State of Play: Geopolitics, US Foreign Policy, and NATO Enlargement — with Jeffrey Sachs

Support for PropG comes from ServiceNow. Today it seems every business is influenced by the uncertainty in the world. It seeps into every discussion. It forces tough choices for what to do next. Should you drive efficiency or should you drive growth? But what if, instead of choosing, you could say yes to both. With the intelligent platform for digital business from ServiceNow, you can. You can say yes to unifying your existing systems and yes to accelerating growth. Visit ServiceNow.com to see how they can help you put yes to work. The world works with ServiceNow. Episode 251. 251 is the area code serving southwestern Alabama. 1951, the development of the birth control pill began. I have the ultimate birth control. It's my personality. True story, my girlfriend said she was on birth control yet got pregnant. And up she's dyslexic and got a DUI. My partner and I use the pull out method for birth control. We pull out our phones and ignore each other all night. I use a birth control that works despite having holes in it. It's called Crocs. Go, go, go! Welcome to the 250 first episode of the PropG pod. In today's episode, we speak with Jeffrey Sachs, a world renowned economics professor at Columbia University, bestselling author and global leader in sustainable development. We discuss with Professor Sachs the state of the nation's debt ceiling, specifically as it relates to military spending. We also do Professor Sachs take on the broader geopolitical landscape as well as the war in Ukraine. I think a lot of Professor Sachs and he's one of those scholars that has just a tremendous amount of influence. And the thing I admire most about him is that he's fearless, is that he's just not afraid to ignore the narrative around any issue and put forward a thoughtful viewpoint that supported data and makes you think. Okay, what's happening? Met is in the news for nothing we haven't seen before, copying its competitors and receiving a record fine. So let's start with a fine EU privacy regulators hit meta with a $1.3 billion fine for transferring European user data to the US, which they said they wouldn't do or it's not supposed to do. The regulators from Ireland's data protection commission demanded that Facebook stop transferring European users data to the United States, or it can be subject to exploitation by US spy agencies and delete data. That's already been sent. Well, $1.3 billion may sound like a lot. It's the GDPR's largest fine since it went into effect in 2018, but it's smaller than the FTC find a $5 billion against meta for consumer privacy violations. It's also less than some of the EU's largest antitrust fines. Not only that, okay, let's talk about this. $1.3 billion is approximately what the Zuck spends and loses every month, such that it can create a series of in-cell panic rooms called the metaverse. And to think this is going to stop them from doing exactly what they want with data such that they can make it more fluid and figure out ways to monetize it to greater extent. It's just ridiculous. The algebra deterrence is not an effective. As a matter of fact, what we are saying to these folks is what you would be saying to anyone if you put a parking meter in front of their house and the parking meter costs $100 an hour in the ticket for not feeding the meter was $20. You would decide to break the law. And that's what we're telling these folks is that it makes sense on a shareholder basis to break the law. In response, our favorite Meadows-Comms guy Nick Clegg said in a statement, quote, we are appealing these decisions and will immediately seek a state with the courts who can pause the implementation deadlines, given the harm that these orders would cause, including to the millions of people who use Facebook every day. Well, Nick, Nick is the new Cheryl Sandberg, except he's not as well paid. He is basically prostituting himself and lying and being totally disingenuous and using weapons of mass distraction that our teens pay for every day and that increases or makes our discourse increasingly coarse. But I think he's only going to make $30 or $50 million where I have more empathy for Cheryl Sandberg who basically sold her soul for about $1.7 billion. By the way, Cheryl, about 10 million parents of teenage girls in the US would like a word. Anyways, Nick Clegg will go down in history. This will be kind of, again, he's throwing his reputation on the funeral pyre by just consistently lying. But he's doing it or he's trading it for only, I think, about $30 or $50 million. Anyways, maybe a little bit more. Don't know. Don't know. The US and EU are hoping to finalize a new agreement over how to handle data transmission by July. Reuters noted that even if an agreement is met, there's a good chance it'll be challenged by other agencies because previous data agreements were rejected over concerns that Europeans can't control how that information is used by the US government for surveillance. So how would you fix this? My sense is the way to fix this, and I don't know if it's practical or even viable, is there are laws that say if you're caught selling drugs within 100 feet of a school, they add 10 years to your sounds. I think of a tech company that has, say, over $100 billion in value is caught or convicted or fined for misuse of data violating privacy. I think you should just add a zero to it because if you find meta $13 billion for violating GDPR and transferring data across border, which you're not supposed to do, they would get really smart, really fast on how to stop that. In the moment a real fine or real regulation comes into place, guess what? It tends to work. This delusion of complexity is their go to that it would be impossible to figure this out yet we kick one account off Twitter and 30 to 60% of election misinformation disappears overnight. The real Donald Trump, if you are at the real Donald Trump, we say, all right, we're removing sex trafficking from the protections of 230. What do you know? Meta does not have a lot of content that would be classified as aiding and abetting sex trafficking. They managed to figure it out right away once they were no longer, could no longer deploy a liability shield called 230. These companies have learned from the sins of the father, the father being Microsoft, Steve Palmer and Bill Gates back in the 80s and 90s said, we're not going to play the game. We're not going to spend money on DC. We're not going to lobby. And what do you know? They swooped in and broke them up and that was overturned in the courts. But big tech has learned and they spend a ton of money on lobbying and they realize and it's one of their fastest growing expense lines. There are more full time lobbyists working for Amazon living in DC than there are. Sitting US senators, these companies will throw out this. I want to be regulated and then immediately deploy an army of regulators and lobbyists to try and delay any type of regulation and the comms department, the comms department manicuring their image is now enormous at these companies. And what we've seen over the last 30 years is a number of journalists has been cut in half. Whereas PR and comms executives, that job has gone up sixfold across the technology sector. So the ratio of bullshit and weapons of mass distraction to actual journalism has gone the wrong way by 12x and we're all buying into it. We all think these companies are not all of us. Most of us think these companies are good people. And simply put when I interviewed Senator Amy Klobuchar for my CNN plus show, No. Malice, six episodes, six episodes, I made it to number six, said, I'm just outgunned. She had proposed antitrust regulation and said, I'm fighting with the staff of 60 people. Maybe I can take a half a dozen or a dozen and put them on this. And I'm literally fighting hundreds of lawyers. So why is meta so negative? Why is meta a net negative for society? And I say that with some, I don't know, some discretion, if you had a button to push to get rid of all the big tech, I wouldn't push it. I think we're a net gainer from big tech. The problem is with the word net. And that is we're a net gainer from fossil fuels. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be thinking about climate change. That doesn't mean we shouldn't have emission standards. We're a net gainer from pesticides. It doesn't mean we shouldn't have an FDA. And I also think we're a net gainer from big tech, but we should absolutely have regulation that you cannot find any industry that is a tenth of the market capitalization of the tech industry that doesn't have 10 times the regulation. Now why is meta such a negative for society? What is happening here? It's always a arbitrage or there continues to be arbitrances in one substance to another. And whenever there is for economic gain, you have an externality. So we have plant-based to meat-based calories. We get methane. We get deforestation. We have a transfer of fossil fuels to petroleum. We get an emission of carbon. But, but the worst puff into the atmosphere, the worst emission in my view, is the enragement that is the externality of transitioning or converting or arbitraging attention into Nissan ads and to shareholder value. And the biggest coal-fired plants in the world aren't in Shenzhen, nor they aren't in Kentucky. They're in fact in Silicon Valley, specifically, meta and Google and Twitter. The biggest threat to our society, and we'll speak to this a little bit with Professor Sacks, is that we don't like each other. We no longer see each other as Americans, we see each other as trans or cisgender or as Republican versus Democrat, not recognizing a fundamental truth. And that is Americans will never have greater allies than other Americans. And what meta has done is found out or deployed a series of algorithms that have figured out that it's no longer sex that sells its rage. And the most profitable thing to do is pit your neighbor against another neighbor, pit one person in one party against another person. No, that's not working then fine. The conservative wing of your party and get you guys fighting. They have made our discourse more in course. If America were a horror movie, the call is coming from inside of the house. Republicans get this are now more worried about inter-party marriage than interracial marriage, which A is a signal of our success and our progress, but also a signal of just how fucked up we are. What do we need? We need national service. We need to bring the temperature down. We need to get out and touch and smell and feel each other more and recognize. I was more social when I moved to Florida. I have really good friends down there that loved to have fun, loved a party and I lived in an environment that was probably conservatively two thirds Republican. And it opened my eyes to the fact that you need to separate the person from the politics, recognize we're all Americans, we all love our kids and just develop a greater sense of what it means to be a citizen. Oh my God. What a guy. Wrap myself in a flag. Where are my Wheaties? Where are my Wheaties? Anyways, back to Meta. Back to Meta. Scott, we need you back. Come back to us, Scott. So supposedly the firm is quietly creating a Twitter competitor. I think everyone's creating a Twitter competitor, including yours truly who invested in post.news, a healthier place to have a discourse centered in the news. By the way, I love post. People are just nicer to each other. We've done some deals with media organizations. It's run by who I think is probably the best product person in the last 10 years, no bombardine who created ways. Anyways, check it out. Check it out. Anyways, according to reports, the app will be connected but separate from Instagram and be compatible with other accounts, including Mastodon. And some everyone's coming for Twitter's launch because they look at this, what used to be a $5 billion company. It's now $2 billion and say the self-inflicted wounds here, they head up your assery of their former CEO. It's just too ripe an opportunity. The app is expected to be available as soon as June. Twitter's new CEO Linda Yacareno. I love that name. Yacareno. Quote tweeted in an article about this and wrote, game on. Well, good for you, Linda. Game on. So does it make sense to build an app from Instagram to take on Twitter? Absolutely from a corporate strategist standpoint. I hate to admit it. I'm watching Reelsmore. You know, TikTok has been slowed down by what I think is a justifiable and warranted conversation around them being a national defense threat. But I find myself on Reels a lot. It's not nearly as good as TikTok, but why am I on it? Because they captured me because I'm on Instagram like another 2 billion people. So they have such incredible interface. They also very good, very good with products, very good with small innovation, not good with new products, other best products, Instagram. Probably I would argue Met as the best acquirer, arguably the best acquirer. I'm going to be Google and I'm anyways, they're a great acquirer. But it makes absolute a ton of sense for them to start a microblogging platform and take advantage of the weakness of the self-inflicted wound that is Twitter and Musk right now. It'll be interesting to see what happens. But meta, 100%, the best thing that happened for all of us is that Mark Zuckerberg continues to make these ridiculous, consensual hallucination, big go-by of wask investments in the metaverse. He needs some signs of success. Well, everybody log on to the metaverse just for a little while. Let's give the good people in reality labs some encouragement. I absolutely think the metaverse is the future. I want to go to Greece without actually going to Greece. I want to have friends where there really isn't any friendship. Way to go, folks, in reality lab. When you head down the 280 into work, you aren't wasting your life. You aren't wasting your life to build these in-cell panic rooms at about seven people every three months go to. Keep it up. Go bigger. Spend more. Imagine you put on your glasses or headset and you're instantly in your home space. It has parts of your physical home recreated virtually. It has things that are only possible virtually and it has an incredibly inspiring power. We'll be right back for our conversation with Professor Jeffrey Sachs. Support for this podcast comes from Helaton. Do you ever feel like you're not good at working out? It can be difficult to find the motivation to move your body in the middle of a busy day. Well, don't worry, you're pretty head any longer because Peloton has you covered with a slew of workout equipment to get your body moving. Peloton wants to redefine the way you work out. You're probably familiar with the renowned bikes, but Peloton is more than just a stationary bike company. They also make Peloton tread, which offers a unique walking and running experience that can be tailored to your level of fitness. 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This week we took a look at the dangers that AI poses with Tristan Harris, the former Google Design Ethicist who co-founded the Center for Humane Technology. From job displacement to deep fakes and more disinformation, to the fear that AI will become a golem. Which guys, is not just from Lord of the Rings. No, it's a really famous old thing, but anyway, it's never good. But don't worry, it's not all sinister here, we'll acknowledge much of the good that AI can unleash too. It's a fantastic episode and a thought-provoking one, and it's live now, search for on with Keras Wisher wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back, here's our conversation with Jeffrey Sachs, the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. Professor, where does this podcast find you? I'm in New York for a change, so back home. In New York, nice. So let's bust right into it. You recently wrote regarding the debt crisis, facing down the military industrial lobby is the vital first step in putting America's fiscal house in order. Let's start there. Why do you think that's the first thing or spending you would attack to restore sort of fiscal sanity? Well, we've just been in one war after another. The military budget is out of sight, and it's got a lot of bipartisan support for even more spending. So I regard this as something we actually should think about after wasting so much money in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and now Ukraine, maybe, maybe there could be some sensible discussion. But the way our government works is that each part of public policy, so-called, is parceled out to special lobbies. This one goes to the military industrial complex. It's got a strong constituency in Congress, and there's really no debate about any of this stuff. So that was really the purpose of the article to say, look, we've spent maybe six to eight trillion by now on these wasted wars. We never look backwards in this country. That's part of our national trait. Never think about what just happened to just plow ahead. And six to eight trillion by, I think, a reasonable calculation is perhaps half of the total increase of the publicly held debt from 2000 till now I show a little arithmetic on that point. And so we on a contemplate were in it deep in another wasteful and destructive effort, and we should sort this out. So just for the purposes of the discussion and some pushback, we have an ascendant China spending more and more money on its military. Even places like Saudi Arabia are, they're increasing their military budget, 16% a year. We have obviously a very aggressive Russia, a land war in Europe. Is this a time to be cutting military spending? Or I mean, is it there's the efficiency? Are there better ways to spend the money? And then there's the overall budget. But what is it? 12 or 13% of our budget is military spending the really the place to start in terms of fiscal responsibility? Yeah, it is. You know, we all know the prisoners dilemma situation where it's individually rational, say for the US to engage in an arms race and maybe individually rational for China to engage in an arms race. And yet the outcome is absurd for both countries and very dangerous actually. The way you get out of a prisoners dilemmas, you actually talk with each other. And that's the one thing we're not allowed to do right now. So the whole setup of how we think about these things is phony to my mind, first of all. And extremely destructive. The idea of the prisoners dilemma, which we teach in school to our students year after year for the last 70 years is that if you don't talk to the other side and realize that you're stuck, it's called a dilemma because you're stuck with a terrible outcome. You'll end up with that outcome. But we could actually talk to the other side and say, you know, this mutual arms race is really absurd. Of course, China thinks they're just being defensive because they say, look, we're spending one third of what the United States spends. You go to Washington, which unfortunately I have to do once in a while and listen to these politicians and it's drumbeats of war everywhere. And so the Chinese say, well, we've got to do this. This is our defense. And then the United States says, oh, China's increasing its spending. We need to do the same thing. That's a prisoners dilemma. But I would say for Americans, it's good to know we're spending three times more than the Chinese right now. The US military spending is more than the next 10 countries combined. If you want to get a good recent accounting of this, there's an organization and Stockholm Institute of Peace Research. I have it wrong. Some have dropped an eye in that. It's slippery, but you can find it online. Their recent report showing $2.2 trillion of military spending. The United States is 40% of the world total, though we are 4% of the world population. I think we've got some scope to do this in a more rational way. I think that's a really important point. It's funny you're saying that because I have in front of me the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. And just to look at some of the numbers, United States spends $877 billion. China number two spends $292. And if you look at the top 10 spenders, I think you'd argue six or seven of the 10 that we're allies. Even the 877 numbers, but misleading because if you think about Western or OECD countries that are largely coordinating with each other, we dwarf the rest. And your belief is that if we sat down and said, okay, China and Russia, and I don't know if you consider India and Saudi Arabia sort of swing votes, this is out of control. We all have better ways to spend our money. Similar to what we did with nuclear arms or nuclear missiles, where we took them from 50,000 to 10,000, we're all going to start reducing our military budget. Would that be a good starting place? I think a really good starting place would be the idea that first we shouldn't be aiming to blow each other up because behind all of this is even a more destructive point than the budget, which is the mindset. The mindset right now in the US is China's an enemy. War is very likely, which is, I can't even believe that, but that's actually what is thought in Washington that war is likely. And this mindset that we're aiming or we're heading for conflict is relatively new, extraordinarily wrong headed, easily avoidable. A good way to avoid it is for Nancy Pelosi not to fly to Taiwan, for example. You don't just stick the thumb in the eye of your counterpart and expect everything is going to work out fine. Actually, you don't freeze dialogue like the Biden administration did when it came into office. There was an order in the government. Don't talk to your Chinese counterparts. That was for most of the first year of the administration. You don't say we're cutting you off from all advanced technology in every way we can and roll out the old containment playbook and expect that you're going to have any kind of peaceful relations. So I think even deeper than the budget issue, though, the way you put it is exactly right, is a mindset issue. We're in the prisoners dilemma in a most naive way, which is we think we know that they are going to be aggressive. So we're going to be aggressive back. And that's the mindset right now. And it's completely wrong headed. Do you think some of this chill though and US China relations is, I think China, I used to go to China a lot. And I think if she as, or China is a different place than it was 10 years ago, and that she's rise to power, that it's an autocracy, that they've actually been quite aggressive and that us going to Taiwan who has been an ally, a strategic ally, we do great trade with them, and that no one should intimidate us into having our representatives visit Taiwan. It just strikes me that you're not holding both parties accountable for the chill here in relations. No, I think it's actually something different, which is a more kind of international realist approach, which is that starting around 2012, you could really date it to around 2014, China reached a new level of its economic development. No, during the period from 1980 to 2010, arguably China became the world's manufacturing workshop. But the idea was, okay, we have the technologies, they have the low cost labor, and this is a great relationship. We're going to get a lot of low cost iPhones out of this, and this is good. The Chinese, it's extremely clever and extremely capable. They started minting hundreds of thousands of PhDs per year, and what really freaked out the American policymakers was two things that came around 2014. I'd say number one was a program in China called Made in China 2025, where China used terms that I would not have advised them to use, but they said, I don't know if it's dominate, but we're going to be the major players in a lot of key technologies by 2025. That was one thing, and it really freaked out Washington. The second was the Belt and Road Initiative. The Belt and Road Initiative was China saying, were the phenomenal world savers while the United States barely saves. We saved 40% of our gross domestic product or more, and we're going to use those savings to build highways, fast rail, 5G, all over Eurasia. By the way, even in East Africa and Latin America, and that's the Belt and Road Initiative. We don't have any initiatives like that. 50 years ago, we would have, but now the United States doesn't. These two things were kind of an announcement. China was reaching a level of superpower status in the world, and the superpower of 1.4 billion people and a highly successful society. At that point, you start finding remarkable statements. It didn't have to do with Xi. It didn't have to do with anything specific about putting up some military facilities on the tiny island in the South China Sea. Nothing like that. It had to do with the recognition that China was now a threat to US dominance. There's a remarkable paper by a former colleague of mine, Ambassador Robert Blackwell, who wrote, I think it's 2015, a council on foreign relations. People can download it. The United States needs to rethink its relations with China because China is now a threat to US predominance or US dominance. He lays out a number of steps in that paper. Very clearly, we need to restrict technology flows. We need to organize countries in Asia to engage and trade with us in ways that deliberately exclude the Chinese from any role in policymaking. He lays out quite explicitly a kind of neo-containment strategy, if I could call it that. That's when the US started to move. It started under Trump, but Biden has accelerated it. I think it's just wrong to think that somehow this was provoked by Xi. It was provoked by China's continued rise in excellence, in innovation, in science, and technology. It was provoked by the good old US idea that, hey, this is our century. Nobody else's century, and we're not going to let it happen. I happen to think that's a ridiculous approach to life because as an economist, I guess, maybe as a human being, I believe in win-win ideas. I don't believe that this is really a game of who's on top, but actually, are we prospering, which is not a zero-sum idea, but more of a shared idea. I regard that whole shift in US politics as being dangerous and wrong-headed, sure to create an enemy of the other side. First if I could finish on this thought, one of my favorite political scientists is John Mersheimer, who is our kind of go-to super realist at the University of Chicago. He wrote a very powerful, very influential book in the early 2000s called The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. In the early 2000s when he wrote, he said, it looks calm right now. It looks like we're past great power crisis, but he writes very presently when China grows in power. We're going to be right back to great power conflict. I give him a lot of credit for it, but I said to him, John, this is going to lead to self-fulfilling crisis. He said, yes, that's in China. It's a tragedy. Yes. He said, that's how it is. I don't accept that part that we have to have a tragic outcome to all of this. Yeah, so I just want to acknowledge. I mean, I work a lot with Chinese companies. I shouldn't say I work a lot with companies whose entire or majority their supply chain is in China. I find that the rhetoric coming out of DC and among the media is different than the rhetoric from companies who still have very productive relationships with people on the ground in China, including Chinese entrepreneurs. We have a great relationship. I mean, 92% of toys under American Christmas trees are manufactured in China. They buy our debt. We buy their stuff. It's been a fantastic relationship. That's my feeling too. So also the other, just a couple of stats that have absolutely blown me away. The year I was born, the life expectancy in China was 47. Now it's 77. They've brought 500 million people out of poverty in the middle class. That's arguably one of the greatest feats in the history of humanity. It does feel like we have mutual prosperity there. I'd like to pivot to another region. I've recently spent some time in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It strikes me that the adult reality, I love that term, the adult reality is that we are going that they have just a massive amount of capital and power. The money translates to power and influence. I'll go out on a limb here and I want to get your thoughts. I think they're a swing vote. Most elections are decided by moderates. I think there's a small number of nations that will be the swing vote if you think of us becoming adversarial. You think of China and Russia on one side, America and Europe on the other. Hopefully we can figure out ways to dialogue and come up with mutually prosperous solutions. But at a minimum, it strikes me that we want to make really massive investments economically and in terms of diplomacy in India and Saudi Arabia. These nations are becoming increasingly important. Economic power translates to political power. I'm just curious what you think our relationship with the kingdom should be. Well, I think it should be, first of all, friendly. And the big thing about the US that is really important to understand, we've been the Imperium. In fact, we viewed ourselves as the Empire. Empires tend to rule by divide at Empira, meaning divide and conquer, divide and rule. And so the United States in region after region of the world has actually a crest division. This may be counterintuitive, but we like to stir up trouble in regions and pit countries against each other so that some come running under our wing. And so the reason that I say this is that what has the US done in the Middle East since 1978? You know, in 1978, 1979, as Big Brzezinski had the idea, he was a clever person, but this was a pretty world-changing step. He said, we're going to provoke the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan. We're going to do it by funding jihadists, the Mujahideen. And that's going to cause the Soviets to come in and we're going to trap them in a war by funding jihadists fighting the Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan. So we did that typical CIA operation. I'd say 44 years later, one of the great disasters of all time, and Boomerang Donas, incredibly. Okay, that was one thing in 1979, triggering what turned out to be more than four decades of war in Afghanistan, leaving that country in complete ruins. In the meantime, that was the Iranian crisis. From 1980 onward, we funded Iraq, Saddam, to fight an absolutely bloody war throughout the 1980s with Iran. And then we took every step to do everything we could to kill the Iranian regime from then until now with just a few tiny iterations. Then in 2009, 2011, excuse me, Hillary Clinton and Obama got the not so bright idea in their head, why don't we overthrow Bashar al-Assad? And we unleashed the Syrian so-called Syrian civil war. It's really a CIA-backed operation to overthrow the Syrian government. I mention all of this in the context of your question because Saudi Arabia knows we've been everywhere meddling and stirring up trouble all over this region from the Middle East, the Gulf, and Western Asia. In fact, all of the major players know it, Iran, Turkey, the Saudis, and so forth, the Egyptians and so on. So what's happened recently is that China stepped in to do something absolutely dazzling and completely beyond the imagination of an American strategist. And that is that the Chinese brought the Iranians and the Saudis together to make peace unbelievable, by the way. You wouldn't have found one in a thousand in Washington that would have said, it's not even possible. What do the Chinese know about this? And the Saudis and Iranians, our whole game plan was based on that supposed Sunni Shia conflict being unresolvable. And the Chinese resolved it. The Chinese brought Bashar al-Assad back into the Arab League. And he was at the meeting just a couple of days ago, re-accepted. So if you ask how the Saudis view the United States right now, they view the United States and say, God, this is a country that is just enmeshed in conflict. And actually, we need to get moving to something bigger at this point. So unless the United States changes its approach, I don't think it's going to play in the Middle East. I think the countries in the Middle East are frankly a little bit tired of all of the wars that the US has stirred up. We'll be right back. So Jeff, let's discuss the war on Ukraine. You believe the US government is falsely claiming that this war started with an unprovoked attack by Russia close quote. And then in reality, we should be recognizing the role that NATO enlargement has played. Same war? Well, back in 1990, Gorbachev, who was a kind of dream for the world to end the Cold War peacefully, said, I'm going to disband the Warsaw Pact military alliance. And James Baker III and Hans Dietrich Dencher jumped in and said, if you do that, we promise NATO won't move one inch eastward. And there's a great archival summary of all of that collected by George Washington University National Archives Project that shows how many times NATO leaders, US leaders, German leaders told Gorbachev and then told Yeltsin, OK, no NATO enlargement. Of course, by 1992, when the Soviet Union was no more, our neocons. And at that point, it was Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld started planning NATO enlargement. Our promises lasted a nanosecond in historical time. And I spoke with a historian leading historian recently. I won't say his name because he hasn't published this work yet, but he was telling me that in the archives, he finds records already in 1992 that the intention is that NATO will expand to Ukraine. It's incredible to my mind. So in 1997's Big Brzezinski spells out in foreign affairs the timeline for NATO enlargement. And he gets it almost exactly because he wasn't surmising what it should be. He was reporting, of course, what the inside plan was in Washington and letting the foreign affairs community that Brown the Council on Foreign Relations understand what all this was about. And from the mid 1990s, this became a public debate because a lot of people told Clinton, including America's leading diplomats, don't do that. This will provoke a new Cold War. And even Bill Perry, Clinton's Secretary of Defense thought about resigning in protest over Clinton's and it was Madeleine Albright and the Democratic Party, neocons. Don't do this. This is absolutely reckless. Well, what happened, as we now know, and it was just like as Big said and wrote in 1997, the NATO enlargement went in three stages. First stage was Poland, Hungary, and Czech Republic. Second stage under George W. Bush Jr. was in 2004 seven more countries right up to Russia's border, but in this case with the Baltic state. So was Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and then on the Black Sea, Romania and Bulgaria, and then Slovenia and Slovakia. Putin gives a famous speech in the Munich Security Conference in 2007, where he says, would you stop it? This is a threat to our core national security. Do not move any closer. Well, 2008, the Neokan agenda continued just on track. Victoria Newland, by the way, who is now our Under Secretary of State and is probably the single continuity of the American deep state and both political parties because she was Cheney's advisor, then she was Ambassador to NATO in 2008. Now she's Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. In 2008, George W. Horscht, that at the Bucharest NATO Summit, we would commit to NATO enlarging to Ukraine and to Georgia. And this really freaked out the Russians because if you look at the map, what we were literally doing was surrounding Russia in the Black Sea. The idea was Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia, exactly the countries that surround the naval base in Sevastopol would all be NATO members. And Putin told Bush then in Bucharest because the day after the NATO conference, there was a US, or there was a NATO-Russia meeting. He said, if you do this, this is likely to go terribly wrong. Well, what I saw was what happened next, which is that a pro-Russian president of Ukraine was elected, Viktor Yanukovych. He said, we need neutrality between the two sides. And neutrality was against the Neocon purpose. And when protests erupted against Yanukovych in late 2013, there was Victoria, Newland, flying back and forth nonstop to Kiev to help orchestrate what turned out to be a violent overthrow of Yanukovych in February 2014. That's when the war began. And I know we were very deeply involved in what was essentially a coup. And Yanukovych left. A roosophobic series of governments came in, all-wanting NATO membership. And at the end of 2021, just to bring us up to the current moment, Putin put a diplomatic initiative on the table on December 17, 2021, actually a draft agreement between Russia and the United States on security matters. And I read it. I thought, yeah, this is absolutely the right basis for a diplomatic outcome. I actually called the White House and had a long talk with one of the top people and said, negotiate for heaven's sake. You know, what Putin's put on the table is absolutely reasonable because NATO enlargement to Ukraine could get us all blown up. No, no, Jeff, it's got nothing to do with this. And anyway, NATO is an open door. And if Ukraine wants it, we're not going to stop it. Just baloney, by the way, complete baloney as if the United States would say to Mexico. Yeah, if you want to have a military alliance with Russia or China, that's just fine with us or say that to Canada, you know, you can imagine what would happen here if anybody tried that unwise step. Well, we hold Putin point blank in January 22. We will not discuss with you the issue of NATO enlargement because it has nothing to do with you. We will not allow any third country, meaning you have any say over where NATO goes. And if you read the minutes of the Russian National Security Council meeting of February 21 or Putin's speech to the nation that night, they said, look, we tried diplomacy. We tried to discuss this. We got the door slammed in our face and we're not going to tolerate NATO on our 1,900 kilometer border with Ukraine. So to my mind, Biden blew it badly and we're at war now and they still won't admit the truth. And one of the things I wrote in that article, Scott, is we can't barely get a discussion in this country going, I tried actually to publish something in the New York Times. They wouldn't take it in the end after they accepted it. They accepted it, then they said, nah, we're not going to really run it. I said, come on, you guys are writing all the time that this is an unprovoked war. This was provoked. You need to run something. Yeah, maybe I don't know. So this is why it's so hard to have an actual debate in this country. It's an inside job and it's dangerous. So that's really the point of my article. So a lot there and I want to acknowledge that if a military alliance that was pro Russia showed up in Canada or Mexico, we would have a much different response. And that I think it all comes down to the core issue that America is struggling with wrapping its head around the notion that we're no longer the only game in town. You got it. That's what it all comes down to. Now, I do want to push back a little bit on. I do believe that NATO, I don't think that NATO nor the West has any designs on invading Russia. I can understand why they're threatened, but I do believe that. Let's talk about here we are. Here we are in a land war. And let's be honest with NATO in Ukraine. And my sense is the best way to end this war, quite frankly, is to win it and that if Russia wants to leave, it's over and that if they don't leave or that we come to some sort of accommodation where they get land for invading and killing as many people, you know, obviously a lot of their own people have perished. Does not send a green light to autocrats all over the world that they have a strategic advantage or that it's in their best interest to invade their neighbors? I mean, distinctive how we got here, isn't really the only viable way out or the best way out for Western interests and democracies all over the world is to convince the Russians to leave. Well, they're not going to leave because they are let me put it this way. The answer is yes to your question. If we said, if you leave, we don't come in. That's the magic word. If we said you leave and NATO doesn't enlarge, we have a real chance. That was what was on offer in December 2021. But we said, you leave and we'll do what we want. And that's just not going to happen. That's the problem. So if we said you leave and we won't enter the gap, I think that is absolutely a viable basis for negotiations. So in my point is in December 2021, Putin was not looking to annex these four regions that are now annexed, which made everything much more complicated. Now mind you, there's also a real complication. And maybe if we have another few hours, we can talk about Crimea because that actually is a quite complicated subject. But just to say your basic approach is the one I take, but I add an important footnote, which is, yeah, Russia should go home. But we agree that NATO won't go in. That line I've been urging for years, the White House explicitly won't say it for a real reason, which is that Victoria, Newland has been on this jag for almost 30 years, probably. And certainly we know from the late 1990s, they want NATO to expand. And here's the point. Obama knew in 2014, he actually gave an interview for which he was heavily criticized. He gave an interview that said, I don't want to get into this more because Russia has escalatory dominance. And what he meant by that is whatever we do, they can take it up a notch up to nuclear war and they care about this a hell of a lot more than we do. So I don't want to take the first step and then have the pot raised by the Russians and then we match or raise and go on because they can keep doing this, they will not allow NATO to expand to Ukraine. To my mind, that's been the story all along. So Jeff, even generous with your time, I just have one last question. We've kind of done a whirlwind tour geopolitically. I know you speak to a lot of people at the highest levels. So let's do the magic wand question. The president or the White House or Congress only has the bandwidth or the ability to get two or three things done. What do you think are the most important initiatives that we can take here in the US to ensure not only continued prosperity but progress? The key to prosperity is investment. We don't invest enough in this country. Our domestic investment rate, it's not properly measured. Even if you add in the R&D, you add in the fixed investment and you add in the education spending, it's a shadow of what it should be because we've got between a third and a half of this country basically outside of the education and even the physical infrastructure increasingly for prosperous life. And that's where our real issues are. It's a great country. We should invest in it. And that's where we should be putting our public finances. That's where we should be putting our efforts. That's where companies should be devoting their time, not fighting over Ukraine, not having a world war threat over Taiwan, not having 800 military bases around the world, all huge anachronisms. The impressive thing about the United States in the last 30 years, the most positive economic point. And it's a surprise for me if I think back 30 years, we really sustained the technology investments. In fact, not just sustain them, we increase them. And the payouts have been huge. Our R&D spending is big and wonderful. And it's actually generating huge amounts of new technology. So then we don't invest in the people. We don't invest in basic health care. We don't invest in poor people and poor communities. We don't even have a concept of social housing. I've been spending a lot of time in Vienna this year, which is magnificent and has 100 years of tradition of social housing. We don't even have the concept right now in this country. And this war stuff is a complete drain. So what I said to the administration at the beginning, though they could care less what I said, but I said, don't do foreign theatrics. Don't get entangled even more. Build this country peacefully. And there's enough for the whole world to have a mutual benefit. Don't break trade. Don't break agreements. Don't contain China. What a waste of time for us. Let's invest in the United States. So that would be my answer. That's investing in the United States. Jeffrey Sachs serves as the director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he holds the rank of university professor, the university's highest academic rank. He also has written several books, including Three New York Times bestsellers, The End of Poverty, Common Wealth, Economics for a Crowded Planet, and The Price of Civilization. He joins us from his home in New York. Professor Sachs, I love how fearless you are in your willingness to go against the narrative, if you will. I disagree with you on a ton, but I always find that you'll never... It's a great thing to have a great discussion. That's right. That's right. Evidence and argument craft better solutions, but I just love how fearless you are. And you back it up with data, and it just strikes me that your heart is in the right place. And I always come away with a different or a twist on what I thought were my knowledge base, which I think is the key to learning. You're in the right place as a professor, Jeffrey. Anyways, thank you for your time. Hey, great to be with you. You're really terrific. I have to have a happy and switching medium. I'm having a really struggling with my relationship with my father. My father is 92 and declining fast, he's suffering, I think from dementia. At his age, they don't even make the diagnosis, because what's the point? But he and I used to have really good conversations every Sunday. And now the conversations are just increasingly difficult. It's essentially me yelling into a phone. The same question over and over, him feeling stressed out because he knows he can't hear, he knows I'm yelling, and it's upsetting for him. And then he tries to answer, and then he asks me the same question over and over, how are the boys? I think it's rough for him, and it's frustrating for me. And so what I've started doing is recording voice memos and videos. And it sounds basic, you know, pretty basic, but I record a video. I say, this is what's going on with me. Me and the boys watch, you know, the Inter Milan game. I'm excited about this. How are your leaves doing? My dad's a huge maple leaf fan. And then him and his home health aide, she will go over with him. And if he needs to watch it seven or eight times and ask her to explain it to him, and then he writes back the text message where the video is. And I think it's more rewarding for him, and it gives him a snapshot, and I can walk around the house and show him videos of the kids and the dogs. And it just struck me, why did this take me so long? I've had these really uncomfortable conversations with him for a couple of years over the phone. And it's just, it's, anyone who has parents who are struggling is going to relate to this. It just gets very upsetting and very hard, very fast. So the bottom line is, and I wish I'd figured this out sooner. And that is, if you're struggling with an aging parent, and you're not communicating as well as you used to for a variety of reasons, write down all the different mediums in the different ways you could communicate with them and try those, try those. Because intimacy is a function of proximity. You want to stay close to your parents. They want to stay close to you. But some of their faculties and their ability to communicate through certain mediums is going to decline with their cognitive ability. And one of the ways you continue to love them and you continue to invest in them is you come up with new mediums. You switch mediums with your kids. When they're tiny, it's all about affection, right? It's all about getting close to them and let them smell you and lie on you. And then as a kid, it's constant verbal communication, mostly reprimanding them. Then as they get older, you start to communicate with them on the phone and via email and text or whatever it is or actions, trying to be a role model for them, trying to have good manners. That's what I'm trying to do in front of my 12 and 15 year old. I'm trying to especially show really good manners such that they begin to model that. We switch mediums. We're smart when our kids are young. Let's think about switching mediums as our parents in an older generation get older. This episode was produced by Caroline Shagrin. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer and Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Propped You Pod from the Vox Media podcast network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy No Malice as read by George Hahn and on Monday with our weekly market show. All right. All right. How was the show? It felt a little flatter. Am I just jet lagged? Am I jet lagged? Am I jet lagged?