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| Good evening, it's Friday, October 4th. | |
| Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. | |
| Eastern exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube. | |
| Tonight... Professor Jeffrey Sachs is a frequent guest on our program and one reason for that is that he is easily one of the most interesting public policy analysts with a virtually singular trajectory. | |
| Sachs, who is now on the faculty of Columbia, spent most of his early career at Harvard. | |
| That is where he received his bachelor's, master's, and PhD in economics and then was named a full professor at Harvard by the age of 28. | |
| The reason for that extreme acceleration, that extreme A height up the ladder was that Sachs in the 80s and early 90s had become one of the most influential and globally respected economic policy planners on the planet. | |
| He had led several countries almost single-handedly including Bolivia and Poland out of their debt crises and became a significant advisor to the post-Soviet governments of Russia under both Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. | |
| In sum, Professor Sachs has always had one foot planted And yet, Sachs Despite his access to the highest circles of political power and policy making, has never really been an adherent, certainly not a reliable adherent, of establishment orthodoxy. | |
| Over the years, he has become increasingly critical, one might say radically so, of the core orthodoxies of the US government and particularly of its foreign policy. | |
| He has long been a vehement critic of neoconservative ideology, was a vocal opponent of the U.S. NATO role in the war in Ukraine from the start, has become one of the sharpest and most emphatic opponents of Israeli government actions and U.S. support for them. | |
| He also, even in his position as chair of that COVID commission, ended up concluding and arguing that it was more likely than not that that epidemic originated from a leak in the wuhan lab and not from naturally occurring viruses now he has found himself now so alienated by establishment washington you'll never see him on morning joe anymore that he announced his protest support for jill stein and the green party in the 2024 presidential election as a way of expressing his increasingly radical discontent Shortly before this show, we sat down with him for a little bit over an hour for a very wide-ranging and, I think, very thought-provoking discussion about the 2024 elections, about the Uniparty, as represented by the support for Kamala of the Cheney family and Bush-Cheney neocons. | |
| The broader historical context for how militarism and neoconservatism and interventionism came to drive U.S. actions since early 1990s. | |
| We talk about both the war in Ukraine and the regional war now raging in the Middle East. | |
| And we end, or at least he does, on a surprisingly optimistic note with a surprisingly optimistic vision for how all of this finally might be overturned. | |
| Like Professor John Mearsheimer, who we interviewed last night, Professor Sachs speaks not as a pundit or an ideologue, But as a scholar who has deeply studied all of these issues as well as a first-hand participant in many of the historical events that continue to shape these policies as well as our current war policies. | |
| Now before we get to all of that, a few programming notes. | |
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| We have a lot of original, exclusive content that we put on that platform, some of which we either can't get to or don't get to on the show, as well as original journalism. | |
| A lot going on in that Welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting with our interview with Professor Sachs right | |
| after this message from our sponsor. | |
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| very fortified and enhanced online privacy First tax it's always great to see you | |
| Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us today. | |
| Great to be with you. Thank you. | |
| As is usually the case when we have you on, there's an enormous amount going on, crises all over the world, wars that are escalating. | |
| We obviously want to delve into those a great deal with you. | |
| But before we get to those, I think that we haven't had you on since you announced your decision. | |
| To endorse neither Donald Trump nor Kamala Harris, but instead to endorse Jill Stein's candidacy for president and the Green Party ticket. | |
| Can you talk about the reasons you made that choice? | |
| Well, basically, I can't even vote for her on the New York ballot. | |
| So the choice is, I don't feel we have much choice. | |
| I don't think either of the two main candidates are up to the job of being president. | |
| And I don't feel like voting for anybody that isn't up to the job. | |
| It's pretty bad that we have this situation. | |
| When you say not up to the job, do you mean they aren't personally capable of carrying out the duties of the presidency? | |
| Are there specific issues where you believe neither of those two candidates have the right view or the right understanding of the issues to be an effective president? | |
| Both. I don't think either, for different reasons, is really capable of guiding our country to security and safety. | |
| That requires helping to guide the world to security and safety. | |
| And I don't believe that either Trump or Harris is likely to do that. | |
| Neither of them has what it takes to be able to do that, which is both the knowledge and personal character to make the right decisions. | |
| Trump we know about. | |
| I don't have to belabor the point. | |
| Harris is not only completely inexperienced, she shows No recognition of the real issues in international affairs. | |
| She pretty much blindly follows the Biden administration, which maybe is a bit understandable in her capacity as vice president, but is not so understandable in her capacity as candidate for the presidency. | |
| Both of them are On deeply the wrong side of the issues in the Middle East. | |
| Both of them are completely obedient to the Israel lobby. | |
| Which is a disaster for Israel, first and foremost, but also for the United States and the world. | |
| I should say first and foremost for the Palestinian people, let me be clear, but then also for Israel, for the United States, and for the world. | |
| And both seem to be pretty slavishly following that Israel lobby line. | |
| When it comes to China, they compete with each other over who can be nastier and I would say dumber in how we're approaching our relations with China. | |
| Oh, it's not good. | |
| It's just not good at all. | |
| Yeah, I get all that. And those are all things that you just referenced that I want to dive into a little bit more deeply with you about. | |
| Before we do, just on the same topic, you made a podcast appearance on the All In Podcast alongside Professor Muir Shimer, who's a frequent guest on our show. | |
| And in fact, he was on our show last night and we spent most of our time talking about the Middle East and Ukraine, but also about the 2024 election. | |
| And what he said is that this argument Trump is making about why he's more trustworthy or more reliable to foster stability and peace in the world, namely that I was president for four years and none of these wars were breaking out. | |
| It was only once Biden was in office did the Russian invasion of Ukraine happen. | |
| It was only once Biden was in office that October 7th happened and everything that followed from that, now the world is sort of in flames. | |
| Whereas when I was president for four years, The war was more or less stable without a lot of very dangerous wars breaking out. | |
| And I asked him, do you think that was just kind of a coincidence? | |
| Good luck on Trump's part, or is there something about Trump's demeanor and approach and ethos that is responsible for that? | |
| And he said he thinks the Democratic Party's instinct now is to always be in favor of intervention, military intervention, in one way or another, whereas he thinks Trump's Is to be averse to that, that he considers not engaging the United States in wars to be kind of a source of pride for him. | |
| Do you think there's any validity to that perspective? | |
| There could be. | |
| It's possible. | |
| But on the other hand, I would say Trump made a mess of so many global issues that helped to bring us to where we are. | |
| He obviously did not solve the Israel-Palestine issue. | |
| Quite the contrary. | |
| He obviously did not solve the issues with Iran. | |
| Utterly the contrary. | |
| He escalated the issues with China. | |
| He armed Ukraine, actually, during his term. | |
| The escalation in 2022 was under Biden, but Trump was a part of the same process. | |
| Yes, NATO will enlarge to Ukraine. | |
| Yes, the United States will arm Ukraine. | |
| That occurred under Trump. | |
| So when you look at all of these theaters of conflict, Trump solved little. | |
| He understood little. | |
| He appointed people like Pompeo and Bolton. | |
| And Nikki Haley. Maybe there's glimmers of hope that he will avoid a war. | |
| I don't want to argue against that, but I just don't find it so reassuring, I have to say. | |
| I think both of them are basically going to be continuing creatures of the U.S. deep state. | |
| Trump's rhetoric just in recent days about Iran that will destroy Iran—I'm paraphrasing, but he said some pretty completely outrageous things in the last few days—doesn't give much confidence to me. | |
| Yeah, I think they've convinced him, even though there's not any evidence for it, that Iran is actually trying to engineer assassinations against Trump and knowing that he would take that very personally. | |
| I'm not saying that's the only factor, but I do believe that he's convinced of that. | |
| That seems to be a phony story from what I can gather. | |
| Yeah, absolutely. No, I think so too. | |
| Traveling in and out of planes, but it seems like a plant of the FBI from what I've heard. | |
| Yeah, I mean, that shouldn't be surprising. | |
| And of course, he has Miriam Adelson financed his campaign. | |
| Anyway, I think there's a lot of reasons to be concerned about that as well. | |
| Last question on just this sort of election, Joel Stein thing. | |
| You know very well the argument, having just kind of laid out a case to be concerned about Trump, which is that although you can't vote for Jill Stein because you're in New York, even if you could, it wouldn't much matter. | |
| New York is, I think, still a pretty safe state for the Democrats. | |
| But the argument is, of course, in swing states, People who listen to you, who trust your credibility, and hear you endorsing Jill Stein, the more people who follow through on that and actually vote for Jill Stein in, say, key swing states, in reality, it's really just a vote for Donald Trump, in effect. | |
| Now, I guess my question for you is, number one, do you accept that premise? | |
| And number two, if you do, does that concern you? | |
| Do you care? I'm very worried about both of these candidates, and I'm very worried about the state of our country. | |
| I'm very worried about the fact that our foreign policy really is determined by deeper forces. | |
| I think what Putin said in an interview with Figaro in 2017 is very interesting. | |
| Putin is quoted as saying that by then, in 2017, he had worked with three U.S. presidents. | |
| And he said they come into office with some ideas. | |
| But then, as he described it, he said men in dark suits and blue ties show up to explain to them the way things really are happening. | |
| And we know with Trump, Bolton showed up and Pompeo showed up. | |
| And they explained how things really are. | |
| We should understand in the United States that What passes for our democracy right now is not real engagement of the people, and our elections are completely overblown in terms of what they do regarding America's role in the world, which right now, because of how close we are to complete disaster in global war, Is actually the preeminent issue. | |
| And we have a deep state problem that is absolutely severe. | |
| So I'm not telling people how to vote. | |
| I really am not. | |
| I'm not voting. So I cannot myself vote for anybody on a even on an ostensible lesser evil basis if I don't feel that they are Meeting the minimum standards for decency as a president of the United States. | |
| It's sad, of course. | |
| It's extremely regrettable. | |
| I think it's a weakness of our system. | |
| In parliamentary systems, you have many more choices. | |
| You can have coalitions that emerge afterwards. | |
| We have two lousy choices right now. | |
| That itself has explanations. | |
| The two explanations for our two lousy choices are that we are a plutocracy where politics is driven by huge money that has nothing to do with us, and we are a deep state system where the things that really determine life and death for us, and especially the 90 seconds of proximity to nuclear Armageddon, As defined by the doomsday clock, is not determined by democratic institutions engaged in public deliberation and debate. | |
| It's determined secretly, surreptitiously, with narratives that are based on lies and where public opinion plays very little role. | |
| This is alarming. | |
| So I would say that no matter what happens in November, Honestly, we have our urgent work cut out for us to restore some semblance of democratic responsibility, small d, democratic responsibility for our foreign policy, because if we continue to be led by the CIA, The NSC, the Pentagon, the arms contractors, the Israel lobby, and all the rest. | |
| We are just going to go deeper and deeper into war. | |
| You know, this is one anecdote to illustrate what you were saying. | |
| We had on our show Speaker Mike Johnson a couple of months before he became Speaker when nobody thought of him as a potential Speaker. | |
| And one of the reasons he had caught my eye was because he was becoming this very vocal and effective critic of the U.S. security state. | |
| The need to have much more fortified privacy for individuals, to curb surveillance. | |
| He was very critical of the attempt to renew FISA. And he came on my show and he laid all of that out in extremely convincing ways. | |
| And I walked away and I said even to people, wow, he seems impressive to me. | |
| And he's very smart. | |
| He's a lawyer and had given a lot of thought to these issues. | |
| He becomes speaker and within a month, Not only is he shepherding the Pfizer renewal law that he told me so explicitly and had been saying for months he was opposed. | |
| Not only was he shepherding it and making sure that it passed, but he was also blocking any attempts to impose even minimal reforms on how the NSA or the CIA or the FBI could spy on Americans. | |
| And then when finally somebody confronted him and said, This is a complete reversal from everything. | |
| You changed on a dime. | |
| As soon as you became Speaker, his explanation was, I was taken to a very secret, sensitive part of the CIA and they showed me the briefing that convinced me that this spying is necessary. | |
| It's just such a vivid and candid expression of who actually rules Washington, no matter how you think you're voting or what the effects of the election are. | |
| That's exactly right. | |
| And it is exactly true. | |
| And people should at least scratch their heads that when we have had these so-called negotiations over ceasefires in the Middle East, who's negotiating? | |
| The CIA and Mossad. | |
| Are you kidding? The CIA is supposed to be an intelligence agency. | |
| Of course, we know it's a private army of the president and a secretive one. | |
| But they're the ones negotiating. | |
| And I can tell you, on case after case, it's the same story. | |
| And I see it when I deal with the politicians as well. | |
| They're taken aside, and the facts are explained to them, and everything is confidential. | |
| Believe me, our life and death is in the hands of confidential papers that we're not going to hear about. | |
| And what's said in public is phony. | |
| And this is how our government operates right now. | |
| Just to say about the election again, nothing is solved on Election Day. | |
| We have a struggle to restore a democratic process in the United States. | |
| And that means to take it out of the plutocratic hands, and it means to take it out of the | |
| deep state CIA, Pentagon arms contractor hands. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I don't know if you've given a lot of thought to this because maybe it doesn't deserve all | |
| that much thought. | |
| But, you know, I know that you recall very well how Democrats talked about George Bush | |
| and Dick Cheney and the neocons. | |
| especially Dick Cheney as this kind of like Hitler figure, this fascist, this warmonger who wanted to go to war just to increase the value of his Halliburton stock. | |
| They also accused him of stealing the 2000 election away from what they consider the rightful winner to be, which is Al Gore. | |
| And now here we are 20 years later and Dick Cheney and his daughter in his name are actively campaigning for the Democratic candidate, not just campaigning for them because they think Trump is a threat to democracy, but because they're specifically saying That the Kamala-led Democratic Party's foreign policy is closer to our foreign policy, meaning us, the Cheney's, than a Trump-led Republican Party would be. | |
| And, you know, I remember back in the day, too, when Nancy Pelosi was a senior Democrat, she was accusing George Bush and Dick Cheney of the most gruesome accusations she could think of. | |
| And then it turns out when Nancy Pelosi's daughter Creates a documentary. | |
| She says that George W. Bush is like a member of the Pelosi family, that the two love each other so much and have for many years, so that it's all sort of this theater. | |
| But what do you make of this kind of migration of neocons and Bush-Cheney officials away from the Republican Party, very enthusiastically, not begrudgingly, supporting the Democrats who 20 years ago were calling them Nazis and fascists? | |
| Well, again, it's extremely important to understand that for the last 33 years—I'm dating it to 1991 for a reason that I'll explain in a moment—we have had one foreign policy, irrespective of whether it is Democrats or Republicans. | |
| So it includes Bush Sr., Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama, Trump, and Biden. | |
| This is the basic fact, and you can trace that literally. | |
| Why do I pick 1991? | |
| Because that was the year that the Soviet Union ended. | |
| I happened to be in the Kremlin because I was advising Boris Yeltsin, President of Russia, when he told me to my face, I may have mentioned this to you, the Soviet Union is finished. | |
| This was in December 1991. | |
| It was a stunning moment. | |
| But from that moment, the United States took on a grandiosity, which we sometimes called neoconservatism, that said, now we run the world. | |
| We don't have to listen to anybody else. | |
| We can choose wars at will because there will be no opposition. | |
| We run the world. | |
| And immediately, this was put on paper By Paul Wolfowitz in 1992, when Cheney was then the Secretary of Defense of Bush Sr. | |
| Well, this document, which was a defense policy for 1992 to 1997, wasn't ready for prime time, let's say, in public opinion. | |
| But the idea of the U.S. grandiose, unipolar, the indispensable state took hold in 1992. | |
| Clinton came in, and in 1994, from what I'm told by an excellent historian who's coming out with a history of this, it was already decided, I haven't seen the document, but it was already decided in 1994 that not only would NATO It would expand, but it would expand to Ukraine. | |
| I know that that's the case by 1997, that the decision had been made. | |
| Now, that 1994 decision under Clinton was completely contrary to the explicit promises that had been given in 1990 to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union, In every implication to Boris Yeltsin. | |
| So Clinton continued the neocon policy. | |
| His Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, put it in words for us. | |
| The indispensable nation. | |
| She was a warmonger herself. | |
| She was the architect of the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia, the first war in Europe after World War II, not Ukraine, as is sometimes said, and that was a Clinton-Albright war. | |
| They started the NATO enlargement. | |
| Now, it's interesting in terms of continuity. | |
| Who was a senior person in the Clinton administration as number two on Russia policy? | |
| That was Victoria Nuland. | |
| Now, as soon as George W. Bush Jr. | |
| comes in in January 20th, 2001, Where is Victoria Nuland? | |
| She becomes the Deputy National Security Advisor for Vice President Cheney. | |
| Complete continuity. | |
| This is now going to be, again, the unipolar And by then, there was already the project for the new American century, which was the neocon document, a famous document called Rebuilding America's Defenses. | |
| By the way, in 1998, Clinton signed a law That called it U.S. policy to replace Saddam Hussein, regime change, under Clinton, not under Bush Jr. | |
| So Bush Jr. now continues all of this. | |
| Comes 9-11, this is responded to not As 9-11, but as now the public relations gimmick to go to all those wars that the neocons wanted. | |
| And the idea in 2003 was three wars in a row, by the way, not just Iraq. | |
| It was Iraq, then Syria, then Iran. | |
| But U.S. troops got tied down in Iraq by the insurgency, and so they couldn't continue to Syria as they planned. | |
| But that was continuity of policy. | |
| The Iraq War, phony pretenses, neocon policy, also part of the Israel lobby strategy to take out any potential enemies of Of Israel. | |
| Then Obama comes in. | |
| By the way, six more NATO countries. | |
| Let's see, three, five, seven NATO countries joined in 2004. | |
| Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004 under Bush Jr. | |
| So the NATO enlargement continues. | |
| Then comes Obama, supposedly our peace president. | |
| Well, what happens to Victoria Nuland? | |
| She becomes Hillary Clinton's spokesman in the new State Department. | |
| Bush's ambassador to NATO in 2005 to 2008, when Bush pushes this extraordinarily reckless drive to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia, the reason of the Ukraine war, and she goes immediately from being Bush's NATO ambassador to being Hillary Clinton's top assistant. | |
| Then she becomes the Assistant Secretary of State For European affairs and she becomes the point person for overthrowing the Ukraine government. | |
| Under John Kerry, who by that point had replaced Hillary Clinton. | |
| There you go. And on February 22, 2014, the same Victoria Nuland is overthrowing the government. | |
| And by the way, in her intercepted call, which describes how this coup is going to operate, Biden's right there. | |
| The veep is going to give those attaboys to the new government. | |
| He's going to make everything work. | |
| And so Sullivan, Biden, Blinken, Nuland, they're there under Obama. | |
| Okay, then comes Trump. | |
| He continues the NATO policies. | |
| He's the one that starts arming Ukraine. | |
| He doesn't get a free pass on this. | |
| And then comes Biden, 2021. | |
| Well, he's been up to his neck with the military industrial complex his whole career, taking money from it, being a shill for it, being a point person for it. | |
| Being the one who gave the attaboys to the overthrow of Yanukovych in 2014, always for NATO enlargement. | |
| And Putin says to him, come on, stop already, stop. | |
| Let's actually negotiate a serious security arrangement. | |
| What does Biden do? First of all, he hires Victoria Nuland, gives her a promotion. | |
| So now she's undersecretary of state for political affairs. | |
| And she becomes the point person for the war that's going to break out now at an escalated level. | |
| The Ukraine war broke out, by the way, on the 22nd of February 2014, 10 years ago, with the U.S. participation in the coup. | |
| But it was at a lower level. | |
| There were thousands of people killed over the 10 years, but then it escalated in February 2022. | |
| So what happens with Biden? | |
| Biden hires the same neocons, follows the same policy. | |
| Putin says on December 15, 2021, Let's negotiate security arrangements. | |
| After all, you, the United States, you walked out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty, you put in Aegis missile systems into Poland and Romania, you walked out of the Intermediate Nuclear Force Treaty, you overthrew a government in Ukraine, or let me be more precise, you participated in the coup. | |
| In 2014, you did all those things. | |
| We need a revised security arrangement. | |
| Okay, Biden says, not interested. | |
| All he can muster is the next march. | |
| That man cannot remain in power. | |
| He calls for regime change. | |
| In Russia. Actually, after February 24, 2022, when Russia's military operation goes into effect, this invasion, Zelensky immediately says, okay, wait a minute, wait a minute. We can have neutrality. | |
| We don't need this NATO thing. | |
| And on that basis, they almost reach an agreement in March 2022, a few weeks after this thing started, before there were many deaths at all. | |
| They reached and actually initialed an agreement in Ankara, Turkey. | |
| And the United States, under Biden, rushes in and stops the agreement. | |
| Then they send Boris Johnson over to make sure that there won't be any more negotiations. | |
| And to explain to Zelensky, you don't have to negotiate. | |
| We're going to whoop them. | |
| And Lloyd Austin explains how our goal is to weaken Russia. | |
| And on and on. | |
| We've had one foreign policy since 1991. | |
| Can it be any surprise that Cheney is backing Harris? | |
| It's the Uniparty. | |
| What else is there? It makes total sense. | |
| So let me stick with Ukraine for a minute, because even though it's not talked about anymore, there actually still is a very bloody war of attrition that's killing a huge number of people. | |
| One to two thousand Ukrainians being killed and severely wounded every single day. | |
| Right. Which was, you know, from the beginning, it was so obvious that the rhetoric was we're going to start that we're going to support Ukraine because we're going to save Ukraine and the Ukrainians when it was obvious all along that what we were actually going to end up doing was sacrificing Ukraine and destroying Ukrainians at the altar of this broader geopolitical goal that had nothing to really to do with Ukraine so much. | |
| Let me ask this question, which is, Putin has given several interviews over the last year, one with Tucker Carlson, but a couple others with Russian outlets. | |
| And one of the things he repeatedly talks about is that, and you alluded to this, is that he always thought that every time there was a new president, there was an opportunity to create more constructive relationships. | |
| If we remember, George Bush said he looked into Putin's eyes and saw a good soul, and then Hillary Clinton was talking about the reset button that we were going to set with Russian relations, and it never really happened. | |
| And then, of course, Russiagate just poisoned and contaminated even the ability to have communications, which is extremely dangerous, but it's at the point where if you're an American official, you almost can't talk to a Russian official or it gets depicted as some form of treason, even though during the Cold War, the Soviets and the Americans talked all the time. | |
| But one of the things that Putin says is, I've tried so many times to kind of deal with the Americans in a constructive way. | |
| And I just got to the point where it's beyond clear. | |
| They've made it clear that you cannot trust them. | |
| They don't want any deal. | |
| And the only thing they understand is confrontation. | |
| It's what they want. | |
| And he was kind of saying it in the context of not only the reason why the war started with Ukraine, but why he doesn't seem very inclined to give up gains in In order to get some kind of a peace deal. | |
| So what do you think is the current Russian mindset when it comes to the obvious advantages that they now have on the battlefield? | |
| Look, there are four issues in this war. | |
| One is NATO, which is a very serious issue. | |
| The question is, will the U.S. put military bases and missile systems right on Russia's border? | |
| This has been a fundamental issue for more than 30 years. | |
| To this day, it remains U.S. policy that the answer is yes, we're determined to do so. | |
| As long as that goes on, this war will continue, or Ukraine will get utterly destroyed, or we'll go to nuclear war. | |
| One of those possibilities. | |
| So that's issue number one. | |
| Issue number two is the nuclear arms framework. | |
| The United States destroyed the nuclear arms framework by walking out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty, walking out of the intermediate nuclear force treaty, torpedoing JCPOA, the agreement with Iran, which Trump torpedoed in 2017-2018. | |
| Trump also is the one that walked out of the Intermediate Nuclear Force Treaty. | |
| So there is no effective framework right now for nuclear arms control. | |
| This is the second major issue. | |
| This is of fundamental significance for every living thing on this planet, for every person on this planet. | |
| We need to get back, even to the conditions of the Cold War. | |
| We're in much worse shape now, which is why the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists says in its doomsday clock, we're 90 seconds to midnight, the closest to midnight we've ever been, and much closer than during the height of the Cold War. | |
| Thank you. Because we don't even have a nuclear arms framework. | |
| The third issue on the table is Crimea. | |
| That goes back actually to 1853. | |
| It was the plan of Lord Palmerston and of the French to banish Russia from its warm water port, its naval base in Sevastopol. | |
| This is a continuation of that effort. | |
| It was in Brzezinski's imagination. | |
| It is all a continuation of the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856. | |
| When the US and the right wing in Ukraine overthrew Yanukovych, the first thing Russia did was take back Crimea because it said, we're not letting this fall into NATO hands. | |
| No way. | |
| This is our naval base since 1783. | |
| And then the fourth issue is the issue of the four regions, Lugansk and Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhia. | |
| Russia now claims them. | |
| Ironically, and I don't think most people understand this, Russia was making no territorial claims until the fall of 2022. | |
| Not during the 2010s. | |
| What Russia was saying after the 2014 coup was that the attacks by Ukraine Essentially Western Ukraine, Ukrainian nationalists on the ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine, which did not accept this coup, needed to stop. | |
| And a treaty was negotiated called the Minsk II agreement, which was backed by the UN Security Council and supposedly guaranteed by France and Germany. | |
| The United States agreed with Ukraine. | |
| Ignore the Minsk II agreement. | |
| Ignore it. | |
| It called for protection of the Russian language, Russian culture in these Russian regions, and for Political autonomy for the ethnic Russian regions following the 2014 coup. | |
| It was signed. It was agreed. | |
| It was backed by the UN Security Council. | |
| It was backed by France and Germany in the so-called Normandy process. | |
| And the United States cynically, completely cynically, Blew it off, telling Ukraine, you don't have to do that. | |
| That was true under Obama and under Trump, and it continued to be true under Biden. | |
| That's the Uniparty once again. | |
| So these are the issues that need resolution. | |
| They're all on the table. | |
| Very little to do with Ukraine and Russia. | |
| This is about the United States and Russia. | |
| And we need to get back to an arms control framework. | |
| We need to agree on no NATO enlargement, which was the provocation of the whole crisis. | |
| We have to accept, which everybody does anywhere in reality land, that Crimea is not going back because Russia is never going to let that fall into NATO hands or enemy hands. | |
| And that has been true for 175 years. | |
| Thank you. On the territories where Russia wasn't making claims after hundreds of thousands of deaths and this fight, there's going to be territorial concessions. | |
| I don't know what they're going to be, because they will depend on the overall framework of negotiations. | |
| The idea that there will just be, say, a ceasefire or an armistice line and that Ukraine will then join NATO, which is what some Democrats You know, they raise it in discussion is absurd. | |
| Russia is not going to stop fighting as long as NATO enlargement is on the table. | |
| This is the basic causes, Belay. | |
| This is the basic reason why we are at war. | |
| So we have a number of things to truly negotiate. | |
| Russia's security interests are absolutely real. | |
| And had we understood that, rather than the neocon position that we don't have to listen to anybody, if we had just done that, we would have avoided this disaster altogether. | |
| And by the way, it's formal NATO policy, Article 10, Which says that if the United States and Ukraine decide that the US will have NATO military bases on Russia's border, it's, quote, none of Russia's business. | |
| Well, this is absurd. | |
| This is in violation of every norm, standard about threats to the international peace under the UN Charter, under OSCE. It's the opposite of our Monroe Doctrine, which told the rest of the world, you stay completely out of our hemisphere. | |
| And it was pretty contrary to the US position when the sovereign Cuban government invited Soviet nuclear submarines and Soviet nuclear missiles to be stationed in Cuba in 1962 in order to deter the United States from trying again to invade Cuba. | |
| Nobody said, oh, the Cuban government Whatever they want on their soil, that's their business. | |
| We felt we had a lot of interest and a lot of say in what the Cubans were able to have in their country because it was just 90 miles away. | |
| In the case of Ukraine, of course, it's right on the border. | |
| Let me ask you, though, The Ukrainians, everyone but Zelensky, have been trying to sound the alarm for a while now. | |
| Like, we know we're losing this war. | |
| We know we can't win this war. | |
| We don't have the people. | |
| It's destroying our country. | |
| Kind of leaking that other than that Zelensky is kind of a maniac at this point. | |
| He's kind of gotten unhinged and detached from reality where he still thinks victory is coming. | |
| But everyone else in the top levels of the Ukrainian political circle and military understand that that's not going to happen. | |
| The change has been over the last month or so where a lot of, I think, surprising voices have started to publicly and very bluntly say that we have to accept the reality that Ukraine is not going to win this war, starting with the Czech president, Peter Pavel, who has been a very vocal defender of Ukraine for obvious reasons. | |
| But even people like Richard Haass, you know, the longtime president of the Council of Foreign Relations, went on warning Joe and he basically gave this speech saying, We have to start accepting reality that we're going to have to give up things to the Russians in order to end this war that we can't keep going on. | |
| The question, though, for me has always been if you look at what NATO said from the start, the way they define victory in this very maximalist way, which is victory means nothing other, nothing more or less than expelling every single Russian troop from Ukrainian soil, including Crimea. It made it almost impossible for anything to happen. | |
| And Glenn, not only doing that, and Ukraine joining NATO. Exactly. | |
| So it was such an unrealistic goal that it was almost bound to lead to either endless war in order to avoid Western humiliation, or as you say, Some kind of nuclear exchange where both sides are getting desperate. | |
| Do you though think these public statements, these increasing public statements from unexpected sources that we have to start accepting reality signals a softening of the American and NATO determination to continue to just fund this war forever? | |
| Yes, for sure. | |
| The only sad point I would say, and only is in quotation marks, because it's so unbelievable, every bit of this was completely predictable for years. | |
| And when these events started in 2022, I'm not even talking about 2014, but when the current escalation started in 2022, It was obvious Ukraine could not win, that either Ukraine would lose or we would go to nuclear war, one of the two. | |
| This was completely obvious. | |
| Now, it was so obvious that it's actually now the conclusion that many people are reaching. | |
| The sad part is there are probably 600,000 Ukrainians dead from that obvious point in February 2022 till now. | |
| They don't count the dead in Washington. | |
| They don't seem to even care. | |
| They didn't think about it. | |
| I wrote up a call for a negotiated settlement in the spring of 2022 where I wouldn't change a word from all of the arguments because they all were obvious then and they turned out to be completely true. | |
| And what the statement at the time said is, if we continue, there will be Tragic, massive loss of life. | |
| But that seems not to figure in to the calculus of these people that are calling these shots. | |
| How can one understand this? | |
| Well, one is it is a system in which mass death It is just something that doesn't involve you as a senior US strategist. | |
| It's not your dad anyway. | |
| You're tough. | |
| You're trained. You're not supposed to think about those things and so on. | |
| So there's part of that. | |
| Part of it is Oh, God, they were so stupid. | |
| They thought they could bluff their way to success. | |
| Maybe Putin won't do this. | |
| Maybe when we cut Russia out of the swift banking system, the Russian economy is going to collapse. | |
| Maybe our Heimars and our Atakums are going to beat them. | |
| Maybe Russia won't mobilize. | |
| They were playing poker with... | |
| Lousy hand. But, you know, they got into the game. | |
| They started to raise. | |
| Of course, they're raising Ukraine's chips, not their own. | |
| And they just kept thinking something's going to show up. | |
| Maybe he'll be taken out. | |
| Maybe there'll be regime change in Russia. | |
| Maybe he'll back down. | |
| Who knows? But it's such a reckless, stupid gamble. | |
| And it was obvious then. | |
| I begged the White House, avoid this, you know, because it was clear. | |
| This wasn't subtle. | |
| This wasn't a hard call is what I'm saying. | |
| This was obvious all the way along. | |
| And yet they decided that they would gamble with Ukraine this way. | |
| And until today, because they're so damn shameless, so irresponsible, so concerned with their own name and their own legacy, which is bloodshed, by the way, rather than reality, that until this day, They're propounding a completely phony line. | |
| I just read the Financial Times' Lunch with Jens Stoltenberg. | |
| A first-class failure, somebody I knew when he was finance minister and prime minister of Norway, and I was a friend. | |
| But what a disaster this person has been. | |
| But he said in the interview, we called Putin's bluff. | |
| Are you kidding? Putin called your bluff, Stoltenberg. | |
| Exactly the opposite. | |
| You know, they've just got it so wrong because they're in a world of political spin. | |
| They're playing games. | |
| With other people's lives, hundreds of thousands of lives. | |
| And they're basically explicit about that. | |
| The argument finally became, oh, look, this is a good deal for us, the Americans, because it's only those Ukrainians who are dying and not any Americans. | |
| And of course, those who pointed out what you're saying from the beginning, and there were a lot of people who Recognized that and said it. | |
| Pretty much all of them who said Ukraine can't win. | |
| The Russians are, you know, perceiving an existential threat. | |
| They're going to go to every length to win. | |
| We're put on official lists of being Kremlin propagandists and the like, you know, because you were put on some of those and so was I. I want to return though to The historical framework you laid out at the start where you traced this kind of continuous foreign policy between both parties starting in 1991 because of the fall of the Soviet Union and the idea that the U.S. is now the world's sole superpower. | |
| We can do whatever we want and I think that was more or less true for some period of time. | |
| Do you think that's still true? | |
| Are we still in a unipolar world where the U.S. is the sole superpower and can do whatever we want or how has that changed? | |
| We were never the sole superpower that could do whatever we want. | |
| We couldn't even, quote, win in Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria or Libya. | |
| We could make a colossal mess. | |
| We could kill a lot of people. | |
| We could overthrow governments, but we couldn't quite win. | |
| So we were never the sole superpower of the world. | |
| But now it's not even a close call because China is a superpower, India is a superpower, Russia is a superpower, the United States is a superpower. | |
| We all face the existential The reality that a misstep by any of these countries could end up blowing up the whole world, the idea of unipolarity or U.S. leadership or U.S. as the indispensable country, come on! It's so completely fantastical and delusional. | |
| We have to learn to get along. | |
| We're 4.1% of the world population. | |
| We are a smaller economy, measured in purchasing power prices, than China. | |
| We're perhaps half of China's industrial capacity. | |
| And anyway, these numbers aren't very meaningful when any of these countries can blow up everybody. | |
| So, of course, we are not the sole superpower. | |
| We're not the leader of the world. | |
| These are delusions. | |
| Now, when an old man like Biden says them, you can kind of understand. | |
| He's living in the past. | |
| He is a delusional person at this point. | |
| This is the rhetoric of the 1990s, which was completely overblown at that point. | |
| Thank you. It had an air of credibility to it because what was China? | |
| Rice growing villages. | |
| What was Russia? | |
| A collapsed, failed society. | |
| So, you know, you could think it. | |
| It was naive even at that time if you knew some economics and some history and could look ahead a bit. | |
| But in any event, today it's completely bizarre even to brew at these ideas. | |
| You look at every number, whether it's military, technological, economic, population, we better learn to get along with other countries and stop pretending. | |
| Pretending that we run the world. | |
| We don't even, most of the time, the world votes overwhelmingly against the United States at the General Assembly because we're so out of line with global realities right now. | |
| We don't know how to calculate it all. | |
| We thought, oh, we're going to put on sanctions on Russia and the whole world trade with Russia is going to stop. | |
| Are you kidding? What stopped was some of the trade of the U.S. and NATO countries and our Military allies in East Asia, Japan, Korea, Australia, and so on. | |
| But for the rest of the world, which is the vast majority of the human population and most of the world economy, trade went on. | |
| So we don't understand these facts. | |
| We seem not to be able to Understand the dynamics of our geopolitics right now, maybe because we have been blinded to this ideology, which was wrong at the start and is absolutely delusional today. | |
| I have to add, Glenn, when you really look at it, This goes back to World War II. It really does go back to the 1840s and the British hatred of Russia, because Russia, they thought, posed a threat to the British Empire and to British hegemony. | |
| That was the roots of the Crimean War. | |
| It's amazing that at the end of World War II, which I'm looking at very intensively right now to try to understand some of these dynamics, even before the dust had settled, when the Soviet Union had Born the brunt of the battle against Hitler's Germany, the United States was, well, Britain, Churchill, already was trying to launch Operation Unthinkable to start a war with the Russians, with the Soviet Union. | |
| The United States started to recruit the Nazis and started to spread CIA operations across Eastern Europe. | |
| Without a loss of a moment, because we decided that the Soviet Union was our implacable, unavoidable foe, which had just been our ally during World War II. And we've been on this business ideologically. | |
| That we can't live together. | |
| What shocked me, because I lived through it personally, was in 1990, 91, 92, when Gorbachev and Yeltsin were pleading for just peace and normal relations and a little bit of financial help to stabilize a financial crisis. | |
| The US could not take Peaceful cooperation for an answer, it could only take victory for an answer. | |
| And that is why we're in the mess that we're in today. | |
| Yeah, just along those lines, I mean, for whatever, however unhinged and militaristic and indifferent to human life the United States foreign policy establishment is under both parties, the British are always, for me, a step or two worse, and especially when it comes to Russia, the obsessive contempt And of course, it was Boris Johnson who played such a big role in quashing any attempt to diplomatically resolve that war is almost psychopathic. | |
| It's really in the blood and bones of the British. | |
| And here, Keith Starmer comes in as the new labor prime minister in a country in deep internal economic crisis. | |
| The National Health Service is in a state of utter disrepair. | |
| Massive social unrest and ethnic fights and internal violence in an economy that's completely stalled out. | |
| And what does he do? | |
| The first thing is go to Kiev, focus on the Ukraine war. | |
| And if what we're hearing is true, and I have every reason to believe it's true, in this recent debate, Well, should Ukraine be allowed to use storm shadow missiles and other NATO missile systems to strike deep into Russia? | |
| Who's the greatest cheerleader? | |
| Yeah, the British. The British. | |
| It's amazing. I know. | |
| I know. Unbelievable. | |
| And the United States can stop because the British can't do anything without the United States technology, hardware tracking systems, navigation systems, satellite systems, all the rest of the US. But it's the British who are the most warmongering of all. | |
| It's so deep, this imperial I always think that because they are so weakened in comparison to their glorious imperial past, being that extreme is almost a psychological compensation. | |
| Like, we might be much smaller now and much weaker and much less relevant, but we are still that courageous Churchillian A force that is ready to go fight for what is good, and that's how they all convince themselves. | |
| Just in the little bit of time we have left, this has all been pretty dark and depressing, and we didn't even get to what might be the most dangerous developments of all, which is the one in the Middle East. | |
| I spent most of my time talking to Professor Mearsheimer about that last night, so I'm glad we had this other ground that we focused on instead so it wasn't redundant. | |
| But obviously, I do want to get your view on what has now become A regional war. | |
| I mean, there's still a question of how much it's going to escalate, how much out of control it'll be. | |
| But we're not anymore in the risk of a regional war. | |
| The Israelis are fighting on multiple fronts in multiple different countries. | |
| You have the Iranian ballistic missile attack, those sorts of things. | |
| What do you think is the Israeli mindset in terms of what it is that they're doing? | |
| Do they actually have some strategic goal in mind, or are they just... | |
| Drunk on this sort of long-standing thirst to kill all the people in all the countries that they perceive to be their enemies. | |
| Just as the Ukraine war would end the moment the US president picks up the phone and calls the Russian president and says, you know, that NATO enlargement idea, enlarging to Ukraine and Georgia, that's a terrible idea. | |
| We'll make clear publicly it's over. | |
| That will end the fighting in Ukraine. | |
| Yeah, there are other details, but that will end the fighting. | |
| In the case of the Middle East, The moment that there is a state of Palestine admitted as the 194th UN member state on the legal borders of 4 June 1967, the fighting will stop. | |
| So why doesn't it stop? | |
| Well, it doesn't stop because Not only the current government, but because of years of propaganda as well in Israel, the Israeli public rejects a state of Palestine. | |
| Without a state of Palestine, there can be no peace, because at best, and I put that in quotation marks, it is a brutal apartheid regime, and at worst, it's a regime of ethnic cleansing and genocidal behavior by Israel to try to hold on To territories that are not theirs, where the occupation is illegal, as recently judged by the International Court of Justice this past July, as recently voted by the UN General Assembly, supporting the ICJ ruling. | |
| And until there is a state of Palestine, There will be no peace. | |
| Now, Netanyahu's entire political career, Likud's entire purpose as a political party and political force in Israel was to reject a state of Palestine. | |
| And now it's much worse because a significant part of this government represents the illegal settlers and the Zealots, the religious nationalists who are ideological zealots, who look at the book of Joshua from the 6th century BC and say, well, God promised us all the land from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean, and that's how it's going to be. | |
| And so we have a complete mess because Israel rejects the one thing that would end the war | |
| and actually bring peace and security for Israel. | |
| Now, why do they continue to do this in the face of global intransigence and spreading | |
| disaster? | |
| The reason is that they think they have the United States completely on their side. | |
| And when Netanyahu, in vulgar terms, boasted at the podium of the UN General Assembly last | |
| week that the long arm of Israel reaches right across the Middle East, he said, | |
| The long arm of Israeli might. | |
| Yeah, he was talking about the U.S. Air Force. | |
| He was talking about the U.S. military. | |
| Now, we know that it's true that the Israel lobby has dominated U.S. politics for decades. | |
| But I believe this is changing quickly right now because the American people do not buy into Israeli extremism. | |
| The American people do not want to escalate to a regional or world war for the sake of what's called Greater Israel. | |
| That means Israel's continued apartheid rule over the Palestinian people and its continued illegal occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and parts of the Golan. | |
| They don't want that. | |
| And the entire world community, other than the United States and Israel and a few tiny islands where the United States has the hand across their neck. | |
| They were part of the Coalition of the Willing, too. | |
| They supported the Iraq War, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands. | |
| There you go. So you can get a few votes, but basically the world is saying, stop this war. | |
| We want two states as international law has held it now for many decades, and we want it now. | |
| And the American people want that as well. | |
| So I think the Israeli lobby, which has been, or the Israel lobby, which has been so powerful, and it remains powerful up until Election Day, Is going to have quite a shock, because this cannot remain American policy, and I think it will not remain American policy. | |
| I actually believe, if we don't blow ourselves up beforehand, I actually believe we're going to have a state of Palestine soon, and it's going to be imposed on Israel. | |
| By the United Nations Security Council, and the United States is going to turn to become the right side of this rather than the single major holdout in the entire international system. | |
| But just about that, because that's an optimistic picture, and I think it's good to end on an unnoted optimism, and I want to make this my last question, just out of respect for your time as well. | |
| And I should note that, of course, while a two-state solution, a Palestinian state, would eliminate the root cause of the conflict in that region, the position of Hezbollah and Nasrallah before they killed him was, we're willing to have a ceasefire right now. | |
| As long as there's a ceasefire for Gaza as well, that's the position of Iran as well. | |
| And Israel won't even cease bombing Gaza in order to facilitate a broader peace in the region, even if it's not an ultimate solution. | |
| And so my question is, let's assume that what you're saying is- In fact, Glenn, I think it's right to say that if a Hamas leader Yes. | |
| This is the opposite of what you might think, but it is because Israel is dead set against a two-state solution. | |
| That's why I want to ask you because You know, it's so interesting, the propaganda that we hear. | |
| You know, we're always told that all these countries that are Muslim or even the Russians don't understand any language other than force, whereas that's what Putin recently said is true of the U.S. But we've also been told for so long that what makes Iran so dangerous is that they're run by religious extremists. | |
| They have an apocalyptic cult. | |
| They don't care about human life or the value of it. | |
| They crave death and therefore they don't have any restraint or operate rationally in any way. | |
| And all we've seen from Iran Over the last several years, including the last year, including in this last ballistic missile attack, was enormous restraint. | |
| All those ballistic missiles were aimed at entirely military targets, no civilian targets were hit, no Israelis were killed, whereas the Israelis have the exact opposite posture of civilian life. | |
| The question then becomes, for all that what you're saying about how the Israelis are going to have imposed on them a two-state solution even though they don't want one, and there's finally going to be some limits on them. | |
| On some level, it seems like Israel is much closer to an apocalyptic cult, this kind of religious fanaticism, this militaristic fanaticism, and of course they too have nuclear weapons, which as you pointed out means they have the ability to destroy the world. | |
| Is that your view of the current Israeli state, that they basically, even if the entire world did demand that they have a Palestinian state, that the Israelis are so far gone that almost nothing could limit what they do? | |
| I'm a bit more optimistic than that, not about particular characters like Smotrich, a self-professed fascist, Ben Gavir, a few other characters in high position, not some of these fanatical religious nationalists, but Israeli society, overwhelmingly, I would prefer survival and security to the end of the world, | |
| to an apocalypse. And I don't believe that Israel's political system is in any way able to negotiate that. | |
| But I think it's able to absorb it. | |
| When it tried to negotiate it, the closest it came was Yitzhak Rabin as prime minister being assassinated by the far right. | |
| That's what changes history. | |
| We've had the same in the United States. | |
| When a president really tried fundamentally to change the Cold War, John F. Kennedy, he was killed. | |
| By very dark forces. | |
| And the same happened in Israel. | |
| When negotiations under the Oslo process were taking place, Ehud Barak, who probably wanted a deal, was a coward. | |
| Maybe because he didn't want to be assassinated the way that Rabin But he failed to carry through clear, unambiguous commitments that Israel had under the Oslo process. | |
| Of course, our spin factory blamed everything on Arapat. | |
| On Arafat. | |
| But aside from the spin, the reality was that Israel couldn't bring itself to do this. | |
| I believe that it is the international community that needs to say to Israel and to the Palestinians and the rejectionists, there are many on the other side also. | |
| We're going to have two states. | |
| They're going to be separated by peacekeepers. | |
| They're going to live in security. | |
| Whether they ever talk to each other in the next generation, that's not going to be decided right away. | |
| But they're going to be two states and the world is not going to let itself Go into a regional or global war for the sake of Israel's religious fanaticism or its failure to listen to years and years and years, including in the most recent days of the Arab countries saying, we want peace, we want security for Israel based on the two-state solution. | |
| I also listened to the President of Iran Face to face at the United Nations. | |
| And he spoke peace all week. | |
| No one was picking it up. | |
| Not our mainstream media. | |
| And Netanyahu was speaking bloody war. | |
| But the president of Iran was speaking peace. | |
| And if we listen, if you actually look at what is being said, if you look at what the Jordanian foreign minister said just after Netanyahu spoke at the UN, the Jordanian foreign minister came out and said on behalf of the 57 countries of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, I want to make clear we are for peace, mutual security of Israel and Palestine based on the two-state solution. | |
| Voila! This is how it's going to have to be. | |
| Will Israel accept this? | |
| Israeli society will. | |
| Will Smotrich or the leaders of the illegal settlers in the occupied territories accept it? | |
| Probably not at the beginning, but with enough effort and patience, they will as well. | |
| All right. Well, it's not often that I can end an interview about foreign policy in the U.S. on an optimistic note. | |
| So I'm glad that we've been able to do that minimal accomplishment today. | |
| I always appreciate your coming on. | |
| It's always very enlightening. I'm so glad you're out there doing the things you're doing and saying the things you're saying with your platform. | |
| And we're, of course, going to continue to chase you to come back on with frequency. | |
| It's always great to see you. Thanks so much. | |
| Thank you. Great to be with you. |