State of Play: Geopolitics, US Foreign Policy, and NATO Enlargement — with Jeffrey Sachs

24:50We're in the prisoner's dilemma in a most naive way, which is we think we know that they are going to be aggressive. So we're going to be aggressive back. And that's the mindset right now. And it's completely wrongheaded. Do you think some of this chill, though, in U.S.-China relations is, I think China, I used to go to China a lot. And I think of Xi as, or China is a different place than it was 10 years ago. And that Xi's rise to power, that it's an autocracy, that they've actually been quite aggressive. And that us going to Taiwan, who has been an ally, a strategic ally, we do great trade with them.

25:31and that no one should intimidate us into having our representatives visit Taiwan. It just strikes me that you're not holding both parties accountable for the chill here in relations. I think it's actually something different, which is more kind of international realist approach, which is that starting around 2012, you could really date it to around 2014, China reached a new level of its economic development. During the period from 1980 to 2010, arguably, China became the world's manufacturing workshop. But the idea was, okay, we have the technologies, they have the low-cost labor, and this is a great relationship.

26:21We're going to get a lot of low-cost iPhones out of this, and this is good. But Chinese, extremely clever and extremely capable. They started minting hundreds of thousands of PhDs per year. And what really freaked out the American policymakers was two things that came around 2014. I'd say number one was a program in China called Made in China 2025, where China used terms that I would not have advised them to use, but they said, we're going to, we're going to, I don't know if it's dominate, but we're going to be the major players in a lot of key technologies by 2025. So that was one thing. And it really freaked out Washington.

27:10And the second was the Belt and Road Initiative. And the Belt and Road Initiative was China saying, we're the phenomenal world savers. While the United States barely saves, we save 40 % of our gross domestic product or more. And we're going to use those savings to build highways, fast rail, 5G, all over Eurasia. And by the way, even in East Africa, Latin America, and that's the Belt and Road Initiative. We don't have any initiatives like that. 50 years ago, we would have, but now Now the United States doesn't. So these two things were kind of an announcement. China's reaching a level of superpower status in the world and a superpower of 1.4 billion people and a highly successful society.

28:01At that point, you start finding remarkable statements. It didn't have to do with Xi, and it didn't have to do with anything specific about putting up some military facilities on a tiny island in the South China Sea, nothing like that. It had to do with the recognition that China was now a threat to U.S. dominance. And there's a remarkable paper by a former colleague of mine, Ambassador Robert Blackwell, who wrote, I think it's 2015, the Council on Foreign Relations, people can download it, that the United States needs to rethink its relations with China because China is now a threat to U.S. predominance or U.S.

28:53dominance. And he lays out a number of steps in that paper very clearly. We need to restrict technology flows. We need to organize countries in Asia to engage and trade with us in ways that deliberately exclude the Chinese from any role in policymaking. And he lays out quite explicitly a kind of neocontainment strategy, if I could call it that. So that's when the U.S. started to move. It started under Trump, but Biden has accelerated it. And I think it's just wrong to think that somehow this was provoked by Xi, it was provoked by China China's continued rise in excellence, in innovation, in science and technology.

29:46And it was provoked by the good old U.S. idea that, hey, this is our century, nobody else's century, and we're not going to let it happen. Now, I happen to think that's a ridiculous approach to life because as an economist, I guess, maybe as a human being, I believe in win-win ideas. I don't believe that this is really a game of who's on top, but actually, are we prospering, which is not a zero-sum idea, but more of a shared idea? And I regard that whole shift in U.S. politics as being dangerous and wrongheaded, sure to create an enemy of the other side. And just if I could, you know, finish on this thought, one of my favorite political scientists is John Mearsheimer, who is our kind of go-to super realist at the University of Chicago.

30:45And he wrote a very powerful, very influential book in the early 2000s called The Tragedy of great power politics. And in the early 2000s, when he wrote, he said, you know, it looks calm right now. It looks like, you know, we're past great power crisis. But he writes very presciently, when China grows in power, we're going to be right back to great power conflict. And I give him a lot of credit for it. But I said to him, John, this is going to lead to self-fulfilling crisis. He said, yes. I said, John, that's a tragedy. Yes. He said, that's how it is. And I don't accept that part, that we have to have a tragic outcome to all of this.

31:38Yeah. So I just want to acknowledge, I mean, it does, I work a lot with Chinese companies, I shouldn't say that. I work a lot with companies whose entire, or the majority of their supply chain is in China. And I find that the rhetoric coming out of D.C. and among the media is different than the rhetoric from companies who still have very productive relationships with people on the ground in China, including Chinese entrepreneurs. We have a great relationship. I mean, 92 percent of toys under American Christmas trees are manufactured in China. They buy our debt. We buy their stuff. And it's been a fantastic relationship.

32:12That's my feeling, too. So, also the other, just a couple stats that have absolutely blown me away. The year I was born, the life expectancy in China was 47. Now it's 77. They've brought 500 million people out of poverty and in the middle class. That's arguably one of the greatest feats in the history of humanity. And it does feel like we have mutual prosperity there. that I'd like to pivot to another region. I've recently spent some time in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And it strikes me that the adult reality, I love that term you use, or the adult reality is that we are going, that they have just a massive amount of capital and power.

32:52The money translates to power and influence. And I'll go out on a limb here. I wanna get your thoughts. I think they're a swing vote. Most elections are decided by moderates. And I think there's a small number of nations that'll be the swing vote if you think of us becoming adversarial. And between like, you think of China and Russia on one side, America and Europe on the other, and hopefully we can figure out ways to dialogue and come up with mutually prosperous solutions. But at a minimum, it strikes me that we want to make really massive investments economically and in terms of diplomacy in India and Saudi Arabia, that these nations are becoming increasingly important.

33:31Economic power translates to political power. And I'm just curious what you think our relationship with the kingdom should be. Well, I think it should be, first of all, friendly. Second, the big thing about the U.S. that is really important to understand. We've been the imperium. In fact, we viewed ourselves as the empire. Empires tend to rule by divide et impera, meaning divide and conquer, divide and rule. And so the United States in region after region of the world has actually pressed division. This may be counterintuitive, but we like to stir up trouble in regions and pit countries against each other so that some come running under our wing.

34:32And so the reason that I say this is that what has the U.S. done in the Middle East since 1978? 1978. You know, in 1978, 79, Zbigniew Brzezinski had the idea. He was a clever person, but this was a pretty world-changing step. He said, we're going to provoke the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan. We're going to do it by funding jihadists, the Mujahideen, and that's going to cause the Soviets to come in and we're going to trap them in a war by funding jihadists fighting the Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan. So we did that typical CIA operation. I'd say 44 years later, one of the great disasters of all time and boomeranged on us incredibly.

35:34Okay, that was one thing in 1979, triggering what turned out to be more than four decades of war in Afghanistan, leaving that country in complete ruins. Same time, that was the Iranian crisis. We decided we'd kill the new Islamic regime of Iran. So from 1980 onward, We funded Iraq, Saddam, to fight an absolutely bloody war throughout the 1980s with Iran. And then we took every step to do everything we could to kill the Iranian regime from then until now with just a few tiny iterations. Then in 2009, 2011, excuse me, Hillary Clinton and Obama got the not so bright idea in their head. Why don't we overthrow Bashar al-Assad?

36:36And we unleashed the Syrian, so-called Syrian civil war. It was really a CIA backed operation to overthrow the Syrian government. I mention all of this in the context of your question because Saudi Arabia knows we've been everywhere meddling and stirring up trouble all over this region from the Middle East, the Gulf, and Western Asia. In fact, all of the major players know it. Iran, Turkey, the Saudis, and so forth, the Egyptians, and so on. So what's happened recently is that China stepped in to do something absolutely dazzling and completely beyond the imagination of an American strategist. And that is the Chinese brought the Iranians and the Saudis together to make peace.

37:37Unbelievable, by the way. You wouldn't have found one in a thousand in Washington that would have said, it's not even possible. What do the Chinese know about this and the Saudis and Iranians? Our whole game plan was based on that supposed Sunni-Shia conflict being unresolvable. And the Chinese resolved it. The Chinese brought Bashar al-Assad back into the Arab League at the meeting. And he was at the meeting just a couple of days ago, reaccepted. So if you ask how the Saudis view the United States right now, they view the United States and think, God, this is a country that is just enmeshed in conflict.

38:23And actually, we need to get moving to something bigger at this point. So unless the United States changes its approach, I don't think it's going to play in the Middle East. I think the countries in the Middle East are, frankly, a little bit tired of all of the wars that the U.S. has stirred up. We'll be right back.

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40:16So, Jeff, let's discuss the war in Ukraine. You believe the U.S. government is falsely claiming that this war started with an, open quote, unprovoked attack by Russia, close quote, and then in reality, we should be recognizing the role that NATO enlargement has played. Say more. Well, back in 1990, Gorbachev, who was a kind of dream for the world to end the Cold War peacefully, said, I'm going to disband the Warsaw Pact military alliance. And James Baker III and Hans Dietrich Genscher jumped in and said, if you do that, we promise NATO won't move one inch eastward. And there's a great archival summary of all of that collected by George Washington University National Archives Project.

41:08that shows how many times NATO leaders, U.S. leaders, German leaders told Gorbachev and then told Yeltsin, okay, no NATO enlargement. Of course, by 1992, when the Soviet Union was no more, our neocons, and at that point it was Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld, started planning NATO enlargement. I mean, our promises lasted a nanosecond in historical time. And I spoke with a historian, leading historian recently. I won't say his name because he hasn't published this work yet, but he was telling me that in the archives, he finds records already in 1992 that the intention is that NATO will expand to Ukraine.

41:58It's incredible to my mind. So in 1997's Big Brzezinski, spells out in foreign affairs the timeline for NATO enlargement. And he gets it almost exactly because he wasn't surmising what it should be. He was reporting, of course, what the inside plan was in Washington and letting the foreign affairs community around the Council on Foreign Relations understand what all this was about. And from the mid-1990s, this became a public debate because a lot of people told Clinton, including America's leading diplomats, don't do that. This will provoke a new Cold War. And even Bill Perry, Clinton's secretary of defense, thought about resigning in protest over Clinton's.

42:48And it was Madeleine Albright and the Democratic Party neocons. Don't do this. This is absolutely reckless. Well, what happened, as we now know, and it was just like Zbigny said and wrote in 1997, the NATO enlargement went in three stages. First stage was Poland, Hungary, and Czech Republic. Second stage under George W. Bush Jr. was in 2004, seven more countries right up to Russia's border, but in this case with the Baltic state. So it was Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and then on the Black Sea, Romania and Bulgaria, and then Slovenia and Slovakia. Putin gives a famous speech in the Munich Security Conference in 2007, where he says, would you stop it?

43:46This is a threat to our core national security. Do not move any closer. Well, 2008, the neocon agenda continued just on track. Victoria Nuland, by the way, who's now our undersecretary of state and is probably the single continuity of the American deep state in both political parties because she was Cheney's advisor, then she was ambassador to NATO in 2008, and now she's undersecretary of state for political affairs. in 2008, George W. pushed that at the Bucharest NATO summit, we would commit to NATO enlarging to Ukraine and to Georgia. And this really freaked out the Russians, because if you look at the map, what we were literally doing was surrounding Russia in the Black Sea.

44:39The idea was Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia, exactly the countries that surround the naval base in Sevastopol, would all be NATO members. And Putin told Bush then in Bucharest, because the day after the NATO conference, there was a NATO-Russia meeting. He said, if you do this, this is likely to go terribly wrong. Well, what I saw was what happened next, which is that a pro-Russian president of Ukraine was elected, Viktor Yanukovych. He said, we need neutrality between the two sides. And neutrality was against the neocon purpose. And when protests erupted against Yanukovych in late 2013, there was Victoria Nuland flying back and forth nonstop to Kiev to help orchestrate what turned out to be a violent overthrow of Yanukovych in February 2014.

45:44That's when the war began. And I know we were very deeply involved in what was essentially a coup. and Yanukovych left. A Russophobic series of governments came in, all wanting NATO membership. And at the end of 2021, just to bring us up to the current moment, Putin put a diplomatic initiative on the table on December 17, 2021, actually a draft agreement between Russia and the United States on security matters. And I read it. I thought, yeah, this is absolutely the right basis for a diplomatic outcome. I actually called the White House and had a long talk with one of the top people and said, negotiate for heaven's sake.

46:41You know, what Putin's put on the table is absolutely reasonable because NATO enlargement to Ukraine could get us all blown up. No, oh, no, Jeff, it's got nothing to do with this. And anyway, NATO's an open door. And if Ukraine wants it, we're not going to stop it. Just baloney, by the way, complete baloney, as if the United States would say to Mexico, yeah, if you want to have a military alliance with Russia or China, that's just fine with us or say that to Canada. You can imagine what would happen here if anybody tried that unwise step. Well, we told Putin point blank in January 22, we will not discuss with you the issue of NATO enlargement because it has nothing to do with you.

47:36We will not allow any third country, meaning you, have any say over where NATO goes. And if you read the minutes of the Russian National Security Council meeting of February 21st or Putin's speech to the nation that night, they said, look, we tried diplomacy. We tried to discuss this. We got the door slammed in our face, and we're not going to tolerate NATO on our 1 ,900 kilometer border with Ukraine. So to my mind, Biden blew it badly and we're at war now and they still won't admit the truth. And one of the things I wrote in that article, Scott, is we can't barely get a discussion in this country going.

48:28I tried actually to publish something in the New York Times. They wouldn't take it in the end after they accepted it. They accepted it. Then they said, nah, we're not going to really run it. I said, come on, you guys are writing all the time that this is an unprovoked war. This was provoked. You need to run something. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. So this is why it's so hard to have an actual debate in this country. It's an inside job and it's dangerous. So that's really the point of my article. So a lot there. And I want to acknowledge that if a military alliance that was pro-Russia showed up in Canada or Mexico, we would have a much different response.

49:08And that I think it all comes down to the core issue that we're just, America is struggling with wrapping its head around the notion that we're no longer the only game in town. You got it. That's what it all comes down to. Now, I do want to push back a little bit on, I do believe that NATO, I don't think that NATO nor the West has any designs on invading Russia. I can understand why they're threatened, but I do believe that. Let's talk about here we are. Here we are in a land war, and let's be honest with NATO, in Ukraine. And my sense is the best way to end this war, quite frankly, is to win it.

49:48And that if Russia wants to leave, it's over. And that if they don't leave or that we come to some sort of accommodation where they get land for invading and killing as many people, you know, obviously a lot of their own people have perished. Does that send a green light to autocrats all over the world that they have a strategic advantage or that it's in their best interest to invade their neighbors? I mean, distinct of how we got here, isn't really the only viable way out or the best way out for Western interests and democracies all over the world is to convince the Russians to leave? Well, they're not going to leave because they or let me put it this way.

50:24The answer is yes to your question. If we said if you leave, we don't come in. that's that's the magic word if we said you leave and nato doesn't enlarge we have a real chance that was what was on offer in december 2021 but we said you leave and we'll do what we want and that's just not going to happen that's the problem so if we said you leave and we won't enter the gap. I think that is absolutely a viable basis for negotiations. So in my point is, in December 2021, Putin was not looking to annex these four regions that are now annexed, which made everything much more complicated. Now, mind you, there's also a real complication.

51:20And maybe if we have another few hours, we can talk about Crimea because that actually is a quite complicated subject. But just to say your basic approach is the one I take. But I add an important footnote, which is, yeah, Russia should go home. But we agree that NATO won't go in. That line I've been urging for years. The White House explicitly won't say it for a real reason, which is that Victoria Nuland has been on this jag for almost 30 years, probably. And certainly we know from the late 1990s they want NATO to expand. And here's the point. Obama knew in 2014, he actually gave an interview for which he was heavily criticized.

52:18he gave an interview that said, I don't want to get into this more because Russia has escalatory dominance. And what he meant by that is whatever we do, they can take it up a notch up to nuclear war. And they care about this a hell of a lot more than we do. So I don't want to take the first step and then have my pot, have the pot raised by the Russians and then we match or raise and go on because they can keep doing this, they will not allow NATO to expand to Ukraine. To my mind, that's been the story all along. So Jeff, even generous with your time, I just have one last question. We've kind of done a whirlwind tour geopolitically.

53:03I know you speak to a lot of people at the highest levels. So let's do the magic wand question. The president or the White House or Congress only has the bandwidth or the ability to get two or three things done. What do you think are the most important initiatives that we can take here in the U.S. to ensure can not only continue to prosperity, but progress? You know, the key to prosperity is investment. We don't invest enough in this country. Our domestic investment rate, it's not properly measured, but even if you add in the R &D, you add in the fixed investment, and you add in the education spending, it's a shadow of what it should be because we've got between a third and a half of this country basically outside of the education and even the physical infrastructure increasingly for a prosperous life.

54:01and that's where our real issues are. This is a great country. We should invest in it. And that's where we should be putting our public finances. That's where we should be putting our efforts. That's where companies should be devoting their time, not fighting over Ukraine, not having a world war threat over Taiwan, not having 800 military bases around the world, all huge anachronisms. The impressive thing about the United States in the last 30 years, the most positive economic point, and it's a surprise for me if I think back 30 years, we really sustained the technology investments. In fact, not just sustained them, we increased them.

54:50And the payoffs have been huge. Our R &D spending is big and wonderful, and it's actually generating huge amounts of new technology. But then we don't invest in the people. We don't invest in basic health care. We don't invest in poor people and poor communities. We don't even have a concept of social housing. I've been spending a lot of time in Vienna this year, which is magnificent and has, you know, 100 years of tradition of social housing. We don't even have the concept right now in this country. And this war stuff is a complete drain. So what I said to the administration at the beginning, though, they could care less what I said, but I said, don't do foreign theatrics.

55:35Don't get entangled even more. Build this country peacefully. And there's enough for the whole world to have a mutual benefit. Don't break trade. Don't break agreements. Don't intense. Don't contain China. What a waste of time for us. Let's invest in the United States. So that would be my answer. That's the best in the United States. Jeffrey Sachs serves as the director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he holds the rank of university professor, the university's highest academic rank. He also has written several books, including three New York Times bestsellers, The End of Poverty, Commonwealth, Economics for a Crowded Planet, and The Price of Civilization.

56:18He joins us from his home in New York. Professor Sachs, I love how fearless you are in your willingness to go against the narrative, if you will. I disagree with you on a ton, but I always find that— Good. Well, it's a great thing to have a great discussion. That's even better. Evidence and argument craft better solutions. But I just love how fearless you are, and you back it up with data, and it just strikes me that your heart is in the right place. And I always come away with a different or a twist on what I thought were my knowledge base, which I think is the key to learning. You're in the right place as a professor, Jeffrey.

56:53Anyways, thank you for your time. Hey, great to be with you. Really terrific.

57:06Algebra of happiness, switching mediums. I'm really struggling with my relationship with my father. My father is 92 and declining fast. He's suffering, I think, from dementia. At his age, they don't even make the diagnosis because kind of what's the point? But he and I used to have really good conversations every Sunday. And now the conversations are just increasingly difficult. It's essentially me yelling into a phone the same question over and over, him feeling stressed out because he knows he can't hear. He knows I'm yelling and it's upsetting for him. And then he tries to answer. And then he asks me the same question over and over.

57:38How are the boys? I think it's rough for him. And it's frustrating for me. And so what I've started doing is recording voice memos and videos. And it sounds basic, you know, pretty basic. But I record a video. I say, this is what's going on with me. Me and the boys watch, you know, the Inter Milan game. I'm excited about this. How are your Leafs doing? My dad's a huge Maple Leafs fan. And then him and his home health aide, she will go over with him. And if he needs to watch it seven or eight times and ask her to explain it to him. And then he writes back. the text message where the video is. And I think it's more rewarding for him.

58:16And it gives him a snapshot and I can walk around the house and show him videos of the kids and the dogs. And it just struck me, why did this take me so long? I've had these really uncomfortable conversations with him for a couple of years over the phone. And it's just, anyone who has parents who are struggling is gonna relate to this. It just gets very upsetting and very hard, very fast. So the bottom line is, and I wish I'd figured this out sooner, and that is if you're struggling with an aging parent and you're not communicating as well as you used to for a variety of reasons, write down all the different mediums and the different ways you could communicate with them and try those, try those.

58:57Because intimacy is a function of proximity. You wanna stay close to your parents. they want to stay close to you, but some of their faculties and their ability to communicate through certain mediums is going to decline with their cognitive ability. And one of the ways you continue to love them and you continue to invest in them is you come up with new mediums. You switch mediums with your kids. When they're tiny, it's all about affection, right? It's all about getting close to them and let them smell you and lie on you. And then as a kid, it's constant in verbal communication, mostly reprimanding them.

59:31Then as they get older, you start to communicate with them on the phone and via email and text or whatever it is, or actions, trying to be a role model for them, trying to have good manners. That's what I'm trying to do in front of my 12 and 15 year old. I'm trying to especially show really good manners such that they begin to model that. We switch mediums. We're smart when our kids are young. Let's think about switching mediums as our parents in an older generation get older. This episode was produced by Caroline Shagrin. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer, and Drew Burrows is our technical director.

1:00:06Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn, and on Monday with our weekly market show.

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