Jeffrey Sachs traces Ukraine’s war to the 1994 U.S. NATO expansion—breaking Gorbachev’s assurances—and the 2002 ABM Treaty collapse, calling it a "Deep State Project" that forced Putin’s hand. He praises Trump’s Putin call as the first acknowledgment Ukraine won’t join NATO, contrasting Biden’s failed arrogance with Trump’s ceasefire envoy Steve Witkoff’s success in Israel. Gabbard’s confirmation as DNI marks a rare honest voice, despite Democratic opposition. Sachs warns U.S. military overreach risks dollar dominance and domestic decline, framing Trump’s peace push as the only path to stability and economic revival. [Automatically generated summary]
Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce someone who I consider one of the smartest people I know and whose understanding of the world is matched only by his ability to synthesize huge themes and illustrate them with precise detail.
Someone who's traveled the world for 40 years, a man who not only writes about the leaders of the world but knows them personally, Professor Jeffrey Sachs.
36 years ago, 1989. He was just getting out of jail at that point.
No, yeah, they were just opening up, and this young guy was starting a political party, and he gave me a call, and we sat in my backyard in Boston for a few hours, and I thought, okay, this guy's going to be prime minister for most of the next 36 years.
It was very impressive then, and very impressive now.
So you heard his analysis, I think, of where we are with the war in Ukraine, election of Trump, on the basis, in part, of his promise to try to end this if he can.
You saw the new Secretary of Defense say, no, we're not going to support Ukraine's entry into NATO. Where are we now?
You know, yesterday was the most important day for peace in maybe decades, actually.
This war in Ukraine resulted from a very bad idea of the United States taken in 1994. It's a project.
The project was a project to expand NATO forever, anywhere.
Just keep moving east.
Keep moving not only to the first wave, which was the prime minister's country, Hungary, Czech Republic, and Slovakia, but then move eastward, closer to the former Soviet Union, into the former Soviet Union, surround Russia in the Black Sea region.
Go all the way to a little country in the South Caucasus, Georgia.
It was mind-boggling.
Clinton signed on to that in 1994. It became what we call the Deep State Project, meaning it didn't really matter who the president was.
Each president would come and basically would be informed.
NATO's moving eastward.
You're part of that process.
So Clinton started it in 1994. And as Prime Minister Orban said, he mentioned briefly, in 1990, on February 9th, 1990, in unequivocal, clear as can be terms, the United States had said to President Mikhail Gorbachev, NATO will not move one inch eastward.
And if you have any doubt about it, All the documents are now online, available.
You can scrutinize everything.
Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the German foreign minister, said the same thing, same day.
He's on tape, actually, explaining, no, no, I don't just mean within eastern Germany, I mean anywhere to the east.
Clinton being Clinton, and the U.S. deep state being the U.S. deep state, started this project in 1980. They already had the idea, by the way, in 1991-92, as soon as the Soviet Union ended.
Aha, now we move.
Now we move eastward.
Now we control everything.
Now we are the sole superpower.
So this has gone on for 30 years.
And each president got into it under George Bush Jr. Seven more countries were added.
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, and Romania in 2004. Then in 2007, President Putin said at the summit that's taking place right now, the Munich Security Summit, said, stop.
You told us no expansion, not an eastward expansion, even an inch, you said.
I don't think our president, Donald Trump, would much like to see China and Russia building their military bases up from Central America.
You know, this was how the Russians saw this.
Why are you coming to our border when you told us you weren't going to move?
And there was one other thing that was very important in this, which is...
Probably the most decisive thing and almost not even recognized.
In 2002, the US did something really, really, really destabilizing.
And that is it unilaterally left the anti-ballistic missile treaty.
That was a core strategy.
To stop a nuclear war between the two superpowers, because what ABM had done for 30 years was to say, we each have deterrence.
If you strike us, we can strike back.
We'll limit our anti-ballistic missiles so that both sides maintain deterrence.
In 2002, the United States unilaterally, unprovoked, Walked out of ABM, said, no, no, we're not going to do it anymore.
We're going to put anti-ballistic missile systems into Russia's bordering territories.
The Russians said, are you kidding?
The U.S. said, what's your problem?
We do what we want.
So in 2007, Putin said, stop already.
In 2008, George Bush Jr. doubled down as Americans...
Typically do.
And said, okay, now we're moving to Ukraine and to Georgia.
That was why this war occurred.
But Ukraine had one more sliver of life, and that was that they elected a president in 2010 that didn't want to be part of NATO. And the public didn't want to be part of NATO. Why?
Because they knew this is very dangerous.
Why get into this provocative situation?
His name was Viktor Yanukovych.
Americans don't like neutrality, but Yanukovych was trying to be neutral between the two sides.
And the U.S. played a rather unfortunate role on February 22, 2014, in a violent overthrow of this.
And that's when the war started.
And it's been now 10 years, and no president has told the truth until yesterday, by the way.
Yesterday is a historic day.
Because a call took place between President Putin and President Trump.
We don't know if there had been a short call beforehand between the two of them, but there was no call by Biden and Putin.
With war going on for three years, no call.
And now there was a call, and the readout from the American side was excellent.
What President Trump said in the call was, we respect Russia.
We hear Russia's concerns.
We fought on the same side in World War II. Nice point, by the way.
True.
Russia lost, Soviet Union lost 27 million people in World War II and was an ally of the United States.
A fact that wasn't mentioned for years and years and years by President Biden.
And then the defense secretary, Hegseth, the new defense secretary, said yesterday the truth.
For the first time, that Ukraine is not going to join NATO. This is the basis for peace.
This is absolutely the basis for peace.
And they couldn't tell the truth for three decades.
They could not admit what any of us knew, because I've been around.
This region for 36 years in detail.
I sat with Boris Yeltsin.
I sat with Mikhail Gorbachev.
But the Americans would not tell the truth publicly until yesterday.
That this was so provocative, it was a game.
They thought they'd win the game.
I don't know how many people here play or played in their childhood the game of risk.
The game of risk was a big game for me.
You wanted your peace on every part of the world map.
That was the game.
When you took over the whole world, world hegemony we now call it, you won.
They're playing that game until this administration.
So the three important things have happened, in my view, in this administration so far.
First, our new Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, told...
The fundamental truth.
We are in a multipolar world.
First time the sentence was uttered, he told the truth.
What does it mean?
The American mindset for 30 years was, we run the show.
Marco Rubio said, well, we don't run the show.
We live with other powerful countries.
Great start.
Second and third were the two events yesterday.
So I'm feeling about peace.
That this is really something that happened yesterday.
If they follow through, we know what Washington is like.
There's every crazy idea swarming still.
A project of 30 years doesn't go down necessarily in one phone call or one statement by the Secretary of Defense.
But it's pretty important that it was said so publicly and so visibly.
And of course, Europe is in a tizzy because Europe signed on to the U.S. project.
All these politicians in Europe are there where they are because they were part of the U.S. project.
And now the U.S. is reversing its project.
And you didn't tell us and you didn't.
What are we supposed to do?
We're way out there.
And so they're completely befuddled.
And I have to say.
I told them personally.
Many of these leaders, and I mean personally, one by one, for years, you are going to get trapped this way.
Because this project doesn't work.
It doesn't make sense.
It's a game for the Americans, but it's life and death for the Russians.
So it cannot be won by the American side.
It's impossible.
And I tried to tell them, and nobody in Europe either had the clarity, Or the guts to see it, except the person that preceded me in this seat, Prime Minister Orban, because he was completely clear about this from the first day.
Now others are starting, but even till today, the Europeans can't get it because they're so deeply invested in something that makes no sense.
They should have said, Russia's big, it lives near us, let's cooperate.
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I think one of the reasons we wound up in this position, we meaning the United States, but also Europe, is there's a habit of speech which reflects a habit of mind, which is an unwillingness to engage with ideas and instead resort immediately to attacking the other person on the basis of motive.
And you saw this with Orban.
You're a Russian stooge or whatever, and it was especially hilarious, as he explained.
He's the opposite of a Russian stooge, of course, lifelong.
This country was occupied by the Russians.
You do see it also in the United States, and it makes it kind of impossible to have a rational conversation about it.
I know you've been the butt of this, too, not whining about it, but it's like, is there even a culture in our foreign policy establishment of having rational conversations to the point where we can solve problems like this?
But I have to say that in 1990-91, we had the chance for global peace, really for global peace.
That doomsday clock of the atomic scientists, which I like to refer to so much, which measures how close or far are we from nuclear war, was the farthest away it was ever in its history.
The Cold War had ended.
So I was there as a young economist who actually knew something about economic stabilization.
And I made proposals.
And interestingly, just as a footnote, I advised the Polish government in 1989. Long story, but suddenly as a kid I happened to be there and I helped write their plan.
Everything I recommended for Poland was immediately accepted by the White House.
It's a very odd thing.
In fact, I went one day, I had an idea of mobilizing some finance to help Poland stabilize, and I called the Polish finance minister, said, do you mind if I try to raise a billion dollars for you today, which was a lot of money in those days.
He said, if you raise a billion dollars, that would be great.
So I called Bob Dole, our Senate Majority Leader, whom I knew because of the Poland work that I was doing.
And he invited me immediately into his office.
And he said, come back in an hour.
So I came back in an hour.
This was September 1989. And who was sitting there?
General Brent Scowcroft.
Okay, he was the general who was our national security advisor.
I was a kid.
So it was a little bit interesting moment.
And he, Senator Dole, said to me, explain to General Scowcroft your idea.
So I handed him the paper.
This is how you do financial stabilization.
And here's how you stabilize the currency.
And Scowcroft looked at it and said, well, will this work?
And I said, General, this will work.
And Dole led me out of the office and said, call me back later in the day.
So at 5 p.m.
I called, and Dole said, the White House has called.
Tell your friends you have the $1 billion.
So I raised a billion dollars that day.
It was good.
So, no, no.
It had nothing to do with me.
Because it was the right idea.
The Polish Zloty stabilized.
I did a good thing.
I was a technically equipped, sophisticated manager of a financial stabilization, or not manager, but advisor on the financial stabilization.
Okay.
Then, in 1991, I recommended the same thing for Gorbachev and for this creaking, collapsing.
Soviet Union.
Gorbachev wanted to have elections in all of the republics, and he wanted to democratize and stabilize.
So, okay, I know something about that, Mr. President.
And so we met in the Harvard Kennedy School, and there were one, two, three, four, five of us, a little team.
One of them was the chief economic advisor of Gorbachev.
One was the dean of the Kennedy School.
One became a very senior diplomat, Bob Blackwell, that I deal with.
One was a very senior economist at MIT, Stanley Fischer.
We wrote a plan for how the Soviet Union could stabilize, and I did the chapter on the financing.
Basically the same thing that I had said for Poland.
It was completely rejected within about 12 hours in Washington.
I hated this for the next 30 years, I have to tell you, because we just could not take yes for an answer.
A couple of months ago, someone sent me from the archives, the first time that I'd ever seen it, the National Security Council minutes rejecting the proposal.
Fascinating to read, because that's your life before your eyes, watching this.
There was a guy named Dick Darman who was a former colleague of mine.
The technical term, I don't think I can say it in mixed company, actually.
You know, the Roman Empire is always a great story for us.
And I compare the Ukraine war to the Battle of the Tutenberg Forest, which is A.D. 9. And in A.D. 9, the Roman Empire reached its limits on the Rhine.
It tried to conquer the Germanic tribes in 9 A.D. They were defeated under Augustus.
And there were sporadic border things from then on, but they never tried again.
They had hundreds of years where that just wasn't their business.
It was very, very smart.
Hadrian, in the second century AD, was the emperor at the maximum extent of the Roman Empire.
And he basically wanted stability across the borderlines.
And this was the prudence of the empire.
Alexander was very different 400 years earlier.
He wanted to conquer the whole world.
There was no limit.
Finally, his soldiers told him, if you go any further, we're...
Killing you.
We've got to go home, because they were already beyond the Indus River.
But the Romans said, no, we're going to put some boundaries, we're going to keep the borders, and we're going to not go beyond our means or our needs.
I hope what happened yesterday was a good example of that.
Trump and Hegseth did yesterday, if they follow through, if the deep state doesn't undermine it, if some crazy thing doesn't happen, said, we don't need to be in Ukraine with NATO. We don't need to be.
It's for us.
It's nothing.
And it doesn't mean that Russia's now going to invade Western Europe.
What are the chances that some, you said, unless the deep state doesn't make some crazy thing happens?
I would note that for a good part of the presidential campaign, the deep state was telling the candidate, Donald Trump, that the state of Iran is trying to kill you, which as far as I know is totally untrue, by the way.
But they were telling him that in order to prepare him to attack Iran, which they're still trying to do.
So we know that this kind of deception is just a feature of it.
How hard will people invested in the Ukraine war go?
To what lengths will they go to continue this, do you think?
Iraq, 2003. I mean, there were just too many wars.
So the question is, can we learn and can the president keep the foot on the brake?
If he does, he will have an extremely successful administration.
He, I think, understands that all of Netanyahu's...
Pleading, and this has been 30 years also, this is another project for the U.S. to go to war with Iran is just the worst idea imaginable, would be a disaster.
And so I think President Trump understands that.
I think he understands that a war with China would be a complete disaster, which it would be, though there's a lot of war parties around on that.
The funny thing about our time right now, not funny, the wonderful thing about our time right now is that we're in the midst of the biggest technological boom in the history of the world.
So, so many good things could happen in the next 10 to 20 years.
President Trump has used the expression, which I fully subscribe to, a golden age.
We could have it.
A golden age is not war.
A golden age is investing in all this wonderful technology so that we can have health care that works, education systems that work, infrastructure that works.
It would be nice if the United States even had one kilometer of fast rail, just saying.
China just completed its 50,000th kilometer of fast rail.
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They are not good for you.
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It does feel, I'm glad that you are saying this, because it does feel like we're not even a month into the Trump administration.
I don't think anybody agrees with everything of anyone else's program, but clearly this is a massive departure from what we had, much more than I thought.
I feel like I watch pretty closely.
I'm amazed by...
The ambition of what they're doing.
And it does feel like the only way to stop this, Tulsi Gabbard just confirmed yesterday.
And if, and we had news today, please, inshallah, that the ceasefire will continue on Saturday because more hostages will be released, more exchanges will take place, and there won't be a return.
Really, inshallah, if it happens and an outbreak of war is, I think Trump's instincts are there.
And what he says, we didn't even hear Biden or other presidents say.
President Trump said many times about Ukraine, too many people are dying.
You didn't even hear those words.
I mean, the idea that war involved, by the way, maybe a million Ukrainians dead or seriously wounded, we're going to find out in the next months because finally we'll see what reality is, not what the propaganda is.
But it's horrible what's happened.
So that instinct is essential.
And there are several places where everything could be derailed.
This region is one of them.
Ukraine is another.
South China and East China Sea is the third.
And if the president gets it and has the basic idea we live together in respect with other countries, The golden age will come.
I think, and I'd love your view of this, I think of all the amazing things I've seen in the last three and a half weeks, maybe the most amazing is the emergence of Steve Wyckoff, who I will say I know personally and like enormously, but who was a real estate guy.
All of a sudden Trump appoints him an envoy, sort of over and above massive stable diplomats.
We have professional diplomats at the State Department.
To go do, you know, effect a ceasefire here in this region.
And then sends him over to Russia and he winds up meeting with Putin apparently for several hours.
He needs a capable guy that can go and read the riot act and say this is no joke and we're going to have it.
And that is basically what good diplomacy is.
Again, in the U.S. system, of course, we've got the deep state who tell presidents what to do.
We've got lobbies.
We've got all sorts of things.
But a president's true job is to lead.
And if you don't have a president compos mentis, like I think we didn't have in the United States, you get war breaking out everywhere, like we had in the last two years.
Or if you have a president that is poorly directed or poorly, you know, really doesn't get it.
And Clinton was an inconsequential president, in my opinion, because he is so easily swayed.
He just made so many lousy decisions.
George Bush Jr. listened to Cheney, who was really a nonstop warmonger.
And so on.
If a president gets the idea, I want peace because this war is really destructive of everything else I'm trying to do, then you can have peace, actually.
It's possible.
No one is going to attack the United States.
So peace depends on us.
No one is attacking us.
China is not about to invade the United States.
Russia's not going to attack the United States.
Mexico and Canada are not going to attack the United States.
Panama's not going to attack the United States.
Greenland's not going to attack the United States.
I'm sorry to make, I don't want to go the whole list, but I'm just confident about this.
So if the president wants peace, he'll get it.
If he gets peace, Believe me, he'll get all the other things that he wants, like low inflation, being able to pass the budget that he wants, getting his tax policies that he wants.
But if there's war, he ain't gonna get any of it.
That's the basic point.
And, you know, I voted Democratic in 2020. I voted for Biden.
And Biden, I've had a lot of experience with governments over the last 45 years, so I've watched them, and I think I understand a lot of them.
And Biden, in the first days, said stupid things about foreign policy.
The world is divided between this and this and blah, blah, blah.
And you say, oh my God, the guy doesn't get it.
He didn't get it at all.
And I told many Democratic leaders when they still talk to me, now they don't talk to me and I don't talk to them.
You're going to do something completely, almost impossible in American politics, which is you're going to lose on the basis of foreign policy.
Because Americans don't vote on foreign policy.
And I said, your foreign policy is so bad, this is going to bring you down.
And in fact, the Democrats lost their heads in this.
And they were so intent on defeating Trump that no matter what, Biden said, well, we have to back him up 100% as he led them off to war and complicity in the war here and the Ukraine war and tensions with China and all the rest.
It created a milieu of so much unhappiness in the United States, anxiety, higher inflation, big budget deficits, that the public said, no, we don't like this.
So, I guess the question is, the opposition, you've alluded to the deep state, but there's also the out in the open state.
You know, the Congress, for example, the other party, the Democratic Party, does Trump's success, not just in the election, winning the popular vote, but in affecting peace, which is actually popular with people, does that change their views on foreign policy?
Like, does he bring people with him?
Or does he stand alone between the two parties as he did in the first time?
Look, this is very early days because we're just a little over three weeks into this.
Turns into policy, which it could.
And the Ukraine war ends soon, which it could.
You're going to see everybody changing their views.
Oh, I didn't support that.
Peace is great.
The European leaders are going to be saying the opposite of what they're saying right now.
Look, in 100 politicians, anyway, three think.
The rest line up somewhere, tactically.
So, yes, they will change their view.
They'll complain about other things.
That's their job.
They're in the opposition.
But this war was a disastrous, stupid project that went awry, should have ended, makes no sense.
And if Trump pulls it off, as he can, if he's resolute now and clear-minded and Whitcoff does his work, because he'll be the one to do it, it looks like, and he does his work, then...
This won't be talked about or complained about.
This will pass into history as just another one of those blunders.
I mean, we don't talk about the 2003 Iraq War or the 20 years waste in Afghanistan or so many, Libya, so many completely ridiculous projects that America's been involved in for no conceivable reason other than these weird game of risk ideas.
We've got to own that space on the board.
Turns out the world and that game board are rather different.
But if Trump pulls this off, what he needs, I think, and what we need to understand is the American scene, it ain't great in general.
The budget deficit is enormous.
The fragility of society is actually quite significant.
There is lots of depression, lots of violence, lots of problems that haven't been addressed for 30 years.
Big, big budget deficit.
Huge.
Can't be solved.
With all due respect to Elon, the budget deficit has very little to do with the size of the civil service.
That's not where the budget deficit comes from.
That's not where the spending comes from.
Spending comes from 750 overseas military bases, from wars, from massive outlays, of course, on pensions, on health care, on interest payments, on the debt, and so forth.
And war derails all of that.
With a buffer.
We're not where the US dollar is king forever.
It's almost the opposite, by the way, although it's not so clear to people.
But 10 years from now, it's going to be a completely different international monetary scene from the one that we have now.
The Renminbi is going to play a completely different role.
And the way that international settlements will be done is completely different.
If you watch like I do, you see all of the stitching together of a new system taking shape.
So the U.S. does not have this great room for maneuver and it's all a game and we can do this and we can do that.
So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing this show.
On one level, that's not surprising.
That's what they do.
But on another level, it's shocking.
With everything that's going on in the world right now, all the change taking place in our economy and our politics, with the wars on the cusp of fighting right now.
Google has decided you should have less information rather than more.
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It's immoral.
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So in September, we went across the country, coast to coast, 17 different cities on a nationwide live tour, and it was amazing.
We brought the entire staff with us like we always do because we all work together for so long and enjoy traveling together.
And one of our producers is a documentary filmmaker.
And so he decided to make a documentary film about our trip, a full month across America with some of the most interesting people around.
Different people join us every single night.
Bon Gino and Russell Brand and Bobby Kennedy and J.D. Vance and Donald Trump, etc., etc.
We had the best time, and the fruit of that is a documentary called On the Road, the Tucker Carlson Live Tour, which is available right now on TCN. On the Road, Tucker Carlson Live Tour is hilarious.