Transcript of Jeffrey Sachs’ Interview on The Tucker Carlson Show (1)

The recent interview given by Professor Jeffrey Sachs to American journalist Tucker Carlson manages to shed light on the most feared conflicts of today: Russia – Ukraine, but also the new attacks launched by Israel on Iranian territories.

The Peace Candidate’s Challenge

Tucker Carlson: Donald Trump ran as a peace candidate. He was going to end the Biden administration’s disastrous war in Ukraine, and he was going to bring peace to the Middle East. And for the past seven months, he’s been trying to do just that. We’re getting a lot closer, but we’re not quite there.

Why? Well, says Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia, who has been watching carefully and speaking to many people involved, because the intel agencies aren’t on board at all.

So almost three years ago, you got bounced off of Morning Joe after many years, basically shunned by the entire world that you occupied and had occupied for decades, simply for saying, hey, maybe the war in Ukraine is not a good idea. So it’s been a number of years since that occurred. And I wonder if you have thought about or answered the question, why is the Ukraine war so central to the people in charge of our society? What is it about that that creates this very intense attachment? They exile you for disagreeing over it.

The Failed Peace Agreement of 2022

Jeffrey Sachs: Well, let me start with the basic point. The war is not a good idea and it could have ended three years ago. This is yet another of the tragedies of the Ukraine war. On April 15, 2022, there was a draft agreement between Ukraine and Russia to end the war. The United States swooped in, told the Ukrainians, don’t do it, keep fighting. And three years on, Ukraine has lost perhaps more than a million young people to death and serious injury.

It has lost territory, it has had the country destroyed, it has had its economy brought to ruins. Nothing of the last three years has been any help whatsoever to Ukraine.

So when I said three years ago, I also said it five years ago and before even Russia’s invasion in February 2022, that there didn’t have to be a war, that the war could easily be avoided. When I said in March and April of 2022, you could stop Russia right now and end the war, not only was that right, it was, if I could put it this way, pro Ukraine. Of course, it was attacked at the time as being anti Ukraine.

This is the craziest idea. The friends of Ukraine, so called, are the ones that are completely destroying Ukraine. The friends of Ukraine, so called, are the ones that tell Ukraine to fight on, to fight on. It’s like being, I guess the coach in a boxing match and your guy is being bloodied and being hit and being destroyed in the battle and you say, “Go, I’m on your side. Go out there and hit him again” until they get smashed one more time. And they’re brought to their side of the ring and again you tell them, “Go out and fight, because I’m your buddy.”

And this is the disaster that the so called friends of Ukraine, whether it is all that we saw during the Biden administration or that we hear every day from Starmer, the Prime Minister of UK or Merz, the new Chancellor of Germany, or Macron from France, and of course from Zelensky, who is now running, I’m sorry to put it this way, but a little dictatorship because he runs by martial law, he doesn’t run by public support. But they’re all the ones telling their young people to go out to the front lines, go get killed. And this has been going on for years.

The Real Target: Weakening Russia

So the question you ask is why? This isn’t for Ukraine, this is destroying Ukraine. So what is it for? Well, I think it’s quite obvious and it’s been obvious for many years, the American push to Ukraine to fight on, don’t accept neutrality and so forth. This has been a project of the American deep state of the military industrial complex dating back decades. And the target has nothing to do with Ukraine at all. Destroying Ukraine. The target is to quote, weaken Russia. This is the point.

Tucker Carlson: But why would one want to weaken Russia?

Jeffrey Sachs: That’s an even longer story.

Tucker Carlson: I mean no one wants to weaken India.

Jeffrey Sachs: Yes, it’s a very good point. And someday when India succeeds, we will want to weaken India. So that’s probably sooner rather than later. It’s actually quite interesting. Maybe you’ll make me digress. Right at the start, in the early years of this century, in 2000, 2001, 2002, the US relationship with China was just kind of normal. Even keel, we had good business with China. And one of my dear friends, with whom I somewhat disagree on some aspects and agree vociferously on other aspects, John Mearsheimer, the great political scientist, wrote a famous book called the Tragedy of Great Power Politics. This is his magnum opus.

And in it, he says at the beginning of the book, in around 2000, the relations with China are quiet now, but when China gains power, we will go into conflict with it. And so this is to answer your question, why would John Mearsheimer say that? Not because of anything China would have done, but because a big power will generate a reaction from the United States. That’s his theory, that we’re on an almost inevitable collision course the great powers.

I’m not so pessimistic, although I’d say Mearsheimer is empirically more right in a way. So he somewhat accurately describes the situation, but he also labeled his book the Tragedy of Great Power Politics. And I don’t want tragedy all the time. I’d like a little comedy, actually. A little normal relations.

The Pattern of Great Power Opposition

So to answer your question, what do we have against Russia? The fact of the matter is Russia is big. Russia is powerful. And for that reason, and that reason alone or sufficiently, the US would oppose Russia just like the US opposes China. Now, of course, maybe people listening to this are saying, that’s crazy. We oppose China because of all the terrible deeds they do. Or we oppose Russia because of all of the terrible deeds they do.

I would take a different view of this, which is we make up stories about why we oppose big powers, but the basic reason we oppose big powers is that they are big. They are an affront to our desire for what the political scientists, in a fancy word, call primacy or call hegemony, or call full spectrum dominance, in other words, is an affront to our ability to dictate circumstances.

China certainly is an affront to the US ability to dictate circumstances in Asia. For that reason alone, we, for me, it’s fine, you know, I understand there are many powers in the world. That’s how the world is. But for the powers that be in Washington, that’s completely antithetical to the American strategic purpose, which explicitly, for many, many years has been full spectrum dominance or primacy. In other words, our purpose stated by the establishment, by the military industrial complex is one. We need to be the unrivaled number one.

So if you ask, why do we hate Russia? Because Russia stands in the way of us being the unrivaled number one. Now you could say, well, it’s because of all the terrible deeds that they do. But it’s a little more complicated than that.

The Evolution of Anti-Russian Sentiment

During the cold war, from 1945 to 1991, we hated Russia because it was communist. Yes. I was quite deeply involved at the end of that period as an economic adviser when they were trying to get out of that horrible system. And I advised President Gorbachev in 1990, 91, and I advised President Yeltsin in 1992 and 93. Yeltsin said, “We don’t want any of this communism anymore. We want to be a normal country.”

So the United States came up with other reasons to hate Russia. So I watched with my own eyes that the reason that had been given was not the real reason. It was maybe the believed reason, but it was the narrative reason. We hate Russia because it is a Godless Communist country. Now it is a Russian Orthodox, non-communist country, and we still hate Russia. Same deal.

Historical Parallels: The British Empire and Russia

And by the way, what’s absolutely fascinating is if you go back to 180 years ago, and I’m not kidding, to 1840, our precursor as world hegemon. That was the British Empire. They hated Russia, too. And why? For no reason. It was a little before the Bolshevik Revolution, by the way. It was before any ostensible reason. But the British elite hated Russia.

And this shows an interesting answer to your question. A historian named Gleason in 1950 tried to answer the question, how did Britain come to hate Russia? Why is it that by 1840, the British hated the Russians so much that 13 years later, in 1853, the British went to war against Russia, a war of choice in the Crimean War?

So this historian did an amazing job because it was before AI and being able to ask all these good questions. He went through all the archives, he went through all the speeches by British leaders, all the speeches in the House of Commons, all the articles written in the intellectual magazines from 1850 onward, and he posed the question. He said, we were allies of Russia in 1815 in defeating Napoleon. Yes, we were allies then. Just 25 years later, we’re enemies. What occurred?

So he goes through all of the speeches, everything. His conclusion in the end is remarkable. Nothing occurred. There was no reason why Britain came to hate Russia, except Russia was big and therefore was an affront to the British Empire. And of course, the British concocted an idea which was a completely bizarre idea, and that was that the czar was going to invade British India through the Khyber Pass. This became known as the Great Game afterwards. This was a crazy idea. The thought never even crossed the heads of these czars.

Tucker Carlson: The idea to march across Afghanistan.

Jeffrey Sachs: To march across Afghanistan and into India, into the Indian subcontinent to fight the British empires and Looney Tunes. But the British elite came to view Russia as the great threat to the British Empire, the threat to India, the crown jewel of the Empire. So much so that by 1840, Britain was rabidly Russophobic. And then by 1853, Lord Palmerston totally concocted a pretext to go to war with Russia. The Crimean War.

Tucker Carlson: Charge of the Light Brigade.

The Crimean War: A Concocted Conflict

Jeffrey Sachs: Yes. Charge of the Light Brigade. And the Crimean War was a concocted showdown between the British Empire and the Russian Empire, concocted because the Russians said, we don’t want to fight you. You know, day and night, challenged. The Russians had challenged the Ottoman Turks and put some troops in Wallachia at the mouth of the Danube, because the Ottomans had given some privileges to France that the Russians thought belonged to them. And then the British and the French threatened the Russians and the Russians retreated.

This is the prelude to the Crimean War. The Russians retreated. And then when the Russians retreated, the British said, we now fight on. In other words, the pretext was gone. But they wanted that war. Why did they want the war? They wanted the war because the British idea was to banish Russia from the Black Sea region.

Tucker Carlson: Yes.

Jeffrey Sachs: Remember, the Black Sea is Russia’s warm water port till today, by the way. It was created as a warm water port in 1783 by the Empress Catherine the Great and it has been Russia’s warm water port since then.

Tucker Carlson: Crimea.

The Black Sea Strategy: Then and Now

Jeffrey Sachs: Palmerston in Crimea, in Sevastopol. Precisely. Which was besieged by the British and the French during the Crimean War. The Russians eventually surrendered. And in the Treaty of Paris in 1856, the Russians agreed to scrap their Black Sea fleet. It remained scrapped for about 20 years, actually. And then as history always shows, the French went running back to the Russians ally with us because the Germans are rising in power. And so suddenly the enemy became the friend because you needed a new friend to fight the new enemy and so on. It’s kind of crazy European politics, but the idea of Lord Palmerston was banish Russia from the Black Sea and you reduce Russia to a third rate power.

Now all of this is fascinating because first of all, the Russophobia was a concocted hatred. Second, the war between Britain and France on one side and Russia in 1853 was concocted. But third, we’re replaying that almost to the same script today and almost with exactly the same plot line, which is so weird but true.

From Cold War to Post-Soviet Hostility

And why I say that is the United States quote, or the inside deep state. The CIA and its apparatus and the rest of the military industrial complexes hated the Soviet Union since 1945, even though they were our ally in defeating Hitler. It turned to preparing for war against our ally within a few months of the end of World War II. This is by itself a very important point. And then from 1945 to 1991, we had the Cold War, ostensibly against communism and against international communism.

Then in December 1991, the Soviet Union ended. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it to you before. I was in the Kremlin that day, literally that hour, sitting next in front of Boris Yeltsin, or I was in front of him, and he said to me and to my Colleagues, “Gentlemen, I want to tell you the Soviet Union is over.” I heard it probably first in the world directly from President Yeltsin in December 1991.

The Deep State’s Long-Term Strategy Against Russia

Jeffrey Sachs: And Yeltsin said at the time, “I want us to be a normal country. We want a normal economy, Mr. Sachs. We want a normal democratic political system. We want to be friends with the United States.” And I in my naivete, said to him, “President Yeltsin, I can assure you the American people will want to partner with Russia to have a future of peace and economic cooperation.” And I was completely convinced of it. I thought this is the most historic moment imagined was pinching myself. Can you believe you’re sitting in the Kremlin hearing from the President of Russia the end of the Soviet Union? And I had that blessing. It was unbelievable. I was wrong.

Because as soon as the Soviet Union ended, what did the deep state say? Well, they said, this is great. Now we need to dismember Russia too. Just like the Soviet Union broke apart on its ethnic lines, Russia is fragile. Maybe as big Brzezinski opined, maybe it’ll be three different parts. Maybe there’ll be a European part, a Siberian part and a Far east part. The arrogance, the hubris is unbelievable on the American side. But the idea was cold war over. That’s ridiculous. Now we go on to surround Russia. Now we go on to chip apart Russia. One of the favorite phrases in Washington used to be to decolonize Russia. It meant that we can break away different regions of Russia, Chechnya or this region or that region. Why? It’s a big power. We’re the only big power that should be on the planet.

And incidentally, in 1992, I can absolutely assure you no one had China on the radar screen. Yes, in Washington at all. China was rice growing, villages, maybe, you know, a counterpoint to help weaken Russia or as it was used in this triangulation to weaken the Soviet Union. But it wasn’t on anybody’s radar screen as potentially a competitor or a threat or anything else. So the focus was on Russia and it remained on Russia.

The Birth of Neoconservative Unipolarity

And we know that the US Deep state. And again, by that I don’t mean just a figment of our imagination or metaphor. I mean the CIA, the rest of the intelligence agencies, the Pentagon, the Armed Services Committees of the Congress, the military contractors. They already, by 1992, had the idea of unchallenged primacy of the United States. And this became called neoconservatism afterwards. But it was early on and of course Cheney was our defense secretary in 1992 and Wolfowitz was his deputy. And all of the familiar figures that we came to know in the Iraq War and afterwards were on the scene. This was the end of Bush Sr. And they already concocted the idea of US unipolarity or primacy or full spectrum dominance or hegemony, whatever term one wants to use.

Then comes Clinton into office. And Clinton’s a kind of inconsequential, inexperienced, I think, just not a serious person and didn’t become one, unfortunately, during his presidency. And the deep state explains to him this is the way it is. And he also hears from Central Europe countries that I was advising, but not advising on this for sure. Oh, we need NATO. Why? Why do you need NATO? NATO was supposed to protect you against the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union doesn’t exist anymore. Russia is not threatening anybody. It’s barely surviving financial crisis, but it doesn’t have its eyes on Prague or on Warsaw or on Budapest. Nothing of the sort. But the idea of unipolarity is we need to put our bases on every part of the board. This is the game of risk. We need to put our pieces everywhere.

NATO Expansion Despite Promises

And so the idea of NATO enlargement is worked out in 1993, and there’s bureaucratic opposition inside by smart diplomats who say, why are we doing this? The Cold War is over. But two, the deep state. The Cold War was not over. It was just revving up because we got to get rid of Russia in its current form as well. So by the beginning of 1994, President Clinton already in a speech in January 1994, endorses the eastward expansion of NATO.

And if I could just put a parentheses around that, the US had promised unequivocally to the Soviet Union in the context of German reunification as of February 1990 that NATO would not move one inch eastward. This remains, by the way, highly contested to this day. But if anyone wants the information, you go on something called the National Security Archive of George Washington University, and you can read the dozens and dozens of statements and all of the archival material making completely, absolutely, unequivocally clear that the United States and Germany promised that NATO would not move one inch eastward. So the record is absolutely clear.

But Clinton being Clinton in the way that he governed, was told by the deep state, now we start moving eastward. And Clinton thought that was good domestic politics also with the Polish American vote, Czech American vote, and so forth. And he was also told by friends like Vaclav Havel in Czech Republic and so forth, this is a good idea. So he starts the NATO enlargement eastward.

Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard Strategy

And in 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski explains basically the Lord Palmerston strategy. We will surround Russia in the Black Sea region and we will render Russia a third rate power. And why not? It’s so low cost, we’re so powerful, what could stop us? We’re unchallenged anyway. They’re weak, they depend on us. So there was no, it wasn’t even heatedly debated. But Brzezinski’s absolutely clear about this. And like so many learned volumes, I need to say his book, the Grand Chessboard is very well written and fundamentally wrong.

And fundamentally wrong in that he has a whole, essentially chapter, long chapter saying NATO will move eastward, Europe, meaning the European Union, will move eastward, and what will Russia be able to do about it? And he goes into a long analysis saying, could Russia turn to China? No, never. Could Russia turn to Iran? No, never. Russia’s only vocation is the European vocation. So Russia’s going to have to swallow hard and accept this.

The point, Tucker, is what we’re witnessing is not short term decisions of presidents. We’re watching a long term consistent strategy, of course, built into the vision of senators and congressmen, and more than the vision built into their campaign contributions as well. So this is built into the Armed Services Committee. This is built into the Intelligence Committee. This is why Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal stand up every day saying we need to fight the Russians and so on. This is not short term claims based on current politics. This is a project that dates back more than 30 years. It’s a stupid project.

The Inevitable Disaster

Tucker Carlson: Well, the verdict is in, though, so interesting. Ultimately, the project reaches its inevitable conclusion, which is including Russia’s largest and most important neighbor, Ukraine, in NATO. They announced that in February at the Munich security conference of 2022. And then almost immediately after Russia rolls across into Ukraine and then the war commences. And it’s a disaster for everybody, especially the United States, I would argue. And it does what Brzezinski said it wouldn’t do, which is drive Russia right into China, into what’s now a permanent alliance. So it’s a disaster, right?

Seven months ago, Donald Trump gets elected on the claim, this is a disaster. I’m going to fix it. And seven months later, it’s still not fixed, despite his, I think, sincere efforts to fix it.

Jeffrey Sachs: I agree with you.

Tucker Carlson: So what? Why isn’t this fixed?

The Insanity of Georgian NATO Membership

Jeffrey Sachs: Let me just say, in terms of chronology, one more piece to add, just to add to the historical note, the decision to invite Ukraine. And even more crazy, by the way, the country of Georgia, which is in the South Caucasus. People should take out a map and look at this region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea and ask themselves a question. Can you? Is that the North Atlantic because NATO is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or is that the soft underbelly of Russia in the Caucasus Mountains? This is insane.

Tucker Carlson: It’s more Asian than European, but in.

The Strategic Encirclement of Russia

Jeffrey Sachs: Some ways, well, it’s literally Asia, because the European demarcation is the crescent line of the Grand Caucasus. So we’re inviting an Asian country, Georgia, into NATO, Stalin’s home nation. And fascinating. Why Georgia? Because look at the map also. Not only is it Asia, not only is it not the North Atlantic, but it completes the encirclement of Russia in the Black Sea. So it’s not a random choice. It’s Palmerston 1853, brought to life by Brzezinski, 1997, and lived out by George Bush Jr. In 2008, they announced this. Putin says, no, this is not going to be. This is craziness.

In the meantime, also remember that in this extraordinary hubris of the United States, this mad arrogance, in 2002, the US unilaterally walked out of the Anti Ballistic Missile treaty, so the US destabilized the nuclear arms control framework fundamentally, in 2002. This is not sufficiently appreciated because from Russia’s point of view until today, and literally on a strike on strategic bombers recently, Russia believes that the United States has killed the nuclear arms framework. So we’re talking about not vague national security concerns, we’re talking about fundamental national and world survival terms. Because from Russia’s point of view, and understandably so, the United States doesn’t want to play by any single rules whatsoever.

The 2014 Ukrainian Coup

So I just want to say that this project Ukraine not only goes back to the 1990s, but the invitation was in 2008, the Russians said no. So in 2010, a pro neutral president, Viktor Yanukovych, is elected. He comes to power on the basis of no NATO enlargement, because he knows how dangerous that is for his country being between east and West. He says, stay away to both sides. And we will keep calm.

In February 2014, the United States conspires in a coup that overthrows Yanukovych. And that was a coup in which the US was deeply engaged. My colleague at Columbia University, Victoria Nuland, was the point person on the ground. Geoffrey Pyatt, who was a senior official for Biden back in 2014. He was Ambassador in fact to Ukraine and then became a senior State Department official in the Biden administration afterwards. Senators, Lindsey Graham, he was out there. John McCain. This was a typical US regime change operation.

What do I mean by that? It means Yanukovych is in the way of our plan. We need to get him out of the way because we need to expand NATO. And so Yanukovych is overthrown on February 22, 2014, violently, within a nanosecond. Rather than saying, hey, the President should come back, a violent group overtook the government buildings. President Obama recognizes the new government within a nanosecond because this is a US game. This is the whole point. If you were a serious country that believed in democracy, President Obama would have said, we don’t accept mobs entering our buildings and overthrowing our government. President Yanukovych is the elected president and he is the one we recognize. No, within a nanosecond, Obama recognized the new post coup regime, the one that Zelensky leads today.

The Crimea Crisis and War’s Beginning

And amazingly, you know, according to script, honest to God, one of the first elements that this new regime, brought to power by an American participation in a coup – not only Americans, there were Ukrainian right-wing forces also, but America played its active role – what is one of the first claims they make? They say we think Russia should exit from Crimea. What does that mean? We think the Russian military base needs to leave Crimea now. It was interesting under Yanukovych’s term, Yanukovych and Putin had negotiated not territorial annexation of Crimea, but rather a 25 year lease. That Russia will keep its naval base in Crimean Sevastopol. But immediately the post coup regime reads the script and says, we don’t think Russia should be in Crimea. In other words, subscript NATO is going to take over the military base in the Black Sea. That’s when Russia immediately organizes a referendum and Crimea is taken into Russian hands.

This wasn’t an innocent event. This was part of the playbook of the United States. The war started in February 2014. It didn’t start with the invasion by Russia in February 2022. That was a major escalation. But the war started in February 2014, it escalated. The US built up the Ukrainian military to be the largest standing army of Europe.

The Failed Peace Negotiations

In fact, by 2021, when Biden came into office, Putin tried one more time, would you commit or we call on you to commit to not enlarge NATO to Ukraine. And we’ve talked about it. I begged Jake Sullivan in a phone call in December 2021, check. Take the agreement. Are you kidding? Avoid the war. No, no, we can’t do that. NATO open door, so called. In other words, we’re determined to move NATO into Ukraine. And Jeff, don’t worry, there won’t be a war. Another brilliant utterance of Professor Jake Sullivan got everything wrong from beginning to end as far as I’m concerned.

So then Russia invaded on February 24, 2022. And what was the point of that invasion in our hopeless mainstream media, which is again, New York Times I’ll use as a reference point, phony, from morning till night, it was to take over Ukraine. No, it was not to take over Ukraine. It was to push Ukraine to accept neutrality. This was the point of the invasion. And it was absolutely clear because within seven days, Zelensky said, fine, we can be neutral. And within a couple of weeks, the Ukrainians had submitted a paper to the Russians to say, we, why don’t we just have neutrality? And the Russians took that paper to President Putin and Putin said, fine, look, let’s negotiate and we can find a resolution of this.

The Istanbul Peace Process

And that’s when the so called Istanbul process began. The Turkish government said, we will be a mediator. I went and talked at length to the Turkish negotiators to understand all the details about this. But the fact of the matter is, in March 2022, as I was saying earlier, there were very rapid advances of a peace agreement. By March 28, 2022, there was actually a joint communique between Russia and Ukraine saying, we have reached a framework for peace. This is forgotten completely today. Then just two weeks later, specifically April 15, there was a draft agreement on the table. Not everything was agreed. There were some important points, but basically there was an agreement and serious negotiators would have completed the work.

That’s when the United States told the Ukrainians, no, no, you fight on. Now this comes to your question. Why did the US say that then and why does the war continue now, even though clearly President Trump wants this war to end? Well, it continued then because it was undoubtedly the deep state idea. And I spoke to US Government officials. A few of them still spoke to me at the time I knew senior officials, they absolutely believed that the economic sanctions would bring Russia to its knees.

The Failed Sanctions Strategy

For example, there was once upon a time that cutting Russia out from SWIFT was called the nuclear option. Kind of a shocking ignorance and delusion that America runs everything. So if we put sanctions on Russia, that will crush the Russian economy. They didn’t factor in the fact that Russia sells commodities that are easily fungible and that not so hard to direct to India, by the way, which then can resell to Europe. So it’s a little bit more costly. It’s stupid. It’s scratching your left ear with your right arm. You know, it’s not the most direct way to handle this. We make everything more expensive, less efficient. But Europe still buys all this stuff. The Indians are middlemen, of course. They buy a lot of oil for their own refining. China buys gas and oil and so forth. So Russia isn’t brought to its knees, but they believed it then.

Tucker Carlson: Well, not only has Russia on brought to its knees, would you rather have the Russian economy or the American economy right now?

The Persistence of War Despite Presidential Intent

Jeffrey Sachs: That’s an interesting question. Let me come to that in a moment because I want to address the question why – why this persists. So they really believed that there would be victory in short order. And if it wasn’t the nuclear option, God, I hate the term because we’re close to nuclear war. But if it weren’t the nuclear option so called of cutting Russia out of the swift banking system, it would be the HIMARS, it would be the ATACMS. Or it was the idea that Putin will never mobilize because that would be so unpopular, it would bring him down. Or it was the idea that there would be an internal coup, Prigozhin or some other concocted event and so on. This was delusion, morning till night, very typical of American foreign policy.

In comes President Trump. President Trump understands clearly this is really insane. This is not helping Ukraine. Ukraine cannot win on the battlefield. More war means more deaths by the hundreds of thousands, more, not less loss of territory. And the whole idea, what are we fighting over this NATO enlargement, “Eh, I’m not interested.” This is President Trump’s very accurate view of the situation and I think he gets it. This is a stupid war. This is an unnecessary war. This is a costly war. This diverts American attention. This costs tens or hundreds of billions of dollars depending on how long this goes on. And so he says the war should end completely. Right? And he enunciates an absolutely basic point clearly. Which is NATO should not expand. This is stupid. This is the cause of this whole situation. That is the basis for ending this war. We’re not far from it.

The Complexity of Waging Peace

But here’s the sad fact. Waging peace actually is as complicated as waging war. And that is a paradox. It seems not right. Why doesn’t peace just come when you say you don’t want to fight? And the reason is that the forces that want war are really powerful. Yes. They don’t just stop. They don’t stop because the President opines that the war should end. The war has a lot of supporters. Why? Because from the American point of view, the project continues. We can defeat Russia and why not have more war? The war is good on many, many counts. It weakens Russia. We get to test our weapon systems as a. I can’t even stand it. But as many of our senators from Blumenthal and Romney and others have vulgarly said, this is great. No, Americans are dying as if more than a million Ukrainian casualties means nothing. And according to our politicians, to them, to American politicians, it means absolutely nothing. It doesn’t mean anything.

You never hear them, you hear them talk about their bravery. You don’t hear them talk about the kinds of emails that I receive, including one that I just received from somebody who said, “Mr. Sachs, they’re about to send me off to die. Someone from Ukraine who just found my email publicly and he said I’m 48 years old and they’re sending me to the front lines. 48 years old, yes. So I’m sending a message that I know I’m about to die.” And it’s true. They send these middle aged people, disabled people, kids grabbed off the streets, delivery boys off of bicycles, grabbed by these so called recruiters who are thugs who pull them into vans and then they’re sent off to the front lines and they’re dying under the drones.

The Deep State Network

So for the American deep state, they don’t care, they don’t count that. The war is fine by them. The CIA has of course created a European wide security system, largely out of view. But whatever the CIA does here, think of the MI6 in Britain operating in the same way. Even more disastrously, think of BND in Germany actually, which if you go back to 1945, not to go into too many details, has its Nazi roots. But the CIA created it after 1945 with the former Nazi intelligence agents to fight against the Soviet Union, taking him straight out of Hitler’s intelligence into U.S. intelligence back in 1945. So called Galen operation. Anyway, we have this whole network and this network is still going.

So the reason you have to wage peace is the President. He’s just the president. After all, he faces throughout the US Government. He faces the Lindsey Grahams and the Richard Blumenthals. He faces the CIA operations. He faces these pathetic politicians. They’re pathetic because they don’t represent their national interests at all. They represent this deep state approach. Starmer, who seems to do nothing more than parrot MI6 lines, Macron in France, Mertz in Germany. They’re all warmongers.

And Zelensky, who is Zelensky? Zelensky was put in by a coup. He’s part of a regime. He won an election, but an election in this post coup regime. He is way over his due date from his electoral mandate. As everybody knows, he rules by martial law. He’s surrounded by complete hardliners. And I’ve been told, I don’t know if it’s true or not, but the senior people in Ukraine have said, well, he has no choice. He’ll get knocked off by his own side. This could be completely true. But he’s not representing the Ukrainian people who he’s killing. He’s representing a clique that’s in power right now.

Trump’s Peace Efforts and Deep State Opposition

So this is actually Trump’s world. To bring the war to a close requires a lot of coordinated activity. It requires an absolutely unified team. But remember, in Washington, everyone’s partly bought out by someone else by the military industrial complex. And so you hear lots of cacophony, you hear lots of confusion, you hear lots of ultimatums given. But President Trump’s really trying to bring about peace.

Now what has occurred is Trump has said, “I want peace.” He’s faced this mountain of deep state or this chorus of deep state and European and Zelensky opposition. “No, no, we want war. We want war. We don’t want peace. We’ll never give in.” And he has. President Trump has usefully tried to maneuver both sides to the negotiating table and that we should give him all our support and all credit for doing that.

But this system is not tamped down in any way because just before the recent round of this one hour second meeting of the Russians and Ukrainians, the Ukrainian SBU, the secret the intelligence agency, launched two attacks deep inside Russia. One, a straightforward terrorist attack, blowing up a civilian railroad, killing a large number of children and people going off for holidays.

Operation Spiderweb: A Dangerous Escalation

The second operation was profoundly more dangerous. They have Zelensky proudly gave it the name afterwards of Operation Spiderweb, which should tell you a lot. And that was a drone attack on several military bases hundreds or thousands of kilometers inside Russia’s territory on Russia’s strategic bomber fleet, meaning the air force that carries nuclear weapons. I’m sorry, this is no joke. This is no small matter to attack.

Tucker Carlson: Could the Ukrainians have done that without Western intelligence help?

Jeffrey Sachs: Of course not.

Tucker Carlson: This is a Western intelligence operation. Well, then how?

Jeffrey Sachs: Without question.

Tucker Carlson: But the White House wasn’t, as far as I know, and I think this is right. The White House didn’t know it was coming.

CIA Independence and Democratic Accountability

Jeffrey Sachs: First of all, the CIA does not tell this White House a lot of information, no doubt.

Tucker Carlson: Well, how can that be?

Jeffrey Sachs: Because partly it is a tradition.

Tucker Carlson: CIA works for the President.

Jeffrey Sachs: Partly it is a tradition of deniability. So the CIA, for decades and decades has done very, very dangerous deeds, not telling the President on the grounds that, well, better that the President doesn’t quite know this because we need the President to be able to deny this. Partly because it’s not just that, but also because the CIA is, is a self protecting, self operating organization that has not had accountability for 50 years. And so it is an out of control organization, in my opinion.

Tucker Carlson: Well, how can you have a democracy if you’ve got a paramilitary and intelligence gathering force that has no civilian control?

Jeffrey Sachs: Our democracy is a democracy in form, but not in substance. On many, many points, obviously our foreign policy is not democratically determined. Most of what the United States does is never explained or justified or voted by the American people. So there’s nothing democratic about American foreign policy, especially when we go to war. We go to war nonstop, either without saying anything to the American people or on the basis of outright lies. And so there’s nothing democratic about it at all. Congress doesn’t vote the wars. We don’t appropriate the funds. It’s done on contingency funding that is completely without public scrutiny, without public explanation.

Now, on this particular event, of course, we’ve not heard anything except the White House declaring and saying to President Putin, we didn’t know about it. The fact of the matter is two alarming points. One is whether or not the White House knew the operation itself is completely reckless and alarming because attacking part of the nuclear triad in this way is a step towards nuclear Armageddon. Absolutely, provocatively, recklessly dangerous. And for the White House to say we didn’t know is horrifying. Either they’re lying or they’re telling the truth. If they’re lying, that’s one aspect. If they’re telling the truth, it’s also horrifying. What is going on? Are you kidding?

Nuclear Escalation Risks

Tucker Carlson: So what’s the thinking? I mean, an act like that could trigger a nuclear exchange.

Jeffrey Sachs: Absolutely.

Tucker Carlson: So why would one do it?

Jeffrey Sachs: Because it’s always been the case that desperate regimes like the Ukrainian regime will gamble the world for their own survival. It’s our job to understand that American foreign policy is not to support a reckless Ukrainian regime.

Tucker Carlson: Given the number of leaders we’ve taken out, couped, assassinated, overthrown and color revolutions, whatever, same effect, regime change, why not do that to Zelensky?

Jeffrey Sachs: What I believe we should do is very simple, and that is have a direct, clear, unambiguous negotiation with Russia over security issues. And in the end, we can’t control Ukraine. But they can’t fight without the United States. And because we have operated in this kind of ambiguous zone in the first months of the Trump administration, there is the ever present effort of the deep state to turn the President. And they know the President’s turn. They know they can do this. If they’re persistent enough, they know they can keep up these operations. They know or they think they know that eventually the combined voices of Lindsey Graham and other warmongers in Congress and the Europeans and Zelensky and pounding this and the New York Times with its idiotic editorializing and all the rest will tell the president, don’t be an appeaser, don’t give in, fight Russia. You know how evil they are. And so they believe that they’ll ultimately win the fight. President Trump has not put an end to that, I have to say so.

Tucker Carlson: Well, that, I mean, it is obvious.

The Deep State Challenge

Jeffrey Sachs: He’s not Putin, he can’t put an end to people saying it, but he does have the constitutional authority to put an end to it from the point of view of the substance of U.S. foreign policy. And that’s the difference. What he’s wanted to do is to try to bring these groups along. He’s tried to say, yeah, we’ll push the Russians. He turns every couple of weeks, you know, against Putin in a post and so forth. It’s clear what he wants to do, which is to end the war, to extricate the United States from this. But he’s trying to have it both ways. My own personal view is you can’t.

President Trump has to understand, I’m sure he does, how deep the deep state is, how far down this goes. This is not, by the way, only Biden’s losing war. It’s also Obama’s losing war. It’s also Bush Jr. It goes back to Clinton. This is a long story. And Trump is trying to put an end to the story because it’s a failure. And he understands it’s a complete failure. And he’s completely right when he says they don’t have the cards, or Biden didn’t have the cards. He didn’t know how to do this. Completely correct.

But what he can’t do is leave everything ambiguous because the way our system works is that the war machine is revving all the time. All the time. It’s a big operation. It’s more than a trillion dollars a year war machine after all, you know, if you count everything, probably $1.5 trillion. And that’s just the US part of it. Then look at all the military contractors in Europe and all, all the rest that is faced.

Trump’s Path to Ending the War

So President Trump needs to close down that part by really ending the war. And the way to end the war, sad to say, it’s not by negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, because we use these terms, Ukraine, but what is Ukraine when it negotiates its Zelensky and a small number of people in military rule and they have their own personal interests, maybe financial, maybe their heads, maybe they’re not Ukraine.

So what can President Trump do. He can say clearly, unambiguously, a few points. Sit down with President Putin, because these are the two superpowers involved in this war, and say, “We absolutely agree, NATO will not enlarge because this is a US Military alliance, and we, by treaty, agree that that will stop, because that’s part of our mutual security arrangement with you. We recognize Crimea as Russian because we understand that this goes back to 1783, it goes back to 1856, it goes back to 1997, it goes back to 2014. We don’t want to play that game anymore.”

On this basis, Starmer and Macron and Mertz and Tusk, and they can all jump up and down, but they can’t do anything anymore. And Lindsey Graham can’t do anything anymore on this. The war will stop. This is real. We’re close, by the way. It’s not far from that. But the point is, what Trump has been saying is, “I want the Ukrainians to agree, but they have a different agenda, and it’s not the agenda for Ukraine.” President Trump is speaking more for the Ukrainian people than Zelensky is. This is the point.

Tucker Carlson: So I think the status quo, as I understand it, as of right now, which is Monday, June 9, is that negotiation, you know, that it’s hard to negotiate your way out. And I don’t think the president, you know, he didn’t start this war. He’s frustrated. He doesn’t want to take credit for it. He doesn’t. So the current view, and I think he said this in public, is, you know, I’m backing off. You guys fight it out. What are the risks in that?

Direct US-Russia Negotiations

Jeffrey Sachs: I would go further, which is, I would say the US And Russia have real security issues. And they became even more dramatic after MI6, CIA, SBU attacked the Russian strategic triad.

Tucker Carlson: The bomber fleet.

Jeffrey Sachs: The bomber fleet. So we need to sit down with the Russians and it’s just the two of us negotiating. We don’t have Starmer there, we don’t have Macron there, we don’t have Zelensky there. This, after all, is between the two leading nuclear superpowers of the world. That we won’t go any farther than that.

President Trump can say, “I’m concerned about what our own intelligence agencies may have been doing. How could it be that for 18 months this was being planned and they didn’t know? If that’s the truth, that is a level of incompetence beyond imagining. We have to clean up our shop. Or if they did know and they didn’t tell me, that is a level of recklessness that we have to clean up because it’s completely unacceptable for the security of the American people. And in the meantime, I and President Putin have some real discussions to do.”

What they would come up with would be clear demarcations that would keep the two superpowers from each other’s neck. Like the Ukrainian attack, which is completely unacceptable, endangers the entire world, and is preventable by the President of the United States on that basis, then I would say after that, if Ukraine wants to continue to fight on without any of our support, any of our weapons, not buying weapons, by the way, not anything, period. They can do so, but we’re done being endangered by this recklessness. I resent completely that Zelensky endangered my family recently.

(to be continued)

 

yogaesoteric
July 4, 2025