Whether one agrees or not with Sachs and others, it is difficult to understand why calls for a peace proposal would be so ill-received by today’s American Establishment.
Written by Uriel Araujo, researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts
Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University professor, has joined the voices within the US who denounce Washington’s foreign policy on Ukraine. On February 21, he addressed the United Nations Security Council to comment on Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’s report, which accuses the US of having exploded the German-Russian Nord Stream pipelines in a covert act of sabotage. In an interview with the New Yorker magazine, Sachs shared his views on the Ukrainian conflict.
The economist might very well be described as a member of the American Establishment, as New Yorker’s journalist Issac Chotiner, who interviewed Sachs, notes, remarking that thirty years ago Times magazine described him as probably “the most important economist in the world”. Sachs, however, has been the target of intense criticism within the US for urging the American authorities to engage in diplomacy with Russia so as to seek a peace plan and thus avoid a nuclear war. This reasonable stance appears to be politically marginalized in the United States.
Echoing some points also made by University of Chicago political science professor John Mearsheimer and other political realists, Sachs talks about the rising Russian-American tensions over the last twenty-five years, going back to the post-1991 unipolar moment, which gave Washington the dangerous illusion of being able to, in his words, “do pretty much whatever it wants, and that includes basing the military where it wants and when it wants, entering and exiting treaties when it wants and where it wants, without serious consequence.”
Already in the mid-nineties, there were concerned voices within the US Establishment, such as former Defense Secretary Bill Perry, who opposed the first phase of NATO expansion. Interestingly, even in the aftermath of NATO’s bombing of Serbia, Russian President Vladimir Putin offered his support to the US after the (2001) September 11 terrorist attacks, and Sachs argues this indicates the good will the Kremlin still had towards the political West. During the early two-thousands, Putin was also “pro-European” and was, in Sach’s words, “dealing closely with many European leaders”. In fact, German-Russia cooperation extended way longer than that, as embodied in the Nord Stream 1 and 2 projects (now all gone). If George Robertson, former NATO secretary general (1999-2003) is to be believed, Moscow even considered joining the Atlantic alliance. In any case, even if this line of thought never went that far, in his 2000 interview to BBC’s journalist David Frost, Putin said: “I cannot imagine my own country in isolation from Europe”, adding that “it is hard for me to visualize NATO as an enemy.”
However, despite Russian willingness to develop a mutually beneficial relationship with the West, the aggressive expansion of NATO went on and on, with seven extra enlargements. By 2008, former US President George W. Bush was pushing for it to enlarge all the way to Georgia. The ensuing 2008 Russo-Georgian conflict was a clear response to that.
In this context of tension escalation building up for years, Sachs sees the real beginning of the current conflict, which was marked by Russia’s February 2022 ongoing military campaign, not in the 2014 annexation of Crimea, but rather in an event which took place sometime earlier in that same year, namely, the “U.S. participation in the overthrow of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych, in February, 2014”, exemplified by National Endowment for Democracy and US NGOs funding for the more violent protesters. Yanukovych had vowed to seek neutrality, which enraged Washington.
According to Sachs, at the end of 2021, the current crisis could have been avoided, as Moscow had placed three demands, involving Crimea, the implementation of the Minsk II agreements, and a stop to NATO’s expansion – all of which were refused by the US.
Amid today’s narrative wars, the West often tries to portray the Russian political system as a kind of autocracy, describing the current military campaign in Ukraine as Vladimir Putin’s sole personal decision. In his 2018 associated professorship habilitation thesis, Sao Paulo University History Professor Angelo de Oliveira Segrillo even intellectually describes Putin as a moderate (albeit ambiguously) Westernist, rather than an Eurasianist, citing as evidence for it the Russian President’s well know admiration for Peter the Great. In Segrillo’s view, Putin was never a radical Westernist such as Boris Yeltsin, but a pragmatic and moderate one, while also a gosudarstvennik, that is, someone who advocates for a strong State, in line with Russia’s political tradition. The Brazilian professor thus compares Putin to the French leader Charles de Gaulle, who often opposed the US and NATO not simply out of an “anti-Western stance” but out of being in the position of someone who is defending the national interests of one’s own country.
Whether the aforementioned thesis is fully accurate or not, that being something which interests mostly biographers and historians anyway, one can in any case argue that far from being staunchly “anti-Western” due to the supposed personal inclinations of the President (as Western propaganda would have it), the Kremlin in fact has had to take a defensive and counter-offensive approach towards the US-led West over the latter’s many provocations and many incidents which constituted crossing red lines, from a Russian perspective.
Giving how blatantly overburdened and overstretched Washington makes itself by trying to simultaneously contain two Great Powers at once, one can only wonder what role, if any, private and shady businesses involving American political elites may play in the decision-making process pertaining to such a policy, thus shaping, to some degree, the energy and geoeconomic goals that accompany Washington’s geopolitical ones.
Regardless of one agreeing or not with Sachs, Mearsheimer and many other assessments of the current Ukrainian conflict’s real causes, it is difficult to understand why calls for a peace proposal would be so ill-received by today’s American Establishment.
“DISASTROUS” for US budget indeed. But Biden zombie and his friends got filthy rich over that one.
. Every weekend we have seen anti-NATO protests all across the Collective West. And they are growing by the day.
The USA is not interested in peace simply because they are losing their power over others world wide. Without a war against Russia and China and win them both, the end of the US empire is inevitable.
You just need to look at Ukraine to realize that 80% of the world are not on the US side. Plus, as Russia and China comes up with their own SWIFT system the US is now losing their money grabbing system/sanctions over others and many approves of it as we can all see by them dumping the dollar. Let’s not forget the fact that many are now looking at joining BRICS which is another blow to the US hegemony over the world.
Soon, it will be the world against NATO and that will force the death of it once and for all. Huge protests to get out of NATO in many European countries (France, England, Italy, Germany to name a few) will eventually force politicians to follow the people’s will.
The western world is losing…big time! Their constant wars, woke, attacks on religions, pushing the LBGTQIAFUCKERS over the mass of their populations is now turning slowly against them. Their movies empowering them and women is a disaster as most could not care less about them.
Don’t get me started on mass immigration in the western world.
Jeff Sachs the architect behind post USSR shock therapy for Russian economy. Also got appointed to head some group related to covid19 basically became a public relations person for China. So he has been carrying water for the establishment for a long time, this would be a first for him to utter a different line, remain to be seen if they will do something to him. Unless political wind in Washington has changed enough even for rays to jump ship.
Who abandoned economic cooperation? Who elected to invade a sovereign nation in a war of territorial conquest? Who refuses to negotiate anything until these territorial gains are made permanent? Who threatens nuclear war?
Get real people!
The Ukraine ceased to be a sovereign nation when the US overthrew the elected government in 2014 and installed a regime to carry out its policy of destabilizing Russia with the aim of removing the Russian government and breaking up the Russian state. Yanukovich did not want to subject the Ukrainian voters to the EU austerity measures, and so he was removed in a US-run coup. Still, that was a very good try, li’l Hasbaranik.
Why are you bothering to feed the zombie?
Uh, let me guess. USA?
Sit down, be quiet. This is a no nonsense zone.
US foreign policy will continue to be a disaster as long as Israel, Psionists, AIPAC and their treasonous Israel-First slaves in the government, in the intel and in the military are not held accountable. AMERICA FIRST
Zelensky now wants americans to come fight his war for him. Put a stop to this by ending all US support for ukraine and physically dropping zelensky off at that russian courthouse in moscow to account for himself before russian authorities
Same Ukrainian bullshit going round and round. They’ve been shoveling that manure for a decade now. It’s just that some westerners now have jumped into the shit pile with them.
The alleged international terrorist Biden has Hunter check his laptop and bank account before any important decision.
The US conjures money to pay for its wars and the Americans are not dying in these wars, there is PROFIT from them so WHY should they stop? Make it hurt THEM.
Dobre napísaný článok!!! Mňa zaujíma čo urobí tá bande debilov z BR OSN, aký zaujme postoj k vyšetreniu a odhaleniu páchateľov teroristického útoku na Nord Stream a Nord Stream II? Toto bude skúška toho ako vôbec BR OSN Funguje až teda vôbec nejak funguje. Lebo zatiaľ pôsobí dojmom ako by slúžila darebáckemu štátu USA!!! Irak, Sýria, Srbsko? Afganistan, Ukrajina, toto všetko jasne poukazuje na to, že BR OSN zlyháva!!!
Sachs was wrong on his “shock therapy” after the Soviet Union collapsed but is right here.
It is important to focus on what creates conflict – this case WW III. Wars are fought over interests (power). But power is ultimately an illusion: no empire has held on to it forever, always had to relinquish it to another. Yet all will be destroyed for what no one can keep. https://patternofhistory.wordpress.com/