JEFFREY SACHS - Director, Center for Sustainable Development, Columbia - President, UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network

Interviewed by Mia Funk

What is the path to peace for the war in Ukraine? Is America still powerful enough to impose global order? The US has just 4.1% of the world's population, while the BRICS countries have 41.5%. In this conversation with economist Jeffrey Sachs, we discuss the origins of the conflict in Ukraine and NATO enlargement, US-China relations, and the decline of US dominance.

Jeffrey Sachs is Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, Sachs has been Special Advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General. He was an economic adviser to Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Former President of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma. Sachs was twice named among Time magazine’s 100 most influential world leaders, received the Tang Prize in Sustainable Development, the Legion of Honor from France, and was co-recipient of the Blue Planet Prize. He is Co-Chair of the Council of Engineers for the Energy Transition, and academician of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences at the Vatican.

Sachs has authored and edited numerous books, including three New York Times bestsellers: The End of Poverty (2005), Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (2008), and The Price of Civilization (2011). Other books include To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace (2013), The Age of Sustainable Development (2015), Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair & Sustainable (2017), A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (2018), The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions (2020), and most recently, Ethics in Action for Sustainable Development (2022).

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Help us understand the history of the war in Ukraine. How did we get here? How do we get out of it? And if the United States isn’t the country to help broker that peace, what country is?

JEFFREY SACHS

This conflict is actually decades in the making. It didn't just come out of a Russian invasion in 2022, as is often said in the Western mainstream media. The war is often defined as an unprovoked attack in 2022. Actually, the roots of this war go back to the end of the Soviet Union and to the geopolitics around that.

In 1990, the US and Germany promised the Soviet government at the time, Mikhail Gorbachev, the President, that NATO would not move one inch eastward if Gorbachev went ahead and disbanded the Soviet Military Alliance. In other words, there would be a deal that on the Soviet side, the military alliance, the so-called Warsaw Pact, would be ended, and on the Western side, NATO would not take advantage and Germany would be reunified, but NATO would not move one inch eastward. The US cheated on that because as soon as the Soviet Union ended in 1991, the policymakers in Washington, especially in the Pentagon and in the permanent state in the United States, immediately planned for the Eastern expansion of NATO.

So this war started, in my opinion, because the United States could not accept a peace in which the military alliances of both sides of the Cold War would stand down. Well, many things happened over the 30 years between the early 1990s and today, but probably the highlights to mention are that in 2008, George W. Bush forced NATO, pushed NATO, but really pressed that NATO would announce that Ukraine would become a member. And that happened at the Bucharest NATO Summit in 2008. The Russian leadership was furious. They had warned again and again: Don't do that. We don't want your military right up against our 2000-kilometer border with Ukraine. Then a Ukrainian President won the election in 2010 on the program of neutrality for Ukraine. Viktor Yanukovych won the election based on the idea that Ukraine doesn't want to become the battlefield between two superpowers and called for neutrality, which had been enshrined in the original Ukrainian Declaration of Independence, but then was abandoned by some of the NATO-oriented politicians of Ukraine.

So in 2010, Jankovich called for neutrality, but he was overthrown violently in early 2014 with US participation. So this was really a terrible escalation because the relatively pro-Russian president, but one who called for neutrality, which I think was the only safe course for Ukraine, was overthrown. And the United States played a significant role in that. People know about the famous tape of Victoria Nuland, who is now our Under Secretary of State. At the time, she was the Assistant Secretary of State and she described who the US would see as the next government three weeks before a violent overthrow.

The US signed several statements in 2021 confirming that NATO would enlarge. I think this was all absolutely irresponsible. Russia massed troops on its border and put on the table a draft US-Russia security agreement on December 17th, 2021 based on no NATO enlargement. The Biden administration formally replied that it was not willing to negotiate over that issue in a response in January. Then Russia invaded on February 24th, 2022, making clear that it was the failure to reach an understanding on the NATO question that was central to Russia's action.

Four weeks later, Zelenskyy declared that Ukraine was accepting of neutrality. In other words, the initial Russian invasion brought Ukraine to the negotiating table, and during the second half of March, with the Turkish government being the mediators, Russia and Ukraine hammered out a peace agreement.

Incredibly, the United States blocked it because the United States told the Ukrainian government you fight on because American policymakers had two ideas. One was that Ukraine should not be neutral. It should be a NATO country. And second, that the war would be won by some combination of Western armaments and financial sanctions.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Right now the US is not looking after the prosperity of its own citizens but is going out conducting these irresponsible wars when it could be focusing on other things: the environment, education, health care, infrastructure... Ironically, what seems to be behind it all this insistence on a unipolar world and dominance, is the US wants to hold onto its status as a reserve currency but under the economic sanctions the US has also suffered. It might even be hastening the strengthening of currencies of other countries.

SACHS

The basic point is the US has 4.1% of the world population. So how could it presume to be the world leader? You know, the US is a powerful country. It's a rich country, but it doesn't run the world, and it should not aspire to run the world. That's a kind of madness, and the US ideology for a long time has been that the US should run the world.

It's, to my mind, unbelievable. But then again, I've spent most of my career outside the US seeing the other 95.9% of the world. And I know that the other 95.9% of the world doesn't want the United States to run the world. It's not against the United States. It just says: let us have our own part of the world. We don't want you running the world. We don't want you deciding what our government is, who we are, how we rule ourselves. You know, you're just one place. And this, the United States leaders don't understand. They're very arrogant. They're very ignorant because of the two big oceans. They're very unaware of the history of other parts of the world. And we end up with this arrogant and naive and dangerous foreign policy because, there's no doubt the United States is rich and powerful, and it makes lots of weapon systems. And I'm 68 years old and the United States has been at war almost every year of my life from Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia and Nicaragua, Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria and Libya, and now Ukraine. Come on, give it a break.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

In this United States of Amnesia, we keep starting these proxy wars. So what is the through line to China and Taiwan?

SACHS

Well, this situation in Taiwan is like the situation in Ukraine, very explosive, very dangerous, and requires cool heads to avoid a conflict. The fact of the matter is that actually all three governments, the United States, Taiwan, and China have a policy that there's One China. And whether it is the government in Taiwan or the government in Beijing, they both say there's One China. They disagree on what happened in 1949 and how China should be governed, but they don't say there are two countries. And the United States, when it established diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China very clearly said that there is One China and has One China policy. And that is how to keep peace, and to make sure that this tension between Beijing and Taipei does not boil over to open conflict. But the United States started to play games with this. It started to form a military alliance with Taiwan, in effect, which is really coming into a military alliance in the middle of one country. And this is an extremely dangerous and imprudent thing to do. And Biden starts talking about how we're going to defend Taiwan. And the American politicians talk about how a war is coming. It's all utterly reckless, irresponsible, and what we should have is trying to reduce tensions, diffuse tensions through negotiation, through talk, through peace-building ideas, rather than stoking the idea that some conflict is inevitable.

A conflict would be devastating, of course, first and foremost, for Taiwan - but actually for the whole world. And so this needs to be avoided, and we need cool heads. And we shouldn't have American politicians saber-rattling. We should not have Speaker Nancy Pelosi fly to Taiwan after the Chinese government has repeatedly said: don't do that. Don't provoke, don't stir up things, don't make conflicts where there don't have to be conflicts. But the United States leadership doesn't listen very well. It's the same thing that when Putin said many, many, many times: do not expand NATO to Ukraine. The United States said, Oh, sorry, we don't hear you. That is, you have nothing to say about that. That's none of your business. And then war comes. This is very typical of American foreign policy because American foreign policy leaders are too arrogant, and they don't listen.

The US is also experiencing the reality that other places in the world are catching up on technology, indeed leading on technologies as well. And China is a very successful, very industrious, very hardworking society, which in the last 40 years has gone from poverty to a very significant world-important economy. And the US has a very hard time accepting that. The US attitude, if you listen to congressmen, who don't seem to know anything, is Oh, if China's successful, must be because they're cheating. What about because they're saving more than 40% of GDP, that the Chinese people have been engaging in a remarkable upgrading of education, hundreds of thousands of PhDs minted each year, and massive scientific research programs? Come on, this is the truth. And so this arrogance is not allowing the truth to come through.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

One of the other things that you’ve written about, but is not often reported about China, is that where America's policy has been destabilizing and destructive in the Middle East, China has stepped in as a peacemaker.

SACHS

Well, probably the most remarkable diplomatic achievement of recent years, I would say, is China brokering a peace agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran. In the American idea, those two countries were implacable foes. They could never agree. And for the United States, Iran was the enemy, and Saudi Arabia was the ally. But the whole idea of US foreign policy is: you bring countries under your authority as an ally of the United States, like Saudi Arabia, and you fight your enemies on the other side. But China has a different idea, which is that Saudi Arabia and Iran had no fundamental reasons for this dissension, but they have plenty of reasons for cooperation. For one thing, they're both being hard hit by climate change. They need to cooperate because the water crisis is quite severe. They're both hydrocarbon economies. They need an energy transformation which is very profound. And so, the Chinese facilitated a reconciliation between the two. I'm very happy about that. Reconciliation, by the way, the fighting between, the bitterness between Iran and Saudi Arabia divided Western Asia. It contributed to an absolutely devastating war in Yemen in which the United States gave its military support that killed a lot of people. And it destabilized a region that needs a lot of economic transformation, technological upgrading, and change. And so this agreement is really a big help for the whole region, not only for the two countries involved. And China gets a lot of credit, in my view, for having the wisdom to see that that was a conflict that could be solved, not just exacerbated. But the US approach was always to push at it. Even when the US made an agreement with Iran in the nuclear agreement called the JCPOA, the US government walked away from it, and then it maintained sanctions on Iran because the US is not really serious at making peace most of the time. It's got an us-versus-them mentality. And I find that very destructive and not in the US interest.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

So what happens with the loss of dominance? When the dollar is no longer the reserve currency? Do you think the United States can have economic hegemony without political hegemony?

SACHS

Part of the US strength after World War II is, well, the US was basically the only economy standing. And it was a technologically advanced, rich, large economy; the world's largest. And the dollar was really the only international usable currency for quite a long time. So the dollar system became the center of how you do international trade. When you trade in goods, they're denominated in dollars when you buy. The imports you pay in dollars, meaning you use accounts in US dollars. Typically in the US banking system, when the transaction is closed, it's closed through the so-called SWIFT interbank system. And so the US has had what France long ago called "an exorbitant privilege", that it could print a lot of money because the rest of the world was holding dollars, using dollars. The dollar was the basis of the world economy. That's changing now. And it's changing for three basic reasons. One is the share of the US and the world economy is diminishing, so this means that the predominance of the US is bound to diminish. The second is technologically settlements are going to occur in all sorts of ways other than through US banks. So-called digital currencies, especially Central Bank digital currencies will mean other ways to make settlements. We'll settle in renminbi when we buy in China, or settle in rubles or settle in rupees when trade is with India, and so forth. So there will be multiple currencies. And then the third part, which is really a matter of a bad set of decision-making, the US has militarized the dollar. Meaning that usually, you think about money, well, you have it, you can use it, you can spend it. But the United States has come to say: if we don't like you, you don't necessarily have access to your money anymore if it's in our banks. So the US froze the dollar holdings of Russia. The US has frozen the dollar holdings of Venezuela. The US froze the dollar holdings of Afghanistan. My advice to any government that's not getting along with the US government is be careful about your money because the US might come in and freeze your money. And so countries are looking to hold their reserves in other ways now. Perfectly understandable. And I think that this is another part of the move to an international system from a dollar-based international system.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

As you think about the future of the prospect of nuclear war, the kind of world that we're leaving the next generation, what would you like young people to know, preserve, and remember?

SACHS

Young people should lead the way to a safer, cooperative, peaceful, environmentally sustainable, and fair world. We need to build the future. We want not to feel trapped in this mindless cycle of violence and environmental destruction. The problems that we face are solvable, and they are not driven by the needs of the people. They're driven by greed or the power-seeking of elites. And we need to have a new generation say: this is not working. We want a world that is at peace, that is shared in prosperity and that solves the environmental crises which have become so deep and are neglected, in part because we are wasting our time, our lives, our resources on these useless wars.

Jeffrey Sachs hosts “The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs” podcast featuring renowned authors of scintillating, inspiring and remarkably important books about history, social justice, and the challenges of building a decent world.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this episode was Sam Myers.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).

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President of EarthDay.ORG

The world recognizes that plastics have imperiled our future. Many environmentalists, myself included, view plastics as on par with, if not worse than, climate change because we do see a little light at the end of the tunnel on climate change. Babies vs. Plastics is a collection of studies, and we particularly focused on children and babies because their bodies and brains are more impacted than adults by the 30, 000 chemicals that assault us every day.

The Unseen Invasion of Microplastics in Our Lives

Interview with KATHLEEN ROGERS
President of EarthDay·org

Microplastics and nanoplastic pollution are currently blanketing the planet. They are in the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink, infiltrating our bodies and even brains and human embryos. Coca-Cola alone sells 100 billion+ single-use plastic bottles each year, ending up in landfills and the ocean. Earth’s population will reach 9.8 billion people by 2050. Two-thirds of humans will become city dwellers. Our waste will drive a mounting worldwide crisis.

POORVA JOSHIPURA

PETA U.K. · Senior Vice President
Author of Survival at Stake: How Our Treatment of Animals is Key to Human Existence

I wrote Survival at Stake because I've been working in animal rights for nearly the past 25 years. Throughout that time, one common question has been asked: Well, shouldn't we deal with human issues first. But animal rights are human rights. Animal rights is environmentalism. These things are not distinct. And that's the point I was really trying to make in my book. I was inspired to write it because of the COVID-19 crisis. It just brings us back to the point of why it is so important to teach people, young people, and young men the importance of being kind to everyone, animals included. If you teach them that, I think the other lessons start to much more automatically transfer over.

LEWIS DARTNELL

Astrobiologist · Science Communicator
Author of Origins: How the Earth Made Us · Being Human: How Our Biology Shaped World History

The challenges facing our society at the moment effectively are the unintended consequence of a solution we found in the late 1700s when society was running out of energy, we had no more timber, and we realized we could dig underground for ancient fossilized woodland, which is basically what coal is from about 300 million years ago. The consequence of burning all that coal and then oil was a release of carbon dioxide, changing our atmosphere and warming the planet. So, it's a problem born out of our ingenuity and resourcefulness, but I'm confident that we will find the solution out of our ingenuity and resourcefulness.

SASHA LUCCIONI

Founding Member of Climate Change AI
AI Researcher & Climate Lead · Hugging Face

My work is really about figuring out how, right now, AI is using resources like energy and emitting greenhouse gases and how it's using our data without our consent. I feel that if we develop AI systems that are more respectful, ethical, and sustainable, we can help future generations so that AI will be less of a risk to society. The way I got into this field was working on the environmentally beneficial applications of AI, and I do believe that that's an impactful way of using AI techniques because there's so much data about the climate, satellite data, and sensor data, and the way to go about this is to work with domain experts. AI is never going to solve the problem on its own, but it can be a tool. So I think that there's a lot of promise there.

DR. SHIV SOMESHWAR

Fmr. European Chair for Sustainable Development & Climate Transition · Sciences Po
Development Clinician focused on Cities & Nation States

How do you have economic growth that is socially equitable and environmentally sustainable? It's not just that you have ecological sustainability; hence, that is sustainable development. Because lots of examples of economic, ecological, and ecologically sensitive growth need not be socially equitable. That's why this whole emphasis on just transition is not just about climate, but it's also about justice. It's about social equity in economic growth. Unlike in Europe, where there is now the call for degrowth or a circular economy, most parts of the world would look at you blankly if you talked about degrowth because they are hungry for growth. And so sustainable development is about managing these trade-offs.

From Ancient Wisdom to the Language of the Earth

Scientists, Artists, Psychologists & Spiritual Leaders Share their Stories and insights on the importance of connecting with nature, preserving the environment, embracing diversity, and finding harmony in the world.

JAY JORDAN & ISABELLE FRÉMEAUX

Artists, Activists & Anarchists Seize Wetlands from the French Republic
Authors of We are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones
the story of a 40-year struggle to preserve 4,000 acres of wetlands from being destroyed to make way for an airport

DOUG LARSON

Award-winning Scientist · Ecologist · Professor Emeritus · University of Guelph
Author of Cliff Ecology · The Urban Cliff Revolution · The Dogma At My Homework

I think one thing I learned from looking at the ancient trees is that there is no great benefit to anything of growing quickly and accumulating vast resources. Growing slowly and patiently and with fewer demands on the environment in which you live is just as healthy and perhaps more healthy than the endless hunger for more and more and more, which we see as a characteristic of our species.

THOMAS CROWTHER

Ecologist · Founder of Restor
Co-chair of the Board for the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration

Global restoration really means finding and empowering the millions of local communities, indigenous populations, and farmers who are promoting biodiversity. Restor is a digital platform, sort of like Google Maps, but for restoration. So rather than seeing coffee shops and supermarkets, you will see conservation projects and Indigenous-led restoration initiatives. And that means you can find a currently on Restor - I think we have around 140, 000 - so you can go on there for free right now and find thousands and thousands of these amazing heroes of nature. And you can zoom in and you can see every single tree on the ground. You can see every bush and you can fund them or you can buy their coffee or you can go visit their projects and do ecotourism. There's a myriad of ways that we can all support their efforts by also improving our own lives.

We need to be cutting our emissions so that we can allow nature to thrive and help us along the way. For far too long people have been squabbling about emissions. We should do this or we should do that. Climate change is way too big for us to be squabbling about things. We need to do everything now. When we grow the same crops every year, the soil gets more depleted and all the nutrients are lost. I've heard quotes that if we cannot find agricultural systems that rejuvenate the soil instead of depleting it, we are signing our death warrant. It's like we need to be promoting healthy soils if we're going to have any agriculture in the future.

PETER D. DITLEVSEN

Professor of Physics, Ice, Climate & Earth at the Niels Bohr Institute

What happens if we lose the Greenland ice sheet and pass the tipping points and Earth systems shut down?

If that shuts down, roughly speaking, the climate of Northern Europe would be like the climate of Alaska. So, climate models that actually simulate what happens when it's shut down, would say that England becomes like Northern Norway, which means that food security and things like that will be threatened because you cannot grow many crops in Northern Norway. And other models say precipitation changes, so places that are wet might become dry, and so on. So, these are of course severe consequences for Europe, but in some sense, this is going in the opposite direction of global warming. We're all talking about we're getting into a warmer world, but I'm talking about a cooling here. But the warm water that does not then flow from the tropics into the North Atlantic will stay in the tropics. And there, you're not contra-balancing global warming. There you will have the heating on top of the global warming. And that I see as maybe the largest problem we have is that the tropics become even warmer. And we have to realize if you live in a place where mean temperatures are maybe late thirties Celsius and or rise to the forties livelihood becomes very difficult.

DR. BARRY SCHWARTZ

Psychologist · Author of Why We Work
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

In 2004, the internet was just getting started in a major league way, and already the choice overload was a problem. I would say that from the modern perspective, 2004 seems like the 18th century, and as near as I can tell, all of these changes, every single one of them has made the problem substantially worse. The idea that you can get information to help guide you through - well, yeah, but what information do you believe? What's trustworthy? What's being motivated by an opportunity to sell you something? So there is a haze, there is this fog that we're operating in. And I think we just sort of give up in resignation and look at recommendations and hope that they're legitimate because how else do you get through the day?

KOHEI SAITO

Author of Slow Down! How Degrowth Communism Can Save the World
Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism

The Green New Deal presents itself as a kind of radical policy. If you look at the content, it's just simply the continuation of what capitalism wants to do. It's a massive investment in new, allegedly green industries, with the creation of more jobs with higher wages, but these are not the things that socialists or any environmentalists should be actually seeking because we recognize that capitalism is basically the root cause of the climate crisis and the misery of the workers. If so, I think it is high time to imagine something radically very different from business-as-usual capitalism.

The Long Tradition of American Jewish Critiques of Israel & Their Suppression

American Jews were interested and involved in Palestinian rights all the way back to 1948. There's this idea that it came about just now or in the 1970s, but actually as long as there's been a Nakba. As long as there's been Palestinian refugees, there’s been American Jews concerned with that, too. I would say that a lot of times these American Jews were very well informed and spent time in the region, and they came to these conclusions often not in the United States, but over there where they were talking to the Israeli left and meeting Palestinians and seeing a situation that they don't feel is ethical or sustainable.

BEN FRANTA

Founding Head of the Climate Litigation Lab
Senior Research Fellow at University of Oxford’s Sustainable Law Programme

For 40 years, the American Petroleum Institute has hired economists to argue it would be too expensive to try and control fossil fuels and that climate change wasn't that bad. The same go-to consultancy firm has been involved in every major climate policy fight from the very beginning and hired by the fossil fuel industry, but what are the courts going to do? It's not just the historical deception. It's an ongoing deception.

MICHAEL STICKA

President/CEO of the GRAMMY Museum

It's actually right in our mission statement that “we celebrate the music of yesterday and today to inspire the music of tomorrow.” And we do it through our exhibits. We have 35,000 square feet of galleries. We travel exhibits, really, all over the world over the world for the past 15 years. And through our education programs, we really focus on the next generation of music's creators and leaders. We do that through really specific curricula that is designed to educate particularly young people, K-12, about the business of music, especially for those who want to go into the industry.

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