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傑弗裏·薩克斯：“危險”的美國政策和“西方的虛假敘述”加劇了與俄羅斯、中國的緊張關係
https://metacpc.org/en/jeffrey-sachs-dn/
現在的民主| 傑弗裏·薩克斯
我們與哥倫比亞大學經濟學家傑弗裏·薩克斯討論西方霸權以及美國在俄羅斯、烏克蘭和中國的政策，他的新文章標題為“西方關於俄羅斯和中國的錯誤敘述”。 薩克斯表示，美國兩黨的外交政策方針“極其危險且錯誤”，並警告美國正在為東亞“製造另一場戰爭”。
艾米·古德曼：Politico 報道稱，拜登政府正準備請求國會批準一項價值 11 億美元的新對台軍售。 據報道，該套裝包括60枚反艦導彈、100枚空對空導彈。 在此之前，自眾議院議長南希·佩洛西本月早些時候訪問台灣以來，兩艘美國軍艦周日首次穿越台灣海峽。 中國譴責這次訪問，並在台灣附近發起了大規模軍事演習。
與此同時，拜登總統上周宣布向烏克蘭提供 30 億美元的額外軍事援助，包括購買導彈、火炮和無人機的資金，以幫助烏克蘭軍隊對抗俄羅斯。
我們今天的節目開始關注美國對俄羅斯和中國的政策。 哥倫比亞大學可持續發展中心主任、經濟學家傑弗裏·薩克斯也加入了我們的行列。 他是聯合國可持續發展解決方案網絡的主席。 他曾擔任三位聯合國秘書長的顧問。 他最新文章的標題是“西方關於俄羅斯和中國的錯誤敘述”。
他在文章開頭寫道：“世界正處於核災難的邊緣，這在很大程度上是因為西方政治領導人未能直言不諱地說明全球衝突升級的原因。 西方無情地認為西方是高尚的，而俄羅斯和中國是邪惡的，這種說法是頭腦簡單且極其危險的，”傑弗裏·薩克斯寫道。
傑弗裏·薩克斯，歡迎來到民主現在！ 你為什麽不從那裏拿走它呢？
傑弗裏·薩克斯：謝謝。 很高興和你在一起。
艾米·古德曼：關於目前與俄羅斯、與俄羅斯和烏克蘭以及與中國的衝突，西方和世界各地的人們應該了解什麽故事？
傑弗裏·薩克斯：艾米，重點是我們沒有使用外交手段；而是使用外交手段。 我們正在使用武器。 你們今天早上討論的現在向台灣宣布的這次出售隻是另一個例子。 這並不會讓台灣變得更安全。 這並不會讓世界變得更安全。 這當然不會讓美國變得更安全。
這可以追溯到很久以前。 我認為從30年前開始是有用的。 蘇聯解體，一些美國領導人認為現在已經是他們所謂的單極世界，美國是唯一的超級大國，我們可以掌控一切。 結果是災難性的。 美國外交政策的軍事化現已經曆了三十年。 塔夫茨大學正在維護的一個新數據庫剛剛顯示，自1991年以來，美國已經進行了100多次軍事幹預。這實在令人難以置信。
根據我過去 30 年在俄羅斯、中歐、中國和世界其他地區廣泛工作的經驗，我看到美國的做法是軍事優先，而且往往是隻軍事， 方法。 我們武裝我們想要的人。 我們呼籲北約東擴，無論其他國家說什麽可能損害他們的安全利益。 我們置其他人的安全利益於不顧。 當他們抱怨時，我們向該地區的盟友運送更多武器。 我們想什麽時候、什麽地方發動戰爭，無論是阿富汗、伊拉克，還是敘利亞針對阿薩德的秘密戰爭（美國人民至今還沒有正確理解這場戰爭），或者利比亞戰爭。 我們說：“我們熱愛和平。 俄羅斯和中國到底出了什麽問題？ 他們是如此好戰。 他們的目的是破壞世界。” 我們最終陷入了可怕的對抗。
烏克蘭戰爭——隻是為了完成介紹性觀點——本可以避免，也應該通過外交來避免。 俄羅斯總統普京多年來一直在說的是“不要將北約擴張到黑海，不要擴張到烏克蘭，更不要擴張到格魯吉亞”，如果人們從地圖上看，它會直接延伸到黑海的東部邊緣。 俄羅斯說：“這將包圍我們。 這將危及我們的安全。 讓我們進行外交吧。” 美國拒絕一切外交手段。 我在2021年底試圖聯係白宮——事實上，我確實聯係了白宮，並表示除非美國就北約東擴問題與普京總統進行外交談判，否則就會爆發戰爭。 我被告知美國永遠不會這樣做。 那是不可能的。 但這是不可能的。 現在我們麵臨著一場異常危險的戰爭。
我們在東亞采取的策略與導致戰爭的策略完全相同
烏克蘭。 我們正在組織聯盟，建立武器裝備，對中國說垃圾話，讓佩洛西議長飛往台灣，而中國政府卻說：“請降溫，緩和緊張局勢。” 我們說：“不，我們做我們想做的”，然後派遣更多武器。 這是另一場戰爭的根源。 在我看來，這很可怕。
我們正值古巴導彈危機 60 周年，我一生都在研究這一危機，我也寫過有關該危機的文章，還寫了一本關於其後果的書。 我們正駛向懸崖，一路上我們充滿了熱情。 美國外交政策的整個方針是不可解釋的危險和錯誤。 這是兩黨合作的。
胡安·岡薩雷斯：傑弗裏·薩克斯，我想問你——你在《聯盟新聞》最近發表的一篇文章中提到的一件事是，美國堅持拖累歐洲，維持全球霸權。 在西方經濟實力日漸衰落之際。 例如，你提到金磚國家——巴西、俄羅斯、印度、中國和南非——占世界人口的40%以上，GDP比七國集團高，但他們的利益和關切卻遠遠高於七國集團。 俄羅斯和中國被忽視了，或者在這種情況下，顯然是俄羅斯和中國，被美國人民描繪成侵略者、獨裁者、在世界上製造動蕩的人。
傑弗裏·薩克斯：你的觀點是——
胡安·岡薩雷斯：我想知道你是否可以對此進行擴展。
JEFFREY SACHS：是的，絕對如此，指導我們實現這一點非常重要。 西方世界，特別是盎格魯-撒克遜世界，從大英帝國開始，到現在的美國，其不成比例的權力大約有250年的曆史，在世界曆史上是一個很短的時期。 由於許多非常有趣的原因，工業革命首先來到了英國。 蒸汽機就是在那裏發明的。 這可能是現代曆史上最重要的發明。 英國在 19 世紀成為軍事霸主，就像美國在 20 世紀下半葉一樣。 英國主導了這一切。 英國擁有日不落帝國。 而西方，指的是美國和西歐，現在指的是美國和歐盟、英國、加拿大、日本——換句話說，七國集團、歐盟一起——也許隻是世界人口的一小部分。 現在大約是 10%，如果再加上日本、西歐和美國，可能會多一點，也許是 12.5%。但人們的心態是“我們統治世界”。 這就是工業時代 200 年來的情況。
但時代已經變了。 事實上，自 20 世紀 50 年代以來，世界其他地區從歐洲帝國主義中獲得獨立後，就開始教育其人民，開始采用、適應和創新技術。 你瞧，世界上的一小部分人並沒有真正統治世界，也沒有壟斷智慧、知識、科學或技術。 這太棒了。 體麵生活的知識和可能性正在全世界傳播。
但在美國，對此有一種怨恨，一種很深的怨恨。 我認為還有一種巨大的曆史無知，因為我認為很多美國領導人對現代曆史一無所知。 但他們對中國的崛起感到不滿。 這是對美國的侮辱。 中國何敢崛起！ 這是我們的世界！ 這是我們的世紀！ 因此，從 2014 年左右開始，我一步一步地看到——我非常詳細地觀察，因為這是我的日常活動——美國如何將中國重塑為一個正在從一個半世紀的巨大困難中恢複過來的國家， 而是作為敵人。 作為美國外交政策的問題，我們有意識地開始說：“我們需要遏製中國。 中國的崛起不再符合我們的利益”，仿佛中國的繁榮與否是由美國來決定的。 中國人並不天真； 事實上，它們非常複雜。 他們以與我完全相同的方式觀看這一切。 我認識美國文本的作者。 他們是我在哈佛或其他地方的同事。 當這種遏製想法開始應用時，我感到震驚。
但基本點是，西方領導世界的時間很短，250年，但感覺，“這是我們的權利。 這是西方世界。 我們是七國集團。 我們可以決定誰來製定遊戲規則。” 事實上，奧巴馬，你知道，在我們外交政策領域是一位好人，他說：“讓我們為亞洲製定貿易規則，但不要讓中國製定任何這些規則。 美國將製定規則。” 這是一種極其幼稚、危險且過時的理解世界的方式。 我們美國人口占世界人口的 4.2%。 我們不統治世界。 我們不是世界領導者。 我們是一個擁有4.2%人口的國家，身處一個多元化的世界，我們應該學會相處，
安靜地在沙箱裏玩耍，不要求我們擁有沙箱裏的所有玩具。 我們還沒有結束這種想法。 不幸的是，這兩個政黨都是政黨。 這就是佩洛西議長在這一切之中前往台灣的動力，就好像她真的必須去煽動緊張局勢一樣。 但這是美國主導的心態。
JUAN GONZÁLEZ：我想稍微回到 20 世紀 90 年代。 我敢肯定，你還記得 20 世紀 90 年代墨西哥發生的巨大金融崩潰，當時克林頓政府授權向墨西哥提供 500 億美元的救助，而這筆資金實際上是針對華爾街投資者的。 當時，您為後蘇聯時期的俄羅斯政府提供谘詢，該政府當時也麵臨嚴重的財務問題，但無法獲得任何重大的西方援助，甚至無法從國際貨幣基金組織獲得援助。 你當時對此持批評態度。 我想知道你能否談談美國應對墨西哥危機和俄羅斯金融危機的差異，以及俄羅斯當前局勢的根源可能是什麽。
傑弗裏·薩克斯：當然。 我做了一個對照實驗，因為我在戈爾巴喬夫總統的最後一年擔任波蘭和蘇聯的經濟顧問，在俄羅斯獨立的頭兩年（1992年、93年）擔任葉利欽總統的經濟顧問。 我的工作是金融，實際上是幫助俄羅斯找到解決正如你所描述的那樣的大規模金融危機的方法。 我在波蘭、然後在蘇聯和俄羅斯的基本建議是：為了避免社會危機和地緣政治危機，富裕的西方世界應該幫助遏製這場隨著經濟崩潰而發生的非同尋常的金融危機。 前蘇聯。
嗯，有趣的是，就波蘭而言，我提出了一係列非常具體的建議，這些建議都被美國政府接受了——設立一個穩定基金，取消波蘭的部分債務，允許采取許多金融手段讓波蘭擺脫困境。 困難。 而且，你知道，我拍拍自己的背。 “哦，看看這個！” 我提出了一項建議，其中一項是十億美元的穩定基金，白宮在八小時內就接受了。 所以，我想：“很好。”
隨後，在最後幾天，首先是代表戈爾巴喬夫，然後是葉利欽總統發出了類似的呼籲。 我所建議的一切都是以經濟動態為基礎的，但都被白宮斷然拒絕。 我當時不明白，我必須告訴你。 我說：“但這在波蘭行得通。” 他們會茫然地看著我。 事實上，一位代理國務卿在 1992 年曾說過：“薩克斯教授，我是否同意你的觀點並不重要。 這不會發生。”
Jeffrey Sachs: "Dangerous" U.S. Policy & "West's False Narrative" Stoking Tensions with Russia, China
https://metacpc.org/en/jeffrey-sachs-dn/
We discuss Western hegemony and U.S. policy in Russia, Ukraine and China with Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, whose new article is headlined “The West’s False Narrative About Russia and China.” Sachs says the bipartisan U.S. approach to foreign policy is “unaccountably dangerous and wrongheaded,” and warns the U.S. is creating “a recipe for yet another war” in East Asia.
AMY GOODMAN: Politico is reporting the Biden administration is preparing to ask Congress to approve a new $1.1 billion arms sale to Taiwan. The package reportedly includes 60 anti-ship missiles, 100 air-to-air missiles. This comes after two U.S. warships sailed through the Taiwan Strait Sunday for the first time since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan earlier this month. China condemned the visit and launched major military drills near Taiwan.
Meanwhile, President Biden announced $3 billion in more military aid for Ukraine last week, including money for missiles, artillery rounds and drones to help Ukrainian forces fight Russia.
We begin today’s show looking at U.S. policy on Russia and China. We’re joined by the economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He’s president of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He served as adviser to three U.N. secretaries-general. His latest article is headlined “The West’s False Narrative About Russia and China.”
He begins the article by writing, quote, “The world is on the edge of nuclear catastrophe in no small part because of the failure of Western political leaders to be forthright about the causes of the escalating global conflicts. The relentless Western narrative that the West is noble while Russia and China are evil is simple-minded and extraordinarily dangerous,” Jeffrey Sachs writes.
Jeffrey Sachs, welcome to Democracy Now! Why don’t you take it from there?
JEFFREY SACHS: Thank you. Good to be with you.
AMY GOODMAN: What is the story that people in the West and around the world should understand about what’s happening right now with these conflicts, with Russia, with Russia and Ukraine, and with China?
JEFFREY SACHS: The main point, Amy, is that we are not using diplomacy; we are using weaponry. This sale now announced to Taiwan that you’ve been discussing this morning is just another case in point. This does not make Taiwan safer. This does not make the world safer. It certainly doesn’t make the United States safer.
This goes back a long way. I think it’s useful to start 30 years ago. The Soviet Union ended, and some American leaders got it into their head that there was now what they called the unipolar world, that the U.S. was the sole superpower, and we could run the show. The results have been disastrous. We have had now three decades of militarization of American foreign policy. A new database that Tufts is maintaining has just shown that there have been more than 100 military interventions by the United States since 1991. It’s really unbelievable.
And I have seen, in my own experience over the last 30 years working extensively in Russia, in Central Europe, in China and in other parts of the world, how the U.S. approach is a military-first, and often a military-only, approach. We arm who we want. We call for NATO enlargement, no matter what other countries say may be harmful to their security interests. We brush aside anyone else’s security interests. And when they complain, we ship more armaments to our allies in that region. We go to war when we want, where we want, whether it was Afghanistan or Iraq or the covert war against Assad in Syria, which is even today not properly understood by the American people, or the war in Libya. And we say, “We’re peace-loving. What’s wrong with Russia and China? They are so warlike. They’re out to undermine the world.” And we end up in terrible confrontations.
The war in Ukraine — just to finish the introductory view — could have been avoided and should have been avoided through diplomacy. What President Putin of Russia was saying for years was “Do not expand NATO into the Black Sea, not to Ukraine, much less to Georgia,” which if people look on the map, straight across to the eastern edge of the Black Sea. Russia said, “This will surround us. This will jeopardize our security. Let us have diplomacy.” The United States rejected all diplomacy. I tried to contact the White House at the end of 2021 — in fact, I did contact the White House and said there will be war unless the U.S. enters diplomatic talks with President Putin over this question of NATO enlargement. I was told the U.S. will never do that. That is off the table. And it was off the table. Now we have a war that’s extraordinarily dangerous.
And we are taking exactly the same tactics in East Asia that led to the war in Ukraine. We’re organizing alliances, building up weaponry, trash-talking China, having Speaker Pelosi fly to Taiwan, when the Chinese government said, “Please, lower the temperature, lower the tensions.” We say, “No, we do what we want,” and now send more arms. This is a recipe for yet another war. And to my mind, it’s terrifying.
We are at the 60th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, which I’ve studied all my life and I’ve written about, have written a book about the aftermath. We are driving to the precipice, and we are filled with our enthusiasm as we do so. And it’s just unaccountably dangerous and wrongheaded, the whole approach of U.S. foreign policy. And it’s bipartisan.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Jeffrey Sachs, I wanted to ask you — one of the things that you mentioned in a recent article that was published in Consortium News was this insistence of the United States, dragging Europe along, as well, in maintaining hegemony throughout the world at a time when the economic power of the West is declining. You mention, for instance, that the BRICS nations — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — represent more than 40% of the world population and have a greater GDP than the G7 nations, yet their interests and their concerns are pretty much dismissed or, in the case, obviously, of Russia and China, portrayed to the American people as the aggressors, as the authoritarians, as the ones that are creating turmoil in the world.
JEFFREY SACHS: Your point is —
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’m wondering if you could expand on that.
JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah, absolutely, and directing us to that is extremely important. The disproportionate power of the Western world, and especially the Anglo-Saxon world, which started with the British Empire, and now the United States, is about 250 years old, so a short period in world history. It happened, for a lot of very interesting reasons, that the Industrial Revolution came to England first. The steam engine was invented there. That’s probably the single most important invention of modern history. Britain became militarily dominant in the 19th century, like the United States was in the second half of the 20th century. Britain ran the show. Britain had the empire on which the sun never set. And the West, meaning the United States and Western Europe, now meaning the U.S. and the European Union, the U.K., Canada, Japan — in other words, the G7, the European Union together — is a small part of the world population, perhaps now roughly 10%, a little bit more, maybe 12.5% if you add in Japan to Western Europe and the U.S. But the mindset is “We run the world.” And that was the way it was for 200 years in this Industrial Age.
But times have changed. And really, since the 1950s, the rest of the world, when it gained independence from European imperialism, started to educate its populations, started to adopt and adapt and innovate technologies. And lo and behold, a small sliver of the world really didn’t run the world or didn’t have a monopoly on wisdom or knowledge or science or technology. And this is wonderful. The knowledge and possibility of decent lives is spreading throughout the whole world.
But in the United States, there is a resentment to this, a deep resentment. I think there’s also a tremendous historical ignorance, because I think a lot of U.S. leaders have no clue as to modern history. But they resent China’s rise. That is an affront to the United States. How dare China rise! This is our world! This is our century! And so, starting around 2014, I saw, step by step — I watched it with intense detail, because it’s my daily activity — how the United States recast China not as a country that was recovering from a century and a half of great difficulty, but rather as an enemy. And we consciously, as a matter of American foreign policy, started to say, “We need to contain China. China’s rise is no longer in our interest,” as if the United States is to determine whether China is prosperous or not. The Chinese are not naive; in fact, they’re extraordinarily sophisticated. They watched all of this exactly the same way that I did. I know the authors of the U.S. texts. They are my colleagues, at Harvard or other places. I was shocked when this kind of containment idea started to be applied.
But the basic point is, the West has led the world for a brief period, 250 years, but feel, “That’s our right. This is a Western world. We are the G7. We get to determine who writes the rules of the game.” Indeed, Obama, you know, a good guy on the spectrum of what we have in foreign policy, said, “Let’s write the rules of trade for Asia, but not have China write any of those rules. The U.S. will write the rules.” This is an incredibly naive and dangerous and outmoded way to understand the world. We in the United States are 4.2% of the world’s population. We do not run the world. We are not world leader. We are a country of 4.2% of the people in a big, diverse world, and we should learn to get along, play in the sandbox peacefully, not demand that we have all the toys in the sandbox. And we’re not over that thinking yet. And unfortunately, it’s both political parties. It’s what motivates Speaker Pelosi to go to Taiwan in the middle of all of this, as if she really had to go to stir up the tensions. But it’s the mindset that the U.S. is in charge.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to go back a little bit to — back into the 1990s. You recall, I’m sure, the enormous financial collapse that occurred in Mexico in the 1990s, where the Clinton administration authorized $50 billion in a bailout to Mexico, which was really to Wall Street investors. At the time, you were advising the post-Soviet Russian government, which also had a financial — had deep financial problems at the time but was unable to get any significant Western assistance, even from the International Monetary Fund. And you were critical of that at the time. I’m wondering if you could talk about the differences how the U.S. responded to the Mexico crisis versus the Russian financial crisis, and what the roots of that may have been in what the current situation is in Russia today.
JEFFREY SACHS: Absolutely. And I had a controlled experiment, because I was economic adviser both to Poland and to the Soviet Union in the last year of President Gorbachev and to President Yeltsin in the first two years of Russian independence, 1992, ’93. My job was finance, to actually help Russia find a way to address, as you described it, a massive financial crisis. And my basic recommendation in Poland, and then in Soviet Union and in Russia, was: To avoid a societal crisis and a geopolitical crisis, the rich Western world should help to tamp down this extraordinary financial crisis that was taking place with the breakdown of the former Soviet Union.
Well, interestingly, in the case of Poland, I made a series of very specific recommendations, and they were all accepted by the U.S. government — creating a stabilization fund, canceling part of Poland’s debts, allowing many financial maneuvers to get Poland out of the difficulty. And, you know, I patted myself on the back. “Oh, look at this!” I make a recommendation, and one of them, for a billion dollars, stabilization fund, was accepted within eight hours by the White House. So, I thought, “Pretty good.”
Then came the analogous appeal on behalf of, first, Gorbachev, in the final days, and then President Yeltsin. Everything I recommended, which was on the same basis of economic dynamics, was rejected flat out by the White House. I didn’t understand it, I have to tell you, at the time. I said, “But it worked in Poland.” And they’d stare at me blankly. In fact, an acting secretary of state in 1992 said, “Professor Sachs, it doesn’t even matter whether I agree with you or not. It’s not going to happen.”
And it took me, actually, quite a while to understand the underlying geopolitics. Those were exactly the days of Cheney and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and what became the Project for the New American Century, meaning for the continuation of American hegemony. I didn’t see it at the moment, because I was thinking as an economist, how to help overcome a financial crisis. But the unipolar politics was taking shape, and it was devastating. Of course, it left Russia in a massive financial crisis that led to a lot of instability that had its own implications for years to come.
But even more than that, what these people were planning, early on, despite explicit promises to Gorbachev and Yeltsin, was the expansion of NATO. And Clinton started the expansion of NATO with the three countries of Central Europe — Poland, Hungary and Czech Republic — and then George W. Bush Jr. added seven countries — Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and the three Baltic states — but right up against Russia. And then, in 2008, the coup de grâce, which was the U.S. insistence, over the private opposition of the European leaders — and European leaders talked to me privately about it at the time. But in 2008, Bush said NATO will expand to Ukraine and to Georgia. And again, if you take out a map and look at the Black Sea, the explicit goal was to surround Russia in the Black Sea. By the way, it’s an old playbook. It’s the same playbook as Palmerston in 1853 to 1856 in the first Crimean War: surround Russia in the Black Sea, cut off its ability to have a military presence and to project any kind of influence into the eastern Mediterranean. Brzezinski himself said in 1997 that Ukraine would be the geographic pivot for Eurasia.
So, what these neocons were doing in the early 1990s was building the U.S. unipolar world. And they were already contemplating lots of wars in order to take out the former Soviet-allied countries — wars to overthrow Saddam, wars to overthrow Assad, wars to overthrow Gaddafi. Those were all rolled out in the next 20 years. They’ve been a complete disaster, debacle for those countries, horrible for the United States, trillions of dollars wasted. But it was a plan. And that neoconservative plan is in its heyday right now on two fronts: in the Ukraine front and on the Taiwan Strait front. And it’s extraordinarily dangerous, what these people are doing to American foreign policy, which hardly is, you know, a policy of democracy. It’s a policy of a small group that has the idea that a unipolar world and U.S. hegemony is the way that we need to go.
AMY GOODMAN: Jeffrey Sachs, we don’t have much time, but since this was such a big issue — Naomi Klein took you on big time with The Shock Doctrine, talking about you recommending shock therapy. Can you draw a line between what happened as the Russian economy unraveled to the conditions leading up to the Ukraine invasion? I mean, how did the economic catastrophe that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union lead to the rise of the oligarchic class and, indeed, the presidency of Vladimir Putin?
JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah, I’ve tried to explain to Naomi, whom I admire a great deal, for years that what I was recommending was financial help to — whether it was Poland or to the Soviet Union or to Russia. I was absolutely aghast at the cheating and the corruption and the giveaways. And I said so very explicitly at the time and resigned over it, both because I was useless in trying to get Western help and also because I did not like at all what was going on.
And I would say that the failure of an orderly approach, which was achieved in Poland but failed in the former Soviet Union because there was no Western constructive engagement, definitely played a role in the instability in the 1990s, definitely played a role in the rise of the oligarch class. In fact, I was absolutely explaining to the U.S. and to the IMF and the World Bank in 1994, ’95, what was going on. They didn’t care, because they thought, “Well, that’s OK. That’s for Yeltsin, perhaps,” all of that cheating in the shares-for-loans process. Having said all of that, it was a —
AMY GOODMAN: We have less than a minute.
JEFFREY SACHS: OK. Having said all of that, I think what is important to say is that there is no linear determinism, even from events like that, which were destabilizing and very unhappy and unnecessary, to what is happening now, because when President Putin came in, he was not anti-European, he was not anti-American. What he saw, though, was the incredible arrogance of the United States, the expansion of NATO, the wars in Iraq, the covert war in Syria, the war in Libya, against the U.N. resolution. So, we created so much of what we’re facing right now through our own ineptitude and arrogance. There was no linear determination. It was step-by-step U.S. arrogance that has helped to bring us to where we are today.
AMY GOODMAN: Jeffrey Sachs, economist and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, president of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network, has served as adviser to three U.N. secretaries-general. I want to thank you so much for being with us, joining us from Austria, where he’s attending a conference.
Coming up, we will look at — we will talk to a reporter who’s documented how, over the last year, the U.S. has approved just 123 Afghan humanitarian parole applications. Compare that to 68,000 approved applications from Ukrainians in recent months. Stay with us.
