Sachs: Ukraine Disaster a 30-Year US Project – Daily Reckoning

Sometimes, I watch videos on YouTube or X and think, “Thank heavens I listened to the right people about Russia and Ukraine.”

Of course, I claim no clairvoyance, and I’m not a “Washington Insider” like my colleague Jim Rickards.

I’m just a well-traveled, educated spectator who tries to understand what’s happening and then writes about it.

And since my trouble with authority extends to the mainstream media, I didn’t listen to their propaganda from Day 1. I listened to alternative intelligent people like John Mearsheimer, Scott Ritter, Douglas MacGregor, The Duran’s Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou, Glenn Diesen, Tom Luongo, Alex Krainer, and Paradigm’s very own Byron King and Brian Maher.

However, Jeffrey Sachs, one of the “Harvard Boys” who allegedly cost Russia billions in the 1990s, is a stunning addition to this roster of fine people.

Sachs was a Harvard man from his undergraduate degree to his Ph.D. in Economics. He now plies his trade at Columbia. His shock therapy of privatizing assets quickly in the post-Soviet era is generally considered a disaster.

I don’t know Professor Sachs, so I can’t say it’s guilt. But he’s been sticking up for Russia a whole lot lately. In fact, he’s laid the blame for this disaster squarely at the door of the US government.

So, with stifled laughter, I watched Professor Sachs politely ignore Piers Morgan’s whining and stupid questions to explain how this whole mess started.

Morgan’s entire strategy was to get Sachs to call Putin names. Really.

Sachs says (bolds mine):

Well, I think he’s very smart, very tough, and I think he says what he means.

In 2007, he said, “Don’t do this,” at the Munich Security Conference. Famously, he said, “Alright, you went violating…” what I know to be true, by the way, which was not an inch eastward for NATO promised by James Baker III and by Hans-Dietrich Genscher to Gorbachev in 1990. I know that’s for sure the case.

The United States expanded NATO to Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic in the Clinton period, and then to seven more countries in 2004… Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, and Bulgaria.

And then, in 2007, Putin said, “Stop. Alright, stop. No more. Not to Ukraine.” So what does George W do in 2008 in Bucharest? Of course, what does he do? He says, “Guarantee Ukraine and Georgia.”

And this is Palmerston’s playbook from 1853. So we’re going to surround Russia and the Black Sea again, exactly that.

Morgan, devastated that Sachs only called Putin smart and tough, asks again:

Just to interrupt though. I just asked you what your view of Putin is, and so far you’ve just said he’s smart and tough. Any negatives, professor?

Sachs, mildly amused, continues:

I believe that the big mistake of both sides is we should talk this out. And now let me say a word about talking it out.

In 2008 when Bucharest happened, European leaders called me, because I’m friends with them.

They said, “What is your crazy president doing?” By the way, some who are in power right now, I won’t name names. “What is your president doing? Why is he destabilizing things? He promised he wasn’t going to push Ukraine.”

That’s what European leaders say in private. They don’t say it in public. We avoided the negotiations.

Then 2014 came, sadly, Piers. I saw it. I saw some of it firsthand. It was ugly. The United States should not be funding overthrows of governments. We did. I know it.

Okay, so I happened to be there soon afterward with the handpicked government handpicked by Victoria Nuland.

We didn’t talk then.

Then came the Minsk agreements, and then the United States said privately, even though the UN Security Council has backed both Minsk One and Minsk Two, you don’t have to do this.

And so with Porschenko, don’t worry about it. Then we heard, of course, Chancellor Merkel say afterward, “Yeah, we weren’t taking it too seriously,” even though Germany and France were the guarantors of that.

Then on December 15th, 2021, Putin put it down in a draft US Russia security agreement. I read it. I called the White House.

I said, “You know what? You can negotiate on this basis. Avoid the war.”

“No, no, no. There’s going to be no war, Mr. Sachs.”

I said, “Just tell them that NATO is not going to enlarge. You’ll avoid the war.”

“No, we’re never going to say that. We have an open door policy.”

[Sachs retorted] “So what kind of open door policy? We’ve had 200 years of the Monroe Doctrine, some open door policy.”

“No, no, no, Mr. Sachs.”

Then the war broke out. Immediately, Zelinsky says, “Okay, okay. We can be neutral. We can be neutral,” and negotiations start, as you know. Naftali Bennett, informally, is the prime minister of Israel and Turkey, with its very skilled diplomacy.

I actually flew to Ankara to discuss with the Turkish diplomats what was going on. The US stopped the agreement. Why? Because they thought, “We’ll win. We can bleed Russia, our sanctions, cutting them out of the banking system. We’re going to bring them to their knees.”

It’s a bunch of terrible miscalculations is what it is. It’s a game, a terrible game.

By now, the clearly frustrated Morgan blurts:

What I’m fascinated by though is I’ve asked you to say what you think of Putin, and so far, like I say, you’ve only called him tough and smart. This is a guy that kills his political opponents. This is a guy who, who rules his country like a gangster? I’m struggling to understand why you can’t find any negatives for the guy. He’s a dictator.

Sachs, maintaining his composure, says:

Because I’m trying to find peace and you don’t do it the way that Biden does. Biden said, okay, he’s a thug. Biden says he’s a crazy SOB. That’s real good, Joe. That’s really getting us to where we want to go. That’s hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians dead. Why don’t we move a little bit beyond?

After a bit more to-and-fro, Sachs says:

I wrote a book about the Cuban Missile Crisis in its aftermath. Kennedy didn’t go name-calling Khrushchev. He tried to save the world to stop the war afterward. He didn’t insult Khrushchev. What he did was sat down with him and negotiated the partial nuclear test ban treaty. We’re not in a game. We’re not in name-calling. We’re not in a cage brawl. We’re trying to actually not have the world spiral into nuclear war. So it’s not that game. The game is sit down and negotiate.

Wrap Up

I’m thrilled to bring you this first because you should hear this kind of learned discourse (against a boorish interviewer). Second, I can say, hand-on-heart, that what we’ve brought to you from Paradigm Press about Russia-Ukraine is finally getting vindicated by people in the know, like Jeffrey Sachs.

From Jim Rickards to Brian Maher to Dave Gonigam to Byron King to me and many others at Paradigm Press, we’ve been on this since Day One in 2022. Many haven’t liked it. They wanted us to toe the line.

But that’s not how we do things around here.

We knew about “not one inch eastward” and wrote about it. We knew the sanctions would backfire and wrote about it. We knew the USG had far too much involvement in Ukraine from 2014 and wrote about it. We knew Russia would come out of this stronger and wrote about it.

To watch a mainstream hack whine because a distinguished professor won’t call Putin names is just delicious.

But what about the content of the interview? If you’ve been reading our stuff for the past few years, you know all this already.

Have a wonderful weekend!