The Tucker Carlson Show - February 18, 2025


Jeffrey Sachs： Tulsi Gabbard’s Confirmation, and the Dangerous Global Chess Game Trump Is Winning


Episode Stats

Length

53 minutes

Words per Minute

142.34505

Word Count

7,611

Sentence Count

712

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

14


Summary

In this episode, Prime Minister Viktor Orban is interviewed by Professor Jeffrey Sachs, who has travelled the world for more than 40 years and knows the leaders of the world personally. In this interview, Professor Sachs talks about how he first met Prime Minister Orban, and what he saw in him that made him such a great leader.


Transcript

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00:00:15.140 Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce someone who I consider one of the smartest people I know
00:00:21.280 and whose understanding of the world is matched only by his ability to synthesize huge themes
00:00:28.520 and illustrate them with precise detail.
00:00:32.360 Someone who's traveled the world for 40 years.
00:00:34.960 A man who not only writes about the leaders of the world but knows them personally.
00:00:40.500 Professor Jeffrey Sachs.
00:00:45.940 Thanks.
00:00:47.140 Thank you.
00:00:48.060 Thank you.
00:00:48.520 Thank you very much, Jeff.
00:00:52.640 Thank you.
00:00:53.800 So how long, I just, you were telling me backstage I didn't realize this.
00:00:56.640 For those who enjoyed Prime Minister Orban, I'm one of them.
00:01:00.540 I was, tell us when you first met the Prime Minister.
00:01:04.940 We met 46 years ago.
00:01:08.100 36 years ago, sorry.
00:01:09.320 36 years ago, 1989.
00:01:12.500 He was just getting out of jail at that point.
00:01:13.940 No, yeah, they were just opening up and this young guy was starting a political party and he gave me a call.
00:01:20.860 And we sat in our, my backyard in Boston for a few hours.
00:01:25.660 And I thought, okay, this guy's going to be Prime Minister for most of the next 36 years.
00:01:31.120 It's very, very impressive then.
00:01:33.000 So you said that you saw in him, and it's not just about him, but it's about what are the markers of enduring leadership?
00:01:42.380 What makes, you know, this politician impressive while most of them are not impressive?
00:01:46.720 What did you see in him?
00:01:48.800 What do you see in leaders like him who have been successful?
00:01:51.540 Look, this was 1989.
00:01:56.060 It was even before the Berlin Wall fell, but Hungary had cut the barbed wire.
00:02:01.920 So people were, that was the beginning of the end in 1989 of the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.
00:02:09.440 And this young guy said, I'm going to make a political party and I'm going to be a leader and I'm going to make a new Hungary.
00:02:15.920 And what he showed was vision that, look, we're a great country.
00:02:21.900 We've been held back for the last 45 years.
00:02:25.040 I'm going to help lead the way.
00:02:27.640 And it was Fidesz, Young Democrats, I think was the translation of it.
00:02:33.260 And he just had the idea, we're going to move forward.
00:02:37.200 He was a kid and we were all kids then.
00:02:40.360 And you could see that there was energy, vision, foresight, and it proved right.
00:02:49.100 Yeah.
00:02:49.560 And a toughness.
00:02:50.580 So you heard his analysis, I think, of where we are with the war in Ukraine, election of Trump on the basis in part of, you know, his promise to try to end this if he can.
00:03:03.140 You saw the new Secretary of Defense say, no, we're not going to support Ukraine's entry into NATO.
00:03:08.780 Where are we now?
00:03:10.360 You know, yesterday was the most important day for peace in maybe decades, actually.
00:03:19.420 This war in Ukraine resulted from a very bad idea of the United States taken in 1994.
00:03:29.620 It's a project.
00:03:30.860 The project was a project to expand NATO forever, anywhere, just keep moving east.
00:03:40.700 Keep moving not only to the first wave, which was the prime minister's country, Hungary, Czech Republic, and Slovakia.
00:03:49.840 But then move eastward closer to the former Soviet Union, into the former Soviet Union, surround Russia in the Black Sea region, go all the way to a little country in the South Caucasus, Georgia.
00:04:05.520 It was mind-boggling.
00:04:07.520 It was mind-boggling.
00:04:09.400 Clinton signed on to that in 1994.
00:04:13.020 It became what we call the deep state project, meaning it didn't really matter who the president was.
00:04:19.180 Each president would come and basically would be informed.
00:04:23.340 NATO's moving eastward.
00:04:25.040 You're a part of that process.
00:04:26.520 So Clinton started it in 1994, and as Prime Minister Orban said, he mentioned briefly, in 1990, on February 9, 1990, in unequivocal, clear as can be terms, the United States had said to President Mikhail Gorbachev, NATO will not move one inch eastward.
00:04:51.600 And if you have any doubt about it, all the documents are now online, available.
00:04:58.620 You can scrutinize everything.
00:05:00.920 Hans-Dietrich Gensher, the German foreign minister, said the same thing same day.
00:05:06.920 He's on tape, actually, explaining, no, no, I don't just mean within eastern Germany.
00:05:12.060 I mean anywhere to the east.
00:05:15.000 Clinton being Clinton and the U.S. deep state being the U.S. deep state.
00:05:21.600 They started this project in 1994.
00:05:25.460 They already had the idea, by the way, in 1991, 92, as soon as the Soviet Union ended.
00:05:31.900 Aha, now we move.
00:05:33.100 Now we move eastward.
00:05:34.380 Now we control everything.
00:05:35.700 Now we are the sole superpower.
00:05:37.720 So this has gone on for 30 years.
00:05:42.060 And each president got into it under George Bush Jr.
00:05:49.700 Seven more countries were added.
00:05:51.740 Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, and Romania in 2004.
00:05:57.340 Then in 2007, President Putin said at the summit that's taking place right now, the Munich Security Summit, said, stop.
00:06:09.160 You told us no expansion, not an eastward expansion, even an inch, you said.
00:06:15.780 You've now done 10 countries.
00:06:19.940 Stop.
00:06:21.800 Perfectly reasonable.
00:06:23.640 Stop.
00:06:24.940 I don't think our president, Donald Trump, would much like to see China and Russia building their military bases up from Central America.
00:06:33.760 You know, this was how the Russians saw this.
00:06:37.340 Why are you coming to our border when you told us you weren't going to move?
00:06:42.820 And there was one other thing that was very important in this, which is probably the most decisive thing and almost not even recognized.
00:06:51.680 In 2002, the U.S. did something really, really, really destabilizing.
00:06:59.140 And that is it unilaterally left the anti-ballistic missile treaty.
00:07:05.500 That was a core strategy to stop a nuclear war between the two superpowers, because what ABM had done for 30 years was to say, we each have deterrence.
00:07:21.280 If you strike us, we can strike back.
00:07:24.940 We'll limit our anti-ballistic missiles so that both sides maintain deterrence.
00:07:32.060 In 2002, the United States unilaterally, unprovoked, walked out of ABM, said, no, no, we're not going to do it anymore.
00:07:42.380 We're going to put anti-ballistic missile systems into Russia's bordering territories.
00:07:50.600 The Russians said, are you kidding?
00:07:52.480 The U.S. said, what's your problem?
00:07:55.220 We do what we want.
00:07:57.460 So in 2007, Putin said, stop already.
00:08:01.340 In 2008, George Bush Jr. doubled down, as Americans typically do, and said, okay, now we're moving to Ukraine and to Georgia.
00:08:12.380 That was why this war occurred.
00:08:17.560 But Ukraine had one more sliver of life, and that was that they elected a president in 2010 that didn't want to be part of NATO.
00:08:29.160 And the public didn't want to be part of NATO.
00:08:31.740 Why?
00:08:32.360 Because they knew this is very dangerous.
00:08:34.700 Why get into this provocative situation?
00:08:38.160 His name was Viktor Yanukovych.
00:08:40.000 Americans don't like neutrality, but Yanukovych was trying to be neutral between the two sides.
00:08:47.720 And the U.S. played a rather unfortunate role on February 22, 2014, in a violent overthrow of this person.
00:08:59.080 And that's when the war started.
00:09:02.820 And it's been now 10 years, and no president has told the truth until yesterday, by the way.
00:09:11.060 Yesterday is a historic day.
00:09:12.940 Because a call took place between President Putin and President Trump.
00:09:21.660 It was the first call.
00:09:24.920 We don't know if there had been a short call beforehand between the two of them.
00:09:28.460 But there was no call by Biden and Putin.
00:09:32.600 With war going on for three years, no call.
00:09:37.880 And now there was a call.
00:09:40.260 And the readout from the American side was excellent.
00:09:44.400 What President Trump said in the call was, we respect Russia.
00:09:50.020 We hear Russia's concerns.
00:09:52.580 We fought on the same side in World War II.
00:09:55.760 Nice point, by the way.
00:09:57.880 True.
00:09:58.640 Russia lost, Soviet Union lost 27 million people in World War II and was an ally of the United States.
00:10:06.100 The fact that wasn't mentioned for years and years and years by President Biden.
00:10:11.640 And then the defense secretary, Hegseth, the new defense secretary, said yesterday,
00:10:18.080 the truth for the first time, that Ukraine is not going to join NATO.
00:10:25.340 This is the basis for peace.
00:10:27.740 This is absolutely the basis for peace.
00:10:31.000 And they couldn't tell the truth for three decades.
00:10:36.940 They could not admit what any of us knew, because I've been around this region for 36 years in detail.
00:10:46.720 I sat with Boris Yeltsin.
00:10:48.680 I sat with Mikhail Gorbachev.
00:10:50.600 But the Americans would not tell the truth publicly until yesterday, that this was so provocative.
00:10:59.280 It was a game.
00:11:00.860 They thought they'd win the game.
00:11:03.540 I don't know how many people here play or played in their childhood the game of risk.
00:11:09.060 The game of risk was a big game for me.
00:11:12.040 You wanted your peace on every part of the world map.
00:11:16.260 That was the game.
00:11:17.120 When you took over the whole world, world hegemony, we now call it, you won.
00:11:23.940 They're playing that game until this administration.
00:11:29.880 So the two most important, three important things have happened, in my view, in this administration so far.
00:11:35.360 First, our new Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, told the fundamental truth.
00:11:42.580 We are in a multipolar world.
00:11:45.420 First time the sentence was uttered, he told the truth.
00:11:50.040 What does it mean?
00:11:50.940 The American mindset for 30 years was, we run the show.
00:11:54.900 Marco Rubio said, well, we don't run the show.
00:11:56.820 We live with other powerful countries.
00:11:59.840 Great start.
00:12:00.660 Second and third were the two events yesterday.
00:12:05.680 So I'm feeling about peace that this is really something that happened yesterday.
00:12:12.880 If they follow through, we know what Washington is like.
00:12:18.240 There's every crazy idea swarming still.
00:12:24.600 A project of 30 years doesn't go down necessarily in one phone call or one statement by the Secretary of Defense.
00:12:34.620 But it's pretty important that it was said so publicly and so visibly.
00:12:41.940 And, of course, Europe is in a tizzy because Europe signed on to the U.S. project.
00:12:48.740 All these politicians in Europe are there where they are because they were part of the U.S. project.
00:12:55.040 And now the U.S. is reversing its project.
00:12:57.920 And you didn't tell us and you didn't, what are we supposed to do?
00:13:00.400 We're way out there.
00:13:01.420 And so they're completely befuddled.
00:13:04.680 And I have to say, I told them personally, many of these leaders, and I mean personally, one by one, for years, you are going to get trapped this way.
00:13:17.120 Because this project doesn't work.
00:13:20.180 It doesn't make sense.
00:13:21.600 It's a game for the Americans, but it's life and death for the Russians.
00:13:25.820 So it cannot be won by the American side.
00:13:29.840 It's impossible.
00:13:30.500 And I tried to tell them, and nobody in Europe either had the clarity or the guts to see it except the person that preceded me in this seat, Prime Minister Orban, because he was completely clear about this from the first day.
00:13:48.520 Now others are starting.
00:13:50.080 But even until today, the Europeans can't get it because they're so deeply invested in something that makes no sense.
00:13:58.240 They should have said, Russia's big.
00:14:00.300 It lives near us.
00:14:02.840 Let's cooperate.
00:14:04.260 That's how you do it.
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00:16:27.020 I think one of the reasons we wound up in this position, we meaning the United States but also Europe,
00:16:31.860 is there's a habit of speech which reflects a habit of mind, which is an unwillingness to engage with ideas
00:16:37.700 and instead resort immediately to attacking the other person on the basis of motive.
00:16:44.460 And you saw this with Orban.
00:16:45.640 You're a Russian stooge or whatever and was especially hilarious, as he explained.
00:16:49.760 No, he's the opposite of a Russian stooge, of course, lifelong.
00:16:53.220 This country was occupied by the Russians.
00:16:54.460 But you do see it also in the United States, and it makes it kind of impossible to have a rational conversation about it.
00:17:00.680 I know you've been the butt of this too, not whining about it, but it's like is there even a culture
00:17:06.840 in our foreign policy establishment of having rational conversations to the point where we can solve problems like this?
00:17:13.680 You know, we've talked about, I think, an uncle of yours who's one of my favorite politicians of American history,
00:17:22.000 J. William Fulbright.
00:17:23.360 And he wrote a book in the 1960s called The Arrogance of Power.
00:17:30.480 And I was a kid then, and I read that book like it was the coolest thing imaginable.
00:17:37.300 This was the chairman of the U.S. Foreign Relations Committee saying we're too arrogant to think clearly.
00:17:44.320 That was amazing.
00:17:45.420 He was an amazing person.
00:17:46.700 Now, I think that's the fundamental problem.
00:17:51.060 I'm not sure we're properly over it.
00:17:54.080 But I have to say that in 1990-91, we had the chance for global peace, really for global peace.
00:18:06.960 That doomsday clock of the atomic scientists, which I like to refer to so much,
00:18:13.700 which measures how close or far are we from nuclear war,
00:18:18.220 was the farthest away it was ever in its history because the Cold War had ended.
00:18:24.240 So I was there as a young economist who actually knew something about economic stabilization.
00:18:34.360 And I made proposals.
00:18:37.060 And interestingly, just as a footnote, I advised the Polish government in 1989.
00:18:42.420 I just, long story, but suddenly as a kid, I happened to be there, and I helped write their plan.
00:18:49.400 And everything I recommended for Poland was immediately accepted by the White House.
00:18:57.520 It's a very odd thing.
00:19:00.120 In fact, I went one day, I had an idea of mobilizing some finance to help Poland stabilize.
00:19:06.740 And I called the Polish finance minister, said, do you mind if I try to raise a billion dollars for you today,
00:19:13.860 which was a lot of money in those days.
00:19:16.480 And he said, if you raise a billion dollars, that would be great.
00:19:20.400 So I called Bob Dole, our Senate majority leader, whom I knew because of the Poland work that I was doing.
00:19:28.580 And he invited me immediately into his office.
00:19:31.420 And he said, come back in an hour.
00:19:34.120 So I came back in an hour.
00:19:35.580 This was September 1989.
00:19:39.460 And who was sitting there?
00:19:41.260 General Brent Scowcroft.
00:19:43.760 Okay, he was the general who was our national security advisor.
00:19:48.060 I was a kid.
00:19:50.300 So it was a little bit interesting moment.
00:19:54.160 And he, Senator Dole, said to me, explain to General Scowcroft your idea.
00:19:58.400 So I handed him the paper.
00:20:00.220 This is how you do financial stabilization.
00:20:02.640 And here's how you stabilize the currency.
00:20:05.440 And Scowcroft looked at it and said, well, will this work?
00:20:08.120 And I said, General, this will work.
00:20:10.740 And Dole led me out of the office and said, call me back later in the day.
00:20:15.020 So at 5 p.m.
00:20:16.040 I called.
00:20:16.680 And Dole said, the White House has called.
00:20:19.120 Tell your friends you have the $1 billion.
00:20:22.200 So I raised $1 billion that day.
00:20:24.440 It was good.
00:20:26.660 So, no, no.
00:20:28.820 It had nothing to do with me.
00:20:30.100 Because it was the right idea.
00:20:34.860 The Polish Zloty stabilized.
00:20:38.080 I did a good thing.
00:20:39.820 I was a technically equipped, sophisticated manager of a financial stabilization.
00:20:48.160 Or not manager, but advisor on the financial stabilization.
00:20:50.840 Then, in 1991, I recommended the same thing for Gorbachev and for this creaking, collapsing Soviet Union.
00:21:07.520 Gorbachev wanted to have elections in all of the republics.
00:21:10.640 And he wanted to democratize and stabilize.
00:21:13.320 So, OK, I know something about that, Mr. President.
00:21:17.440 And so we met in the Harvard Kennedy School.
00:21:22.600 And there were one, two, three, four, five of us.
00:21:29.200 A little team.
00:21:30.880 One of them was the chief economic advisor of Gorbachev, Grigory Yablinsky.
00:21:37.100 One was the dean of the Kennedy School.
00:21:39.240 One became a very senior diplomat, Bob Blackwell, that I deal with.
00:21:42.940 One was a very senior economist at MIT, Stanley Fischer.
00:21:47.900 We wrote a plan for how the Soviet Union could stabilize.
00:21:52.720 And I did the chapter on the financing.
00:21:55.120 Basically, the same thing that I had said for Poland.
00:21:57.980 OK.
00:21:58.960 It was completely rejected within about 12 hours in Washington.
00:22:04.140 OK.
00:22:04.280 I hated this for the next 30 years, I have to tell you, because we just could not take yes for an answer.
00:22:15.060 A couple of months ago, someone sent me from the archives, the first time that I'd ever seen it,
00:22:21.420 the National Security Council minutes rejecting the proposal.
00:22:25.580 Fascinating to read, because that's your life before your eyes, watching this.
00:22:34.340 There was a guy named Dick Darman, who was a former colleague of mine.
00:22:39.040 The technical term, I don't think I can say it in mixed company, actually.
00:22:43.440 So I won't say what I would say about him.
00:22:47.520 But it's an unpleasant English word.
00:22:49.260 It's really nasty.
00:22:52.180 Too nasty for polite company.
00:22:55.140 He says in this thing, we should do the minimum necessary so that there's not a collapse, but nothing more.
00:23:05.580 And he quotes Machiavelli, and, you know, we're not interested, and we're not going to do this.
00:23:14.280 And it's really watching stupid people taking important, stupid decisions.
00:23:23.880 Fools.
00:23:25.160 By the way, they never called to say, can we discuss stabilization?
00:23:28.620 This guy knew nothing.
00:23:30.280 They don't understand anything.
00:23:31.740 They don't care.
00:23:33.140 So what were they doing?
00:23:34.260 They actually reached the conclusion at the end of the meeting.
00:23:37.120 We're going to do the minimum possible.
00:23:40.320 I mean, minimum, minimum.
00:23:42.120 It's not our business to help.
00:23:43.720 We're not going to do any of that.
00:23:45.600 That's arrogance of power.
00:23:48.280 We don't have to do anything.
00:23:51.420 Why?
00:23:52.020 We're the United States.
00:23:53.280 We don't have to do anything.
00:23:56.680 They didn't even, look, the stakes for the world were very high.
00:24:02.140 You could have a 30-minute phone call to understand financial stabilization.
00:24:08.860 You could say, in history, when countries are destabilized this way, here's how stability has worked.
00:24:16.660 That was my specialty.
00:24:18.480 That's what I knew and taught at Harvard and knew a lot about.
00:24:22.900 But they're so arrogant that it's not even to discuss for a half an hour any of this.
00:24:31.020 And they didn't.
00:24:32.160 And they took a terrible decision.
00:24:34.200 And by the way, my point is not that that led on to this and this and this.
00:24:39.020 No.
00:24:39.640 They took terrible decisions for the next 35 years.
00:24:42.760 This could have been stopped at any moment.
00:24:47.120 Not one thing led to the next thing.
00:24:49.660 No.
00:24:50.200 One stupid decision, then the next one, then the next one, then the next one.
00:24:54.700 You have to learn to behave.
00:24:56.880 The way you behave in this world is mutual respect.
00:25:00.440 The way you behave is thinking you're not going to be more secure if they're completely destabilized.
00:25:06.100 That's what you have to understand.
00:25:10.140 And that is not so hard to understand.
00:25:13.800 We teach it to our kids.
00:25:15.920 At age four, we start teaching that.
00:25:19.380 And then suddenly, if you want your passport to Washington, you have to forget it at age 40 or something.
00:25:26.540 And that's how they behave.
00:25:28.580 So that's my feeling about this, that it's just a kind of arrogance.
00:25:34.360 And you can see it in this writing, which I find fascinating to go back and watch this tragedy unfold.
00:25:42.620 1997, another wonderful moment if you want to just watch hubris and tragedy.
00:25:50.840 Very good book.
00:25:52.720 Good in that it's insightful.
00:25:55.800 Terrible book in that it's all wrong.
00:25:59.100 By Zbigniew Brzezinski.
00:26:00.300 And many of you have probably read it called The Grand Chessboard.
00:26:05.640 And he could have called it The Game of Risk.
00:26:07.920 It would have been a little bit more accurate.
00:26:10.060 But it was about how to make American dominance in the world.
00:26:14.080 And he has a chapter about expanding NATO to Ukraine.
00:26:19.380 Exactly that.
00:26:21.440 And he talks about Europe and NATO expanding eastward.
00:26:25.180 And the question that he asks in 1997 is, what can the Russians do about it?
00:26:32.260 Because they're weak.
00:26:34.040 And he answers meticulously.
00:26:38.100 He considers, would Russia ever ally with China?
00:26:43.600 Impossible, he concludes.
00:26:45.160 That'll never happen.
00:26:46.360 That'll never happen.
00:26:47.600 Could Russia ever ally with Iran?
00:26:50.540 No.
00:26:51.360 Impossible.
00:26:52.560 That will never happen.
00:26:53.600 So you watch, like we watch now, ChatGPT thinking out loud.
00:27:00.020 It's all there.
00:27:01.480 It's all wrong.
00:27:02.900 And it was all American policy for the next 25 years.
00:27:06.800 That's tragedy.
00:27:08.020 Let me ask a question, though.
00:27:09.040 Like a kind of thematic, fundamental question.
00:27:11.780 So a great empire, one of it, you know, empires tend to be arrogant.
00:27:16.080 I do think that's a feature of empires.
00:27:17.680 That is it.
00:27:18.120 But an enduring empire shows stability.
00:27:22.340 Its goal is stability.
00:27:23.840 Because it understands exactly what you said, I thought, so nicely.
00:27:26.740 It doesn't help you if your neighbors are in chaos.
00:27:29.220 It doesn't help you.
00:27:30.300 It's against your own interests.
00:27:32.280 So that's such an obvious insight.
00:27:34.340 The Roman Empire was based on it.
00:27:35.760 The British Empire was based on it.
00:27:37.140 Ours is the only empire I'm aware of that has kind of intentionally sowed chaos.
00:27:44.600 And I don't understand where that thinking comes from.
00:27:46.820 Leaving aside the moral questions, is it right or wrong?
00:27:49.100 It doesn't work for you.
00:27:51.000 So why have we done it?
00:27:52.360 You know, the Roman Empire is always a great story for us.
00:27:58.680 And I compare the Ukraine war to the Battle of the Tutenberg Forest, which is A.D. 9.
00:28:07.660 Yep.
00:28:08.060 And in A.D. 9, the Roman Empire reached its limits on the Rhine.
00:28:15.340 It tried to conquer the Germanic tribes in 9 A.D.
00:28:22.240 They were defeated under Augustus.
00:28:26.420 And there were sporadic border things from then on, but they never tried again.
00:28:33.460 They had hundreds of years where that just wasn't their business.
00:28:38.400 It was very, very smart.
00:28:39.980 Hadrian, in the first, second century A.D., was the emperor at the maximum extent of the Roman Empire.
00:28:51.420 And he basically wanted stability across the border lines.
00:28:57.540 And this was the prudence of the empire.
00:29:02.120 It wasn't Alexander, you know, was very different 300, 400 years earlier.
00:29:08.140 He wanted to conquer the whole world.
00:29:11.780 There was no limit.
00:29:13.320 Finally, his soldiers told him, if you go any further, we're killing you.
00:29:18.900 We've got to go home because they were already beyond the Indus River.
00:29:23.220 But the Romans said, no, we're going to put some boundaries.
00:29:26.600 We're going to keep the borders.
00:29:27.900 And we're going to not go beyond our means or our needs.
00:29:34.260 I hope what happened yesterday was a good example of that.
00:29:42.420 What Trump and Hegseth did yesterday, if they follow through, if the deep state doesn't undermine it, if it's some crazy thing doesn't happen, said, we don't need to be in Ukraine with NATO.
00:29:57.080 Well, we don't need to be.
00:30:00.080 It's for us.
00:30:01.360 It's nothing.
00:30:03.200 And it doesn't mean that Russia is now going to invade Western Europe.
00:30:07.400 That's crazy.
00:30:08.160 This was a project going the other direction.
00:30:10.900 So it's basic prudence.
00:30:13.640 And that's what a great power should show.
00:30:18.240 Prudence.
00:30:18.760 What are the chances that some, you said, unless the deep state doesn't make some crazy thing happens, I would note that for a good part of the presidential campaign, the deep state was telling the candidate, Donald Trump, that the state of Iran is trying to kill you, which as far as I know is totally untrue, by the way.
00:30:34.460 But they were telling him that in order to prepare him to attack Iran, which they're still trying to do.
00:30:38.620 So we know that this kind of deception is just a feature of it.
00:30:44.380 How hard will people invested in the Ukraine war go?
00:30:49.680 To what lengths will they go to continue this, do you think?
00:30:53.560 First of all, the main job of a U.S. president, of a successful U.S. president, is to put the foot on the brake.
00:31:04.180 This is, if you look in history, the good presidents know when to stop.
00:31:11.460 Eisenhower was such.
00:31:13.660 Kennedy was such.
00:31:15.840 Reagan understood this.
00:31:18.240 And all our recent presidents did not, up until now, basically.
00:31:23.200 Well, Truman in Korea, George H.W. Bush in Kuwait, I mean, also true.
00:31:28.840 No, that they fought too many wars in my opinion.
00:31:31.880 Yeah, but they did stop.
00:31:33.380 No, but they stopped, but they made too much Iraq in 2003.
00:31:39.080 I mean, there were just too many wars.
00:31:42.340 So the question is, can we learn and can the president keep the foot on the brake?
00:31:51.840 If he does, he will have an extremely successful administration.
00:31:56.600 He, I think, understands that all of Netanyahu's pleading, and this has been 30 years also, this is another project for the U.S. to go to war with Iran, is just the worst idea imaginable.
00:32:14.640 It would be a disaster.
00:32:16.640 And so I think President Trump understands that.
00:32:20.120 I think he understands that.
00:32:20.720 I think he understands that a war with China would be a complete disaster, which it would be, though there's a lot of war party around on that.
00:32:32.080 The funny thing about our time right now, not funny, the wonderful thing about our time right now is that we're in the midst of the biggest technological boom in the history of the world.
00:32:48.380 So, so many good things could happen in the next 10 to 20 years.
00:32:55.640 President Trump has used the expression, which I fully subscribe to, a golden age.
00:33:01.020 We could have it.
00:33:02.620 A golden age is not war.
00:33:04.420 A golden age is investing in all this wonderful technology so that we can have health care that works, education systems that work, infrastructure that works.
00:33:16.620 It would be nice if the United States even had one kilometer of fast rail, just saying China just completed its 50,000th kilometer of fast rail.
00:33:27.000 We don't have one.
00:33:29.200 I can't even take the train reliably from New York to actually from Washington to New York.
00:33:36.220 Last time I took the Accela, it broke down in the middle and I had to change to a local in New Jersey, which does not happen between Shanghai and Beijing, by the way, just saying.
00:33:47.280 But you missed the countryside.
00:33:48.560 I mean, that is part of it, though.
00:33:49.860 That's it.
00:33:50.940 Not a lot of incentive to stop in New Jersey and now they're giving you one.
00:33:54.500 There I was.
00:33:55.480 I felt so privileged.
00:33:57.120 Right.
00:33:57.400 And there was the local right on the next track waiting for us.
00:34:01.060 And you wouldn't have been in Passaic otherwise.
00:34:03.520 Exactly.
00:34:03.820 So lucky you.
00:34:05.520 You count your blessings, right?
00:34:07.220 So the whole point of market capitalism is consumer choice.
00:34:12.340 You have a choice between products and services.
00:34:15.020 And the competition between companies makes the goods and services better.
00:34:20.600 That's the core idea.
00:34:22.640 Unfortunately, there are an awful lot of monopolies out there.
00:34:25.480 Monopolies are not good for consumers.
00:34:27.440 They are not good for you.
00:34:29.320 And one of the places where there's effectively a monopoly is in wireless contracts.
00:34:33.440 But it's not a complete monopoly.
00:34:35.260 You're probably paying way too much to use your cell phone.
00:34:39.840 But now you have a choice.
00:34:41.200 You don't have to pay $100 a month just to get a free phone.
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00:36:47.040 It does feel, I'm glad that you are saying this, because it does feel like we're not even a month into the Trump administration.
00:36:54.540 I don't think anybody agrees with, you know, everything of anyone else's program.
00:36:57.940 But clearly, this is a massive departure from what we had, much more than I thought.
00:37:03.220 I feel like I watch pretty closely.
00:37:04.620 I'm amazed by the ambition of what they're doing.
00:37:09.000 And it does feel like the only way to stop this, Tulsi Gabbard just confirmed yesterday as the director.
00:37:15.580 That's a very big deal.
00:37:17.680 It's unbelievable.
00:37:18.620 It's a very big deal.
00:37:19.760 Tulsi Gabbard's writing the president's daily brief.
00:37:21.940 Tulsi Gabbard is in charge of a lot of declassification efforts.
00:37:24.580 Like, the whole thing is unbelievable.
00:37:25.460 The only way to stop this is with a war.
00:37:29.280 I mean, that's my kind of simple reading of it.
00:37:30.940 Do you agree with that?
00:37:32.180 I think that is exactly, entirely the point.
00:37:37.140 And if, and we had news today, please, inshallah, that the ceasefire will continue on Saturday
00:37:49.820 because more hostages will be released, more exchanges will take place, and there won't be a return.
00:37:59.380 Really, inshallah, if it happens and an outbreak of war is stopped, because it has to be stopped,
00:38:09.960 this will be such a blessing, not only for this region, but I have to say for our country, too, the United States.
00:38:16.300 I agree.
00:38:16.440 And so this is really the key moment, and I think Trump's instincts are there.
00:38:27.060 And what he says, we didn't even hear Biden or other presidents say,
00:38:33.860 President Trump said many times about Ukraine, too many people are dying.
00:38:39.140 You didn't even hear those words.
00:38:41.160 I mean, the idea that war involved, by the way, maybe a million Ukrainians dead or seriously wounded,
00:38:50.360 we're going to find out in the next months, because finally we'll see what reality is,
00:38:55.500 not what the propaganda is, but it's horrible what's happened.
00:38:59.400 So that instinct is essential.
00:39:02.100 And there are several places where everything could be derailed.
00:39:08.940 This region is one of them.
00:39:11.100 Ukraine is another.
00:39:13.360 South China and East China Sea is the third.
00:39:17.080 And if the president gets it and has the basic idea, we live together in respect with other countries,
00:39:31.420 the golden age will come.
00:39:34.360 I think, and I'd love your view of this.
00:39:36.400 I think of all the amazing things I've seen in the last three and a half weeks,
00:39:39.580 maybe the most amazing is the emergence of Steve Wyckoff, who I will say I know personally and like enormously,
00:39:47.480 but who was a real estate guy.
00:39:50.240 All of a sudden, Trump appoints him an envoy sort of over and above massive stable diplomats.
00:39:56.920 We have professional diplomats at the State Department to go do, you know, effect a ceasefire here in this region
00:40:03.400 and then sends him over to Russia.
00:40:05.180 And he winds up meeting with Putin, apparently, for several hours.
00:40:07.960 And then all this stuff happens.
00:40:10.480 You've been around diplomats your entire life.
00:40:12.580 You've functioned as a diplomat.
00:40:15.040 What do you think of that?
00:40:16.900 Look, he did the single coolest thing since this administration started, I have to say,
00:40:23.060 which was Trump made this ceasefire.
00:40:28.580 There's no question about it.
00:40:29.960 Biden would never.
00:40:31.100 I mean, he didn't make the ceasefire because we don't know where Biden was.
00:40:37.960 Mentally, anyway.
00:40:39.480 But his team was completely incompetent.
00:40:43.840 Horrible.
00:40:44.700 I'm sorry to say it.
00:40:45.940 It's very terrible.
00:40:47.600 A lot of the rest of us didn't notice that.
00:40:49.680 Yes.
00:40:50.120 It wasn't a completely.
00:40:52.020 It wasn't a completely closely held secret, let's say.
00:40:55.200 So, Trump said, we got to have a ceasefire before my inauguration.
00:41:03.140 And he sent Witkoff.
00:41:05.740 And Witkoff said to Netanyahu, I'm coming to meet you tomorrow.
00:41:13.460 And Netanyahu said, no, no, no, tomorrow is Saturday.
00:41:20.620 I can't meet you.
00:41:22.240 And Witkoff said, I'll be in your office tomorrow at one.
00:41:26.260 And told him, I don't care.
00:41:28.860 Anything.
00:41:29.600 I'm there.
00:41:30.680 We're going to have a discussion.
00:41:33.640 And out of that meeting came the ceasefire.
00:41:38.240 Now, the ceasefire looks maybe like it will hold this weekend.
00:41:45.080 Believe me, in Israel, they want war everywhere for a lot of reasons.
00:41:50.960 But the president's job, from my point of view, of American interest and the world interest and this region's interest, everybody's interest, no more war.
00:42:02.620 Stop this now.
00:42:04.160 So, if Witkoff can keep that track record, that would be the heroic success.
00:42:10.720 Well, what does it tell you that Steve Witkoff, who I will say, again, I'm biased because I really like him.
00:42:15.440 He's got a great personality, super energetic, very straightforward, believable.
00:42:19.680 But zero training in any of this.
00:42:23.080 Like, none.
00:42:23.600 He's a real estate guy.
00:42:24.840 And he pulls this off?
00:42:26.600 Like, what does that tell you about a professional diplomatic corps?
00:42:29.460 I'll tell you one thing it tells you.
00:42:33.440 Trump can make peace if he wants to make peace.
00:42:36.360 I mean, he needs a capable guy that can go and read the Riot Act and say, this is no joke and we're going to have it.
00:42:44.480 And that is basically what good diplomacy is.
00:42:48.340 And, again, in the U.S. system, of course, we've got the deep state who tell presidents what to do.
00:42:59.040 We've got lobbies.
00:43:00.020 We've got all sorts of things.
00:43:02.540 But a president's true job is to lead.
00:43:07.380 And if you don't have a president compass mentis, like I think we didn't have in the United States, you get war breaking out everywhere like we had in the last two years.
00:43:18.800 Or if you have a president that is poorly directed or poorly, you know, really doesn't get it.
00:43:27.720 And Clinton was an inconsequential president, in my opinion, because he is so easily swayed.
00:43:36.260 He just made so many lousy decisions.
00:43:42.520 George Bush Jr., listened to Cheney, who was really a nonstop warmonger and so on.
00:43:49.280 If a president gets the idea, I want peace because this war is really destructive of everything else I'm trying to do, then you can have peace, actually.
00:44:05.160 It's possible.
00:44:06.500 No one is going to attack the United States.
00:44:09.500 So peace depends on us.
00:44:12.060 No one is attacking us.
00:44:13.880 China is not about to invade the United States.
00:44:16.500 Russia is not going to attack the United States.
00:44:19.680 Mexico and Canada are not going to attack the United States.
00:44:23.200 Panama is not going to attack the United States.
00:44:25.400 Greenland is not going to attack the United States.
00:44:27.700 I'm sorry to make, I don't want to go the whole list, but I'm just confident about this.
00:44:34.180 So if the president wants peace, he'll get it.
00:44:38.400 If he gets peace, believe me, he'll get all the other things that he wants, like low inflation, being able to pass the budget that he wants, getting his tax policies that he wants.
00:44:54.020 But if there's war, he ain't going to get any of it.
00:44:58.740 That's the basic point.
00:45:00.560 And, you know, I voted Democratic in 2020.
00:45:08.520 2020, I voted for Biden.
00:45:11.440 And Biden, I've had a lot of experience with governments over the last 45 years.
00:45:19.100 So I watched them and I think I understand a lot of them.
00:45:23.360 And Biden, in the first days, said stupid things about foreign policy.
00:45:29.180 The world is divided between this and this and blah, blah, blah.
00:45:33.960 And you say, oh, my God, what is the guy's is doesn't get it.
00:45:39.180 And in fact, he didn't get it at all.
00:45:44.160 And I told many Democratic leaders when they still talk to me now, they don't talk to me and I don't talk to them.
00:45:51.260 Now, you're going to lose you're going to do something completely almost impossible in American politics, which is you're going to lose on the basis of foreign policy because Americans don't vote on foreign policy.
00:46:07.720 And I said, your foreign policy is so bad, this is going to bring you down.
00:46:13.360 And in fact, the Democrats lost their heads in this and they were so intent on defeating Trump that no matter what Biden said, well, we have to back him up 100 percent as he led them off to war and complicity in the war here in the Ukraine war and tensions with China and all the rest.
00:46:35.980 And they created a milieu of so much unhappiness in the United States, anxiety, higher inflation, big budget deficits that the public said, no, we don't like this.
00:46:50.340 This is so they did really be impossible.
00:46:54.240 But they brought Liz Chang over to the coalition.
00:46:56.280 Yeah, exactly.
00:46:57.280 And then what's ironic is, you know, this wonderful person who was confirmed yesterday for the head of the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who's really smart, by the way, very honest, very meticulous.
00:47:20.520 I know her extremely well over many, many years, totally up and up.
00:47:27.120 So I'm delighted she's going to be briefing the president each day.
00:47:30.820 I couldn't think of a better person.
00:47:32.800 All the Democrats voted against her.
00:47:36.020 This is crazy.
00:47:37.460 She was their colleague for decades.
00:47:40.460 She stood up for things that they should be applauding her for.
00:47:44.820 Every one of them voted against her.
00:47:46.820 She was the vice chairman of the DNC.
00:47:49.300 Exactly.
00:47:49.760 Seven, eight years ago.
00:47:51.800 Exactly.
00:47:53.280 So I guess the question is, the opposition, you've alluded to the deep state, but there's also the out in the open state, you know, the Congress, for example, the other party, the Democratic Party, does Trump's success, not just in the election, winning the popular vote, but in affecting peace, which is actually popular with people, does that change their views on foreign policy?
00:48:17.940 Like, does he bring people with him?
00:48:20.500 Or does he stand alone between the two parties as he did in the first time?
00:48:24.620 Look, this is very early days because we're just a little over three weeks into this.
00:48:29.140 But if yesterday turns into policy, which it could, and the Ukraine war ends soon, which it could, you're going to see everybody changing their views.
00:48:42.440 Oh, I didn't support that.
00:48:44.960 Peace is great.
00:48:46.400 The European leaders are going to be saying the opposite of what they're saying right now.
00:48:52.720 Look, in a hundred politicians anyway, three think.
00:48:56.360 The rest line up somewhere, tactically.
00:48:59.880 So, yes, they will change their view.
00:49:02.820 They'll complain about other things.
00:49:04.580 That's their job.
00:49:05.460 They're in the opposition.
00:49:06.640 But this war was a disastrous, stupid project that went awry, should have ended, makes no sense.
00:49:15.940 And if Trump pulls it off as he can, if he's resolute now and clear-minded and Witkoff does his work, because he'll be the one to do it, it looks like, and he does his work, then this won't be talked about or complained about.
00:49:32.140 This will pass into history as just another one of those blunders.
00:49:37.280 I mean, we don't talk about the 2003 Iraq war or the 20 years waste in Afghanistan or so many, Libya, so many completely ridiculous projects that America's been involved in for no conceivable reason other than these weird game of risk ideas.
00:49:57.100 We got to own that space on the board.
00:49:59.760 Turns out the world and that game board are rather different.
00:50:04.700 But if Trump pulls this off, what he needs, I think, and what we need to understand is the American scene, it ain't great in general.
00:50:16.660 The budget deficit is enormous.
00:50:18.960 The fragility of society is actually quite significant.
00:50:25.740 There is lots of depression, lots of violence, lots of problems that haven't been addressed for 30 years.
00:50:36.360 Big, big budget deficit, huge, can't be solved.
00:50:42.560 With all due respect to Elon, it's not, the budget deficit has very little to do with the size of the civil service.
00:50:51.020 That's not where the budget deficit comes from.
00:50:52.840 That's not where the spending comes from.
00:50:54.380 Spending comes from 750 overseas military bases, from wars, from massive outlays, of course, on pensions, on health care, on interest payments, on the debt, and so forth.
00:51:10.440 So war derails all of that.
00:51:15.220 We're not with a buffer.
00:51:17.540 We're not where the U.S. dollar is king forever.
00:51:21.760 It's almost the opposite, by the way, although it's not so clear to people.
00:51:25.980 But 10 years from now, it's going to be a completely different international monetary scene from the one that we have now.
00:51:33.240 Because the red minby is going to play a completely different role.
00:51:37.060 And the way that international settlements will be done is completely different.
00:51:42.240 You can, if you watch like I do, you see all of the stitching together of a new system taking shape.
00:51:48.960 So the U.S. does not have this great room for maneuver and it's all a game and we can do this and we can do that.
00:51:56.540 The president needs to be really accurate right now, really accurate, and understand, also, don't overplay the hand.
00:52:09.480 The world's not desperately waiting to get into the U.S. market, as I think he thinks, that these tariffs give all this leverage.
00:52:17.840 No, the U.S. is not the big deal that maybe some people imagine right now.
00:52:23.560 So we've got to get our act together and you can't get your act together in war.
00:52:28.740 That's the bottom line.
00:52:31.280 Professor Jeffrey Sachs, thank you very much.
00:52:33.660 Great to be with you.
00:52:34.700 Thanks.
00:52:35.420 Thank you.
00:52:37.400 That was great.
00:52:38.880 Thanks.
00:52:43.260 So in September, we went across the country, coast to coast, 17 different cities on a nationwide live tour.
00:52:49.700 And it was amazing.
00:52:50.300 And we brought the entire staff with us like we always do because we all work together for so long and enjoy traveling together.
00:52:56.940 And one of our producers is a documentary filmmaker.
00:52:59.860 And so he decided to make a documentary film about our trip, a full month across America with some of the most interesting people around.
00:53:07.880 Different people join us every single night.
00:53:09.640 Von Geno and Russell Brand and Bobby Kennedy and J.D. Vance and Donald Trump, et cetera, et cetera.
00:53:14.540 We had the best time.
00:53:16.120 And the fruit of that is a documentary called On the Road, the Tucker Carlson Live Tour, which is available right now on TCN.
00:53:24.600 On the Road, Tucker Carlson Live Tour is hilarious.
00:53:27.580 You will like it.