Jeffrey Sachs is an economist at Columbia University and the author of the book A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism, which argues that both Democratic and Republican presidents are worsening global instability. He joins today to explain his critique of American foreign policy. We discuss some of the most pressing dilemmas in the world today from the war in Ukraine to tensions with China and Prof. Sachs explains why he believes U.S. policy is worsening the prospects for global peace.

nathan j. Robinson 

One of the themes that runs through your writing on foreign policy is that the end of the Cold War was a missed opportunity to forge a lasting global peace, in large part attributable to the hubris and arrogance of U.S. leaders. Could you elaborate on that? It seems like a really critical point.

jeffrey Sachs 

The Cold War ended in part because the Soviet system was a miserable system, and in part because Mikhail Gorbachev was a gifted and wonderful person who believed in peace. He ended the Cold War more than anybody else. He said, "we're not going to shoot people who disagree with the Soviet Union." It’s a little known fact, which I happen to know firsthand, but most others don't know, that in 1989, Gorbachev helped to broker the entry of Solidarity into the Polish government, just the opposite of what you would expect of Soviet behavior. What Gorbachev wanted was peace, normalcy, cooperation. He talked about a common European home and about a common European space from Rotterdam to Vladivostok.

The U.S. could not take yes for an answer. In our view—our, not mine, but in our government's view—we won the Cold War. We defeated the Soviet Union. We now had all the chips. We could do what we wanted. That became the official doctrine, I would say, of the last year of the Bush administration, the tacit doctrine of Madeleine Albright and Bill Clinton, and then later Hillary Clinton, the belief of the so-called neocons.

It was the strategy that was implemented from 1992 onward, and it was implemented with increasing hubris over time, and a more and more radical view over time that we would be the single unchallengeable power in the world. We would have what came to be called “full-spectrum dominance” in every region of the world. We would call the shots. We would take out a number of governments, as General Wesley Clark has explained to us on numerous occasions on his discussions inside the Pentagon.

No one follows up on these things, by the way. Wesley Clark was told we're going to have several wars of choice, and we will take out regimes that we don't like. I recently looked at a manuscript by a Pentagon insider who also described how the Israelis were pushing for the U.S. to take out Saddam Hussein and to take out others that they thought were Israel's antagonists, and a lot of people in the administration felt that, sure we can do that—we're the only superpower in the world. So, in my view, we completely blew it.

And I measured that recently by noting that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock, which is a measure by one group of experts that I find very sound and subtle and sophisticated of how close we are to nuclear war. They put the clock at the maximum distance from Armageddon—maximum distance from midnight—in 1992 at 17 minutes from midnight, after having started the clock in 1947 at seven minutes to midnight. So, when the Cold War ended, we were safe. What have we done since then? We're now 90 seconds to midnight, according to the doomsday clock.

Boy, how stupid can one be to have so much power, so much opportunity, and to squander it so badly?

Robinson 

Importantly, you fault both Democratic and Republican presidents here. I was looking back at your 2018 book, A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism, and a lot of that is spent criticizing Donald Trump's foreign policy and his belligerence, with a lot of the themes that you’ve mentioned here—that the United States believes doesn't have to listen to anyone else and obey international law. You certainly hear that quite openly from the right. But importantly, you are just as scathingly critical of Joe Biden's foreign policy, which you call bankrupt and reckless. So, perhaps you could elaborate because there are many people who will say they see that in Donald Trump, but not in the moderate, centrist, pragmatic Joe Biden.

Sachs 

First of all, I'm an absolutely equal opportunity complainer. I think both parties are miserable. Both parties are in the grips of the military industrial complex. Both parties get funded by the military industrial complex. If anything, right now—it's only a close call, so I don't want to overemphasize it—the Democrats are more warmongers than the Republicans at the moment. But I don't want to emphasize that point because I think both are miserable.

So, if we go back to 1993, Bill Clinton comes in, and we’re 17 minutes from midnight on the Doomsday cCock, and what does Clinton start? With Madeleine Albright and the other neocons in his administration, he starts NATO enlargement. It's true—I want to emphasize to everybody—we really did truly promise that we would not move NATO one inch eastward, and it wasn't a semantic gimmick. It was a repeated point made by [former Secretary of State] James Baker III and by Hans Dietrich Genscher, the German foreign minister, to the leadership of the Soviet Union and Russia.

Clinton immediately started to cheat and plan the expansion, which started with the three countries of Central Europe: Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Russia was very unhappy, but not crushingly unhappy because these were Central European countries. These are not countries on Russia's border, except for the technicality of Kaliningrad, but generally, these are far from the mainland of Russia. But [former National Security Advisor] Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1997 laid it out very clearly in an essay in Foreign Affairs called "A Geostrategy for Eurasia," where he said, this is going to continue. We start here. We go on to the Baltic states. We go on to Ukraine and Georgia, and we surround Russia in the Black Sea. We render Russia a second rate power, because without Ukraine, Russia is only a second rate power.

So, the agenda was spelled out very clearly, and these things take years. He said that the time for Ukraine's membership in NATO would be the second half of the aughts—2005 to 2010. It was in 2008 that we made the invitation under George W. Bush's administration with Victoria Nuland, famously the ambassador of Bush to NATO, to have NATO enlarged to Georgia and Ukraine. So, George W. Bush was a neocon par excellence. But of course, it was Cheney, who had been the Secretary of Defense and now Vice President, that pushed a lot of the agenda. Victoria Nuland is always there. That's one thing you could say: she's always part of it with any administration. 

Robinson 

This is your new colleague, Victoria Nuland. 

Sachs 

She is, absolutely. Coming in to teach "diplomacy."

I should add, by the way, Bill Clinton had the idea of bombing Belgrade 78 days in a row. Oh my god, talk about war in the center of Europe—completely irresponsible and internationally illegal actions.

Then we have Afghanistan, and we have Iraq.

Then comes Obama. Obama does the same. He tasks the CIA with overthrowing Syria's President, Bashar al-Assad, in operation Timber Sycamore. He assigns NATO the task of bombing and overthrowing Libya.

By the way, I spoke with a world leader yesterday, and we talked about this. I asked, "why Libya? Why bombing?" Well, this very esteemed president said, probably because of [former French President] Sarkozy's personal feud with Muammar Gaddafi. Really? Yes, probably. Well, why Obama? It’s hard to know. This is how weird this situation is, and it's true: we went to Libya on completely false premises, as we did with Iraq, and unleashed mayhem in that country for the next 13 years, but also mayhem across the Sahel of Africa, with all those weapons, jihadists, and the military capacity that had been part of the Libyan scene suddenly spreading across North Africa and the Sahel.

Then Donald Trump: a very odd character in a lot of ways, but he immediately dumps the JCPOA (The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), the plan with Iran for Iran's denuclearization in return for ending the sanctions regime and reestablishing normal trade relations. He dumps that, and he starts the campaign against China, unilateral tariffs and sanctions and everything else, which, by the way, is internationally illegal. Why? Because the U.S. can do what it wants.

Then comes Biden. I thought maybe we would have something a little more reasonable. Biden doubles down on everything. He's just a politician. He sees that Trump made hay with anti-China, he's going to double down on that, which he has done. The Ukraine war could absolutely have been ended. It started in 2014 with the U.S.-led, or U.S.- cooperated, coup in February 2014. Biden was part of that back then. He and Victoria Nuland were part of the coup. They were already in it, but Biden had an exit ramp in 2021. Putin wanted one key point, and this is verified by everyone who knows on the inside, and it's been said by [NATO Secretary General] Jens Stoltenberg and by Davyd Arakhamia, [Ukrainian President] Zelensky’s advisor, and many others.

This was a war launched in 2022—the war started eight years earlier, but this was to stop NATO enlargement. Biden could have stopped NATO enlargement and avoided this catastrophe. No, they thought, we can wipe Russia off the map. We can break them, take them out of SWIFT—take them out of the international financial system—impose comprehensive sanctions, put in HIMARS, our wonder weapons.

They really thought that this was just going to be great and dandy. We'll take out Russia, then we go on to China, because that's the neocon fantasy world, that the ultimate contest is with China. And so, Biden has played this all along. It's been a mess. It's been a disaster. It's been one miscalculation after another, but now we face a three-front debacle, or imbroglio, however you want to see it. One is Ukraine, one is Gaza and the Middle East, and the third is over Taiwan and East Asia. Every one badly managed.

Robinson 

Well, I assume that if I spoke to someone in the Biden administration and I presented what you've just said, they would treat me as if I'd portrayed the world upside down. They would say that NATO is a defensive alliance; Russia's invasion of Ukraine was aggression; the Biden administration has done a very good job managing the Ukraine war, and is keeping us out of a hot war with Russia; we are committed to defending countries around the world against aggression, which is the source of the conflict over Taiwan, and that the same is true of Israel, which was attacked on October 7.

How would you respond to someone who characterized the history that you've just laid out as a history of defense rather than offense?

Sachs 

Well, I would like them to do a little homework for maybe the first time. If they really asked that, I would smile and pat them on the back and say how cute that is. But I would regard it as absurd on substance. A good place to start is a very nice book, a PhD dissertation published as a book, by Lindsey O'Rourke on covert regime change. This is really a good primer for people who have some confusion on these matters.

U.S. foreign policy is based on regime change, because we're the Empire of the world. So when we don't like another government, we take it out. She records the regime change operations between 1947 and 1989, because she's doing a scholarly study and can open the archives for these earlier interventions. But there have been countless similar regime change operations since then.

There are two kinds of regime change operations that the U.S. engages in. One is open war, like overthrowing Saddam Hussein, bombing Belgrade and Libya, and trying to overthrow Bashar al-Assad and invading Iraq. These are wars of choice. They're not defensive operations, but they're part of a history since 1947 in the Americas. It goes back, actually, to the beginning of the 20th century, to 1898.

But these are regime change operations. That's American foreign policy. Everyone knows it around the world. One of the oldest jokes, maybe only semi-true, is: why is the United States the only country that's never had a coup? And the answer is, "Because we're the only country that doesn't have a U.S. embassy." Now, we may have had a coup in 1963 with the assassination of JFK, but I'll put that issue aside.

Everybody knows around the world the United States is not a peace-loving country. It's the empire of the day, and that's why they don't want it right on their border. They don't. 

Robinson 

You've pointed out there the disjunction, the divergence, between the United States' image of itself and the image held by other powers. 

Sachs 

I'd say most of the world. 

Robinson 

Yes, most of the world. I just wanted to bring up China here because you say in your book that China is being portrayed as a dangerously expansionist power, but this is like the pot calling the kettle black. It gets the picture entirely backwards in a very alarming way, because we see both parties are increasingly belligerent towards China. That leads to the buildup of armaments, of tensions, and the possibility of an utterly catastrophic war in the long term.

Sachs 

China is a very fascinating case because it's one of the great civilizations of the world, and of course, one of the longest-lasting civilizations. As a unified state, it's traditionally dated to 221 BC, when China became unified in a geography that is not so unlike China's geography today.

Now, China did expand its land base in part of its history, but China's boxed in if you look at it geographically. To the north of China are the drylands, or the steppe regions. China was repeatedly invaded from the north by nomadic invaders like the Mongols. To the west of China is the Himalayas. That's a pretty steep barrier. To the south of China are the tropical rainforests, and they have been an effective barrier as well. China skirmished with Vietnam throughout history, but Vietnam is Vietnam, not China, because the tropical rainforest barrier held. And to the east of China is the Pacific Ocean.

China's remained pretty much in that box for 2,000 years. China's statecraft never went for world colonies. China has not even been in a war since a one-month war with Vietnam more than 40 years ago. The U.S., in the meantime, has been in perpetual war. Interestingly, if you think about China’s proximity to Japan and compare it, say, with France and Britain, France and Britain were at each other's necks for most of a thousand years. They fought endlessly, sometimes in centuries long wars of competition. How many times did China invade Japan in 2,000 years? The answer is zero.

Now, the Mongols ruled China briefly in the Yuan Dynasty and the Mongols twice tried unsuccessfully to invade Japan in 1274 AD and in 1281 AD, 700 years ago. China never did. Interestingly, when Japan industrialized at the end of the 19th century, Japan invaded China. It invaded twice, in the 1890s and in the 1930s.

What's my point? We're saying that China's the belligerent? Are you kidding? We've been in non-stop war. China has not been at all. If we just have normal relations and accept the fact that, thank goodness, China is experiencing an economic rebound after a disastrous century at imperial hands—Britain, France, the U.S., Japan—and is now recovering from that, we should say, hurrah! Now we can have good relations.

Robinson 

Well, what you said there indicates a thread that runs through your writing and talking on U.S. foreign policy, which is that you are a self-described "internationalist." You believe in the possibility of countries working out their disputes diplomatically—I'm sure not always, but you believe that there is great potential for cooperation, for collaboration, for the building of mutual understanding.

In fact, that distinguishes you from some people who make what sound like similar criticisms to the one you make, for example the "realists" like John Mearsheimer. He’s had similar criticisms of the U.S. policy towards Ukraine, but says we should "pivot" to the inevitable competition with China. That is not your vision. You believe that we are not doomed towards an endless, terrible, apocalyptic clash.

Sachs 

In fact, you use the same word JFK used in his June 10, 1963, peace speech, where he said, "Some believe that war is inevitable, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Man can solve manmade problems," and Kennedy goes on in a beautiful way. I am as much a fan of what is possible as John F. Kennedy was.

So, John Mearsheimer and I are good friends. I admire him enormously. He is decent, bright, and smart. But I have one basic disagreement with him. His book is called The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. He's not offering a way out, and says tragedy is inevitable. And I say to him, "John, it's a tragedy! We can't accept the tragedy." He says, "Jeff, that's just how it is." And I say, "No! It's not that way." He says, "Yes, it is."

And so, that is the ongoing discussion between the two of us. Also, Kennedy said in his June 10, 1963 peace speech, "I speak of peace because of the new face of war," because he described what it means to be in the nuclear age. We've had wars throughout history, of course. Some would argue—I think John Mearsheimer would argue, most likely—that war is inevitable in some way, that it's part of the human psyche, the human makeup, the politics, the anarchy of the international environment.

But we live in an era when a war could end everything, and I think it forces us to rethink. If you look back at past wars, the one that is most on the minds of the historians these days is actually the Peloponnesian Wars from 431 BC to 404 BC, when Sparta and Athens faced off against each other. This has been used as a metaphor for the U.S. being Sparta and China being Athens, the rising power, and the possibility, or even inevitability, of conflict. Now the interesting thing about the Peloponnesian War, in addition to the great book that Thucydides produced about it, is that both Sparta and Athens lost in this terrible war that went on. They both ended their international political role because they were exhausted. What came next was Alexander the Great from Macedonia.

This is the real lesson: wars are incredibly destructive, and in a nuclear age, they could end everything. We have to be a lot more clever about our foreign policy today. By the way, you can read just about anywhere, but especially on the comment pages of our newspapers, people saying, don't be afraid of nuclear war; don't be nuclear blackmailed; the chances are low, and Putin won't do this.

Oh, my God. Be afraid. Come on. We have to find our way away from the cliff. 

Robinson

You say "Be afraid," but one of the things I appreciate about the book A New Foreign Policy is that you conclude by laying out steps that can be taken. There is an internationalist foreign policy that is possible. You say we need to just live by the UN Charter, commit to international organizations, follow international law. Believe in it. We are in this situation, in part, because we have declined to show any leadership in following the rules that if everyone followed, would avert the catastrophe that many see on the horizon.

Sachs

That's precisely right. And we're told you're a sap if you believe in those rules, and no one else is going to follow them. It's an old story. Many people will be familiar with the prisoner's dilemma. It’s the idea that cooperation is the best, but there's a temptation to cheat, and therefore cheating by both sides is inevitable and is the "rational" equilibrium of the prisoner's dilemma. It's just disastrous for the two prisoners. It's disastrous for two superpowers that are in a nuclear face off.

So, the question is, how can one have cooperation? Now, President Kennedy, in the peace speech, said even great powers can be counted on to observe treaties that are in their interest. He said, only those treaties that are in their interest. Ronald Reagan also wisely said, trust but verify. So, don't have blind trust, but trust. Because without trust, you can't cooperate, but verify as well. The idea is, let's think about how to avoid nuclear Armageddon, and think about how we can build relations rather than our current mode, which is to say the other side is evil and perfidious, and nothing can be done about it except war. This is what we're really being told, and it's wrong.

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.