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June 9, 2023 - RFK Jr. The Defender
36:27
Jeffrey Sachs On China

Jeffrey Sachs discusses China and the world peace and prosperity with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in this episode. Jeffrey David Sachs is an American economist, academic, public policy analyst, and former director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, where he holds the title of University Professor. He is known for his work on sustainable development, economic development, and the fight to end poverty.

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Hey, everybody.
I've got my friend Jeffrey Sachs back on here as one of my heroes.
And Jeffrey Sachs is an American economist, academic, public policy analyst, and former director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, where he holds the title of university professor.
He's known for his work on sustainable development and economic development and the fight to end poverty.
I just read the first paragraph of a long Wikipedia piece, and that's all I'm going to give because you've been on here before and people know who you are.
Great to be with you again.
I know, you know, I know this is kind of an informal discussion, and we both kind of booked this at the last minute.
But I wanted to, I really want to talk to you about China.
But before we talk, before we came online, you were telling me that, because I was saying to you that you wrote a beautiful synopsis of the Ukraine war, which I tweeted about.
I didn't want to talk to you today about the Ukraine, because I've done so many shows on it that I think the listeners are going to get tired of it.
And your take on the war is...
Basically identical to mine, but you wrote this very, very, really useful synopsis that then you publish on your website and I tweeted and it kind of had the whole setup about, you know, the provocations that led up to the war and how the principal doyans, the most respected graybeards of American foreign policy in both political parties.
George Cannon, who, you know, who is the architect of the containment policy.
Bill Perry, who was the, who was Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense, who threatened to resign because he saw that we were provoking the Russians by moving NATO so close.
And then Bill Burns, who was the ambassador of Russia, who said this, you know, you can't...
And is now the CIA director, after all.
And he wrote that memo in 2008.
And he said, you know, you are going to provoke the Russians to war.
This is a line that you can't be crossed.
The title of his email was, Nyet means nyet.
You are crossing red lines here.
And you go back to Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was kind of the figurehead of the neocon movement.
Who, after we made the promises in 1991 and 1992, in exchange for Russia moving all of its troops out of East Germany and us unifying East Germany under NATO and promising we won't move NATO one inch to the east.
And then Brzezinski does this plan, publishes this plan in 1997 that lays out the rollout about how we're going to encircle Russia with NATO. And all these guys, the most respected people, are saying, you can't do that.
You've got to stop treating Russia like an enemy, or she's going to become an enemy.
It's going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, and you're going to provoke her.
You know, this was before Putin was in there, they were saying.
So you laid it out perfectly in this.
And you and I were talking, and you told me, I said, it's kind of a perfect editorial length.
It's about 800 words, right?
And you said, yeah, I wrote it for the New York Times, and that's the length that the Times asked you to do, 750 to 800.
You said that you gave it the Times, and you went in and argued with their editorial board.
They didn't want to hear you.
And I've had those kind of arguments with them on other issues.
It's just like talking to a wall.
And they're, you know, respectful, but, you know, it's like the words bounce off of them.
They're impervious to logic, to reason, to facts, to anything.
It's really extraordinary because these are some of the most intelligent, thoughtful people in the world, supposedly.
And yet logic has no impact on them.
They're armored against it.
And you said that then, they said, well, you can do an op-ed.
So you did the op-ed.
And they edited it.
They screw with it, as they always did.
And then, you know, at the last minute, they tell you, we're not going to go with it.
No, but the funny thing, by the way, I did the op-ed.
It was accepted.
We did some edits.
I thought the edits were fine.
They sent it back in the New York Times font.
That's the stage we were at.
We were at the stage where you press the button and it goes into the paper.
So it was all there.
I felt pretty good.
In fact, I have to say my family was amazed.
They're going to run your thing?
And I said, yeah, we really talked.
They disagreed, but they're going to run it.
And then the last moment when it's already in New York Times setting...
The editor writes me, oh, I have bad news.
Sorry, we're not going to run it.
One of our regular contributors is going to say something like this.
I don't want to clog the pages.
So it was, whoa, that's a little weird.
Like a story that relates to global survival.
You couldn't run one guest essay of a few hundred words in addition after accepting it.
So I said, who is it?
Silence.
So I looked day after day.
You know, who's this contributor that's saying that the war was provoked by NATO? Nothing like it.
Nothing like it.
So days go by.
You know, I write to them.
I'm still searching.
Who's your contributor?
Because now we're, you know, 10 days later.
I don't see anything like this.
And then a couple days ago, there was another unbelievably aggressive, we gotta get them the F-16s, another escalation, you know, on the road to what?
To Armageddon?
And so I said, oh, is that the piece?
You know, and of course they don't answer that also.
In other words, they just won't have a public debate.
That's it.
Not in their pages.
That's it.
They just want to feed a line and they don't want to hear any other lines, even for public discussion.
And this is an op-ed page.
It's not their policy.
It's just to have a public discussion.
You know, I happen to know a little bit about this.
I was actually an economic advisor to Gorbachev.
I was an economic advisor to Yeltsin.
I was an economic advisor to President Kuchma, the first president of independent Ukraine.
I was a friend of President Yushchenko, the second president of independent Ukraine.
I've been called to give them advice on things.
I'm following this for 30 years.
And I asked for 700 words.
No way!
Because they don't want any public debate, by the way, about the obvious.
And interestingly, you know, it's quite interesting.
Somebody wrote to me a couple days ago, asked me a question.
Then he wrote back again saying, by the way, Professor Sachs, I was on the Italian negotiating group in the Bucharest NATO summit in 2008, which was when Bush pushed the statement by NATO that Ukraine would become a NATO member.
And I know what this guy told me, said we were aghast.
You know, all the Europeans, the French, the Germans, the Italians, they knew this was a terrible thing.
And he wrote to me a couple days ago just to describe what I knew already in 2008 because my European friends in high position said, what's your president doing with this provocation?
So these are obvious things.
Our own diplomats said it.
We made commitments.
The Europeans said it.
But there's a silence on it in this country.
Even as we're heading towards more escalation, more than 100 billion already sent To this disaster, so many people losing their lives, and we don't have a public debate in our mainstream press, mainstream media, in fact.
I want to get back to the New York Times in a minute, but why do you think Obama came in as kind of a peace president, and why do you think that he went along with this in 2000?
You know...
I really think, and I learned a lot by studying your uncle's administration and wrote a book about his peace initiatives in 1963, which I think were the most important initiatives on peace in modern times when President Kennedy negotiated the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
And the thing that I really felt after a very deep dive in U.S. foreign policymaking is that A president has one main job in foreign policy, and that is to keep the foot on the brakes.
Because this war machine is always revving.
The military industrial complex is always cooking up new things.
The intelligence agencies and their covert operations are always cooking up new things.
And you got to keep your foot on the brake.
And President Kennedy learned it after the Bay of Pigs.
He saw the disaster.
And you know, Obama had his foot on the brakes on a couple of things, but he lifted his foot off the brakes on many things also, trying to overthrow the Syrian government, a disaster, being talked into the disaster of overthrowing the Libyan government and engulfing that country in 10 years of civil war that's not over yet.
And he presided over the U.S. role in the overthrow of the Ukrainian president.
So there's a lot there.
Obama did say we should negotiate with Iran, and that takes a lot of bravery in Washington because there's a lot of forces against that.
But he took his foot off the brake because I don't think he had the experience and he didn't understand.
That's his real job.
Stop the wars.
Stop the new wars.
Stop the covert operations.
They're dangerous.
Don't overthrow the Ukrainian president, for heaven's sake.
And, you know, his Secretary of State, that's another matter.
She didn't feel that way.
She loved all of this stuff.
I just listened to her talk recently.
And, you know, this is really where we're at.
We've got a war machine here.
And, you know, war machines want to be used.
They want to bulk up.
They want to try new weapons.
They want to buy new armaments.
They want to open new bases.
And a president, a smart president, knows to say, No!
Stop!
You're going to get us into a lot of trouble.
And Obama did know, by the way, in 2014, don't go more deeply.
Because he said in an interview, when he got attacked for it, he said, Russia has escalatory dominance.
Meaning, whatever we do in Ukraine, they care a hell of a lot more about this than we do.
And they will just keep escalating to not have NATO along their 2,000-kilometer border.
And so whatever we start, it's not going to end well.
So he said, at least don't start this.
But...
President Biden doesn't get that.
They just keep escalating step by step.
They say, we're not going to do this, then they do it.
We're not going to do this, then they do it.
We're not going to have F-16s, then they do it.
And now we have the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley, saying, oh, this war could go on for decades.
Are you kidding?
By the way, that was the first thing I wrote, and I tried to tell the Ukrainians, This is a terrible idea for you.
Look at Afghanistan.
That's what America does.
It gets in there.
War that just never ends.
Because they don't know how to end it.
And this is what's going to happen to you.
And now they say these are grown-ups, supposedly.
Grown-ups saying, oh yeah, the war could go on for...
Instead of saying, we've got to find a way to peace.
Which is absolutely possible.
That's really the story of this thing.
You mentioned about my uncle discovering it during the Bay of Pigs, which he was very suspicious about.
He didn't want to do it.
He thought, you know, why are we going in there?
There were no Russians in Cuba at that time.
It was just a country that had chosen a different form of government that we didn't like.
But, you know, in his view, it was not the U.S. job to go in there and correct it.
You know, that was the job of the Cuban people.
And they talked him into it through using a variety of subterfuges and lies.
But afterward, when those men were dying on the beach, he felt so devastated by that that he considered resigning.
And he told that to his father.
And his father said, it's the best thing that could have ever happened to you because it happened early and now you know who you're dealing with.
And, you know, he's been 10,000 days of his administration saying no to those guys.
And by the way, he took full responsibility for it in that famous line that success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan.
And he said, I stand here.
This was my responsibility.
And it was a shocking thing.
And he found out that My God, he found out that there really is a lot that goes on in the U.S. war machine that is hard to control, really hard to control.
Let's talk, because I know you don't have that much time either.
I want to talk about China and that the Republicans and Democrats are split on China.
The Democrats seem to be.
The whole thing is kind of incoherent and opaque.
The Democrats seem to be, you know, wanting to be super friendly to China and the Goldman Sachs people who have invested.
Microsoft is really, at this point, a Chinese company.
Its whole research division in China is utterly dependent on China for its survival and cannot survive if China cuts it off.
And so you have a lot of the tech people who are pro-Democratic or tend to be Democrat, who kind of almost have blinders on about the adversarial posture that Republicans believe China is.
And, you know, my take is, which is kind of an amateur take, but we should not be de-escalating.
We are going to have to compete with the Chinese on some And it's better to compete with them on an economic landscape than it is on a military landscape.
China does not want to go to war with us.
It does not want to have World War III in Taiwan.
And that our military response to all of their kind of expansion and their ambitions, their muscle flexing, is heading us in that direction, which would be a calamity for the globe.
And I'm not scared about competing with the Chinese head-to-head on economics.
And to me, that's where we should be headed.
So let's hear what you have to say about that.
I'm on a very cooperation end on all the China issues.
And let me explain why.
First, I've been going to China now for 42 years, a lot.
I started in 1981, just after The end of the Cultural Revolution and Deng Xiaoping had just come to power.
China was impoverished and I saw China in its impoverished condition.
And I've been going frequently since then for four decades.
And China has developed with tremendous success through an incredible amount of hard work, high saving, smart policies, And catching up, basically.
And to my take, and I've studied this now really in depth for a long time, there's a view in the U.S., which I think is a deeply wrong view, which is, well, they must have cheated to do what they did.
I do not think that is right.
They're very smart, industrious, hardworking, high-saving, and they basically followed a model of rapid industrialization that Japan had pioneered actually at the end of the 19th century, and then after World War II, when everything was destroyed, Japan did it again 25 years ahead of China starting.
So I'm impressed.
Now, I have to also say I've trained dozens of Chinese students who are now in senior levels of government or the industry and so forth.
I liked them when they were my students.
I like them now.
I have personal relations of...
Very friendly and extensive professional relations.
And it's all normal to me that this is not an enemy.
This is a country that was poor.
It's now still, by U.S. standards, way behind the United States in per capita income.
So this is not a rich country.
It's probably about one third of the U.S. per person income.
But the population's large, so it's four times larger than the US. So that means that the overall size of the economy by one kind of measure called Purchasing Power Parity.
They're bigger by another kind of measure.
Market prices, they're smaller.
But they're not rich.
They're still developing.
And then I've written a lot of books about their history and studied it.
And the basic point, Bobby, is that, you know, for hundreds of years, China was great world leader.
But that goes back a thousand years ago.
And the Song Dynasty was really impressive.
One thousand years ago, then China was invaded by the Mongols.
And I won't go through a thousand years of history, except to say that famously, they had a great fleet in the early 1400s that basically, unbelievably, toured the Indian Ocean all the way to East Africa, to India, to all the ports of the Indian Ocean. to India, to all the ports of the Indian Ocean.
And then in 1434, and probably the worst policy move in the history of world economy, and I'll put it that way, They closed up the fleet.
They said, we're not so interested in trade.
We're pretty self-sufficient.
And while they never closed entirely, China basically gave up its leadership, say in naval capacity and so forth, and turned mostly inward.
It's a long, complicated story.
I won't go into it in detail.
By the early 19th century, China had really fallen behind because Britain had an industrial revolution, which started with the steam engine, and all of that went into the military early on, with turning the Navy to steamers and so on.
In 1839, Britain invaded China.
We call it the First Opium War, probably the most cynical, nasty, particular cause of war in modern times, perhaps.
Which was that Britain demanded that China accept opium from British merchants at a time when the Chinese leaders knew that the opium addiction was a really serious addiction.
So there was a first opium war.
There was a second opium war.
There was a Taiping rebellion.
There were the unequal treaties.
There was the Boxer Rebellion.
There was the Chinese Revolution in 1910.
There was civil war.
Then there was the Japanese invasion.
And I go through all of this to say there was a hellish 110 years, hellish, from Britain invading to 1949, when the modern state, the People's Republic of China, was established.
And they call that the century of humiliation.
What it means from an economic point of view is they went from being a very advanced and, of course, esteemed civilization to being completely impoverished by invasion after invasion, humiliation after humiliation, which was the fact because all the humiliation after humiliation, which was the fact because all the imperial powers, including the United States in the early years of the 20th century, abused China incredibly.
And then Japan really was nasty.
And this is another long story.
But Japan invaded, actually invaded China several times already back in 1895 in the Sino-Japanese War and then really invaded 1931, taking over Manchuria, 1937 with the Nanjing Massacre. taking over Manchuria, 1937 with the Nanjing Massacre.
and then open war.
So, the Chinese have the view, hell, we don't want that to happen again.
We don't want to be dismembered.
We don't want to fall under colonial rule.
We don't want to be impoverished again.
We need to stand on our feet again.
And really, since Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, China opened to the world.
China has been peaceful and focused on economics.
And the economics that China's been focused on is catching up.
So it's not nefarious.
It's not evil.
It's the kind of rapid industrialization that Japan invented, actually, in 1868, something called the Meiji Restoration, and again in the 1950s and 1960s.
And a lot of what happened with Deng Xiaoping starting in 1978 was learned Literally learned from Japanese because Japanese engineers went over and helped China to retool, helped them to build a new industry, and so on.
Now, as an economist, I look at this and say, my God, even from a very poor income level, they were saving 40 or 50 percent of their national income.
They were investing, investing, investing.
They went from mass illiteracy and very little education to incredible building up of skills and knowledge base and hundreds of thousands of STEM PhDs per year.
And I've been seeing this with my own eyes year after year after year after year.
So my view is there's no reason for conflict, none whatsoever.
And in the last 40 years, when the U.S. has been in nonstop wars, I'm sorry to say, China has not been involved in one war.
And they had one brief war that was around the Khmer Rouge, Vietnam issue in the late 1970s.
Otherwise, they've been a victim of wars for 200 years and have launched none.
None.
One short war in 1979 involving Vietnam and Cambodia because of the Khmer Rouge and Cambodia, and it was very short-lived.
Other than that, none.
And we keep accusing them of, you're belligerent, you're belligerent.
And we have surrounded them with the military.
We've surrounded them with bases.
We outspend them still three to one on the military.
If we sat down with them, it would really, really make a difference.
And I have to tell you, Bobby, one of my star students from about 30 years ago is now one of the top academics in China.
Wonderful person.
And we were at a meeting a few years ago.
It was Chinese and Americans and some others.
And we were talking about why everything is broken down And he said something deep and hilarious.
He said, you guys, he looked around to the whole room, you just don't understand it.
I've been part of the American world.
I have an American PhD from Harvard.
Here's my advice, he said.
The Chinese want one thing.
Respect.
The Americans want one thing, to be told how smart they are.
If each side would just do what they should do vis-a-vis the other, believe me, everybody's going to get along just fine.
Okay, it's a clever remark, but there's a depth to it.
As well.
And when the Biden administration came in, I had a lot of friends, have a lot of friends, a lot of former friends, I'm afraid, but a lot of friends in the administration and senior reaches.
And I said, reach out to China.
And you know what?
The order came from the White House.
No discussions with China during the first year because we're reassessing.
Biden came out swinging when they had that first meeting in Anchorage, Alaska.
It was like, nice to meet you.
What about Hong Kong?
What about Xinjiang?
What about Taiwan?
In other words, put the thumb in the eye of the other side, publicly and aggressively from the start.
What's Nancy Pelosi doing flying to Taiwan?
Don't provoke.
If you know the history, don't provoke.
Talk, discuss, debate, disagree, negotiate.
All of that's fine.
But why we're provoking is something I find irresponsible and really dangerous and unnecessary.
And we will walk into a war the way we're going.
Just like we did with Ukraine.
And our diplomats told us the war with Ukraine is going to come if we continue on the path that we're going.
And I'm telling you, if we continue on the path that we're going and our rhetoric in Taiwan and the arming of Taiwan and all the rest, it's no favor to Taiwan.
All we're doing is taking steps towards A complete breakdown of trust that will lead to disaster if we don't understand how to avoid that.
So, what do you make of what happened with Saudi Arabia and Iran, with the Chinese brokering that peace?
The Chinese have a growing reach in the world because they're the lead trade partner of probably half the world at this point.
And they buy a lot of oil from the Middle East.
They have good relations with Iran and Saudi Arabia.
And they really don't want war.
God, they don't want war in Taiwan.
They don't want war in East Asia.
They don't want war in Ukraine, by the way.
And I know it.
And I had long discussions in Beijing a couple of months ago about the Ukraine war.
They don't want this instability.
What they want is to continue to have economic development.
And so I think that their foreign policy is Pretty darn serious, which is it is based on economics.
It's based on what we used to do.
And we did it a lot.
and we did it to good effect, which was helping to build infrastructure, helping American businesses to have a positive role in places to be a base for economic development.
Well, China's doing that exactly right now.
And we view that as, oh my God, look at how horrible, but it's not horrible.
It's just smart.
They've grown, they are major trade partners, so they're doing things that are to their benefit, but not to the disadvantage of the other countries.
They believe actually that there's the cooperation and win-win makes a lot of sense for them.
And I think they're being proved right because most of the world is not falling into line with the United States Most of the world is looking at, say, the Ukraine war and saying, why don't you negotiate this?
And why is NATO enlargement so vital when Russia said don't do it?
And most of the world's looking at the Taiwan issue and saying, you know, maybe calm down.
Don't just have an arms race there.
I think the Chinese are very successful diplomatically, except in what we call the Western world, which, by the way, is now, you can define it pretty precisely, it's the US, Canada,
UK, European Union, We're good to go.
Probably about 12 to 15% of the world population.
And the rest of the world's looking on and saying, we're not quite in line with that.
And we tell ourselves, oh, we're leading the world.
But not really.
What we're leading is a...
A pretty small part of the world population that doesn't buy into expanded military alliances and so forth that basically wants economic development.
So competing on economic development, great.
Competing on who can help a different region of the world to develop or to have green energy, great.
But let's do that.
That's a race to the top, not a race to a new nuclear arms race and so forth.
And we keep saying, look, China's building up its military.
We are three times the military spending of China.
So if we're concerned about that, let's sit down and negotiate so that we don't have an arms race between the two.
China doesn't want an arms race.
China wants economic development.
How about, you know, you didn't talk about in that kind of litany of the countries describing our cohort, you didn't talk about where Latin America, traditionally Latin America was in the American sphere of influence.
Is that changing, Tim?
Yeah, you know, President Lula is, first of all, quite outspoken, saying we need a negotiated peace in Ukraine.
And he, of course, was recently in China.
And he said it in China, and our press reported, how dare he say these things?
And how dare he talk about NATO expansion as being provocative and so forth?
But this is the Latin American view.
And I was with another president of a major Latin American country a few months ago.
I won't put that person on the spot.
But the first words...
When we sat down was from the president.
This is about NATO. What is this enlargement thing?
Why is this being pushed so much?
That's again from the...
I didn't provoke it.
That was what That's what the president said to me first thing.
That is a widespread view.
And remember, we've not exactly been helpful in the Latin American context in recent years.
There was an active attempt to overthrow the Venezuelan president.
Not even subtle.
I mean, it was admitted, acknowledged.
At one point, Trump, what I regarded as...
We put on sanctions to break the Venezuelan economy, which our sanctions actually did.
And I was in the Americas quite often during this period.
And the presidents were saying to me, you know, you're breaking the region.
You're dividing the region in two.
We can't cooperate.
Of course we have to go along with the White House.
They can squeeze the hell out of us.
They can stop us from getting loans from the Inter-American Development Bank or from the Latin American Development Fund.
So we go along, but we can't even talk to our neighbor because they're on the other side of this thing.
So this is really a strong feeling.
It's crazy.
It's so unnecessary.
We shouldn't Declare that someone else is president than the actual president of a country.
It's a bad habit.
It's a kind of arrogance that never works out.
And on all of these things, I have to say, just watching them for so many years and so many decades, when we froze the accounts of Venezuela, said, you can't have your own money anymore.
And then we said Maduro is no longer president.
Guido was president.
And by the way, then some Harvard economists and some MIT economists said, yeah, now we're going to help the new administration of Guido.
I thought, this is ridiculous.
This absolutely is going to end bad.
And of course...
It ended almost like a farce except for Venezuela, which has been devastated economically, but Maduro is there.
Now we run to him to say, you've got to pump more oil to replace the Russian oil that we're taking off the market, because they're not thinking.
And the main point is, John, stop being so arrogant in this U.S., because this is where you keep stepping into problems, thinking you can do whatever you want, even when the other country is saying, please don't do that, just give us some space, or don't overthrow us, or don't seize our assets.
But there's an arrogance.
That really is bad.
I went back, by the way, and read a book that I vaguely remembered from high school.
And I read it last weekend.
It's almost 60 years old.
J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power.
Remember that book?
Unbelievable.
I remembered it too, and for more than a half a century, I hadn't looked at it.
And I went back and I read it this weekend, and you could read it as if it was talking about today.
And basically, Fulbright, who was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and of course where the Fulbright scholarships came from, originated, We keep getting into trouble because we can't listen to the other side.
And he has a whole riff about how good neutrality can be and that sometimes you don't want to push NATO or you don't want to push your side.
It's actually literally there in the 1960s saying if we would let some of these countries be neutral, the Soviet Union would go home, we would go home, and we'd leave these countries in the middle in peace.
And he cites Austria, which I've come to know this year very well because I've been spending some of my sabbatical there.
In 1955, Austria declared neutrality.
The Soviet Union, which had occupied part of Austria after World War II, sent the troops home, and Austria became a neutral, incredibly successful, peaceful country, never bothered again at all by the Soviet Union, because it was neutral.
And that was a model.
That's the model for Ukraine, by the way.
That's the model that George Kennan kept saying.
Give some space so that we're not putting our nose right up against the other guy, you know, not provoking.
And it's a model that we don't learn because you have to tone down the arrogance a little bit to learn to give some space.
So I think it comes back over and over again to that.
Jeffrey Sachs, thank you so much for joining us.
And I look forward to talking to you next time.
Oh, I can't wait.
Thanks a lot.
Great to be with you.
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