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Aug. 28, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
40:45
Prof Jeffrey Sachs - ''Rescuing Foreign Policy from One-Man Rule'

Professor Jeffrey Sachs tells the audience of the 2025 RPI DC Conference how the wars in Ukraine and Gaza could end virtually overnight.

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Time Text
Blueprint Peace 00:03:55
Dan, thank you.
Thank you so much for being persistent.
I'll tell you the trick, why it worked.
He was persistent and extraordinarily polite, and it really worked because I said that's a meeting I want to do everything I can to make.
So it is a little bit rushed today, but an honor to be here and really a special delight to be at a conference whose title is Blueprint Peace.
We don't hear much about peace in this world, strangely enough, other than on the judges' show and from the Ron Paul Institute.
Today, I was looking at all of the banner headlines about the failure yesterday in Alaska, the failure because we didn't launch World War III, because the two presidents had a good meeting together, because they announced progress.
This is taken as failure in our media, which of course is hawkish by the moment and manipulated by, controlled by, paid by, or simply aligned with the military-industrial complex in the country.
So it's extraordinarily hard to hear a word about peace in this country.
It's not so complicated, actually, to end these conflicts.
It's a little surprising how long it takes and how hard it is to accomplish this, but it's not so hard in substance because the underlying reasons for the conflicts that the United States is in perpetually are not sound reasons from the point of view of America's interests,
from the point of view of our security, from the point of view of our well-being or our economy.
All of the conflicts that we are in and those that we could get in are misguided, misdirected, provoked by us to a very large extent, and solvable.
That's the basic point.
It really is not so complicated.
I think the wisest words which we repeat, and Dan just started us with, that we've heard in the 80 years since the end of World War II were those in President Eisenhower's farewell address on January 17, 1961.
And I'll just repeat them because they summarize all that has come to pass.
He said, in the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.
The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
This is a man who knew what he was talking about as the supreme allied commander and as president of the United States, and I might add as president of Columbia University, his most important job.
He knew what he was talking about, and he was reporting to us a reality that existed already in January 1961.
The 1991 Crisis Avoided 00:11:53
That reality almost led to the end of the world, actually.
Just a year and a half later in the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy experienced the full, nearly catastrophic weight of the military-industrial complex at that time.
Because if President Kennedy had followed the overwhelming advice of absolutely almost every advisor in that excom that was famously preserved for history through its recordings of the days of that crisis, we would not be here today.
And I think people know, or you should know, that even after Kennedy and Khrushchev resolved the crisis through a kind of genius of decency and humanity against the advice of all of their military advisors, we nearly had the world end anyway because of a disabled Soviet submarine that was out of communication.
And when it began, and it was in crisis, and when it began to surface, some jackass in the U.S. military was dropping live hand grenades as a joke rather than depth charges.
They thought they were under attack.
And it happened to be the one submarine in the squadron that had nuclear-tipped torpedoes, and they were entered into the bay.
And a man named Mr. Arkipov, who was senior to the captain, countermanded the order and saved the world, only to go back home, by the way, and be reprimanded and live in obscurity.
But literally, the man who saved the world saved the world within one second because U.S. doctrine at the time was that any attack by a nuclear atomic weapon would be met by the full force of the U.S. nuclear armaments.
And the estimation at the time was 700 million dead across the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, but good reason to believe that all of humanity might have perished.
And we came within a second of that.
Next year, Kennedy made peace with the Soviet Union in one of the most brilliant and illustrative episodes of modern history.
I commend everybody to listen to Kennedy's peace speech of June 10, 1963.
My poor family has had to listen to it maybe 100 times.
I wrote a book about it because I loved the speech so much.
I was a friend also of Ted Sorensen, whom I admired enormously.
But Kennedy made peace by praising the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, talking about their valor, their culture, their scientific accomplishments, and the fact that both sides would perish in a conflict, so both sides could be depended on to seek peace.
And Khrushchev heard the speech, immediately summoned Kennedy's envoy, Avril Harriman, and said, that's the finest speech by a modern American president.
I want to make peace with your boss.
And five weeks later, the partial nuclear test ban treaty was signed.
And about four months after that, in my opinion, the CIA killed Kennedy for that and for other crimes of trying to make peace.
Maybe that explains the military-industrial complex as much as anything.
Maybe our leaders are just afraid.
They're afraid to make peace.
They're afraid to step out of line.
Maybe it is true, as some have said, that since John F. Kennedy, there hasn't been a president really that has been an independent actor in the American scene.
I think it's an arguably correct point.
Nixon is another partial example, and he may have paid the price as well by an inside job to help bring him down.
I think it's arguable that they're just afraid.
If they're not afraid of that, maybe they're afraid of Mossad.
Or maybe they're bought.
Or maybe they don't understand.
Or maybe they read the New York Times.
It's a little hard to understand why it is that we are in this mess of war after war that cost trillions of dollars and that do nothing but worsen our security.
I happen to be a fan of the doomsday clock, which is the graphic of the bulletin of atomic scientists unveiled in 1947, which tries to alert us with a considered opinion of how close or far we are from nuclear war and nuclear Armageddon.
And as people who follow the doomsday clock will know that when it was unveiled in 1947, it was seven minutes from midnight.
It went closer to midnight during the height of the Cold War.
Then as some measure of détente and Kennedy's initiatives came to fruition, it was moved away from midnight.
Then it came closer to midnight.
Then the Cold War ended in December 1991, or so we thought.
And the clock was reset at 17 minutes away from midnight, the farthest away.
Every president since 1991 has been in a period in which the clock has moved closer to midnight.
I would argue that every president since 1991, Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama, Trump I, Biden, have moved us closer to disaster, that this isn't just an accident of their term.
We had all of the ability to make peace in 1991.
We chose not to.
We chose not to consciously the military-industrial complex and the lobbies, the Israel lobby and others chose not to.
They chose not to because they said after 1991, we are all powerful and now we can do what we want.
And some of our so-called leaders and strategists put it exactly in those terms, Wolfowitz and others, who had the doctrine that now we can do whatever we want.
We can go to war anywhere we want.
We can overthrow any government anywhere we want.
I had a bit of a front row seat in those days because I Fruitlessly was trying to get the United States to actually help the Soviet Union actively in 1990 and then to help Russia in 1991 and 1992 with financial assistance because of an urgent financial crisis that engulfed,
not randomly but a failed economic system.
But when a system fails and a society is in distress, I believe you help so that you don't get into worse trouble.
So I had a front row seat.
I was part of an effort as an advisor to President Gorbachev to try to enlist U.S. support for financial stabilization in a very deep crisis.
Then I was asked by President Yeltsin, and I mentioned this, I actually was in the Kremlin on December, I think it's December 13.
I haven't been able to absolutely confirm the specific date, but it was around December 13, 1991, when President Yeltsin walked across the room and sat in front of me because I was a young kid but happened to be head of the delegation.
And he said, gentlemen, because it was all men, I want to tell you the Soviet Union is over.
That's pretty interesting to hear that in the Kremlin.
I kind of pinched myself, and then it was my turn to speak.
And I said, Mr. President, this is one of the greatest days in modern history.
And I am sure, I am sure that my country will come to your assistance to give you help, to help you stabilize, because I know how extreme the financial crisis is.
I'm a financial economist.
I've helped stabilize a number of hyperinflations.
You need some urgent help, even just a standstill on debt service payments because you don't have foreign exchange reserves.
This is a revolution.
You need help to stabilize.
But, Mr. President, I'm sure that this will happen.
Incidentally, without digressing, I had said the same thing as Poland's advisor two years earlier.
And when I made those recommendations as a technical economist, Brent Scowcroft, General Scowcroft, delivered within eight hours the recommendations that I made and Senator Dole.
So I thought I'm a pretty good economist, very convincing, and they'll do the same.
Nothing of the sort.
Then I got blamed for the lack of stabilization in Russia by many people, though it was exactly the opposite of what I had been saying, because we refused to provide any help whatsoever.
And honestly, I could not quite figure it out.
I knew that the people weren't very clever, but I still couldn't figure out why.
To summarize, the reason why is that the Cold War did not end in December 1991.
It was only midway.
Because the idea, which actually goes back to the British, I would date it to 1840, was to destroy Russia, then to destroy the Soviet Union, and then back again, now we'll destroy Russia.
And Brzezinski spelled it out, of course, in his book in 1997, The Grand Chessboard, opining that a NATO expansion eastward would be inevitable, that Russia would exceed.
What could it do?
He actually has a whole chapter reasoning that Russia would never side with China.
Impossible, Zbig told us.
And I liked Zbig because he was a nice man who helped me when I was helping Poland.
Netanyahu's Plan Falters 00:04:44
But he had his designs.
We're going to break Russia.
And that's what the military-industrial complex went after after 1991.
Another not-so-gentle gentleman joined the scene in 1996, another disaster of our time, and that's Benjamin Netanyahu, one of the most vile,
misguided criminals on our planet as far as i'm concerned maybe you'll give me 58 standing ovations like congress gave netanyahu 58 standing ovations
But Netanyahu's idea was at a smaller scale, while the military-industrial complex of Wolfowitz and Fife and all these extraordinarily naive and ignorant people thought the U.S. would run the world.
Israel decided, of course, it would control the Middle East, and it would do so on our tab and with our military and with our support.
And so Netanyahu said, we're not going to make any compromises.
It's even a funny term if you know the history of Zionism, that it's a compromise.
We come in, you should leave, is the basic summary, but not even we'll divide the house.
It was your house, we'll divide the house.
We'll take 78%, you can have 22%, no.
We'll take 100%, and there's a lot of places you can move to.
What are you complaining about?
You ingrate?
That's the basis of the idea.
And then the point is that a lot of people won't like that.
There will be a militant reaction.
And then Netanyahu's idea is: you don't fight the militants, you fight the governments that back them.
So we know, of course, from Wesley Clark the famous story that he visited the Pentagon a week after 9-11 and he was shown the list of the seven wars in five years, which was a neocon-Israel concoction combined.
We're going to take out all those governments, and that is Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, and Libya.
You know what?
We've been at war with all seven of them.
It didn't quite go to plan of seven wars in five years because we got bogged down in each one.
It didn't go to plan because it made a wasteland of several thousand kilometers from Libya to Iran.
But that's been a plan.
And that's part of this same disaster.
It solves nothing.
We have solved nothing.
And to this day, these maniacs who are murderous genocidaires and killing in mass murder, to this day, they have the backing of the United States government.
Not even a murmur of opposition.
60,000 dead, 20,000 of them, 18,000 by the official count, children, names listed in the Washington Post recently, people showing up starving at food depots to be shot at, all caught on TikTok.
Ben Gevere saying we're going to take everything again yesterday.
Not a murmur from our government.
Who runs it?
What is going on?
The American people, at least two to one against Israel in this, in the opinion surveys, because the American public is revolted by what's happening.
So this is why we're here.
And yesterday was at least a glimmer of hope.
It's just a glimmer.
There's a battle going on, obviously, in Washington and in London.
Monroe Doctrine Misremembered 00:12:45
London is even worse than Washington, by the way, because they had centuries of insanity.
If anyone's here from Britain, my apologies.
But it's unbelievable.
It shows you can lose your empire 80 years ago and still think you have it and still think you run the world and still think that America's your junior partner doing your mischief.
MI6 is an absolute reckless, out-of-control disaster, and you look at a starmer, oh my God, don't get me started.
Do not get me started because I will not get off the podium.
We had a doctrine issued 202 years ago, which is not remembered properly, the Monroe Doctrine.
And I do want to remember it because it's sometimes taken as a bogeyman or sometimes taken as a statement of American foreign policy, but it's not taken correctly.
And the idea of the Monroe Doctrine was that in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and the Declaration of Independence of the other states in the Western Hemisphere in the early years of the 1820s, the United States said to the European powers, do not interfere in our hemisphere.
Okay, a little bold, by the way, of the U.S. at the time.
We were not exactly the strapping empire of the world compared to the European empires, but there was actually a very important part of it that I want to recall, and I want to read it.
And I quote, it's from the message to Congress of President Monroe, December 2nd, 1823, with this part written by the Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams.
He said, our policy in regard to Europe, which was adopted at an early stage of the wars that have so long agitated that quarter of the globe, nevertheless remains the same, which is not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers.
It was a reciprocal commitment.
Stay out of our lane, we'll stay out of your lane.
This is really smart advice, even smarter in a nuclear-armed world.
Don't go to provoke.
Don't think you run the world.
Don't expand NATO eastward To Russia's border, for God's sake, after you have said repeatedly, explicitly, not ambiguously, to President Gorbachev and to other Soviet and Russian leaders that NATO would not move one inch eastward.
And if you think it's a myth, go to the National Security Archive of George Washington University and pull out the dozens of documents or the clips of Hans-Dietrich Enscher saying explicitly, this doesn't refer to a promise within Germany.
This is in general, we're not going to move eastward.
That's what the Monroe Doctrine really says.
What are we doing trying to push NATO to Ukraine and to Georgia?
Well, I'll tell you what we're doing.
We're doing what Lord Palmerston tried to do in 1853 in the Crimean War, which was to surround Russia and banish Russia from the Black Sea.
That's the idea.
And immediately after the Maidan coup, which my colleague Victoria Newland was a very competent sponsor of, she now teaches diplomacy at Columbia University.
You cannot make this up.
Even George Orwell did not imagine such a thing.
Anyway, she teaches diplomacy together with Hillary Clinton.
It's so weird.
Anyway, the coup came, and immediately the post-coup government said, we don't think the Russians should be in Crimea.
That is their naval base for the last hundred from 1783.
I won't calculate the number of years.
That was the idea.
It was Palmerston's idea.
It was Brzezinski's idea.
That's not the Monroe Doctrine.
That is, we will be in your face, right up to your face.
We will annoy you.
We will, as the RAND Corporation wrote in 2019 in one of the most absurd, dangerous, ridiculous exemplars of American foreign policy, we will extend you, extending Russia a document of a think tank, how to annoy Russia in 27 different ways.
Is this really what we pay them for?
How to provoke the other nuclear superpower with 6,000 nuclear weapons and then wonder why the hand of the doomsday clock is 89 seconds to midnight?
These people are crazy.
Honestly, it's very, very dangerous.
So I know I don't, nobody told me how long to speak, and I tend to speak about six hours.
So I'm going to stop very shortly.
Let me just say that all the major conflicts can be ended straightforwardly.
The Ukraine war, the causes, bell eye of the Ukraine war is NATO enlargement, U.S. coup, CIA operations all over Ukraine.
Even the New York Times reported that one a couple of months ago.
We've got to stop being in Russia's face.
They know it.
They know all of it.
They were so kind as to post Victoria Newland's call with Jeffrey Piat choosing the next government.
Thank you.
They know all of it.
They know who paid for the Maidan demonstrators.
They've got everything.
We've got to stop the provocations.
And yes, by the way, there was no Russian demand for territory of any kind.
Crimea, they wanted a 25-year lease, which they negotiated, President Putin and President Yanukovych.
Not territory, not a claim.
Even after the coup, Russia took back Crimea.
No, NATO, you're not getting that base.
But even when it came to the Donbass, they just said autonomy in this post-coup anti-Russia regime.
The United States said no to that one, too.
And incidentally, I'll share with you just one moment.
In 2021, the war could have been avoided easily by President Biden saying to President Putin, NATO will not expand to Ukraine, and I will say so.
And I called Jake Sullivan.
He teaches at Harvard.
It's all consistent.
After you fail in Washington.
And I said, Jake, avoid a war.
Stop NATO enlargement.
It's ridiculous.
It's useless.
Would you like it on the Rio Grande in Mexico, a Russian military base?
Said, Jeff, we have an open-door policy for NATO.
Said, Jake, give me a break.
Open door policy.
I repeated the Monroe Doctrine to no effect.
And I said, Jake, stop the NATO enlargement.
He said to me, Jeff, NATO's not going to enlarge to Ukraine.
I said, Jake, we're going to have a war over something that's not going to happen.
Why don't you say so?
He said to me, don't worry, there's not going to be a war.
Honestly, these people are not clever.
They're not clever.
What they're doing makes no sense.
They don't know what they're doing.
We don't know when Biden checked out, maybe already then.
But in any event, they're not smart.
They're getting us into trouble.
So we could make peace in Ukraine.
Tomorrow was yesterday was a hint of it.
But you could see the president is so everything about our media, about the Congress, about the military-industrial complex, whether he has the skill or not, I don't know.
But if he were a communicator and had the guts and what he should stand up and explain to the American people, this was about NATO enlargement, we're not going to do it.
That would be the end.
But he can't quite, he says it privately, I'm sure, but not publicly.
Why?
Because we're still trapped.
We're trapped as Eisenhower told us we're trapped.
And all these think tanks up and down the East Coast are bought the same way.
It's all phony.
Everything you hear about the data.
There was a report recently about Russia's casualties being X times that of Ukraine by one of the Washington think tanks.
So I looked at the, it was absurd.
So I looked at the footnote.
Where'd that come from?
The footnote came from the Ministry of Defense of Britain.
I was already suspicious.
So then I went to the Ministry of Defense of Britain and after a little maneuvering, tracked down its source.
It was Ukraine.
Oh my God.
They get paid for this.
Of course, it's paid propaganda.
Okay.
Ukraine can be stopped when the President of the United States says publicly, NATO will not enlarge.
He could add parentheses, it was a bad idea.
If he wants, he could say, it wasn't my idea, it was their terrible ideas.
He could say, Obama did the coup.
Whatever he wants to say, but if he told the treat, the war will end.
When it comes to the Middle East, practically speaking, we should vote today, tomorrow, Monday, in the UN Security Council for a state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel.
You'd have a hundred nine hundred and ninety-two votes, and Israel would not have a veto.
And it would be implemented.
And I speak with top leaders across the world in my job, including throughout the Middle East, all of the governments, with Iran, with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, with presidents of Islamic-majority countries all over the world, Indonesia, Malaysia, throughout Africa.
Everybody's ready for peace, except the zealots in Israel and the Israel lobby here in the United States.
That's it.
And peace could come the moment we tell the truth and tell them to stop the genocide and we stop being complicit in the genocide too.
China's 2,000 Year War 00:04:13
It's not even complicated.
And finally, we are preparing for war with China now.
If you want the worst idea on the whole planet in all of history, that's it.
Unbelievable that the thought could even be uttered.
Let me tell you something about China's overseas military adventures.
It's easy.
I'm going to give you 2,000 years of China's overseas military adventures.
I'm done.
There have never been Chinese overseas military adventures.
China never invaded Japan once in 2,000 years.
With the following footnote, if anyone challenges me when you repeat that and they say Sachs is an idiot, doesn't he know that China invaded Japan in 1274 AD and 1281 AD?
And you remind them, no, no, that was the Mongols, not the Chinese.
Okay?
China never invaded Korea once in 2,000 years, except in 1950 when Douglas MacArthur threatened nuclear war on China.
Other than that, never.
And yes, I did get an email from a very nice Vietnamese correspondent corresponder, not correspondent, who said, Mr. Sachs, you underestimate.
We've been at war with China for 2,000 years, Vietnam.
I had to remind him that the actual war ended 1,050 years ago, and that there were two wars in the last thousand years.
It's true.
China did invade a northern province of Vietnam in 1410 AD, and the war lasted for 17 years to 1427, at which point the Chinese were defeated by the Vietnamese and by malaria, which is one of the reasons why they never did it.
There is a disease zone and a tropical forest zone and a mountain zone, and they invaded Vietnam one month in 1979 after Vietnam had toppled their ally next door in Cambodia.
It was one month.
Other than that, 1,000 years, China's not going to invade the United States.
It can't.
It won't.
It's not going to invade any place.
And if there would be an invasion even of Taiwan, which is a province of China, it would be because the United States is unilaterally arming Taiwan against our diplomacy, against our treaties, against our 1982 communique, which said we would phase out arming Taiwan.
The biggest risk we face is turning Taiwan into Ukraine.
And we're way on the way to doing that because the same thought processes in Washington are at work in East Asia.
It's just that the consequences would be even more devastating, first for Taiwan, second for the United States, and third for the entire world.
So let me end by saying not only could all these conflicts easily be resolved, easily be resolved, but we should also look just a bit at the process.
Risks of Taiwan Uprising 00:03:13
And I just want to mention a few quick points.
First, it was already recognized by President Truman in 1963 publicly, soon after Kennedy's assassination, and already known before that that the biggest mistake we made in 1947 was to give the CIA two jobs.
One, intelligence, which we need, and two, covert operations, which is absolutely deadly for our security and for world peace.
We should end all CIA covert operations, period.
Second, obviously, from the news that we've seen recently and from what we know, we need to depoliticize the CIA and the intelligence agencies.
We need intelligence.
We don't need politics in those agencies.
Third, we need to close our overseas military bases.
They served.
They are hundreds of billions of dollars in 80 countries, 750 to 800 overseas military bases that only suborn politics all over the world, support covert operations, and create terrible expense and terrible crises.
We need diplomacy to return.
JD Vance explained what he called the Trump doctrine.
I just want to say he got part of it right and one major part wrong.
Or, I mean, the doctrine is part right and a major part wrong.
Vance said that the Trump doctrine is, first, articulate a clear American interest.
Good.
Second, aggressively seek a diplomatic solution.
Good.
Then the third, if diplomacy fails, use overwhelming military force to solve the issues and then withdraw before it becomes a right word.
An extended conflict.
That is the Iran absurdity at play.
By the way, if that was aggressive diplomacy, you announce your next meeting is on Sunday and you bomb on Friday, and that that's really going to solve your problems or enhance diplomacy.
So the Trump doctrine, if that's really what it is, urgently needs to be rethought.
And finally, most importantly, we need public understanding.
We need public awareness.
We need the public to understand what America's real interests are.
We need brave congressmen like Congressman Duncan, who told his constituency that these wars make no sense, that they are not for American security.
We need the Ron Paul Institute.
We need our favorite judge, Napolitano.
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