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 ) &
00:00:00.000I've got my friend Jeffrey Sachs back on here as one of my heroes.
00:00:04.000And 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.
00:00:15.000He's known for his work on sustainable development and economic development and the fight to end poverty.
00:00:21.000I 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.
00:00:30.000I know, you know, I know this is kind of an informal discussion, and we both kind of booked this at the last minute.
00:00:35.000But I wanted to, I really want to talk to you about China.
00:00:37.000But 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.
00:00:47.000I 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.
00:00:56.000Basically 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.
00:01:20.000George Cannon, who, you know, who is the architect of the containment policy.
00:01:24.000Bill 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.
00:01:33.000And then Bill Burns, who was the ambassador of Russia, who said this, you know, you can't...
00:01:38.000And is now the CIA director, after all.
00:01:55.000And you go back to Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was kind of the figurehead of the neocon movement.
00:02:02.000Who, 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.
00:02:17.000And 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.
00:02:31.000You've got to stop treating Russia like an enemy, or she's going to become an enemy.
00:02:36.000It's going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, and you're going to provoke her.
00:02:39.000You know, this was before Putin was in there, they were saying.
00:05:06.000And 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?
00:06:13.000Because they don't want any public debate, by the way, about the obvious.
00:06:20.000And interestingly, you know, it's quite interesting.
00:06:23.000Somebody wrote to me a couple days ago, asked me a question.
00:06:26.000Then 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.
00:06:46.000And I know what this guy told me, said we were aghast.
00:06:50.000You know, all the Europeans, the French, the Germans, the Italians, they knew this was a terrible thing.
00:06:56.000And 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?
00:07:17.000But there's a silence on it in this country.
00:07:20.000Even 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.
00:07:39.000I 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?
00:07:54.000I 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.
00:08:13.000And 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.
00:08:27.000Because this war machine is always revving.
00:08:32.000The military industrial complex is always cooking up new things.
00:08:37.000The intelligence agencies and their covert operations are always cooking up new things.
00:08:42.000And you got to keep your foot on the brake.
00:08:45.000And President Kennedy learned it after the Bay of Pigs.
00:08:51.000And 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.
00:09:15.000And he presided over the U.S. role in the overthrow of the Ukrainian president.
00:12:32.000And 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.
00:12:39.000And, you know, he's been 10,000 days of his administration saying no to those guys.
00:12:46.000And by the way, he took full responsibility for it in that famous line that success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan.
00:13:01.000And 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.
00:13:16.000Let's talk, because I know you don't have that much time either.
00:13:19.000I want to talk about China and that the Republicans and Democrats are split on China.
00:13:26.000The whole thing is kind of incoherent and opaque.
00:13:31.000The Democrats seem to be, you know, wanting to be super friendly to China and the Goldman Sachs people who have invested.
00:13:39.000Microsoft is really, at this point, a Chinese company.
00:13:43.000Its whole research division in China is utterly dependent on China for its survival and cannot survive if China cuts it off.
00:13:52.000And 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.
00:14:06.000And, you know, my take is, which is kind of an amateur take, but we should not be de-escalating.
00:14:13.000We 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.
00:14:27.000China does not want to go to war with us.
00:14:30.000It does not want to have World War III in Taiwan.
00:14:33.000And 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.
00:14:43.000And I'm not scared about competing with the Chinese head-to-head on economics.
00:14:49.000And to me, that's where we should be headed.
00:14:51.000So let's hear what you have to say about that.
00:14:54.000I'm on a very cooperation end on all the China issues.
00:15:01.000First, I've been going to China now for 42 years, a lot.
00:15:06.000I started in 1981, just after The end of the Cultural Revolution and Deng Xiaoping had just come to power.
00:15:16.000China was impoverished and I saw China in its impoverished condition.
00:15:20.000And I've been going frequently since then for four decades.
00:15:25.000And China has developed with tremendous success through an incredible amount of hard work, high saving, smart policies, And catching up, basically.
00:15:39.000And 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.
00:15:56.000They'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.
00:17:02.000It's probably about one third of the U.S. per person income.
00:17:10.000But 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.
00:17:21.000They're bigger by another kind of measure.
00:17:30.000And then I've written a lot of books about their history and studied it.
00:17:35.000And the basic point, Bobby, is that, you know, for hundreds of years, China was great world leader.
00:17:42.000But that goes back a thousand years ago.
00:17:44.000And the Song Dynasty was really impressive.
00:17:48.000One thousand years ago, then China was invaded by the Mongols.
00:17:52.000And 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.
00:18:10.000And 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.
00:18:21.000They said, we're not so interested in trade.
00:18:24.000And while they never closed entirely, China basically gave up its leadership, say in naval capacity and so forth, and turned mostly inward.
00:18:39.000By 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.
00:18:58.000We call it the First Opium War, probably the most cynical, nasty, particular cause of war in modern times, perhaps.
00:19:09.000Which 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.
00:19:39.000And 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.
00:19:57.000And they call that the century of humiliation.
00:20:00.000What 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.
00:20:33.000But 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.
00:21:32.000It's the kind of rapid industrialization that Japan invented, actually, in 1868, something called the Meiji Restoration, and again in the 1950s and 1960s.
00:21:44.000And 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.
00:21:58.000Now, 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.
00:22:09.000They were investing, investing, investing.
00:22:11.000They 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.
00:22:24.000And I've been seeing this with my own eyes year after year after year after year.
00:22:30.000So my view is there's no reason for conflict, none whatsoever.
00:22:37.000And 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.
00:22:47.000And they had one brief war that was around the Khmer Rouge, Vietnam issue in the late 1970s.
00:22:54.000Otherwise, they've been a victim of wars for 200 years and have launched none.
00:24:28.000And 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.
00:25:45.000And our diplomats told us the war with Ukraine is going to come if we continue on the path that we're going.
00:25:52.000And 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.
00:26:02.000All 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.
00:26:16.000So, what do you make of what happened with Saudi Arabia and Iran, with the Chinese brokering that peace?
00:26:26.000The Chinese have a growing reach in the world because they're the lead trade partner of probably half the world at this point.
00:26:37.000And they buy a lot of oil from the Middle East.
00:26:41.000They have good relations with Iran and Saudi Arabia.
00:27:22.000and 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.
00:27:35.000Well, China's doing that exactly right now.
00:27:38.000And we view that as, oh my God, look at how horrible, but it's not horrible.
00:27:45.000They'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.
00:27:55.000They believe actually that there's the cooperation and win-win makes a lot of sense for them.
00:28:02.000And 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?
00:28:15.000And why is NATO enlargement so vital when Russia said don't do it?
00:28:19.000And most of the world's looking at the Taiwan issue and saying, you know, maybe calm down.
00:28:29.000I 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,
00:29:20.000A pretty small part of the world population that doesn't buy into expanded military alliances and so forth that basically wants economic development.
00:29:30.000So competing on economic development, great.
00:29:33.000Competing on who can help a different region of the world to develop or to have green energy, great.
00:30:06.000How 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.
00:32:44.000It's a kind of arrogance that never works out.
00:32:49.000And 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.
00:33:04.000And then we said Maduro is no longer president.
00:33:23.000It ended almost like a farce except for Venezuela, which has been devastated economically, but Maduro is there.
00:33:31.000Now 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.
00:33:39.000And 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.
00:34:26.000I remembered it too, and for more than a half a century, I hadn't looked at it.
00:34:32.000And I went back and I read it this weekend, and you could read it as if it was talking about today.
00:34:38.000And 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.
00:34:57.000And 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.
00:35:09.000It'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.
00:35:21.000And he cites Austria, which I've come to know this year very well because I've been spending some of my sabbatical there.
00:35:33.000The 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.