Tucker Carlson - Jeffrey Sachs with probably the smartest and most accurate assessment of the Ukraine war, and American foreign policy more broadly, ever caught on tape. (20:17) Why did America push for Ukraine to Join NATO? (58:34) What is a Neocon? (1:25:28) Regime Change Never Works (1:36:27)
Jeffrey Sachs dismantles the "unprovoked invasion" myth, exposing how U.S. policy—from NATO’s 2008 Ukraine pledge to Victoria Nuland’s 2014 coup orchestration—ignored Gorbachev’s assurances and provoked Russia, despite Minsk-II peace offers. He frames neoconservative regime-change (Syria, Libya) as reckless, CIA-led destabilization, with Nord Stream sabotage and COVID-19’s lab origins (DEFUSE, Ralph Baric) as examples of unchecked power. Sachs warns U.S. brinkmanship—from Zaporizhzhia nuclear risks to ignored Palestinian statehood—threatens global stability, urging diplomacy over hegemony. [Automatically generated summary]
I actually asked a research assistant of mine to count how many times we heard that in the New York Times in that first year from February 2022 to February 2023 in their opinion columns was 26 times unprovoked.
It's about the U.S. It's about Britain before that.
I think it's a little bit like that old game of risk.
I don't know if you played that as a kid, but the idea was have your peace on every place in the world.
That was the game.
And you read the American strategists, whether it's Zbigniew Brzezinski, although he was a very moderate, Or the neocons who have run U.S. foreign policy for the last 30 years.
The neocons are very explicit.
The U.S. must be the unchallenged superpower in every place in the world, in every region.
We must dominate.
It's quite a load for us American people.
What they say is, we are going to be the constabulary duty holder.
Fancy word for saying, we'll be the world's policemen.
They say it explicitly.
They say, that's lots of wars.
We have to be ready for all these wars.
To my mind, it's a little crazy.
But their idea was, after the end of the Soviet Union, well, now we run the world.
And to come back to Russia, the idea was, well, Russia's weak.
It's down.
We're the sole superpower.
They're on their back or on their knees, whatever it is.
And now we can move NATO where we want and we can surround them.
And the Russians said, please don't do that.
Don't bring your troops, your weapons, your missiles right up to our border.
It's not a good idea.
And the U.S., I was around in those years, involved in...
Russia and in Central Europe, the U.S. was, we don't hear you.
We don't hear you.
We do what we want.
They kept pushing inside the U.S. government in the 1990s when this debate was going, should NATO expand?
Some people said, yeah, but we told Gorbachev and we told Yeltsin we weren't going to expand at all.
No, come on!
The Soviet Union's done.
We can do what we want.
We're the sole superpower.
Clinton bought into that.
That was Madeleine Albright's line.
NATO enlargement started.
And our most sophisticated diplomats, we used to have diplomats at the time, we don't have them anymore, but we used to have diplomats like George Kennan, said, this is the greatest mistake we could possibly make.
We had a defense secretary, Bill Perry, who was Clinton's...
Defense Secretary, who agonized, God, I should resign over this.
This is terrible.
What's going on?
But he was outmaneuvered diplomatically by Richard Holbrook and by Madeleine Albright, and Clinton never thought through anything systematically, in my opinion.
So they decided, okay, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, first round.
And then Brzezinski, in a 1997 article in Foreign Affairs magazine, which is kind of the Bellwether of foreign policy wrote a strategy for Eurasia where he laid out exactly the timeline for this U.S. expansion of power.
And he said, late 1990s, we'll take in Central Europe, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic.
By the early 2000s, we'll take in the Baltic states.
Now, that's get close to Russia.
2005 to 2010 will invite Ukraine to become part of NATO. So this wasn't some flippant thing.
This was a long-term plan, and it was based on a long-term geo-strategy.
Now the Russians are saying, are you kidding?
We wanted peace?
We ended the Cold War II. You didn't just defeat us.
We...
Said, no more we disbanded the Warsaw Pact.
We wanted peace.
We wanted cooperation.
You call it victory.
We just wanted to cooperate.
I know that for a fact because I was there in those years.
What Gorbachev wanted, what Yeltsin wanted.
They didn't want war with the United States, nor were they...
Saying we're defeated.
They were saying, we just want to cooperate.
We want to stop the Cold War.
We want to become part of a world economy.
We want to be a normal economy.
We want to be a normal society connected with you, connected with Europe, connected with Asia.
And the U.S. said, we get it.
We get it.
We won.
You do everything we say, and we determine how the pieces are going to go.
So, in the early 2000s, Putin comes in.
First business for Putin was good cooperation with Europe.
You know, it was a little bit sad, but we do lots of sad things and lots of destructive things, lots of wars.
We're the country of perpetual war.
We don't look back.
We're not even supposed to talk about this, because this was unprovoked, remember?
So in 2002, the U.S. unilaterally pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
Unilaterally.
Well, that was one of the stabilizers of the relationship with Russia, and it was one of the stabilizers of the global nuclear situation, which is absolutely dangerous.
And the U.S. unilaterally started putting...
Aegis missiles into first Poland, then Romania, and the Russians are saying, wait a minute, what do we know you're putting in this?
You're a few minutes from Moscow?
This is completely destabilizing.
Do you think you might want to talk to us?
So then comes 2004, seven more countries in NATO, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Slovenia.
Starting, filling in the Black Sea, Romania and Bulgaria.
Suddenly, they're now North Atlantic countries, but it's all part of this design.
All spelled out, all quite explicit, were surrounding Russia.
In 2007, President Putin gave a very clear speech at the Munich Security Conference.
Very powerful, very correct, very frustrated, where he said, Gentlemen, you told us in 1990 NATO would never enlarge.
That was the promise made to President Gorbachev, and it was the promise made to President Yeltsin.
And you cheated.
And you repeatedly cheated.
And you don't even admit that you said this, but it's all plainly documented, by the way, and as you know, in a thousand archival sites, so it's easy to verify all of this.
James Baker III, our Secretary of State, said that NATO would not move one inch eastward.
And it wasn't a flippant statement.
It was a statement repeated and repeated and repeated.
Hans Dietrich Genscher, the foreign minister of Germany, same story.
Repeated so many times in many documents, many statements by the NATO Secretary General, by the U.S. Secretary of State, by the German Chancellor, now, of course, all denied by...
Our foreign policy blob, because we're not supposed to remember anything.
Remember this was all unprovoked.
So, back to 2007, Putin gives this speech, and he says, stop.
Don't even think about Ukraine.
This is our 2,100-kilometer border.
This is absolutely part of the integrated economy of this region.
Don't even think about it.
Now, I know from insiders, from all the diplomatic work that I do, that Europe was saying to the U.S. European leaders, don't think about Ukraine, please.
You know, this is not a good idea.
Just stop.
We know from our current CIA director, Bill Burns, that he wrote a very eloquent, impassioned, Articulate, clear, secret, as usual, memo, which we only got to see because WikiLeaks showed to the American people what maybe we would like to know once in a while, but we're never told.
What they're doing and how they're putting us at nuclear risk and other things.
Okay, this one did get out, and it's called Nyet means nyet, no means no.
And what Bill Burns very perceptively, articulately conveys to Condoleezza Rice and back to the White House in 2008 is Ukraine is really a red line.
Don't do it.
It's not just Putin.
It's not just Putin's government.
It's the entire political class of Russia.
And just to help all of us as we think about it, it is exactly as if Mexico said, We think it would be great to have Chinese military bases on the Rio Grande.
We can't see why the U.S. would have any problem with that.
The whole idea is so absurdly dangerous and reckless that you can't even imagine grown-ups doing this.
So what happens is, for what I'm told by European leaders, And by long, detailed discussion, Bush Jr. says to them, no, no, no, it's okay, don't worry, I hear you about Ukraine.
And then he goes off for the Christmas holidays and comes back, whether it's Cheney, whether it's Bush, whatever it is, says, yeah, NATO's going to enlarge to Ukraine.
Yeah, I don't know whether it was CIA or whether someone explained to him or whether someone said, George, Mr. President, this is a longstanding project.
You know, it's not something for...
European country to object to.
I don't know what happened there, but what I do know is that he came back and told the European leaders, no, we're doing it.
They said, no, no, no, no, we're not doing it.
And then they had the NATO summit in Bucharest, and this was 2008, and the Europeans, Chancellor Merkel, the French president, all of them, George, don't do this.
Don't do this.
This is extraordinarily dangerous.
This is really provocative.
We don't really need or want NATO right up to the Russian border.
Bush pushed, pushed, pushed.
This is a U.S. alliance fundamentally, and they made the commitment Ukraine will become a member of NATO. The dodge was, okay, we won't give them exactly the roadmap right now, but Ukraine will...
Because in those days the U.S. and Russia met in a NATO partnership, even then, Putin was there the next day in Bucharest saying, don't do this.
This is completely reckless.
Essentially, this is our fundamental red line.
Do not do this.
The U.S. can't hear any of this.
This is our biggest problem.
Of all, because the neocons who have run the show for 30 years believe the U.S. can do whatever it wants.
This is the most fundamental point to understand about U.S. foreign policy.
They're wrong.
They keep screwing up.
They keep getting us into trillion-dollar-plus wars.
They keep killing a lot of people.
But their basic belief is the U.S. is the only Superpower.
It's the unipolar power and we can do what we want.
So they could not hear Putin.
Even that moment, they couldn't hear the rest of the Europeans.
And, by the way, they said Georgia would become part of NATO. Again, the only way to understand that is in this long-standing...
Palmerston-Rzynski theory.
This isn't just haphazard.
Oh, why don't we take Georgia?
This is a plan.
Okay, the Russians understand every single step of this.
So, another thing goes awry.
What goes awry?
The Ukrainians don't want NATO enlargement.
The Ukrainians don't want it.
They're against it.
The public opinion says, no, this is very dangerous.
Neutrality, it's safer.
We're in between East and West.
We don't want this.
So they elect.
Viktor Yanukovych, a president that says, we'll just be neutral.
And that's absolutely the U.S.'s, oh, what the hell is this?
Ukraine?
They don't have any choice either.
So Yanukovych becomes the enemy of the neocons, obviously.
So they start working, of course, the way that the U.S. does.
We got to get rid of this guy.
Maybe we'll elect his opponent afterwards.
Maybe we'll catch him in a crisis and so forth.
And indeed, at the end of 2013, the U.S. absolutely stokes a crisis that becomes an insurrection and then becomes a coup.
And I know, again, from firsthand experience, the U.S. was...
Profoundly implicated in that.
But you can see our senators standing up in the crowd, like if Chinese officials came to January 6th and said, yes, yes, go!
How would we like it if Chinese leaders came and said, yeah, we're with you 100%.
American senators standing up in Kiev saying to the demonstrators, we're with you 100%.
Victoria Nuland famously passing around the cookies, but it was much, much more than the cookies, I can tell you.
And so the U.S. conspired with a Ukrainian right to overthrow Yanukovych, and there was a violent overthrow in the third week of February of 2014. That's when this war...
This war didn't even start in 2022. It started in 2014. That was the outbreak of the war, was a violent coup that overthrew a Ukrainian president that wanted neutrality.
When he was violently overthrown and his security people told him, you're going to get killed.
And so he flew to Kharkiv and then flew.
Onward to Russia that day, the U.S. immediately, in a nanosecond, recognized the new government.
This is a coup.
This is how the CIA does its regime change operations.
So this is when the war starts.
Putin's understanding, completely correct in this moment, was, I'm not letting NATO take my naval fleet and my naval base in Crimea.
Kidding.
The Russian naval base in the Black Sea, which was the object of the Crimean War and in its way is the object of this war in Savastopol, has been there since 1783. And now Putin's saying, oh, NATO's going to walk in?
Hell no.
And so they organize this referendum of the, this is a Russian region, and there's an overwhelming support.
We'll stay with Russia, thank you, not with this new post-coup government.
An outbreak breaks out in the eastern provinces, which are the ethnic Russian provinces in the Donbass, in Lugansk and Donetsk.
And there's a lot of violence, so the war starts in 2014. Saying something's unprovoked in 2022 is a little bizarre for anyone that actually reads a normal newspaper to begin with.
But in any event, the war starts then.
And within a year, the Russians are saying very wisely, we actually don't want this war.
We don't want to own Ukraine.
We don't want problems on our border.
We would like peace based on...
Respect for the ethnic Russians in the East and political autonomy because you, the coup government, tried to close down all Russian language, culture, and rights of these people after having made a violent coup.
So we don't accept that.
So what came out of that was two agreements called the Minsk-1 and the Minsk-2 agreements.
The Minsk II agreement was backed by the UN Security Council, and it said that we'll make peace based on autonomy of the Donbas region.
Now, very interesting.
The Russians were not saying, that's ours, we want that.
All the things that are claimed every day that Putin just wants to recreate, you know, he thinks he's Peter the Great, he wants to recreate the Russian Empire, he wants to grab territory.
Nothing like that.
The opposite.
We don't want the territory.
We actually just want autonomy based on an agreement reached with the Ukrainian government.
So what was the U.S. attitude towards that?
U.S. government attitude.
U.S. government attitude was to say to the Ukrainians, don't worry about it.
Come on.
Don't worry about it.
You keep your central state.
We don't want to see Ukraine weakened at all.
We just want a NATO in a unified Ukraine.
Don't go for decentralization.
We tell them to blow off the very treaty that they've signed.
Then we accuse Russia of not having diplomacy, by the way, which is par for the course.
Oh, you can't trust them.
We blow off every single agreement.
We blow off not...
Moving one inch eastward.
We blow off the anti-ballistic missile treaty.
We have so many NATO-led wars of choice in between.
I didn't even mention in Syria, CIA attempt to overthrow Assad in Libya and so forth.
And we blow off the Minsk agreements.
And actually, Angela Merkel...
Explained in a rather shockingly frank interview that she gave last year when asked why Germany didn't help to enforce the Minsk agreement because Germany and France were the guarantors of the Minsk agreement under something called the Normandy process.
Well, the formal response of the United States is that issues about NATO are non-negotiable.
They're only between NATO countries and NATO candidates, no third party has any stake or interest or say in this.
Russia, it's completely irrelevant.
Again, to use the analogy, you know, if Mexico and China want to put Chinese military bases on the Rio Grande, the United States has no right to interfere.
Putin told me, and I checked, I think it's true, that he, in Clinton's final days, asked Clinton if Russia could join NATO, which seems almost by definition like a victory.
NATO exists as a bulwark against Russia.
Russia wants to join the alliance, then you've won, right?
Why would the U.S. government have turned that offer down?
Russia, and actually Europe, wanted It used to want before Europe was completely a kind of vassal province of the United States government, wanted what they call collective security, which was we want security arrangements in which one country's security doesn't ruin the security of another country.
Two paths to that.
There were basically three paths, let's say.
One path was what they call the OSCE, the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe.
Really a good idea.
It's Western Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and former Soviet Union.
And the idea was, let's bring us all together under one kind of charter, and we'll work out a collective security arrangement.
I liked it.
This is what...
Gorbachev was saying, we don't want war with you.
We don't want conflict with you.
We want collective security.
Second arrangement that actually makes a lot of sense, but people say, is this guy out of his mind?
But it actually makes a lot of sense.
Gorbachev disbanded the Warsaw Pact.
We should have disbanded NATO. NATO was there to defend against a Soviet invasion.
There's not going to be any Soviet invasion.
In fact, after December 1991, there's not even a Soviet Union.
We don't need NATO. Why is there NATO? NATO was established to defend against the Soviet Union.
So why did it continue after Gorbachev and Yeltsin?
The neocons, thankfully, Thank you.
Read the document.
It's all explicit.
This is our way of keeping our hegemony in Europe.
In other words, this is our way of keeping our say in Europe, not protecting Europe, not even protecting us.
There are basic mechanisms that I don't understand truly after being around more than 40 years in this and knowing all the leaders, and I know Schultz, and I know others.
I don't understand it, but when the U.S. has a military base in your country, It really pulls a lot of the political strings in your country.
If men with guns showed up in your apartment in New York and just camped out there, you probably wouldn't really be the head of your household anymore, would you?
It's probably true, but your question of why would the Germans want this, it's the same question of after the U.S. blew up the Nord Stream pipeline.
Why wouldn't the Germans have said before or after, why did you do that?
This is our economy.
You just blew up.
But they don't.
And so they're so subservient to the U.S. interests.
It's a little hard to understand because it makes no sense for Europe.
But like you said, there are armed people in your house.
Maybe that's the bottom line.
I've spoken to European leaders who have said to me, I can't quote it because it's so shocking, and I won't quote it because it was said confidentially, but basically, they don't take us seriously in Washington.
And I said yes.
I didn't say it was the bubble over my head speaking to a European leader, but maybe if you pushed a little bit, you would be taken more seriously, not in this way of just...
But it was said to me in such a sad way, I just felt, oh, God, don't tell me that.
We talked about this last night at dinner, but one of the most shocking things, just as someone who lived in Washington, to me, is if you ask any of the senators, as I have, who voted to keep this work going with U.S. tax dollars, how many of your beloved Ukrainians have been killed?
They have no idea and they have no interest in knowing.
I mean, at some point, it's certainly hypocritical that you're telling us we're doing this for Ukraine, for our friends in Ukraine, the standard bearers of democracy.
But also, don't you have an obligation to kind of care about the people you kill?
So, just to circle back to the provocation, I watched as a complete non-expert the administration send the vice president to the Munich Security Conference in February of 2022 when it was clear that things were getting really hot and watched Kamala Harris say to Zelensky on camera we want you to join NATO when everybody, even me, a talk show host, knew that that was the red line for Putin.
So the only conclusion I could reach was they want him to move across the border into Ukraine.
Tucker, just to say, Until this moment, every senior official in the U.S. or the Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, says Ukraine will join NATO. And one thing everyone that's listening should understand, Ukraine will never join NATO short of a nuclear war.
Because Russia will never allow it, period.
So every time we say it, All we mean is the war continues and more Ukrainians are destroyed.
They believed up until now that they would get their way through bluff or superiority of force or superiority of finance.
They gambled because they were gambling with someone else's lives, someone else's country, and someone else's money, our money, the taxpayer money, but they were gambling, not with their own stakes.
But they were gambling.
They're not very clever.
They gambled wrong all along.
Putin said, no.
For us, this is existential.
For you, it's a game.
Apparently the game of risk.
You need your piece on that board as if American NATO forces in Ukraine is somehow existential for the United States as opposed to a neutral Ukraine.
Who just thought Russia won't object, or can't object, or will be pushed aside, or will fall to its knees with U.S. financial sanctions, or will succumb to the U.S. HIMARS and ATAKEMS. Just one absolutely naive idea after another.
But the people, what's so interesting, so you've been an academic your whole life.
I think you're one of the youngest tenured professors at Harvard, but you've also been, I think uniquely, a diplomat on and off, mostly on, for decades.
So you know the people who are making U.S. foreign policy personally well.
And the quality of the person engaged in that seems to have declined just dramatically.
They're not only not true, if you are able to watch you or someone outside the mainstream, it becomes obvious that these aren't true.
But if you follow Admiral Kirby and the White House every day lying with a smirk on his face, which I can't stand because he can't even control his smirk because he tells us, I'm lying.
As he's talking, it's unreal.
Or if you read the New York Times, which is sad and pathetic, you won't know.
But if you actually listen to any independent...
Which I do because I'm traveling in the world most of the time, actually, not in the U.S. You know that these things are obvious.
Someone asked me a couple days ago, Ukraine's getting blasted on the battlefield now.
Some days are 1,500 dead, typical 1,000 dead.
Russia has air superiority, artillery superiority, missile superiority, everything.
And the Ukrainians are...
Getting blasted.
And now the U.S. press is reporting the Ukrainians are falling back and the tone has suddenly changed.
So someone asked me a couple days ago, you know, why did this sudden change on the battlefield occur?
And I said, excuse me?
He said, yeah, why did this sudden change?
He said, there's no sudden change.
This whole trend has been obvious for more than two years.
We're in a war of attrition, and the bigger party is blasting the hell out of the smaller one.
But you wouldn't know it by any of our narrative, official, congressional, or our kind of mainstream media, because they don't tell the truth until, I'd say until, but even after.
It's staring you in the face.
Then maybe they'll say something that's a little bit true.
When the U.S. put on sanctions on Russia in March 2022, just after the beginning of this latest phase of the war that started in 2014, I know senior U.S. Financial officials and they, oh, we've got them.
This is going to crush them.
I said, I don't think so.
You know, I was in Latin America last week.
They're not going to do this.
I was in India the week before that.
It's not going to go like that.
So what happened was the only ones that applied the sanctions are Europe, the United States, and a few allies in East Asia, Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore.
The rest of the world said, we're not part of that.
We don't sign up to this.
We don't like this.
We don't agree with the NATO enlargement.
We don't like this narrative.
And the sanctions proved to be pretty useless compared to what this grandiosity of the U.S. strategists thought.
So it comes to this question, what is the rest of the world?
The rest of the world doesn't think much of the United States, what it's doing.
It seems to them it's a bizarre country.
Why are you pushing NATO enlargement?
Why are you bringing us into your war?
We don't really want this.
Interestingly, most of the rest of the world is not against the United States, by the way.
They said, just don't make us choose all these things.
This isn't our battle.
And we don't even like what you're doing.
Just make peace.
Calm things down.
And we don't want bad relations.
So it's not as if the world's antagonistic.
But Washington does not get this at all.
I probably speak to more world...
I don't know.
I speak to a lot of world leaders in developing countries all the time.
It's my job as a development economist.
So I'm talking to world leaders, foreign ministers, heads of state, and so on.
And I know there...
Understanding and position very clearly, I don't know whether the White House or Blinken or anyone else in the administration understands even these basic points.
Yeah, not nimble, not effective, not necessarily in charge, not necessarily making decisions.
I don't really know.
But what I do know is that it's not improv.
It's a rudder that's stuck, I would say.
In other words, they can't...
Do something different.
And what is improv is that the last thing they tried didn't work.
So now they need to quickly improvise something else as the rudder is stuck so we continue on the same destructive path.
And it's not working, so oh my god, we've got to do something else.
That's the improv part.
But what is not changing is...
Goals, direction, strategy, or this most basic point, which for me is a kind of, it sounds so simple-minded, but I actually, from a lifetime of experience, really believe in it.
So, for example, since you are an economist, the economic effects of kicking Russia to swift, etc., etc., of these very serious sanctions imposed against Russia, Two and a half years ago.
Big picture, it seems like that's a country with an economy based on natural resources and manufacturing.
Ours is largely an economy based on finance, lending, money, and interest, and real estate.
They figured out how to get those tankers in, they figured out how to get insurance cover, and they figured out how to do it.
And they're making a lot of money, and the sanctions didn't have any effect.
And what they also didn't understand, and I think it's also important for people to understand, in all of this neocon strategizing, They had this glimmer of insight, and actually Zbigniew Brzezinski was very good on it.
He said, by all means, the one thing never, never to do is to drive Russia and China together.
Think that this has been just about the most disastrous foreign policy imaginable.
How can you go from peace in 1991 when you have a chance for creating a peaceful, cooperative world that could actually be prosperous and do good things together to this mess that we're in?
It took a strategy so...
Stupid.
So reckless.
So blind.
And that's what the neocons gave us.
They gave us a strategy which said, we now run the world.
And explicitly, we will be the world's policemen.
We will fight the wars that we need to fight whenever and wherever we need to fight them.
We will make sure that there's never a rival.
Well, you do that long enough, you end up in lots of absolutely destructive, stupid wars.
And the rest of the world doesn't just sit back and say, oh, thank you, U.S., we're so grateful you're the leader.
They say, come on, you're 4.1% of the world population.
There's another 95.9% of the world population that actually would just like peace and some cooperation and not you to be telling us what to do.
So this strategy was explicit, clear, adopted in the last years of basically in 1991-92 after the Soviet Union was dissolved in December adopted in the last years of basically in 1991-92 after the Clinton was...
He's just not...
Serious, consequent, or experienced enough.
He wasn't a rigid neocon, but Madeleine Albright was a true believer, and Clinton drifted in that direction.
And that's also partly something to understand, which is when you have the biggest military machine in the world, when you are so powerful.
The war machine is always revving.
There's always some case for war.
The neocons basically said, yeah, we're the policemen.
We're the constabulary.
This is our duty.
And said, you have to be in each of these conflicts because U.S. reputation also depends on this.
So they invited...
Regional wars everywhere and all the time.
And believed, of course, we could clean out governments we didn't want, regime change by war, by covert operations, and so on.
And it became not a little movement.
It became the dominant drive.
So Clinton kind of drifted.
His administration was divided between Madeleine Albright and...
Holbrook on one side and William Perry on the other side, but he went with Albright.
By the end of Clinton's term was NATO enlargement, bombing of Belgrade, and we were kind of off to the races.
Then came Bush Jr., 9-11, global war on terror, but basically 9-11 as the Opportunity to implement the project for the new American century, which is the document that defines the neocon agenda.
And it's such an interesting document because very clear, it was very carefully studied, and it's also important to understand the U.S. is a big ship, so it doesn't turn quick, so you prepare a path, or it's this stuck rudder, as I said.
And you can read in Rebuilding America's Defenses, which was a kind of campaign document for the incoming Bush Jr. administration, what we should do.
And it defines this neocon agenda.
So Bush Jr. Introduced all of these things, the unilateral withdrawal from ABM, the war in Iraq, the expansion of NATO to seven more countries, the commitment to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia.
Then comes Obama.
You don't think of him as a neocon especially, but who becomes the point person for...
Eastern Europe and Ukraine, Victoria Newland.
So interesting.
Victoria Newland was the Deputy National Security Advisor of Cheney.
Then she was George W.'s ambassador to NATO during the commitment to enlargement.
And if Obama weren't a neocon, You would say, well, that's not someone I'm going to hire, but all of a sudden she lands as Hillary's assistant.
Now, Hillary's absolutely neocon to the core, and there's Victoria Nuland, and she goes from being Hillary's assistant to becoming Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs and becomes the point person in the overthrow of Yanukovych at the end of 2013 and early 2000. And Obama is also very inexperienced,
obviously no experience at all in foreign policy, but he wasn't by nature a neocon, but the system keeps you moving unless you're a president that knows how to keep a foot on the brakes.
There were things that were going on in Syria, but the president said, okay, we'll send in the CIA to overthrow the government in Syria.
And if anyone is wondering, we do this dozens of times, so don't have any illusion that this is unusual.
It is the job, the terms of reference of the CIA to overthrow governments in other countries.
I don't approve.
I think it leads to war, destruction.
It hasn't passed Putin's notice that that's the job of the CIA, so it's another reason he doesn't exactly want the U.S. on his border and so forth.
Okay, so we start arming the jihadists, crazy things in Syria.
Yeah, I can say it.
I'm just thinking because...
And the U.S. says Assad must go.
So the U.N. starts a diplomatic process to try to find peace, which is the job of the U.N. It's not to implement U.S. regime change.
It's to try to find peace.
So the U.N. succeeds in getting all of the parties to agree to a peace agreement except one, the U.S. So the idea that you couldn't find peace, you couldn't find all these different factions in Syria, there was an agreement reached.
But there was one obstacle to the agreement.
And the obstacle was the U.S. said on the first day of this agreement, Assad must go.
And the response was, you know, why don't you...
Have it a process.
They'll be in two years an election or three years.
Don't overthrow the government the first day.
We have all this in place.
And Obama, well, I don't know if it's Obama, probably Hillary, but whatever, said no.
No one knows because some people say Sarkozy knew that Gaddafi had contributed to Sarkozy's campaign, that it was a personal vendetta.
There are 100 theories.
The fact that there are 100 theories shows that the whole thing was bullshit.
To use a technical diplomatic term.
You cannot even know right now why.
What you know is that they misused a UN Security Council resolution to protect the people of Benghazi to launch a months-long NATO aerial bombardment of Libya until they brought down the government, unleashed war in Africa for the next 13 years until today, which is still roiling.
All of the countries of the region.
They do these things because they can.
Because it doesn't count.
Maybe another theory which is even...
Maybe true.
What difference?
It's money.
It's a business.
We're running a business.
We're trying weapons.
We're doing this.
Maybe it's all success from somebody's point of view that you have all these wars going with this big military machine.
I don't know.
That is a theory which is not completely dismissible because what you can't do, Tucker, is look and say, My God, we had a geopolitical reason to do this.
This was really part of American security.
We really needed to overthrow Assad.
We really needed to take out Gaddafi because if we didn't do that, something else would happen.
You cannot even concoct a crazy narrative ex post that explains that.
You know, when you're an empire, And if anyone still plays Risk, I don't know.
I played it 60 years ago, I have to admit, so I'm not sure if people still play the game.
But Risk, you're trying to get your piece on every part of the board.
When you have your piece someplace on the board, if the neighboring spots are not yours, you better have wars with them or they're going to take you out.
And so every place becomes...
An object for war because it becomes next door to wherever you have your bases, your concern, and so on.
So we have military bases in, I would say, 80 countries probably.
Something like that.
Of course, the count is not public, so people put together their own lists.
We have about 750 military bases around the world.
Each of those places has a neighborhood.
Each of those places has the next door, which, oh, well, we don't have a base there.
We better have a base there.
And so that's the logic, which is if you're at the outer end of this, well, you better continue because otherwise your outer limit is...
What we don't learn, actually, it's another analogy which I found to be useful.
The Romans...
By around 110 AD with Hadrian and Trajan, okay, we've reached a good limit.
And they said there was a war that I... Find analogous to Ukraine.
They had a war in Germania, so-called, east of the Rhine, in what is now Germany, in 9 AD, which was a war of expansion by Augustus to tame the German tribes, and they lost that war.
It's the War of the Tutenberg Forest, and they lost that war in 9 AD. They basically decided after that, not...
Entirely.
They didn't say, well, this is the end of the Roman Empire.
So, speaking of increasing our risk, I think the unstated but very clear objective of all of this is to kill Putin and replace him and break up Russia.
If you read even this project for a new American century rebuilding America's defenses, It says maybe Russia will be decentralized into European Russia, Central Asian Russia, Siberian Russia, they call it, and a Far East Russia.
This is essentially what you're saying.
There's even some commissions in Washington decolonizing Russia.
Their hope...
The CIA's hope, if they would ever tell us the truth about anything, was, but they don't get any of this right, but their thought probably in this deep, long-term vision was, after the Soviet Union fell, so too will Russia disintegrate.
It will disintegrate along its ethnic lines.
It will disintegrate along its geographic lines.
Why is that a U.S. project?
It's a U.S. project only because, from my point of view, the U.S. resents that there is a country of 11 time zones, and it's so big that it is on its face a denial of U.S. global hegemony.
In other words, how obnoxious of them to be there?
And the fact of the matter is, I was an advisor to Gorbachev in 1990-91.
I got to watch Close Up.
I was an advisor to President Yeltsin in 1991-1992.
I actually, it's literally true, as weird as this sounds, I, well, maybe not to you.
You're about the one person for whom it's not weird.
I sat in the Kremlin.
Sitting across from Yeltsin the day the Soviet Union ended.
Wow.
Not even quite that day, literally.
It was even more remarkable and bizarre than that.
I was leading a little economics delegation to talk about the collapse of the economy that was underway.
And Yeltsin came from the back of the room in one of these giant Kremlin rooms and walked across the long room and sat down right in front of me and said, gentlemen, I want to tell you the Soviet Union is over.
Yeah, that was, of course, the most unbelievable moment I've had.
And you're sitting in the Kremlin, and you hear that suddenly.
And then he went on to say, he spoke very beautifully for a few minutes, what does Russia want?
And he must have used the word normal 10 times in that short speech.
We want to be a normal country.
We're done with the communism.
We want to be normal.
We want to be friendly.
We want to be part of Europe.
We want to be part of the world economy.
We want to be normal.
Mr. Sachs, can you help us be normal?
And I said, Mr. President, the world will be so grateful for this opportunity for peace that I am absolutely sure that the United States and the rest of the world is going to come to your assistance.
And I said this most remarkably wrong fact because I believed it.
I knew that that was America's interest.
I believed we would follow our interest.
And I had had a very unusual experience, a wonderful experience two years earlier when I served as Poland's main outside economic advisor, helping them to develop the plan for becoming a market economy and part of Europe.
And in those days...
I helped Poland raise many billions of dollars of emergency support to stabilize a very shaky, unstable economy.
And in those days, in 1989, everything I recommended was adopted by the United States government almost immediately.
I thought, hey, I'm pretty good.
I once went in one morning to...
Senator Dole, and I said, Poland needs a billion dollars to stabilize its currency.
And he said, Mr. Sachs, come back in an hour.
And I came back in an hour, and there was Brent Scowcroft and our national security advisor.
Senator Dole said, you know who this is, Mr. Sachs.
I said, General, it's an honor to meet you.
And Scowcroft said, what's your idea?
And I handed him my one page about a billion dollars.
And he looked and he said, will this work, Mr. Sachs?
And I said, I think this is the right way to stabilize the currency.
He said, well, we'll get back to you.
And at 5 p.m., as Dole asked me, I called Dole and he said, tell your friends they have their billion dollars.
Within eight hours, basically.
So I said to Yeltsin, this will be great.
You're going to get all the support.
We're going to go mobilize the financial package for you.
We're going to help you stabilize the ruble.
We're going to get a stabilization fund for the ruble.
We're going to get this and that.
And of course, every single thing I recommended that had worked in Poland, they rejected in Washington.
And just for the life of me, What the hell is going on here?
Stabilization fund.
It worked.
The złoty was stable.
The Polish currency stabilized.
No, Mr. Sachs, I'm afraid we don't support that.
And one after another, knocked down.
So I did not understand the geopolitics that I was in at all.
I didn't get it.
I said, are you kidding?
they want normal they want peace this is our greatest moment this is the greatest moment of the second half of the 20th century the scourge of nuclear war has been lifted the cold war is over do something no you So that's it.
Because he emerged from the KGB, he understands the way the U.S. operates because we became a security state.
We became a state where the CIA has absolutely extraordinary influence, and Putin gets that.
And so he really understands how we operate.
He doesn't like it, but he understands it.
And his background, especially because his background comes from the KGB, his counterpart was the CIA. He does not have illusions about the United States.
And I wish we were proving him wrong, but we're not.
The U.S. is the only country in the world that relies on regime change as I would say the lead diplomatic, let me put it a different way, not diplomatic, as the lead foreign policy instrument.
In other words, most countries, virtually any small country, any middle power country, when it doesn't like another country, It either has to deal with it or it comes begging to the United States to take out that country.
We are the country that makes a living by overthrowing other governments.
A good vocation for us.
It almost always ends in disaster, in bloodshed, in continued instability.
But that's the job of the CIA. It's half the job of the CIA. CIA is also an intelligence agency.
It collects information and makes analysis and it gives intelligence findings.
I have no problem with that role at all, although I don't want him to spy on us, but I think that making intelligence findings for the U.S. government is necessary.
But being a private army or a hidden force that overthrows governments, that stokes unrest...
That puts people in power, that runs covert operations.
Yeah, probably 61 years ago was their first run at this with President Kennedy from, I think it's best guess, not sure, but best guess that this was at least...
Maybe rogue CIA, or maybe official CIA, or maybe compartmentalized CIA operation.
It was clearly someone's operation, not Lee Harvey Oswald's, from all we know.
And all of the evidence points in that direction.
It used to be said, why is the United States the only country in the world that's never had a coup?
And the answer was, well, we're the only country that doesn't have a U.S. embassy.
Yeah, but we probably had a coup in broad daylight on November 22, 1963. And we never quite got over it.
And we never looked into it.
On the contrary, we covered it up from the beginning.
And drip by drip, evidence comes, including the most recent evidence that that magic bullet, which was one of the...
Justifications of the absurd account of a lone gunman was also debunked by the, I think, now 88-year-old Secret Service agent who said, I actually put that bullet from the back of Kennedy's seat in the limousine on the stretcher at Parkland Hospital.
So there's so many things wrong with the official.
And it's preposterous.
Almost nobody believes it or should believe it.
But it's also interesting for all that we're discussing.
Most likely it was a government coup in broad daylight with a tremendous amount of evidence that it was a conspiracy at a high level.
And yet it passed for the last 61 years without any...
Well, I'm sure the CIA influences domestic politics all the time in this country because we know about extensive surveillance operations.
But it's interesting.
Next year will be the 50th anniversary of the Church Committee hearings.
Frank Church was a very unusual figure from Idaho, a pretty staunch Republican state.
He was a young, gifted patriot whose favorite senator was Bora, a conservative Republican senator.
He was just an upright, very decent person who saw more and more.
My God, the things we're talking about, something's not right.
People are getting assassinated in other countries.
Our government, it doesn't look clean.
And one thing after another in a series of events led him to chair the only time a Senate investigative committee actually looked deeply into What made it possible was just a confluence of events.
Nixon had resigned.
Ford was an unelected president who came from Congress who didn't want to take on Congress, so he didn't resist.
Church's investigation, even though his chief of staff, Dick Cheney, was telling him, go after this guy, we've got to crush this investigation.
But Ford said, no, no, no, we can't in any way, the Supreme Court, and I don't want to get into another huge fight.
Hoover had died, J. Edgar Hoover had died in 1972, I believe, so the FBI couldn't resist the same way.
Bill Colby had become CIA director, and he didn't want to inherit all the shit from the past CIA. So there came this one moment when all these pieces enabled actually someone to look into what this organization was doing.
And the first thing they discovered was no one had ever looked into any of it before.
But, you know, the congressional committees are only one part of the oversight the Constitution prescribes, and the other part, of course, is the media, right?
It's supposed to provide oversight, oversight of government.
And the moment I really wanted to speak to you was the day that I saw the clip of you on Bloomberg News.
Yeah, so, you know, the U.S. blew up Nord Stream, as it promised to on probably dozens of occasions, but the most recent of those occasions was President Biden...
I think it's February 7, 2022. I may have the date a little bit off, but he said in a statement to the press, if the Russians invade Ukraine, Nord Stream is finished.
And the reporter who asked him the question, I think from Germany, but international, said, well, Mr. President, how can you say that?
How could you do that?
And he looks and he says very gravely.
Believe me, we have our ways.
Okay, so this is...
And then you can go back and find a thousand clips of Victoria Nuland and Cruz and everyone saying, this must stop, this must stop.
We'll never let it happen.
It will be destroyed.
It will be ended.
Okay, so then it's blown up.
Okay?
And then the American, you know...
Well, before we get to that, I was on Bloomberg soon afterwards.
I don't remember whether it was the next day or the day after.
I said, you know, I think the U.S. did this.
Mr. Sachs, how can you say that?
And I said, well, first the president said it was going to be over.
And then there's actually some readings of planes in the vicinity and so forth.
And there was the tweet by the former and now current foreign minister of Poland.
Thank you, USA, with a picture of the water bubbling over the blown up.
Look, if you can kill a president in broad daylight...
And get away with it for 61 years.
If you can walk a president of a neighboring country out to an unmarked plane and not have it covered.
If you can have a, quote, unprovoked war that you provoke over a 30-year period.
You can do lots of things.
And this is just one of the things that you could do.
And I discovered that...
Some of our press, like the New York Times, which opined after the blow-up that looks like Russia did that to their own infrastructure.
Their reporters, their top reporters know better.
They tell me, yeah, Jeff, of course, of course, but they don't cover it because we're living in An environment where the people in power think it's a game and they think that it's not their job to tell us.
They're playing risk with our lives.
They're playing risk with Ukrainian lives.
They don't have to tell us the truth.
We don't have to have any serious discussion.
We don't have to call anyone for a real hearing or even much less a congressional investigation.
We're not living in that kind of world.
We're living in a world where it's almost daily that the government says what it wants.
Kirby at the White House says it with that damn smirk of his.
It's just interesting because you're from a very specific class.
Well-known academic economist, diplomat, frequent TV guest.
And, you know, there are a bunch of other people in that world, but you were pretty much the only person to say, no, that's a lie, and I'm not going along with it.
I'm not interested, and I would not take a job in the U.S. government, for example.
I quote it anyway, you know, with all the things I've said, I can imagine the congressional hearings would be, did you say that about the U.S. government?
Did you say that about the U.S. government?
But in any event, I'm not looking for a job.
I'm not looking for a USAID grant.
I'm not looking for a U.S. government grant.
So in that sense also, I'm not part, I'm not exactly, I hope trapped in that way.
I'm just trying to be accurate.
And what I'm really, really trying is to help the United States government understand they're operating on dangerous, dangerous trajectories and with a lot of delusions.
And it's very risky for everybody.
And I also have a...
Big measure of resentment.
I don't like the risks that we're being put under, Tucker.
I've got grandchildren, and I really care about this, and I don't like the games, and I want people to tell the truth.
And if we told the truth, we could actually stop the wars today.
That sounds crazy.
It's not crazy.
If we told the truth about Ukraine, Biden called Putin and said, that NATO enlargement we've been trying for 30 years, it's off.
We get it.
You're right.
It's not going to your border.
Ukraine should be neutral.
That war would stop today.
There'd be lots of pieces to figure out where exactly will the borders be?
How will it go?
I don't say that there won't be issues, but the fighting would stop today.
If the government of Israel, Either we're told or said there will be a state of Palestine and we will live peacefully side by side, the fighting would stop today.
These are basic facts, basic matters of truth, that if we actually spoke them, if we actually treated each other like grown-ups, we would resolve what seemed to be these.
Well, you know, when I said that this war has a reason, that it's not that Putin's evil, that we provoke this and that it could stop, I got most of my remaining interlocutors saying...
Jeff, what is the matter with you?
You're a Putin apologist?
You know, how dare you?
When I say this about Israel, I lose another group.
Because there are things you're supposed to say here.
Because this idea of U.S. hegemony, this idea of U.S. dominance, it's pretty deep.
In American academia also, it's not a shock to tell you, but all of these special organizations, the think tanks or university special departments or research units, they're funded by the U.S. government.
They're funded by the security state.
They're funded by large donors that are all part of this story.
COVID? The question is which lab and in which way.
It almost surely did not come out of nature.
It almost surely came out of a deliberate...
Research project that had a core idea, which was to take a natural virus and make it more infectious.
And we have one major blueprint of that, which is a research proposal called DEFUSE, which was submitted to the Department of Defense, to the unit called DARPA, in 2018. And it is a kind of cookbook for how to make the virus that causes COVID-19, and the virus is called SARS-CoV-2.
And what's distinctive about SARS-CoV-2 is that it has something called a proteolytic cleavage site, and specifically something called a furin cleavage site, and it's just some pieces of the genome.
That make this thing damn infectious.
And what's interesting about it is that for this class of bat viruses, which are called beta coronaviruses, which is what SARS comes from and what COVID-19 comes from, for that class of viruses, and there are several hundred known, none of them in nature ever had that particular piece of the genome called- None?
None.
Other than- SARS-CoV-2.
And that piece of the genome, the furin cleavage site, was an object of research attention from 2005 because it was understood that if a virus were to have that, it would make the entry of the virus into human cells easier and would make the virus, therefore, infectious for humans.
SARS-1.
Which is the first outbreak of a virus like this in 2003 in Hong Kong, was most likely a natural virus that came from a farm animal.
And it was not so infectious.
It killed some thousands of people.
But with SARS-1, you got very, very sick for weeks before you were infectious to someone else.
And that meant that it was not so hard to stop by isolating people who had the symptoms.
With SARS-CoV-2, you are infectious even without any symptoms.
Sometimes you're completely asymptomatic.
So what's the difference of SARS-1 and SARS-CoV-2?
The fur and cleavage site.
And in 2005 already, so almost 20 years ago, That experiment was done that said, oh, take SARS-1, add in a furin cleavage site, this thing becomes really infectious.
And there are a series of experiments, 2005, 2009, 2011, that are called gain-of-function experiments, where you deliberately manipulate the virus to make it more infectious.
By 2015, we had a full-blown research program.
Funded by NIH, by Tony Fauci's unit, on beta coronaviruses, already with the lead scientists focusing on this furin cleavage site.
It's starting to get...
So they're starting to do more and more targeted experiments.
That probably came out of AMRID. It was probably some U.S. scientists either provoking or doing some crazy things or disgruntled or boosting up the DOD budget.
I don't know.
I don't know the answer to that.
I know that after that...
DOD put its budget through Tony Fauci's unit, which suddenly became the largest unit of NIH, and Fauci became the head of what is politely called biodefense.
But one only suspects that we're not supposed to do biowarfare.
And they say, well, it's for vaccines against biowarfare.
It's to defend against it.
It's to defend against natural outbreaks.
But what it is is a tremendously dangerous research program that involves a lot of manipulation of very dangerous pathogens.
And by 2015, the ability of scientists to manipulate these viruses was reaching astounding proportions.
And we've got a real genius who was part of this group named Ralph Baric at University of North Carolina, who is a genius.
And what he could do was if you gave him 30,000 letters of the DNA code, A, G, C, C, G, A, and so forth, and I mean give him the letters, he'll turn that into a live virus.
I think that's pretty damn remarkable.
In other words, you give him the designer virus, he'll give you the live virus.
And he created what's called a reverse genetic system.
To make these viruses and to put in pieces into the viruses with a technique which he also called no-seum, meaning you suture in a part, but you do it in a way that you can't identify that it was put in in the lab, so it's without the fingerprints, as it were.
And it's clear that this area of research picked up.
A tremendous amount of steam because a lot of American scientists were shouting, this is so damn dangerous, stop it.
And Fauci was saying, no, this is important.
This is really crucial.
We're going to continue to do this.
There was a brief moratorium at the end of the Obama period, and then the moratorium was lifted during the Trump administration.
And even during the moratorium period, we know that the research continued on many grants.
It's clear when you look closely at this that they were getting closer and closer to this insertion of the furin cleavage site into SARS-like viruses.
Now, in 2018 came this proposal.
As always, this was a highly classified proposal.
We only learned about it after the fact by a whistleblower.
We never even would have learned about it, even in all of the commotion of the pandemic, but for a whistleblower, a brave whistleblower in the Department of Defense who said the public needs to see this.
And when you look at the defuse proposal, really, you say, holy shit, because on page 10, it says, We have collected more than 180 previously unreported beta coronaviruses.
And on page 11, it says we're going to test them for whether they have a proteolytic cleavage site, which is a furin cleavage site.
And if they don't, we're going to insert a furin cleavage site into them.
It's the goddamn cookbook for how to make this virus.
Here comes the Defense Department turned it down, supposedly.
I mean, probably did.
And then comes the question, well, so what happened?
Well, the people that wrote that little cookbook said, not us.
We didn't do anything like that.
No, it got turned down.
Nothing to look at here.
And there are all...
I know because people have told me, oh, Jeff, it's not just that it got turned down.
They had done the work even before they submitted the grant proposal.
That's not uncommon in science, which is you do a lot of the work beforehand.
So I've heard that on good authority.
I can't verify it personally.
And there are so many strands now that say, yeah, something really screwy was going on.
For example, there's a very weird paper, weird to me, by Beric and the head of what's called Rocky Mountain Laboratory, which is a NIH laboratory under Fauci's authority, that reports this completely bizarre finding.
And the finding sounds very technical, but it says the...
Wuhan Institute of Virology Type 1 Virus Does Not Infect Egyptian Fruit Bats.
Okay, that's the title.
So you say, so what the hell is that?
What that is, is that obviously in 2019 and 2018, they were doing experiments using viruses from Wuhan in the Rocky Mountain Labs with their collection of bats.
Okay, so...
One theory, and the bats in Rocky Mountain Labs is called an Egyptian fruit bat.
It's not the kind of bat that carries this virus in China, which is in Yunnan, which is a different kind of bat.
But they tried it in Rocky Mountain Lab.
I scratched my head and said, what the hell?
We have Rocky Mountain Lab doing experiments with Wuhan viruses in Montana in NIH labs with Ralph Baric, who is one of the principal investigators of the Insert the Furin Cleavage site into the virus.
I'd like to know more about that.
Thank you.
Isn't that curious?
Then there are other scientists that have pieces of this puzzle.
So the answer is we don't know exactly.
One theory is that it was concocted in the U.S. And sent over to Wuhan, to this Wuhan Institute of Virology, for testing in their bat collection, which is the Chinese bats rather than the Egyptian fruit bats.
That's plausible.
That's one person's theory.
There are other theories that even a related research group of German and Dutch may have played a role because they have in Wuhan research.
When the virus broke out in that period at the end of 2019, early 2020, there's commotion among the scientists.
What the hell is this?
Where'd this come from?
Oh my God, did we do this?
How'd this escape?
Or whatever.
Nobody knows, of course.
So they start having secret calls and one of the...
Most important of these calls was on February 1st, 2020, that was then memorialized by one of the participants in a long memo, all of which became public through a Freedom of Information Act subsequently, because our government has lied to us about every single moment of this from the start, hasn't told us anything about any of this.
It's all whistleblowers.
Or Freedom of Information Act.
That's the only way we know any of what I'm describing to you right now.
No one has told the truth at all.
So, on the February 1st call, the scientists say, Oh, God, this looks like a lab stuff.
One of them says, I can't figure out how this could have ever come out of nature.
And they're all looking at the furin cleavage site because they know.
This group of scientists knows that's the object of research.
That's the goal.
It's never been seen before in a virus like this.
It's the signature right there.
I did this.
And four days later, that group authors the first draft of a paper called The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2.
It ran in Nature Medicine in March 2020. Which I think is considered one of the most credible medical journals, right?
When I read it, when it came out, it was, I think, the most cited paper in biology or in medicine by far in 2020. Everyone wanted to know where this virus came from.
I read it, and I went around knowingly telling everyone, oh, it's natural.
A call by several scientists to the editor, a very clever one, calling for its retraction because, this is interesting, all in the weeds, but it's like everything we're talking about, the nonstop line.
The paper was to an important extent honchoed by somebody named Jeremy Farrar, who at the time was the director of British...
Welcome Trust, which is a huge foundation that supports biomedical research.
And Farrar was working with Fauci to make it look like nature.
And so he was part of this group, but he's not a named author.
There's more details than you want to know, but at the bottom of the article, it thanks, welcome, trust.
Well, under the rules of science and under the rules of a journal, if there's a contributor who financed the thing but is not mentioned as a contributor to the article, that is per se a violation of conflict of interest standards.
And that wasn't revealed.
So just last week, A group of very illustrious virologists called for the retraction of this.
I've called for the retraction of it because it's an outright fraud because we have Slack messages and other email messages and other e-messaging that says, I don't really believe this.
And more than that, we're going to have another pandemic if it came out of a lab.
They're still doing this work.
It's not as if they said, oh.
Oh my God, we really blew it.
Now we stop gain-of-function research.
There's gain-of-function research going on all over the place.
And interestingly, Tucker, last year, almost like Monty Python, but it's so serious, Boston University put out a paper based on gain-of-function for manipulating SARS-CoV-2.
And NIH says, you didn't ask for approval before doing that experiment.
And Boston University says, we don't have to ask for approval.
It's not on your grant.
We're doing it like we want.
And it shows.
We got a shit show going on in this country right now.
If a university thinks it can do whatever it wants, and if NIH has a different opinion and we have no rules and they're doing work on dangerous pathogens, yeah, we're going to have another pandemic.
Even if this one didn't come from it, this line of work is really dangerous.
And who's watching it?
Well, we don't know because it's DOD. Because it's confidential.
Because no one tells us anything.
And interestingly, you know, now the House Investigation Committee is trying to get at some of this.
The Democrats completely surrounded Fauci and said, we don't want to have a look at this.
Is it strange to wake up one day and all of a sudden see actual threats to the existence of humanity right there?
Nuclear war, bio-warfare, possibly AI. Yeah.
But just right there.
I mean, what...
Big picture, what is this?
Did you ever think you would, after living in the most prosperous country in the world your entire life, find yourself in a place where the country you live in is basically causing the potential extinction of humanity?
You know, I think it's really true and important to understand that since 1945, we've been living this way.
And we don't know it.
We're barely aware of it.
But the ability to screw things up in this world is very high.
The ability to have terrible accidents.
Oops, where'd that virus come from?
The ability to have a nuclear war even by accident, but much less when you're in the face of your opponent and talking about defeating them and so forth.
A war between Two nuclear superpowers that we have normalized.
Yeah, we're not at war.
We're just feeding them all the weapons and the British, who are the worst at this, yeah, they can use the weapons wherever they want.
No constraint, no control.
We've been living this way, but we don't know it because, like everything else, the narrative doesn't permit it.
One day, Biden said in, I think it was the fall of 2022, you know, this is pretty dangerous.
We could be on a path to nuclear Armageddon.
He didn't say that in a speech to the American people because he doesn't give speeches to the American people.
He doesn't talk to the American people.
He doesn't have press conferences.
He said it at some fundraiser, as usual, and then someone reported it.
What was the reaction of the press the next day?
Almost to a paper, the reaction was, how dare he say these things?
How dare he scare the people?
How dare he say a word like Armageddon?
There was, I think, an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, if I remember correctly, this unforgivable, this kind of slip of the President of the United States.
So Biden, for a moment, blurted out the truth, no doubt by accident, no doubt because he was in some fundraiser.
Probably trying to impress some donor.
But the reaction wasn't, oh my God, what does this mean?
How do we consider this?
Let's go back and think about unprovoked, unprovoked, unprovoked, and maybe we could decide how to step a little bit back from the cliff.
And no, absolutely the opposite.
Completely the opposite.
And I've seen, I mean, not only you could have a pandemic that kills an estimated 20 million people and not really care to find out where it came from.
You can be on the brink of nuclear war.
We can have Ukraine shelling the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant.
Do you know our newspapers won't say that it's Ukraine shelling the power plant?
And Ukraine is shelling the nuclear power plant.
I can reveal as if it's a...
As if it's a surprise because the Russians are inside the power plant and the Ukrainians are trying to take back the power plant.
And so these shells come to the nuclear power plant.
And then our lovely newspapers say each side accuses the other of shelling the nuclear power plant.
And I happen to know, for the reasons that I know some of these things, that...
Of course, it's Ukraine shelling a plant that the Russians are inside of, not Russians shelling the plant that the...
But you can't get officialdom to say this.
You can't get the newspapers to say this.
That's pretty serious to be shelling a nuclear power plant.
So that leads to my last sincere question, which you may or may not answer, but you're telling the truth about things that are big things, the biggest things.
And in a world where you're just absolutely, as you've noted repeatedly and correctly, you're just not allowed to do that.
And you're telling the truth about People who don't care about the deaths of millions, who have caused the deaths of millions.
So are you worried because you do have credibility, you're not a crank, and your job and your career give you prima facie credibility, it's a big thing for you to say these things.
It's funny, in a fair world, in a meritocratic world, he'd be very famous, even if you disagree with everything he said, because he's so obviously smart.
He's astoundingly smart and astoundingly capable, and he's astoundingly someone that we should be speaking with to find an answer to this.
So the thing that makes it, if I were shouting in the wilderness and just felt it's insane, no one's listening, I'd have a very different reaction from the one that I actually carry day by day.
Almost everyone I talk to around the world is worried, shares...
The things we're talking about.
Understands the risks.
Makes you feel completely normal, not abnormal in any of this.
Says, please keep doing this.
Can you find a way to talk here or there?
I've spoken twice in the UN Security Council or testified twice in the UN Security Council in the last two years.
I want to make the diplomacy work because our lives depend on it.
And we We stopped all diplomacy in the United States, all of it, except what we call speaking with our friends and allies.
But diplomacy is not speaking with your friends and allies.
Diplomacy is speaking with your counterparts, even your adversaries.
That's what diplomacy is, and we've got to get it back.
I think people are worried and people are not happy campers and people do not agree with the foreign policy of...
This administration.
But people are also very confused because we don't hear anything clear, except when you interview President Putin and we get to hear what he says.
And think of, I mean, that was a monumental occasion, Tucker, and an extraordinarily important one.
But how rare it is.
And that's what made it also so extraordinary because you're not supposed to do that.
We're not supposed to listen to that.
So I think Americans are...
They know that something's wrong.
They don't know exactly how could they know what...
Exactly is wrong.
The level of trust in government is extraordinarily low.
That low trust has been, unfortunately, amply deserved because our government lies and lies and lies, and it doesn't even try to tell the truth anymore.
It tries to make a narrative.
So I think people sense something seriously wrong, but God, I hope...
You know, our lives are in the hands of a few people, and they better learn some prudence because they have not had it for a long time, and they don't even understand what it is to talk to a counterpart.
And my absolute core bottom line is until Biden speaks directly with Putin and starts talking, our lives are deeply at risk.
It's unimaginable to me that we are in open war as we are, and we're not even trying to find the path to peace right now.
And we have crazy statements that the president of Finland said, the path to peace is through the battlefield.
These people don't understand anything.
I was just going to mention two quick things in closing.
One, I spent a lot of my life studying the Cuban Missile Crisis and its aftermath, and I wrote a book about Kennedy's peace initiative in 1963, which was remarkable because he actually, in the height of the Cold War, reached to The Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with Khrushchev.
And they both knew we had to pull back from the brink because they both had had advisors that would have led us to nuclear annihilation.
And they were just completely, completely shocked as the two people who had saved the world but just barely how close we had come.
But one of the things that most people don't know about the Cuban Missile Crisis is that even when Kennedy and Khrushchev had reached an agreement, we almost had nuclear war.
After that event, because of the disabled Soviet submarine.
Because it's one of the most remarkable, little-known facts of modern history, and it's worth understanding.
After Kennedy and Khrushchev reached the agreement to end the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy...
Removing the nuclear weapons from Turkey and Soviet Union removing the nuclear weapons from Cuba and the US promising never again to try to invade Cuba.
There was a disabled Soviet sub at the bottom of the Caribbean that had been sent over during the crisis and it blew a gasket as it were.
Temperatures inside, 120 degrees, and the sailors fainting, and the ship deeply disabled.
And this was 1962, so the communications did not exist.
The ship was out of communication.
They had no idea what was going on.
So they decided to surface, and as they surfaced, American Navy pilots were dropping charges on the sub.
Not absolutely sure, but one story is that the Navy pilot, one Navy pilot for fun, was dropping live grenades on the sub as it was surfacing rather than depth charges.
And the pilot thought that they were under attack and that there was a war above the surface.
Now, this was the lead sub of a squadron of seven in the Caribbean.
And it was the one sub in that squadron that had nuclear-tipped torpedoes.
And under U.S. doctrine, any attack by a nuclear weapon was to be met by the full force of the U.S. nuclear arsenal with an attack across the Soviet Union, China, and all of the Eastern European countries.
Estimate 700 million dead.
And that was to happen with any nuclear attack.
And Curtis LeMay was the head of the US Air Force at the time, and he couldn't wait.
So what happened was this skipper, the commander of the vessel, ordered the nuclear torpedo into the torpedo bay to be fired.
Because he thought the ship was under attack.
And by miracle, a guy named Arkhipov, who was the person who saved the world, whose name nobody knows, and I'm pretty sure I have the name right, was a party official that had a higher rank than the ship's captain.
And he countermanded the order at the last moment, and the ship surfaced, and they found out there was no war and no crisis, and that was the end of it.
And we came within a moment of a full nuclear annihilation.
Now, that's a true story.
If people want to read about it in detail.
The most remarkable book about this is a book by the late historian Martin Sherwin called Gambling with Armageddon, which is an absolutely phenomenal work.
And Martin Sherwin, as some people may recall, is the historian who's the co-author of Oppenheimer, which became the screenplay.
He's a wonderful historian who died a few years ago.
And he tells this story in Unbelievable, riveting detail.
Now, I take this not only as a literal event, but as a metaphor for our reality, which is something can always go wrong.
Stay away from the cliff.
Exactly.
Stay away from the cliff.
This is how close we are.
Talk to President Putin.
Negotiate with China.
Make a two-state solution to stop the war in the Middle East.
Stop carrying on like you run the world because you don't.