John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs | All-In Summit 2024

0:00Hey everybody, Friedberg here. What you're about to hear is a panel discussion from our All In Summit recorded in LA on September 10th. We're going to publish some of the best conversations once a week over the next month. If you want to see all the talks, subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube .com slash at all in and follow us on x at the All In pod.

0:30economic development. One of the most famous political scientists in history.

0:40What we're talking about moral and political principles here. I would suggest that all four wars could be ended quickly. Great power politics is now back on the table. If we are anything as a world community, we have to implement what we've said.

1:06I'm excited for this panel. We're going to talk about foreign policy. I think two of the most interesting, imminent renowned thinkers about foreign policy, Professor John Mirscher from University of Chicago, Professor Jeffrey Sachs from Columbia. So great to have you guys here today. It's a big world and there's a lot of things happening, so let's just jump into it. The big news over the past week was that Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris for president. I think for people who see the world in partisan political terms, this might have been surprising, but I don't think that you guys were that surprised by that.

1:46Do you see an underlying logic to this? Jeff, why don't I start with you? I think it's obvious there's basically one deep state party and that is the party of Cheney, Harris, Biden, Victoria Nuland, my colleague at Columbia University now. And Nuland is kind of the face of all of this because she has been in every administration for the last 30 years. She was in the Clinton administration, wrecking our policies towards Russia in the 1990s. She was in the Bush administration, Jr. with Cheney wrecking our policy towards NATO enlargement. She was in, then, the Obama administration as Hillary's spokesperson first, and then making a coup in Ukraine in February 2014.

2:41not a great move, started a war, then she was Biden's undersecretary of state. Now that's both parties. It's a colossal mess and she's been a Chinese advisor, she's been Biden's advisor, she and makes perfect sense. This is the reality. We're trying to find out if there's another party, That's the big question. John, what's your thought on that? Do you see any difference between Republicans and Democrats? No, I'd like to refer to the Republicans and the Democrats as Tweetle D and Tweetle Duh. That's what I'm talking about. That's what I'm talking about. It's hardly any difference. I actually think the one exception is that former President Trump, when he became President in 2017, was bent on beating back the deep state and becoming a different kind of leader on the foreign policy front.

3:42But he basically failed. And he is vowed that if he gets selected this time, it will be different. And he will be back the deep state. He will pursue a foreign policy that's fundamentally different than Republicans and Democrats have pursued up to now. And the big question on the table is whether or not you think Trump can beat the deep state in these two established parties, and I bet against Trump. John, and Jeff, but let's start with John. Can you actually define for us, for me, I don't understand when people say deep state what it is. I almost viewed the term comically. We have one of our friends in our group chat who we call deep state, who is...

4:22Deep state? He's really in the deep state. But we say it as a joke, but for maybe the uninitiated, what does it actually mean? What are their incentives? Who are they? Jeff, maybe you want to start or John you want to start? Yeah, I'll say a few words about it. When we talk about the deep state, we're talking really about the administrative state. It's very important to understand that starting in the late 19th, early 20th century, given developments in the American economy, it was imperative that we develop, and this was true of all Western countries, a very powerful central state that could run the country.

5:02and over time that state has grown in power. And since World War II, the United States, as you all know, has been involved in every nook and cranny of the world fighting war. It's here there and everywhere. And to do that, you need a very powerful administrative state that can help manage that foreign policy. But in the process, what happens is you get all of these high level bureaucrats, middle level and low level bureaucrats, who become established in positions in the Pentagon, the State Department, the intelligence community, you name it. And they end up having a vested interest in pursuing a particular foreign policy.

5:42And the particular foreign policy that they like to pursue is the one that the Democrats and the Republicans are pushing. And that's why we talk about Tweedle D and Tweedle Dome with regard to the two parties you could throw in the deep state as being on the same pages those other two institutions. There's a very interesting interview of Putin in Figaro in 2017 and he says, I've dealt with three presidents now. They come into office with some ideas even, but then the men in the dark suits and the blue ties and then he says, I were red ties but they were blue They come in and explain the way the world really is and they're both the ideas and I think that's Putin's experience That's our experience.

6:33That's my experience Which is that there's a deeply entrained foreign policy It has been in place in my interpretation for many decades But arguably a variant of it has been in place since 1992 I got to watch some of it early on because I was an advisor to Gorbachev and I was an advisor to Yeltsin And so I saw early makings of this, though I didn't fully understand it except in retrospect. But that policy has been mostly in place pretty consistently for 30 years, and it didn't really matter whether it was Bush senior, whether it was Clinton, whether it was Bush junior, whether it was Obama, whether it was Trump.

7:13After all, who did Trump hire? He hired John Bolton. Well, the pretty deep state. That was the end of, they told you know, we explained. This is the way it is. And by the way, Bolton explained also in his memoirs, when Trump didn't agree, we figured out ways to trick him, basically. So, and what are their incentives? Is it war, is it self -enrichment, is it power, is it all three, is it some kind of... Or is it, yeah, is it just... Is there a philosophical entrenchment? Or is it just this inertial issue that, like, once a policy begins, it's hard to change, and the system's just working with 10 ,000 people working towards it?

7:51And if I were lucky to sit next to the world's greatest political philosopher, which I am, he'd give you a good answer, which is the right answer, which is if you want to interpret American foreign policy, it is to maximize power. And he gives a, John gives an explanation of that. We have some differences, but I think it's a very good description of American foreign policy, which is that it's trying to maximize global power, essentially, to be global hegemon. I think it could get us all killed. This is because it's a little bit delusional in my mind, but not his interpretation of their idea, but the fact that they hold that idea is a little weird to me.

8:41But in any event, that's the idea. And every time a decision comes inside that I've seen. I'm an economist so I don't see the security decisions the same way, but every decision that I've seen always leans in the same direction for the last 30 years, which is power as the central objective. So Clinton faced an internal cabinet really debate should NATO be enlarged. This is a post called War Phenomenon that... Well, I'll let John take that. Two very quick points. First of all, I do believe that the people who are in favor of this foreign policy do believe in it. It's not cynical. They really believe that we're doing the right thing.

9:31I've met them, yeah. Yeah. The second point I would make to you, and this sort of adds on to what Jeff said. Jeff said power has a lot to do with this, and it's a good realist, I, of course, believe that. But it's also very important to understand that the United States is a fundamentally liberal country and we believe that we have a right, we have a responsibility, and we have the power to run around the world and remake the world in America's image. Most people in the foreign policy establishment and the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, they believe that and that has motivated our foreign policy in large part since the Cold War ended.

10:09Because Because remember when the Cold War ends, we have no rival great power left. So what are we going to do with all this power that we have? What we decide to do is go out and remake the world in our own image. So that's a values point of view, though, right? There are values that they hold dear, that many do hold dear, that liberalism democracy does ultimately, I believe I've heard this, reduce conflict worldwide, that there's an importance that we've never seen to democratic nations since World War II go to war, and that there's a reason why we want to see liberalism kind of breed throughout the world and it's our responsibility for global peace to make that a mandate.

10:54Let me step in for one moment. Just, okay, sure. Very quick. And by the way, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, what do you call it? Where you pull the spirits of the, the voice of others. But I'm, I'm just trying to channeling, channeling, that's the word. I want to be very clear, I am forever thankful that I was born in a liberal democracy and I love liberalism. But the question here is, do you think that we can run around the world imposing liberal democracy on other countries and in some cases shoving it down their throat, doing it at the end of a rifle barrel? And my argument is that's almost impossible to do.

11:29It almost always backfires the Iraq, Afghanistan, so forth and so on. And secondly, you begin to erode liberalism in the United States because you build a deep state. Right. And you want to understand that a lot of the complaints here about cracking down on freedom of speech and so forth and so on are related to the fact that we have this ambitious foreign policy. Those two things go together in very important ways. What an irony. Let me disagree just a bit because we agree actually on the behavior and I've learned I'd say most of that from you that it's power seeking. Truly, John, in my work 40 years overseas, I don't think the U .S.

12:14government gives a damn about these other places. I don't think they really care if it's a liberal democracy, if it's a dictatorship, they want the right of ways, they want the military bases, they want the state to be in support of the United States. They want NATO enlargement. I know you've written and there are some who believe in state building. God, if they do, they are so incompetent. It's unbelievable. But. The professor said. I'll give you an example if I could just one example. example, I'm a friend with one of the only PhD, Afghani economist, senior person in the US on academia over the last 30 years.

13:03You would think that the State Department, if they were interested in state building, would ask him one day, one moment, something about Afghanistan. Never happened. Never happened. Not even one question. Never happened. He asked me, can you get me a meeting with the State Department? They were completely uninterested. This is about power. You're too idealistic, John. They don't care about the other places. They may feel we should be whatever we want, free and so forth. But freedom, I've seen with my own eyes the coups, the overthrows, the president's democratic President's led away. They don't care at all.

13:49This is Washington. Be a realist. Come on. Professor Meweshwai Mer, when we talk about power, there are other people in the world who are trying to accumulate power. We live in a multipolar world right now. And they have, in some cases, very nefarious or bad intent. And they do not have democracies. So it's one thing to tell people in Afghanistan then you need to evolve, you know, to be a perfect democracy like the one we have here. I think we all agree that's unrealistic and insane and not practical. But what about the free countries of the world uniting together to stop dictators from invading other free countries?

14:31Is that noble? Is that a good use of power and a good framework for America to evolve to? No, I don't think so. So I think that what the United States should do is worry about its own national interest. In some cases, that's going to involve aligning ourselves with a dictator. If we're fighting World War II all over again, it's December 8, 1941. You surely would be in favor of aligning with Adolf Hitler, with Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union against Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. Sometimes you have to make those kind of compromises. As I said before, I love liberal democracy. I have no problem aligned with liberal democracy.

15:14But when you begin to think in the terms that you're thinking, you end up with an impulse to do social engineering around the world. And that gets you all sorts of problems. Well, what I'm proposing is when dictatorships invade other countries, then we take action. It depends. Maybe defend them. It depends. Yeah, of course. I mean, when Russia invades Ukraine, basically what you're saying is you want to go to war on behalf of Ukraine against Russia. Are you in favor of that? No, I would say diplomacy would obviously be what we want to exhaust, but if they do roll into other free countries, I think there's an argument for the free countries of the world to get together and say, two dictators, we're not going to allow this.

15:58Could I come in here? Could I clarify a few things?

16:07Look, first of all, almost all the time that we intervene, it's because we view this as a power situation for the U .S. So whether it's Ukraine or Syria or Libya or other places, even if we define it as defending something, believe me, it's not about defending something, it's about a perception of US power and US interest. And it's in objectives of US global hegemony. And if we analyze the Ukraine conflict just even a little bit below the surface, this is not a conflict about Putin invading Ukraine. This is something a lot different that has to do with American power projection into the former Soviet Union, so it's completely different.

17:02Second, if we decide where the police, which we do, you can't imagine how cynical bullshit we use to justify our actions. We used the cynical bullshit that were defending the people of Benghazi to bomb the hell out of Libya to kill Moor Markadafi. Why did we do that? Well, I'm kind of an expert on that region, and I can tell you maybe because Sarkozy didn't like Kadafi. There's no much deeper reason except Hillary liked every bombing she could get hands on. And Obama was kind of convinced my Secretary of State says go with it. So why don't we go with the NATO expedition? It had nothing to do with Libya.

17:51It unleashed 15 years of chaos, cheated the UN Security Council, because like everything else we've done, it was on false pretenses. We did the same with trying to overthrow Syria. We did the same with conspiring to overthrow Victor Yanukovic in Ukraine in February 2014. So the problem with this argument is we're not nice guys, we're not trying to save the world, we're not trying to make democracies. We had a committee by the way of all the luminaries you could mention, but they're the Neocon crazies, but they're luminaries. the committee for the people of Chechnya. Are you kidding? Do you think they even knew where Chechnya is or cared about Chechnya?

18:38But it was an opportunity to get at Russia, to weaken Russia, to support a jihadist movement inside Russia, to do, this is a game. But it's a game that John has described better than anyone in the world. It's a game of power. It's not that we're defending real things. If you want to defend real things, go to the UN Security Council and convince others because the other countries are not crazy and they don't want mayhem in the world. But we play games so they say that's a game, Iraq, which was obviously a game before we went in. It was obviously Colin Powell could not move his lips without lying that day.

19:17Obviously. And so they said no. But if we're real about our interests, then you go to the UN Security Council and then it's not just on us. It's actually been a collective security issue. Professor Mejou Ramour, if we were to take Jeffrey's position here, that we are exerting power for the sake of our reputation and, in fact, to weaken dictatorships, if I'm summarizing correctly here, is that not a good strategy to weaken dictators around the world who might like to invade other countries? Is there a framing in which you could see that being for a world where democracy and people living freely has gone down in our lifetimes?

20:00Is that not noble? Is there not a justification somebody can make for it? I'm not saying I have that, but I'm just trying to steal me on the other side of this. Is weakening dictators and despots a good strategy? It depends. Well, let's talk about the two that we have, Xi Jinping. I think you wanted to get to eventually and then Ukraine and Putin are these people worth trying to You know contain or even weaken? Well in terms of China, I'm fully in favor of containing China. Okay, so containment check. It's containment I'm not interested in regime change. I'm not interested in trying to turn China into a democracy Not gonna happen.

20:41You know not gonna happen. We tried it actually and I thought it was foolish to even pursue a policy of engagement toward China. With regard to Russia, I don't think Russia is a serious threat to the United States, and indeed, I think the United States should have good relations with Putin. It's a remarkably foolish policy to push him into the arms of the Chinese. There are three great powers in the system, the United States, China, and Russia. China is a peer competitor to the United States. It's the most serious threat to the United States. Russia is the weakest of those three great powers, and it's not a serious threat to us.

21:17If you are playing balance of power politics, and you're interested as the United States in containing China, you want Russia on your side of the ledger. But what we have done, in effect, is we have pushed Russia into the arms of the Chinese. This is a remarkably foolish policy. And furthermore, by getting bogged down in Ukraine and now bogged down in the Middle East, It's become very difficult for us to pivot to Asia to deal with China, which is the principal threat that we face.

21:53I think, David, could I just say two -thirds right, perfect. So you gave them a B? A plus. A minus. I always give them an A minus. Great inflation. I just wanted to add a footnote which is that China is also not a threat It's just not a threat. I mean, we're gonna get to it. China's a market. It's a got great food great culture Wonderful people civilization 10 times older than ours. It's not a threat Well as an economist can you talk about the impact of a cold or hot Conflict with China from an economic perspective given the trade relations. Yeah, I would wreck California for one thing It would destroy the economy that you guys are making completely.

22:40This economy has been the biggest beneficiary of China's rise probably in the whole world. So it's crazy. Maybe if you're worried, if you're really worried about whether a worker in Ohio has a particular job on a particular assembly line, then you can be anti -China. If you're worried about the tech industry, about California, about peace in the future, you should be pro -China. That's all. So why does it become so universal to assume that we are already in a state of conflict with China on not just party lines, but like almost any spectrum you could kind of like consider. Because John said it exactly right and he predicted it better than anyone in the whole world in 2001.

23:25He said when China becomes large, we're going to have conflict because that's John's theory. And it's right as a description of American foreign policy that we are for power. They are big. Therefore, they're an enemy. They're an enemy of our aspiration to global. Do cities trap? Do cities? No, let's not go. John, jump in here. You want me to, is it okay if I talk about this? Yeah, yeah. I think that, what's interesting? I mean, you and Jeff, I think, arrive at similar conclusions about Ukraine, but different ones on China, right? Because Jeff is an economist and I think sees the world in fundamentally positive some ways based on the potential for trade, economics, basically.

24:10Whereas you see the world as more of a zero -sum game based on the balance of power. Why don't you just explain that difference? Okay. It is very important to emphasize, as David was saying, that Jeff and I agree on all sorts of issues, including Ukraine and Israel, Palestine. But we disagree fundamentally as he just made clear on China. And let me explain to you why I think that's the case. And then Jeff can tell you why he thinks I'm wrong. It has to do with security, whether you privilege security or survival or whether you privilege prosperity. And economists, and I would imagine most of you in the audience really care greatly about maximizing prosperity.

24:50For someone like me who's a realist, what I care about is maximizing the state's prospects of survival. And when you live in an anarchic system, and in IR speak, that means there's no higher authority, there's no night watchman that could come down and rescue if you get into trouble. And this is the international system. There's no higher authority. In that anarchic world, the best way to survive is to be really powerful. As we used to say, when I was a kid on New York City playgrounds, you want to be the biggest and baddest dude on the block. And that's simply because it's the best way to survive.

25:23If you're really powerful, nobody fools around with you. The United States is a regional hegemon. It's the only regional hegemon on the planet. We dominate the Western hemisphere. And what China has begun to do as it's got increasingly powerful economically is translate that economic might into military might, and it is trying to dominate Asia. It wants to push us out beyond the first island chain. It wants to push us out beyond the second island chain. It wants to be like, we are in the Western hemisphere, and I don't blame the Chinese one bit. If I was the national security advisor in Beijing, that's what I'd be telling Gigi Ping, we should be trying to do.

26:08But of course, from an American point of view, this is unacceptable, and we do not tolerate peer competitors. We do not want another regional hegemon on the planet. In the 20th century there were four countries that threatened to become regional hegemon like us. Imperial Germany, Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The United States played a key role in putting all four of those countries on the scrap heap of history. We want to remain the only regional headjaman in the world. We are a ruthless great power. Never want to lose sight of that fact. And the end result of this is you get an intense security competition between China and the United States, and it revolves around the concept of security.

27:00Not prosperity. I think this is what you just very quickly. So what you see beginning to happen is that it's in all domains where the competition takes place, especially high tech. We do not want them defeating this, defeating us in the high tech war. We are competing with them economically. We are competing with them militarily. And this is because the best way to survive is for us, the United States of America, to be the only regional headgemon on the planet. So Jeff, let me set it up for Jeff here. So Jeff, you and John I think agree that the game on the board is power seeking. I think what John is saying is there are smart ways and dumb ways to pursue power.