An Interview with Jeffrey D. Sachs by Tucker Carlson On the war in Iran, the US—Israel alliance, and the choice of an off-ramp
Tucker Carlson: Jeff, thanks a lot for doing this.
Jeffrey Sachs: Great to be with you.
Tucker Carlson: Where does it go from here? The war in Iran.
Jeffrey Sachs: We’re at a decisive moment, and there’s an off-ramp we should take. We should avoid a return to outright bombing—a very real possibility. The other possibility is uncontrolled escalation into full-blown war that becomes regional and could become a world war. We’re not in a stable situation where we can choose at our leisure. The world economy is reeling, because, as everybody has learned in their geography in the last few weeks, the Strait of Hormuz is closed1. As long as it’s closed, a worldwide economic crisis is building. We can’t say, well, we’ll decide in another month, we’ll see how things go, we’ll negotiate. Right now, there is a serious global economic crisis, because a narrow stretch of water through which an enormous strategic flow of resources passes—oil and gas, but also fertilizers, petrochemicals, and commodities like aluminum—is closed. Simply opening it would be fine. That’s basically what the off-ramp would allow. It would not solve any of the underlying issues, nor any of the stated objectives of the United States, much less Israel. I don’t believe those objectives were valid, so they shouldn’t be the basis for whether to take that exit ramp. But there’s a way out that avoids escalation to something quite different.
So, what is that other path? Trump and his partner Netanyahu might say the only thing to do is make the maximal threat, and if that doesn’t lead Iran to concede, follow through—not by waiting but by returning to massive bombing, this time even more. On that alternative, the Iranians will strike back very hard and very rapidly. What we have learned since February 28th is that the entire Gulf region is exposed to missile fire from Iran, and the anti-missile defenses are permeable, limited, even depleted. The desalination plants, oil and gas fields, and port facilities are not systematically protected against Iranian attacks. And Iran would understandably respond to what Trump has repeatedly threatened, which is the destruction of Iran. So, if we don’t take the exit ramp, I don’t see anything less than an all-out war. I’m an economist, not a military analyst, but having watched this for decades, I think it would be only a few weeks before much of the infrastructure of the region was destroyed—in Iran, in the Gulf, and in Israel. The result would not be peace and easy recovery; it would be a global calamity brought upon us in a few short weeks.
So, to return to the question: Trump could say, “We’re not going to go to disaster. We just pull back.” That’s the right answer. If instead he says, “We can’t wait any longer, we’re going to attack,” I believe we’ll see a profoundly different world four weeks from now—the economy in crisis, the possibility of escalation to a full world war. I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic to say we are at that fork in the road right now. The problem is that the right thing to do is not a political victory for Trump and is an outright loss for Netanyahu. I don’t think the individual fates of two politicians should determine the fate of the world, because the objectives of Trump and Netanyahu going into this made no sense at all. They weren’t objectives I supported, or that I believed on February 28th were within reach, or that I believe today are within reach. So, the fact that the off-ramp is not a political success story for Trump and Netanyahu doesn’t bother me. It’s the right way to save the world. And it’s the responsibility of grown-ups to save the world—not to save face, not to double down on failed gambles, not to engage in reckless escapades. The off-ramp requires grown-up behavior. I don’t associate that term with these two leaders, unfortunately, so I’m not extremely optimistic.
Tucker Carlson: I agree with every word you’ve said, but in fairness, they would have to swallow a lot to walk this back, because it would mean that Iran is more powerful now in effect than it was before the war started at the end of February.
Jeffrey Sachs: Correct.
Tucker Carlson: We would have to acknowledge they control the strait, and 20% of the world’s energy2 and 30% of its fertilizer3. Iran controls that supply chain.
Jeffrey Sachs: That’s essentially correct, except for a couple of important considerations. One is that Iran has suffered very heavily from this attack. Let’s start by recalling the 160 schoolgirls killed on the first day by, apparently, Palantir’s AI system4. As we are told every day on our screens, “This is an AI—it can make mistakes.” Apparently Palantir’s mistake was to kill 160 innocent schoolgirls. This is not definitively known, but it’s what is being widely reported. We will perhaps someday find out what really happened. Iran has lost thousands of people and suffered tens of billions of dollars of damages that will take years to recover. For me as a development economist whose whole career over half a century has been to build things, I find the mindlessness, the cruelty, the brazen destruction, the glorification of this violence by Hegseth and others5, completely, totally repulsive. So first, Iran has suffered a lot. There’s no glory for Iran in the off-ramp—just continued bereavement, deaths, deprivation, suffering. No joy, and no humiliation for others. Just peace and decency.
Second, the Iranian people are very civilized, and have wanted to negotiate for years. The depiction of Iran as evil that we have been played since 1979 mistakes the reality fundamentally. If Iran controls the Strait, it would not be in the malevolent way Americans would expect from hearing this is the most evil of evil empires—the axis of evil, the heart of evil. Netanyahu said that Iran wants to annihilate us. This is not correct. It is our non-stop official propaganda narrative. If you go to Iran, which I have been lucky to do, and speak to Iranians, which I do frequently, the narrative that Iran is so evil we can’t leave it in control of the Strait of Hormuz gets everything wrong.
Let me add a historical perspective. Where does this hatred toward Iran come from? In 1953, Iran was a parliamentary democracy that had not invaded another country for a century —not since 1856-57, when Persia under Naser al-Din Shah invaded Herat, precipitating the Anglo-Persian War6. Iran had later been bothered but had not bothered anybody else. In the early 1950s, the elected, respected Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, had the audacity to say the thing never to be said by this region: “I think the oil under our ground is Iranian, not British.” Immediately the British Empire in the form of MI6 came to the new ascendant American Empire in the guise of the CIA and said, “We’ve got to overthrow this guy.” Which of course they did in 1953. They made what today we would call a color revolution7. They stirred up protests and unrest, and Mosaddegh was chased from power. The United States installed what the Persian Empire would have called a satrapy: Iran became a kind of province of the American Empire under ultimately CIA rule. We put the Shah of Iran as the face of that empire and the police organization SAVAK as the enforcers8.
That lasted 26 years. In 1979, as the Shah was dying of cancer, the people led a revolution and threw out SAVAK, the CIA, and the Shah. Iran had its Islamic revolution and installed the government that remains in place today. The United States hated that. When you’re an empire with protectorates and military stationed around the world, and your major oil companies suddenly lose what was stolen from Iran when Iran takes it back, it becomes a reputational question. We need to bring Iran back under control because we’re an empire. If we’re too weak toward any part of the empire, it damages our reputation everywhere. We needed to punish these people. And then there was the hostage-taking by youth radical groups who said, “We’re doing this because we want the Shah to be brought back here to face trial for the crimes of the police state over more than two decades.” The United States had taken in the Shah in 1979 for medical treatment, an unwise decision by President Carter9 who had in fact suspected it would lead to this kind of eruption. The Iranians demanded reparations, an apology, and an end to US subversion—all rather reasonable. But the hostage-taking became another humiliation for America, which an empire never tolerates. An empire repays any loss of face with extreme punishment, not only to get the recalcitrant province back under control, but to signal to the rest of the empire, “Don’t you dare try this.”
So, from 1980 onward, the US went to war with Iran in various ways. We paid, armed, and supplied Saddam Hussein to invade Iran10—a sordid deal. Saddam used poison gas with American knowledge at minimum, and according to some testimonies, with American active support11. Donald Trump, already in 1980, was advocating Vietnam-style military intervention against the new Iranian government12. So, when Trump gives his explanations for the current war—“Oh, nuclear, or this or that”—these are convenient explanations for something that has been on his mind for 46 years, because the American Empire suffered a slight: a country had escaped from under CIA control, which you don’t allow. From 1980, it’s been non-stop war, including economic war. Our Treasury Secretary, who I increasingly regard as a thug—someone who gloats in crushing other economies by financial means, trade sanctions, or financial blockades—explained in Davos this year, in a Fox News interview with Maria Bartiromo, that our ‘economic statecraft’ destroyed the Iranian economy last year13. We’ve been doing that kind of economic statecraft—a horrible Orwellian term for destroying another country’s economy—for decades. We have also assassinated Iranian leaders and blown up their nuclear facilities even when they have been pleading, “Let’s have an agreement that puts us under strict supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency.” We’ve used what’s called hybrid warfare—every means of subversion, economic warfare, direct military action, and covert operations. Donald Trump confirmed that in the protests last year, the US sent weapons to the protesters14. That’s not a protest; that’s an insurrection we were creating. It did not work.
In short, we portray Iran as evil because it did something unacceptable to the United States that has nothing to do with nuclear weapons or Hezbollah or Hamas. It goes back to 1979: they escaped from the American Empire, from CIA control. That’s what you’re not supposed to do. And this war has been going on with various pretexts ever since.
May I say one more thing, Tucker. Trump’s main argument in the last months has been, “I will stop them from having a nuclear weapon.” Anyone who knows the history knows this is Orwell to the nth power. The Iranians have not pursued a nuclear weapon—our own intelligence agencies have said so repeatedly. What they have pursued is a treaty with the UN Security Council to confirm that by putting themselves under strict monitoring under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, in return for ending US economic warfare. What Iran has wanted for 15 years is, “You supervise us, you control us, fine, but lift your sanctions. Let us breathe. Let us have a normal economy. Let us trade. And let us have our own money back”—because the United States has directly or indirectly confiscated or frozen tens of billions of dollars of Iran’s money15. Iran’s money, not ours. We do that as an empire: we freeze the money of other countries, and sometimes just overtly take it. It’s obnoxious and self-defeating for the United States to have the reputation that it steals other people’s resources.
So, what Iran has wanted is diplomacy. They’re nice people, diplomats. I sometimes tell them, “You don’t even know who you’re dealing with, how nasty this is.” They reply, “No, no, no. We want an agreement, Professor Sachs. Do you know who we might speak to about negotiations?” Very civilized people.
In 2015, such an agreement was reached, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the JCPOA16. It was reached not only with the United States, but with Britain, France, Russia, China, and Germany—the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany, called 5+1. Then it went to the UN Security Council, where it was unanimously backed17. Then came the Zionist lobby in the United States. “Oh no, you can’t have an agreement with Iran. They’re the evil empire. You can’t do this.” So, when Trump was elected in his first term, he ripped up the JCPOA18. This is not the approach of someone who doesn’t want them to have a nuclear weapon when you had the controls. No, this is the opposite. This is the demand for regime-change because they humiliated the United States by escaping from our empire. We tried to defeat them in many ways, but they stood up to it. In the Washington mindset, including Trump’s, we need to defeat them.
There’s an Israeli version, which is not quite the same. The Israeli version is: we need absolute control over the Middle East to pursue our Greater Israel agenda. There are many people in the US who back Greater Israel. This is not Israel saying, “You escaped from the American Empire.” This is Israel saying, “We control almost all the Middle East militarily, but not yet Iran. That’s the last big prize.” That’s why Israel is even more against the off-ramp than the United States. Trump is against the off-ramp because he can’t declare victory, would lose face, and faces pressure groups, notably the Israel lobby—or Zionist lobby, as I’d call it. For Israel, the issue is distinct: Israel wants complete military dominance of West Asia and the Middle East and even into the Horn of Africa and North Africa. It almost has that—not that it can easily control the territory, but it acts with impunity. It invades Lebanon, occupies Syria, overthrows governments. That’s what it wants. But it faces an obstacle: Iran.
Israel, 30 years ago this year, when Netanyahu first became prime minister, adopted a strategy explained in a public paper called the Clean Break strategy19. It said: we will never accept a state of Palestine. We will occupy all of what had been British mandatory Palestine—Gaza, the West Bank, all of Jerusalem, and possibly other places. We’ll face resistance from militant groups, but rather than fighting those groups directly, we need to bring down the governments in the Middle East and West Asia that support them. The Clean Break was a clean break from the Oslo peace accords, or more generally the land-for-peace idea that Israel would return to its borders in return for a Palestinian state and peace. That’s what international law calls for. But Israel under Netanyahu says, “We’re never returning. There’s never going to be a state of Palestine. We’re going to have what we call Greater Israel, which is all of Palestine—Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, legal Israel—but also expanded parts of the region in Lebanon and Syria.” When you, Tucker, recently interviewed Ambassador Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel20, he put very clearly that he agrees with Greater Israel, and that indeed, according to Huckabee (and fellow Christian Zionists) Israel deserves even more, based on the Biblical gift in Genesis 15 of the Promised Land from God to the descendants of Abraham, notably the land from the great river of Egypt to the great river of Mesopotamia, the Euphrates.
So, Israel wants military dominance, to topple the governments that oppose Greater Israel. That’s where Israel’s idea of perpetual war in the Middle East came from. The 1996 Clean Break paper itself focused on Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, with Iran as a longer-term concern. A more expansive seven-country list—governments to be overthrown in just five years—was famously described by General Wesley Clark in 2007, recounting a Pentagon memo he was shown shortly after 9/1121. That list included Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.
Israel has now pulled the U.S. into all seven of those wars. Six have led to bloodbaths and disasters. Libya is still in civil war. Sudan, unbelievably, is in two civil wars, because we broke the country apart and now each of those two parts has its own civil war. Somalia barely has a government—there is a government, with a very nice prime minister whom I know, but barely order in the country. Lebanon is an invaded and basically destroyed country. In Syria, the US and Israel worked for 15 years, from Obama’s time until this past year, to overthrow the government—an active covert regime-change operation. In Iraq, the 2003 war and the debacle that lasted for years after. And Iran was the last war to be fought. So, six of the seven countries are in chaos. From Israel’s point of view, “Great. We like chaos. We are the military hegemon for that whole region from Libya to Iraq. They can’t get their act together. What could be better?” The seventh is Iran. That’s what we’re facing right now.
And when the war started, Netanyahu tweeted, “This is my dream come true for 40 years.”22 I had to confess, Tucker, that I had made a mistake. I had been saying that Netanyahu has wanted the war for 30 years because I dated that desire to Clean Break, 1996. What I hadn’t realized is that Netanyahu had had 10 more years of dreaming of this war even before he became prime minister. So, the off-ramp violates not only the American imperial desire for revenge, but also the Israeli dream of full control over the region. That’s why the off-ramp is so hard.
One more thing, because it’s a complicated picture. When we talk about why the US wants Iran within its empire, why it overthrew Mosaddegh in 1953, let us remember the oil. Trump is as strongly beholden to the Big Oil lobby as he is to the Zionist lobby. He said so vividly in 2024: “Raise a billion dollars for me. It’s a deal. You’ll get all the benefits from this.”23 What he did in Venezuela in January, effectively seizing control of Venezuela’s oil, he thought he was about to do in Iran. Yes, he wanted to fight Iran for 46 years, at least since 1980. But what he thinks he learned from kidnapping the Venezuelan president and suborning the Venezuelan government24 is, “I can do a decapitation strike on Iran and then own the oil.” So, part of the U.S. motivation is revenge—bring Iran back into the empire. But part of the motivation is oil. Trump thought he’d get the oil within one day, because just as removing Maduro gave America control over Venezuela’s oil (he thinks), killing the Iranian leadership—starting with the religious supreme leader, and the top officials meeting with him that day—would deliver Iran’s oil.
So that’s the tableau, and why it’s hard to take the exit ramp. There were reasons for this war—to my mind cruel, illegal, delusional, but reasons. Taking the off-ramp means none would be fulfilled. From my point of view, fine; none was valid in the first place. But from the point of view of the two architects, Trump and Netanyahu, that’s quite hard to swallow. The alternative—an escalated war within a few weeks—could destroy the world economy. Sorry to go on.
Tucker Carlson: I loved it. And it’s much needed because there’s always a context. You did this with the Ukraine war once in this room and I’ve never stopped thinking about it. Thank you for that. Couple quick follow-up questions. You talked about the ongoing war against Iran by the United States, now 46 years since 1980, first a proxy war with Iraq, etc. There are reports that the United States, in addition to all of that, has used geoengineering to evoke a drought in Iran. Is that true?
Jeffrey Sachs: I doubt it. There are enough reasons for drought as a natural condition of an arid and semi-arid region that we don’t have to go there.
Tucker Carlson: Okay.
Jeffrey Sachs: I can tell you about one visit. I was in the Gulf in Saudi Arabia and then in Tehran, and in both places—many years ago now—there was drought and intense sandstorms like none of us has ever experienced. From a top floor of a building during an evening reception, you couldn’t see anything out the window because it was darkened by the sandstorm. It struck me: these are arid regions drying under long-term changes underway. The Gulf and Iran share the same ecosystem and environment. The most natural thing is that they should be working together to solve these problems. Just because someone drew a political line doesn’t change the fact that the same sandstorm is on both sides of the border. I had this visceral feeling about how artificial these political boundaries are. This region shares intense human problems like droughts, sandstorms, and getting enough water to stay alive, and they should be working together to solve them. So, I don’t think you need the United States to geoengineer anything. It’s happening by itself.
Tucker Carlson: Second question. Clean Break, 1996, listed seven countries whose governments need to be overthrown to create room and strategic depth and options for Israel. Six of those wars have taken place. The US was—well, now seven—but the US was the instrument of all of those.
Jeffrey Sachs: Correct.
Tucker Carlson: Okay, great. So, this was Israel’s plan, but the US military was used. The US has spent 5 to 10 trillion dollars on this Israel venture.
Jeffrey Sachs: That’s the basic point. Yes, we’ve had our own misguided ideas about this, but it’s just bizarre. Of course, Iraq, we know in detail, was a concocted war. Syria has never been understood in as much depth, but it’s the same story. Why suddenly did Barack Obama feel the compulsion to task the CIA with overthrowing Bashar al-Assad?
Tucker Carlson: Assad must go.
Jeffrey Sachs: Yes.
Tucker Carlson: That was on the lips of everyone in one day.
Jeffrey Sachs: I remember I was on Morning Joe the morning either Hillary or Obama said Assad must go25. Joe turned to me and said, “What do you think about that?” I said, “Oh, that’s interesting. How are they going to do that?” Well, it took 14 years, hundreds of thousands of deaths, tens of billions of dollars, massive destabilization, and a refugee crisis, to put a jihadist in charge and then clean up his reputation. But of course—
Tucker Carlson: To take a secular government that protected religious minorities, Alawites, Christians, everybody, for generations, generationally, father and son did the same and replace it with a guy we thought we were fighting against.
Jeffrey Sachs: And to destroy historic sites as they’re doing in Iran right now—cultural sites, I should say—that are human heritage, not only Syrian or Iranian heritage but world heritage, because they’ve lasted thousands of years. Then in our idiocy, we’re destroying them in hours.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah, I would say evil. But yeah, no, that’s—okay, so I just want to be clear with that. Third question, about the off-ramp. So, the United States would have to—the president, but the whole government would have to swallow that. We’ll just have to admit it didn’t work, and Iran is now more powerful. Iran is an economic power which we didn’t understand. I don’t think before this war we thought of them as this emerging military threat. Turns out they’re an economic power because they control the Strait of Hormuz. But from an Israeli perspective, there is this process I’ve seen many times where people talk themselves into believing their own rhetoric. So, you start out by saying the real threat from Iran is its nuclear program, but you don’t mean it. You just want to take Iran out because you don’t want Hezbollah and Hamas to hassle you. Got it. But if you say it enough, you start to believe that the main threat to your existence is this government. And I think the Israelis are there. I think they believe that. So could not just Netanyahu, but the whole country, live with a strengthened Iran, or would they be forced to do something really radical? Netanyahu said a couple of days ago that they’re out to annihilate us, which is not true.
Jeffrey Sachs: That’s a heavy thing to say. It shows a deep part of the psyche of Netanyahu personally and one strand of Israeli extremism: the belief, taught and repeatedly widely, that they’re out to annihilate us every generation. The Holocaust is used as the model: we can never tolerate this again, so we must fight preemptively against anyone who would annihilate us. It leads, as even Netanyahu said, to a Sparta state, a war state, with no capacity for diplomacy. Israel has diplomats, but they rip up the UN Charter or stand at the podium of the UN General Assembly and accuse the whole world of anti-Semitism. It’s not diplomacy, because one strand of their thought is: nobody can be trusted, we have to kill them before they kill us. If you live like that, you end up as a non-stop killer. This is one tragic reality of the mentality of a Netanyahu and others. He’s been “killing them before they kill us” for decades. He’s a killer. He kills in the name of self-defense—preemptive self-defense. If you believe the others are out to kill you and you must not talk to them, you end up as a non-stop killer.
Netanyahu would say to me, “You’re so naive.” What I would say to him is, “But you, sir, have the idea, not out of any reason, that you will have a Greater Israel and expunge the people in your area who are not Israeli Jews. For millions of people there, you will exterminate them, ethnically cleanse them, or rule over them in some racially segregated society. And when others object, you will say they’re out to destroy you. Why not show human reason and decency, and say that in conditions of peace there would be a Palestine? There are more than 7 million Palestinian Arabs, and in peace we could have calm with the rest of the region without going to war and subverting governments. But you don’t even try, Mr. Netanyahu.” His position is, “There’s no possibility of diplomacy. We must kill them before they kill us.” Without trying for peace, without acknowledging that there are deep moral, legal, and historical reasons for doing something different from pursuing Greater Israel—which kills, maims, and expropriates the Palestinian people and claims territory wherever it wants in Lebanon, Syria, and who knows where else according to Ambassador Huckabee.
So, I give no credence to Netanyahu, because his starting point is not only fear but something obnoxious: we don’t recognize the people who live among us, whom we have expropriated, whose land we have taken, whom we have killed by the tens of thousands, whom we have denied basic political rights. Without that recognition, how can he think there’s any solution? So, Netanyahu’s absence of an exit ramp starts from his own radicalism—not only fear, but a complete absence of diplomacy that recognizes there’s another side to be dealt with as human beings. Where that extremism comes from, I’m not sure. It’s pathological. You could find it in religious extremist views that this is our land, God gave it to us, and everyone else must get the hell out. There’s a complete collapse of understanding that there are people to talk to who want to make peace.
Tucker Carlson: So, I always thought it was Netanyahu leading this, that he had a particular worldview, and through his brilliant political skill he was able to control the country. Now it seems there are a lot of people who have even more radical views. One of them would be Danny Danon, whom I know—I always thought he was kind of a reasonable guy. He’s the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. There was an amazing exchange between you and him at the UN recently that made me think, wow, it’s not just Netanyahu. Can you explain that exchange?
Jeffrey Sachs: I can explain the exchange, and I can also say there are two variants of Israeli extremism, now literally a coalition—political and ideological. One is the view: every generation they’re out to kill us, so we have to kill them before they kill us, the preemptive strike, the Clean Break idea—grounded in the perverse idea that there will never be a Palestine alongside Israel. That’s what led to Clean Break, to all these wars, to the militancy: the absence of Palestinian political rights alongside Israeli political rights—the so-called two-state solution. Since Netanyahu’s party Likud, founded in 1973 and whose 1977 platform under Begin made this explicit, said there will never be a Palestinian state—this will all be Israel’s sovereignty from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean—there was never a basis for a diplomatic way out.
Now there’s a second variant which gives a theological interpretation. Netanyahu’s interpretation is mainly secular and security-based, with the only theological twinge being the idea that they’re always out to kill us every generation. The Holocaust put that fear into overdrive, for understandable but not rational reasons that attend to current realities. So, Netanyahu is the security vision—to my mind irrational, cruel, illegal, self-defeating, disastrous; not real security but security in the phrase, “We kill them before they kill us.” Then there is a very different variant, the coalition partners represented by two now well-known leaders, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich26—religious cabinet ministers with a very strange idea. It’s a new form of Judaism that attaches to some ancient texts but was not a real form of Judaism for 2,000 years. It’s not what I grew up with at all.
Tucker Carlson: It’s not what I grew up with in my interaction with Jews.
Jeffrey Sachs: It’s something late 20th century, early 21st century. One of the parties is called Jewish Power27 (Otzma Yehudit). And it is the idea that—
Tucker Carlson: That’s its actual name.
Jeffrey Sachs: Yes, in translation. We redeem God’s promise to us by becoming Greater Israel. So, this expanded Israel is a religious demand, our redemption—this very political military program. That is the religious ideology of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, who say on a religious basis we can’t have a state of Palestine next door. God gave us this land. That’s not theirs—even though the Palestinians were living there for well over a thousand years. According to some historical studies, perhaps today’s Palestinians are the descendants of Jews who converted to Islam in the 7th century, when Islam swept across the eastern Mediterranean, Iran, and North Africa. The Islamic caliphates enabled Jews and Christians to live within the Islamic lands, governing themselves but paying a tax (jizyah). To avoid taxes, many Jews converted, and probably today’s Palestinians are, at least many of them, descendants of Jews who were settlers there before the 7th century sweep of Islam. Even David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of the modern state of Israel, made this case with Yitzhak Ben-Zvi28, calling the Palestinians really the original Jews of the land who converted. But today—
Tucker Carlson: Wait, Ben-Gurion said that?
Jeffrey Sachs: Ben-Gurion said that, yes.
Tucker Carlson: Not to get sidetracked, but Ben-Gurion was secular, I think.
Jeffrey Sachs: Yes, of course, all of the original Zionists—
Tucker Carlson: Yes, from Eastern Europe. So, I don’t understand. I know they wanted to leave Europe, I get that. But what was the justification in his mind for displacing millions of people from their land if he acknowledged that they were the actual heirs of Abraham?
Jeffrey Sachs: The idea was that Jews are not a religion but a people—in their view, that is. These early Zionists were not religious people. They didn’t consult with the rabbis. So, it’s all very ironic. But in their view, Jews are not a religion, they are a people. And in the ideology of Europe of the late 19th century, a people needs a state. So, the idea was there should be a Jewish state. That was the name of the first book, The Jewish State, by the founder of Jewish Zionism Theodor Herzl29.
Tucker Carlson: Well, that makes sense. But—
Jeffrey Sachs: But the Zionist project asked, where? In Herzl’s book, Argentina was considered as one option. Later, the British colony of today’s Uganda was considered as another option.
Tucker Carlson: Yep.
Jeffrey Sachs: In other words, for the early Zionists, a state for the Jewish people did not necessarily mean the Holy Land. Their’s wasn’t some religious compulsion to return to the promised land. And ironically, the rabbis had said 1,500 years earlier, “Don’t go back en masse to the Holy Land. Live where you are. Stay peaceful. Someday a messiah will come and there will again be the holy land for us. But in the meantime, stay calm, live where you are, behave and obey God’s laws.” That was the idea of the rabbinic Jewish religion, in what is called The Three Oaths in the Talmud. So, the variant of extreme Zionism on display now—this is our land, God promised it to us, we need to redeem it, God will protect us—is a new variant that came later in the 20th century mostly after the founding of the state of Israel. It was not the original Zionist movement, which was almost completely secular.
This religious variant had some rabbis with modest influence. Its prominence emerged after the 1967 war and the conquest and occupation of the Palestinian territories and the beginning of the settler movements; things became radicalized after that. Radical, militant, violence-preaching rabbis like Meir Kahane—an American-born rabbi who preached violence for the settler cause in Israel30—gained a following, and that group grew with the illegal settlers in the occupied lands. The settlements were illegal because according to international law, an occupying power is not allowed to settle territory conquered in war. The UN Security Council said repeatedly, “No, you can’t have settlers there.”31
I started visiting Israel myself 54 years ago. When I first went in 197232, the early settlement activity was already underway. I was a high school kid, so I didn’t understand much, but I was told that these settlements would “make facts on the ground” to ensure Israel’s security. Facts on the ground was the famous expression. When I went back in the mid-70s and late 70s, suddenly there were groups of young zealots dancing in the streets of Jerusalem proclaiming God’s will about West Bank settlements in places mentioned in the Bible. Suddenly these settlements were the redemption of God’s promise. This was new. This was not traditional Judaism—by traditional I mean from 400 AD to 1970, 1,600 years or so. This was a fervor, a zealotry, a new fundamentalism that emerged: this land is ours; no one can interfere, it’s God’s command that we control this land. This is not about security, borders, or treaties. This is God’s command. That’s a big part of the Israeli political scene right now—half the motivation, and why all of this is now so radicalized and zealous.
It’s important in the US context to understand the Christian Zionist dimension as well, because Zionism did not originate with Jews. Herzl, a secular Jew, was encouraged in his Zionism by a Christian Zionist33, and Christian Zionism was an evangelical belief that the Jews should go back to make a homeland specifically in the promised land. That has roots hundreds of years before the Jewish secular Zionists started at the end of the 19th century. A big part of the Christian Zionist movement began in Britain in the first half of the 19th century34. These were Christians reading the Bible in particular ways, increasingly with an emphasis on Revelation—so what’s called eschatology. Part of that eschatology, preached by a British preacher named John Nelson Darby with huge effect later in the United States35, was that the Jews should go back to the Holy Land so the second coming can occur, because Revelation says the second coming of Christ will occur when the Jews control the Holy Land. These Christian Zionists were often confirmed anti-Semites who wanted the Jews out of their own country—they didn’t want them in Britain, didn’t want Eastern European Jews migrating to Britain. So, they wanted them, conveniently, out of Britain and back in the Holy Land.
But the point is, there is a set of non-religious claims: our security depends on this, they’re out to kill us, we need dominance, they’re evil, they have nuclear weapons or want them. Those are all on the security side. Then there’s this strong religious dimension. When you had the amazing interview with Ambassador Huckabee, which was a world eye-opener, he displayed in a way that people all over the world had never seen before this very particular British and American Christian Zionism that emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries. It’s a very specific way of reading a couple of books of the Bible—Genesis, the promise of the land; the book of Joshua, which says to the Israelites, go kill everyone in the land so you can take it, a very strange commandment in the Bible to commit multiple genocides in the name of God to get all the land promised to you; and then Revelation, the final book of the New Testament. It’s not at all mainstream Judaism. It’s not at all mainstream Christianity anywhere in the world. But it has its important political base in the United States and more traditionally in Britain.
So, what we’re seeing in Israel is an extremism that is shocking. Coming back to my exchange with the ambassador at the UN: I said to him that I thought Israel was committing suicide. I didn’t accuse Israel of what it’s doing to others—that’s implicit perhaps—but I said it’s committing suicide because it’s taking such a violent extremist course that it’s putting itself outside the bounds of civilization, outside opinion everywhere, outside international law, and relying entirely on the United States to do that. If Israel did this on its own, it would be immediately suicidal—wouldn’t stand for a day. It thinks the United States will support this extremism unconditionally. But you and I know that’s not true. Americans are sickened by Israel’s extremism, by the tens of thousands of innocent deaths in Gaza, by this war in Iran, by the trillions of dollars spent for Israel’s Clean Break. Most Americans are sick of this right now, overwhelmingly, and the polls show it.
I read analyses saying it’s going to take years for American politics to end its unconditional support to Israel. I think that’s absurd. If our current political system remains in place—an open question—the reset is going to be abrupt. People aren’t going to get elected if they’re taking AIPAC money. And wait four weeks. If they don’t choose the off-ramp in the next few days, wait until real incomes are decimated, until the world’s economy is in a tailspin because half the Gulf has been blown to pieces. How is this going to be sustained when Americans don’t want to be the agents of mass murder, and most of us don’t believe that the mass expulsion of people is somehow God’s command?
Tucker Carlson: Well, no, it’s insane. And by the way, from a Christian perspective, you can only support Christian Zionism if you ignore the Gospels, which are the heart of Christianity.
Jeffrey Sachs: There’s nothing in the Gospels that supports this violence. The Sermon on the Mount says the opposite. Blessed are the peacemakers, a message for the whole world.
Tucker Carlson: Of course.
Jeffrey Sachs: The message of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount is completely the opposite of what we’re doing right now. That’s not from a Christian or Jewish perspective—it’s from a human perspective, because he was speaking about humanity, about how human beings should treat other people. They should not kill them. They should not abuse strangers in their midst. The good Samaritan rescued the man on the side of the road. The Samaritan, the quintessential outsider, is teaching us something. Another part I love is: “Why do you point to the mote in the other’s eye when you have the plank in your own?” Jesus is saying clearly to us: Don’t be a hypocrite.
Tucker Carlson: Yes. And don’t just say they’re evil without reflecting on yourself.
Jeffrey Sachs: This is so basic. All of that is left out by Ben-Gvir’s “Jewish Power” or the Christian Zionists’ focus on one passage of Genesis—15:18, God’s promise of land to Abraham36—and on the Book of Joshua, which is probably a political tract written during the late 7th century BC during the reign of King Josiah of the state of Judah37, a tract that says in essence, “Murder other people to take the promised land.” And then there is reference to the book of Revelation. It’s clear that the Gospels are not part of this framework, because the message of the Gospels is completely different.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. Jesus is saying, “You’ve been told, don’t murder. I tell you, don’t even be angry at someone else.” It’s a message of radical reconciliation and nonviolence. So that’s just what it says. It’s inconvenient, but it’s true. So I guess my question is, though, if the United States withdraws under popular pressure its unconditional support for Israel, and the Iranian regime stays in place, some form of it does, and once again, Iran is more powerful than it’s ever been and now has a clear incentive to buy a nuke from Pakistan or somewhere else—what does Israel do at that point? That’s my concern, because now it’s kind of out of options.
Jeffrey Sachs: First, look at Iranian invasions of other countries. It hasn’t happened for a century. The last military operation of Persia or Iran abroad was the 1856 invasion of Herat, which precipitated the Anglo-Persian War of 1856-57. Iran is not out to destroy Israel and does not want to be destroyed by a petulant American empire from which it escaped. If you’ve dealt with Iranians for decades as I have, that message is clear. Israel is not threatened by Iran. Iran wants its place in the world. It doesn’t want to be bombed by Israel and the United States. This is the first, most important point.
Second, Iran has supported Hezbollah and Hamas and would stop doing so, in my view, if there were a Palestinian state alongside Israel. You want a path to peace, you make peace. There are two peoples in that land. When Jewish Zionism started, there were more than 90% Palestinian Arabs. Now the population division is roughly half and half between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. So, there need to be two states. Or I’m fine with one democratic state, but Israel doesn’t want that and two states can meet the purposes and security and aspirations for a good life for the two peoples. There can’t be one state in which Israel rules over everybody or kills or expropriates the others. But if there is a political settlement with two states, the militancy will end. Iran does not want to live as a militant state—I know because I’ve watched and discussed it for decades. It wants to live, but not as an American satrapy.
So, the idea that if we leave, Iran is going to defeat Israel—no. Israel will not be defeated. It has nuclear weapons. It would use them. Iran does not have nuclear weapons and doesn’t want them. If we had the slightest sanity, it would be the easiest thing to make sure Iran has no nuclear weapons, because they don’t want them. The first thing you would do, if you wanted to make sure of that, is not kill the religious leader who issued the judgement that nuclear weapons are against the religion. But the first thing they did was kill the very religious leader who had issued the so-called fatwa prohibiting nuclear weapons.
So, the idea that Israel is in dire threat if we leave is wrong. We also need to remember there’s a whole world out there. We don’t like to admit it, it’s not the American way, but there’s also Russia, China, India, Brazil, South Africa—the BRICS, to help enforce a peace agreement. They will tell Iran, “Now you have peace. Now you live peacefully.” Iran cannot engage in some regional takeover to become the regional superpower, because they’re profoundly constrained right now. They’re trying to stop themselves from being destroyed by American bombs—precisely what Trump has threatened, the end of their civilization, which is 5,000 years old38, 20 times longer than the United States.
They’re not about to do all these terrible things. They’re not about to hold a chokehold over the world economy. President Xi Jinping, who has, let’s just say, a lot of influence with Iran as a main consumer and supplier and trader, said yesterday the Strait of Hormuz needs to be opened39. Iran is not going to do all these horrible things that are imagined. And when I say leave, it wouldn’t hurt to leave with an agreement: "Okay, we’re leaving. You don’t invade. There’s going to be a Palestinian state alongside Israel, as is the core of international law since 1967, indeed since 194740. You’ll live peacefully. They’ll live peacefully. And you won’t have nuclear weapons. You’ll go under IAEA inspection according to the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty"—which Israel doesn’t abide by at all41, so it’s already asymmetric. But Iran has said, “Okay, we’ll do it asymmetrically but put us under this. Don’t put us under the bombs and the sanctions.”
There’s no sense in which the exit ramp means Iran becomes a dire threat to Israel. The more fundamental point is that Greater Israel is an untenable project. If you believe Mike Huckabee, what I’m saying is not acceptable. If you believe Israel should control all this land from Egypt to Iraq, I will still advise Donald Trump, "Don’t fall for it. It’s a mega-trillion-dollar disaster for the United States42. It’s not in the least in America’s interest. Stay clear. Netanyahu is a repeated failure and liar, and everything he’s told us for 30 years has turned out to be the opposite." But yes, if your purpose is Greater Israel and continued expansion of Israel’s borders, you wouldn’t accept what I’m saying. I don’t believe in that. I believe in peace, in a secure state of Israel and a secure state of Palestine, in getting on with our lives and not squandering America’s resources endlessly in this delusional Israeli cause of Greater Israel. It’s absurd. It’s tragic. It’s got to end now, before we have a complete disaster.
Tucker Carlson: Can Trump constrain, control Netanyahu?
Jeffrey Sachs: Of course. The question is, can Trump constrain himself? Can he say, “I thought it was going to be a one-day Venezuela-type operation. That’s what Bibi told me. Bibi was bullshitting me. Now I understand. It didn’t work. I’m stopping this, and I’m telling Bibi, you stop this too.” Could that work? When Trump said to Netanyahu, “Stop the bombing of Beirut,” we had a demonstration43 that it can. Could Israel continue the war without the United States? Basically, not for one day. Could Israel survive the global opprobrium of its extremism? Not for one day. Israel needs trade, tourism, contracts, finance. Without the American Empire backing it, without American military, intelligence, and satellite data—which isn’t Israel’s, it’s America’s—Israel cannot do anything on this.
But we bought into the whole Greater Israel package, for a mix of perceived American self-interest in our global power. Israel’s regional hegemony was consistent with our desire for global control. We bought into the Iran story because Israel’s story that we’ve got to kill them before they kill us is not inconsistent with our desire for revenge and for their oil. It’s a real partnership between Israel and the U.S. But Israel’s capacity to have this war that stretches now from Libya to Iran—that’s an American capacity, and we’re bleeding from Israel’s wars. This is important to understand.
Trump said something interesting—the Washington gaffe, meaning he told the truth off script. He said, “We can’t afford the wars and those things like child care, Medicare, and Medicaid, and other those individual things.” And you know what? It’s true. We’re bleeding. What did he do? He said, “Okay, we’re going to cut all those things Americans actually need.” We want our health care, dental repairs, medicines, doctors, operations when our lives depend on it. And Trump said, “No, we have to have war instead.” So, he put in a budget a couple of weeks ago, which won’t be enacted by Congress, in which military spending goes up another half a trillion dollars44 and the things he said “we can’t afford” go down—making people who are already hurting hurt desperately more. Not to mention the gas pump, food prices, and everything else they will face cataclysmically if they don’t choose the off-ramp.
Can Trump say no to Greater Israel? He must, for the American people. He must listen. We don’t want this. It’s crazy extremism. We don’t buy the story. We don’t need the American Empire owning Iran. We don’t need revenge for 1979. We don’t need Greater Israel. We need our health care, our dental care, our daily lives. We want peace. We don’t want to be murdering schoolgirls or destroying ancient cultures. The American people are saying, “Mr. President, your partner cannot do this for one moment without your backing. Your job is to tell Mr. Netanyahu: your clean break, 30 years, $7.4 trillion of American treasure now piled up in debt—we tried your approach. It’s done. Now we’re going to try peace.” That’s what he needs to tell Netanyahu. It can work.
Tucker Carlson: If he doesn’t do that, and in the next few days this accelerates, and you’ve said if it does accelerate, Iran’s first move will be to destroy civilian infrastructure in the Gulf, the energy, the rest. What are the effects at that point? Let’s just start with the economic effects, the rest of the world.
Jeffrey Sachs: I came into my profession—and I’ve now been on a university faculty for 46 years45 and worked in more than 100 countries—writing my PhD dissertation on the oil shocks of the 1970s. I wrote the first model of how these oil shocks worked. I literally wrote the book, published in 1985, called The Economics of Worldwide Stagflation46. Those two oil shocks give us an idea of what would happen. In 1973-74, when there was an oil embargo, and then in 1979-80, with the Iranian revolution, big disruptions of oil supplies sent prices soaring and the world economy into a tailspin. It was a particular tough tailspin: people lost their jobs, real (inflation-adjusted) incomes went down, and inflation soared at the same time. An economic downturn and a rise of inflation—at the time viewed as a paradox, because usually you have a recession and prices come down, or a boom and prices accelerate. But this was contraction and inflation.
Tucker Carlson: So people had less money coming in and everything cost more to buy.
Jeffrey Sachs: That’s it. That’s what was called stagflation. The difference between then and now is that the two shocks then were temporary stops of the flows of oil. The first was a boycott by the Arab countries against the US and other buyers, like shutting down the Strait.
Tucker Carlson: Just to be clear, what were they mad about?
Jeffrey Sachs: They were mad about the 1973 war47.
Tucker Carlson: US support for Israel.
Jeffrey Sachs: Exactly.
Tucker Carlson: Just to be clear, this has been the same issue.
Jeffrey Sachs: And then 1979-80 was the Iranian revolution48. The oil got turned off, but the oil fields weren’t destroyed. There was no war in the oil fields, no destruction of infrastructure, no refineries destroyed. What will happen in the next few weeks, if we don’t choose the off-ramp, is the physical destruction of a lot of the Gulf region and the Middle East more generally, because the US will rain missiles on Iran, and Iran will launch what it has against targets in the neighborhood to show deterrence. What we could get is both sides unleashing their arsenals. What would happen in a short time is not a closure of shipping but the destruction of the physical capacities for providing oil, gas, fertilizers, petrochemicals, and other core commodities.
It doesn’t take much to bring the world economy into a tailspin. You don’t need to close half the oil supply—you might need to shut off 20%, and that would be enough to send prices soaring, making Americans and others suffer, not only at the gas pump and utility bills, but also food, which will soar because of worldwide disruption of food supplies. A significant proportion of the urea that underpins the world’s nitrogen-based fertilizers comes from this region.
Tucker Carlson: From natural gas.
Jeffrey Sachs: Exactly. From the hydrocarbon production, and so too are other petrochemicals. I’m afraid it won’t take long for this supply to be destroyed. One leader pulled me aside a few weeks ago. I don’t want to say who exactly, but that person was in a country that has a lot of oil production not from the region, and said, “Jeff, you don’t understand. I governed our state oil company. These are complex systems. They don’t get rebuilt so fast. Believe me.” This was a very authoritative figure, and I really take that to heart.
Tucker Carlson: Well, energy extraction, refining, petrochemicals, distribution—it’s all about a million times more complicated than people understand.
Jeffrey Sachs: Exactly. These are very sophisticated plants, and they are not built for war. They are built for normal, peaceful, complex, sophisticated operations. A lot of that could be destroyed in a very short period.
Tucker Carlson: No, I appreciate that. I think the view in the US seems to be, if there’s oil under the ground, you stick a straw in, it comes out. No. If you ever go and tour a petrochemical plant or oil refinery or any extraction facility, it is highest-level technology, smartest people, super hard to understand the market.
Jeffrey Sachs: I’ll add that we’ve had one of the most sophisticated places on the planet, the United Arab Emirates asking the Federal Reserve a few days ago for emergency swap lines that may be needed in the event of a crisis. This is kind of shocking, because first, you think of the Emirates as super rich.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah.
Jeffrey Sachs: It’s the place where rich people go to put their money in the region. Of course, it’s been completely destabilized—a complete disaster for them. But they’re girding for even worse to come if there is a renewal of the war. The crisis would emerge as a sequence. First, you get the physical destruction. Then you get the economic downturn—in physical production, manufacturing employment—cascading across the world economy with huge negative consequences. Third, you get the financial effects, because people say, “Is the UAE viable anymore? I’m withdrawing my money.” The Emirates operates on a US-backed dollar standard. Suddenly you have a run on the banks and financial markets. So, the UAE is already asking, can we have emergency lines of credit? Maybe yes, maybe no. That’s the tip of the iceberg of the worldwide financial consequences. You get a huge cascade of effects.
For completeness—it’s more speculative, but the daily evidence is growing—that what we call the ENSO cycle, the fluctuations in air pressure, currents, and sea surface temperatures in the Pacific that cause El Ninos and La Ninas, is turning into an El Nino, and perhaps a very strong El Nino, later this year. It may not happen, but the evidence is growing. What does that mean? Warm surface water over the Pacific would spread to the west coast of South America. When you get a powerful El Nino, the temperatures, rainfall, drought, and storm patterns in all the tropical and subtropical regions are disturbed. One thing that happened around the 1973-74 oil shock was that in 1972-73 there was also a major El Nino49, and the combination of the oil shock and the El Nino sent food prices soaring worldwide. The next big El Nino even by itself is going to be world-destabilizing, because many countries are already on the edge financially and socially. The world’s been so perturbed by crises in recent years that many governments are on the edge of financial crisis. But if we now combine mass physical destruction in West Asia, the Gulf, and Eastern Mediterranean with a super El Nino, I don’t even know how huge that shock would be. Somebody’s going to have to write the next book quickly, because we would not have had a shock like that since World War II. The political destabilization, the governments falling, the cascading of this war would be tremendous and uncontrollable.
Just think, a Chinese naval fleet is heading toward the Gulf right now to escort Chinese vessels—I don’t know if they will escort only Chinese-flagged or all Chinese vessels heading to China. Suppose there’s a war on, the United States says we have a blockade and the U.S. interdicts a Chinese oil tanker, and then a Chinese destroyer comes alongside. We’re not in self-control right now. Sailors aren’t, captains aren’t. We’re living at nanosecond speed. Maybe Palantir’s Maven system will say to shoot. Who knows what will happen?
We’re lighting fuses that could blow up everything if we choose the ramp of escalation. I think it would go faster and with less control than we imagine. We don’t have any real control in our government, even of basic processes—no interagency reviews, no expert intelligence guiding policy, nothing systematic. Israel’s the same way. When missiles are at hypersonic speed and decisions are made with a few seconds of warning—what are we doing with all this gamble when the whole premise of this war was wrong, and when the tactical premise that this was a one-day operation was proved wrong by the second day? Why are we still facing this possibility of complete disaster?
I’m sorry to say it, Tucker, but every few days I get an email from somebody who says, “I really appreciate what you say, Professor Sachs, but I do want you to know that we’re in the End Times, that this is all as prophesied, and so thank you for your voice.” These are not hostile messages. They’re very nice, sweet people who say we’re in the end times. I’m hoping we’re not. We should have some prudence. Somebody should reach the President of the United States and say, stop before disaster.
Tucker Carlson: I’ve tried. I wonder, what do you make of that? I know you’re not a famously observant man. However, things are happening that certainly don’t have any precedent in our lifetime. You’ve watched the world carefully for 50 years, and suddenly, anomalous things are happening all over. People are behaving in ways you never would have expected they behave. Do you allow for the possibility that some of this is pre-ordained, that we’re getting off the train?
Jeffrey Sachs: I don’t. I’ve studied history now for my whole life, and I’ve seen and studied many disasters. I’ve studied intensively disasters and near misses and avoided disasters with care. I wrote a book about the Cuban Missile Crisis and its aftermath (To Move the World, JFK’s Quest for Peace). I’ve studied World War I and World War II upside down, right side up, from every country’s perspective. I’ve spent a half century looking at these crises and others. Terrible things happen because individual leaders and governments make miscalculations. They don’t talk to each other. They don’t understand the ramifications. They have a breakdown of systematic processes. So, I don’t think this is ordained, but I think we’re close to overload right now, which is what you see happening around crisis often.
Tucker Carlson: What does it mean, overload?
Jeffrey Sachs: It means very consequential decisions need to be made skillfully but are not being made skillfully. We are facing what I would call “nonlinearities”—choices can take us either to disaster or to a solution. These are big choices, and individuals make a big difference at times like this. What I’ve tried to understand—you know better than I do—is the decision process in the US government right now. Normally you would have a deliberative process. The process I’ve studied carefully, as have many scholars, is the Cuban Missile Crisis. President Kennedy immediately installed an executive committee, ExComm, and during the 13 days they met repeatedly50. They debated, discussed options. It was all put on tape, all studied for decades afterward. Many of the judgments stated in the meetings were very wrong. One lesson was that Kennedy’s cool rationality and decency saved the world. A remarkable truth, because many hotheads, especially in senior military positions—Curtis LeMay above all—said in effect, “Let us go blow up the commies”51. Almost to the point of insubordination, LeMay was pressing Kennedy to launch attacks and accusing him of not standing up for America. Kennedy did save the world. The outcome depended on a mix of detailed deliberation, back channels—UN Secretary General U Thant played a huge role as intermediary52—and very good judgment by the leader. Today I can’t see any such process. What we read is that this was Trump’s decision, led by Netanyahu, with no real process of systematic deliberation such a crucial decision needs.
Tucker Carlson: That’s correct.
Jeffrey Sachs: Netanyahu’s agenda is fanatical and wrong, has been mistaken for 30 years, and has cost America a fortune. The man is a disaster. He has the wrong framework of the world, and Trump bought into that. Normally there would be the National Security Council with detailed interagency assessments, the intelligence agencies reporting, our friend Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence53, weighing in heavily, the Joint Chiefs explaining doubts they clearly had, consultations with senior members of Congress. That was once routine. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, the president consulted with congressional leaders in detail. Even as commander-in-chief in an emergency, he knew Congress was essential. I don’t see any such decision making right now, and this is dangerous. The president needs real analysis, data, intelligence, internal debate, opposition. The president has ultimate decisions on many things, but not on a gut instinct, or a whim, or on the superficial idea that Iran is like Venezuela, and certainly not on the basis of Netanyahu and the leaders of Mossad spinning some absurd yarn to one person with a group of sycophants saying, “Well, I don’t know, it looks doubtful, but I will follow you, Mr. President.” That is not the kind of deliberative process that keeps us safe.
Tucker Carlson: And yet, I think that’s exactly the process. I don’t think there’s any decision maker or even anyone who influences the decisions greatly other than Trump.
Jeffrey Sachs: I think the degradation of our political system is so deep right now that maybe there is no chance for that. But I do every day plead with the congressional leaders to do their constitutional duty, because they’re not doing it right now. They’re a co-equal branch of government that under Article 1 of the Constitution assigns them the responsibility for the declaration of war54. They are the only branch that can declare war. And when—I don’t know how many umpteen times now—the Republicans, all but one (Rand Paul, the best Republican senator by far55, and whom I regard as the best senator in the whole Senate), and all the Democrats on the other side but one (John Fetterman, who I regard as weird in his complete and total allegiance to Israel’s reckless agenda56), vote that Congress should not have any oversight over this war, completely contrary to the whole framework of the Constitution, it shows how degraded we have become.
Tucker Carlson: Maybe it’s an inevitable process where in late-stage republics like ours all power vests in the executive, away from the legislative body. Well, think of it this way: since you know so many world leaders, is there any legislative body in any country you’re familiar with that has become more powerful in the last 10 years, or are they all shrinking in authority?
Jeffrey Sachs: I know lots of places that have very high levels of deliberation.
Tucker Carlson: Yep.
Jeffrey Sachs: Very rational processes. People will be very surprised to hear me say it, and they’ll doubt it and they won’t believe it, but China has among the most deliberative processes that I see in any government in the world. We portray Xi Jinping as the leader who decides everything. I was just in Beijing a couple of weeks ago, and they’ve just announced a very sophisticated economic program, the 15th five-year plan. I spoke to many people that were part of the planning process. It was two years of detailed deliberation over cutting-edge sectors and what to do and how to combine public and private initiatives. Very sophisticated. We don’t have that right now. So, this is quite strange. We have just the opposite.
Tucker Carlson: But I wonder, do you think that our big picture—asking a lot to predict something like this—but does our current system survive this moment?
Jeffrey Sachs: We have one overwhelming delusion held firmly by a president who has his own personal delusions: that America reigns supreme in the world. Every day Trump says, “We are the most powerful country in the history of the world,” blah, blah, blah, and he feels good saying it. Maybe his followers feel good hearing it, but it’s the wrong approach. The world faces many deep challenges. There are many nuclear-armed and powerful countries. We need to find a way to get along, cooperate, solve problems, and avoid the traps of a war that can destroy the world economy or even the world in a short time. All the bluster about being the biggest, the best, the hottest, is a remnant of the idea the US has pursued during its imperial era since World War II, that we should run the world. Trump has a particular view: that he himself should run the world.
We have a workable constitutional system. It’s worked brilliantly at times and could also be updated usefully. I used to work some years in internship positions in Congress in the 1970s. Congress worked then as an institution—holding hearings, writing policy papers, proposing, drafting, and passing legislation. There were leaders, Senator Fulbright and others, who spoke out and wrote brilliant books, and I met or watched many of them as a kid. The idea of a legislative branch with lions of the Senate and House, and a Speaker of the House who was an independent voice of politics as the people’s tribune—it worked, at least to an extent. I was there. I watched it. I quite loved it. We don’t have that right now. Could it work again? Yes. There are many interesting things to do in our digital age. We can involve the public much more, have public deliberations in different ways, upgrade and update the way our system works. So yes, the system could work. It doesn’t have to dissolve into one person operating on gut hunches based on delusions of grandeur that could send the world to disaster.
Tucker Carlson: Or ends.
Jeffrey Sachs: Or ends. Exactly.
Tucker Carlson: Thank you, Jeffrey Sachs. Thank you very much for that.
Jeffrey Sachs: Great to be with you, Tucker. Thanks.