 Jeffrey Sachs, you wrote a terrific article in Common Dreams entitled America's Wars and the US Debt Crisis. To surmount the debt crisis, America needs to stop funding the military industrial complex which you identified. And I think most of us listening would agree the most powerful lobby in Washington DC. Jeffrey Sachs, talk about the connection between military spending and our skyrocketing debt. How do you think one has led to the other? Well, great to be with you, first of all. And thanks for a discussion of a really important topic because nobody has quite explained in this debate, whether it's the White House or the Congress, how we got to the situation that we're in. Here are the basic numbers. If you look at the debt that the government owes to the public, not that the government owes to other units of the government, it's something around $25 trillion, not quite the 31 trillion because some of that is owed to the Federal Reserve, for example. Okay, these are technicalities. 25 trillion is still a big number. And it's nearly 100% of our annual output in the country which is the gross domestic product. Now, back in the year 2000, the debt that was owed by the government was only 35% of the gross domestic product. So it went from being 35% of national income back in the year 2000 to nearly 100% of our national income today. That's a pretty steep increase. That means that we are spending but not covering that spending by taxes but covering that spending by borrowing. And obviously we've been borrowing a lot. The point of my article is that really a lot of that borrowing has gone to fund these useless, wasteful, destructive wars. Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, now Ukraine. That's awful. And when you look at the estimates by the Watson Institute at Brown University, they say that the costs of these wars is about $8 trillion if you combine them, not even up to today but up to a couple of years ago. Now there are some definitional issues and some timing issues that mean that we should go a little bit deeper at the technical level. But the point is that if we had kept our debt at 35% of GDP rather than at 100% of GDP, that is about 65% of GDP or two thirds of today's GDP of 24 trillion. You do the arithmetic, that's about a $16 trillion, 15 to $16 trillion increase of debt beyond what would have kept the debt at a level relative to income. So what the Watson Institute estimates are showing is that about half of that has gone to war. I think even more than half has really accounted for by the military because in addition to the war spending, we're funding 800 military bases around the world, we're funding a bloated intelligence world, we're funding all sorts of things that the military industrial complex likes, they're Raytheon or General Dynamics or Boeing or those that are selling weapons like but are a waste for the American people. Now, mind you, the other half of that increase of debt came from the 2008 financial crisis which blew a hole in the budget. That was Wall Street excess, let me put it that way. Another part came from the pandemic, various things could be said about that but basically between war, financial crisis and the pandemic, that's where our budget was blown. And here's the challenge I would put to President Biden. I'm completely against what we're doing in Ukraine because I think this war could have been avoided. I think it has a lot to do with the US relentless push to expand NATO, which by the way is a military industrial complex lobbying goal. That's what they lobby for, they love selling weapons to new NATO members. They wanna keep expanding NATO and other countries including Russia say, stop coming up to our border. Okay, so I think this war could have been avoided but Biden really as part of the military industrial complex has been as a senator, a vice president, now as president. He's always backed NATO enlargement. He's backed NATO enlargement to Ukraine. I think it's been reckless. I think it's the reason we have this war. So I'm saying, okay, if you really wanna make a deal stop this wasteful spending, get the military budget under control. But by the way, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are talking about this almost at all. Yes, yes, it's up to us, right? They're gonna slash the social safety net which is already in tatters in this country and then protect the military spending so that we can have more war. Yeah, this is what I wanted to ask you about Jeffrey Sachs because I know that at one point during this debt crisis Republicans were adamant about reducing spending. We even had our House Speaker, our, I'll put that in quotes. Kevin Karthi promised the Freedom Caucus and promised the American people that we would not issue a blank check for Ukraine. And now we're up to what, over $115 billion, half of that an estimated half for weapons and military training. The latest being that the US, Biden has agreed that the United States will train Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16 fighter jets. Unbelievable because it's nonstop escalation, more weapons systems, more destruction, more deaths, more spending. And I remember what I wanted to say which is I would challenge President Biden if he wants to continue on this path of the Ukraine war which I think is tragic and completely solvable if he would stop the NATO enlargement and say to the Russians, go home and we don't go into Ukraine. And that's how you end this war. But I'd like him to say, okay, if we're gonna spend more money, we're gonna raise taxes to do it. Let's put it to the American people, fund this, not just put it on the debt. And I'd say to the Republicans also, you want the war, tell the American people they're gonna pay more taxes. You wanna have a war in Asia with China? Okay, raise the taxes for that. See how the American people feel about that. They don't dare do it. That's why the debt keeps going up because these wars are not popular at all. And by the way, they don't wanna ask the American people their views about anything. So they just put it onto the debt without asking us, do we really wanna have this tragic war in Iraq? Do we really wanna have a CIA-led operation to overthrow the Syrian government? Do we really wanna bomb Libya back into rubble? They never asked us on any of this stuff. And if they just put it onto the debt, but if they said, okay, this is really important and we're gonna raise taxes to do it, then we could have a good debate in this country. Is this really important or is this good for general dynamics? Is this good for Boeing? Is this good for the military industrial complex? We don't have that debate right now because they hide it on the debt. That's right. And few people realize that the Department of Defense, the Department of War, it used to be called, it should still be called, has never passed an audit. That's because there's missing money and people can't explain where this money has gone. And now we're just hurling money, spending about $6 billion to prop up the government in Ukraine rather than saying, we'll support a ceasefire, we'll sit down, we'll negotiate with Putin, with Zelensky, maybe have two tracks of diplomacy, but we wanna end this war now. No, instead, Biden has committed to US, the United States to train Ukrainian pilots on these F-16 fighter jets, which could take a year or two. I mean, that's in essence saying, we're committed to further death, destruction, the risk of nuclear war for another two years. But let's get back for a minute to the debt, so-called debt crisis, because you're an economist, Jeffrey Sachs. I want answers to a couple of questions in the weeds. Okay, so we have this, you say it's a $24 trillion debt if you really examine it, that the media is saying 31 trillion. Anyway, the point is, where are we getting this money? It's debt. Who do we owe it to? How are we raising this money to pay for all of these wars, including the war in Ukraine? So the government borrows, it borrows from the public, it borrows from foreign governments that hold this debt, it borrows from foreign wealth holders that owe this debt. And to some extent, the borrowing is okay, but we went from owing 35% of our income to 100% of our gross domestic product. And what the Congressional Budget Office signals is that if we keep on the current policies, the debt will rise to around 160%, or even higher of our gross domestic product by mid-century. In other words, we're on an upward spiral because no side, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans want to talk about spending to cover wars and the military budget, neither one wants to talk about taxing the rich. By the way, that's true, not just of the Republicans who fight that, the Democrats fight that. President Biden announces for reelection and where does he go immediately? To wealthy donors, he goes to Wall Street. This is both parties, come on. This is why the rich don't pay taxes. So we're on a spiraling rise of debt. You can carry some debt, we all carry a mortgage maybe if you own a home. Some people have consumer debt and so forth, but you keep it under a limit so that it doesn't get out of hand. And for a while, the interest rates were very, very low. So the government said, oh, look, we can borrow, it doesn't matter, we'll just keep borrowing. But you know what? It turned into inflation. Now the interest rates are going up because the Fed is once again raising interest rates to try to staunch inflation. And suddenly the debt service burden. In other words, how much we have to pay on just interest on this debt is rising by percentage points of GDP eating up invaluable tax revenues that we need to help educate our kids for normal society, for fighting the pandemics and the mental health and the crime and other things that we have a social safety net for, but it's now gonna go to debt service. And that is why you keep your debt under control so that when you collect revenues, you can use it for the important things, not simply to pay interest on what you borrowed in the past. Now, when we're paying this interest, Jeffrey Sachs, are we paying this interest to Japan, a large holder of US debt to China, another large holder of US debt? Did they buy treasury bonds? Is that the debt that we're talking about? Yeah, we pay the interest on anyone that holds US treasury bills and bonds. That includes a lot of foreign governments, as you've mentioned, it includes a lot of wealthy people in the United States. It includes a lot of pension funds, insurance funds, money market funds backed up by US treasury bills. Government borrows by selling its bills and bonds in a kind of open market that any wealth holder can buy to include in their wealth or their asset portfolio. So it's wealth holders all over the world of all kinds from pension funds and insurance funds and money market funds and foreign exchange reserves of other governments. The point from our governmental point of view is that's okay if it's 35% of GDP, even if it's 50% of GDP. By the way, it's okay if it went up to 100% of GDP and we had used the difference for making wonderful investments that were going to boost the economy. But where did that increase of debt come from? That 16 trillion that I talked about, what was it used for? Was it used for modernizing our infrastructure and making everything work well in the US? No, it went to wars down the drain. It went to the veterans spending for all the wounded soldiers that suffered from this. A huge bill, human disaster, financial and fiscal disaster. It went also for this Wall Street debacle in 2008 when they were playing games with subprime mortgages and we ended up with a massive recession and it went to the spending on the COVID pandemic. And so we don't have the infrastructure or the investment, the physical capital as the counterpart of all that borrowing. We have a lot of waste. It's very sad. We ran up the debt and we have nothing to show for it except my God, why did we do that? Well, I think we did it because the capital has really been invaded by lobbyists or military contractors. They're the most powerful. As you mentioned in your article in Common Dream, it's the most powerful loving group. Well, I imagine the oil industry, fossil fuel industry is right up there as well with big pharma, but by and large we have a captive Congress. So here's my question. To talk about the debt just a little bit more with us owing something like over $800 billion in interest to China, how is it that we have all these lawmakers who are saying that we need to prepare for war with China. I was listening to a hearing in the house the other day and I just, I couldn't believe what I was even I couldn't believe what they were saying about sending more and more troops over to the Pacific to surround China. I think we already have about 250 bases. We're opening a new base in Guam, sending 5,000 Marines from Okinawa to Guam, fully militarizing Guam. And yet we owe China money. How did they, how do they square this in their mind? Well, I can tell you I've been engaged in international economics at the professional level for 43 years and you add some student years in that I've never seen a worse public discussion and debate than we have right now. It's almost mindless. It's also filled with lies and many other things but this warmongering against China is, it's so wrong by the way aside from the question of debt do we really want to end the world? Do we really want to have World War Three with China right now? These congressmen need to get a life, get out of their handouts and hands out to the military, industrial funders and the other lobbyists and go learn something, go to China, go have some discussions, go see something because what they're talking is nonsense and it's gonna get us in deep, deep trouble. So when it comes to the question of the drumbeats of war with China, much more than the debt issue and the economy issue, I'm worried about the survival issue and I just see so much ignorance in Congress but maybe it's not ignorance. Maybe they're just expert at fundraising for their reelection campaigns and that's all that matters to them but I don't think they know what they're talking about at all right now. Well, I would agree with you on that. I think many of us at Code Pink would agree with you and there are some of us who believe that this war in Ukraine is really a prelude to what people like Victoria Newland, number three in the State Department who was there in the Medan Square in 2014 encouraging the coup and engineered the transition government want to see which is the next war with China, God forbid, right? We know that that would be an absolute disaster. You know, overseas a lot of people call this the Newland administration, not the Biden administration because Newland has been there, she was Cheney's advisor, she was the Bush ambassador to NATO when the NATO enlargement to Ukraine and to Georgia was put, this disastrous idea that got us into this was put into the NATO agenda. By the way, over the huge objections of the Europeans at the time, she was the ambassador to NATO. Under the Republicans, okay, then she stays and then she's the point person for the US role in the overthrow of the Ukraine government in February, 2014 that starts this war because people need to remember just get on a website and look at it, even they're admitting it. This war did start in 2022 with Russia's invasion. This war started in 2014 with the violent overthrow of the Ukraine government. And go listen to Newland on tape, several weeks before the overthrow talking about who the next government would be in Ukraine. She's already plotting this with the US ambassador to Ukraine, Jeffrey Piat on a phone call that was intercepted. It's unbelievable. She was then assistant secretary of state for European affairs. Now she's under secretary of state for political affairs. So she's that deep state, the one that transcends the political parties that shows this is not Democrats and Republicans. This goes back to Cheney, to Bush. This goes to Obama administration. This goes right up to Biden. Come on, what is this? And we've known all along our own diplomats, William Burns, who in 2008 was the US ambassador to Russia. Cable home and people can find it online because it was covered by WikiLeaks. They can find William Burns email, cable, that says, my God, if we push NATO enlargement, this is absolutely a Russian red line. And the Russians have explained, don't do this, why this is so dangerous. And Newland, okay, close your eyes, just go ahead. Everything will be fine and not everything's fine. Now we're in the middle of one war and at risk of another war and nothing is fine. Nothing is fine. I wanna ask you back at the debt on the topic of the debt, there are those Jeffrey Sachs who say, you know what, we don't have to worry about the debt, so-called debt crisis because our dollar is not back by goal. We can just keep printing dollars. This is I think modern monetary theory. We can afford whatever we want. What would you say to them? Well, it's technically right. What you do, technically the treasury borrows from the open market and then the Federal Reserve buys that debt from the bond holder, puts money into the economy and takes the debt back onto the books of the fed. So it's no longer owed to the public. The debt is now owed to another unit of the government. But what happens is the money supply has gone up. So it is printing money to finance the war. The problem with that is that, again, you can do it to an extent, but if you do it too much, you get inflation. And in 2021 and 2022, we had a blow out of the money supply. I've been a monetary economist for 43 years, I mentioned international. I never saw it. In fact, it never happened before such a large increase of the money supply. And then you start having inflation. The first inflation was that every crazy cryptocurrency soared in value. And then the stock market soared in value and asset prices soared in value and non-fungible tokens soared in value. But then it got into the commodities markets. Now it's getting into the real, you go to the grocery store, it's into the real economy. And so that's what happens when you print trillions of dollars, which is what we did in 2021, 2022. So you can do it. It's just that you have consequences when you do it. Don't do it and think you're gonna get away with it, just completely printing money. Lots of governments have tried that for actually a couple of millennia, it's called debasing the currency. And you can do it for a little while, but after a while, you better pay your bills. That's the basic point. Thank you. For those of you who just tuned in, I'm Marcy Winograd from Code Pink Radio. I am with the distinguished Jeffrey Sachs, economist, public policy analyst who's been doing this for decades, talking about this debt crisis of anywhere from $24 trillion to $31 trillion and the betrayal of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy who promised that he would not deliver a blank check for military spending. And yet all talk of cutting the military budget has suddenly evaporated during this period in which he is negotiating with President Biden and demanding cuts in social security and Medicare, food stamps and so forth. Jeffrey Sachs. I wish we heard Biden saying, well, at least we'll cut the military budget. I'm not hearing that either, neither of them. No. Now, Jeffrey Sachs, let's say you're in the White House, you're in the Oval Office, you have the pen. Hard to believe. I'm going to put you there right now. And you can, you're meeting maybe with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and the minority leader, Keem Jeffries. And you say, look, this is out of control. This is a debt we have. We need to cut the military budget, slash it. What are you going to cut in that budget? First thing I'm going to say, you know, God, we thought we were going to bluff Putin and so forth and just NATO enlargement was going to go on. And he called the bluff and now we're in this ridiculous, horrible, tragic, destructive, expensive war. We're going to tell him, OK, no NATO enlargement, you go home. You know, in other words, we're going to negotiate the end of this, which started with these provocations of overthrowing a neutral government and overthrowing the sanity of not moving NATO right up to a nearly 2,000 kilometer border with Russia and all that. So I would stop the war through negotiation. That would be the first thing we'd save a lot of money. Second, I would say, look, we just had the accounting by Cypri, which is the Stockholm Institute that keeps track of who spends what on the military. You know, the United States is spending more than the next 10 countries combined. And I'm talking about China among those countries. We're spending three times China's military spending. We're spending more than the next 10 countries combined. Let's get this under control. Then I would point out that we have 800 military bases abroad. China, one or two, depending on how you count, maybe a small one in Djibouti, maybe one or two others. We have 800. OK, we don't need 800 for our security. It's not adding to our security. It's adding to our debt enormously. So let's get this under control. Let's take out an Excel spreadsheet also and do this right. Real numbers, not gimmicks. Let's see what we need to do in taxes because, God, there are so many loopholes here that it's unbelievable. But at the same time, let's stop waste on them, not just waste, tragic spending on the military industrial complex because that is where we have wasted so much of our money. Yes, and when we create, I don't like that word as a positive connotation, but when we produce or the military contractors who are really making a killing off of killing, when they produce new weapons systems, these systems emit tremendous greenhouse gases. So there is that connection. And too often, we see environmentalists and peace activists operating in silos. And at Code Pink, we have a war is not green campaign because we think it's essential that we integrate these campaigns because the military is a driver of the climate crisis. The Pentagon is the single largest global institutional emitter of greenhouse gases, consumer of oil and fossil fuels. Too much of that is under the radar. So let's talk about it. Now, let's also talk about what we're doing at Code Pink this week and next week. We have grassroots activists on the hill, on Capitol Hill, Medea Benjamin, Olivia Nucci, which who many people met when she disrupted, well, she's disrupted a few times those powers that be that insist on all of this never-ending spending for the military, including Joe Biden. So anyway, they're going to be on Capitol Hill with others visiting key lawmakers' offices and saying, look, this is our petition. Code Pink is a partner in the Peace and Ukraine Coalition, which represents over 100 organizations. We have a petition calling on Biden, Putin, and Zelensky to support a ceasefire and peace negotiations now. And I thank you, Jeffrey Sachs, because you are one of the prominent signers of that petition, along with others such as Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, Dr. Cornell West, Anne Wright, Jack Matlock, the former ambassador to the Soviet Union, even Roger Waters, the co-founder of Pink Floyd has signed that as well as Dennis Kucinich, one of my heroes who was in Congress for many years and a great peace champion. So we are taking this ceasefire petition not only to offices on Capitol Hill, but also fanning out across the country to deliver it to congressional offices, along with a full page ad that ran in the New York Times last week. Thank you very much, Eisenhower Media Network, and this ad said, let the United States be a force for peace in the world instead of, well, I'm adding this now, instead of a force for war and destruction. There are those, however, Jeffrey Sachs, there are those who disagree with this call for a ceasefire. They think it's controversial. They say, no, we cannot have a ceasefire because then Russia, Putin would end up with this annexed territory in the Donbass and in Crimea, whether that was an annexation or reunification is certainly up for debate. What would you say to them? I think it's really important to get to negotiations and to understand the roots of this war. This war came because we kept pushing NATO. And at the end of 2021, Putin put on the table, actually. You want to avoid war? Here is a draft Russia-US security treaty. And it had several points, the most important of which is stop the NATO expansion. And you know what the White House said? No way we're going to talk to Russia about NATO expansion. That's our business. It has nothing to do with Russia. Of course it has to do with Russia. We were about to put NATO right up against the Russian border. And so this was calamitously misguided foreign policy in the United States. And it's not just me saying it. The leading American diplomats have been saying this for decades now. Don't do this. George Kennan, William Burns, who's our CIA director right now, warned about this in 2008. And William Perry, who was our Clinton's Secretary of Defense, nearly resigned over Clinton deciding to enlarge NATO because Perry was saying, no, we're going to start another cold war with Russia. So it's possible to negotiate. But it's actually been strangely enough, the United States that has absolutely rejected diplomacy. Americans probably couldn't believe that. But it's actually true. And it's at least two recent occasions. One is at the end of 2021, when Putin was putting a diplomatic initiative on the table. And we said, no, we're not going to talk about it, NATO enlargements. None of your business. That's what we told the Russians. And then at the start of the invasion, just a couple of weeks after the invasion, Zelensky said, all right, okay, we can think about neutrality. We should negotiate. Now, I know what happened there because I've spoken to people that were deeply involved in this. Right at the beginning, the Ukrainians said, you know, we could really go to, we don't have to be a NATO. We could have guarantees from other ways. And the Russians said, okay, let's talk. And the Turkish diplomats said, we'll mediate. And so real mediation started. And actually the former prime minister of Israel, Naftali Bennett, got into the act as an informal mediator. Towards the end of March, 2022, they actually were working on the draft agreement to end the war. I'm talking about more than a year ago. And the United States said no. The United States said no diplomacy. Nobody questioned that in the mainstream media here because when's the last time you read in the New York Times a real understanding of this war? It doesn't exist in the New York Times. They just want you to follow what the US government says. And so if the US government says it's all Russia, they don't want to negotiate. Okay, then the New York Times will say it's all Russia. They don't want to negotiate. But for those of us who are there watching, seeing, talking, it's so different. We could negotiate this till today. And we're not even trying. And we're not trying because Victoria Nuland doesn't want to try. Every time this issue of negotiation comes out, no, no, no, it's not the time. And actually when General Milley said, this is the time for negotiation, it was the undersecretary of state that said about the general, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, no, no, no, he's wrong. This is not the time to negotiate. Come on, let's get serious. We have at Code Pinga campaign by Victoria Nuland which we released on International Women's Day. It's still on our website. Oh, good. Because we are very aware of what she is up to. Now you touched on a lot of issues that I'd like to revisit. You mentioned the media and we have Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst, he says it's not the military industrial complex. Let's see if I can remember this. It's the military industrial, he calls it the Mickey Mat and included in that is the congressional complex and the media complex. We see the New York Times, we see the Washington Post constantly producing headlines that would only encourage the warmongers on the Capitol to continue funding this war in Ukraine rather than sit down and negotiate. What personally has been your experience with the New York Times and Washington Post, Jeffrey Sachs? I mean, you're a world renowned economist. Will they talk to you? I tried to get a piece in the New York Times recently. They actually accepted it, then they rejected it. I was trying to explain that there were provocations to this war because they have used the word unprovoked about the Russian invasion 26 times by my count. They've done it in their editorials. They've done it in the New York Times columnist columns like Tom Friedman and others. And they've done it in the invited op-ed pieces. So I said to the editors, come on, could you run something that says that there was provocation? You know, just let me write a few hundred words to put it on the other side. And first the editor said, yeah, well, except that I actually sent in a piece and he edited it. And then they said, no, we're not gonna run this thing. So it's very hard right now to have a real discussion in the major mainstream, I'd say pro-Biden media. You know, I think the New York Times, if it was probably against the prevailing administration would be more critical. I don't think it's just pure dumbing down. I think it's politics. They like Biden. So they don't wanna say anything against the Biden administration. And if the Biden administration is part of this war effort, they don't wanna talk about it. I think that's really what it is. It's just a kind of pure partisanship so that they feel, oh, we don't want Trump back. So we're not gonna say anything bad about Biden. So, and our readers, they must think, you know, aren't grown up enough to be able to discern any subtleties in this. It's bad actually. I'm, it's very strange. It is, it is strange. I'll tell you, you know, my own view, this is another issue, but I'm a pretty good observer and I talk to a lot of people. And my own view, you know, just to shift topics for a moment is that the US blew up the Nord Stream pipeline. And I explained why I thought so from the start. Then came along Seymour Hirsch who I have to admit is a hero of mine, lifetime hero because I grew up as a young kid reading his accounts of Vietnam war atrocities and so forth. So I've always loved Seymour, but he gave a very detailed explanation of what happened, the timing, how it was done and so forth. You know, the New York Times didn't even cover that. Didn't even cover it to debunk it. And then there was this almost like a joke. I think it was a joke on the New York Times actually. They got some, you know, somebody from the CIA or someplace in, or the White House told them it was some people in a yacht, you know, it was six people in a boat. That story lasted about 24 hours. I mean, it didn't even last two minutes in my view. I thought it was hilarious, not substantive. But the New York Times ran it with a straight face, but they wouldn't run Seymour Hirsch's account and then discuss it. So they're not even covering the news and much less challenging a critical thought. And that's pretty serious. The New York Times, the Washington Post and their coverage of what's happening in Ukraine have really assigned themselves to irrelevancy because they are Pentagon PR flaks who just repeat talking points and there's no serious investigation into any aspect of this war. And that's why, you know, at Code Pink, we support alternatives, non-corporate journalism. Please tell others. Code Pink radio will tell you the truth. Now, Jeffrey Sachs, let's talk about China a little bit further. China has come out with a 12 point piece proposal which Biden immediately dismissed as, what did he say? He said it was irrational. Frankly, his response was irrational. Meanwhile, we've had actually Code Pink members have met with representatives of China in Washington, DC to thank the Chinese government for coming up with this peace plan and for playing a positive, a peacemaker's role. I mean, whatever people think about China and whatever criticisms they have, I think we have to be very clear that China, as you mentioned has maybe one or two overseas bases. It's not a threat militarily and it is trying to play the role of peacemaker, not just in the Middle East, but also in Ukraine. Do you think that China, the global South can make a difference here? I mean, because it's not just China, it's Mexico, it's Brazil, it's other countries too that are saying, we need a ceasefire, we need it now because they know the security of not just Ukraine and Russia and the United States is at stake, but the security of the entire globe. First, I think people should understand a basic fact about China. China has not engaged in one overseas war in the last 40 years while the United States has been engaged in non-stop wars. We keep pointing our finger at China. Look at how militaristic. We vastly outspend China on the military. We have surrounded China with military bases. We've been engaged in constant wars. We are trying right now to break the Chinese economy and then we point our finger like the G7 did in this recent meeting in just a kind of a hate-filled, ignorant session. Look at how evil China is. Look at how evil China is. It's so low level for anyone who really follows this. I was actually myself in China last month. I've been to China so many times over the last 40 years. We're in a propaganda field right now of anti-China propaganda that has no basis in reality. And we're trying to create an enemy there so we can crush China because they're daring to achieve economic development. So this is the starting point. Now, in terms of China's peace plan, it has one crucial point. And it says that a peace agreement should respect the security interests of all parties. What does that mean? That's code for don't expand NATO because Russia understandably regards that as a direct security threat. To have NATO weapons on Russia's 1,900 kilometer border with Ukraine is not what Russia would like. Just like we would not be thrilled with Russian bases in Mexico or in Canada or any place else nearby. That's what Russia's trying to tell us. China gets it. China just uses very confusion, if I could say, very nice orderly words, respect to the security interests of all parties. And that means to the United States, would you understand what Russia has been saying to the US since Russia was independent December 1991? Don't enlarge NATO. And especially since 2008, by God, not to Georgia. Are you kidding? That's what they've been telling us. And China gets it. And that's why Biden immediately rejected it because this is a game. The game is Nuland's game to expand NATO to Ukraine. You know, I think a lot of people don't realize, Jeffrey Sachs, that this has been a long time coming, not just in terms of beginning in 2004 with the greatest expansion of NATO, but also in 2020, we had NATO recognize Ukraine as what I call a de facto member with this interoperability agreement saying, we're gonna integrate our armed forces. Now, what's the difference between being a de facto member of NATO and an official member of NATO? It could be what you're talking about, bases. It could be nuclear weapons. People say, well, Ukraine gave up. It's nuclear weapons. First of all, they should all give them up, right? We should be pushing for the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, which NATO emphatically opposes. So NATO is the way it's going to be. And by the way, if I may just say that under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, of which we are a major signatory, we are bound to nuclear disarmament. But we're not even trying right now. So we're not even honoring the treaties that we're in, much less joining the treaties that we ought to be joining. So this is a terrible thing. And by the way, that's a huge budget cost that is hundreds of billions of dollars that we're spending on, quote, modernizing the nuclear weapons rather than negotiating nuclear disarmament. So that's another part to come back to the budget story of the past. But this story of NATO goes back actually to the early 1990s. I spoke with a wonderful historian recently who told me that in documents that he is reviewing as and published yet, Ukraine was already on a list for NATO enlargement in 1992. Now, that's years before Putin's anywhere around on this. This is a plan that goes back to the neocons with Cheney and Wolfowitz in and Rumsfeld in the Bush administration. So this goes back a lot. And now, interestingly, if you look up, it's a fascinating article, Big Brzezinski in 1997, in Foreign Affairs Magazine. Mind you, this is before Putin's president by years. In 1997, Big Brzezinski spells out the timeline for expanding NATO to Ukraine. And he says almost exactly the sequence as it actually happened, because what he was writing in 1997 was not just his ideas. He was writing what was already in the works inside the government. So this is a story that goes back 25 years at least. And it's been hidden from the American people. And they thought they'd get it on a bluff. The real idea of the United States was, what's Putin gonna do? We're gonna expand NATO, what's he gonna do? And he's gonna complain and we're gonna say it's none of your business and we're gonna expand. And that was really their idea. Then Yanukovych got in the way. Yanukovych, president of Ukraine, who said, no, I don't want Ukraine to be in NATO. That's very dangerous, we'll be neutral. Well, the US helped get rid of him. So this is a long, long story. None of it told honestly to the American people. And then if you say it now that this had something to do with the war, try to get it published in the New York Times. You can't. Jeffrey people say, I've heard this over and over again and they quote different people, unnamed people. I won't give them the credit here. They say, look, the reason why Putin has not invaded Poland, let's say, is because Poland is a member of NATO. So Ukraine needs this protection. If Ukraine were a member, an official, not just a de facto or interoperability member of NATO, then Putin never would have invaded. That's possible. But you know what? The way we did it, we virtually guaranteed a war, period. In other words, to say, okay, Ukraine, yeah, you're gonna join NATO and the Russians are saying against our border, no. And then letting as this occurred, they said, you keep pushing this, we're gonna have war. And the war started in 2014 because the safety for Ukraine was when Ukraine was saying, we don't even want it, stop, don't get us into the middle of this war between the two of you. So the fact of the matter is this, NATO enlargement was completely unnecessary and provocative all the way back to the 1990s. And then we saw in 2019, Ukraine embedded in its constitution, this is about to join NATO. Just to say, even the first round, which was Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, the Russians hated it, but it didn't cause a war. That's far from their borders. Then the next round came and the Russians were really, really annoyed because that one was on their border with the Baltics. So it was Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania. And then they said, oh, come on, what do you stop? Then in 2007, Putin said, okay, you've done it. You keep expanding NATO, you promise you wanted, but you keep doing it, stop, do not come up to our border with Ukraine and Georgia. And by the way, people should take a map out and understand a little bit about this. The real goal of these neocons, the Newland neocons, is to surround Russia in the Black Sea. This is why, where does Georgia come in here? I don't mean Atlanta, Georgia. I mean, Georgia is a country in the Caucasus. Where does that come from? If you look at a map, the idea of these neocons is that you have Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey and Georgia surrounding Russia in the Black Sea. And Putin's saying, don't do this, stop. And he says this in 2007, then in 2008 pushes this and Newland is key member of the administration then. And they push this over the opposition of the Europeans and get the Bucharest NATO declaration to declare that Ukraine will be a member of NATO. Will. And by the way, Biden has been part of this all along and the military-industrial complex has pushed this. The literal lobbies for NATO enlargement have been Raytheon people. Amy, you can't make this up. This is how the US government works. Lastly, Jeffrey says, I wanna ask you about Ukraine and the future of Ukraine, should we continue on this calamitous path of endless war? Funding the propping up the Ukrainian government to the tune of $6 billion a month, spending over $115 billion to continue the war, half of that going to military contractors for weapons and military training. Meanwhile, what's going to happen to the Ukrainian economy because we've already read about Zelensky privatizing a lot of these industries that were nationalized under the Soviet Union. And we know the BlackRock, representatives of BlackRock have been over in Ukraine. And we know that Zelensky has a website and on the website, there's a menu for privatizing Ukraine and inviting investors to, yes, invest in the military in Ukraine. Where do you see this going? Should we continue on this course? Look, Ukraine is being destroyed. This is the first tragedy is for Ukraine itself. Being a place where the US wage is a proxy war is the worst place you can be. As Kissinger famously said, to be an enemy of the United States is dangerous, but to be a friend can be fatal. We are killing Ukraine. Literally, we're killing Ukrainians, but we're killing Ukraine. Think of how we loved Afghanistan, how we love South Vietnam. What do we do? Iraq, if you are the place where the US is waging a proxy war, first of all, you will be physically destroyed. You will have mass outmigration of young people, of talented people, of people just trying to survive for God's sake. You'll have your infrastructure destroyed. All of this, the Ukrainian economy is busted and the Ukrainian population has shrunk tremendously because people have left the country. And so this is no way helping Ukraine. This is just, I tried to tell the Ukrainians, I'm for you, I'm not against you. This is, they kept thinking, oh, that's group propaganda. I said, no, listen, I go back to the Vietnam War in the United States to Iraq, Afghanistan. I've seen what happens when the US grabs you in a proxy war and this is what's happening right now to Ukraine. It's being tragically destroyed and every time things don't work, our side ratchets up and they keep ratcheting up and sad to say, you know, Obama knew in 2014, he got the main point when he said and realized that Russia has what's called escalatory dominance. What that means is Russia can meet us and raise the bet because for Russia, this is existential. For us, it's another war. Okay, we're going to expand NATO here. We're going to expand NATO there. We're going to do whatever we want to do. For Russia, they view this as the essence of Russia's national security. They have 1,600 deployed nuclear weapons. Obama realized this, said, I don't want to even start down this path. I don't know what this administration is doing. They have no plan. It's all, it's phony. And phony in the sense that they have no route to success, but they're in it up to their necks right now, worse than that, for Ukraine, they're in it above their heads. They're drowning in this violence. We've got to stop the fighting because there is no military path to victory because Russia can escalate and can escalate to devastation. And we keep, we were told, oh, don't say that, don't mention nuclear weapons and so forth. You know what, mention them. Understand. Understand this. I think we should also mention, Jeffrey Sachs, that the United States says in Nuclear Posture Review, the Biden administration, it says we will use nuclear weapons first if our allies' interests are threatened. So, you know, who's going to use them first or will they be used? All of this is speculation, but it's frightening that we are escalating right now training Ukrainians on F-16 fighter jets that could... After they said again and again that they wouldn't do it, they keep taking the next step. It's time for the Newland administration, really, to step down so that we can have peace and have some sanity. With that, I want to thank you, Jeffrey Sachs, world-renowned economist, public policy analyst, author, prolific author for your time on Code Pink Radio. Here's to peace. Thank you. Indeed. Thank you so much. Great to be with you.