Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Why Jeffrey Sachs Thinks That Indonesia's Leadership Is Needed

Starting point is 00:00:00 America's self-perception versus reality. I began to call it pretty delusional. It was the idea of the CIA that the core role of the CIA was to fight communism. It would throw out leaders, it would create coups. It did this dozens and dozens of times around the world. We became the great meddler. The United States would get in there and meddle and leave behind a real mess, really a mess, all of that should end.

Starting point is 00:00:37 Stop provoking, stop overthrowing other countries' governments, stop the secret operations, stop the murders, the assassinations. Enough. Stop the destabilization of other countries. The track record is absolutely Awful. Come on, this is a game, but a very deadly game, and it's not a funny game. There is an open, ongoing genocide in Gaza right now, where the United States is completely complicit with Israel. Is that liberal values to be starving two million people? Well, believe

Starting point is 00:01:21 me, the propagandists in the United States can make anything what they want. What should the United States do. Hi, friends. Today, we're honored to be graced by Professor Jeffrey Sachs from Columbia University. Jeffrey, thank you so much for gracing our show again. Well, I'm delighted to be with you. Thank you. I want to ask you about what's happening around the world.

Starting point is 00:02:11 You've aptly pointed out a few times that, you know, policymaking in many parts of the world, particularly in the U.S., seems to be impervious to public opinion. Why do you think that's a phenomenon that's increasingly occurring in many places around World? I don't know if it's a general proposition, but in the United States, public policy became really owned by two major groups of our politics. One is the military security apparatus, and that's a great deal of what the U.S. federal government does. It's the military budget. It's the intelligence agencies. It's really foreign policy.

Starting point is 00:02:57 And that is simply not open to public opinion almost at all. The military industrial complex is very powerful, very secretive, and it is what we call the deep state for a good reason. It's deep. It's not changing even with changes of the presidency. The other reason why public opinion plays a relatively minor role in the United States, or a declining role, is the power of corporate lobbies in particular sectors. Our political process was deliberately by the Supreme Court opened up to big money

Starting point is 00:03:47 already about 30 years ago. And so it's a kind of pay-to-play politics, especially on domestic policy. And we have Wall Street as a major lobby when it's financial issues. We have big oil, when it's energy issues. We have big ag, when it's food and nutrition and land use issues.

Starting point is 00:04:13 We have several such powerful lobbies that own their domains of public policy. Little changes between administrations. Presidents generally come in even using

Starting point is 00:04:31 the same expression. They're going to drain the swamp. Everyone knows what the swamp is. The swamp is the money in politics. Nobody drains the swamp. They build new swamps. They expand the swamps, but they don't drain the swamps. So, you know,

Starting point is 00:04:47 To an extent, of course, a similar phenomena occur in other parts of the world. When there are geopolitical tensions, as there are pervasively right now, the security part of the state apparatus plays a more important role. And this simply takes place without public opinion playing much of a role or being given much of the truth or having much understanding of what's happening. The multilateralism was going on for nicely for a long time until a few years ago. And this, I think, partly, if not meaningfully, would have been on the back of the leadership of the U.S., which I think had a great degree of magnanimity.

Starting point is 00:05:36 But now we're seeing things very differently. Is there a hope for the world to re-multilateralize? Yes. I'm not sure how much magnanimity there was. In fact, of course, the United States portrayed an image of magnanimity. That was part of its tactics. Now it doesn't even portray such an image, by the way. It's just the tough guy.

Starting point is 00:06:01 So you have to get along with the United States. That's Trump's particular approach. But in fact, the United States was the dominant power in the world. since 1945. This is clear from the economic, financial, technological, and military point of view. It had a arrival in the Soviet Union between 1945 and 1991. The Soviet Union was a real rival from the point of view of nuclear arms and military outlays and military technology.

Starting point is 00:06:41 After all, the Soviets were ahead of the U.S. in the space race for quite a while. But in terms of overall economy, economic and technological dynamism, the Soviet Union was markedly behind the United States. And especially with the arrival of the digital age, this was almost a creation of the United States itself. and Soviets never managed to come close to the U.S. in that. Then in 1991, at the end of the year in December, I happened to be there in the Kremlin when it happened. The Soviet Union ended. It ended because of the internal conflicts among different national nationalities

Starting point is 00:07:35 within the Soviet Union, and it ended as, as often as the case because the harsh power system was being reformed. One of the great social theorists of the 19th century, Tocqueville said that the most dangerous time for a government is in the midst of reform. The Soviets were relaxing the tensions, opening up society to free speech. reforming the economy, and it led to its collapse, actually, in 1991. When that happened, the general view in the world was, well, now the United States is the only superpower left, and the U.S. had that self-image, of course, as well.

Starting point is 00:08:29 Well, the point is that step by step, year by year, maybe without the American policymakers, quite realizing it. A lot of the world was catching up in key technologies, was modernizing infrastructure, was putting down fast rail, of which the United States has almost none, was putting in 5G, of which the U.S. also lagged.

Starting point is 00:09:00 And so the U.S. became quite complacent, didn't really pay too much attention. And by even the years, 2000, I think it's fair to say we had reached a kind of multipolarity, though not one recognized in geopolitical terms by the United States. China was already a significant power. Russia had already stabilized from the implosion of the Soviet Union. By 2010, this became more clear. again, I think American policymakers didn't get it. I'd say they don't really get it till today, but the world was moving forward.

Starting point is 00:09:46 Since I traveled the world for a living for my job as a development economist, I would see these changes before my eyes. I would see very sophisticated companies in Southeast Asia, certainly, of course, in China without question in India and so forth. And that didn't quite register in the United States. All of this is to say that not only was a significant part of the world catching up, or at least closing the gap with the United States, another gap was opening of America's self-perception versus reality.

Starting point is 00:10:31 And that gap was that America, continued it in the political class and in the strategic groups in the country, especially the military and security side, to believe that America was so far ahead of the rest of the world, pretty much untouchable, with the nuisance of China, but not to take China all that seriously. that the gap of the real success of much of Asia compared to the perception by U.S. leaders of the continued unipolarity of the world meant that American foreign policy was increasingly out of sync with the reality.

Starting point is 00:11:26 I began to call it pretty delusional, I'd say about 10 years ago. And I think it has become more and more delusional as we've approached the present because we're truly in a multipolar world now. Clearly, Russia is not what America thought as some third-rate country. It's a very sophisticated economy, and it took on NATO and NATO memo. military strategy, equipment, financing, armaments, and so forth. And it showed it could more than hold its own. China, of course, is in many sectors way ahead of the United States right now, not in all, but in many.

Starting point is 00:12:23 India is able to say no to the United States quite clearly when Trump, puts on threats or puts on demands of a, and so I think that this is our current reality. Our geopolitics has not adjusted. The U.S. is pretty much in a confrontational, snarly, rather nasty mode with everybody in the world right now. That's partly Trump's personality. It's partly geopolitical tantrum that the United States is throwing

Starting point is 00:13:00 because it wants to be number one, unchallenged and recognized as such, and it just ain't so. And so the U.S. finds itself in tension with everybody right now. So this is where we are. I want to pick up on, well, a bunch of things, but one of which is what, you know, what's happening in Europe, as you made reference to. And recently you made this remarkable discovery with respect to rereading the Monroe Doctrine. And it refers to this principle of reciprocity. And a lot of what you've just alluded to, does that explain as to why the United States is not honoring that principle of reciprocity as it relates to what's happening in Europe and other places around the world? Well, the Monroe Doctrine, of course, just to make a make.

Starting point is 00:13:56 sure everybody knows about it was a statement to the U.S. Congress by President Monroe in 1823, so 202 years ago. And part of that statement was written by the Secretary of State at the time John Quincy Adams, who would become president in a couple of years after this was made. And the Monroe Doctrine refers to the part of the statement that, told the European powers don't meddle in the Western Hemisphere. And that is a famous idea for Americans. You learn it as a kid that the U.S. has told the Europeans don't mess in our backyard.

Starting point is 00:14:45 If you do, there's going to be a brawl. What I hadn't really realized until rereading it, just recently, is how explicit it is that the United States says, and by the way, we won't meddle in your yard either. And so John Quincy Adams was making not simply a unilateral claim. He was basically saying, you stay out of our way, we'll stay out of your way. This was the new United States talking to the well-established empires of Europe. a little cheeky, but still it was with reciprocity.

Starting point is 00:15:31 It wasn't a bargain. It wasn't a deal. It was a unilateral statement by the U.S., but still, it recognized we're telling you France and Spain and Britain and others. Don't meddle in our neighborhood. And it is our policy not to meddle in yours. Well, the United States, I already dropped that. We won't meddle in other places about 125 years ago.

Starting point is 00:16:07 When the U.S. completed the construction of the continental country by the end of the 19th century, the U.S. leaders, in a very direct, imperialistic way, said, we're going to now start building our own international empire so we catch up with the European empires. This was the era in which the so-called Western world, which means the North Atlantic world, the United States, Britain, and continental Western Europe, viewed themselves as the natural leaders of the world. The U.S. was behind, actually behind the curve, because Britain was by far the dominant.

Starting point is 00:16:53 country in the world. Of course, the Dutch had colonized Java and other islands of what is today Indonesia. So there were a variety of empires, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the French, the Germans for a while until they were defeated in World War I. But the British were, of course, the dominant power, the empire on which the sun never, set, and the United States aimed to get in there too. So it picked a fight with Spain in 1898, accusing Spain of all sorts of perfidy and perfidy, excuse me, and went to war with Spain. Everybody loved it.

Starting point is 00:17:46 This was the age of daring due of Theodore Roosevelt, who would become our imperialist president in the early years of the 20th century, he added the so-called Roosevelt corollary early in the 20th century that said, okay, in addition to the Monroe Doctrine, we will meddle in our neighborhood. We are the policemen. We're going to keep order. In the 20th century, the United States, after World War II, took over where Britain has been. left off. Not quite. The U.S. did not come to conquer territory, but rather its empire was that it would determine who governed. It would throw out leaders, it would create coups, it would undermine governments, change regimes. It did this dozens and dozens of times around the world.

Starting point is 00:18:48 We became the great meddler and with so much power. The U.S. annoyed countries all over the world. It turned many into police states. Iran is an example of overthrowing a democracy in 1953, and it created a lasting negative legacy. And that was an overthrow that the British wanted U.S. help on to make sure that Iranian oil stayed in British hands.

Starting point is 00:19:21 So these were not. high principled interventions. These were business operations to a very significant extent. Famously, when Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala wanted to make land reform, the United Fruit Company, which happened to have, as its lawyers, Sullivan and Cromwell, which was the law firm from which John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State and Alan Dulles, the head of the CIA, had worked. They went to work to overthrow the government of Guatemala in 1954. So this meddling became standard fare for the U.S.

Starting point is 00:20:09 And part of this, which I just find terrible, I have to tell you, is annoy the other superpower or annoy the other superpowers. So the CIA game, very dangerous, for decades, was try to provoke the Soviet Union, try to trap the Soviet Union, try to work on the soft underbelly of the Soviet Union in the caucuses, for example, or in the Muslim majority. Islamic majority countries. The idea being Soviet unions are adversary, the CIA should make operations to weaken the Soviet Union. One of the most notorious in the last 50 years was that under Carter, as big Nubershinsky recommended and got a presidential order to back the

Starting point is 00:21:18 jihadists called the Mujahideen in Afghanistan with the idea of trying to provoke the Soviet Union to actually invade Afghanistan with the Brzynski's idea that Afghanistan would become the Soviet Union's Vietnam, in other words, it would become a war that would entrap and weaken the Soviet Union. It worked in its way. Unfortunately, it destroyed Afghanistan. Afghanistan. Afghanistan never since 1979 has had really a moment of peace again, a period of development. This is a U.S. game playing. Well, I came not to love this, I have to tell you. You know, as a development economist working all over the world, I just saw so many times that for absolutely illegitimate,

Starting point is 00:22:20 Lakey reasons, the United States would get in there and meddle and lead behind a real mess, really a mess, a mess that would last 10 or 20 or 30 years, as in Afghanistan. But more than that, it was the idea of the CIA

Starting point is 00:22:41 that the core role of the CIA was to fight communism, to fight the Soviet Union, Union to weaken this bow. But you had two nuclear superpowers, so you're provoking, you're sticking pins in the other side, and it's very, very dangerous. Well, to make a long story short, this continued after the end of the Soviet Union vis-à-vis Russia.

Starting point is 00:23:13 The United States continued to play its games. We had, for example, a friendship committee for Chechnya. Okay. Who was the Friendship Committee for Chechnya? It was all the top neocons in the United States. Brzynski was a co-chair and many other people who could not put Chechnya on a map, who could care less about Chechnya, never heard of Chechnya. But what they knew from the CIA was, well, here we can,

Starting point is 00:23:46 annoy, provoke Russia into a crisis in this soft region of Russia. Well, that's what Ukraine turned into as well, because the idea for Ukraine was a long project of expanding U.S. military presence to surround Russia in the Black Sea region. And this was a game plan, actually, from the middle of the 19th century. It was Lord Palmerston's game plan of Britain that led to the so-called Crimean War, another useless war. That was 1853 to 1856. But the idea was that Britain was going to really banish Russia from the Black Sea. Well, Brzynski had the same idea at the end of the 20th century.

Starting point is 00:24:43 and it's led to a prolonged war in the Black Sea region, it turned Ukraine to a battlefield. Of course, if you don't follow this stuff or have the chance to see it so close and you just read the U.S. mass media or listen to State Department speeches, you can't get it because the propaganda is so thick that you, punch, they punch back, and then you say, you see how aggressive they are. And you say, yeah, but you punch them first. No, we didn't punch them. You know, what are you talking about? We, we had nothing to do with it. And so the famous word of American propaganda is unprovoked. Putin's

Starting point is 00:25:32 unprovoked. He's just a nasty, aggressive man. He just wanted to go to war. He's like Peter the Great. He wanted to rebuild the Russian Empire. And you hear this clap trap. nonstop without understanding, come on, this is a game, but a very deadly game. And it's not a funny game. It's, so anyway, sorry to rant, but that's the... Yeah, no, no, it makes a lot of sense. You've referred to this as the ostensible depravity of foreign policy of the U.S. And if, you know, looking at the U.S. after winning the Cold War in the early 90s, blessed with power, wealth, and favorable geography. How much longer do you think the U.S. will continue, you know, embarking on this ill campaign

Starting point is 00:26:22 of spreading liberal values around the world? Yeah. So, of course, let me be clear. We're spreading no values at all. This is just... I said ill campaigns. Right. This is propaganda.

Starting point is 00:26:37 What is liberal values? Liberal values is whatever the United States says on a given day it is. is. There is an open, ongoing genocide in Gaza right now, where the United States is completely complicit with Israel. Is that liberal values to be starving two million people? Well, believe me, the propagandists in the United States can make anything what they want. What should the United States do? Well, it goes back to 1947. We have a had a very important piece of legislation that reorganized the military and the security apparatus in the United States called the National Security Act.

Starting point is 00:27:27 And it's in that act that the Defense Department was made and other parts of the military industrial complex. And it's the place where the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency, was created. And the CIA was created with two completely different missions. And this has been the bane, in my view, of American foreign policy ever since. One mission is intelligence. What are the other countries doing? Where are the security risks?

Starting point is 00:28:04 Fine. Countries need that kind of intelligence if it's intelligent. But the other side of the CIA was operations, covert operations. And the CIA was basically created half of the House as a private army of the President of the United States operating secretly and with deniability. And the CIA, therefore, has played a role in dozens of countries, in overthrowing governments, assassinating leaders,

Starting point is 00:28:40 creating unrest, creating insurgencies, and so forth. My view is, and by the way, just as I'll give another example, I've mentioned some, but in 2011,

Starting point is 00:28:56 for a variety of reasons, none of them good, the United States decided it would overthrow the Syrian government. This was a very very, conscious decision. It was a change of policy, actually. And suddenly, President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are saying, Assad must go. Well, Americans had no idea who's Assad. Why must he go? But suddenly the campaign started. And the president signed a secret order called Operation

Starting point is 00:29:29 Timber Sycamore, which assigned the CIA the responsibility of arming and training and funding the insurgency, basically jihadists, who would bring down the Syrian government. It took, by the way, 14 years. The U.S. didn't fund this effort the whole time, but it set the course for 14 years of war that eventually toppled Bashir al-Assad. Assad. That's the CIA. It was tasked by the president. The United States people were not told

Starting point is 00:30:13 about it until a couple of very brief articles five years after this started. The New York Times ran a story about it. It was an expository for one day and then quickly forgotten again. My view is all of that should end. And I don't think that's idealistic. I think that's just common sense for survival. Stop provoking, stop overthrowing other countries' governments, stop the secret operations, stop the murders, the assassinations. Enough.

Starting point is 00:30:56 Collect intelligence, okay. I don't have a problem with that. But stop the destabilization. of other countries. The track record is absolutely awful. In other words, these destabilizations very rarely lead to anything in even remotely the U.S. interest, by the way, they very often fail in their primary objective of actually toppling a government.

Starting point is 00:31:26 But if they do topple a government, they very rarely bring about a pro-es-example. US stable government, they typically lead onward to more coups, more assassinations, maybe not at the US hands, but having created great instability. Look at Libya, for example, now. It's an ongoing civil war. Look at Sudan. That was another U.S. operation to back a rebellion in the south of Sudan to weaken a country that was deemed to be in the forefront of Islamist rule. Well, it's led to two civil wars, one in the rump part of Sudan and the other in South Sudan. It's a complete humanitarian catastrophe.

Starting point is 00:32:19 Of course, the people in Washington that do this don't have a humanitarian side to them. They don't care about that. They're playing games. But the games don't even work on American terms. So my view is stop all of this covert operation, get the CIA out of the business of covert operations entirely, and other parts of the security apparatus that also do this because the Pentagon has some action in this as well. Stop all of that. return to diplomacy.

Starting point is 00:32:58 America is not endangered by any country in the world. In fact, we've got two big oceans, we've got a deterrence that is unique in the world.

Starting point is 00:33:13 The only risk the United States faces is the world risk of nuclear war. Stupidly, these fools that run my country, bring us closer and closer to nuclear war

Starting point is 00:33:27 because they provoke other nuclear superpowers. And I'm saying, stop. Go back to the Monroe Doctrine. I'm perfectly happy for the United States to say to China and Russia, stay out of the Western Hemisphere with your militaries. But then

Starting point is 00:33:44 the United States should stay out of Russia's neighborhood with its military. The United States should stay out of China's neighborhood with its military. The United States should not be in the business of arms, Taiwan over China's opposition. That is an internal affair, even by the standards of American agreed diplomacy with China.

Starting point is 00:34:08 And frankly, if the U.S. were not or had not militarized the first island chain, which is the so-called chain of Taiwan and Japan and Guam and the Philippines, to. hold China away from the Pacific, China wouldn't be building its Navy the way that it is right now because that's what's called a strategic dilemma. China's not going to sit there and let the United States choke its sea lanes, its food supplies, its energy supplies, and so forth. So stop the games. This is my main point. All right. You know, these provocative measures, as they relate to the seven wars that you've alluded to,

Starting point is 00:35:00 as they occurred in Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, explain how they're attributable to the Zionist lobby, how they're attributable to the evangelical Protestant support for the leadership of the United States, and especially with respect to the atrocity, that we're witnessing in Gaza. Yeah, we have to go back, actually, to strangely enough, to the early 19th century. Who were the first Zionists?

Starting point is 00:35:36 By Zionist, it means a movement to create a Western colony or settlement in the Holy Land, in what is roughly today, Israel and Palestine. Well, the first Zionists were not Jews. The first Zionists were Christian Protestants. And they followed the Crusades 11th and 12th and 13th centuries where Europe tried to gain control over the Holy Land, over Jesus' land. And it did for a little while,

Starting point is 00:36:20 and then it lost it to Muslim armies and eventually lost it to the Ottoman Empire, and eventually the Eastern Roman Empire, so-called or the Byzantine Empire, was captured entirely by the Ottomans in 1453 when Constantinople fell and became Istanbul. But in more modern times, the idea was, yes, go back and build a new Western settlement,

Starting point is 00:36:52 but this time have the Jews make the settlements. And this followed ideas that were extant in British Protestantism in the 19th century, based on one of the books of the Bible, actually, the final book of the New Testament called the Book of Revelations, which describes the end of days, the end of the world, and it describes the Battle of Armageddon, so-called, and in the prophecy of this final book, there's a Jewish state. And so the idea was recreate a Jewish state in Palestine, what was then part of the Ottoman Empire. And this started as a Christian project.

Starting point is 00:37:50 At the end of the 19th century, it became a Jewish project, not a religious project, but secular Jews who were fighting what was really anti-Semitism or second or third or fourth-class treatment in Eastern Europe and in the Russian Empire. And Theodore Herzl is the name associated with the Jewish Zionist. and he started his campaign for a Jewish homeland in the 1890s. Well, in 1917, in the midst of World War I, Britain made a declaration, the Balfour Declaration, which said that a Jewish homeland should be established in Palestine at the end of World War I, taking territory from the Ottoman Empire.

Starting point is 00:38:50 When the Ottomans were defeated, Britain, under the New League of Nations, became the so-called mandatory power, the imperial power, that ruled over this area, which is now Israel and Palestine. And at the end of World War II, Britain was exhausted. It was disgorging its empire, which it could not hold on to. It was broke. And in 1947, Britain said we're out of Palestine and threw it over to the UN, at which point, for a lot of reasons, the United States took up the cause of creating not a Jewish homeland within a unified Palestine, but rather a state that's not a Jewish homeland. would become Israel in 1948.

Starting point is 00:39:53 And in the end of 1947, the UN voted to partition mandatory Palestine into two parts, an Arab part and a Jewish part. And the Arabs who were the majority of Palestine said, no, this is not fair. Why are you partitioning our country in all of the other post-colonial? Countries, it's countries kept as a unity, and the majority governs the country, but in our case, you're giving away part of the country to the Jews for their own state. Well, the Jews said, yes, this is fine. We're going to have our own state, and the UN, under a lot of lobbying by the United States,

Starting point is 00:40:44 voted to partition Palestine. The Arabs then rejected the plan, and the Jewish settlement accepted the plan and declared an independent state of Israel, at which point the Arab nations attacked Israel, said, no, you can't do that. We don't accept this. But Israel won that war, captured more territory, and ended up. by 1950 an armistice with about 78% of the territory of what had been British Palestine. Okay, well, that's 1950, and the issue's never been settled. And in 1967, again, another war occurred.

Starting point is 00:41:39 And in that war, Israel conquered the other 22% of the land, and that is Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank. And these became known as the occupied territories. Well, that's 1967. We're almost 60 years since then, and there's never been a settlement. Israel has ruled over the Palestinian people. The population now, if you take Israel and the occupied territories, is about 8 million Jews and about 8 million Palestinian Arabs, most of whom are Muslim, some are Catholic.

Starting point is 00:42:25 But it's about 50-50. But the Jews have all the power. And for about 25 years, most of the world, to say, go back to the partition. We need a two-state settlement. And generally, the international law, as defined by the UN Security Council and the UN General Assembly and the International Court of Justice says make a state of Palestine out of the three occupied zones. That is, out of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. That would be about 22 percent of of British Palestine,

Starting point is 00:43:10 let's put it that way. Pretty good deal for the Jewish part. But what happened is that in Israel, politics became more and more extremist to say never will we give up this so-called occupied territory. That belongs to us. And we'll never come.

Starting point is 00:43:35 compromise on it. And there are two strands of that reasoning in Israel. One is a security argument that Israel should never risk its own security by enabling a Palestinian state next to it. And the other has become a religious fervor that says, God promised us all this land. and we're going to keep it. Of course, Muslims don't see it that way. This is, you know, an extremist Jewish interpretation, and it's not a mainstream Jewish interpretation. It's an interpretation of a zealous or extremist part of believers

Starting point is 00:44:27 who became more and more radical and a larger proportion of the Israeli population over time. Well, that's the long-winded background to our current reality, which is that Israel rules over the Palestinians. The government is absolutely extremist, in my view, intolerant, violent, and completely determined that there will never be a state of Palestine. And when you look inside the motivations of that, some of the leaders, like probably Prime Minister Netanyahu, who's not very religious, I don't know what his religious beliefs are, but his view all along has been, no, we're not doing it because Israel's security depends on their never being a Palestinian state. But then there are other ministers in the government, like a pair named Ben Gavir and Smotrich, who are absolutely religious fanatics, in my view, utter extremists, who quote the Bible and their interpretation anyway from 2,500 years ago,

Starting point is 00:45:47 as if that's their present lease on the property. And they say, God gave us this and this is our calling and we're never going to compromise. Well, there are 8 million Palestinians there. So what to do? And what to do is they treat them like a concentration camp. Gaza was, as widely called, an open-air concentration camp, an open-air prison. No one could come or go without Israel's control. you couldn't invest, they couldn't make a port, they can't do anything.

Starting point is 00:46:23 Because Israel, under this very radical interpretation, says, no, this is for Jews, this isn't for the Palestinians. And in the West Bank, which is the other major territory that was occupied, hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers came in to what had been Arab-Palestinians. land and they beat up the Palestinians, they shoot them, they kill them, they expropriate their land because they say we're in control. This is our land. What the hell are you doing here? Of course, they were there for centuries. This is an incredible story. So all of that was to answer your question, what about these wars? So Netanyahu came to power in 1996, dead set against to Palestinian state. And he wrote some articles, gave some speeches.

Starting point is 00:47:22 They're quite interesting. I think he's a disgusting madman in my view. But just to say, he spelled out his arguments. And his arguments are, look, we face terrorists. What is a terrorist? A terrorist is a militant for the Palestinian cause. And we're never going to give the Palestinians rights, and they're going to take up arms.

Starting point is 00:47:44 But you know what? it's not good enough to just fight the terrorists, as he defines them. We have to fight the states that support the terrorists. So if the Arabs in the neighborhood say, yeah, this is unfair, there should be a state of Palestine, and they back militant groups, then Netanyahu says, okay, come over, Uncle Sam, beep out of them. And it's nothing less than that. And a list was constructed by this group because in the U.S., they're called neocons.

Starting point is 00:48:21 And in Israel, they're militant Zionists. And it's a partnership. And after 9-11, after that event, we know from a number of witnesses, including Wesley Clark, who was an important general in the U.S. at the time, and by others who have written about this, that a list was made of seven wars that Netanyahu said, we've got to get rid of all these governments. These are the ones supporting the militants. We have to take them out.

Starting point is 00:49:03 Saddam Hussein, he supports the Palestinians. The Iranians, they support the Palestinians. Assad, they support the Palestinians. They're under Iranian control. Well, you know, if you're doing something so improper as ruling over another people through extreme violence, you'll generate a backlash. You'll generate a militancy. And then if you say, we're going to kill anyone that supports the militancy, you're just making a theater of war of the Middle East. And strangely, the United States has backed this.

Starting point is 00:49:42 mindlessness, this violence for 30 years. It's completely disgusting. And it's been a complete debacle in my view. The leadership of Indonesia is planning to attend the upcoming UNGA in September. What is what is the hope for the world to recognize Palestine as a state? We have an overwhelming worldwide consensus that Palestine has the legal rights, the moral rights, the practical means to have an independent, peaceful state of Palestine next door to Israel. I'd say that 185 countries of the 193 countries have in one way or another express support for that. About 147 have actually literally recognized Palestine and opened up diplomatic relations with a state that exists but has no power, no control, and no permanent seat in the UN as a member yet. But it's 147 of the 193. Many, many more are going to recognize Palestine in September.

Starting point is 00:51:09 Australia has recently announced. France, Britain, others are going to do so. So who are the opposition? Of course, Israel, as I've described. And the United States, that's the only real opposition. It happens in the votes that Argentina, because of President Malay, wanting to never part company with Trump, votes with the U.S., Paraguay,

Starting point is 00:51:37 for some bizarre reasons, votes with the U.S., Nauru, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, and Micronesia. There you go. That's it. Now, if you add up the ones that support Palestine, it is 95% of the world population, living in the countries that support Palestine. The 5% is the United States,

Starting point is 00:51:59 which is 4% plus 1% from all the rest. Can it really be the fact that 95% of the world will be blocked? I don't think so, but it requires really a strong, strong voice to say to Mr. Trump, no. unacceptable, no more. It's not going to continue. And genocide is what's really happening right now, because Israel's lost all constraints and all moral anchor and foundation. It's just murdering people right and left because these people are crazed. Smotrich, Ben-Gabir, they're crazed. And we need President Praboh, and we need Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim and other leaders in ASEAN and the 57 countries of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Arab League and the Bricks

Starting point is 00:53:16 and Latin America and the African Union to say absolutely to Donald Trump, no more you can't do this anymore you have to stop your veto of a Palestinian state and why the U.S.? Because I mentioned

Starting point is 00:53:42 six or so countries that block this or not block this that vote against but the U.S. is the one with the veto. The way you become a U.N. member state is you get a vote in the U.N. Security Council, then a vote.

Starting point is 00:53:57 in the UN General Assembly. In the General Assembly, no problem, as I said, 185 to 6 maybe. But in Security Council, the United States has a veto. And it's vetoed Palestinian state, even though everybody agrees on all conditions, on international law. Of course there should be a Palestinian state. And by the way, because the Arab League and OIC and others, would make it the case. It would come in as a peaceful state.

Starting point is 00:54:31 The militancy would end because there'd be a state. It would be achieved. But the United States and Israel blocked this. Now, you know, my view is that if the world tells Trump,

Starting point is 00:54:47 I don't think Israel's going to change, but Israel has no veto. This should be imposed on Israel. Israel has no role. Israel has no right and no legal way to veto a state of Palestine. It's only the United States. And I think the world needs to say to the United States, time over. Genocide, you've done it, you've reached the limit.

Starting point is 00:55:12 No more. The whole world agrees. Stop. And I think that actually that can work strangely enough because the United States does not want every other country. any of significance. Okay, Nauru and Micronesia may continue to vote with the U.S. but all the rest should say to the United States, enough is enough.

Starting point is 00:55:36 We're watching a genocide before our eyes. You cannot do this any longer. All of the arguments against our, excuse my language, but I need to use it. We're talking about a genocide. And this needs to be said. Now, if it doesn't work and the United States persists, I think other measures are absolutely needed to say to Israel, this is completely beyond anything. This is totally unacceptable.

Starting point is 00:56:09 And you remember South Africa, for example, lost its voting rights in the General Assembly. There are things that can be done. But even before going there, I think the United States. just needs to change. And the US way of operating is the ancient dividei at Impera, divide and rule. And so when it negotiates on trade, it negotiates with Indonesia,

Starting point is 00:56:40 it negotiates with Vietnam, it negotiates one by one. I would have rather that ASEAN as a group actually said no. You deal with us as a group, But of course the United States wanted to play one against the other. But when it comes to Palestine, don't let it be played one against the other. You got the entire world majority overwhelming. And everybody has to stand up and say, enough is enough.

Starting point is 00:57:12 We're done with this. And the United States will bend. And one of the reasons why it will bend, by the way, is that American public opinion, And this is where we started. It doesn't count for all that much. But American public opinion is overwhelmingly on the Palestinian side now. This is the first time. What Israel has done is so awful that Americans see it with their own eyes.

Starting point is 00:57:37 They see it on their TikTok feed. They see it every day before their eyes. They want it to stop. And so the latest survey showed 60-30 pro-Palest. Palestine versus pro-Israel. In other words, an overwhelming two-to-one lopsided majority on the Palestinian side right now and against what Israel's doing. So even the American politicians need to take that into account. Amen.

Starting point is 00:58:07 Professor, I apologize for extending this interview and I'm mindful of your time. I want to ask you one more question, and it relates to my place, Asia. Yes. You have alluded to the fact that the United States sees China's rise as a threat to its pre-existing hegemonic posture. And I helped initiate the RSEP in 2011, which got ratified a few years later. Thank you, sir. I love R-SEP. Thank you.

Starting point is 00:58:39 It's inclusive of 15 economies, and we've given an open-ended window to India. I want to combine two questions into one. What do you think would motivate India to join RSEB? And number two, how do you think ASEAN can be an effective swing region as it deals with China and the West going forward? Perfect. First of all, RSEP is a great thing because AARCP not only brings together the TANASAN countries, but it brings China, Japan, Korea together because the U.S. wants to divide them.

Starting point is 00:59:22 And, of course, it brings Australia and New Zealand. So you have 15 countries. It's a great grouping. It's a natural trade unit. But geopolitically, it's a great unit also. It should be a region of peace. And by the way, if it weren't for the United States, it would be a region of peace.

Starting point is 00:59:41 China just does not have the tradition, the cause, the reason, or the means to take over Indonesia or to invade Australia. The whole thing's ridiculous. You look at a thousand years of Chinese history. There's almost no attempt in a thousand years by China to do anything overseas in a hostile way. China never invaded Japan. I mean, never. The Mongols controlled China for a short period,

Starting point is 01:00:19 and they tried twice to invade Japan, but that was Mongolia. There are the Mongols, 1274 or 1281. The Vietnamese fought with China. By the way, somebody from Vietnam sent me, Mr. Sachs, how can you defend China? We've been fighting China forever and ever. So I went back and I said, yeah, not for the last thousand years.

Starting point is 01:00:46 You know, thousand years. Come on. You should take a hint from that. There was a fight between the Ming court and a northern Vietnamese empire in 1410 to 1427. Other than that, nothing until one. one month, January, 1979. In other words,

Starting point is 01:01:18 this is not a country. This is not the U.S., first of all. This is not Britain. This is a country that never had overseas empires, never wanted overseas empires, never once invaded Korea except when Douglas MacArthur

Starting point is 01:01:34 was threatening China with nuclear weapons. You look at the long history, and you look at the present reality. China is not a threat. China feels threatened because the U.S. has military all over the place. It has the military in its bases in Korea, in Japan, in the Philippines, and on and on, you know, across the first island chain. So China says, yeah.

Starting point is 01:02:05 And then China reads the U.S. material about the choke points. in the Malacca's or the choke points in the South China Sea. So it says, we need a Navy. Yeah. And then the United States, oh, you see how belligerent they are. So in other words, China's not a threat. The United States is trying to make China into a threat. It's telling Japan and Korea and Australia every day, you know, will protect you.

Starting point is 01:02:40 From what? You know, the protection is from a self-fulfilling war that the United States might provoke. Okay, anyway, I'll end that rant. Arsup is a great idea, and China is a wonderful economy that can really help development all over the place because it's a high-saving economy. It's the low-cost producer of a lot of things. rest of ARSEP needs, solar power, long distance of power transmission, hydrogen economy, and so forth. And it makes naturally the industrial supply chain should be all over the ASEAN countries.

Starting point is 01:03:28 And so this would build up the whole East Asian region, Northeast and Southeast Asia, in an incredibly healthy and productive way. So I'm a huge fan. Now, India. India, what's going to make India join Arsup? Donald Trump. He's going to be the best friend of Arsep. And the reason is he just put on 50% tariffs on India. And for years I was telling India, don't play games.

Starting point is 01:04:00 Don't think that you're the new China because the United States is going to embrace you throw out China and make you rich India. It's not going to happen. If you get successful at all, the U.S. is going to slam the door shut

Starting point is 01:04:22 on you too the same way because the United States doesn't care at all about India. I said this for years. They said, oh, you're so anti-American. I said, no, I'm not anti-American. I am American, but I know America.

Starting point is 01:04:39 and I know the politics here. Well, Trump proved me right. You know, within basically, within 48 hours, he proved you cannot rely on the United States, even years of building these relations and Prime Minister Modi standing next to President Trump at rallies and so forth. I could have told them.

Starting point is 01:05:09 did tell them. And I also said, please, this quad thing, this is another typical U.S. game. Don't do it. The last thing you need is a confrontation with China. Now, that's another story, because truly, yes, the British, as usual, completely messed up things by two people of McMaster. and Bradcliffe drawing lines on a map of places they never visited and demarcating the Himalayas a hundred years ago. And that line needs to be demarcated. And indeed, there were a lot of border disputes in East Asia because the place was never demarcated by the empires anyway. But almost all of them have been worked out. The China-India border. in the Himalayas have not been worked out.

Starting point is 01:06:11 One of the sad parts, ironically, is that when India became independent, Nehru just grabbed the McMahon line as the claim of India, rather than saying, God, the British made such a mess. Why should we accept the 1907 line by a guy named McMahon to determine our relations with China? So if Nehru had been a little bit more careful, the China-India relations would have gone in a completely different way. All of this is to say, I think China and India should mend their controversies. They're not over fundamental issues.

Starting point is 01:06:58 Both of them have a fundamental shared, important goal of creating a multipolar, multilateral world. And they share almost entirely in this. Neither really wants the United States as a hegemon. And other than the U.S. playing India against China, both of them have an overriding interest in saying to the United States, behave, you're not the hegemon.

Starting point is 01:07:31 you're one of several major powers and you should behave. So I'm constantly saying in India and in China, the two should get together. And I'm constantly saying in India, don't trust the U.S. And don't play this quad game and don't think the U.S. is your protection. Believe me, it isn't. Well, in any event, you know, I wasn't winning the arguments, I would say. say, until Donald Trump came along. And now I think Donald Trump proved really in a very short period of time.

Starting point is 01:08:10 And with ugly rhetoric, by the way, you know, just as nasty as could be by it. Out of nothing, because he's a bully. And suddenly it got the idea I'm going to threaten Putin. And now India has to side with me in the threat against Putin. And I make this demand. And when prime minister of a country of 1.5 billion people, almost five times the size of the U.S. says, no, no, no, you buy from Russia. We're going to buy from Russia.

Starting point is 01:08:42 Then comes the punitive tariffs, the insults. Okay. Anyway, now I think India sees. Prime Minister Modi will be visiting Xi Jinping shortly. Good. let's get India into Arsep, honestly. It would make a tremendous, tremendous plus for India, for RSEP and for the world. Win, win, win, believe me.

Starting point is 01:09:13 So we should really work on that. Amen, amen. On that note, Professor Sacks, I want to thank you for your time, perspectives, and wisdom, as always. Yeah, great to talk with you. It's such interesting discussion. Thank you. Wonderful. Thanks a lot. Friends, that was Jeffrey Sachs from Columbia University. Thank you.

Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Why Jeffrey Sachs Thinks That Indonesia's Leadership Is Needed

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