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Jeffrey Sachs Brings Real Politics to the EU Parliament @mvdschulenburg https://t.co/sAHzVrYWeP
Video Transcript AI Summary
When the Soviet Union ended, the U.S. believed it could do as it wanted, leading to wars in the Middle East, Serbia, and Africa. Europe, lacking a foreign policy, has shown only American loyalty. It's time for European officials to lead with a European foreign policy.
The war in Ukraine is ending. Putin's intention was to negotiate neutrality. Ukraine walked away from a near agreement because the U.S. told them to. I advised Ukraine to be neutral, echoing Kissinger's warning: "To be an enemy of the United States is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal."
The U.S. viewed NATO enlargement as its right, ignoring Russian concerns. This project, dating back to the 90s, aimed to neutralize Russia. Trump and Putin will likely agree to end the war, regardless of Europe's warmongering.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Jeffrey Sachs is about to give a talk here in the European Parliament. Enjoy it.
Speaker 1: When the Soviet Union ended in 1991, the United States literally believed this is now a US world, and we will do as we want. The wars in The Middle East, Serbia, the wars in Africa, these are wars that The United States led and caused. And this has been true for more than forty years, as Europe Europe has not had any foreign policy during this period that I can figure out. No voice, no unity, no clarity, only American loyalty. Please don't have American officials as head of Europe.
Have European officials. Have a European foreign policy. You're gonna be living with Russia for a long time, so please negotiate with Russia. Trump and president Putin will agree to end the war. If Europe does all its great warmongering, it doesn't matter.
The war is ending. Not one word is told to the American people about anything or to you or by any of your newspapers these days. This idea that Putin's reconstructing the Russian empire, this is childish propaganda. So the war started. What was Putin's intention in the war?
I can tell you what his intention was. When Zelensky said in seven days, let's negotiate, I know the details of this exquisitely. I flew to Ankara to listen in detail to what the mediators were doing. Ukraine walked away unilaterally from a near agreement. Why?
Because The United States told them to. I begged the Ukrainians, and
Speaker 2: I had
Speaker 1: a track record with the Ukrainians. I advised the Ukrainians. I'm not anti Ukrainian, pro Ukrainian completely. I said, save your lives, save your sovereignty, save your territory, be neutral. Don't listen to the Americans.
I repeated to them the famous adage of Henry Kissinger, that to be an enemy of The United States is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.
Speaker 3: Above all, I want to welcome professor Jeffrey Sachs. And today, Jeff is probably the person in the world to speak up for peace, everywhere for peace, which is all these things combined, and therefore, I'm very happy that you're here. And I'm here since six months in this parliament, and for somebody who worked for the UN, I was actually quite shocked to learn that this parliament speaks only about war. I think we have now to rethink what we want to do, and I hope the European Union will also come, because I'm pro European Union, will come to realize that we have also to see how we seek peace and how we manage peace and how we create again a peaceful Europe, and Jeff might give us, for these things, some insight. Thank you very much.
Speaker 1: I've watched the events very close-up in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Russia, very closely for the last thirty six years. I was an advisor to the Polish government in 1989, to President Gorbachev in 1990 and 'ninety one, to President Yeltsin in 1991, to 1993, to President Kuchma of Ukraine in 1993, 'ninety four. I helped introduce currency, I helped several countries in former Yugoslavia, especially Slovenia. I've watched the events very close-up for thirty six years. After the Maidan, I was asked by the new government to come to Kyiv, and I was taken around the Maidan and I learned a lot of things firsthand.
I've been in touch with Russian leaders for more than thirty years. I know the American political leadership close-up our previous close-up. Our previous Secretary of Treasury was my macroeconomics teacher fifty one years ago, or just to give you an idea. So we were very close friends for a half century. I know all of these people.
I just want to say this because what I want to explain in my point of view ideology, it's what I've seen with my own eyes and experienced during this period. In my understanding of the events that have befallen befallen Europe in many contexts. And I'll include not only the Ukraine crisis, but Serbia Nineteen Ninety Nine, the wars in the Middle East, including Iraq, Syria, the wars in Africa, including Sudan, Somalia, Libya, these are to a these are, to a very significant extent, that would surprise you, perhaps, and would be denounced about what I'm about to say, these What happened, more than thirty years I should say, to be more precise, The United States came to the view, especially in nineteen ninety, especially in nineteen ninety, ninety one, and then with the end of the Soviet Union, that The US now ran the world, and that The US did not have to heed anybody's views, views, red lines, concerns, security viewpoints, or any international obligations, or any UN framework. I'm sorry to put it so plainly, but I do want you to understand, I tried very hard in 1991 to get help help for Gorbachev, who I think was the greatest statesman of our modern time.
I recently read the archived memo of the National Security Council discussion discussion of my proposal, how they completely dismissed it and laughed it off the table when I said that The United States should help the Soviet Union in financial stabilization and in making its reforms. And the memo documents, including some of my former colleagues at Harvard in particular, saying we minimum that we will do to prevent disaster, but the minimum, it's not our job to help. Quite the contrary, it's not our interest
Speaker 3: to help.
Speaker 1: When Soviet Union ended in 1991, the view became even more exaggerated, and I can name chapter and verse, but the view was, was we run the show. Cheney, Wolferwitz, and many other names that you will have come to know literally believed this is now a US world, and we will do as we want. We will clean up from the former Soviet Union. We will take out any remaining allies. Countries like essentially thirty three years.
Europe has paid a heavy price for this, because Europe has not had any foreign policy during this period that I can figure out. No voice, no unity, no clarity, no European interests, only American loyalty. There were moments where there were disagreements and very, I think, wonderful disagreements, especially in the last time of significance was 02/2003 in the Iraq War, when France France and Germany said, we don't support The United States going around the UN Security Council for this war. That war, by the way, was directly concocted by Netanyahu and his concocted colleagues in The US Pentagon. I'm not saying that it was a link or mutuality, I'm saying it was a direct war.
That was a war carried out for Israel. It was a war that Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Fife coordinated with Netanyahu. And that was the last time that Europe had Europe lost its voice entirely after that, but especially in 02/2008. Now, what happened after 1991 to get to 02/2008 is United States decided that unipolarity meant that NATO would enlarge somewhere from Brussels to Vladivostok, step by step. There would be no end to eastward enlargement of NATO.
This would be The US unipolar world. If you play the game of risk as a child like I did, this is The US idea, to have the peace on every part of the board. Any place without a US military base is an enemy, basically. Neutrality Neutrality is a dirty word in The US political lexicon, perhaps the dirtiest word. At least if you're an enemy, we know you're an enemy.
If you are neutral, you're subversive, because then you're really against us, because you're not telling us. You're pretending to be neutral. So this was the mindset, and the decision was taken formally in 1994 when President Clinton signed off on NATO enlargement to the East. You will recall that in 02/07/1991, Hans Dietrich Genscher and James Baker III spoke with Gorbachev. Genscher gave a press conference afterwards where he explained, NATO will not move eastward.
We will not take advantage of the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and understand that was in a juridical context, not a casual context. This was the end of World War two being negotiated for German reunification. And an agreement was made that NATO will not move one inch eastward. And it was explicit, and it is in countless documents, and just look up National Security Archive of George Washington University, and you can get dozens of documents. It's a website called What Gorbachev Heard About NATO.
Take a look, because everything you're told by The US is a lie about this, but the archives are perfectly clear. So the decision was taken in 1994 to expand NATO all the way to Ukraine. This is a project. This is not one administration or another. This is a US government project that started more than thirty years ago.
In 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote The Grand Chessboard. That is not just musings of mister Brzynski. That is the presentation of the decisions of the United States government explained to the public, which is how these books work. And the book describes the eastward enlargement of Europe and of NATO as simultaneous events. And there's a good chapter in that book that says, what will Russia do as Europe and NATO expand eastward?
And I knew Zbig Brozynski personally. He was very nice to me. I was advising Poland. He was a big help. He was a very nice and smart man, and he got everything wrong.
So in 1997, he wrote in detail why Russia could do nothing but exceed to the eastward expansion of NATO and Europe. In fact, he says the eastward expansion of Europe, and not just Europe, but NATO. This was a plan, NATO.
Speaker 0: Project. And he explains how Russia will never align
Speaker 1: with China. Unthinkable. Russia will never align with Iran. Russia Russia has no vocation other than the European vocation. So as Europe moves east, there's nothing Russia can do about it.
So says yet another American strategist. Is it any question why we're in war all the time? Question why we're in war all the time? Because one thing about America is we always know what our counterparts are going to do, and we always get it wrong. And one reason we always get it wrong is that in game theory that the American strategists play, you don't actually talk to the other side.
You just know what the other side's strategy is. That's it's wonderful. It saves so much time. You don't need any diplomacy. So this project began, and we had a continuity of government for project.
Why? Because America learned everything it knows from the British. And so we are the wannabe British Empire. And what the British Empire understood in 1853, mister Palmerston Lord Palmerston, excuse me, is that you surround Russia in the Black Sea, and you deny Russia access to the Eastern Mediterranean, and all you're watching is an American project to do that in the twenty first century. The idea was that there would be Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia as the Black Sea literal that would deprive literal deprive
Speaker 0: Russia of any international status by blocking the Black Sea and essentially by neutralizing Russia
Speaker 1: as more than a local power. Brzezinski is completely clear about this. And before Brzezinski, there was Mackinder, and who owns the island of the world owns the world. So this project goes back a long time. I think it goes back basically to Palmerston.
In '19 and, again, I've lived through every administration. I've known these presidents. I've known their teams. Nothing changed much from Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump won to Biden. Maybe they got worse step by step.
Biden was the worst in my view. Maybe also because he was not compas mentis for the last couple of years. And I say that seriously, not as a snarky remark. The American political system is a system of image. It's a system of media manipulation every day.
It is a PR system. And so you could have a president that basically doesn't function and have that in power for two years and actually have that president run for reelection. And one damn thing is he had to stand on a stage for ninety minutes by himself, and that was the end of it. Had it not been that mistake, he would have gone on to have his candidacy, whether he was sleeping after 4PM in the afternoon or not. So this is actually the reality.
Everybody goes along with it. It's impolite to say anything that I'm saying, because we don't speak the truth about almost anything in this world right now. So this project went on from the 1990s. Bombing Belgrade's Seventy Eight Straight Days in 1999 was part of this project. Splitting apart the country when borders are sacrosanct, aren't they indeed?
Except for Kosovo. That's fine. Because borders are sacrosanct except when America changes them. Sudan was another related project. The South Sudan rebellion.
Did that just happen because South happen because South Sudanese rebelled? Or can I give you the CIA playbook? To please understand, as grown ups, what this is about. Powers. That doesn't come from local insurrections.
South Sudan did not defeat North Sudan or Sudan in a
Speaker 3: tribal
Speaker 1: battle. It was a
Speaker 3: tribal
Speaker 1: battle. It was a U. S. Project. I would go often to Nairobi and meet U.
S. Military or senators or others with deep interest in Sudan's politics. This was part of the game of unipolarity. So the NATO enlargement, as you know, started in 1999 with Hungary, Poland, and The Czech Republic, and Russia was extremely unhappy about it. But these were countries still far from the border, and Russia protested, but, of course, to no avail.
Then George Bush junior came in. When nine eleven occurred, president Putin pledged all support. And then The US decided in 09/20/2001, that it would launch seven wars in five years. And you can listen to General Wesley Clark online talk about that. He was NATO's supreme commander in 1999.
He went to the Pentagon on 09/20/2001. He was handed the paper explaining seven wars. These, by the way, were Netanyahu's wars. The idea was partly to clean up old Soviet allies and partly to take out supporters of Hamas and Hezbollah. Because Netanyahu's idea was there will be one state, thank you, only one state.
It will be Israel. Israel will control all of the territory. And anyone that objects, we will overthrow. Not we, exactly, our friend, The United States. That's US policy until this morning.
We don't know whether it will change. Now, the only wrinkle is that maybe The US will own Gaza instead of Israel owning Gaza. But the idea has been around at least for twenty five years. It actually goes back to document called Clean Break that Netanyahu and his American political team put together in 1996 to end the idea of the two state solution. You can also find it online.
So these are projects, these are long term events, these aren't, is it Clinton, is it Bush, is it Obama? That's the boring way to look at American politics, as the day day to day game, but that's not what American politics is. So the next round of NATO enlargement came in 02/2004, with seven more countries. The three Baltic states: Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, and Slovakia. At this point, Russia was pretty damn upset.
This was a complete violation of the postwar order agreed with German reunification. Essentially, was a fundamental trick or defection of The US from cooperative arrangement, is what it amounted to, because they believe in unipolarity. So as everybody recalls, because we just had the Munich Security Conference last week in 02/2007, president Putin said, stop. Enough. Enough.
Stop now. And, of course, what that meant was in 02/2008, the United States jammed down Europe's throat enlargement of NATO to Ukraine and to Georgia. This is a long term project. I listened to Mr. Saakashvili in New York in February, and I walked out, called Sonia, and said, this man's crazy.
And a month later, a war broke out because The United States told this guy, we save Georgia. And he stands at the Council on Foreign Relations, says Georgia's in the center of Europe. Well, it ain't, ladies and gentlemen. It's not in the center of Europe. And the most recent events are not helpful for Georgia, for its safety and your MPs going there, or MEPs going there, and European politicians.
Gets Georgia destroyed. Doesn't save Georgia, that gets Georgia destroyed, completely destroyed. In 02/2008, as everybody knows, our former CIA director William Burns sent a long message back to Condoleezza Rice, niet means niet, about expansion. This we know from Julian Assange, because believe me, not one word is told to the American people about anything or to you or by any of your newspapers these days. So we have Julian Assange to thank, but we can read the memo in detail.
As you know, Viktor Yanukovych was elected in 02/2010 on platform of neutrality. Russia had no territorial interests or designs in Ukraine at all. I know. I was there during these these years. What Russia was negotiating was a twenty five year lease to 2042 for Sevastopol Naval Base.
That's it. Not for Crimea, not for the Donbas, nothing like that. This idea that Putin is reconstructing the Russian empire, this is childish propaganda. Excuse me. If anyone knows the day to day and year to year history, this is childish stuff.
Childish stuff seems to work better than adult stuff. So no designs at all. The United States decided this man must be overthrown. United States decided this man must be overthrown. It's called a regime change operation.
There have been about a hundred of them by The United States, many in your countries and many all over the world. That's what the CIA does for a living. K? Please know it. It's a very unusual kind of foreign policy.
America, if you don't like the other side, you don't negotiate with them, you try to overthrow them, preferably covertly. If it doesn't work covertly, you do it overtly. You always say it's not our fault. They're the aggressor. They're the other side.
They're Hitler. That comes up every two or three years, whether it's Saddam Hussein, whether it's Assad, whether it's Putin. That's very convenient. That's the only foreign policy explanation the American people are ever given anywhere. Well, we're facing Munich, Nineteen Thirty Eight.
Well, we're facing Munich, Nineteen Thirty Eight. Can't talk to the other side. They're evil, implacable foes. That's the only model of foreign policy we ever hear from our mass media, and the mass media repeats it entirely because it's completely suborned by the US government. Now, in thousand fourteen, the US worked actively to overthrow Yanukovych.
Everybody knows the phone call intercepted by my Columbia University colleague, Victoria Newland, and The US Ambassador, Peter Piatt.
Speaker 4: Can't remember if I told you this or if I only told Washington this, that when I talked to Jeff Feltman this morning, he had a new name for the UN guy, Robert Seri. Did I write you that this morning?
Speaker 2: Yeah. I saw that.
Speaker 4: He he's now gotten both Seri and Ban Ki Moon to agree that Seri could come in Monday or Tuesday.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 4: So that would be great, I think, to help glue this thing and have the UN help glue it and, you know, fuck the EU.
Speaker 2: No. Exactly. And I think we've got to do something to make it stick together because you can be pretty sure that if it does if it does start to gain altitude, the Russians will be working behind the scenes to try to torpedo it.
Speaker 1: You don't get better evidence. The Russians intercepted her call, and they put it on the Internet. Listen to it. It's fascinating. I know all these people.
By the way, by doing that, they all got promoted in the Biden administration. That's the job. Now when the Maidan occurred, I was called immediately, oh, Professor Sachs, the new Ukrainian prime minister would like to see you to talk about the economic crisis, because I'm pretty good at that. And so I flew to Kyiv, and I was walked around the Maidan. And I was told how The US paid the money for all the people around the Maidan.
Spontaneous, revolution of dignity. Ladies and gentlemen, please, where do all these media outlets come from? Where does all this organization come from? Where do all these buses come from? Where do all these people called in come from?
Are you kidding? This is organized effort. And it's not a secret except to citizens of Europe and The United States. Everyone else understands it quite clearly. Then came Minsk, and especially Minsk Two, which, by the way, was modeled on South Tyrolean autonomy.
And the Belgians could have related to Mitzvah very well. It said there should be autonomy for the Russian speaking regions in the East Of Ukraine. It was supported unanimously by the UN Security Council. The United States and Ukraine decided it was not to be enforced. Germany and France, which were the guarantors of the Normandy process, let it go.
And it was absolutely another direct American unipolar action with Europe as usual playing completely useless subsidiary role, even though it was a guarantor of the agreement. Trump won, raised raised the armaments. There were many thousands of deaths in the shelling by Ukraine in the Donbas. There was no Minsk Two agreement. And then Biden came into office.
And, again, I know all these people. I used to be a member of the Democratic Party. I now am strictly sworn to be a member of no party, because both are the same anyway, and because this is I the Democrats became complete warmongers over time, and there not was not one one voice about peace, just like most of your parliamentarians, the same way. So at the end of 1991, Putin put on the table a last effort in two security agreement drafts, one with Europe and one with The United States. The US put on the table December 2021.
I had an hour call with Jake Sullivan in the White House begging, Jake, avoid the war. You can avoid the war. All you have to do is say, NATO will not enlarge to Ukraine. And he said to me, oh, NATO's not gonna enlarge to Ukraine. Don't worry about it.
I said, Jake, say it publicly. No. No. No. We can't say it publicly.
I said, Jake, you're going to have a war over something that isn't even going to happen? He said, don't worry, Jeff, there'll be no war. These are not very bright people. I'm telling you, if I can give you my honest view, they're not very bright people. And I dealt with them for more than forty years.
They talk to themselves. They don't talk to anybody else. They play game theory. In non cooperative game theory, you don't talk to the other side. You just make your strategy.
This is the essence of game theory. It's not negotiation theory. It's not peacemaking theory. It is unilateral, non cooperative theory, if you know formal game theory. That's what they play.
It started at the Rand Corporation. That's what they still play. In 2019, there's a paper by Rand, how do we extend Russia? Do you know they wrote a paper which Biden followed? How do we annoy Russia?
That's literally the strategy. How do we annoy Russia? We're trying to provoke it, trying to make it break apart, maybe have regime change, maybe have unrest, maybe have economic crisis. That's what you call your ally. Are you kidding?
So, I had a long and frustrating phone call with Sullivan. I was standing out in the freezing cold. I happened to be trying to have a ski day. And there I was, Jake, don't have the war. Oh, there'll be no war, Jeff.
We know a lot of what happened the next month, which is that they refused to negotiate. The stupidest idea of NATO is the so called open door policy. Are you kidding? NATO reserves the right to go where it wants without any neighbor having any say whatsoever? Well, I tell the Mexicans and the Canadians, don't try it.
You know, Trump may wanna take over Canada so Canada could say to China, why don't you build a military base in in in Ontario? I wouldn't advise it. And The United States would not say, Well, it's an open door. That's their business. I mean, they can do what they want.
That's not our business. But grown ups in Europe repeat this. In Europe, in your commission, your high representative. This is nonsense stuff. This is not even baby geopolitics.
This is just not thinking at all. So the war started. What was Putin's intention in the war? I can tell you what his intention was. It was to force Zelensky to negotiate neutrality.
Neutrality. And that happened within seven days of the start of the invasion. You should understand this, not the propaganda that's written about this. Oh, that they failed failed and he was gonna take over Ukraine. Come on, ladies and gentlemen.
Understand something basic. The idea was to keep NATO, and what is NATO? It's The United States, off of Russia's border. No more, no less. I should add one very important point.
Why are they so interested? First, because if China or Russia decided to have a military base on the Rio Grande or in Canadian border, not only would The United States freak out, we'd have war within about ten minutes, but because The United States unilaterally abandoned the anti ballistic missile treaty in 02/2002 and ended the nuclear arms control framework by doing so. And this is extremely important to understand. The nuclear arms control framework is based on trying to block a first strike. The ABM treaty was a critical component of that.
The US unilaterally walked out of the ABM treaty in 02/2002. It blew a Russian gasket. So everything I've been describing is in the context of the destruction of the nuclear framework as well. And starting in 02/2010, the US put in Aegis missile systems in Poland and then in Romania. And Russia doesn't like that.
And one of the issues on the table in December and January, December '20 '20 '1, January '20 '20 '2, was does The United States claim the right to put missile systems in Ukraine? And Blinken told Lavrov in January 2022, the United States reserves the right to put middle sis missile systems wherever wherever it wants. That's your putative ally. And now let's put intermediate missile systems back in Germany. The United States walked out of the INF treaty unilaterally in 2019.
There is no nuclear arms framework right now. None. When Zelensky said in seven days, let's negotiate, I know the details of this exquisitely because I've talked to all the parties in detail. Within a couple of weeks, there was a document exchanged that president Putin had approved, that Lavrov had presented, that was being managed by the Turkish mediators. I flew to Ankara to listen in detail to what the mediators were doing.
Ukraine walked away unilaterally from a near agreement. Why? Because The United States told them to. Because the UK added icing to the cake by having Bojo go in early April to Ukraine and explain. And he has recently and if your security is in the hands of Boris Johnson, God help us all.
Keith Starmer turns out to be even worse. It's unimaginable, but it is true. Boris Johnson has explained, and you can look it up on the website, that what's at stake here is Western hegemony. Not Ukraine, Western Hegemony. Western hegemony.
Michael and I met at the Vatican with a group in the spring of twenty twenty two where we wrote a document explaining nothing nothing good can come out of this war for Ukraine. Negotiate now because anything that takes time will mean massive amounts of deaths, risk of nuclear escalation, and likely loss loss of the war. I wanna change one word from what we wrote then. Nothing was wrong in that document. And since that document, since The US talked talked the negotiators away from the table, about a million Ukrainians have died or been severely wounded.
And the American senators who are as nasty and cynical and corrupt as imaginable say, this is wonderful expenditure of our money because no Americans are dying. It's the pure proxy war. One of our senators nearby me, Blumenthal, says this out loud. Mitt Romney says this out loud. It's best money America can spend.
No Americans are dying. It's unreal. Now just to bring us up to yesterday. This failed. This project failed.
Project failed. The idea of the project was that Russia would fold its hand. The idea all along was Russia can't resist, as Zbigniew Brzezinski explained in 1997. Americans thought we have the upper hand. We're gonna win because we're gonna bluff them.
They're not really gonna fight. They're not really gonna mobilize. The nuclear option of cutting them out of swift, swift, that's going to do them in. The economic sanctions, that's going to do them in. The HIMARS, that's
Speaker 3: going to
Speaker 1: do them in. The the f sixteens. Honestly, I've listened to this for seventy years. I've listened to it as semi understanding, I'd say, for about fifty six years. They speak nonsense every day.
My country, my government. This is so familiar to me, completely familiar. I begged the Ukrainians, and I had a track record with the Ukrainians. I advised Ukrainians. I'm not anti Ukrainian, pro Ukrainian completely.
I said, save your lives, save your sovereignty, save your territory, be neutral. Don't listen to the Americans. I repeated to them the famous adage of Henry Kissinger that to be an enemy of The United States is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal. Okay? So let me repeat that for Europe.
To be an enemy of The United States is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal. So let me now finalize a few words about Trump.
Speaker 3: Trump
Speaker 1: does not want the losing hand. This is why it is more likely than not this war will end, because Trump and president Putin will agree to end the war. If Europe does all its great great warmongering, it doesn't matter. The war is ending. So get it out of your system.
Please tell your colleagues. It's over. And it's over because Trump doesn't morality. He doesn't wanna carry a loser. This is a loser.
The one that will be saved by the negotiations taking place right now is Ukraine. Second Second is Europe. Your stock market's rising in recent days by the horrible news of negotiations. I know this has been met with the sheer horror in these chambers, but this is the best news that you could get. Now I encouraged.
They don't listen to me, but I tried to reach out to some of the European leaders. Most don't wanna hear anything from me at all. But I said, don't go to Kyiv, go to Moscow, discuss with your counterparts. Are you kidding? You're Europe, you're Europe.
You're four fifty million people. You're $20,000,000,000,000 economy. You should be the main economic trading partner of Russia. It's natural links. Natural links.
By the way, if anyone would like to discuss how The US blew up Nord Stream, I'd be happy to talk about that. So the Trump administration is imperialist dominate the world. It is we will do what we want when we can. We will be better than a senescent Biden, Biden, and we'll cut our losses where we have to. There are several war zones in the world, The Middle East being another.
We don't know what will happen with that. Again, if Europe had a proper policy, you could stop that war. I'll explain how. But war with China is also a possibility. So not saying that we're at the new age of peace, but we are in a very different kind of politics right now, and Europe should have a foreign policy.
And not just a foreign policy of Russophobia, a foreign policy that is a realistic foreign policy that understands Russia's Europe's situation, that understands what America is and what it stands for, that tries to avoid Europe being invaded by The United States because it's not impossible that America will just land troops in Danish territory. I'm not joking, and I don't think they're joking. And Europe needs a foreign policy, a real one, not a, yes, we'll bargain with mister Trump and meet him halfway. You know what that will be like? Give me a call afterwards.
Please don't have American officials as head of Europe. Have European officials. Please, have a European foreign policy. You're going to be living with Russia for a long time, so please negotiate with Russia. There are real security issues on the table.
But the bombast and the Russophobia is not serving your security at all. It's not serving Ukraine's security at all. It contributed to a million casualties in Ukraine from this idiotic American adventure that you signed on to and then became the lead cheerleaders of. Solves nothing. On the Middle East, by the way, The US completely handed over foreign policy to Netanyahu thirty thirty years ago.
The Israel lobby dominates American politics. Just have no doubt about it. I could explain for hours how it works. It's very dangerous. I'm hoping that Trump will not destroy his administration and worse, the Palestinian people because of Netanyahu, who I regard as a war criminal, properly indicted by the ICC, and that needs to be told no more, that there will be a state of Palestine on the borders of the 06/04/1967, according to international law, as the only way for peace.
It's the only way for Europe to have peace on your borders with the Middle East is the two state solution. There is only one obstacle to it, by the way, and that is the veto of The United States and the UN Security Council. So if you wanna have some influence, tell The United States, drop the veto. You are together with a 80 countries in the world. The only ones that oppose a Palestinian state are The United States, Israel, Micronesia, Nauru, Polau, Papua New Guinea, Mr.
Malay, and Paraguay. So this is a place where Europe could have a big influence. Europe has gone silent about the JCPOA and Iran. Greatest dream in life is a war between The United States and Iran. He's not given up, and it's not impossible that that would come also.
And that's because The US, in this regard, does not have an independent foreign policy. It is run by Israel. It's tragic. It's amazing, by the way. And it could end.
Trump may say that he wants foreign policy back, maybe. I'm hoping that it's the case. Finally, let me just say, with respect to China, China is not an enemy. China is just a success story. That's why it is viewed by The United States as an enemy, because China is a bigger economy than The United States.
That's all.
Speaker 3: Very well. Now questions. Please don't make any statements. Just make questions because we are too many, and we we don't have that all that much time. So where do I start?
I start with on the left side. I have a preference to the left, as you know. You've come over. Yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 5: Thank you, Jeffrey Sachs. From the Czech Republic, we are glad we have you here. We have a problem. We were cursed by a witch who told the EU and the EU is mocked. So it won't be improved until 02/1929.
But what we, the Central Europeans, should do in the meantime, especially if the Germans doesn't don't happen to vote for Sara Waggenknecht enough. Are we supposed to create some kind of neutrality for the Central Europe, or what would you suggest us to do? Yeah.
Speaker 1: So first of all, all my grandchildren are Czech, I want you to know. And Sonia is a Czech born and Czech citizen, so we're very proud. I'm the trailing spouse in this, but I'm a Czech wannabe. Europe needs to have a foreign policy that is a European foreign policy, and it needs to be a realist foreign policy. Realist is not hate.
Realist is actually trying to understand both sides and to negotiate. There are two kinds of realists, a defensive realist and an offensive realist. My dear friend John Mearsheimer, who is the offensive realist, we're very close friends and I love him, but I believe more than he does, you talk to the other side and you find a way to make an understanding. And so, basically, Russia is not going to invade Europe. This is the fundamental point.
It may get up to the deeper river. It's not going to invade Europe. But there are real issues. The main issue for Russia was The United States, because Russia, as a major power and the largest nuclear power in the world, was profoundly concerned about U. Profoundly concerned about U.
S. Unipolarity from the beginning. Now that this is seemingly, possibly ending, Europe has to open negotiations directly with Russia as well, because The United States will quickly lose interest and you're going to be living with Russia for the next thousands of years. Okay? So what do you want?
You want to make sure that the Baltic states are secure. The best thing for the Baltic States is to stop their Russophobia. This is the most important thing. Estonia has about 25% Russian citizens, Russian speaking citizens, ethnic Russians. Latvia, the same.
Don't provoke the neighbor. That's all. This is not heard. It really isn't heard. And again, I want to explain my point of view.
I have helped these countries, the ones I'm talking trying to advise I'm not their enemy, I'm not Putin's puppet, I'm not Putin's apologist. I worked in Estonia, they gave me, I don't, it's not, I think it's the second highest civilian honor that a president of Estonia can bestow on a non national, because I designed their currency system for them in 1992. So I'm giving them advice. Do not stand there, Estonia, and say, we want to break up Russia. Are you kidding?
Don't. This is not how to survive in this world. You survive with mutual respect, respect, actually. You survive in negotiation. You survive in discussion.
You don't outlaw the Russian language. Not a good idea when 25% of your population is has a first language of Russian. It's not right even if there weren't a giant on the border. It wouldn't be the right thing to do. You'd have it as an official language.
You'd have a language of in lower school. You wouldn't antagonize the Russian Orthodox Church. So basically, we need to behave like grown ups. And when I constantly say that they're acting like children, Sonya always says to me that's unfair to children. Because this is worse than children.
We have a six year old granddaughter and a three year old grandson, and they actually make up with their friends. And we don't tell them, go, just, just ridicule them tomorrow and every day. We say, go give them a hug and go play. And they do. This is not hard.
By the way Well, anyway, I won't belabor the point. Thank you. Elect a new government. Shouldn't
Speaker 3: say that. All
Speaker 1: all I should say is change change policy.
Speaker 3: I don't want to have a political leaning here. Yeah. Maybe a lady.
Speaker 6: And Does that work? Yeah. Hi. My name is Kira. I'm a reporter with The Brussels Times.
Thank you for the fascinating talk, Jeffrey. I just wanted to ask you about Trump's statements about wanting NATO members to increase their spending by 5%. And we're now seeing lots of countries scrambling to prove that they're going to do that, including Belgium. And given that Belgium is also the NATO headquarters, I wanted to ask you what would be the appropriate response to those statements by NATO members? Thanks.
Speaker 1: Great. Thank you. We don't see exactly eye to eye on this question, so let give you my own view. My first recommendation, with all respect to Brussels, is move the NATO headquarters somewhere else. I mean it seriously, because one of the worst parts of European policy right now is a complete confusion of Europe and NATO.
Policy right now is a complete confusion of Europe and NATO. These are completely different, but they became exactly the same. Europe is much better than NATO. In my opinion, NATO isn't even needed anymore. I would have ended it in 1991.
But because The US viewed it as an instrument of hegemony, not as a defense against Russia. It continued afterwards. But the confusion of NATO and Europe is deadly, because expanding Europe meant expanding NATO. Period. And these should have been completely different things.
So this is the first point. My own view, again, with all respect to Michael, we only had a brief conversation about it, is that Europe should have Europe basically should have its own foreign policy and its own military security, its own strategic autonomy, so called. And it should. I'm in favor of that. I would disband NATO, and maybe Trump is gonna do it anyway.
Maybe Trump's gonna invade Greenland. Who knows? Then you're really gonna find out what NATO means. So I do think that Europe should invest in its security. 5% is outlandish, ridiculous, absurd, completely absurd.
No one needs to spend anything like that amount. Two to 3% of GDP? Probably under the current circumstances. What I would do, by the way, is buy European production. Because actually, strangely, weirdly, unfortunately in this world, and it's a true truism, but it's unfortunate, so I'm not championing it, a lot of technological innovation spins off from the military sector, because governments invest in the military sector.
So Trump is a arms salesman. You understand that. He's selling American arms. He is selling American technology. Vance told you a few days ago, don't even think about having your own AI technology.
So please understand that this increase of spending is for The United States, not for you. And in this sense, I'm completely against that approach. But I would not be against an approach of Europe spending two to 3% of GDP for a unified European security structure and invested in Europe and European technology and not having The United States dictate the use of European technology. It's so interesting. It's The Netherlands that produces the only machines of advanced semiconductors, extreme ultraviolet lithography.
It's ASML. But America determines every policy of ASML. The Netherlands doesn't even have a footnote. I wouldn't do that if I were you, hand over all security to The United States. I wouldn't do it.
I would have your own security framework, so you can have your own foreign policy framework as well. Europe Europe stands for lots of things that The United States does not stand for. Europe stands for climate action, by the way, rightly so, because our president is completely bonkers on this. And Europe stands for decency, for social democracy, as an ethos I'm not talking about a party, I'm talking about an ethos of how equality of life occurs. Europe stands for multilateralism.
Europe stands for the UN Charter. The US stands for none of those things. You know know that our secretary of state, Marco Rubio, canceled his trip to South Africa because on the agenda was equality and sustainability. And he said, I'm not getting into Egalitarianism is not a word of the American lexicon. Sustainable development, not at all.
You probably know, by the way, that of the 93 UN member states, a 91 have had SDG plans presented as voluntary national reviews. A 91, two have not, Haiti and The United States Of America. The Biden administration wasn't even allowed to say sustainable development goals. The treasury had a policy not to say sustainable development goals. Okay.
I mention all of this because you need your own foreign policy. I issue a report, two reports each year, one, the World Happiness Report, and 18 of the top 20 countries, if I remember correctly, are European. This is the highest quality of life in the whole world. So you need your own policy to protect that quality of life. The United States ranks way down.
And the other report, where's my colleague Guillaume, he's somewhere in the room, here, there he is, Guillaume Lafortune is the lead author of our annual sustainable development report. And almost all of the top 20 countries are European countries, because you believe in this stuff. And that's why you're the happiest, except in geopolitics. Happiest, except in geopolitics. But quality of life.
So you need your own foreign policy, but you won't have it unless you have your own security. You just won't. And so and by the way, 27 countries cannot each have their own foreign policy. This is a problem. You need a European foreign policy and a European security structure.
And by the way, although Michael assures me it's dead, I was the greatest fan of OSCE and believed that OSCE is the proper framework for European security. It could really work.
Speaker 3: Okay. And afterwards. First, yeah. You.
Speaker 0: Thank you very much.
Speaker 3: You are at the lunch. Now you can then.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you, professor. I am from Slovakia, and my prime minister, Robert Fitsa, was almost shot dead because the opinions you had are the similar with him.
Yes. We are, as a Slovakia, Slovak Government of the few countries in the European Union, we are talking to Russians. Two months ago, I was talking with mister Medvedev. In two weeks, I will be talking in Duma with mister Slutsky, who is the chairman of the Russian Foreign Affairs Committee in Moscow. Maybe my question is, what would you be your message to Russians in this moment?
Because as I heard, they are on the victorious wave. They have no reason to not to conquer the Donbas because that's their war aim. And what can Trump can offer to them to stop the war immediately? What would be what would be the message for Russians from your side? Thank you very much.
Speaker 1: Quickly because of this, and this will be at least one blessing in a very, very difficult time. Exactly what the settlement will be, I think, is now only a question of the territorial issues. And that is whether it is the complete four oblasts, including all of Herzon and Zaporizhzhia, or whether it is on the contact line, and how all of this will be negotiated. I'm not in the room of the negotiations, so I can't really say more. But the basis will be, there will be territorial concessions, neutrality, there will be security guarantees for Ukraine, for all parties, there will be, at least with The U.
S, an end of the economic sanctions. But what counts, of course, is Europe and Russia. I think that there are and maybe there will be a restoration of nuclear arms negotiations, which would be extraordinarily positive. I think that there are tremendously important issues for Europe to negotiate directly with Russia. And so I would urge President Costa and the leadership of Europe to open direct discussions with President Putin, because European security is on the table.
I know the Russian leaders, many of them quite well. They are good negotiators, and you should negotiate with them, and you should negotiate well with them. I would ask them some questions. I would ask them, what are the security guarantees that can work so that this war ends permanently? What are the security guarantees for the Baltic States?
What should be done? Part of the process of negotiation is actually to ask the other side about your concerns, not just to know what they know as you think is too true, but actually to ask, we have a real problem, we have a real worry, what are the guarantees? Well, I want to know the answers also. By the way, I know Mr. Minister Lavrov, for thirty years, I regard him as a brilliant foreign minister.
Talk with him, negotiate with him, get ideas, put ideas on the table, put counter ideas on the table. I don't think all of this can be settled by pure reason because of oneself. You settle wars by negotiating and understanding what are the real issues, and you don't call the other side a liar when they express their issues. You work out what the implications of that are for the mutual benefit of peace. So the most important thing is stop the yelling, stop the warmongering, and discuss with the Russian counterparts.
And don't beg to be at the table with The United States. You don't need to be in the room with The United States. You're Europe. You should be in the room with Europe and Russia. If The United States wants to join, that's fine.
But to beg, no. And by Europe does not need to have Ukraine in the room when Europe talks with Russia. You have a lot of issues, direct issues. Don't hand over your foreign policy to anybody, not to The United States, not to Ukraine, not to Israel. Keep a European foreign policy.
This is the basic idea.
Speaker 7: Hans Neuhof from the Southernists political group in this parliament, Alternative for Germany as political party. First of all, let me thank you, mister Sachs, for being here and sharing your ideas with us. And be assured that many of your ideas and of your colleague, John Mersheimer, have well been received by political groups here and have been integrated into our agenda. I widely share your views, yet there's one question regarding the historical account that you gave where I would like to go in some detail. This concerns the beginning of NATO expansion.
You reported from the website what Gorbachev heard that there are many quotations from Genshir, for example, that NATO will not move one inch eastwards. Now the two plus four treaty has been signed in September 1990, right, in Moscow. So at that point in time the Warsaw Pact still existed and countries like Poland, Hungary and Czechia were not part of the negotiations for the True and For Treaty. So the Warsaw Pact actually dissolved in July 1991 and the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991. So nobody who was present in the negotiations could speak for Poland, could speak for Hungary, could speak for Slovakia, that they would not try to become member of NATO once the overall situation has changed.
So the counterargument, which we have to counter, is that it was on the will of these countries of Poland, of Hungary, of Slovakia that they wanted to join NATO because of the very history they had with the Soviet Union. And, of course, Russia was still perceived in a way as a follower of the Soviet Union. So how do you counter
Speaker 3: that argument?
Speaker 1: I have no doubt of why Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia wanted to join NATO. The question is, what is The US doing to make peace? Because NATO is not a choice of Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, or Slovakia. NATO is a US led military alliance. And the question is, how are we going to establish peace in a reliable way?
If I were making those decisions back then, I would have ended NATO altogether in 1991. When those countries requested NATO, I would have explained to them what our Defense Secretary William Perry said, what our lead statesman George Kennan said, what our lead statesman George Kennan said, what our final ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock, said. They said, Well, we understand your feelings, but it's not a good idea because it could provoke provoke a new Cold War with Russia. So that's how I would have answered it. When those countries joined in the first wave, I don't think it was that consequential, in fact, except except that it was part of a bigger project.
And the project was spelled out already in 1994. There's a very good book by Jonathan Haslam, Harvard University Press called Hubris, which gives a detailed historical documentation of step by step what happened. And it's really worth reading. So this is a Now, but the point I would really make is that Ukraine and Georgia were too far. This is right up against Russia.
This is in the context of the complete destabilization of the nuclear framework. This is in the context of The US putting in missile systems on Russia's borders. If you listen to President Putin over the years, probably the main thing, if you listen carefully, that he's concerned about is missiles seven minutes from Moscow, is decapitation strike. And this is very real. The US not only would freak out, but did freak out when this happened in the Western Hemisphere.
So it's the Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse. And fortunately, Nikita Khrushchev did not stand up and say, open door policy of the Warsaw Pact. We can go wherever we want. Cuba's asked us. It's none of America's business.
What Khrushchev said is, war, my god, we don't want war. We end this crisis. We both pull back. That's what Khrushchev and Kennedy decided in the end. So this is the real consequential.
Russia even swallowed with a lot of pain the Baltic States, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia. It is Ukraine and Georgia. And it's because of geography. It's because of Lord Palmerston. It's because of the first Crimean War.
It's because of the missile systems that this is the essence of why there was this war.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Is there anybody else? Because then we maybe close. What you want to be the last one? Oh, see.
Which one? Oh, can you still continue? Sure. Yeah. No, you come for the lunch.
I don't take it.
Speaker 8: Thank you very much, professor Sachs, for coming. You've mentioned that the European Union needs to formulate its own foreign policy. In the past, the German Franco alliance was a big driver for those policies. Now with the Ukraine war, arguably, received a crack. Do you think that in the future, when the European Union is going formulate this new foreign policy, that they are going to be again in the front seat?
Or should it be other countries or other blocks trying to make that change? Thank you very much.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's hard. It's hard because, of course, of structure in which Europe can speak as Europe, even with some dissent, but with the European policy. I don't want to oversimplify how to get there exactly, but even with the structures you have, you could do a lot better with negotiating directly. The first rule is your diplomats should be diplomats, not secretaries of war. Honestly, that would go halfway, at least, to where you want to go.
Diplomat is a very special kind of talent. A diplomat is trained to sit together with the other side and to listen, to shake hands, to smile, smile, and to be pleasant. It's very hard. It's a skill. It's training.
It's a profession. It's not a game. You need that kind of diplomacy. I'm sorry. We are not hearing anything like that.
I'll just make a couple complaints. First, Europe is not NATO, as I said. I thought Stoltenberg was the worst, but I was wrong. It just keeps getting worse. Could someone in NATO stop talking, for God's sake, about more war?
And could NATO stop speaking for Europe and Europe stop thinking it's NATO? This is the first absolute point. Second, I'm sorry, but your high representative vice presidents need to become diplomats. Diplomacy means going to Moscow, inviting your Russian counterpart here, discussing this doesn't happen till now. So this is really my point.
Now I believe that Europe should become more integrated and more unified in the years ahead. I'm a strong believer in subsidiarity, so we were discussing, I don't think housing policy is really Europe's main issue. I think this can be handled at the local level or at the national level. I don't see it as a European issue. But I don't see foreign policy as being a 27 country issue, I see it being as a European issue.
And I see security being at a European level. So I think things need to be readjusted, but 'd like to see more Europe for truly European issues, and maybe less Europe for things that are properly subsidiary to Europe at the national and the local level. And I hope that such an evolution can take place. You know when the world talks about great powers right now, they talk about US, Russia, China, I include India, and I really want to include Europe, and I really want to include Africa as an African Union, and I want that to happen. But you'll notice on the list, Europe doesn't show up right now, and this is because there is no European foreign policy.
Speaker 3: Okay. Maybe after you, one more, and then we when I close. Is there is there anybody who wanted I would prefer a woman actually if I'm I'm sorry. You you want no. First first this gentleman and then you close.
Sorry for this one. It's a
Speaker 9: you very much and thank you very much, professor, for this very courageous speech, very clear speech also that you made. I'm an MEP from Luxembourg. My question is the following, what are the long term consequences of this lost war? We lost the war, now we have an uncertain future for NATO. We have also clearly and to refer to it the marginalization of Europe.
We have a strengthening of the BRICS countries which can be rivals in many respects. So will there be a future for a collective West over the next twenty or thirty years? Thank you very much.
Speaker 1: I I don't believe there is a collective West. I believe that there is United States and Europe that are, in some areas, in parallel interest, and in many areas not in parallel interest. I want Europe to lead sustainable development, climate transformation, global decency. I believe if the world looked more like Europe, it'd be a happier, more peaceful, safer world. And longevity and better food, by the way.
But just saying. In any event, Europe has a vocation that is rather different from the American tradition and, frankly, from the Anglo Saxon tradition, because it's been two hundred years of Anglo Saxon hegemony or aspirational hegemony, the British still believe they've run the world. It's amazing what nostalgia means. Stop. It's almost like a Monty Python skit, actually.
But in any event, where was I? I'm thinking of Monty Python when the knight gets all his limbs cut off and says, everything's fine. I'm victorious. That's Britain, unfortunately. And so it's it's it's it's really terrible.
So, no, I don't believe in the collective West. I don't believe in the global South. I don't believe in all these geographies don't even make sense because I'm actually you know, I look at maps a lot, and the global South is mostly in the North, and the West is not even West. And so I don't even understand what this is about. I do believe that we could be in a true age of abundance if we got our heads on straight.
We're in the biggest technological advance in human history. It's truly amazing what can be done right now. You know, I marvel at the fact that somebody who knows no chemistry won the Nobel Peace Prize for chemistry, because he's very good at deep neural networks, a genius, Demis Hassabis. They figured out protein folding, that generations of biochemists spent their whole lives on, and now DeepMind figured out how to do it by the thousands of proteins. We have friends that spent their entire life on one protein, brilliant friends, and now what we can do.
So if actually, and same with renewable energy, as everybody knows, the price has come down by more than two orders of magnitude, the costs, we could transform the planet, we could protect the climate system, we could protect biodiversity, we could ensure every child gets a good education, we could do so many wonderful things right now. And so what do we need to do that? In my view, we need peace, most importantly. And my basic point is there are no deep reasons for conflict anywhere, because every conflict I study is just a mistake. It's not we are not struggling for Lebensraum.
That idea that came from Malthus and that became a Nazi idea was always a wrong idea. It was mistake, a fundamental intellectual mistake. An intellectual mistake, by the way, because leading scientists adopted the idea that we had race national wars, we had wars of survival, because we don't have enough on the planet. As an economist, I can tell you, we have plenty on the planet for everybody's development, plenty. We're not in a conflict with China.
We're not in a conflict with Russia. If we calm down, if you ask about the long term, the long term is very good. Thank you. The long term, if we don't blow ourselves up, is very good. And so this is what we should aim for, a positive shared vision under international law.
Because of our technology, things operate at a regional scale now. It used to be it was villages, then it was small areas, then it was unification of countries, now it's regional. That's not just because regions are wonderful. It's because the underlying technological reality, say Europe should be an integrated area by transport, by fast rail, by digital, by and so there's Europe. Politics follows the technological realities to a very important extent.
We're in a world of regions now. So Europe should be Europe with subsidiarity. Don't lose all of the wonderful, wonderful national and local elements. But Europe should be Europe. So the good side is let's I want Europe to have diplomacy, for example, with ASEAN.
I spend a of time with the ASEAN countries. If the the EU green deal, wonderful idea. I said many years ago, okay, to the ASEAN leaders, make an ASEAN Green Deal. And then talk with the Europeans so that you have this wonderful relationship, trade, investment, technology. So last year they announced an ASEAN Green Deal.
What did Europe do about it? Nothing. It said, Sorry, we're in the Ukraine war. Thank you. No interest.
So this is my point. Prospects are very positive if we construct the piece.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Because we have to go, I get all the time messages that I should hear, leave the room. Short. So with something very short? Yeah.
Speaker 10: Do you think that a way out of the conflict is some kind of style of felentization? And then, is that what you would have liked to see in Sweden and Finland's foreign policy as an example? Is that instead of them becoming members of NATO, is that the way that you would have liked to see these countries handed off foreign policy? And do you think that these countries that border Russia should just kind of succumb to their faith that, okay, we can't provoke Russia, like this is the way we have to live?
Speaker 1: Yeah. Very good. Excellent question. And let me just report one part about Finlandization. Finlandization landed Finland number one in the World Happiness Report year after year.
Rich, successful, happy, and secure. That's pre NATO. So Finlandization was a wonderful thing. Number one in the world. When Sweden and Finland and Austria were neutral.
Bravo. Smart. When Ukraine was neutral. Smart. If you have two superpowers, keep them apart a little bit.
You don't have to be right with your nose up against each other, especially if one of them, The US, is pushing its nose into the other one. And so Finlandization, to my mind, has a very positive connotation. So does Austrianization. Austria, nineteen fifty five, signed its neutrality. The Soviet Army left.
And Austria is a wonderful place, by the way, absolutely wonderful. And so this is basic how to avoid conflict. If The United States had any sense at all, it would have left these countries space in between the US military and Russia. But that's where The US lost it.
Speaker 3: Thank you very much. Let me I I just want to end with an appeal. I think we both agree that we will have a the war will end within a month or two, and that means the fighting will end. It doesn't mean that we will have peace in Europe. The peace in Europe, that has to be done by us, by Europeans, not by a president from The United States.
We have to create this peace, and that is Europe, which includes, of course, Belarus, Russia, and all these other countries. So we have to do something, and we are here at parliament. We are as a parliamentarians, we represent people. We are the only legitimate democratically legitimate institution in the European Union. Maybe we should have become all a little bit more proactive in trying to move this peace process forwards across party lines.
I think, I don't know how many parties here really are, but if we can talk to each other without saying, ah, you're from this party, you're from this party, I think we really have to concentrate. If here we could not take more initiative from the parliament vis a vis the commission and say, we are presenting the people, not you. We are presenting the people, and these people in Europe want peace, and that's what we should go. So maybe this the beginning of one. We will make every month, I will organize with my colleagues the same thing here about different topics, which we are all around it, and we hope that this one we get a discussion that is different than what we have in the where we basically don't have a discussion, but that we have a discussion also across the party and invite also people from other political parties.
We don't invite anybody. Let's discuss it. In the end, we want all want this the same peace for the next generation, and I have plenty of children, grandchildren, you too, and that's what we need. Okay, thank you very much, professor Lin.
@Fidias0 - Fidias Panayiotou
Jeffrey Sachs on Why Europe is Failing https://t.co/jXnBam6ZLv
Video Transcript AI Summary
Europe should have been negotiating with Russia, but now that Trump is, some are in an uproar. If the US stops sending arms and funding, the war will end. This all stems from American arrogance, going back decades to the US declaring itself the sole superpower and expanding NATO eastward, ignoring Russian concerns. The US participated in a violent coup in Ukraine in 2014, further escalating tensions.
Europe needs a grown-up foreign policy, not one based on hate speech or Russophobia, but real diplomacy. NATO should have been disbanded in 1991. The US sees this as a game, but for Russia, it's about core national security.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Now Trump is starting negotiations. Now the Europeans and Zelensky are saying, oh my god. Oh my god. Well, Europe should have been negotiating.
Speaker 1: Out of the 720 members of the European Parliament, which are out of them, majority of 500 of them, they vote to continue this war to keep sending weapons.
Speaker 0: Let me mention a secret to the members of parliament. If The United States stops, the war's gonna stop. All of this came about because of American arrogance and stupidity. This goes back thirty years. If people really think that this started on 02/22/2022, my god, they could understand what it means for my country, The United States, to have been engaged in a hundred regime change operations since the end of World War two.
A hundred. In March 2022, the Russians and Ukrainians say, okay. We can settle this on the basis of Ukrainian neutrality. The United States and Britain told Ukraine, don't sign that agreement. Fight on.
Speaker 1: How should we think about foreign policy as Europe?
Speaker 0: If Europe acts like 27 individual countries, I'm sorry. It's gonna get picked to pieces. How's it gonna deal with Russia? How's it gonna deal with China? How's it gonna deal with The United States, if I could put it quite bluntly?
The past ideas of Biden were were the unipolar world. The current ideas are we take what we want. If we want Greenland, Canada, Panama, Gaza, we take it. Europe is gonna need to have diplomacy.
Speaker 1: Not delusional diplomacy.
Speaker 0: Can I call it grown up diplomacy? Not childish diplomacy, not propaganda based diplomacy, not slogan based diplomacy, not Russophobic diplomacy or sinophobic diplomacy, but real diplomacy. NATO should have been disbanded in 1991 when the Warsaw Pact was disbanded and when the Soviet Union ended. The goal of NATO of The US, it is to surround Russia. If you look at the Black Sea, you would have Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia completely surrounding Russia.
For The United States, this was a game. For Russia, this is core national security. Who do you think is gonna win?
Speaker 1: Who are you? I know everyone a lot of people know you, but introduce yourself. It's interesting to see how you introduce yourself.
Speaker 0: I'm Jeff Sachs. I'm a professor at Columbia University and have been involved in global affairs and economic development for for a long time. So
Speaker 1: You know, I'm very excited today because you are not with your brain, you are not only just giving your opinion, but you recently and for a long time, you are influencing also politics, which is amazing just with your intellect and your opinion to influence politics around the world without being in big positions in politics. So it's amazing. I'm very excited. But there is a lot of news that we need to talk about and recently you didn't give talks about the recent involve news about Ukraine and all this stuff. So how do you see the current state of the negotiations that is happening now without Europe, just with Russia and United States?
Explain everything about this.
Speaker 0: Well, first, thank god there are negotiations. This war can end. And Europe should have been involved in negotiations with Russia, but it said no. Ukraine should have been involved with negotiations with Russia, but Zelenskyy actually issued a decree back in October 2022. No negotiations.
So there were no negotiations. Now Trump is starting negotiations. Now the Europeans and Zelensky are saying, oh my god. Oh my god. Well, Europe should have been negotiating.
My advice to Burrell for years was go to Moscow to go talk. You're the diplomat. Didn't happen because the attitude here was unfortunately, Russia is the enemy. We must defeat Russia on the battlefield. We must militarize.
So there were no diplomats around. All the people who called themselves diplomats were basically arms salesmen. They weren't they weren't engaged in diplomacy. Now we finally have some diplomacy started. It's good.
Speaker 1: It's it's crazy to me a lot. Like, majority, like, out of the 700 members of the European Parliament, which one of them, 720, majority of 500 of them, they vote to continue this war to keep sending weapons. So it's no wonder that they don't want us into negotiation, and I heard the
Speaker 0: Let let me mention a secret to the members of parliament. If The United States stops, the war's gonna stop. The United States has provided the arms, the financing for the armaments, the logistics. The Europeans can talk about continuing the war. I think it's a tragedy if they do, but it's not gonna happen actually.
The war will end.
Speaker 1: What we could do better as Europeans to be more influential in this thing and to play a part of these talks?
Speaker 0: Well, all of this came about because of American arrogance and stupidity. Sorry to say. This goes back thirty years. I hope some people here understand that. This is not something that Putin started, although that's everybody's line.
But if someone actually knows some history, and I do go back with advising Ukraine Russia and The Soviet Union before that, so I've been involved personally in these issues since 1989. This is US arrogance that goes back to 1992 when the Americans said, we run the world. We're the unipolar, sole, indispensable nation of the world, sole superpower. And then in 1994, Bill Clinton said, okay, we'll expand NATO, and it'll just keep going eastward. We told the Soviets we won't move one inch eastward, doesn't matter.
We're gonna do it. We're Americans. We do whatever we want. And Zbigh Brzezinski, people here know, they should go back and read his grand chessboard book, 1997, where he he lays out Washington policy. He actually has a chapter.
What will Russia do as NATO expands eastward? And his conclusion is they can't do anything. They'll have to agree to whatever The United States says. So people should learn a little bit of history. They should understand that The United States, their ally, destabilized the nuclear control, arms control framework in 02/2002 by unilaterally withdrawing from the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty.
This was the single most destabilizing action by The United States, even more than so many other terrible things, because the nuclear arms framework is the centerpiece of stability with Russia. And The United States unilaterally walked out. The Russians were extraordinarily upset about this. And then The US started placing anti ballistic missile systems in Poland and Romania, these Aegis missile systems. And listen to what the Russians are saying.
It would be like Russia putting missile bases in Mexico or Canada. Do you think America would say, well, that's their business. You know, how can we have any concern? And then if The United States expressed a concern, Russia would say, well, but Canada wants it or Mexico wants it. This is the childish attitude of The United States.
Then in 2014, the United States participated in a violent coup that overthrew the Ukrainian government. And within a nanosecond of that violent coup, The US said, we recognize that new government. And then came the Minsk agreement. And the Minsk Two agreement was backed by the UN Security Council. And what did Ukraine and The United States decide behind the scenes?
We don't have to take that seriously. Forget it. We don't like that agreement. That was at gunpoint. UN Security Council backs this unanimously.
The United States says, no. Don't worry about it. So the war continues already from 2014 to 2021. Tremendous shelling and deaths in the Donbas region. Then Putin says at the end of 2021, we need a new security arrangement between Europe and Russia, between The United States and Russia.
Europe, of course, doesn't act at all because it has no foreign policy other than obeying The United States. The United States tells Putin, no, we don't negotiate over that. Big surprise that the war escalates. And then in March 2022, the Russians and Ukrainians say, okay. We can settle this on the basis of Ukrainian neutrality.
So what happens? We know what happens. We know from insiders what happened. The United States and Britain told Ukraine, don't sign that agreement. Fight on.
This is even the words of one of the biggest bumbling idiots of our modern statesmanship, Boris Johnson, who says, Western hegemony depends on this. Are you kidding? Yeah. Good. Okay.
So negotiations stop. Ukraine leaves the negotiating table. Probably a million Ukrainians are dead or gravely wounded since that moment. Zelenskyy issues a decree because he rules by martial law. We say it's a democracy.
He rules by martial law. And by martial law, he issues a decree. No negotiations with Russia. How clever. What about Europe's Negotiators?
Well, sorry, but mister Barrel was not negotiating with Russia. He was warmongering.
Speaker 1: We're blackmailing him.
Speaker 0: And Annalisa Berebak, foreign minister of Germany. A word of peace? No. We will never negotiate until this moment. Okay.
So finally negotiations are started. Maybe Ukraine will be saved by all of this. But the issue here is there's a history to this. If people really think that this started on 02/22/2022, my god, they could learn a little bit that there's a little bit of background to this. They could understand what The US is.
They could understand what it means for my country, The United States, to have been engaged in a hundred regime change operations since the end of World War II. A hundred. These are documented. This is you destabilize regimes. You make coups.
This is a game. They might even read the New York Times, which once in a while tells the truth, like the story about the CIA operations all across Ukraine aimed at destabilizing Russia. Is this how we behave as grown ups in this world? Come on. This is so dangerous.
Speaker 1: So we shouldn't follow what The US was doing as Europeans? This is basically what you are saying?
Speaker 0: Of course. Europe should have a foreign policy, but a grown up foreign policy. A grown up foreign policy means you actually sit down and discuss your concerns with the other side. You don't just make hate speech or say, you're evil.
Speaker 1: You are Hitler.
Speaker 0: That's that's not negotiating. The idea that, oh, negotiation is appeasement. Appeasement is Hitler. This is the only thing, so never talk to the other side. This is a little primitive in this world.
Really primitive. But what's sad, I love Europe, and I am trying desperately for years to say to Europe, The US, you're you're gonna put everything in in that hand. You don't understand how The US works. I'm sorry to say I was right. Now they're running, running.
Oh my god. How could they do this? And I would say, how could you not understand? Maybe because I'm an American, I've lived through the Vietnam War. I've lived through the Contra Wars.
I've lived through the two Iraq Wars. I've lived through The US destabilization of Syria. I've lived through The US destabilization of Libya. I've lived through the US invasion of Afghanistan. I've lived through The US complicity in this massacre underway in Gaza.
I've lived through every one of these. What would they like to know? That that's their great ally and shared values and all the rest? No. I'm afraid not.
Europe needs a foreign policy.
Speaker 1: So I'm stupid 24 years old, even though I'm a member of the European Parliament. But can you explain me simply how should we think about foreign policy as Europe? Because we don't really have a common arm. It's a bit complex How we should act in as foreign policy in your opinion in Europe?
Speaker 0: Yeah. First of all, it's a complicated, multipolar world with many great powers, not one. So it's not just The United States, but it's also Russia, it's China, it's India. And it should be Europe. Europe is a region of 400, of course.
Europe is a region of four fifty million people. It's got an economy that is around $20,000,000,000,000. It is the center of world culture and civilization. And it has foreign policy needs and risks. And just saying, okay, we let The US take care of all of this, is not gonna work.
How's it gonna work if The US invades Greenland? Is that gonna work very well? How's it gonna work if The United States threatens Europe in countless different ways, which it might? How's it gonna work when The US has diplomacy with Russia and Europe does not? Even though Europe and Russia are on the same continent, The United States is thousands of miles away.
How's that going to work? So Europe needs to act like Europe. If Europe acts like 27 individual countries, I'm sorry. It's gonna get picked to pieces. I'm sorry about that.
That, in fact, I not only am I sorry about it
Speaker 1: Because everyone will disagree. Right?
Speaker 0: Everyone will disagree. And, yeah, there's Russia. There's The United States doing this demand, there's this one making this demand, there's this one making this demand, internally a disarray. How can that be to Europe's advantage? And, you know, as I study American history quite a bit, we had an experience, although it was more than two centuries ago.
The United States started, as people know, as British colonies. There were 13 of them. Some had been set up by royal charters, some had been set up by migrants, and there there were 13 distinct colonies. They united for the purpose of fighting for independence, starting around 1774, '17 '70 '5, and then the Declaration of Independence in 1776. With French help, they beat the the British.
Without French help, by the way, no America as an independent country. But with the French help, with France being a major power at the time, they the British said, okay. Have your independence. Treaty was reached in 1781. What happened then was something like the European Union.
The 13 formed a kind of union, but it was a confederation, and the governing constitution was called the Articles of Confederation. It was very weak. You needed unanimity. The taxes were only at the state level, not at the federal level. There was no national defense.
There was no national treaty making. It's a lot like Europe. You know, you need unanimity on all of these issues. By 1787, '6 years later, kind of miraculously, one leading politician said, we're gonna go down the drain. The the British are gonna take us to pieces.
The Spanish are gonna take us to pieces. The Spanish were trying to block the American access to the Mississippi River and and the port at New Orleans, for example. So they realized, and this one political entrepreneur James Madison realized, we better have a real union. Not just a kind of we get together and we have a weak union where there's no real foreign policy and maybe, I don't think they called it a high representative vice president in The United States. But we didn't have someone who could represent The United States.
We didn't have the treaty making power effectively. So they made a new constitution, and they made a federal government that created a real government. Frankly, Europe needs to be more united right now.
Speaker 1: It gonna federation.
Speaker 0: Yes. How's it gonna deal with Russia? How's it gonna deal with China? How's it gonna deal with The United States, if I could put it quite bluntly? And and and it needs actually a foreign policy.
But then it needs to be a sensible foreign policy. If you live on the continent next to Russia, you don't stand up and scream every day, you're evil, you're evil, you're evil. You actually sit down, discuss, and negotiate. You don't let The United States blow up the pipeline that provides the energy for Europe and then sit there
Speaker 1: like a dumb
Speaker 0: idiot. We don't know who did it. Well, I can give you 50 quotations by American officials saying we'll never let that happen. I can quote on video, show you the president of The United States saying on 02/07/2022, if Russia invades, Nord Stream will be finished. And then the reporter says, but mister president, how can you do that?
And he says, believe me, we have our ways.
Speaker 2: If Russia invades, that means tanks or troops crossing the the the border of Ukraine again, then there will be we there will be no longer Nord Stream two. We we will bring an end
Speaker 0: to it. Okay. But how will you how will you do that exactly since the project and control of the project is within Germany's controls?
Speaker 2: We will I promise you we'll be able to do it.
Speaker 0: Is that a clue? Well, the Europeans couldn't figure that out, that little clue. There's chancellor Schultz standing next to Biden. Quiet. He heard all of this.
Then the pipeline gets blown up. We don't know who did it. We don't know. And then there are the investigations. But those have to be kept secret even from the Bundestag, even from the public, even from the United Nations.
This is not foreign policy. This is not foreign policy. This is doing what The United States wants, but now you obviously can't just follow Trump. Obviously, they thought naively they could follow Biden. I could have told them, and I did tell them repeatedly.
No. You can't. You should understand The United States. You should understand how weak the foreign policy is. You should understand how crazy the idea of US unipolarity is.
Understand this. You know what I was told here? Don't talk to me anymore. Because to be anti American oh, I'm not anti American. I'm an American citizen.
I my job. I have my family. I have my I'm trying to get American foreign policy not to wreck the world. But Europe should have its own foreign policy. This is the bottom line.
Speaker 1: So to summarize what you said, you want Europe to stop following each other and just decide for themselves and for what is good for them. Yes. Make some alliance with Russia. Make some alliance with China. Make some alliance with United States when it's at use for us.
Speaker 0: Exactly. And to understand because Europe does understand. The best is to do all of this under the framework of multilateralism. Actually make the United Nations work. Now, strangely, if you ask, of all the countries, who ignores the UN the most?
I'm sure every member of parliament would say, oh, Russia. But you know what? I've actually done the numbers across many different dimensions. It's not even close. The United States is the country that ignores the UN completely.
Although the UN sits on the East River, I work at the UN for the last twenty five years, the US is the country least aligned with the UN. And for Europe, which is a look, it's it's a wonderful region of the world. It's it's got the highest living standards of the whole world. It needs its security. It needs to help other regions achieve this kind of quality of life, which is unique to Europe.
But to do that, an effective United Nations is the most important way. And so when I say be Europe, be Europe in a way that promotes also a global rule of law, a global multilateralism. And stop just ducking under The United States whatever The US does. And if you see a coup led by The United States, don't just stand there and say, oh, we can't say anything. That's our ally.
We share values with them. If you see pipelines being blown up, if you see regime change operations, you you can't just say, oh, that is normal. If you see The US complicity in what Israel is doing in Gaza, which I believe is a genocide, you don't just sit there. You have your own policy. If you see, after negotiating with Iran, the JCPOA in 2015 2016, and then Trump comes in in 2017, blows it off.
You don't just sit there quietly and say, that's our ally, The United States. We we can't say anything. You have to have a European policy. Sometimes The US will do things right. Sometimes they won't.
Sometimes The US may do something in the global interest. Often, The US won't. The US just walked out of the Paris Climate Agreement. Where's Europe on this? Well, maybe they mumble a few words, so we don't like that.
But that's our ally, the Transatlantic relationship. I don't want Europe and The US to be enemies. I want Europe to be a unified Europe as one of the great power centers of the world because I do believe in Europe, and I do believe what Europe stands for, sustainable development, is crucial and can work for the world. But not if it's all subservient to some crazy ideas in Washington. The the past ideas of Biden were were the unipolar world.
No. The current ideas are we take what we want. If we want Greenland, Canada, Panama, Gaza, we take it. Well, this is not gonna work either. So Europe is gonna need to have diplomacy.
But if if the diplomacy is only shouting against Russia, believe me, that's not diplomacy.
Speaker 1: That's thing. Not delusional diplomacy. Diplomacy based on ground truth.
Speaker 0: Can I call it grown up diplomacy? Not childish diplomacy, not propaganda based diplomacy, not slogan based diplomacy, not Russophobic diplomacy or sinophobic diplomacy, but real diplomacy?
Speaker 1: I want you you spoke about Trump. How do you did it surprise you, and how Trump thinks about his foreign policy in a way? With now, he's is it true that I see that he's moving away from Europe? He doesn't care that much
Speaker 0: Of course.
Speaker 1: About all this stuff, and he has other priorities? And can you define me what are his priorities from the underlying moves that you see?
Speaker 0: First of all, Washington is very noisy. Trump is, as an individual, very noisy. Every day, something a little bit different. So I wouldn't say that this is a a deep strategy.
Speaker 1: But it's an exciting time for politics.
Speaker 0: Well, it's a very interesting time to watch. It's a showmanship, and it's a 20 fourseven media and so forth, but it's a little unstable. And Washington itself is very divided because we have a deep state, we have a CIA, we have a Pentagon, we have a military industrial complex. They don't like some of this. Some of this they like and so on.
So there are lots of contradictions. It's not a simple narrative. But the most basic points of Trump, I think, are the following. Trump, probably unlike Biden, says we're not the only major power. We're dealing with Russia.
We're dealing with China. So that's a starting point. It's more realistic, actually. But there's a certain unrealism about it as well. Trump is probably thinking, okay, I'll make peace with Russia so that we can be more effective in making war with China.
So I don't see all the goodwill so far. And and it's very risky because there's a lot of anti China emotion in Washington because that also plays into the American arrogance. The whole idea of America Yeah.
Speaker 1: It was exciting to see deep sea fear that they are afraid so
Speaker 0: much of No. No. But the whole idea of America is American exceptionalism. And this manifests in a number of ways. But the basic ideas for that that mentality, America is number one.
And so China's the biggest affront to that, more than Russia. So part of what's going on with Russia is we we normalize with Russia so that we can focus on China, but not in the right way, but in a dangerous way. So it's not So you're afraid. All safe world right now. Second thing is the other.
There are three big hot spots in the geopolitical world. There are other hot spots like Sudan or Democratic Republic Of Congo, which are major conflicts, but not geopolitical in quite the same way. So the three big geopolitical conflicts are the US war with Russia in Ukraine, because that's a US Russia War. That's a war over NATO enlargement fundamentally. The second is the war in the Middle East, which is basically Israel's war to crush the Palestinian people forever.
That's the basic idea. And The US has sided with that for decades, because The US is in the hands of the Israel lobby to a very weird, really weird, and very discouraging extent. The third conflict is The US China competition. What's that about? China's not doing anything bad to The US.
It's not invading The US. It's not threatening The US. It's just too big. It's too successful for The US. It is a bigger economy measured in purchasing power prices.
That's that's an affront to The United States. I can only tell you it's almost a neurotic reaction because China's too successful for The United States, so it has to be confronted. So those are the the areas. And Europe doesn't show up in this. Partly because Europe has been so subservient to The United States over decades that Trump doesn't even recognize Europe.
Says, what's what's that? Why should they be at the negotiating table? Who who are they? So the whole thing from all he wants from Europe is buy more American weapons. So he's an arms salesman.
But other than that, I don't think that there's much much interest. Europe
Speaker 1: That's why he's asking to for everyone to increase the budget of NATO.
Speaker 0: Right? Of course.
Speaker 1: And
Speaker 0: by the way, of course. But one thing for sure and quite serious, Europe should have its own defense, not NATO. It should have a European defense. And when it makes procurements, it should be European, not American procurements. If Europe's smart, why is
Speaker 1: So you don't like the NATO alliance. It's not useful for NATO. It's only useful for The US.
Speaker 0: You mean NATO should have been disbanded in 1991 when the Warsaw Pact was disbanded and when the Soviet Union ended. What was NATO? NATO was to prevent a Soviet invasion of Europe. Russia was not invading Europe. Even now, the bop bop bop bop that you hear from the British or others, this is absurd stuff.
Of course, Europe has security interests. Europe wants to make sure that the Baltic states are are safe. So do I. But those are specific security issues that should be discussed with Russia, with the Baltic states, under a framework like the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe. That is not a NATO business, especially when the goal of NATO of the US is something completely different.
It is to surround Russia, and it's all explained for decades. If anyone cares to read about this, they would understand this.
Speaker 1: So we're fools, the Europeans, to be able to play the game of the The the
Speaker 0: Europeans thought this is pretty clever. We we don't spend much on defense, and The US defends us. Okay. But where Europe went completely wrong was the failure to differentiate, being defended from being offensive. And going the first wave of NATO enlargement was already a cheat on the agreement, but it was Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic.
The Russians said, we don't like this. You told us no. But how much did they complain? A bit. But these are countries not on their border.
Then the next wave, oh, that got right up to the collar because that was the three Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and it was also Black Sea countries. So starting this action in the Black Sea, Romania and Bulgaria, and it was Slovenia and Slovakia. And the Russians said, ah, you're getting awfully close. You promised you wouldn't do this. And in 02/2007, Putin made a famous speech at the Munich Security Conference.
He said, don't go any farther. Stop. Of course, when The United States hears this, what do they say? Ah, we have to go farther. No one tells us what to do.
Believe me, this is the American mentality. I grew up in that country. I understand. And so in 02/2008, at the Bucharest summit.
Speaker 1: As Biden was saying a lot of times, you are the goddamn United States Of America.
Speaker 0: Exactly. 02/2008, in Bucharest, Chancellor Angela Merkel knew this is very dangerous because The US wanted a commitment to Ukraine and to Georgia. She resisted. Many European leaders resisted. Many talked to me about the meeting afterwards.
And then in the end, Europe folded its hand because because The US calls the shots. And in 02/2008, in the Bucharest NATO summit, the fateful promise was made that Ukraine and Georgia would become part of NATO. Why Georgia? Okay. This is also good geography.
Georgia. Why Georgia?
Speaker 1: To surround Russia.
Speaker 0: Because if you look at the Black Sea, you would have Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia completely surrounding Russia. Now why would you do that? Because a geographer would tell you, Brzezinski would tell you, that ends Russian power in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. That surrounds them. This is clear.
And by the way, it was exactly the idea of Palmerston and Napoleon the third in 1853 in the first Crimean War. This is the second Crimean War we're fighting right now. It was exactly their idea. Take the Russian fleet out of the Black Sea. We're doing it again.
This is primitive stuff. Do we really have to have this war? And
Speaker 1: But but now Trump understood that it's not the danger, Russia. The big danger Exactly. China the danger. So he's removing the focus from And
Speaker 0: and one should understand, and this is really the point, and it's really the tragedy. For The United States, for Brzezinski and others, this was a game. Kind of a he called it a chessboard. This is a game. For Russia, this is core national security.
Okay. Now you're fighting right on Russia's border. One side, it's core national security. The other side, it's a game. Who do you think is gonna win?
Speaker 1: The Russian people that they think is an existential threat to them.
Speaker 0: Thank you. A little obvious. I said this to the Ukrainians repeatedly. So I said this to the I said this to Burrell repeatedly. I said this to many European leaders repeatedly.
But there was not independent thinking aloud because this was a US led game, because Europe didn't have a foreign policy.
Speaker 1: So just to summarize everything you said, so you're saying that Europe needs to get out of NATO or inform their
Speaker 0: own Yeah. Kind of Exactly. Europe needs its its strategic autonomy is, I think, is the technical phrase. It needs its own military and defense policy. It needs its own military and defense industries, by the way, not to be spending 80% of its outlays on The United States.
That's our business. That's what Trump's an arms salesman. But Europe needs to be able to develop its own capacity. And then Europe is one of the great powers of the world. And it should sit down with Russia and say, we have security issues.
We don't like our eastern border. It feels vulnerable. What should we do about it? How are we gonna have relations that are stable? Because for Russia, it's also an issue positive to have stable relations.
Russia just saw The US pushing further, putting its missile systems, putting NATO enlargement, leaving the intermediate force agreement, leaving the ABM agreement. Europe wouldn't acknowledge any of those provocations because the only word you could use in Europe is unprovoked. So if Europe is grown up in this, if I could use the expression, and Europe is 2,000 years old, and The United States Two Hundred years old, so Europe really should be 10 times more grown up than The United States, It should act as Europe and it should negotiate with Russia. It should negotiate with China. It should negotiate with The United States.
It should promote multilateralism and the United Nations. It should have its military defense, no doubt about it. But it shouldn't farm it out to The United States.
Speaker 1: I'm a bit afraid of what you're saying because we are stupid and it's proven that we are stupid and we are going as a double edged sword to have an army and to use it in
Speaker 0: Europe is not stupid.
Speaker 1: Europe Our leaders.
Speaker 0: Has a very bad habit of fighting inside Europe. That is a, maybe a
Speaker 1: But in inside Europe, meaning?
Speaker 0: Meaning too many wars inside Europe. Since the fall of the Western Roman Empire in April, it's been pretty fragmented, nonstop war. So this is a this is there was a hundred years of relative peace partly based on European imperialism outside of Europe. But since 1945, the best peace, real peace. And Europe now should take that, strengthen the European institutions, not weaken them, but also understand that in our world today you need a strong and independent Europe, which is reflecting European security issues.
I don't say that the issues with Russia are nonexistent. If I were the Baltic States, I'd be worried. But Russia invading France? I don't think so. Russia invading Western Europe?
No way. So there are real issues. And the real issues are how do we make sure that this boundary is not a conflict line, but a proper line, a mutually respectful one? Well, to my mind frankly, you wouldn't freeze 300,000,000,000 of Russian assets in Belgium, in Euroclear. You wouldn't taunt Russia every single day as if there weren't other reasons for all of this.
You would say that, okay, we understand you had reasons for all of this and many of them legitimate. We have our fears. Now, how do we work this out? Because whatever happens, we're sharing this continent together. And maybe we go back and revisit the concept of collective security in the OSCE, which to my mind is a hugely, hugely beneficial idea, much better than the NATO us versus them idea.
Speaker 1: Another two questions. But before I go say the last two questions, I want to say that with your ideas and all your interviews that you did and all this stuff, I saw a lot of them, and that's why I voted the way I voted to stop the war in the European Parliament. So your videos have an impact also in legislative and also in the the stuff. So I don't know if that's
Speaker 0: Let's make peace together. This is good.
Speaker 1: That's hopeful for you to see the impact. The second to last question is professor Meschheimer is another great like you about foreign policy. And I know you have one difference in the way that you see the kind of world.
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 1: So I I saw some interviews, and I didn't understand exactly
Speaker 0: Yeah.
Speaker 1: What is the difference in the way you're working. If you can explain us.
Speaker 0: So one simple way to say it is three conflict regions, Ukraine, Middle East, China. And two out of the three, we see completely eye to eye on explaining the source of the crisis, on explaining how it should be resolved, on explaining The US foreign policy mistakes. On the third, on China, we have a difference of view. John, who's a very good friend and a wonderful, wonderful scholar, says, well, it's inevitable that The US and China are going to compete with each other, and even that competition can fall into conflict, and that conflict could become a war. His big book, his magnum opus is The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.
My view is no tragedy. We must not have a tragedy, I mean, if I could say, in the nuclear age. No tragedy, no war with China. We have to absolutely say we're not gonna have a war with China, so we have to take steps both sides not to provoke each other. So my view is, for example, The US should stop arming Taiwan because Taiwan could very well become the Ukraine of East Asia, the place where there's the war between The US and China.
Have some restraint on The US side. I do not want China arming Mexico or Canada. Even if those two countries are uncomfortable with The United States, I do not want China arming them. And if China did, we'd likely have a war with China. And the United States should think basically the golden rule.
We should not do what we don't want China to do to us. So that's my argument. John's argument is, it's inevitable. Who follows the golden rule? We're gonna have a conflict.
I say, John, it's a kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. He says, yeah. It is. I said, John, it's a tragedy. Yes, Jeff.
It is a tragedy. And so part of it is, I'm just a believer that we can construct peace. And he's more of a pessimist. But we're dear friends, by the way.
Speaker 1: So you have a bit more optimistic view that you can make things not to come to lead to a conflict with in the long term, and he says it's inevitable.
Speaker 0: It's inevitable, but he says it's so hard to stop. And my view is we have to do everything to try to stop it.
Speaker 1: K. I want to say before the last question that this, from the bottom of my heart, thank you. I love you, this was an honor.
Speaker 0: Al, it's great to be with you. Thank you so much. And congratulations on being the voice of young people in Europe and and also just helping to understand these issues, which is so great.
Speaker 1: Yes. More information, especially like this grounded is always good and transparency. So the last question is you are going to die in thirty seconds. If this was true, what your last words in this planet you wanted it to be?
Speaker 0: I would hug my children and grandchildren and my wife. That's what I would do for the last thirty seconds, frankly. Because everything that I'm doing, I feel, is for my grandchildren and everyone else's grandchildren. That's honestly how I view this, which is we're the grown ups. We should act like grown ups to take care of our children and our grandchildren.
Speaker 1: Thank you. Thank you guys for watching until the end. We love you.
@Fidias0 - Fidias
I'm Building an App for Direct Democracy https://t.co/eMQ3LHiMYf
Video Transcript AI Summary
I believe in direct democracy, which is why I'm developing an app for citizens to have a direct say in the European Parliament. I've conducted polls on social media about key issues, like whether Ursula von der Leyen should remain in her position. These polls have helped gauge public opinion, but they risk participation from non-Europeans. The new app will ensure secure voting exclusively for Europeans, allowing citizens to engage in everyday decision-making and legislative development, rather than just voting every five years. The initial version will launch in Cyprus, and after testing, we plan to expand it to all of Europe. Please share your ideas for features and functionalities you'd like to see in the app.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: I believe in direct democracy. That's why I'm building an app so people can have directly a saying here in the European Parliament. Since I came here, I put polls on social media to decide on important topics like, do you want Ursula von der Leyen to remain? Yes or no? I think making these polls was a great experiment to take into consideration what the people really want and to promote the idea of direct democracy.
But it's true that these polls are in danger of being participated by people outside Europe or by both. But now with this app, there will be no such problems as it will be much more secure, and only Europeans will be able to vote. I envision this app to be a step towards the future, where citizens not only vote every 5 years, but can actually participate in everyday decision making and in the development of legislation. The first version will be available only in my country Cyprus, and after we test it, we'll make it available for all Europeans. Let me know in the comments below what features and functionalities you want this app to have, and we'll try to make it.