Episode Transcript
[00:00:11] Speaker A: I'm Afshin Ratanti. And welcome back to Going Underground, broadcasting all around the world from the uae. On the anniversary of the European Union winning the Nobel Peace Prize today, leaders from that grouping which has armed genocide in Gaza, meet at something called the Warsaw Security Forum. Speakers will avowedly call for the destruction of the Russian Federation, not just Ukrainian dictators. Zelensky, who has been given long range missiles by Britain and intel from the CIA to kill civilians in Russia. It's also four years today that 143 out of 193 UN General assembly member states voted to condemn Russia for referendums in the Donbas, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia democracy. And the economies of Western European states that did so are now in chaos as uprisings rage in Spain and France. Joining me again is someone who was recently at the latest UN General assembly in New York. He has tirelessly fought for the war in Europe to end before 24 February 2022. He advised US officials to publicly admit Ukraine would not be permitted NATO membership. Professor Jeffrey Sachs is the director of Columbia University's center for Sustainable Development, President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and former adviser to UN Secretaries General General Kofi Annan, Ban Ki Moon and Antonio Guterres. He's in Rome in Italy. Professor Sachs, thanks so much for coming back on going underground. It's quite a while. I'm not going to ask you why you're in Rome immediately. But for four years then, since the UN General assembly resolution against Russia, I mean, apart from threats of mass killing from Trump and Netanyahu at the UN General assembly, which we might talk about, what did you detect 12 years on since the coup in Ukraine at the UN General assembly in New York?
[00:01:54] Speaker B: Well, these wars continue to rage because it seems nobody wants to speak the truth and nobody wants to acknowledge ground realities.
The war in Ukraine is a war that came as, as you mentioned, with a coup that overthrew a Ukrainian president so that NATO could enlarge all the way to Russia's border.
When the United States pushed the Europeans to agree to commit to Ukraine's membership in NATO, then German Chancellor Merkel wrote in her a diary that this was, as she knew, tantamount to a declaration of war. That's the way that the Russians would see it. And she was right. She wasn't strong enough to resist George W. Bush. She should have.
We have been on a slide to war ever since 2008 when the US pushed for this NATO enlargement. 2014 started the war with the US backed coup on February 22, 2014.
And Europeans have gone with gusto, denying truth, denying logic, denying the off ramps to peace. And till today, they are the warmongers. Right now they're championing the war, they're talking about escalation, they're talking about remilitarizing Germany, God forbid, but this is the way things go. The only glimmer, the only glimmer of light at the UN General assembly was that the German foreign minister at least sat down for 20 minutes with his Russian counterpart. It doesn't seem like much, but it was the first time in years that that has happened. I've been pressing and writing open letters to Chancellor Merz and publishing pretty much non stop in the German media.
Talk, talk because remember, German reunification in 1990 came because you, the German leaders promised that NATO wouldn't move one inch eastward.
Go talk, go learn what the Russian point of view is.
And when you understand the Russian point of view, this war could stop in a day on sensible terms that are sensible for Russia, for Ukraine and for Europe.
And that's what I continue to hope for.
[00:04:29] Speaker A: You did advise Antonio Guterres. So did you get to manage to see him in New York and ask him why, as many have around the world, why the UN has not taken a more muscular role and convened some kind of conference in a neutral space? Of course. I mean, we're hoping there'll be a conference here in the un Eason.
[00:04:48] Speaker B: Boy, I sure hope so. You know, all of these wars that are raging right now actually have, if I may put it this way, straightforward exit ramps. The war in Ukraine would end by Ukraine returning to neutrality, which is what it was before the US backed coup by NATO saying, okay, okay, we won't enlarge to Russia's border and having an armistice line where both sides say, you know, we have disagreements on borders but we're not going to pursue them through military means. The war in Gaza, the genocide in Gaza will end one of two ways. A state of Palestine alongside a state of Israel or one binational state in which both the Palestinian Arabs and the Israeli Jews live in one state. Either way, we need that. Because the current way of a ruthlessly murderous Israeli state backed by Europe and the United States is unforgivable, absolutely unforgivable. And the war in Iran is the dumbest of all possible wars.
President Trump brags that six previous presidents resisted it, but he did it. I don't think that's a matter of bragging. I think it's a Matter of the most shocking incompetence we probably ever had in that office. But the war in with Iran, which was a war of aggression and murder of the Iranian leadership on February 28 of this year, will end simply when the United States leaves. We don't even need an agreement, because if the US Leaves, Iranians are going to open the Strait of Hormuz wide open to sell oil, and the rest of the Gulf region, where you are, and all the rest will go back to normal life. It's the US that provoked this with Israel.
It's the US that kept it going. There is no reason for this war to continue another hour. The United States should turn around and go home. As far as I'm concerned, nobody has to agree on anything. If you've done something unbelievably stupid, stop doing it.
[00:07:14] Speaker A: Yeah, but did you get to speak to Antonio Guterres, who you used to advise?
Why is he not organizing?
[00:07:20] Speaker B: I didn't. I did. I didn't speak to him this time because he was sitting on the podium. I was there cringing with every word of my president, Donald Trump, who said he had a hard choice to make whether to make Iran a great country.
I don't think he realizes Iran was a great country 2,500 years ago, 10 times older than the United States. Thank you. But in any event, whether to do that or whether to annihilate Iran and send everybody to hell. And this is a President of the United States speaking this way.
So, yes, the UN has a huge role, fundamental role, but the United States really blocks the role.
[00:08:06] Speaker A: Yeah. So the un. The UN has no role, arguably. I mean, back to Ukraine. I understand Jake Sullivan told you before Russia went in, in 2022 that there'd be no NATO expansion.
[00:08:17] Speaker B: I'm just thinking what he said to me specifically.
Yeah, go ahead.
[00:08:22] Speaker A: The reason I'm talking is, like, why has the UN Secretariat done absolutely nothing to stop a war in Europe? The UN was only created because of the end of another war in Europe.
[00:08:34] Speaker B: I believe the UN should do a lot more and can do a lot more. But the reason that it is paralyzed as it is is essentially the United States says, we don't obey any rules.
And the. You even. Trump said, by the way, people will remember when he was asked, are you bound by international law? He said, I'm not bound by anything but my own morality. He said, by my will. That's the only thing that binds me. This is a kind of madness, frankly. This is an old man who doesn't have all the Marbles together.
[00:09:15] Speaker A: Although. Although, it should be said, but Trump has done a lot more for peace, arguably than anything the UN has done. As regards the war in Europe, at least Trump is. I wouldn't say at least Trump set up meetings in Anchorage and tried rhetorically. Rhetorically, while at the same time supplying the weapons.
[00:09:33] Speaker B: I won't go that far because he said in Anchorage privately, well, NATO won't enlarge, but he didn't say it publicly because he's incompetent. And then when he was opposed by the military industrial complex in the United States and in Europe and by Zelensky rather than being president of the United States, he just backed down. And that's why the Russians are saying, okay, what is all of this? You told us things. You don't follow through. This is, unfortunately the way it goes unless you have a confident president.
So I don't, unfortunately, give many points for having a meeting and failing to follow through.
And I give even fewer points for a complete, total failure to communicate basic truths. What is needed to end this war is for a president of the United States and a chancellor of Germany to say, NATO won't enlarge. That's the one sentence that's going to end this war. They won't say it.
[00:10:37] Speaker A: I'll get back to Europe in a second. So do you. What do you think Putin made a mistake when he went to Anchorage to meet Donald Trump? Do you think the Russians don't fully understand Trump?
[00:10:47] Speaker B: No, I don't.
No, I don't. I don't think you make a mistake by trying, But I think that they are not shocked that it didn't work. Putin famously said in an interview that he gave in 2017 that he had, by that time, worked with three American presidents. And he said, you know, they come into office with ideas, but then men in dark suits and blue ties come to tell them the way the world really is, and then you never hear of those ideas again.
So Putin is very experienced with American presidents. He knows that they do not follow through.
And I don't think they're shocked by Trump's failure to follow through. I think they're disappointed. I think they hoped. And I think it's always worth trying to have diplomacy.
So I don't think that that's a matter of regret. To take that extra mile is extremely important.
In fact, what I completely think is the huge mistake of Europe is they don't even try diplomacy. They don't even know what it is.
[00:11:54] Speaker A: You. You've been talking to the officials. Huge. You've been writing letters, but you also have been talking to EU officials, as far as I understand it. What is your, I mean, clearly you're unable to persuade them, but what is your impression of why they don't even seem to be that fearful of the prospect of a nuclear war?
[00:12:12] Speaker B: Well, first of all, we have pundits and we have officials that say, oh, that's a bluff.
You know, this threat of nuclear weapons. These people are so unbelievably reckless with your life and my life and my children's lives and my grandchildren's lives. I can't even tell you how disgusted I am by this blase attitude. We are.
We are at dire risk of blowing ourselves up and to deny it and then just talk provocatively and Russia hate talk and, oh, yes, maybe we can take Kaliningrad and on and on. This kind of recklessness is shocking. Don't these people understand anything?
Apparently not. This is, but by the way, when I spoke with one very nice European official and I said, just say NATO's not going to enlarge. He said, oh, well, you know, the United States has, has said that to, to President Putin. I said, yeah, it may be true. They said it privately, they didn't follow through. And your government has never said it, so why don't you say it publicly? And he looked at me a little quizzically like that was a new thought. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, let me think about that.
Do they not understand what's going on? I don't know. I really don't know. It's shocking to me that this has continued in this way for years, but I think that there is a tremendous amount of incompetence and cowardice and unwillingness of these politicians to admit basic truths and that that keeps this going, it's just absolutely disastrous.
[00:14:15] Speaker A: Professor Jeff Sachs, I'll stop you there. More from the director of Columbia University center for Sustainable Development after this break.
[00:14:30] Speaker B: Foreign.
[00:14:36] Speaker A: Welcome back to Going Underground. I'm still here with the president of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, Professor Jeffrey Sachs. Professor Sachs, you were telling me in part one about how a unnamed EU official seemed surprised that the declaration of no expansion of NATO might be helpful in the situation. I don't suppose you could tell me who the EU official is?
[00:14:59] Speaker B: I could, but I won't because it was a private conversation.
But just to stay.
It's so odd because this is actually someone I've known for a long time.
This was foreign Minister. I know his leader also very well. I think actually they probably want peace, but they cannot bring themselves to say basic truth. And this comes back to the conversation you mentioned before the break that I had with Jake Sullivan, which was one of the most surrealistic conversations that I've had. Jake Sullivan was the national Security advisor under Biden, and Putin put a security agreement on the table to try to avert this escalation. He did that in December 2021.
And it didn't have everything the US would ever accept, but it had a lot of good stuff, including stop the NATO enlargement. So I called Sullivan and I had a long conversation with him and the gist of it was I said, jake, just, just announce NATO's not going to enlarge and avoid a war.
And he said, Jeff, NATO's not going to enlarge. I said, jake, are you kidding?
You're going to have a war? Oh. He said, first, we can't announce that NATO is not going to enlarge. We have an open door policy.
So, Jake, NATO's open door policy is the biggest bunch of BS imaginable. Does the US have an open door policy for Mexico that it can have a, a Chinese military base or Canada can have a Russian military base there? Is that America's open door policy?
How about a little bit of principle here? There is no principle of open door. You don't put your military on Russia's border, just like you don't want Russia to put their military on the US Border. And we almost blew up the world when Russia, Soviet Union did that in October 1962. So just say, Jake, that NATO is not going to enlarge. He said, jeff, NATO is not going to enlarge.
I said, say it publicly. Said, no, no, it's not going to happen. You know that, Jeff. I said, okay, we're going to have a war because of something that's not going to happen.
He said, don't worry, don't worry, there's not going to be a war.
[00:17:35] Speaker A: This is the same national.
[00:17:36] Speaker B: What do you make of that?
[00:17:37] Speaker A: Is the same national security adviser who wrote to Clinton that the, the USA was on the same side as Al Qaeda in Syria. Do you think he was just lying to you or he was that incompetent that he didn't realize what the policy was?
[00:17:54] Speaker B: No, I think that, I think the level of incompetence in our governments is staggering, actually. Just staggering.
And they believe that they can say anything without consequence, so they can twist things, they can create their own realities. It's a staggering incompetence is my, my view of this. I don't think it was just lying to me because he was saying things that weren't exactly lies. They were just foolish.
Foolishness.
[00:18:29] Speaker A: Sounds like a lie to sound like a lie to many people. I mean, I've got to say that Sikorski, the Polish Foreign Minister, will be at the Warsaw Security Conference today, famously saying, you can kill a lot of people, but you cannot win. The Russian Empire has fallen. Russia lost the Crimean War, lost the Russia Japanese war, lost the First World War in Afghanistan, lost the Cold War.
Ben Hodges, the former US Army Europe commander, said Finland alone would crush Russian forces.
The European Union Defense and Space Commission said, if we continue to be afraid of Russian escalation, we'll encourage Putin to escalate more.
Time and time again, the speakers at this forum will be saying, I mean, the ex NATO Military Committee chair, Admiral Rob Bowers, said, our whole of society, he's talking about Western Europe, I presume our whole of society effort must now be structured to withstand a hot conflict with Russia.
[00:19:23] Speaker B: These people are so, I'm going to double down. These people are so incompetent, it's beyond belief. It's not only war profiteering, although some of them do that. It is incredible incompetence. I know these people. I know many of them, not all of them. I, I know I, I won't go into personalities, but I know people for many, many decades. In fact, I was senior adviser to the Polish government. I helped them a lot. Thank you.
In the late 80s and the early 1990s, at the same time that I was meeting with Chancellor Cole, and the same time I was advising President Gorbachev, at the same time I was advising President Yeltsin. And the same time I was advising Ukrainian President Kuchma.
And I know how the United States so profoundly messed up. Yes, it's incompetence mixed with hubris. All of these people are arrogant. They don't know history.
They're, they're taking other people's lives.
Of course, they have no accountability.
So there are many different dimensions to it. But I'm going to double down on incompetence as being a very major factor. We need governments of people who know what they're doing. And of course they have to care not to get a lot of people killed. And so it's two criteria, some decency and some competence.
[00:20:47] Speaker A: I mean, the Trump administration is sending the former special presidential envoy, Keith Kellogg and a commissioner for US European Command, Alexis Grinkovic.
[00:21:02] Speaker B: Kellogg is, Kellogg is a hardliner. Kellogg absolutely could not put together a coherent thought when he was the formal advisor.
Last time I saw Kellogg was on the, on, on the floor of the UN General Assembly a year ago schmoozing with, with Mr. With Minister Sikorsky.
This is not someone who was pursuing peace or who knew what he was doing.
[00:21:29] Speaker A: Well, in fairness, Trump demoted him arguably. But the current US NATO representative is a guy called Matthew Whitaker, who's on the record for saying the answer to Russia should be more support for Ukraine. I suppose my question to you is, you know that there's a fair degree of opposition to Putin now within Russia, that he's not prosecuting this as well as he might do and is being too lenient as the drone attacks on Moscow, the civilian casualties caused by MI6 and CIA intel guided drones.
What do you think Russia should do given that this is the kind of thing they say this is. You know, Gabriel Landsbergis of the ex Lithuania foreign Minister, Lithuania just changed their nuclear weapons doctrine, said we are merely postponing a war that will swallow the rest of Europe if we don't defeat
[00:22:18] Speaker B: Russia on the battlefield from Lithuania. Can you believe it's just so unbelievable.
What is. And it, it's a little bit like Israel, but even, even radically more so, which is they think the US that they can say anything, that they can spew as much anti Russia hatred, that they can talk about defeating a nuclear superpower with the 1,600 deployed nuclear weapons and about 6,000 in total. That they can say all of this because they think the US has their back.
This is actually not how the world works. And they are so reckless and stupid to talk in these terms. And please, I don't want anyone to call me a Putin apologist on this because I have a presidential award from Estonia because I helped the Baltic states, I worked with Estonia, helped them introduce their national currency, got an award from their president, one of the highest civilian awards. I'm not anybody's apologist. I just find what is being said right now suicidal and unbelievably stupid and unbelievably devoid of historical awareness and unbelievably reckless.
Just reckless. And who the hell is Lithuania to talk about defeating Russia?
Come on, we absolutely have to behave like grownups if we're going to survive and if we're going to save this world for our children and grandchildren. And these people are not behaving like grownups.
[00:24:01] Speaker A: Anyone who's watching this program who also watches a lot of Western European broadcasts or American broadcasts, well, the wire agency Reuters Associated Press will say everything you've said is A kind of Putin talking point. How has the media helped to promote the continuation of this war and the horrific numbers of dead and wounded on the front?
[00:24:25] Speaker B: The media is a mouthpiece for the military industrial complex in the United States.
And I counted in 2022-2023 in the first year of the war.
The New York Times used the word unprovoked to refer to Russia's invasion. Unprovoked. It used the word 26 times on the opinion pages.
So I asked the editor of the opinion pages, let me write one, I 700 words to explain why this war was provoked. And she wouldn't let me do it. And I went around and around in circles for months.
I couldn't get 700 words. I didn't even care if it was in print. I said, just make it online. You have endless capacity online.
These places don't want to hear facts, they don't want to debate. It's all closed up. And that's just the propaganda that we're living with right now. Just the tragedy.
[00:25:31] Speaker A: Just finally, by the time this is being broadcast, we don't know. Israel or the United States might have deployed a nuclear attack on Iran. How would you advise the Iranian government in the circumstances, given the seismic impact of this war? Billions pushed well into poverty, partly because of the high inflation, let alone the mass casualty events we've seen in this region in the past since February.
[00:25:58] Speaker B: Look, Iran is facing an existential war. It was attacked in a brutal aggression by the United States and Israel.
I think people should remember that on the first day of the attack, the leaders of Iran were together because they were discussing the next round of negotiation, because there was supposedly a negotiating process underway. That's the American and Mossad style, which is, oh, get the other side to negotiate and then when they're together, kill them. That is literally the policy that they followed. They were together to discuss what to say or how to respond in the next round of negotiation that was to take place in Vienna the following week. The Omani mediator had said how much progress had been made. And so Mossad and Trump and Bibi thought, this is a great opportunity to kill.
[00:27:01] Speaker A: And yet Iran continue to offer more negotiations, though, even with this.
[00:27:07] Speaker B: You know, they're very civilized and very nice people. I know, I know them. They, in my mind, carry a dignity of a civilization that is 2,500 years old. The history is that Persia's been there a very long time. And the Persian and the Iranian negotiators are very dignified, very intelligent, very well educated people. And the United States and Israel think that they're just targets for assassination.
[00:27:38] Speaker A: Professor Sachs, unfortunately, we run out of time.
We'll have to have you on again to explain what the advice might be. Thank you so much for joining us from Rome. Thank you so much.
[00:27:48] Speaker B: Great. Thank you. Thanks a lot.
[00:27:50] Speaker A: That's it for the show. Condolences to all those of you bereaved or affected by NATO wars of aggression. We'll be back on Saturday with a brand new show. Until then, keep in touch with all our social media, if it's not censored in your country. And head to our channel, going undergroundtv on normal.com to watch new and old episodes of Going Underground. See you Saturday.
