Were Not Nice Guys Jeffrey Sachs Exposes Us Deep State Mocks Uk

TITLE: “We’re not nice guys”: Jeffrey Sachs exposes US deep state, mocks UK CHANNEL: Visanalysis DATE: 2026-04-26 ---TRANSCRIPT--- 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. Uh and this is because there is no European foreign policy. By the way, I don’t believe India is an ally. India is a superpower. The United States introduced the stupidest word in the English language last year, overcapacity. China doesn’t have overcapacity, it has the capacity the world needs. The British still believe they run the world. It’s amazing what nostalgia means. Uh they don’t even stop. It’s almost like a Monty Python skit, actually. When when the knight gets all his limbs cut off and says everything’s fine, I’m victorious. That’s Britain, unfortunately. Uh Biden was the worst in my view. Uh maybe also because he was not compos 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 2 years and actually have that president run for re-election. And one damn thing is he had to stand on a stage for 90 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 4:00 p.m. 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. There’s basically one deep state party. Uh and that is the party of Cheney, uh Harris, Biden. In my work 40 years overseas, I don’t think the US government gives a damn about these other places. I don’t think they really care if it’s a liberal democracy, if it’s a dictatorship. They want the right of ways, they want the military bases, they want the state to be in support of the United States, they want NATO enlargement. I’ve seen my with my own eyes the coups, the overthrows, the presidents, democratic presidents led away. They don’t care at all. This is Washington. If you listen to President Putin over the years, probably the main thing, if you listen carefully, that he’s concerned about is missiles 7 minutes from Moscow. Is a 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. Because if China or Russia decided to have a military base on the Rio Grande or in uh the Canadian border, not only would the United States freak out, we’d have war within about 10 minutes. I would disband NATO, and maybe Trump is going to do it anyway. Maybe Trump’s going to invade Greenland. Who knows? Then you’re really going to find out what NATO means. No, I don’t believe in the collective West. I don’t believe in the global South. I don’t believe in I all these geographies don’t even make sense because I’m actually, you know, I look at maps a lot in the global South is mostly in the north, and the West is not even West. [music] And so I don’t even understand what this is about. That was a glimmer of how Jeffrey Sachs views the world. And as time has gone on and the world has grown more polarized, his interventions have grown proportionately more powerful. Be that as it may, and as steadfast as he remains at sharing his worldview, by choosing to be a contrarian of the deep state media narrative, he has often come across as an angry economist shouting pointlessly into the wind. But that has hardly deterred him. Here we present a look at some of his most notable harsh truths that he has spoken at public forums recently and some of the positions that he’s taken. Many of these positions have seen him being castigated and his loyalties questioned by sections of the US media. It is in fact somewhat of a cruel irony that in many ways Jeffrey Sachs has become a figure quite like the person he views as the greatest statesman of our times, Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader who oversaw the collapse of the Soviet Union. For this, Gorbachev is viewed more favorably abroad than he is in his own country, much like Sachs himself now. Hello and welcome to Viz Analysis with me, Ankit Prasad. In this episode, we look at an alternate viewpoint to the geopolitics since the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union, much of which continues to shape the events of today. As you may have glimpsed already, it’s not what the conventional histories, mainstream media, and political narratives tell you. But Jeffrey Sachs has seen quite a bit of these events firsthand from vastly different vantage points. And that’s because he’s worked closely with several post-Cold War states, being at the core of it all, an American economist. In the US, he even now holds posts related to sustainable development at Columbia University and with the United Nations, and has worked directly with multiple UN Secretary Generals. Earlier in life, he completed his master’s and PhD in economics at Harvard and became a tenured professor there age 28, which is quite some achievement. But the most important thing he’s done is advise governments. Before the 1985 elections in Bolivia, he was invited by a Bolivian leader to formulate a plan to counter hyperinflation. The plan was to come into effect if the Bolivian leader came to power, but unfortunately, he lost. However, the guy who did come to power adopted Jeffrey Sachs’s plan anyway, and guess what? It worked. He then advised Poland on the shift from communist central planning to a capitalist market economy. After some back and forth and finding solutions, his plan worked once again, and he was eventually given one of Poland’s highest honors, something other countries have also done, including India. As per his bio on a US government website, he has been a senior advisor to the Indian government, most recently on the scaling up of primary health care in rural areas, a policy that he recommended and helped to promote through the Indian Commission on Macroeconomics and Health. For his broad-based support of India’s economic reforms, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2007. But an even bigger accolade than that was the fact that both the last USSR President, Mikhail Gorbachev, and the first solo Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, asked Jeffrey Sachs for his help in transitioning Russia to a market economy. In essence, this makes him an American economist who communist powers asked to help them become capitalist. His views are controversial and contrarian and have often seen him being criticized and called a stooge of various countries, from Russia to now China. But as we are about to find out, he makes a very solid case for whatever he says, drawing from his own firsthand involvement and rich idealistic intellect. So take a second to subscribe to the channel, sit back and listen in to what he says is America’s real foreign policy, the background to its many wars, which American president he says was the worst, and why Europe needs its own foreign policy, apart from his views on India and China. This is the world according to Jeffrey Sachs. The United States came to the view, especially in 1990, ‘91, 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, 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 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 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 will do the 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 to help. When the Soviet Union ended in 1991, the view became even more exaggerated. And I can name chapter and verse. But the view was we run the show. Cheney, Wolfowitz, 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 Iraq, Syria, and so forth will go. And we’ve been experiencing this foreign policy for now essentially 33 years. 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, Mr. Palmerston Lord Palmerston, excuse me,

[clears throat] 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 21st century. The idea was that there would be Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia as the Black Sea littoral that would deprive Russia of any international status by blocking the Black Sea, and essentially by neutralizing Russia as more than a local power. 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? Yeah, there there’s a very interesting interview of Putin in Figaro in 2017, and he says I’ve dealt with three presidents now. They come into office with some ideas even. But then the men in the dark suits and the blue ties, and then he says, I I wear red ties, but they wear blue ties. They come in and explain the way the world really is, and there go the ideas. And I think that’s Putin’s experience, that’s our experience, that’s my experience, which is that there’s a deeply entrained foreign policy. It has been in place, in my interpretation, for many decades, but arguably a variant of it has been in place since 1992. I got to watch some of it early on because I was an advisor to Gorbachev, and I was an advisor to Yeltsin. And so I saw early makings of this, though I didn’t fully understand it except in retrospect. But that policy has been mostly in place pretty consistently for 30 years, and it didn’t really matter whether it was Bush Sr., whether it was Clinton, whether it was Bush Jr., whether it was Obama, whether it was Trump. After all, who did Trump hire? He hired John Bolton. Well, the pretty deep state. That was the end of They told you know, we explained, this is the way it is. And by the way, Bolton explained also in his memoirs, when when Trump didn’t agree, we figured out ways to trick him, basically. Almost all the time that we intervene, it’s because we view this as a power situation for the US. So whether it’s Ukraine or Syria or Libya or other places, even if we define it as defending something, believe me, it’s not about defending something, it’s about a perception of US power and US interest, and it’s in objectives of US global hegemony. And if we analyze the Ukraine conflict just even a little bit below the surface, this is not a conflict about Putin invading Ukraine, this is something a lot different that has to do with American power projection into the former Soviet Union. So it’s completely different. Second, if we decide we’re the police, which we do, you can’t imagine how cynical we use to justify our actions. We used the cynical that we’re defending the people of Benghazi to bomb the hell out of Libya to kill Muammar Gaddafi. Why did we do that? Well, I’m kind of an expert on that region, and I can tell you maybe because Sarkozy didn’t like Gaddafi. There’s no much deeper reason except Hillary liked every bombing she could get her hands on. And Obama was kind of convinced, my Secretary of State says go with it, so why don’t we go with the NATO expedition? It had nothing to do with Libya. It It unleashed 15 years of chaos, cheated the UN Security Council, cuz like everything else we’ve done, it was on false pretenses. We did the same with trying to overthrow Syria. We did the same with conspiring to overthrow Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine in February 2014. So the problem with this argument is we’re not nice guys. We’re not trying to save the world. We’re not trying to make democracies. 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 Jr. came in. When 9/11 occurred, President Putin pledged all support. And then the US decided in September 20th, 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 in September 20th, 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 25 years. It actually goes back to a 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-to-day game, but that’s not what American politics is. So the next round of NATO enlargement came in 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 post-war order agreed with German reunification. Essentially, it was a It It It was a fundamental trick or defection of the US from a 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 2007, President Putin said, “Stop. Enough. Enough. Stop now. And of course, what that meant was in 2008, the United States jammed down Europe’s throat enlargement of NATO to Ukraine and to Georgia. This is a long-term project. 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 want to take over Canada. So, Canada could say to China, why don’t you build a military base uh 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. Cuz if China or Russia decided to have a military base on the Rio Grande or in uh the Canadian border, not only would the United States freak out, we’d have war within about 10 minutes. I don’t see any reason in the world that NATO has to be on Russia’s border with Ukraine. I was, as I said, Gorbachev’s advisor and Yeltsin’s advisor. And they wanted peace and they wanted cooperation. But whatever they wanted, they did not want the US military on their border. So, if we continued to push, as we did, we would get to war. One of the worst parts of European 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 a 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. 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 one to Biden. Maybe they got worse step by step. Biden was the worst in my view. Uh maybe also because he was not compos 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 2 years and actually have that president run for re-election. And one damn thing is he had to stand on a stage for 90 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 4:00 p.m. 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. [clears throat] Because we don’t speak the truth about almost anything in this world right now. In my work, 40 years overseas, I don’t think the US government gives a damn about these other places. I don’t think they really care if it’s a liberal democracy, if it’s a dictatorship. They want the right of ways, they want the military bases, they want the state to be in support of the United States, they want NATO enlargement. I’ve seen my with my own eyes the coups, the overthrows, the presidents, democratic presidents led away. They don’t care at all. This is Washington. These borders are sacrosanct except when America changes them. Sudan was another related project. The South Sudan rebellion. Did that just happen because South Sudanese rebelled? Or can I give you the CIA playbook? To please understand as grown-ups what this is about. Military events are costly. They require equipment, training, base camps, intelligence, finance. That comes from big powers. That doesn’t come from local insurrections. South Sudan did not defeat North Sudan or Sudan in a tribal battle. It was a US project. 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 voice about peace. Just like most of your parliamentarians, the same way. Honestly, I’ve listened to this for 70 years. I’ve listened to it as semi-understanding, I’d say, for about 56 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. [laughter] 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. As you know, Viktor Yanukovych was elected in 2010 on the 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 25-year lease to 20 42 for Sevastopol naval base. That’s it. Not for Crimea, not for the Donbas, nothing like that. This idea that Putin’s 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. [snorts] So, no designs at all. The United States decided this man must be overthrown. It’s called a regime change operation. There had 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. Okay? Please know it. It’s a very unusual kind of foreign policy. But in 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 1938. Well, we’re facing Munich 1938. 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. [clears throat] 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 15th, uh 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 going to 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 will be no war.” These are not very bright people. If you listen to President Putin over the years, probably the main thing, if you listen carefully, that he’s concerned about is missiles 7 minutes from Moscow. Is a decapitation strike. And this is [clears throat] 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. So, the war started. What was Putin’s intention in the war? I can tell you what his intention was. It was to force Zelenskyy to negotiate neutrality. And that happened within 7 days of the start of the invasion. You should understand this, not the propaganda that’s written about this. Oh, that they failed and he was going to 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. When Zelenskyy said in 7 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. Keir 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. We wrote a document explaining 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 of the war. I want to change one word from what we wrote then. Nothing was wrong in that document. And since that document, since the US 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, uh 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. So, the Trump administration is imperialist at heart. It is uh great powers [clears throat] dominate the world. It is we will do what we want when we can. We will be better than a senescent Biden, and we’ll cut our losses where we have to. Trump 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 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 want to carry a loser. That’s it. It’s not some great morality. He doesn’t want to carry a loser. This is a loser. [clears throat] The one that will be saved by the negotiations taking place right now is Ukraine. 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. Uh by the way, I know Mr. Lavrov, Minister Lavrov for 30 years. I I regard him as a brilliant foreign minister. Uh talk with him. Negotiate with him. Get ideas. Put ideas on the table. Put counter ideas on the table. Uh 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. 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 2003 in the Iraq War when 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 colleagues in the US uh 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 Feith coordinated with Netanyahu. And that was the last time that Europe had a voice. And I spoke with European leaders then. And they were very clear and it was uh quite wonderful. Europe lost its voice entirely after that, but especially in 2008. Now, what happened after 1991 to get to 2008 is that the 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 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 cuz you’re not telling us. You’re pretending to be neutral. So, you’re Europe. You’re 450 million people. You’re $20 trillion economy. You should be the main economic trading partner of Russia. [snorts] It’s 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. 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, I’m not saying that we’re at the new age of peace. But we are in a uh very uh 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 situation, that understands 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 Mr. Trump and meet him halfway. You know what that will be like? Give me a call afterwards. [clears throat] 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. Russia is not going to invade Europe. This is the fundamental point. It may get up to the Dnieper River. It’s not going to invade Europe. But there are real issues. The the main issue for Russia was the United States. Because Russia as a major power and a the largest nuclear power in the world was profoundly concerned about US 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 hard. It really isn’t hard. And again, I want to explain my point of view. I have helped these countries, the ones I’m talking about, 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 Estonian say, “We want to break up Russia.” Are you kidding? Don’t. This is not how to survive in this world. I would disband NATO and maybe Trump is going to do it anyway. Maybe Trump’s going to invade Greenland. Who knows? Then you’re really going to 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. 2 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 2 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. Europe stands for lots of things that the United States does not stand for. Europe stands for climate action. By the way, rightly so, cuz 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 a quality of life occurs. Europe stands for multilateralism. Europe stands for the UN Charter. The US stands for none of those things. And by the way, 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. 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. [laughter] 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. I I don’t believe there is a collective West. Uh I believe that there is a a United States and Europe that are uh in some areas uh in parallel interests and in many areas not in parallel interest. I I want Europe to lead uh 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 long longevity and better food, by the way. 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. Uh and this is because there is no European foreign policy. I don’t believe in the global South. Uh I don’t believe in uh I 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 uh and the West is not even West. Uh and so I don’t even understand what this is about. 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. I deeply believe the only threat to the United States, period, in the world, given the oceans, given our size, and given the military, is nuclear war. I deeply believe we’re close to nuclear war because we have a mindset that leads us in that direction. We have a mindset that everything is a challenge for survival and that escalation is therefore always the right approach. My view is a little bit of prudence could save the whole planet. My advice to you is worry a lot about nuclear war. And so, be prudent. You don’t have to put the US military on Russia’s border, okay? And my advice to Russia and to Mexico, when I’m going to Mexico tomorrow, I’ll give them a piece of advice. Don’t let China or Russia build a military base on the Rio Grande. Not a good idea for Mexico. Not a good idea for Ukraine. Not a good idea for Russia. Not a good idea for China. Not a good idea for the United States. We need to stay a little bit away from each other so that we don’t have a nuclear war. China, first of all, is not a threat to the United States security. Big oceans, big nuclear deterrent, and so forth. Second, we don’t have to be in China’s face. What do I mean by that? We don’t have to provoke World War over Taiwan. That’s a long complicated issue, but this would be the stupidest thing for my grandchildren to die for imaginable. And I resent it every day when we play that game. We have three agreements with China that say we’re going to stay out of that. And we should. And then China would have no reason for war, either. China And then on the economic side, let me just reiterate because I was asked yesterday and there was some surprise. Was it good to let China into the the WTO? I said, of course. It enriched all of you, by the way. It enriched me. It enriched this country. It enriched the world, including enriching China. That’s normal. Economics is not a zero-sum game. We all agree on that. I believe that security doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, either. We can stay a little bit away from each other and China does not spend its time bemoaning America being a Western Hemisphere hegemon. They don’t. That’s not their greatest interest to bring down American uh power in the Western Hemisphere. Our politicians in the United States are so stupid that when Los Angeles burns down, they can’t even figure it out. When Miami gets hit by yet another Category 5 hurricane, they can’t even figure it out. When New York gets destroyed by a mega storm, they can’t even figure it out cuz they don’t want to, because our political system’s so corrupt. But we are in an emergency. And you know that in the last 3 years alone, the world temperature rose by 0.3° C in 3 years. And the climatologists explained this that the underlying trend of warming is dramatically [clears throat] higher than we have thought. And my climatologist colleagues have been explaining this to me for years and they’ve been right. And what they’re telling me now is that the whole ocean circulation system that transports heat from the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern Hemisphere [clears throat] may be on the verge of closing down. Now we can actually get something done. And it’s not hard to know what to get done. China produces, has the capacity to produce more than 1,000 billion watts of solar power. And it stinks they’re saying the world’s only taking up half that right now. That’s not overcapacity. That’s capacity that we need. China needs to sell and install at least another 100 billion watts of solar power each year. That’s not hard. That’s a bit of financing. The whole world wants that. We need to get pragmatic. China doesn’t have overcapacity. It has the capacity the world needs. That’s all. It’s simple. Export your solar. By the way, all the talk about raised consumption, you don’t have to raise consumption. You have to raise production of solar power and sell it to the rest of the world. You’ll make a lot of money. You’ll do it on credit. But 20 years from now, they’ll repay you because they will grow because they have electricity. And you’ll save the world in the process. By the way, I don’t believe India is an ally. India is a superpower. India is going to have its own very distinctive interest, thank you. It’s not going to be an ally of the United States. I happen to like India enormously and and admire their policies, but the idea that India is going to ally with the United States against China, in somebody’s dream uh in Washington, because it’s another delusion in Washington cuz they should get a passport and go see the world. And and on and understand something. [applause] 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. As every conflict I study is just a mistake. 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.