Is the U.S. Leading Us to Nuclear War? Jeffrey Sachs on Power, Politics, and a Dangerous Future

0:01I am so glad you could join us. I'm your host, Mo Gaudet This podcast is nothing more than a conversation between two good friends sharing inspiring life stories and perhaps some nuggets of wisdom along the way This is your invitation to slow down with us Welcome to Slow Mo

0:33Welcome back. Today is my last episode of the very important mini-series about the reality of our world. It's not what they told you. and it also is the very last episode of this wonderful journey that I had with this podcast. 300 plus guests so far, some of the most incredible conversations of my life and so much support and love from all of you. I really think that our world is at a very, very interesting crossroads and that because of the limited bandwidth of my abilities to do anything, I do have more pressing projects to work on. My work on happiness continues, but I think my work on artificial intelligence takes priority.

1:35And as much as this gives me incredible joy, I really need to take some time off to focus on other initiatives and other projects. Who knows? We may be back for shorter seasons. We may be back all together. But for now, I think I need to focus on what is more urgent. And this mini-series, it's not what they told you, I think, is the absolute best way to leave you pondering and reflecting and considering. Because I will say openly throughout my life, I had certain beliefs and understandings of the world that I think 2023 and 2024 have shown me are not true. And I think the big message that I wanted to leave you with in this many series is not additional knowledge, because if anybody tells you they know, nobody truly fully knows all of the intricacies and complexities of the world we live in today.

2:42I think my message was go out and ask and investigate for yourself, even if you're told by others that something is true. Social media is not true, mainstream media is not true, the slogans of the corporate world are not true, and of course what your government tells you is not always true. So it's up to each and every one of us to understand and learn and choose what we should believe and stand for. My guest today to conclude the miniseries and conclude slow-mo before the vacation is the best to have a conversation around those issues. Professor Jeffrey Sachs is a renowned economist. He's a public policy analyst and a professor known for his work on sustainable development, poverty alleviation, and global economic policy.

3:41Jeffrey has served as the advisor to numerous governments on every side of the Atlantic, and he served in many international organizations, including the United Nations, where he was one of the key architects of the Millennium Development Goals and later the Sustainable Development Goals. Geoffrey's view comes from within the heart of the economic superpower of the world, or maybe used to be superpower of the world, the US, and his views expand to cover quite a bit of the geopolitical and economic landscape of our world today. What an honor to be with Geoffrey today. I hope you enjoy this episode, and I hope it leaves you thinking.

4:35as let's say a freshman student into the world, I found what you share very, very eyeopening. And I have to say one, you know, some of the most interesting sides of my new discoveries is truly how the U.S., I don't want to use the word empire. I don't think it's the right word, but how the world has been shaped by the Cold War and how the post-Cold War era I was never really post cold war. It was really much more, I think, sort of more forceful across the world. And I was born and raised in the East. And then as soon as I started to get my formal education, I was formally educated in the West and I worked my entire life in IBM and Microsoft.

5:26And at the end of my career, I was chief business officer of Google X. So I'm very much part of that path, if you want. But I have to say, I never understood in reality. I thought that leaders of developing countries were corrupt, but then I didn't know why they were corrupt. I thought that, you know, changes happened, but I didn't know why they happened. And in your analysis, you seem to be quite unbiased, to be honest, about what's good for the U.S. and what's not good for the U.S. and what's good for the West and what's not good for the West. And I think starting from Ukraine into Gaza and so on, the world has started to change very drastically.

6:08And I think a lot of people started to become aware that what you're told is not real and that what you're told is serving agendas. So it's a very shocking reality to wake up to. Where do you think this all started and how far did we go and where do you think this will end is the conversation for today? Well, thank you very much. Maybe the proximate start of this is the British Empire because what America knows, it learned from Britain. Britain undoubtedly was an empire. At its peak, it controlled about one quarter of the inhabited land area of the world and was extremely powerful and extremely nasty from my point of view.

7:01I loved the British when I was young because they spoke such wonderful English, and they do. They speak better English than I do. It's their language, but Americans use it. And that very wonderful language masked a lot of tremendous cruelty. The British Empire was an extremely cruel empire, as empires are, very violent, very much determined to dominate, very much neglectful of the lives of those that the empire dominated, leaving millions of people to die in famines in Ireland in the 1840s or in India in the 1870s to 1890s. what's been called the late Victorian holocausts. These were El Nino-related famines, but then were supervised by harsh imperialists who didn't care as millions of Indians were dying.

8:10And, of course, Britain pioneered in concentration camps in Africa in many wars of conquest, in many cynical wars, The most cynical that I know of in modern history is the opium war, so-called a war on China to demand the right to export British opium, India-grown British opium, to China, where the Chinese authorities were perfectly clear this was leading to addictions and social problems. And it literally had as the cause, one cause of war, Britain's demand that China accept opium. Get high or we will kill you. Exactly. And become addicted under our demands. Well, and another very cynical war was the Crimean War, which I mentioned because the Crimean War was a war led by Britain to weaken Russia, to drive Russia and especially the Russian fleet from the Black Sea and to weaken Russia sufficiently that Britain thought that Russia would then not threaten British imperial possessions.

9:34And one of their concerns, which was mostly delusional anyway, was that Russia would invade India through the Khyber Pass. And the Crimean War was a war to put Russia in its place. I call the current war in Ukraine the second Crimean War because it's got almost an identical structural purpose. This time the U.S. and the U.K. trying to put Russia in its place. So I start with Britain because the U.S. took over the British style. And I would say that empire is an appropriate word, but the American empire is a different kind of empire. The American empire is an empire in the sense that the American government has actively determined who rules in other countries.

10:29It's taken as a natural point that the U.S. can overthrow another country's government if that other country's government is deemed to be inimical to U.S. interests in some way. And there have been perhaps 100 covert regime change operations by the U.S., largely the CIA, but not only. And those have extended from 1947 until today. The lesson is that they get us into terrible crises and they get the target countries into prolonged instability and crises. And because they are, by design, deniable by the U.S. government, there's almost no awareness or discussion of the underlying causes of such wars.

11:26And I'll give two examples. One is the Syrian war. In general, Americans don't pay too much attention to the rest of the world anyway, but they may have heard that there is a war in Syria. And they would say, well, yes, because there's a Syrian despot. And that led to a civil war. I doubt that one in a thousand would know that President Obama signed an order in 2012 to overthrow the Syrian government. And already in 2011, began to arm an insurgency to overthrow the Syrian government. I know from my diplomatic roles that a peace agreement was reached in 2012 to end the civil strife in Syria, but that the United States blocked it.

12:27So the war now has gone on for 14 years openly from 2011 to 13 years to 2024 with hundreds of thousands of dead. Nobody in America knows. Yes, nobody knows. Nobody cares. Nobody reports on it. Nobody knows the CIA role. once in a while we hear Vladimir Putin entered Syria in 2015 without even the minimal notice. Well, yes, the United States was there four years before. Thank you. And so this is a typical kind of action. Another example to bring us closer to our immediate crisis is Ukraine. It is said by the mainstream media that the war in Ukraine started on February 24th, 2022, when Vladimir Putin, in an unprovoked manner, invaded Ukraine.

13:35this is a fantasy of a description the war started 10 years ago it started eight years before its ostensible start date because it started in february 2014 but the cool people have short memories the u.s overthrew a government february 22nd 2014 the sitting president had the temerity to say that this is sitting president of Ukraine, excuse me, had the temerity to say that Ukraine would be neutral rather than a NATO country. And that was a cause for the United States to overthrow Yanukovych together with extreme nationalist militaries and paramilitaries in Ukraine. And this installed an anti-Russian, indeed, Russophobic regime in Kiev.

14:38And the war began then with breakaway republics and bombing and then a negotiated settlement called the Minsk Agreements, which was repudiated by the U.S. and the Ukrainians. So basic facts like the Syrian and the Ukrainian cases are not actually known or discussed in the United States, which is why you and I are surprised when we learn them, because these are big events. You would think that a newspaper like the New York Times, which has a storied reputation, would be doing investigative reporting, would find out what's the real story, would take pride in a Pulitzer Prize-quality expose. Why did the U.S.

15:28overthrow a regime? Well, it's exactly the opposite. Not only do they not do that reporting, they block that reporting. They prevent it from happening. And so we don't hear the truth on almost anything. So I call this the U.S. empire because an empire means when a powerful state has control outside of its own state. It could be a direct colonial possession. The U.S. has a few of those, But mainly the U.S. has a archipelago of military bases around the world in 80 countries or so and around 750 military bases. It has CIA secret sites all over the world. It has regime change operations all over the world.

16:25And I count that as an empire. And I find that the behavior of this empire is not very smart. It's not even in the service of the American people. If it were, one could resent it and say how clever and evil and perfidious it is, but it's worse than that. The American behavior is destructive, wasteful, leading to American deaths, leading to millions of deaths of others, leading to trillions of dollars of outlays that are paid for on debt. So the wars have been a major contributor to a rising public debt in the United States. The supply chains have been disrupted globally. There's no benefit to any of this, to anybody, Certainly not the target countries, not the U.S.

17:28itself. Maybe the benefits, which are real and some people claim are the ultimate aim, are the military contracts for the military contractors. So, yes, there are war profiteers, and I don't want to actually in any way deny that that is one motivation. But I think that there is, in addition to the war profiteering of the military-industrial complex, a hubris, an arrogance, a disdain for the rest of the world, and a general belief in American superiority in this security state that we have, not the public, but this narrow security state that is driving very, very dangerous and bad behavior. My view living outside the U.S.

18:24most of my life is that there was a very clever facade for a very long time, but that very quickly, especially in the last, I'd probably say post Obama years, even in the Obama years, a little bit, it started to become very clear that we are all occupied, that most of the actions that a government in the development world is taking that's not favorable for its people is either directly influenced by a regime change threat or by a significant amount of fortune that can be bestowed on someone, or simply by the fact that there is ideologies and concepts that are embedded within our minds that are basically telling us that certain things are the way to go, and that impacts behavior.

19:18But in reality, at the end of the day, believe it or not, one of the very first eye-openers for me was a movie about Charlie Wilson. If you remember that Charlie Wilson's war, where Tom Hanks plays Senator Charlie Wilson and basically shows you how the U.S. impacted the Afghan war when in a covert operation by getting the Egyptians to work with the Israelis and then the Saudis to go through the Pakistanis to get to Afghanistan, which is, you know, unthinkable if you live in that part of the world that those parties would work together. My question then is that when you refer to this as a belief in the superiority of America, which by the way is also served by quite a large portfolio of very advanced nations and very capable other news networks across the world that are just glorified slaves of the US policy.

20:12but it is hurting the American citizen very significantly. So it's not really in the benefit of America at all. And if this is being done for the benefit of the military complex or the arms trade complex, this is one side of it. But it is sort of orchestrated by so-called politicians that seem to be in power but are not. How does that work at all? It's a very good question of the motivations, the behaviors, and the continuation or continuity of this American security state. And I happened to recently have a good long discussion with a talented political scientist named Aaron Good, who wrote his Ph.D.

21:08dissertation and then published it on explaining what is the American deep state? Is it real? Is it a proper concept? Is it a conspiracy theory? What is it exactly? And he recommends a three-part structure of the state that is the apparatus of power in the United States that I find in my decades of work to be a useful construct. First, there is the visible state. He calls it the Madisonian state because James Madison wrote the Constitution. We have a president, we have a Congress, we have a Supreme Court, we have an election for the House of Representatives every two years, for the president every four years, and so forth.

21:59And those politicians exist and they vote the laws, they vote the budget, and so forth. Then there is what's sometimes called the permanent state, or sometimes called the deep state. He uses the term the security state. And the security state is long-term professionals, if you will, who run the security apparatus of the United States. What is the security apparatus? Well, it's a trillion-dollar-a-year business. That's the budget of the Pentagon, basically, and related military outlays. A trillion dollars is not nothing. It's a pretty big operation. It supports, as I said, overseas military bases in 80 countries.

22:48It supports the Pentagon. It supports hundreds of billions of dollars, interestingly, in military contracts each year with the likes of Boeing or Lockheed Martin or what was Raytheon, now renamed General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman. So the major military contractors. and, of course, the CIA and the intelligence community. And the CIA is distinctive in that it is a military or quasi-military unit of the United States, but it operates in secrecy by design. And it operates almost without any accountability at all, because what is supposed to be accountable as operations to intelligence committees in the Congress.

23:42But basically, those committees are there to support the CIA rather than to oversee the CIA. So this is the second category is this trillion dollar a year military machine. And to my mind, it's always ready for war, likes war, wants war, wants to test new weapon systems, wants to show American might, wants to scare the wits out of little countries, wants to be present for regime changes where and when it's needed. Then there is a third component, which Aaron Good calls by a variety of names. One is the deep state, even though what he means by it is not the permanent bureaucracy. That's this security state.

24:39He means it's the bankers, it's Wall Street, it's the oil industry. It's those who ostensibly profit by America's reach around the world with the security state making it safe for pipelines, for oil ownership, for regulatory control, for placement of military bases and so on. and the other names that he uses as in juxtaposition to the underworld which plays its role with the security state because organized crime and the cia work hand in hand and have for decades but he calls it just a statement in the passing you know yes but this is this is known they've been involved in drug trafficking they've used the mafia for assassinations and it's it's a it's a bit of a mess.

25:38And he calls this third component, the overworld. And in a way it is, it's the market's Marx's idea for who is all of this done for whom we bono who benefits from all of this. And that's our billionaires and our tech industry, which is both a source of power for the security state, but also is enriched by it in its own ways. You know this world very well. There are huge Pentagon contracts. There are huge tie-ins with the National Security administration, and so on. There's all of the things that Snowden revealed about the back doors to all our data, thank you, and all the information. There's Mark Zuckerberg telling us recently, yes, the government and I, we work together to make sure certain things wouldn't be on Facebook.

26:45Sorry about that. So there's a lot of tie-ins. It used to be big oil and Wall Street were the quintessential partners in this, much less so the tech world. But now tech is the dominant part of our economy. And so it also has its tie-ins because it's partly militarized and partly so consequential for our lives. But the point is that we should think about three levels of government, our politicians, our permanent security apparatus, which is very big, and our interested industry, which is aligned in contracts, power, regulation, secrecy, surveillance, and other areas. This is not textbook civics of seventh grade, of how a bill becomes a law.

27:46This is some ground reality that has a lot of unpleasantness to it, but I think helps to account for why we're in perpetual wars, why my whole lifetime has been Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, Sudan, Somalia, you name it. We have a big war machine. We have a big regime change operation. We have a big secrecy security apparatus. We have a big surveillance apparatus. It's not what we signed up to with James Madison's constitution. Not at all. I mean, in a very interesting way, when, you know, in your comparison to the British empire, you know, it's almost upside down in reality, but it's still royalty, you know, the deep state employing an army to protect itself only with the presence of a few talking heads that we call the politicians that basically are the front line in front of the public to claim democracy somehow.

29:00This is correct. And there's a wonderful, I don't know, wonderful. My wife doesn't like me to use that word when I refer to President Putin's statements. I will say just very accurate. And that is in an interview that President Putin gave to Le Figaro in 2017, he has an observation, which I found very astute or very accurate. He said, you know, I've dealt with three presidents now. He says they come to office with ideas, but then soon enough, the men in dark suits and blue ties show up and tell them the way the world really is. And that is why things continue as they are essentially no matter who is in office.

29:46And I think that there is a great deal of truth to that. When I look at foreign policy from Clinton, who was a Democrat, it's the economy, stupid, but he was the one that initiated the NATO enlargement. He was the one that bombed Serbia in 1999 for 78 straight days. Then George W. Bush Jr., who had the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and who further enlarged NATO and then committed NATO to expand to include Ukraine and Georgia. Then Obama, the man of peace, the man who won the Nobel Peace Prize right at the start. And then he signs the order for the overthrow of the Syrian government. He invokes NATO to overthrow the Libyan government.

30:38He sends Victoria Nuland to overthrow the Ukrainian government. Well, you know, come on, this is not proper behavior or in line with the public perceptions and precepts. Then Trump, Well, he continues the arming of Ukraine. He, of course, doubles down on Israel in the Israel-Palestine disaster and tragedy, making things work. He rejects a peace agreement with Iran, which would have denuclearized Iran in return for dropping U.S. sanctions. So he leaves the world less safe. Then Biden, who's supposedly the opposite of Trump, comes in. And what does he do? He refuses to negotiate with Russia. He relishes the Ukraine wars leading to Finland and Sweden joining NATO.

31:48He continues to pledge at disastrous cost to Ukraine, by the way, that NATO will enlarge to Ukraine. It leads to ongoing war. It leads to destruction of Ukraine. It leads to the impossibility of a peace agreement. And that's Biden's policy. So that's five presidents in a row. that I think have made me much less safe than we were in 1992 when the Russians had just become independent and said, we want to be friends with you. And the United States said, well, that's fine. Get in line and respect us because we're going to run the show now. And this is essentially our circumstance, we are more in danger, but every president supposedly left or right basically has listened to the men in the dark suits and blue ties.

32:43I think, however, that it's never been so out in the public. I mean, even when the war in Afghanistan was happening, even when the war in Iraq was happening, you know, in the Middle East, we knew that this was very, very - Cynical and cruel. Cruel, yeah. I mean, millions of Iraqis, innocent Iraqis die for absolutely no reason directly by the hands of American soldiers. But I have to say it's Gaza that really, you know, gave it all away. So it's quite interesting that in my lifetime, you know, the war in Iraq didn't expose to me the extent of US cruelty, but that the war in Gaza, which is, you know, of course, using 68%, I think, American weapons, is still seen as the hand of Israel.

33:37And I really have to wonder, where is the benefit for the US to see anything at all in Gaza? Like Gaza doesn't even feature in US security or US economic policy in any way. How stupid is that position that Biden took? Well, I think what we see in Gaza is a complete, blatant, shocking exposure to the false values and utter hypocrisy of the United States and the West regarding human rights, international law, claims about genocide, and so on. And to go back, The U.S. has been making a claim that China is committing a genocide in Western China, in Xinjiang province, which is a province in the west of China.

34:32I have been to Xinjiang. I've written about this. There is no genocide going on. This is a publicity psyops of the United States. China's the adversary. It's trying to paint China in a false but very harsh light. And it used the word genocide in the State Department human rights reports and got a lot of notice. and Western parliaments also in Canada and elsewhere repeated, yes, this is a genocide. No deaths reported, by the way. No deaths. But various claims, but no deaths. Then comes a real genocide before our eyes, where a tightly packed 2 million people in a tiny strip along the Mediterranean, the Gaza Strip, are bombed out of their homes, hospitals destroyed, schools destroyed, universities destroyed, all caught on video feed every day.

35:46And official count of 40 ,000 dead, but estimated multiples of that, people buried under the rubble, people dying of hunger, dying of deprivation, dying of disease. And what is the U.S. position? We support 100 % Israel's security. Shocking, but as you say, a complete expose. There are no standards here. Even genocide can be excused at the stage of the White House or the State Department, basically smirked away and the U.S. providing the weapon systems to carry out this genocide. So it is shocking. Even I had become, of course, a critic of this many years ago and on a growing basis because I learned more and more, even in recent days, of things that I didn't know about that are absolutely disgusting in U.S.

36:51foreign policy. But this one, like you say, is so vivid and dramatic that the world is watching as the U.S. is seemingly able to justify any level of cruelty and suffering. And even when accounts of torture, verified accounts, come out of Israel, first groups of Israelis, say that's just fine because essentially the people that are being tortured are effectively being treated as subhuman. But the United States does nothing except continue to provide the bombs, the financing, the weaponry, the artillery, all of the rest of the killing apparatus. Why? Well, a variety of reasons. One, the U.S. security state and the Israeli security state are completely intertwined.

37:55Even when there are negotiations ostensibly about a ceasefire, who are the representatives? Very typically, it's the heads of the CIA and Mossad. It shows you a bit who runs the show. It is shocking. Yes, but that's the case. It's not even the politicians. No. Very often, you'll read a report in recent weeks that there's going to be another round of ceasefire negotiations and the CIA director and head of Mossad will be meeting in the Emirates or Qatar or other place. And I'm shocked by it also. The CIA is, by name, of course, an intelligence agency, not a negotiator, not part of our democratic institutions.