RFK Jr. The Defender - June 09, 2023


Jeffrey Sachs On China

Topics
stop the new wars China development and competition century of humiliation
Hosted by
Robert F. Kennedy
Mentioned
Jeffrey Sachs Obama Deng Xiaoping Biden Zbigniew Brzezinski Kennedy Maduro Bobby George Kennan J. William Fulbright Hillary Clinton Nancy Pelosi Bill Perry Bill Burns Yushchenko Gorbachev Literally Yeltsin Mongols Taiping and 7 more
How To Fix the Economy with David Stockman Censorship and Twitter Files with Matt Taibbi

Episode Stats


Length

36 minutes

Words per minute

152.76

Word count

5,568

Sentence count

438

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

13

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Jeffrey Sachs is an American economist, academic, public policy analyst, and former Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He s known for his work on sustainable development and economic development, and the fight to end poverty. Jeffrey has been a friend of mine for a long time, and I'm so grateful to have him on the show today. We talk a lot about China, but I really wanted to talk to Jeffrey about one of the most important countries in the world, and that's Russia. Jeffrey is a great writer, so I really enjoyed having him on to talk about the Ukraine crisis. And I think you'll agree that he's one of my favorite people on the planet. Jeffrey's work can be found at his website: JeffreySachs.org. His work has been featured in the New York Times, CNN, CBS, NPR, and many other publications. He's also a regular contributor to the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The Huffington Post. He's a good friend and a good human being. I hope you enjoy this episode, and tweet me if you do! to let me know what you thought of it! Timestamps: 3:00 - What was your favorite part of the episode? 4:15 - What do you think of it? 5:30 - How did you think it was? 6:40 - What would you do with it in the piece? 7:20 - What are you looking for? 8:00 9:10 - How do you feel about it? / Is it better? 11:30 12:40 13:00 -- What is your favorite thing? 15:10 16:00 Is it a little bit more? 17:00 + 9? 14:15 15 + 6 + 6 17 + 5 + 6 = 6 + 7 #1 5 + 5 6) 8) 9) Is it more than 5 ? 7) 5) #5 + 6) + 6?) 11) 6) 4) 6 6 7 5 #7 ) 10) + 5) #6 & 7?) #8) ) Also 2) And v=4 3) & 5 ) &

Transcript

Transcripts from "RFK Jr. The Defender" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.
00:00:00.000 I've got my friend Jeffrey Sachs back on here as one of my heroes.
00:00:04.000 And Jeffrey Sachs is an American economist, academic, public policy analyst, and former director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, where he holds the title of university professor.
00:00:15.000 He's known for his work on sustainable development and economic development and the fight to end poverty.
00:00:21.000 I just read the first paragraph of a long Wikipedia piece, and that's all I'm going to give because you've been on here before and people know who you are.
00:00:28.000 Great to be with you again.
00:00:30.000 I know, you know, I know this is kind of an informal discussion, and we both kind of booked this at the last minute.
00:00:35.000 But I wanted to, I really want to talk to you about China.
00:00:37.000 But before we talk, before we came online, you were telling me that, because I was saying to you that you wrote a beautiful synopsis of the Ukraine war, which I tweeted about.
00:00:47.000 I didn't want to talk to you today about the Ukraine, because I've done so many shows on it that I think the listeners are going to get tired of it.
00:00:54.000 And your take on the war is...
00:00:56.000 Basically identical to mine, but you wrote this very, very, really useful synopsis that then you publish on your website and I tweeted and it kind of had the whole setup about, you know, the provocations that led up to the war and how the principal doyans, the most respected graybeards of American foreign policy in both political parties.
00:01:20.000 George Cannon, who, you know, who is the architect of the containment policy.
00:01:24.000 Bill Perry, who was the, who was Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense, who threatened to resign because he saw that we were provoking the Russians by moving NATO so close.
00:01:33.000 And then Bill Burns, who was the ambassador of Russia, who said this, you know, you can't...
00:01:38.000 And is now the CIA director, after all.
00:01:41.000 And he wrote that memo in 2008.
00:01:43.000 And he said, you know, you are going to provoke the Russians to war.
00:01:46.000 This is a line that you can't be crossed.
00:01:49.000 The title of his email was, Nyet means nyet.
00:01:53.000 You are crossing red lines here.
00:01:55.000 And you go back to Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was kind of the figurehead of the neocon movement.
00:02:02.000 Who, after we made the promises in 1991 and 1992, in exchange for Russia moving all of its troops out of East Germany and us unifying East Germany under NATO and promising we won't move NATO one inch to the east.
00:02:17.000 And then Brzezinski does this plan, publishes this plan in 1997 that lays out the rollout about how we're going to encircle Russia with NATO. And all these guys, the most respected people, are saying, you can't do that.
00:02:31.000 You've got to stop treating Russia like an enemy, or she's going to become an enemy.
00:02:36.000 It's going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, and you're going to provoke her.
00:02:39.000 You know, this was before Putin was in there, they were saying.
00:02:42.000 So you laid it out perfectly in this.
00:02:45.000 And you and I were talking, and you told me, I said, it's kind of a perfect editorial length.
00:02:52.000 It's about 800 words, right?
00:02:53.000 And you said, yeah, I wrote it for the New York Times, and that's the length that the Times asked you to do, 750 to 800.
00:03:00.000 You said that you gave it the Times, and you went in and argued with their editorial board.
00:03:05.000 They didn't want to hear you.
00:03:06.000 And I've had those kind of arguments with them on other issues.
00:03:08.000 It's just like talking to a wall.
00:03:11.000 And they're, you know, respectful, but, you know, it's like the words bounce off of them.
00:03:15.000 They're impervious to logic, to reason, to facts, to anything.
00:03:20.000 It's really extraordinary because these are some of the most intelligent, thoughtful people in the world, supposedly.
00:03:26.000 And yet logic has no impact on them.
00:03:30.000 They're armored against it.
00:03:32.000 And you said that then, they said, well, you can do an op-ed.
00:03:35.000 So you did the op-ed.
00:03:36.000 And they edited it.
00:03:38.000 They screw with it, as they always did.
00:03:39.000 And then, you know, at the last minute, they tell you, we're not going to go with it.
00:03:44.000 No, but the funny thing, by the way, I did the op-ed.
00:03:46.000 It was accepted.
00:03:48.000 We did some edits.
00:03:49.000 I thought the edits were fine.
00:03:51.000 They sent it back in the New York Times font.
00:03:54.000 That's the stage we were at.
00:03:56.000 We were at the stage where you press the button and it goes into the paper.
00:03:59.000 So it was all there.
00:04:02.000 I felt pretty good.
00:04:03.000 In fact, I have to say my family was amazed.
00:04:07.000 They're going to run your thing?
00:04:08.000 And I said, yeah, we really talked.
00:04:11.000 They disagreed, but they're going to run it.
00:04:13.000 And then the last moment when it's already in New York Times setting...
00:04:18.000 The editor writes me, oh, I have bad news.
00:04:21.000 Sorry, we're not going to run it.
00:04:22.000 One of our regular contributors is going to say something like this.
00:04:26.000 I don't want to clog the pages.
00:04:28.000 So it was, whoa, that's a little weird.
00:04:30.000 Like a story that relates to global survival.
00:04:35.000 You couldn't run one guest essay of a few hundred words in addition after accepting it.
00:04:42.000 So I said, who is it?
00:04:45.000 Silence.
00:04:46.000 So I looked day after day.
00:04:48.000 You know, who's this contributor that's saying that the war was provoked by NATO? Nothing like it.
00:04:54.000 Nothing like it.
00:04:56.000 So days go by.
00:04:57.000 You know, I write to them.
00:04:59.000 I'm still searching.
00:05:00.000 Who's your contributor?
00:05:01.000 Because now we're, you know, 10 days later.
00:05:04.000 I don't see anything like this.
00:05:06.000 And then a couple days ago, there was another unbelievably aggressive, we gotta get them the F-16s, another escalation, you know, on the road to what?
00:05:18.000 To Armageddon?
00:05:19.000 And so I said, oh, is that the piece?
00:05:21.000 You know, and of course they don't answer that also.
00:05:24.000 In other words, they just won't have a public debate.
00:05:29.000 That's it.
00:05:30.000 Not in their pages.
00:05:32.000 That's it.
00:05:33.000 They just want to feed a line and they don't want to hear any other lines, even for public discussion.
00:05:40.000 And this is an op-ed page.
00:05:43.000 It's not their policy.
00:05:44.000 It's just to have a public discussion.
00:05:47.000 You know, I happen to know a little bit about this.
00:05:49.000 I was actually an economic advisor to Gorbachev.
00:05:52.000 I was an economic advisor to Yeltsin.
00:05:54.000 I was an economic advisor to President Kuchma, the first president of independent Ukraine.
00:05:59.000 I was a friend of President Yushchenko, the second president of independent Ukraine.
00:06:04.000 I've been called to give them advice on things.
00:06:07.000 I'm following this for 30 years.
00:06:10.000 And I asked for 700 words.
00:06:12.000 No way!
00:06:13.000 Because they don't want any public debate, by the way, about the obvious.
00:06:20.000 And interestingly, you know, it's quite interesting.
00:06:23.000 Somebody wrote to me a couple days ago, asked me a question.
00:06:26.000 Then he wrote back again saying, by the way, Professor Sachs, I was on the Italian negotiating group in the Bucharest NATO summit in 2008, which was when Bush pushed the statement by NATO that Ukraine would become a NATO member.
00:06:46.000 And I know what this guy told me, said we were aghast.
00:06:50.000 You know, all the Europeans, the French, the Germans, the Italians, they knew this was a terrible thing.
00:06:56.000 And he wrote to me a couple days ago just to describe what I knew already in 2008 because my European friends in high position said, what's your president doing with this provocation?
00:07:09.000 So these are obvious things.
00:07:12.000 Our own diplomats said it.
00:07:13.000 We made commitments.
00:07:15.000 The Europeans said it. 0.84
00:07:17.000 But there's a silence on it in this country.
00:07:20.000 Even as we're heading towards more escalation, more than 100 billion already sent To this disaster, so many people losing their lives, and we don't have a public debate in our mainstream press, mainstream media, in fact.
00:07:39.000 I want to get back to the New York Times in a minute, but why do you think Obama came in as kind of a peace president, and why do you think that he went along with this in 2000?
00:07:53.000 You know...
00:07:54.000 I really think, and I learned a lot by studying your uncle's administration and wrote a book about his peace initiatives in 1963, which I think were the most important initiatives on peace in modern times when President Kennedy negotiated the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
00:08:13.000 And the thing that I really felt after a very deep dive in U.S. foreign policymaking is that A president has one main job in foreign policy, and that is to keep the foot on the brakes.
00:08:27.000 Because this war machine is always revving.
00:08:32.000 The military industrial complex is always cooking up new things.
00:08:37.000 The intelligence agencies and their covert operations are always cooking up new things.
00:08:42.000 And you got to keep your foot on the brake.
00:08:45.000 And President Kennedy learned it after the Bay of Pigs.
00:08:49.000 He saw the disaster.
00:08:51.000 And you know, Obama had his foot on the brakes on a couple of things, but he lifted his foot off the brakes on many things also, trying to overthrow the Syrian government, a disaster, being talked into the disaster of overthrowing the Libyan government and engulfing that country in 10 years of civil war that's not over yet.
00:09:15.000 And he presided over the U.S. role in the overthrow of the Ukrainian president.
00:09:22.000 So there's a lot there.
00:09:24.000 Obama did say we should negotiate with Iran, and that takes a lot of bravery in Washington because there's a lot of forces against that.
00:09:36.000 But he took his foot off the brake because I don't think he had the experience and he didn't understand.
00:09:42.000 That's his real job.
00:09:44.000 Stop the wars.
00:09:45.000 Stop the new wars.
00:09:47.000 Stop the covert operations.
00:09:49.000 They're dangerous.
00:09:50.000 Don't overthrow the Ukrainian president, for heaven's sake.
00:09:54.000 And, you know, his Secretary of State, that's another matter.
00:09:56.000 She didn't feel that way.
00:09:58.000 She loved all of this stuff.
00:10:00.000 I just listened to her talk recently.
00:10:03.000 And, you know, this is really where we're at.
00:10:06.000 We've got a war machine here.
00:10:07.000 And, you know, war machines want to be used.
00:10:10.000 They want to bulk up.
00:10:11.000 They want to try new weapons.
00:10:13.000 They want to buy new armaments.
00:10:16.000 They want to open new bases.
00:10:18.000 And a president, a smart president, knows to say, No!
00:10:22.000 Stop! 1.00
00:10:23.000 You're going to get us into a lot of trouble.
00:10:25.000 And Obama did know, by the way, in 2014, don't go more deeply.
00:10:31.000 Because he said in an interview, when he got attacked for it, he said, Russia has escalatory dominance.
00:10:40.000 Meaning, whatever we do in Ukraine, they care a hell of a lot more about this than we do.
00:10:45.000 And they will just keep escalating to not have NATO along their 2,000-kilometer border.
00:10:53.000 And so whatever we start, it's not going to end well.
00:10:58.000 So he said, at least don't start this.
00:11:01.000 But...
00:11:02.000 President Biden doesn't get that.
00:11:04.000 They just keep escalating step by step.
00:11:06.000 They say, we're not going to do this, then they do it.
00:11:08.000 We're not going to do this, then they do it.
00:11:10.000 We're not going to have F-16s, then they do it. 0.85
00:11:12.000 And now we have the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley, saying, oh, this war could go on for decades.
00:11:20.000 Are you kidding?
00:11:22.000 By the way, that was the first thing I wrote, and I tried to tell the Ukrainians, This is a terrible idea for you. 1.00
00:11:29.000 Look at Afghanistan. 0.93
00:11:31.000 That's what America does. 1.00
00:11:33.000 It gets in there.
00:11:34.000 War that just never ends.
00:11:37.000 Because they don't know how to end it.
00:11:38.000 And this is what's going to happen to you.
00:11:40.000 And now they say these are grown-ups, supposedly.
00:11:43.000 Grown-ups saying, oh yeah, the war could go on for...
00:11:46.000 Instead of saying, we've got to find a way to peace.
00:11:49.000 Which is absolutely possible.
00:11:52.000 That's really the story of this thing.
00:11:54.000 You mentioned about my uncle discovering it during the Bay of Pigs, which he was very suspicious about.
00:12:00.000 He didn't want to do it.
00:12:01.000 He thought, you know, why are we going in there?
00:12:03.000 There were no Russians in Cuba at that time.
00:12:05.000 It was just a country that had chosen a different form of government that we didn't like.
00:12:09.000 But, you know, in his view, it was not the U.S. job to go in there and correct it.
00:12:14.000 You know, that was the job of the Cuban people. 0.99
00:12:17.000 And they talked him into it through using a variety of subterfuges and lies.
00:12:22.000 But afterward, when those men were dying on the beach, he felt so devastated by that that he considered resigning.
00:12:30.000 And he told that to his father.
00:12:32.000 And his father said, it's the best thing that could have ever happened to you because it happened early and now you know who you're dealing with.
00:12:39.000 And, you know, he's been 10,000 days of his administration saying no to those guys.
00:12:46.000 And by the way, he took full responsibility for it in that famous line that success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan.
00:12:54.000 And he said, I stand here.
00:12:56.000 This was my responsibility.
00:12:58.000 And it was a shocking thing.
00:13:01.000 And he found out that My God, he found out that there really is a lot that goes on in the U.S. war machine that is hard to control, really hard to control.
00:13:16.000 Let's talk, because I know you don't have that much time either.
00:13:19.000 I want to talk about China and that the Republicans and Democrats are split on China.
00:13:24.000 The Democrats seem to be.
00:13:26.000 The whole thing is kind of incoherent and opaque.
00:13:31.000 The Democrats seem to be, you know, wanting to be super friendly to China and the Goldman Sachs people who have invested.
00:13:39.000 Microsoft is really, at this point, a Chinese company.
00:13:43.000 Its whole research division in China is utterly dependent on China for its survival and cannot survive if China cuts it off.
00:13:52.000 And so you have a lot of the tech people who are pro-Democratic or tend to be Democrat, who kind of almost have blinders on about the adversarial posture that Republicans believe China is.
00:14:06.000 And, you know, my take is, which is kind of an amateur take, but we should not be de-escalating.
00:14:13.000 We are going to have to compete with the Chinese on some And it's better to compete with them on an economic landscape than it is on a military landscape. 1.00
00:14:27.000 China does not want to go to war with us.
00:14:30.000 It does not want to have World War III in Taiwan.
00:14:33.000 And that our military response to all of their kind of expansion and their ambitions, their muscle flexing, is heading us in that direction, which would be a calamity for the globe.
00:14:43.000 And I'm not scared about competing with the Chinese head-to-head on economics. 1.00
00:14:49.000 And to me, that's where we should be headed.
00:14:51.000 So let's hear what you have to say about that.
00:14:54.000 I'm on a very cooperation end on all the China issues.
00:15:00.000 And let me explain why.
00:15:01.000 First, I've been going to China now for 42 years, a lot.
00:15:06.000 I started in 1981, just after The end of the Cultural Revolution and Deng Xiaoping had just come to power.
00:15:16.000 China was impoverished and I saw China in its impoverished condition.
00:15:20.000 And I've been going frequently since then for four decades.
00:15:25.000 And China has developed with tremendous success through an incredible amount of hard work, high saving, smart policies, And catching up, basically.
00:15:39.000 And to my take, and I've studied this now really in depth for a long time, there's a view in the U.S., which I think is a deeply wrong view, which is, well, they must have cheated to do what they did.
00:15:53.000 I do not think that is right.
00:15:56.000 They're very smart, industrious, hardworking, high-saving, and they basically followed a model of rapid industrialization that Japan had pioneered actually at the end of the 19th century, and then after World War II, when everything was destroyed, Japan did it again 25 years ahead of China starting.
00:16:22.000 So I'm impressed.
00:16:24.000 Now, I have to also say I've trained dozens of Chinese students who are now in senior levels of government or the industry and so forth.
00:16:35.000 I liked them when they were my students.
00:16:38.000 I like them now.
00:16:40.000 I have personal relations of...
00:16:43.000 Very friendly and extensive professional relations.
00:16:46.000 And it's all normal to me that this is not an enemy.
00:16:51.000 This is a country that was poor.
00:16:54.000 It's now still, by U.S. standards, way behind the United States in per capita income.
00:17:01.000 So this is not a rich country.
00:17:02.000 It's probably about one third of the U.S. per person income.
00:17:10.000 But the population's large, so it's four times larger than the US. So that means that the overall size of the economy by one kind of measure called Purchasing Power Parity.
00:17:21.000 They're bigger by another kind of measure.
00:17:24.000 Market prices, they're smaller.
00:17:26.000 But they're not rich.
00:17:28.000 They're still developing.
00:17:30.000 And then I've written a lot of books about their history and studied it.
00:17:35.000 And the basic point, Bobby, is that, you know, for hundreds of years, China was great world leader.
00:17:42.000 But that goes back a thousand years ago.
00:17:44.000 And the Song Dynasty was really impressive.
00:17:48.000 One thousand years ago, then China was invaded by the Mongols. 0.93
00:17:52.000 And I won't go through a thousand years of history, except to say that famously, they had a great fleet in the early 1400s that basically, unbelievably, toured the Indian Ocean all the way to East Africa, to India, to all the ports of the Indian Ocean. to India, to all the ports of the Indian Ocean.
00:18:10.000 And then in 1434, and probably the worst policy move in the history of world economy, and I'll put it that way, They closed up the fleet.
00:18:21.000 They said, we're not so interested in trade.
00:18:23.000 We're pretty self-sufficient.
00:18:24.000 And while they never closed entirely, China basically gave up its leadership, say in naval capacity and so forth, and turned mostly inward.
00:18:35.000 It's a long, complicated story.
00:18:37.000 I won't go into it in detail.
00:18:39.000 By the early 19th century, China had really fallen behind because Britain had an industrial revolution, which started with the steam engine, and all of that went into the military early on, with turning the Navy to steamers and so on.
00:18:55.000 In 1839, Britain invaded China.
00:18:58.000 We call it the First Opium War, probably the most cynical, nasty, particular cause of war in modern times, perhaps. 0.90
00:19:09.000 Which was that Britain demanded that China accept opium from British merchants at a time when the Chinese leaders knew that the opium addiction was a really serious addiction.
00:19:21.000 So there was a first opium war.
00:19:23.000 There was a second opium war.
00:19:25.000 There was a Taiping rebellion.
00:19:26.000 There were the unequal treaties.
00:19:29.000 There was the Boxer Rebellion.
00:19:32.000 There was the Chinese Revolution in 1910.
00:19:36.000 There was civil war.
00:19:37.000 Then there was the Japanese invasion.
00:19:39.000 And I go through all of this to say there was a hellish 110 years, hellish, from Britain invading to 1949, when the modern state, the People's Republic of China, was established.
00:19:57.000 And they call that the century of humiliation.
00:20:00.000 What it means from an economic point of view is they went from being a very advanced and, of course, esteemed civilization to being completely impoverished by invasion after invasion, humiliation after humiliation, which was the fact because all the humiliation after humiliation, which was the fact because all the imperial powers, including the United States in the early years of the 20th century, abused China incredibly.
00:20:26.000 And then Japan really was nasty. 0.94
00:20:30.000 And this is another long story.
00:20:33.000 But Japan invaded, actually invaded China several times already back in 1895 in the Sino-Japanese War and then really invaded 1931, taking over Manchuria, 1937 with the Nanjing Massacre. taking over Manchuria, 1937 with the Nanjing Massacre.
00:20:51.000 and then open war.
00:20:54.000 So, the Chinese have the view, hell, we don't want that to happen again.
00:21:00.000 We don't want to be dismembered.
00:21:02.000 We don't want to fall under colonial rule.
00:21:05.000 We don't want to be impoverished again.
00:21:08.000 We need to stand on our feet again.
00:21:11.000 And really, since Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, China opened to the world.
00:21:18.000 China has been peaceful and focused on economics.
00:21:23.000 And the economics that China's been focused on is catching up.
00:21:28.000 So it's not nefarious.
00:21:31.000 It's not evil.
00:21:32.000 It's the kind of rapid industrialization that Japan invented, actually, in 1868, something called the Meiji Restoration, and again in the 1950s and 1960s.
00:21:44.000 And a lot of what happened with Deng Xiaoping starting in 1978 was learned Literally learned from Japanese because Japanese engineers went over and helped China to retool, helped them to build a new industry, and so on.
00:21:58.000 Now, as an economist, I look at this and say, my God, even from a very poor income level, they were saving 40 or 50 percent of their national income.
00:22:09.000 They were investing, investing, investing.
00:22:11.000 They went from mass illiteracy and very little education to incredible building up of skills and knowledge base and hundreds of thousands of STEM PhDs per year.
00:22:24.000 And I've been seeing this with my own eyes year after year after year after year.
00:22:30.000 So my view is there's no reason for conflict, none whatsoever.
00:22:37.000 And in the last 40 years, when the U.S. has been in nonstop wars, I'm sorry to say, China has not been involved in one war.
00:22:47.000 And they had one brief war that was around the Khmer Rouge, Vietnam issue in the late 1970s.
00:22:54.000 Otherwise, they've been a victim of wars for 200 years and have launched none.
00:22:59.000 None.
00:22:59.000 One short war in 1979 involving Vietnam and Cambodia because of the Khmer Rouge and Cambodia, and it was very short-lived.
00:23:10.000 Other than that, none.
00:23:12.000 And we keep accusing them of, you're belligerent, you're belligerent.
00:23:17.000 And we have surrounded them with the military.
00:23:20.000 We've surrounded them with bases.
00:23:22.000 We outspend them still three to one on the military.
00:23:27.000 If we sat down with them, it would really, really make a difference.
00:23:32.000 And I have to tell you, Bobby, one of my star students from about 30 years ago is now one of the top academics in China.
00:23:41.000 Wonderful person.
00:23:42.000 And we were at a meeting a few years ago.
00:23:45.000 It was Chinese and Americans and some others.
00:23:48.000 And we were talking about why everything is broken down And he said something deep and hilarious.
00:23:57.000 He said, you guys, he looked around to the whole room, you just don't understand it.
00:24:02.000 I've been part of the American world.
00:24:03.000 I have an American PhD from Harvard.
00:24:06.000 Here's my advice, he said.
00:24:07.000 The Chinese want one thing. 1.00
00:24:10.000 Respect.
00:24:11.000 The Americans want one thing, to be told how smart they are.
00:24:15.000 If each side would just do what they should do vis-a-vis the other, believe me, everybody's going to get along just fine.
00:24:23.000 Okay, it's a clever remark, but there's a depth to it.
00:24:27.000 As well.
00:24:28.000 And when the Biden administration came in, I had a lot of friends, have a lot of friends, a lot of former friends, I'm afraid, but a lot of friends in the administration and senior reaches.
00:24:39.000 And I said, reach out to China. 0.58
00:24:42.000 And you know what?
00:24:43.000 The order came from the White House.
00:24:45.000 No discussions with China during the first year because we're reassessing.
00:24:52.000 Biden came out swinging when they had that first meeting in Anchorage, Alaska.
00:24:58.000 It was like, nice to meet you.
00:25:01.000 What about Hong Kong?
00:25:02.000 What about Xinjiang?
00:25:03.000 What about Taiwan?
00:25:04.000 In other words, put the thumb in the eye of the other side, publicly and aggressively from the start.
00:25:11.000 What's Nancy Pelosi doing flying to Taiwan? 1.00
00:25:14.000 Don't provoke.
00:25:15.000 If you know the history, don't provoke.
00:25:19.000 Talk, discuss, debate, disagree, negotiate.
00:25:24.000 All of that's fine.
00:25:26.000 But why we're provoking is something I find irresponsible and really dangerous and unnecessary.
00:25:36.000 And we will walk into a war the way we're going.
00:25:42.000 Just like we did with Ukraine. 0.91
00:25:45.000 And our diplomats told us the war with Ukraine is going to come if we continue on the path that we're going.
00:25:52.000 And I'm telling you, if we continue on the path that we're going and our rhetoric in Taiwan and the arming of Taiwan and all the rest, it's no favor to Taiwan.
00:26:02.000 All we're doing is taking steps towards A complete breakdown of trust that will lead to disaster if we don't understand how to avoid that.
00:26:16.000 So, what do you make of what happened with Saudi Arabia and Iran, with the Chinese brokering that peace?
00:26:26.000 The Chinese have a growing reach in the world because they're the lead trade partner of probably half the world at this point.
00:26:37.000 And they buy a lot of oil from the Middle East.
00:26:41.000 They have good relations with Iran and Saudi Arabia.
00:26:45.000 And they really don't want war.
00:26:48.000 God, they don't want war in Taiwan.
00:26:51.000 They don't want war in East Asia.
00:26:53.000 They don't want war in Ukraine, by the way.
00:26:57.000 And I know it.
00:26:58.000 And I had long discussions in Beijing a couple of months ago about the Ukraine war.
00:27:03.000 They don't want this instability.
00:27:05.000 What they want is to continue to have economic development.
00:27:08.000 And so I think that their foreign policy is Pretty darn serious, which is it is based on economics.
00:27:19.000 It's based on what we used to do.
00:27:21.000 And we did it a lot.
00:27:22.000 and we did it to good effect, which was helping to build infrastructure, helping American businesses to have a positive role in places to be a base for economic development.
00:27:35.000 Well, China's doing that exactly right now. 0.85
00:27:38.000 And we view that as, oh my God, look at how horrible, but it's not horrible.
00:27:43.000 It's just smart.
00:27:45.000 They've grown, they are major trade partners, so they're doing things that are to their benefit, but not to the disadvantage of the other countries.
00:27:55.000 They believe actually that there's the cooperation and win-win makes a lot of sense for them.
00:28:02.000 And I think they're being proved right because most of the world is not falling into line with the United States Most of the world is looking at, say, the Ukraine war and saying, why don't you negotiate this?
00:28:15.000 And why is NATO enlargement so vital when Russia said don't do it?
00:28:19.000 And most of the world's looking at the Taiwan issue and saying, you know, maybe calm down.
00:28:25.000 Don't just have an arms race there.
00:28:29.000 I think the Chinese are very successful diplomatically, except in what we call the Western world, which, by the way, is now, you can define it pretty precisely, it's the US, Canada,
00:28:45.000 UK, European Union, We're good to go.
00:29:04.000 Probably about 12 to 15% of the world population.
00:29:08.000 And the rest of the world's looking on and saying, we're not quite in line with that.
00:29:14.000 And we tell ourselves, oh, we're leading the world.
00:29:17.000 But not really.
00:29:18.000 What we're leading is a...
00:29:20.000 A pretty small part of the world population that doesn't buy into expanded military alliances and so forth that basically wants economic development.
00:29:30.000 So competing on economic development, great.
00:29:33.000 Competing on who can help a different region of the world to develop or to have green energy, great.
00:29:41.000 But let's do that.
00:29:42.000 That's a race to the top, not a race to a new nuclear arms race and so forth.
00:29:48.000 And we keep saying, look, China's building up its military.
00:29:52.000 We are three times the military spending of China.
00:29:55.000 So if we're concerned about that, let's sit down and negotiate so that we don't have an arms race between the two.
00:30:03.000 China doesn't want an arms race.
00:30:04.000 China wants economic development.
00:30:06.000 How about, you know, you didn't talk about in that kind of litany of the countries describing our cohort, you didn't talk about where Latin America, traditionally Latin America was in the American sphere of influence.
00:30:19.000 Is that changing, Tim?
00:30:21.000 Yeah, you know, President Lula is, first of all, quite outspoken, saying we need a negotiated peace in Ukraine.
00:30:31.000 And he, of course, was recently in China.
00:30:34.000 And he said it in China, and our press reported, how dare he say these things?
00:30:41.000 And how dare he talk about NATO expansion as being provocative and so forth?
00:30:46.000 But this is the Latin American view.
00:30:49.000 And I was with another president of a major Latin American country a few months ago.
00:30:54.000 I won't put that person on the spot.
00:30:57.000 But the first words...
00:30:59.000 When we sat down was from the president.
00:31:03.000 This is about NATO. What is this enlargement thing?
00:31:07.000 Why is this being pushed so much?
00:31:09.000 That's again from the...
00:31:10.000 I didn't provoke it.
00:31:12.000 That was what That's what the president said to me first thing.
00:31:17.000 That is a widespread view.
00:31:19.000 And remember, we've not exactly been helpful in the Latin American context in recent years.
00:31:28.000 There was an active attempt to overthrow the Venezuelan president.
00:31:33.000 Not even subtle.
00:31:34.000 I mean, it was admitted, acknowledged.
00:31:36.000 At one point, Trump, what I regarded as...
00:31:41.000 We put on sanctions to break the Venezuelan economy, which our sanctions actually did.
00:32:00.000 And I was in the Americas quite often during this period.
00:32:05.000 And the presidents were saying to me, you know, you're breaking the region.
00:32:10.000 You're dividing the region in two.
00:32:12.000 We can't cooperate.
00:32:14.000 Of course we have to go along with the White House.
00:32:16.000 They can squeeze the hell out of us.
00:32:18.000 They can stop us from getting loans from the Inter-American Development Bank or from the Latin American Development Fund.
00:32:24.000 So we go along, but we can't even talk to our neighbor because they're on the other side of this thing.
00:32:29.000 So this is really a strong feeling.
00:32:33.000 It's crazy.
00:32:34.000 It's so unnecessary.
00:32:37.000 We shouldn't Declare that someone else is president than the actual president of a country.
00:32:43.000 It's a bad habit.
00:32:44.000 It's a kind of arrogance that never works out.
00:32:49.000 And on all of these things, I have to say, just watching them for so many years and so many decades, when we froze the accounts of Venezuela, said, you can't have your own money anymore.
00:33:04.000 And then we said Maduro is no longer president.
00:33:07.000 Guido was president.
00:33:09.000 And by the way, then some Harvard economists and some MIT economists said, yeah, now we're going to help the new administration of Guido. 0.75
00:33:16.000 I thought, this is ridiculous.
00:33:19.000 This absolutely is going to end bad. 0.98
00:33:22.000 And of course...
00:33:23.000 It ended almost like a farce except for Venezuela, which has been devastated economically, but Maduro is there.
00:33:31.000 Now we run to him to say, you've got to pump more oil to replace the Russian oil that we're taking off the market, because they're not thinking. 0.91
00:33:39.000 And the main point is, John, stop being so arrogant in this U.S., because this is where you keep stepping into problems, thinking you can do whatever you want, even when the other country is saying, please don't do that, just give us some space, or don't overthrow us, or don't seize our assets.
00:34:03.000 But there's an arrogance.
00:34:05.000 That really is bad.
00:34:07.000 I went back, by the way, and read a book that I vaguely remembered from high school.
00:34:13.000 And I read it last weekend.
00:34:15.000 It's almost 60 years old.
00:34:20.000 J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power.
00:34:23.000 Remember that book?
00:34:25.000 Unbelievable.
00:34:26.000 I remembered it too, and for more than a half a century, I hadn't looked at it.
00:34:32.000 And I went back and I read it this weekend, and you could read it as if it was talking about today.
00:34:38.000 And basically, Fulbright, who was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and of course where the Fulbright scholarships came from, originated, We keep getting into trouble because we can't listen to the other side.
00:34:57.000 And he has a whole riff about how good neutrality can be and that sometimes you don't want to push NATO or you don't want to push your side.
00:35:09.000 It's actually literally there in the 1960s saying if we would let some of these countries be neutral, the Soviet Union would go home, we would go home, and we'd leave these countries in the middle in peace.
00:35:21.000 And he cites Austria, which I've come to know this year very well because I've been spending some of my sabbatical there.
00:35:30.000 In 1955, Austria declared neutrality.
00:35:33.000 The Soviet Union, which had occupied part of Austria after World War II, sent the troops home, and Austria became a neutral, incredibly successful, peaceful country, never bothered again at all by the Soviet Union, because it was neutral.
00:35:50.000 And that was a model.
00:35:52.000 That's the model for Ukraine, by the way.
00:35:54.000 That's the model that George Kennan kept saying.
00:35:58.000 Give some space so that we're not putting our nose right up against the other guy, you know, not provoking.
00:36:06.000 And it's a model that we don't learn because you have to tone down the arrogance a little bit to learn to give some space.
00:36:14.000 So I think it comes back over and over again to that.
00:36:18.000 Jeffrey Sachs, thank you so much for joining us.
00:36:21.000 And I look forward to talking to you next time.
00:36:24.000 Oh, I can't wait.
00:36:25.000 Thanks a lot.
00:36:26.000 Great to be with you.