Transcript of Jeffrey Sachs’ Interview on The Tucker Carlson Show (2)

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.

Read the first part of the interview

The Role of Intelligence Services

Tucker Carlson: You’re describing a scenario where this war is being run by three intelligence services, in your description, CIA, MI6, and SBU, without democratic input, without control by elected leaders, including the president of the United States, and without the interest of the nations at heart. Can you just define sort of a little more precisely what’s going on? And let’s start with MI6. What is MI6 and what’s their role?

Jeffrey Sachs: Just to say, the war is being fought with Ukrainian troops dying and with a flow of armaments that has been in the pipeline. That pipeline can stop and then the war will stop. So I don’t want to imply that the CIA, MI6, BND, SBU can fight the war on their own. They can’t. The pipeline exists because it still is the Biden pipeline. It still is whatever Europe is managing. But that pipeline of armaments and finance is basically coming to an end, and Trump should end it definitively. And then Ukrainians literally can’t fight.

Of course, Europe would try little bits here and there. One can imagine they may try more stunts like the ones that they did a couple of weeks ago, which endangered the whole world, but they cannot fight a war afterwards. At that point, what would occur? What would occur is either Russia indeed takes over essentially Ukraine in terms of military occupation or a peace is reached. One of the two aspects occur. But that’s how to stop the war is to stop the pipeline of funding. When I talk about the deep state role, they are the cheerleaders. They are the managers. They are the designers. We’re not at a stage where they appropriate their own funds.

So I don’t want to be misunderstood in that way. They cannot continue the war, but they’re very powerful in the U.S. system. And in the U.S. system, this war has not been an unpopular war for the U.S. It’s been a deep state project for more than 30 years. And the idea was to shield the American people from it, mainly secret. Once in a while, like we had the story about how the CIA was operating all over Ukraine that the New York Times ran one day. You hear bits and pieces, but the idea is to shield the American people from these wars. The main way we do it is that we don’t have our boots on the ground.

Tucker Carlson: Just lack of information.

Jeffrey Sachs: It’s the Ukrainians dying. And so there’s no body bags coming home to us. The body bags, if they go back at all, they go back to Ukraine. So the idea is not that they are the ones that can make the war occur. They are the main lobbyists for the war. They are the main protagonists. They are the deep strategists of what should be done. Of course, there’s a military component also, not only the intelligence system, but both are playing their role. But the president can stop this. All I’m saying is that it’s a lot of political effort to stop it. And he is facing a wall of this deep state opposition.

And the way out of that is actually not the tactic that he’s been pursuing of getting the Ukrainians to agree, because from the Ukrainian option, the better solution is run around to the CIA, to MI6, to all the other agencies, run around to the European leaders, run to everyone to try to turn Donald Trump. And I’m saying what President Trump has is two ways. One is he has constitutional authority. And the second, he and he alone has the direct line to President Putin. And the two superpowers are the protagonists in this fundamentally.

Tucker Carlson: That’s right.

Jeffrey Sachs: And they can end the war between the two of them, not to stop the Ukrainians from fighting, but to stop Ukraine from having the means to fight. The Ukrainians can’t fight one day without U.S. intelligence, by the way, not just the armaments, but without the intelligence.

Presidential Control Over the CIA

Tucker Carlson: But if President Trump gave that order, would it be affected? I mean, who was the last president to control the CIA? The last U.S. president who had actual control over CIA?

Jeffrey Sachs: No one had actual control over the CIA, ever. Because most of the time, with one pertinent, horrible example, presidents have gone along with the CIA. Of course, the one horrible, shocking, disgusting example is John F. Kennedy, who famously said that he would like to take the CIA and tear it into a thousand pieces. And maybe those were his last words, in essence.

Tucker Carlson: So if you look big picture at the United States, you don’t have a real country as long as there is the CIA. I mean, everything since November of 63 has been post-coup.

The Unaccountable Security State

Jeffrey Sachs: I believe that we have not brought this absolutely dangerous part of our government under any effective control for a half century. The last time that there was any slight measure of control and accountability was 1975, 50 years ago, with the Church committee. Frank Church from Idaho, uniquely in the whole history of the CIA since 1947, did a real investigation. Of course, as soon as they looked under the covers it was horrifying what they found they found: recklessness, assassinations, coups, regime change, operations like MK-Ultra, the shocking CIA attempts to create assassins and Manchurian candidates, and experimentation with hallucinogens for the sake of intelligence operations. Really vulgar, disgusting, awful stuff.

That was 1975. That’s the last time there has been an actual accounting of what the CIA has done. Let me give just the most pertinent example of what we’re talking about. What actually occurred in the so-called Maidan, in the coup in 2014? Do we know every point? I got to know certain aspects just because I saw certain aspects with my own eyes. I was told certain info. But has anything been explained in a single day once? Has the New York Times ever run an honest story? Of course not. Has the government ever been called to account even once? Of course not. Has there been a public hearing in the Senate even once of an event that affects our security absolutely fundamentally? Of course not.

And I could go on with 50 examples like this where the deep state is unaccountable, where there are no answers, where nothing is heard. We heard about Area 51. We heard about how the U.S. military concocted phony stories, which lived for decades in order to hide secret weapons development programs. Our government lies every day, the security state. And the danger of that is that it is not national security. This is national insecurity. We have never been more endangered than we are today. It’s so weird. We should be the safest country in the history of the world. And we would be, if we did not have these deep state, unexamined, unaccountable strategies of going up against other major powers in the most reckless ways. And I use the language because we’re just a few days after an absolutely disgusting, unacceptable intelligence agency operation attacking strategic bombers deep inside Russia.

Tucker Carlson: Well, how long before there’s an attack that Russia can’t ignore and where that does lead? I mean, it seems like all the incentives are in place for the Ukrainians working with MI6 and CIA to push us into a global conflict with Russia.

The Deep State’s War Machine

Jeffrey Sachs: Absolutely. And if it’s not Ukraine, it’s Israel or someone else. There’s so many. Our foreign policy is so suborned, so much not in America’s interest, so much used by the military industrial state or particular lobbies in favor of particular places, we could be yanked into war for absolutely no consequential reasons whatsoever when we should be enjoying the height of our national security. And in 1991, I witnessed it with my own eyes. We had everything we could have ever dreamt. Our erstwhile foe, and that’s another long story why they were the foe, but our erstwhile foe of the cold war said we don’t want to be an enemy we want to be friends we want to open up we want to reform we want to be with you. In fact, of course, famously Putin said we want to be part of NATO, he did and it’s no joke and when Putin came in, by the way, he was completely pro-American and pro-European. I know. Completely.

Tucker Carlson: He still is the most pro-Western leader that country will ever have again.

Jeffrey Sachs: Yes. It’s unbelievable. We can’t accept peace for an answer. But that’s why the president of the United States has to stop the war machine.

The Iran Conflict and Netanyahu’s Strategy

Tucker Carlson: On to the second conflict raging that, as you just said, has the potential to engulf the world. And that’s Iran, which is obviously connected to a bunch of other conflicts around that region. Where are we in averting a war with Iran right now?

Jeffrey Sachs: Good news, of course, is that President Trump is negotiating. And that call by Bibi for yet another war in the Middle East is yet another of these long-term deep state projects. This is an Israeli project primarily, but the U.S. has been a party to Netanyahu’s wars going back essentially 30 years. Netanyahu came to office as Prime Minister of Israel first in 1996. He did it with the backing of U.S. political advisors, many of whom became senior U.S. officials. And he did it on the basis of a strategy, a political strategy called Clean Break back in 1996. And what Clean Break meant was a clean break with the idea of the two-state solution. So the two-state solution means that there should be a state of Israel and a state of Palestine living side by side. That goes back to the United Nations 1947 partition plan idea. Netanyahu leads a political party, the Likud, and a political alliance, which holds that Israel should dominate all of the lands of that region, including Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, but also into Lebanon and Syria and borders undefined, but a very expansive view of what Israel’s rule should be.

That’s a quite outlandish and outrageous idea to most of the world and I would say to most Americans who say look just make peace, that the Palestinians who are eight million people should have their place, and the Israelis who are eight million people should have their place. But this idea of the clean break is: no we don’t want to get on with it, we want to control everything and Netanyahu’s philosophy – or not philosophy but his strategy – is: we know there’ll be a lot of resistance to our domination over the Palestinian people, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and so forth. So we’re going to face opposition. We will face even militant opposition, Hamas or Hezbollah, and so forth. But Netanyahu pointed out something which is actually correct. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he says these militants basically don’t operate on their own. That’s true in general of these groups that we fight.

They are state-backed. it has been true that Hezbollah and Hamas, for example, were backed by Iran for most of this period. And so, the idea of Netanyahu is: don’t make peace. We want to win. We want all the territory. We don’t accept two states. We don’t accept Palestinian rights and so forth. We will win, but we don’t win by defeating militant groups. We win by destroying the governments that support those groups. And that means war. And it really means endless wars.

The Pentagon’s War List

And the U.S. became the complicit party to this because of the deep state vision that Israel is our battleship or aircraft carrier in the Middle East – that it is our strategic asset in the Middle East and because of the Zionist lobby, which is itself a complicated political concoction in the United States. But in any event, the U.S. completely bought into the Netanyahu idea, which is war after war after war.

And it’s not well understood, but it should be because we’ve been told pretty clearly by no less than General Wesley Clark, for example, who was the commander of NATO that the Pentagon has had a list of wars to prosecute that essentially is Netanyahu’s list, actually. After 9-11 in particular, that went into overdrive. The U.S., as Wesley Clark was told and as he subsequently explained to us, and as others have also explained to us, an Air Force commander named Dennis Fritz, who wrote a very important book called Deadly Betrayal in 2024, telling the same story in essence. The Pentagon had a list which the neoconservatives or the deep state of the U.S. would carry out, which was: we would take out the regimes in opposition to Israel. And it’s a long list. Of course, not only the Palestinians, that’s the point, but also Syria. That was the regime of Bashar al-Assad, which was viewed by Netanyahu and by the U.S. deep state as an Iranian client. So Syria would be one. Lebanon would be another. Iraq under Saddam Hussein would be another. The Iranian regime would be a fourth. And then, believe it or not, three countries in Africa, which are Islamic countries that supported the Palestinian cause. And that was Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya. That was Somalia and the Horn of Africa. And that was Sudan, which was a Sharia state in the 1990s. Well, we’ve been to war with all of them except Iran, and not by accident. The list is literally the guide in this case. And again, it’s not simple for Americans to connect the dots because these stories are not told. They’re not explained. They’re not debated. They’re not voted. These are presidential actions by and large, one after another.

The Iraq War Deception

So let’s go through them step by step. One is the Iraq War, 2003. We now know not only was it under wrong pretenses, weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist, it was under completely phony, concocted, false pretenses. And in 2002, the Pentagon actually did a PR analysis of how to sell the war to the American people, a unit by a guy named Abe Shulsky. And he came up with a PR strategy, literally public relations, that the right narrative was weapons of mass destruction. So this is not as it was subsequently told to us: oh, we made a mistake. We didn’t know that Saddam didn’t have them. This was a concocted narrative in 2002 to justify a war in 2003 to take away a regime that Netanyahu deemed to be hostile to Israel.

The Syria Operation

Then in 2011, again, something very basic, but not understood by the American people, because, again, the government lies and cheats and doesn’t explain. The U.S. went to war in Syria. Now, this was not a declared war. There was never a presidential speech, but President Obama said Assad must go. Every time you hear an American president say some other leader must go, say: here we go again.

And the president signed a presidential finding called Operation Timber Sycamore, assigning the CIA with the task of organizing, training, financing, and arming an insurgency to overthrow Assad. That came to fruition just in recent months. That’s how the new government came in.

Tucker Carlson: Yes, in December of 2024.

Jeffrey Sachs: Yes. Unfortunately, very much unfortunately, it was after 13 years of war that killed hundreds of thousands of people and destroyed sites in Syria that date back thousands of years. In other words, it was a destruction of one of the heritage sites of humanity because Netanyahu said “That guy’s too close to Iran. We need to take him out.”

Tucker Carlson: Wait, can I ask you to pause? And by the way, it flooded Europe with migrants, too. Completely destabilized Europe forever.

Jeffrey Sachs: That’s another fascinating story. As all these migrants came in and wrecked European politics, not one politician in Europe said: oh, the United States shouldn’t be engaged in an overthrow of Syria. They can’t connect the dots because everything’s a lie. All the narratives are narratives.

The Assad Must Go Moment

Tucker Carlson: So when Obama comes out and says Assad must go, I think in retrospect was a pivot point in modern history. Because Syria is not Yemen. It’s on the Mediterranean.

Jeffrey Sachs: I mean, it’s right there. By the way, Syria was viewed, you know, up until then, there’s an IMF report, which I like to cite, of 2009, praising the authorities on their growth strategy and reform. This is crazy. This is deciding to overthrow a country without an iota of public discussion.

Tucker Carlson: This is Hillary. But a nice country, a civilized country with lots of doctors and accountants and scientists. It’s a real place.

Jeffrey Sachs: And, of course, you paint the dictator to be the worst evil ever and so forth.

Tucker Carlson: His wife had just appeared on the cover of Vogue when…….

Jeffrey Sachs: Right. But whatever one says about Assad and so forth, the United States should not be overthrowing the government through a CIA operation. Of course not. And hundreds of thousands dead.

Tucker Carlson: And it was a domino that led to greater human suffering and the destabilizing of Europe itself. Absolutely. It was a really, really big deal. I just want to go back and linger for a second on why.

Jeffrey Sachs: Why?

Tucker Carlson: Yes, why? I mean, it was sort of a non sequitur. All of a sudden Obama stands up and says Assad must go. Assad who? Why do we care about Assad?

Jeffrey Sachs: Syria’s on the list. It’s Iranian influence. We gotta take out Assad.

Tucker Carlson: It was purely for Israel, you’re saying?

The Pentagon Papers Revelation

Jeffrey Sachs: I think very substantially. I’ll tell you again, Dennis Fritz, very interesting. He’s a very smart former Air Force commander who, strangely enough, resigned from the Air Force in 2003 because he couldn’t get a clear explanation of why we were fighting Iraq. And he’s a very nice man. And he said: I can’t lead my troops if I can’t explain. And he was told from above: Well, because we have the orders to. This order came from the White House.

Tucker Carlson: Shut up and do it. Yes.

Jeffrey Sachs: And so he said: I can’t lead troops under these circumstances. So he resigned. Then he was called back in 2005 to the Pentagon for a remarkable reason. And that was that Douglas Feith, who was a senior Pentagon official, a neocon close to Netanyahu, said: We want to declassify papers around the Iraq war. And okay, so Feith came back because he was an expert on classification and security issues and so forth. Why did Feith want to do that? Because he was writing his memoirs. And so he wanted to include documents in his book. So Feith hired Dennis Fritz. And Fritz got to read everything. Where did this war come from? What are all the communications? So he’s a little bit like Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers.

Suddenly, he’s sitting there in 2005 reading all the files. And he only wrote about this 20 years later in this book, Deadly Betrayal. And I got to speak with him at length and interviewed him. He’s a wonderful, gentle soul. And he said he was shocked by what he read because he’s reading it and he realizes this is Bibi’s war. We’re going to war because Israel said so. And Feith was Bibi’s man in the Pentagon.

Tucker Carlson: But how could Douglas Feith, who’s an American citizen and an American official at the American Pentagon, do the bidding of a foreign government like that?

Jeffrey Sachs: Well, because America has been doing Israel’s bidding for 30 years, because of the Israel lobby, because of the concocted idea that this is U.S. security.

Tucker Carlson: But sending young people to die? I mean, that’s a pretty heavy deed to do.

The Iraq War and American Foreign Policy Failures

Jeffrey Sachs: As long as it’s not American people to die. Well, in that case, it was more heavy. But actually, I apologize for that statement because most of the wars, we don’t send our own Americans. We send their young people to die.

But in the Iraq war, if you ask how we could do it, it’s a good question. That war, I can’t use the proper word that I would like to use because it’s absolutely obscene. But that war was so phony, so completely unjustified, so reckless. That was a real turning point because it was so brazenly wrongheaded. And who was the great cheerleader of that war in the fall of 2002? And I encourage people, go online and watch it on tape. Watch Bibi Netanyahu say how wonderful this war will be, because Saddam will fall, and that will lead to a chain reaction across the Middle East of bringing down the tyrants. Bibi Netanyahu is full in, and I also won’t say it, but this is how he’s been for 30 years. And the U.S. has done his bidding. And in that case, and again, I apologize for my slip. Yes, we sent our own to die out of complete phony, phony pretenses, not wrong, not mistaken, whether it’s bringing down Russia, whether it is fighting and bringing down Saddam or Assad or Gaddafi, the arrogance in Washington is the first point of reference. They don’t believe this is hard. They don’t believe it’s costly. They don’t believe it will go wrong. They fail every time. And they get promoted every time.

They don’t go away when they lose. Look at Lindsey Graham. He’s been wrong on every single war, on every single piece of American foreign policy, and he’s still standing up there telling us what to do because there’s no accountability.

Tucker Carlson: But also no shame or inner compass. I mean, you would think – Oh, of course, no shame. But don’t you feel shame when you’re wrong, especially when you pursue to be right?

Jeffrey Sachs: Absolutely.

Tucker Carlson: Your bad decisions hurt people.

Syria and Libya: The Pattern of Intervention

Jeffrey Sachs: I mean, gosh. Well, we don’t have that. We don’t have any reflection or accountability. And that is literally the case on all of this. When you go back to bringing down Assad in Operation Timber Sycamore, I think I’ve checked a couple of times. I think the New York Times, again, I refer to that because it used to be the paper I read. I think they mentioned it three times from 2012 onward. That’s all. So how can the American people understand any of it? And interestingly, amazingly, Russia came into the Syrian conflict in 2015. And what was our reaction? How dare Russia interfere? You know, in other words, the phoniest narrative that there goes Putin again, when we have been inside for four years, militarily trying to overthrow the other government. Then came, just after that, by the way, after Assad must go, then they took out Gaddafi. That was a NATO operation in which the U.S., France, and the United States…….

Tucker Carlson: I’m sorry, Jeff, I’m going to have to stop you right there. It was a NATO operation. I know that NATO is a defensive alliance.

Jeffrey Sachs: That’s right. Yes.

Tucker Carlson: Right. Defending the North Atlantic. Why would NATO be killing leaders in Africa?

Jeffrey Sachs: Because we needed to have the French, the British and the Americans together to murder the leader of Libya and overthrow the government. That’s why. Did Libya get a lot better?

Libya has been in nonstop war since then. Again, profound destruction, massive loss of life, and ongoing civil war. And since I know many, many leaders around the world, I’ve asked them repeatedly why Gaddafi in 2011. And you know what they tell me? The leaders who are as close as can be to this: We don’t know. Maybe Sarkozy hated him. Maybe Gaddafi funded Sarkozy’s campaign. We don’t know what this was really about. I’ve talked recently to an African president very close to the scene, a very senior former African president who said to me: Jeff, I can’t give you the answer to that question. I’ve asked. He’s been involved.

I’ll tell you another aspect quite interesting, by the way, about these wars. In 2012, the Syrian war broke out because of the United States. By the way, they say: no, it was the Syrian people, the Free Syrian Army, and so forth. Yes, yes, yes. Tell me about it. Who armed them? Who paid for them? Who trained them? Who gave them military bases? Of course, this is a CIA operation. Stop talking romantically about this domestic insurrection. This was a government operation.

After it started, the UN tried to stop the war because failing to stop it, there would be massive death and destruction. And in fact, there have been hundreds of thousands of deaths. So a person I absolutely admired, Kofi Annan, the former Secretary General of the UN, went as the special envoy of the Secretary General to Syria. And he met all the parties. And Kofi Annan was a brilliant personality and a brilliant statesman. And he told me just before resigning in the spring of 2012: Jeff, there was a negotiated agreement. Peace could have come, but there was one party that said no, and that was the United States. And I asked, why did the United States block the peace agreement? He said, because the United States insisted that the only agreement would sign would be one in which Assad would leave the first day. And Kofi Annan said to me: When I tried to say to the Americans that, well, there will be a process and under the agreement, there will be elections and so forth. So there’ll be a process. They said: no, no, we will only agree if it’s the first day.

So this is how American arrogance works. How you end up with 500,000 dead, how you end up with whatever this regime is in Syria right now. It took 14 years. It didn’t come out of the blue. It was an American operation from the start. It then morphed in several ways, but this is a long-term story. And all of this is to say, and I mentioned not just Libya, but also Somalia, also Sudan, where the United States did an absolutely appalling deed. It supported an insurgency in what was then southern Sudan to break apart Sudan because Sudan was an Islamist state supporting Palestine. So we had to destroy Sudan and they funded an insurgency for a long time and then the United States, quote, “brokered a peace to give independence to South Sudan.” Okay. The American geniuses have created an instability so great that we not only have two Sudans, Sudan and South Sudan, we have civil wars in both Sudans. So this is ongoing, nonstop: massive deaths through another concoction of Clean Break, Bibi, the deep state. This is a disaster.

Read the third part of the interview

 

yogaesoteric
July 11, 2025

 

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