he got everything wrong. So in 1997, he wrote in detail why Russia could do nothing but accede to the eastward expansion of NATO and Europe.
In fact, he says the eastward expansion of Europe and not just Europe, but NATO. This was a plan, a project. And he explains how Russia will never align with China. Unthinkable. Russia will never align with Iran.
Russia has no vocation other than the European vocation. So as Europe moves east, there's nothing Russia can do about it. So says yet another American strategist. Is it any question why we're in war all the time? Because one thing about America is we always know what our counterparts are going to do, and we always get it wrong.
And one reason we always get it wrong is that in game theory that the American strategists play, you don't actually talk to the other side. You just know what the other side's strategy is. That's wonderful. It saves so much time. You don't need any diplomacy.
The Black Sea Strategy
So this project began, and we had a continuity of government for 30 years until maybe yesterday, perhaps. Thirty years of a project. Ukraine and Georgia were the keys to the project. Why? Because America learned everything it knows from the British.
And so we are the wannabe British Empire. And what the British Empire understood in 1853, Mr. Palmerston, Lord Palmerston, excuse me, is that you surround Russia in the Black Sea, and you deny Russia access to the Eastern Mediterranean. And all you're watching is an American project to do that in the 21st century. The idea was that there would be Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia as the Black Sea littoral that would deprive Russia of any international status by blocking the Black Sea and essentially by neutralizing Russia as more than a local power. Brzezinski's completely clear about this.
And before Brzezinski, there was Mackinder. And who owns the island of the world owns the world. So this project goes back a long time. I think it goes back basically to Palmerston. In 19, and again, I've lived through every administration.
I've known these presidents. I've known their teams. Nothing changed much from Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump to Biden. Maybe they got worse step by step. Biden was the worst in my view.
Maybe also because he was not compos mentis for the last couple of years. And I say that seriously, not as a snarky remark. The American political system is a system of image. It's a system of media manipulation every day. It is a PR system.
And so you could have a president that basically doesn't function and have that in power for two years and actually have that president run for reelection. And one damn thing is he had to stand on a stage for 90 minutes by himself, and that was the end of it. Had it not been that mistake, he would have gone on to have his candidacy, whether he was sleeping after 4 PM in the afternoon or not. So this is actually the reality. Everybody goes along with it.
It's impolite to say anything that I'm saying because we don't speak the truth about almost anything in this world right now. So this project went on from the 1990s, Bombing Belgrade 78 straight days in 1999 was part of this project. Splitting apart the country when borders are sacrosanct, aren't they indeed? Except for Kosovo. That's fine.
Because borders are sacrosanct except when America changes them. Sudan was another related project. The South Sudan rebellion. Did that just happen because South Sudanese rebelled? Or can I give you the CIA playbook?
To please understand as grown-ups what this is about. Military events are costly. They require equipment, training, base camps, intelligence, finance. That comes from big powers. That doesn't come from local insurrections.
South Sudan did not defeat North Sudan or Sudan in a tribal battle. It was a US project. I would go often to Nairobi and meet US military or senators or others with deep interest in Sudan's politics. This was part of the game of unipolarity. So the NATO enlargement, as you know, started in 1999 with Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic.
And Russia was extremely unhappy about it, but these were countries still far from the border. And Russia protested, but, of course, to no avail. Then George Bush Junior came in. When 9/11 occurred, President Putin pledged all support. And then the US decided on September 20, 2001, that it would launch seven wars in five years.
U.S. Foreign Policy and NATO Expansion
And you can listen to General Wesley Clark online talk about that. He was NATO's supreme commander in 1999. He went to the Pentagon on September 20, 2001. He was handed the paper explaining seven wars. These, by the way, were Netanyahu's wars.
The idea was partly to clean up old Soviet allies and partly to take out supporters of Hamas and Hezbollah. Because Netanyahu's idea was there will be one state thank you. Only one state. It will be Israel. Israel will control all of the territory.
And anyone that objects, we will overthrow. Not we exactly, our friend, the United States. That's US policy until this morning. We don't know whether it will change. Now the only wrinkle is that maybe the US will own Gaza instead of Israel owning Gaza.
But the idea has been around at least for 25 years. It actually goes back to a document called Clean Break that Netanyahu and his American political team put together in 1996 to end the idea of the two-state solution. You can also find it online. So these are projects. These are long-term events.
These aren't, is it Clinton? Is it Bush? Is it Obama? That's the boring way to look at American politics as the day-to-day game. But that's not what American politics is.
So the next round of NATO enlargement came in 2004 with seven more countries, the three Baltic states, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, and Slovakia. At this point, Russia was pretty damn upset. This was a complete violation of the post-war order agreed with German reunification. Essentially, it was a fundamental trick or defection of the US from a cooperative arrangement, is what it amounted to, because they believe in unipolarity. So as everybody recalls, because we just had the Munich Security Conference last week in 2007, President Putin said, stop.
Enough. Enough. Stop now. And, of course, what that meant was in 2008, the United States jammed down Europe's throat, enlargement of NATO to Ukraine and to Georgia. This is a long-term project.
I listened to Mr. Saakashvili in New York in May of 2008, and I walked out, called Sonia, and said, this man's crazy. And a month later, a war broke out because the United States told this guy, we save Georgia. And he stands at the Council on Foreign Relations, says Georgia's in the center of Europe. Well, it ain't, ladies and gentlemen. It's not in the center of Europe.
And the most recent events are not helpful for Georgia for its safety and your MPs going there or MEPs going there and European politicians, that gets Georgia destroyed. That doesn't save Georgia. That gets Georgia destroyed. Completely destroyed. In 2008, as everybody knows, our former CIA director William Burns sent a long message back to Condoleezza Rice.
Nyet means nyet about expansion. This we know from Julian Assange. Because believe me, not one word is told to the American people about anything or to you or by any of your newspapers these days. So we have Julian Assange to thank, but we can read the memo in detail. As you know, Viktor Yanukovych was elected in 2010 on the platform of neutrality.
Russia had no territorial interests or designs in Ukraine at all. I know. I was there during these years. What Russia was negotiating was a 25-year lease to 2042 for Sevastopol naval base. That's it.
Not for Crimea. Not for the Donbas. Nothing like that. This idea that Putin is reconstructing the Russian empire, this is childish propaganda. Excuse me.
If anyone knows the day-to-day and year-to-year history, this is childish stuff. Childish stuff seems to work better than adult stuff. So no designs at all. The United States decided this man must be overthrown. It's called a regime change operation.
There have been about a hundred of them by the United States, many in your countries and many all over the world. That's what the CIA does for a living. Please know it. It's a very unusual kind of foreign policy.
But in America, if you don't like the other side, you don't negotiate with them, you try to overthrow them, preferably, covertly. If it doesn't work covertly, you do it overtly. You always say it's not our fault. They're the aggressor. They're the other side.
They're Hitler. That comes up every two or three years. Whether it's Saddam Hussein, whether it's Assad, whether it's Putin, that's very convenient. That's the only foreign policy explanation the American people are ever given anywhere. Well, we're facing Munich 1938.
Well, we're facing Munich 1938. Can't talk to the other side. They're evil, implacable foes. That's the only model of foreign policy we ever hear from our mass media. And the mass media repeats it entirely because it's completely suborned by the US government.
The Maidan Revolution and Its Aftermath
Now in 2014, the US worked actively to overthrow Yanukovych. Everybody knows the phone call intercepted by my Columbia University colleague, Victoria Nuland, and the US ambassador, Peter Pyatt. You don't get better evidence. The Russians intercepted her call, and they put it on the Internet. Listen to it.
It's fascinating. I know all these people. By the way, by doing that, they all got promoted in the Biden administration. That's the job. Now when the Maidan occurred, I was called immediately.
Oh, Professor Sachs, the new Ukrainian prime minister would like to see you to talk about the economic crisis. Because I'm pretty good at that. And so I flew to Kyiv, and I was walked around the Maidan. And I was told how the US paid the money for all the people around the Maidan. Spontaneous revolution of dignity.
Ladies and gentlemen, please, where do all these media outlets come from? Where does all this organization come from? Where do all these buses come from? Where do all these people called in come from? Are you kidding?
This is organized effort. And it's not a secret, except to citizens of Europe and the United States. Everyone else understands it quite clearly. Then came Minsk, and especially Minsk II, which, by the way, was modeled on South Tyrolean autonomy. And the Belgians could have related to Minsk II very well.
It said there should be autonomy for the Russian-speaking regions in the east of Ukraine. It was supported unanimously by the UN Security Council. The United States and Ukraine decided it was not to be enforced. Germany and France, which were the guarantors of the Normandy process, let it go. And it was absolutely another direct American unipolar action with Europe as usual playing completely useless subsidiary role even though it was a guarantor of the agreement.
Trump won, raise the armaments. There were many thousands of deaths in the shelling by Ukraine in the Donbas. There was no Minsk II agreement. And then Biden came into office. And, again, I know all these people.
I used to be a member of the Democratic Party. I now am strictly sworn to be a member of no party because both are the same anyway. And because this is, the Democrats became complete war mongers over time, and there was not one voice about peace. Just like most of your parliamentarians, the same way. So at the end of 1991, Putin put on the table a last effort in two security agreement drafts, one with Europe and one with the United States. The US put on the table December 15, 2021.
I had an hour call with Jake Sullivan in the White House begging, Jake, avoid the war. You can avoid the war. All you have to do is say, NATO will not enlarge to Ukraine. And he said to me, oh, NATO's not going to enlarge to Ukraine. Don't worry about it.
I said, Jake, say it publicly. No. No. No. We can't say it publicly. Said, Jake, you're going to have a war over something that isn't even going to happen? He said, don't worry, Jeff. There will be no war. These are not very bright people. I'm telling you, if I can give you my honest view, they're not very bright people.
And I dealt with them for more than 40 years. They talk to themselves. They don't talk to anybody else. They play game theory. In noncooperative game theory, you don't talk to the other side.
You just make your strategy. This is the essence of game theory. It's not negotiation theory. It's not peacemaking theory. It is unilateral, noncooperative theory, if you know formal game theory.
That's what they play. It started at the RAND Corporation. That's what they still play. In 2019, there's a paper by RAND. How do we extend Russia?
Do you know they wrote a paper which Biden followed? How do we annoy Russia? That's literally the strategy. How do we annoy Russia? We're trying to provoke it, trying to make it break apart, maybe have regime change, maybe have unrest, maybe have economic crisis.
That's what you call your ally. Are you kidding? So I had a long and frustrating phone call with Sullivan. I was standing out in the freezing cold. I happened to be trying to have a ski day.
And there I was, Jake, don't have the war. Oh, there'll be no war, Jeff. We know a lot of what happened the next month, which is that they refused to negotiate. The stupidest idea of NATO is the so-called open door policy. Are you kidding?
NATO reserves the right to go where it wants without any neighbor having any say whatsoever. Well, I tell the Mexicans and the Canadians, don't try it. You know, Trump may want to take over Canada. So Canada could say to China, why don't you build a military base in Ontario? I wouldn't advise it.
And the United States would not say, well, it's an open door. That's their business. I mean, they can do what they want. That's not our business. But grown-ups in Europe repeat this.
In Europe, in your commission, you're a high representative. This is nonsense stuff. This is not even baby geopolitics. This is just not thinking at all. So the war started.
The Ukraine War and Nuclear Arms Control
What was Putin's intention in the war? I can tell you what his intention was. It was to force Zelensky to negotiate neutrality. And that happened within seven days of the start of the invasion. You should understand this, not the propaganda that's written about this.
Oh, that they failed and he was going to take over Ukraine. Come on, ladies and gentlemen. Understand something basic. The idea was to keep NATO. And what is NATO?
It's the United States off of Russia's border. No more, no less. I should add one very important point. Why are they so interested? First, because if China or Russia decided to have a military base on the Rio Grande or in the Canadian border, not only would the United States freak out, we'd have war within about ten minutes.
But because the United States unilaterally abandoned the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 and ended the nuclear arms control framework by doing so. And this is extremely important to understand. The nuclear arms control framework is based on trying to block a first strike. The ABM Treaty was a critical component of that. The US unilaterally walked out of the ABM Treaty in 2002.
It blew a Russian gasket. So everything I've been describing is in the context of the destruction of the nuclear framework as well. And starting in 2010, the US put in Aegis missile systems in Poland and then in Romania. And Russia doesn't like that. And one of the issues on the table in December and January, December 2021, January 2022, was does the United States claim the right to put missile systems in Ukraine?
And Blinken told Lavrov in January 2022, the United States reserves the right to put missile systems wherever it wants. That's your putative ally. And now let's put intermediate missile systems back in Germany. The United States walked out of the INF treaty in 2019. There is no nuclear arms framework right now.
None. When Zelensky said in seven days, let's negotiate, I know the details of this exquisitely because I talked to all the parties in detail. Within a couple of weeks, there was a document exchanged that President Putin had approved, that Lavrov had presented, that was being managed by the Turkish mediators. I flew to Ankara to listen in detail to what the mediators were doing. Ukraine walked away unilaterally from a near agreement.
The End of the Ukraine War
Why? Because the United States told them to. Because the UK added icing to the cake by having BoJo go in early April to Ukraine and explain. And he has recently and if your security is in the hands of Boris Johnson, God help us all. Keith Starmer turns out to be even worse.
It's unimaginable, but it is true. Boris Johnson has explained, and you can look it up on the website, that what's at stake here is Western hegemony. Not Ukraine, Western hegemony. Michael and I met at the Vatican with a group in the spring of 2022 where we wrote a document explaining nothing good can come out of this war for Ukraine. Negotiate now because anything that takes time will mean massive amounts of deaths, risk of nuclear escalation, and likely loss of the war.
I want to change one word from what we wrote then. Nothing was wrong in that document. And since that document, since the US talked the negotiators away from the table, about a million Ukrainians have died or been severely wounded. And the American senators who are as nasty and cynical and corrupt as imaginable say this is wonderful expenditure of our money because no Americans are dying. It's the pure proxy war.
One of our senators nearby me, Blumenthal, says this out loud. Mitt Romney says this out loud. It's best money America can spend. No Americans are dying. It's unreal.
Now, just to bring us up to yesterday, this failed. This project failed. The idea of the project was that Russia would fold its hand. The idea all along was Russia can't resist, as Zbigniew Brzezinski explained in 1997. The Americans thought we have the upper hand.
We're going to win because we're going to bluff them. They're not really going to fight. They're not really going to mobilize. The nuclear option of cutting them out of SWIFT, that's going to do them in. The economic sanctions, that's going to do them in.
The HIMARS, that's going to do them in. The ATACMS, the F-16s. Honestly, I've listened to this for 70 years. I've listened to it as semi-understanding, I'd say, for about 56 years. They speak nonsense every day.
My country. My government. This is so familiar to me. Completely familiar. I begged the Ukrainians. And I had a track record with the Ukrainians. I advised the Ukrainians I'm not anti-Ukrainian, pro-Ukrainian completely. I said, save your lives. Save your sovereignty. Save your territory.
Be neutral. Don't listen to the Americans. I repeated to them the famous adage of Henry Kissinger, that to be an enemy of the United States is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal. Okay? So let me repeat that for Europe.
To be an enemy of the United States is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal. So let me now finalize, a few words about Trump. Trump does not want the losing hand. This is why it is more likely than not this war will end because Trump and President Putin will agree to end the war. If Europe does all its great warmongering, it doesn't matter.
The war is ending. So get it out of your system. Please tell your colleagues. It's over. And it's over because Trump doesn't want to carry a loser.
That's it. It's not some great morality he doesn't want to carry a loser. This is a loser. The one that will be saved by the negotiations taking place right now is Ukraine. Second is Europe.
Your stock market's rising in recent days by the horrible news of negotiations. I know this has been met with the sheer horror in these chambers, But this is the best news that you could get. Now I encouraged they don't listen to me, but I tried to reach out to some of the European leaders. Most don't want to hear anything from me at all. But I said, don't go to Kyiv.
Go to Moscow. Discuss with your counterparts. Are you kidding? You're Europe. You're 450 million people.
You're 20 trillion dollar economy. You should be the main economic trading partner of Russia, its natural links. By the way, if anyone would like to discuss how the US blew up Nord Stream, I'd be happy to talk about that. So the Trump administration is imperialist at heart. It is a great powers dominate the world.
It is we will do what we want when we can. We will be better than a senescent Biden and will cut our losses where we have to. There are several war zones in the world, the Middle East being another. We don't know what will happen with that. Again, if Europe had a proper policy, you could stop that war.
I'll explain how. But war with China is also a possibility. So I'm not saying that we're at the new age of peace, but we are in a very different kind of politics right now. And Europe should have a foreign policy. And not just a foreign policy of Russophobia, a foreign policy that is a realistic foreign policy that understands Russia's situation, that understands Europe's situation, that understands what America is and what it stands for, that tries to avoid Europe being invaded by the United States because it's not impossible that America will just land troops in Danish territory.
I'm not joking, and I don't think they're joking. And Europe needs a foreign policy, A real one. Not a, yes, we'll bargain with Mr. Trump and meet him halfway. You know what that will be like? Give me a call afterwards.
Please don't have American officials as head of Europe. Have European officials. Please have a European foreign policy. You're going to be living with Russia for a long time, so please negotiate with Russia. There are real security issues on the table, but the bombast and the Russophobia is not serving your security at all.
It's not serving Ukraine's security at all. It contributed to a million casualties in Ukraine from this idiotic American adventure that you signed on to and then became the lead cheerleaders of solves nothing. On the Middle East, by the way, the US completely handed over foreign policy to Netanyahu 30 years ago. The Israel lobby dominates American politics. Just have no doubt about it.
I could explain for hours how it works. It's very dangerous. I'm hoping that Trump will not destroy his administration and worse the Palestinian people because of Netanyahu who I regard as a war criminal, properly indicted by the ICC. And that needs to be told no more. That there will be a state of Palestine on the borders of the fourth of June 1967, according to international law, as the only way for peace.
It's the only way for Europe to have peace on your borders with the Middle East is the two-state solution. There is only one obstacle to it, by the way, and that is the veto of the United States and the UN Security Council. So if you want to have some influence, tell the United States, drop the veto. You are together with 180 countries in the world. The only ones that oppose a Palestinian state are the United States, Israel, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Mr. Malay, and Paraguay.
So this is a place where Europe could have a big influence. Europe has gone silent about the JCPOA and Iran. Netanyahu's greatest dream in life is the war between the United States and Iran. He's not given up, And it's not impossible that that would come also. And that's because the US in this regard does not have an independent foreign policy.
It is run by Israel. It's tragic. It's amazing, by the way. And it could end. Trump may say that he wants foreign policy back.
Maybe. I'm hoping that it's the case. Finally, let me just say with respect to China, China is not an enemy. China is just a success story. That's why it is viewed by the United States as an enemy, because China is a bigger economy than the United States.
That's all. Very well.
Q&A Session
MICHAEL VON DER SCHULENBURG: Now questions. Please don't make any statements. Just make questions because we are too many, and we we don't have that all that much time.
So, where do I start? I start with on the left side. I have a preference to the left. As you know, you come over. Yeah. Go ahead.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Thank you, Jeffrey Sachs. From the Czech Republic, we are glad we have you here. We have a problem. We were caused by a witch who told mugged the EU and the EU is mugged.
So it won't be improved until 2029. But what we, the Central Europeans, should do in the meantime, especially if the Germans don't happen to vote for Sarawakeng next enough, Are we supposed to create some kind of neutrality for the Central Europe? Or what would you suggest us to do?
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: So, first of all, all my grandchildren are Czech, I want you to know. And Sonia is Czech born and Czech citizen, so we're very proud.
I'm the trailing spouse in this, but I'm a Czech wannabe. Europe needs to have a foreign policy that is a European foreign policy. And it needs to be a realist foreign policy. Realist is not hate. Realist is actually trying to understand both sides and to negotiate.
There are two kinds of realists, a defensive realist and an offensive realist. My dear friend, John Mearsheimer, who is the offensive realist, we're very close friends and I love him. But I believe more than he does, you talk to the other side and you find a way to make an understanding. And so basically, Russia is not going to invade Europe. This is the fundamental point.
It may get up to the Dnieper River. It's not going to invade Europe. But there are real issues. The main issue for Russia was the United States because Russia, as a major power and the largest nuclear power in the world, was profoundly concerned about US unipolarity from the beginning. Now that this is seemingly possibly ending, Europe has to open negotiations directly with Russia as well Because the United States will quickly lose interest, and you're going to be living with Russia for the next thousands of years.
Okay? So what do you want? You want to make sure that the Baltic states are secure. The best thing for the Baltic states is to stop their Russophobia. This is the most important thing.
Estonia has about 25 percent Russian citizens or Russian speaking citizens, ethnic Russians. Latvia, the same. Don't provoke the neighbor. That's all. This is not hard.
It really isn't hard. And, again, I want to explain my point of view. I have helped these countries, the ones I'm talking about, trying to advise I'm not their enemy, I'm not Putin's puppet, I'm not Putin's apologist. I worked in Estonia. They gave me I don't it's not I think it's the second highest civilian honor that a president of Estonia can bestow on a non-national because I designed their currency system for them in 1992.
So I'm giving them advice. Do not stand there, Estonian, and say, we want to break up Russia. Are you kidding? Don't. This is not how to survive in this world.
You survive with mutual respect, actually. You survive in negotiation. You survive in discussion. You don't outlaw the Russian language. Not a good idea when 25 percent of your population has the first language of Russian.
It's not right. Even if there weren't a giant on the border. It wouldn't be the right thing to do. You'd have it as an official language. You'd have a language of, in lower school.
You wouldn't antagonize the Russian Orthodox Church. So, basically, we need to behave like grown-ups. And when I constantly say that they're acting like children, Sonia always says to me, that's unfair to children. Because this is worse than children. We have a six-year-old granddaughter and a three-year-old grandson, and they actually make up with their friends.
And we don't tell them, go. Just just ridicule them tomorrow and every day. We say go give them a hug and go play, and they do. This is not hard. By the way well, anyway, I won't belabor the point.
Thank you. So elect a new government. No, I shouldn't say that. What all all I should say is change change policy. I don't want to have a political Does that work? Yeah.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Hi. My name is Keira. I'm a reporter with The Brussels Times. Thank you for the fascinating talk, Jeffrey.
I just wanted to ask you about Trump's statements about wanting NATO members to increase their spending by five percent, and we're now seeing lots of countries scrambling to prove that they're going to do that, including Belgium. And given that Belgium is also the NATO headquarters, I wanted to ask you what would be the appropriate response to those statements by NATO members. Thanks.
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: We don't see exactly eye to eye on this question. So let me let me give you my own, my own view.
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: My first recommendation, with all respect to Brussels, is move the NATO headquarters somewhere else. I mean it seriously because one of the worst parts of European policy right now is a complete confusion of Europe and NATO. These are completely different, but they became exactly the same. Europe is much better than NATO. In my opinion, NATO isn't even needed anymore.
I would have ended it in 1991. But because the US viewed it as a instrument of hegemony, not as a defense against Russia, it continued afterwards. But the confusion of NATO and Europe is deadly. Because expanding Europe meant expanding NATO. Period.
And these should have been completely different things. So this is the first point. My own view, again, with all respect to Michael, we only had a brief conversation about it, is that Europe should have Europe basically should have its own foreign policy and its own military security, its own strategic autonomy, so called. And it should. I'm in favor of that.
I would disband NATO, and maybe Trump is going to do it anyway. Maybe Trump's going to invade Greenland. Who knows? Then you're really going to find out what NATO means. So I do think that Europe should invest in its security.
Five percent is outlandish, ridiculous, absurd, Completely absurd. No one needs to spend anything like that amount. Two to three percent of GDP, probably under the current circumstances. What I would do, by the way, is buy European production. Because, actually, strangely, weirdly, unfortunately in this world, and it's a true truism, but it's unfortunate, so I'm not championing it, a lot of technological innovation spins off from the military sector because governments invest in the military sector.
So Trump is a arms salesman. You understand that. He's selling American arms. He is selling American technology. Vance told you a few days ago, don't even think about having your own AI technology.
So please understand that this increase of spending is for the United States, not for you. And in this sense, I'm completely against that approach. But I would not be against an approach of Europe spending two to three percent of GDP for a unified European security structure and invested in Europe and European technology and not having the United States dictate the use of European technology. It's so interesting. It's the Netherlands that produces the only machines of advanced semiconductors, extreme ultraviolet lithography.
It's ASML. But America determines every policy of ASML. The Netherlands doesn't even have a footnote. I wouldn't do that if I were you, hand over all security to the United States. I wouldn't do it.
I would have your own security framework so you can have your own foreign policy framework as well. Europe stands for lots of things that the United States does not stand for. Europe stands for climate action. By the way, rightly so because our president is completely bonkers on this. And Europe stands for decency, for social democracy, as an ethos.
I'm not talking about a party. I'm talking about an ethos of how equality of life occurs. Europe stands for multilateralism. Europe stands for the UN Charter. The US stands for none of those things.
You know that our secretary of state Marco Rubio canceled his trip to South Africa because on the agenda was equality and sustainability. And he said, I'm not getting into that. That is an honest reflection of deep Anglo Saxon libertarianism. Egalitarianism is not a word of the American lexicon. Sustainable development?
Not at all. You probably know, by the way, that of the 193 UN member states, 191 have had SDG plans presented as voluntary national reviews. 191. Two have not. Haiti and the United States of America.
The Biden administration wasn't even allowed to say sustainable development goals. The treasury had a policy not to say sustainable development goals. Okay. I mentioned all of this because you need your own foreign policy. I issue a report two reports each year.
One, the World Happiness Report. And 18 of the top 20 countries, if I remember correctly, are European. This is the highest quality of life in the whole world. So you need your own policy to protect that quality of life. The United States ranks way down.
And the other report where's my colleague Guillaume, is somewhere in the room. Here there he is. Guillaume La Fortunes is the lead author of our annual sustainable development report. And almost all of the top 20 countries are European countries because you believe in this stuff. And that's why you're the happiest except in geopolitics, but quality of life.
So you need your own foreign policy, but you won't have it unless you have your own security. You just won't. And so and by the way, 27 countries cannot each have their own foreign policy. This is a problem. You need a European foreign policy and a European security structure.
And by the way, although Michael assures me it's dead, I was the greatest fan of OSCE and believed that OSCE is the proper framework for European security. It could really work. Thank you very much. Yeah. Okay.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Well, thank you, professor. I'm from Slovakia, and my prime minister Robert Fritze was almost shot dead because the opinions you had, the similar with him. Yes. We are, as a Slovakia, a Slovak government of the few countries in the European Union, we are talking to Russians. Two months ago, I was talking with Mr. Medvedev.
In two weeks, I will be talking, in Duma with Mr. Slutsky, who is the chairman of the Russian Foreign Affairs Committee in Moscow. Maybe my question is, what would you be your message to Russians in this moment? Because as I heard, they're on the victorious wave. They have no reason to not to conquer the Donbas because that's their war aim. And what can Trump offer to them, to stop the war immediately?
What would he what would be the message, for Russians from your side? Thank you very much.
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Lots of important things are now on offer and on the table. And I believe that the war will end quickly because of this. And this will be at least one blessing in a very, very difficult time.
Exactly what the settlement will be, I think, is now only a question of the territorial issues. And that is whether it is the complete four Oblast, including all of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia or whether it is on the contact line and how all of this will be negotiated. I'm not in the room of the negotiations, so I can't really say more. But the basis will be there will be territorial concessions, there will be neutrality, there will be security guarantees for Ukraine for all parties, there will be, at least with the U.S, an end of the economic sanctions.
But what counts, of course, is Europe and Russia. I think that there are and maybe there will be a restoration of nuclear arms negotiations, which would be extraordinarily positive. I think that there are tremendously important issues for Europe to negotiate directly with Russia. And so I would urge, President Costa and the leadership of Europe to open direct discussions with President Putin because European security is on the table. I know the Russian leaders, many of them, quite well.
They are good negotiators, and, you should negotiate with them, and you should negotiate well with them. I would ask them some questions. I would ask them, what are the security guarantees that can work so that this war ends permanently? What are the security guarantees for the Baltic states? What should be done?
Part of the process of negotiation is actually to ask the other side about your concerns, not just to know what they know as you think is too true, but actually to ask, we have a real problem. We have a real worry. What are the guarantees? Well, I want to know the answers also. By the way, I know Mr. Lavrov, Minister Lavrov, for 30 years.
I regard him as a brilliant foreign minister. Talk with him. Negotiate with him. Get ideas. Put ideas on the table.
Put counter ideas on the table. I don't think, all of this can be settled, by pure reason because, of oneself. You settle wars by negotiating and understanding what are the real issues. And you don't call the other side a liar when they express their issues. You work out what the implications of that are for the mutual benefit of peace.
So the most important thing is stop the yelling, stop the warmongering, and discuss with the Russian counterparts. And don't beg to be at the table with the United States. You don't need to be in the room with the United States. You're Europe. You should be in the room with Europe and Russia.
If the United States wants to join, that's fine. But to beg, no. And by the way, Europe does not need to have Ukraine in the room when Europe talks with Russia. You have a lot of issues. Direct issues.
Don't hand over your foreign policy to anybody, not to the United States, not to Ukraine, not to Israel. Keep a European foreign policy. This is the basic idea.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Hans Neuhoff from the Sovereignists political group in this parliament, alternative for Germany as political party. First of all, let me thank you, Mr. Sachs, for being here and sharing your ideas with us. And be assured that many of your ideas and of your colleague, John Mersheimer, have well been received by political groups here and have been integrated into our agenda. I widely share your views. Yet, there's one question regarding the historical account that you gave where I would like to go in some detail. This concerns the beginning of NATO expansion.
You reported from the website what Gorbachev heard that there are many quotations from Genscher, for example, that NATO will not move one inch eastwards. Now the two plus four treaty has been signed in September 1990, right, in Moscow. So at that point in time, the Warsaw Pact still existed. And countries like Poland, Hungary and Czechia were not part of the negotiations for the two and four treaty. So the Warsaw Pact actually dissolved in July 1991, and the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991.
So nobody who was present in the negotiations could speak for Poland, could speak for Hungary, could speak for Slovakia, that they would not try to become member of NATO once the overall situation has changed. So the counterargument, which we have to counter, is that it was on the will of these countries, of Poland, of Hungary, of Slovakia, that they wanted to join NATO because of the very history they had with the Soviet Union. And, of course, Russia was still perceived in a way as a follower of the Soviet Union. So how do you counter that argument?
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: I have no doubt of why Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia wanted to join NATO.
The question is what is the US doing to make peace? Because NATO is not a choice of Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, or Slovakia. NATO is a US led military alliance. And the question is, how are we going to establish peace in a reliable way? If I were making those decisions back then, I would have ended NATO altogether in 1991.
When those countries requested NATO, I would have explained to them what our defense secretary William Perry said, what our lead statesman George Kennan said, what our final ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock, said. They said, well, we understand your feelings, but it's not a good idea because it could provoke a new cold war with Russia. So that's how I would have answered it. When those countries joined, in the first wave, I don't think it was that consequential, in fact, except that it was part of a bigger project. And the project was spelled out already in 1994.
There's a very good book by Jonathan Haslam by Harvard University Press called Hubris, which gives a detailed historical documentation of step by step what happened. And, it's really worth reading. So this is now but the point I would really make is that Ukraine and Georgia were too far. This is right up against Russia. This is in the context of the complete destabilization of the nuclear framework.
This is in the context of the US putting in missile systems on Russia's borders. If you listen to President Putin over the years, probably the main thing, if you listen carefully, that he's concerned about is missiles seven minutes from Moscow, is a decapitation strike. And this is very real. The US not only would freak out, but did freak out when this happened in the Western Hemisphere. So it's the Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse.
And fortunately, Nikita Khrushchev did not stand up and say, open door policy of the Warsaw Pact. We can go wherever we want. Cuba's asked us. It's none of America's business. What Khrushchev said is war, my god.
We don't want war. We end this crisis. We both pull back. That's what Khrushchev and Kennedy decided in the end. So this is the real consequential.
Russia even swallowed with a lot of pain the Baltic states, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Slovenia. It is Ukraine and Georgia. And it's because of geography. It's because of Lord Palmerston. It's because of the first Crimean War.
It's because of the missile systems that this is the essence of why there was this war.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Thank you very much, Professor Sachs, for coming. You've mentioned that the European Union needs to formulate its own foreign policy. In the past, the German Franco Alliance was a big driver for those policies. Now with the Ukraine war, arguably, that receives a crack.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Do you think that in the future, when the European Union is going to formulate its new foreign policy, that they're going to be again in the front seat? Or should it be other countries or other blocks trying to make that change?
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Oh, it's hard. It's hard because, of course, you don't yet have a constitution for Europe, which really underpins a European foreign policy. And it can't be by unanimity.
There has to be a structure in which Europe can speak as Europe, even with some dissent, but with the European policy. I don't want to oversimplify how to get there exactly, but even with the structures you have, you could do a lot better with negotiating directly. The first rule is your diplomats should be diplomats, not secretaries of war. Honestly, that would go halfway, at least, to where you want to go. A diplomat is a very special kind of talent.
A diplomat is trained to sit together with the other side and to listen, to shake hands, to smile, and to be pleasant. It's very hard. It's a skill. It's training. It's a profession.
It's not a game. You need that kind of diplomacy. I'm sorry. We are not hearing anything like that. I'll just make a couple complaints.
First, Europe is not NATO, as I said. I thought Stoltenberg was the worst, but I was wrong. It just keeps getting worse. Could someone in NATO stop talking, for God's sake, about more war? And could NATO stop speaking for Europe And Europe stop thinking it's NATO.
This is the first absolute point. Second, I'm sorry, but your high representative vice presidents need to become diplomats. Diplomacy means going to Moscow, inviting your Russian counterpart here, discussing this doesn't happen till now. So this is really my point. Now I believe that Europe should become more integrated and more unified in the years ahead.
I'm a strong believer in subsidiarity. So we were discussing, I don't think housing policy is really Europe's main issue. I think this can be handled at the local level, or at the national level. I don't see it as a European issue. But I don't see foreign policy as being a 27 country issue.
I see it being as a European issue. And I see security being at a European level. So I think things need to be readjusted. But I'd like to see more Europe for truly European issues and maybe less Europe for things that are properly subsidiary to Europe at the national and the local level. And I hope that such an evolution can take place.
You know, when the world talks about great powers right now, they talk about US, Russia, China. I include India. And I really want to include Europe. And I really want to include Africa as an African Union, and I want that to happen. But you'll notice on the list, Europe doesn't show up right now, and this is because there is no European foreign policy.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Thank you very much, and thank you very much, professor, for this very courageous speech, very clear speech also that you made. I'm an MEP from Luxembourg. My question is the following. What are the long term consequences of this lost war? We lost the war.
Now we have an uncertain future for NATO. We have also clearly, and you referred to it, the marginalization of Europe. We have, a strengthening of the BRICS countries, which can be rivals in many respects. So will there be a future for a collective West over the next 20 or 30 years? Thank you very much.
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: I don't believe there is a collective West. I believe that there is a United States and Europe that are, in some areas, in parallel interests and in many areas, not in parallel interest. I want Europe to lead sustainable development, climate transformation, global decency. I believe if the world looked more like Europe, it'd be a happier, more peaceful, safer world. And long longevity and better food, by the way.
But, just saying, in any event, Europe has a vocation that is rather different from the American tradition and, frankly, from the Anglo Saxon tradition because it's been 200 years of Anglo Saxon hegemony or aspirational hegemony. The British still believe they've run the world. It's amazing what nostalgia means. They don't even stop. It's almost like a Monty Python skit, actually.
But in any event, where was I? I'm thinking of Monty Python when the night gets all his limbs cut off and says, Everything's fine. I'm victorious. That's Britain, unfortunately. And so it's, it's really terrible.
So, no, I don't believe in the collective West. I don't believe in the global south. I don't believe in, all these geographies don't even make sense because I'm actually I look at maps a lot and the global south is mostly in the north and the west is not even west. And so I don't even understand what this is about. I do believe that we could be in a true age of abundance if we got our heads on straight.
We're in the biggest technological advance in human history. It's truly amazing what can be done right now. You know, I marvel at the fact that somebody who knows no chemistry won the Nobel Peace Prize for chemistry because he's very good at deep neural networks, a genius, Demis Hassabis. They figured out protein folding that generations of biochemists spent their whole lives on. And now DeepMind figured out how to do it by the thousands of proteins.
We have friends that spent their entire life on one protein, brilliant friends. And now what we can do. So if actually and same with renewable energy, as everybody knows, the prices come down by more than two orders of magnitude, the costs. We could transform the planet, we could protect the climate system, we could protect biodiversity, we could ensure every child gets a good education, we could do so many wonderful things right now. And so what do we need to do that?
In my view, we need peace, most importantly. And my basic point is there are no deep reasons for conflict anywhere because every conflict I study is just a mistake. It's not we are not struggling for Lebensraum. That idea that came from Malthus and that became a Nazi idea was always a wrong idea. It was a mistake, a fundamental intellectual mistake.
An intellectual mistake, by the way, because leading scientists adopted the idea that we had race wars. We had national wars. We had wars of survival because we don't have enough on the planet. As an economist, I can tell you, we have plenty on the planet for everybody's development. Plenty.
We're not in a conflict with China. We're not in a conflict with Russia. If we calm down, if you ask about the long term, the long term is very good. Thank you. The long term, if we don't blow ourselves up, is very good.
And so this is what we should aim for, a positive shared vision under international law. Because of our technology, things operate at a regional scale now. It used to be it was villages, then it was, it was small areas, then it was unification of countries. Now it's regional. That's not just because regions are wonderful.
It's because the underlying technological reality say Europe should be an integrated area by transport, by fast rail, by digital, by and so there's Europe. The politics follows the technological realities to a very important extent. We're in a world of regions now. So Europe should be Europe with subsidiarity. Don't lose all of the wonderful wonderful national and local elements.
But Europe should be Europe. So the good side is, let's I want Europe to have diplomacy, for example, with ASEAN. I spend a lot of time with the ASEAN countries. If the the EU green deal, wonderful idea. I said many years ago, okay, to the ASEAN leaders, make an ASEAN green deal.
And then talk with the Europeans so that you have this wonderful relationship, trade, investment, technology. So last year, they announced an ASEAN green deal. What did Europe do about it? Nothing. It said, sorry.
We're in the Ukraine war. Thank you. No interest. So this is my point. The prospects are very positive if we construct the peace.
MICHAEL VON DER SCHULENBURG: Because we have to go, I get all the time messages that I sort of leave the room. Short. Can you start with something very short?
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Yes. Thank you a lot for the lecture.
I wanted to ask, do you think where out of the conflict is some sort of style of Finlandization? And then also, do you think that's what's is that the way you would have liked to see, for example, Finland and Sweden's nature process that, like is that what you would have like to see in, like, Sweden and Finland's foreign policy as an example? Like, is that instead of them becoming members of NATO, is that the way that you would have liked to see these countries handed off foreign policy? And do you think that these countries that border Russia should just kind of succumb to their faith that, okay, we can't provoke Russia, like this is the way we have to live?
PROFESSOR JEFFREY SACHS: Very good. Excellent question.
And let me just report one part about Finlandization. Finlandization landed Finland number one in the World Happiness Report year after year. Rich, successful, happy, and secure. That's pre-NATO. So Finlandization was a wonderful thing.
Number one in the world. When Sweden and Finland and Austria were neutral, bravo. Smart. When Ukraine was neutral, smart. If you have two superpowers, keep them apart a little bit.
You don't have to be right with your nose up against each other, especially if one of them, the US, is pushing its nose into the other one. And so Finlandization, to my mind, has a very positive connotation. So does Austria. Austria, 1955, signed its neutrality. The Soviet army left.
And Austria is a wonderful place, by the way. Absolutely wonderful. And so this is basic how to avoid conflict. If the United States had any sense at all, it would have left these countries as the neutral space in between the US military and Russia, but that's where the US lost it.
MICHAEL VON DER SCHULENBURG: Thank you very much.
I just want to end with an appeal. I think we both agree that we will have a the war will end within a month or two. That means the fighting will end. It doesn't mean that we will have peace in Europe. The peace in Europe, that has to be done by us, by Europeans, not by a president from the United States.
We have to create this peace. And that is Europe, which includes, of course, Belarus, Russia, and all these other countries. So we have to do something. And we are here at parliament. We have as parliamentarians, we represent people.
We are the only legitimate democratic and legitimate institution in the European Union. Maybe we should have become all a little bit more proactive in trying to move this peace process forward across party lines. I think I don't know how many parties here really are, but that we can talk to each other without saying, oh, you're from this party, you're from this party. I think we really have to concentrate. If here, we could not take more initiative from the parliament vis-a-vis the commission and saying, we are presenting the people, not you.
We are presenting the people. And these people in Europe, one piece, and that's what we should go. So maybe this is the beginning of when we will make every month, I will organize with my colleagues the same thing here about different topics, which were all around it. And we hope that this one we get in discussion. That is different what we have in the plenum where we basically don't have a discussion, but that we have a discussion and take also across the party and invite also people from other political parties.
We don't invite anybody. Let's discuss it. In the end, we want all want this the same piece for the next generation. And I have plenty of children, grandchildren, you too, and that's what we need. Okay.
Thank you very much, professor.
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