La terrible advertencia de Jeffrey Sachs sobre Israel: el momento más peligroso desde la Segunda Guerra Mundial.
Krystal Ball and Ryan Grim are joined by Jeffrey Sachs to discuss Israel and Gaza.
Krystal Ball et Ryan Grim sont rejoints par Jeffrey Sachs pour discuter d'Israël et de Gaza [et de l'Europe et de l'Ukraine].
Breaking Points, 28.08.2025.
TRANSCRIPTION (Les liens et les crochets sont de mon cru) :
Krystal Ball : To talk about the very latest with regard to Israel and Gaza, we are very fortunate to be joined this morning by economist and professor at Columbia University, Jeffrey Sachs. Great to have you again, sir.
Jeffrey Sachs : Thank you. Wonderful to be with you.
Krystal Ball : Of course. So, let's go ahead, guys, and put this first element up on the screen.
[AXIOS - Scoop: Tony Blair and Jared Kushner brief Trump on Gaza post-war plans]
Axios got this scoop that apparently now we've got Tony Blair and Jared Kushner involved in some sort of Trump Gaza quote unquote ‘post-war plans’.
There is a meeting which is set to occur with regard to this as well. What did you make of this?
Jeffrey Sachs (0:35) : Well, who knows what to make of anything when Blair, Kushner and Trump get together? That is really…
Krystal Ball : …make nothing good of it, I guess we can say, hahaha!
Jeffrey Sachs : …an unholy alliance. But this is not the way to any solution right now.
The way to a solution lies in immediately ending the genocide that's underway [cf. IAGS Resolution on the Situation in Gaza], the mass starvation that's underway, which the US again denied yesterday in the UN Security Council, which Israel has denied, but which the whole world sees before our eyes, that at least half a million people are being starved to death right now before our eyes.
And so, this has nothing to do with Kushner and Blair.
This has to do with ending a genocide. It has to do with creating a state of Palestine immediately [One democratic State campaign]. And it has to do with this absolutely fascist government in Israel being stopped by the United Nations.
Ryan Grim : As somebody who follows global south politics pretty closely, including Russia and China, India as well —India is a separate case here—, when is the world going to do anything about what's happening in Gaza? I think the UN obviously has the United States sitting on the Security Council and will veto it, but it feels like there's very little pressure brought to bear from the global south, and South Africa obviously took Israel to the ICC and was joined… at some significant risk by a number of other countries from the global south, but that's about it, like… is there no countervailing force that exists on a kind of just moral and ethical level willing to push back against this genocide? In other words, if the Chinese and the Russians don't see it in their specific national interest, are they okay to just set sit back and allow a genocide to unfold? Is that the realist politics that we live in? Am I too naive to expect that? I'm like… there's got to be somebody that's going to do something about this, but there isn't. Like what have you seen from…?
Jeffrey Sachs : …I think that there are probably three arenas that we should consider.
1) First is the battlefield itself, where Israel is mass murdering the Palestinian people. I don't expect any of the regional powers to land troops or to be in a direct war over this issue.
So, I don't expect Russia or China, or any of the Arab countries to land troops and open a war with Israel.
2) The second area is on the diplomatic front.
Every single day there is a worldwide condemnation of Israel, some of which gets reported in the US, most of which does not.
The Security Council meeting yesterday was an overwhelming condemnation of Israel's genocide and starvation, but it doesn't get even mentioned. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation had a meeting in Jeddah on August 25th condemning this. That's 57 Muslim majority countries.
The BRICS condemn this routinely. China, Russia, Brazil, India condemn this routinely. It doesn't get picked up.
So, they don't intervene on the battlefield, but they are not sitting back or complacent or winking at Israel, but they don't do more let's say than condemnation.
3) The third would be an increasing set of measures that I think should be taken. I think Israel is courting suspension from the UN General Assembly. I would recommend it, because I believe that this is a completely lawless, murderous, genocidal regime. I don't think there's any other country in the world remotely doing what Israel is doing in terms of the violence and the mass murder and the mass starvation.
So, there could be Israel's suspension from the UN.
This was at least raised at the OIC [Organisation de Coopération Islamique] meeting.
There could be a break of diplomatic relations, which I think should be in the cards. There could be a suspension or end of the so-called Abraham Accords.
Remember, of course, I think everyone knows the US military is all over the Middle East. In a way, the Middle Eastern countries often feel more like occupied countries than they do with sovereigns. They worry that if they are too vocal, the United States will do something, overthrow their regimes, ferment unrest, do the things that the United States covert operations do for a living.
So, I think that there is some trepidation there. But the fact of the matter is both the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and most other groups in the world, and I would say the UN General Assembly more than 180 of the 193 countries are openly aghast.
But I think stronger measures are needed right now. And these are measures that might be blocked if it's through the UN, but could be taken by dozens or well over 100 countries on their own, breaking diplomatic relations, putting on boycotts and sanctions.
Israel is completely out of control. Mass starvation is not an acceptable policy for the world. It should not be tolerated one moment longer.
Krystal Ball : And what do you make of the American politics? There's just a poll that came out yesterday. I don't have an element for it, but I don't know and I don't know if you saw it or not, but 77% of Democratic voters say this is a genocide. You know, I mean, it's an overwhelming consensus among the Democratic base. And yet, you only have a handful of Democrats who are willing to say it. The leadership of the Democratic party, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer and the like, are still very much, you know, anything for Israel and whatever AIPAC wants us to do. And look, I don't expect these people to be moral actors, but you would think at some point there would be a political calculation, like a cynical political calculation that occurs? And it's genuinely perplexing to me at this point that that hasn't happened. Obviously, I understand, you know, the money of AIPAC and their affiliates, Democratic Majority for Israel, etc. But it still doesn't seem like that would be sufficient to keep them from seizing what is a genuine wide-open obvious political imperative and political opening in the landscape. What is your assessment of what keeps these politicians so tied to the status quo with regard to Israel and their commitment to allowing Israel and facilitating Israel's commitment to this genocide?
Jeffrey Sachs (8:21) : This is an excellent and very important question. And it starts with the fact that, in foreign policy, public opinion plays almost no role in the United States in general. That's true across wars. That's true across almost all of the issues that we have foreign policy. This is an executive branch, largely covert.
It's very heavily CIA and national security driven rather than any publicly driven decision-making.
Congress is pretty much useless across the board in foreign policy and has been for a long time. Of course, the Congress is suborned by the military-industrial complex to begin with, by the military contractors.
And then, there are the specific issues of Israel.
So, you mentioned of course the biggest one, which is the Zionist lobby, the AIPAC and others.
There's just a tremendous amount of buying of votes and corruption and threats against individual congressmen.
I'm sure that the Epstein files play some role in this.
Epstein was a Mossad agent and there's no doubt that there's blackmail involved in this in some way or another that we don't fully know.
The CIA-Mossad relationship dates back many many decades. Mossad does murders on behalf of the CIA. They deeply share intelligence.
The CIA is the single most powerful agent of our foreign policy.
So, this is not only the Israel lobby because after all, by the way, the Jewish community is profoundly unhappy with what's happening.
Of course, there are Jews that support Israel, but there's a vast community of Jews that is completely aghast and disgusted and also reviled at what Israel is doing, because it… Israel claims to do it in the name of world jewelry. That is an obscenity. I would say Israel is doing it in the face of opposition of world jewelry.
So, this is another element the CIA-Mossad linkage that go quite strongly.
They are very powerful in Silicon Valley right now.
Palantir is the AI murder inc. company of the world. It does the targeting.
We know that Microsoft and many other companies are deeply involved with Israel.
There's a lot of money in all of this.
The Israeli stock market has been up during this war.
So, there's a lot of corruption, blackmail, campaign finance, deep state, CIA-Mossad relations.
But I have to tell you, saying all of that, it's still shocking.
It's still shocking because we don't have genocides before our eyes this way. All recorded day by day. All with the thank you of the Israeli ministers Smotrich and Ben Gvir every day explaining that it's a genocide making no bones about it, being very explicit about it.
So, your question hangs there even after all of the explanations. It is a puzzle.
How corrupt can America be? We're plumbing new depths basically.
Krystal Ball : Truly.
Ryan Grim : And while we have you, I wanted to ask you about the newest piece from you that I read, that may not be the most recent piece that you wrote, but called A New Foreign Policy for Europe, in Horizons magazine, taking a look at the historical relationship between Europe and Russia, and envisioning a new kind of path out that doesn't involve Europe constantly invading Russia and then, at the same time, having this fear that Russia is going to invade them.
Can you talk a little bit about what can you lay out this vision that you presented here and what's been the reaction to it?
Jeffrey Sachs : Basically Russia, for more than 200 years, going back to Napoleon, certainly including Hitler, including the remilitarization of Germany by the United States after World War II, in the years immediately following Nazism and, by the way, bringing a lot of Nazis to leadership of West Germany, including the new intelligence agencies led by the chief Nazi intelligence official for Hitler, for Eastern Europe, [Reinhard] Gehlen*; the Russians said, "What are you doing?" You know, again, “we just lost 27 million people”.
But the western idea, going back absolutely to Napoleon in his invasion in 1812; going to Palmerston and Napoleon III in their invasion of Russia in 1853; going to Germany's attack and war on Russia in August 1914; going to Hitler's invasion in 1941; and then, going to the creation of this military machine of Germany after World War II —there's never been an honest moment of discussion about what a real security arrangement in Europe would be that respects Russia's security as well as Europe’s… Western Europe's security. Russia is, to an important extent, Europe, but I'm talking about the non-Russian Western part of Europe.
And that's what has been needed all along. But the United States has refused.
The British, which ran the world up until basically World War II, were completely russophobic from the 1840s onward.
And then, the United States took over in 1945. And our goal from 1945 onward was first, to defeat the Soviet Union and then —I watched with my own eyes, in shock, by the way— after 1991 that our goal continued to be, even after the Soviet Union was over, communism was over and so forth, our goal continued to be: now, we defeat and divide Russia.
Well, eventually, after so much provocation, with the US being the major impetus to a coup in Ukraine in 2014, expanding NATO, dissing a peace agreement called the Minsk 2 agreement in 2015 and so forth…,
[Angela Merkel et François Hollande se lâchèrent en décembre 2022 : „Das Minsker Abkommen war der Versuch, der Ukraine Zeit zu geben. Sie hat diese Zeit auch genutzt, wie man heute sieht“ / « Les accords de Minsk visaient à donner du temps à l'Ukraine. Ils ont d'ailleurs profité de ce temps, comme nous le voyons aujourd'hui » (Angela Merkel dans une interview à « Die Zeit », 7.12.2022). « Angela Merkel a raison sur ce point », déclara Hollande plus tard au « Kyiv Independent » : « Les accords de Minsk ont stoppé l'offensive russe pendant un certain temps. »]...eventually, it came to full-scale war. And then, when it did, in February 22, after maybe you could say 180 years of provocation, or maybe you could just say 30 years of provocation, or maybe you could say 8 years of provocation, from the Maidan coup, then we said “You see? Russia! Unprovoked expansionism!”
It's un-be-lie-vable how primitive this discussion is.
I once counted in… between February 2022 and February 2023, I had an assistant count the number of times that the New York Times used the word ‘unprovoked’ to characterize the Ukraine war, and it was 26 times that we were able to count that, in the opinion pages of the New York Times.
So, basically there's a propaganda war.
Now, Europe is so devoid of sense and diplomacy. Trump… this is not exactly Mr. Diplomat.
There's just confusion, and the war will continue until the confusion is sorted out.
So, what I've been saying to the Europeans, who don't like my saying it, but I'm going to keep saying it, is they need diplomacy with Russia, not through the White House.
[D'ailleurs, Emmanuel Todd, Mike Whitney (UNZ Review) ou Michael Hudson (the role of NATO is to essentially subordinate Europe to the United States ou America Defeats Germany for the Third Time in a Century) ont défendu et bien argumenté la thèse que l'expansion étasunienne de l'OTAN avait pour but, entre autres, d'affaiblir l'industrie allemande encore plus que la Russie de Poutine elle-même ou de nuire à la coopération économique et commerciale entre l’Allemagne ou l’UE et la Russie. Cf. Joaquín Rábago, 5.02.2023]They don't have to meet Zelenskyy, who rules by martial law in a complete contradiction to the real interests of Ukraine and to the public opinion in Ukraine, which wants this war to end, because they're suffering in Ukraine.
The Europeans meet with Zelenskyy a thousand times, but they don't meet with Putin once, and this is what passes in this pathetic way for foreign policy right now.
So, my article is: do something different, talk directly with your counterparts, understand that there are real security issues that need to be solved.
One other thing I might add, which is almost never mentioned, but absolutely at the top of mind for Russia for more than 20 years, is that, in 2002, the United States unilaterally abandoned the anti-ballistic missile treaty.
From Russia's point of view, that was a threat of a decapitation strike by the United States, because the idea of the anti-ballistic missile treaty was to prevent a decapitation strike by making it plain that there would be a credible deterrent, a second strike. But with the anti-ballistic missiles, a decapitation strike becomes a possibility. So, the Russians said after 2002 you have completely destabilized the nuclear arms control framework.
It's in that context that the United States was pushing missile systems in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
These Aegis anti-ballistic missile systems overthrew the government in Ukraine, built a 1 million-person or men army in Ukraine —under Trump, by the way, who calls himself the man of peace: he armed Ukraine in the first term to a million-man army, the biggest army in Europe. And then, in 2019 [2.08.2019], Trump walked out of the Intermediate Nuclear Force Treaty, basically destroying the nuclear arms control framework while also pushing missile systems and US military bases up to Russia's nose.
This is why we're in such a dangerous, unstable mode. And there's such lack of clarity and honesty for one moment in any of this.
Trump, by the way, one of his many, many weaknesses, but one of his great weaknesses, is the confusion of speaking truthfully to the American people in a speech, for example, which he never gives, versus a truth social post with eight exclamation points and capital letters, which is not the same thing as trying to explain what is happening and how we get out of this. He probably doesn't have the capacity to do what needs to be done at just… at an individual level. But we lack any clear understanding and that's why there is so much instability and Washington is… !!! completely incoherent, because there is no clarity of policy from one moment to the next.
Krystal Ball (20:51) : Professor, last question for me. Let's say… going back to Israel and Gaza, let's say the world does nothing and this final solution is allowed to just unfold. What does that mean for the future of the world?
Jeffrey Sachs : The world is in the most dangerous state since the end of World War II. And The Doomsday Clock, which portrays how close we are to Armageddon, puts the clock at 89 seconds to midnight, the closest that it's been since the clock was unveiled in 1947.
We have no rules of the road right now. We have no clarity. We have no consistency of policy, and Western values has been exposed to mean open genocide.
So, I would say that we're in an extraordinarily dangerous world, and Trump, who in his delusion, calls himself a president of peace, is complicit in an open genocide that the world sees.
And I travel all over the world, all the time. Everybody knows what's happening right now, and this is a tremendous risk to global security and to any place of the United States in the international system, which is being squandered.
I think it's also a fundamental risk to Israel's survival.
Israel banks entirely on the United States for its survival, because virtually every other country in the world is aghast at the crimes that Israel is committing. And because, as you pointed out, the American people are also aghast. It's a pretty… pretty… slender and fragile thing to depend on the United States when public opinion is against you as your sole source for survival. So, I think Israel has put itself at absolutely mortal risk. Of course, it's mass murdering the Palestinians. So, I'm not expressing that in sympathy. I'm just stating a fact that this is wildly against Israel's security interests.
*German military and intelligence officer, later dubbed "Hitler's Super Spy," who served the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, and West Germany, and also worked for the United States during the early years of the Cold War. He led the Gehlen Organization, which worked with the CIA from its founding, employing former SS and Wehrmacht officers, and later became the first head of West Germany's Federal Intelligence Service (BND). In years prior, he was in charge of German military intelligence on the Eastern Front during World War II and later became one of the founders of the West German armed forces, the Bundeswehr.
Officier de l'armée et du renseignement allemand, surnommé plus tard « le super espion d'Hitler », il servit sous la République de Weimar, l'Allemagne nazie et l'Allemagne de l'Ouest, et travailla également pour les États-Unis au début de la Guerre froide. Il dirigea l'organisation Gehlen, qui collaborait avec la CIA dès sa fondation, employant d'anciens officiers SS et de la Wehrmacht, et devint plus tard le premier chef du Service fédéral de renseignement ouest-allemand (BND). Auparavant, il avait été responsable du renseignement militaire allemand sur le front de l'Est pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale et devint l'un des fondateurs de la Bundeswehr, l'armée ouest-allemande.
