Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 4/4/23 Jeffery Sachs on What Led to War in Ukraine

Episode Date: April 5, 2023

Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University joins the show to discuss the war in Ukraine. First, Scott asks him about his extensive experience telling the truth about American foreign policy on national television. They then take a look back at the important developments that led to this war over Ukraine. They discuss the talks after the fall of the USSR, the Russian interest in the port at Sevastopol, the true beginning of the current war in 2014 and more.  Discussed on the show: Naftali Bennett interview “NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard” (National Security Archive) Jeffrey David Sachs is an American economist, academic, public policy analyst, and former director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, where he is currently a Professor.  This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys introducing geoffrey sacks professor at columbia university welcome the show how you doing sir good to be with you thank you very happy i have you here so uh you first came to my

attention during the days about 10 years ago, I guess, during the days of Obama's dirty war in Syria. And you were the only guy that they'd a let on TV who knew anything about it to tell the truth about it, right? Anyone else who had a contrary point of view didn't have the status. But for whatever reasons, the Vignabrasinski's daughter would let you come on her show and tell the truth about what was going on in that dirty war, which was so contrary to the official narrative here. So I was wondering, first of all, can you just talk about, I mean, first of all, like, you know, your perspective on it, but also what gives you the courage to come out and contradict everybody when the entire consensus between New York

City and Washington, D.C. is that the Shiites are worse, and these are our moderate rebels, and we got to do what we got to do. Look, the problem with U.S. foreign policy is that it's based on a lot of lies, and the lies just keeps spilling over. And, I've now lived a long time hearing and actually studying the lies because I go back to the Vietnam War era. My first lessons in geopolitics were in the 1960s. A lot of lies were told then, and not dissimilar to the lives that are being told now about the U.S. in Ukraine, actually. But the modern era in 21st century began with massive lies about Iraq. And I happened to be on a show the day that Colin Powell had made his presentation to the UN Security Council about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.

Actually, the Charlie Roe Show. and I was in a group and I think there were six of us around the table and all of them said, yes, yes, General Powell, he's telling it like it is. And they turned to me and I said, you know, it's lies. You can hear it. Actually, this is not the truth. And they focused the camera on me. Are you calling General Powell a liar? And I said, well, I'm saying he's lying. And of course, he was. This was a bogus arguments for a massive war that ended up costing the United States trillions of dollars. So all I can say is you get into the habit of it, actually a little bit. In 2011, I happened to be on Morning Joe the day that, or maybe the day after President Obama,

Secretary Clinton said, Assad must go. Okay, here we go again. Another regime change operation, absolutely doomed to fail, as always. And I was on the show and I said, hmm, this is going to be bad again. And they were very surprised because, as you said, it was, it was, the common narrative, that Assad's bad, Assad must go. And we keep doing this in foreign policy. We make up narratives. We decide something. The State Department spokesman says it often enough. The White House declares something often and often. For most of the media, that becomes the truth.

It's weird. Don't people think? Well, you know, actually, they do think because they don't believe the U.S. government, but a lot of the media don't question the U.S. government anymore. That's really disappointing because the role of the media actually should be to be skeptical and to say, oh, yeah, is that really right? Why don't you show us the evidence? And they don't do that anymore. Yeah. Well, I think part of it, too, is they just really don't even know, right?

I mean, Morning Joe and Mika Brzynski, they're probably two of the more educated types. to have TV shows on major cable TV news, but it seemed like, well, this is the enemy of the month right here, but neither of them were able to put it in the context that you were putting it in, that, well, wait a minute, al-Qaeda in Iraq, these were the bad guys from the last war in Iraq on the other side of the line, and now we're calling a moderates, and we're pretending that the Shiite-aligned dictator in the three-piece suit is somehow worse than a bunch of bin Ladenites. Well, but I think the basic point is that with experience, you come to know that most foreign policy is conducted through these kind of confabulated narratives. We're not told the truth. It's not the business of the American people to meddle in U.S. foreign policy.

That's the basic view of the permanent state. And we created back in 1914. 47, the CIA, with the express directions. Look, you're a secret agency. You report to the president. I assume that's true. I hope all of the time, but who knows? But in any event, yeah, you operate in secret. So we designed a foreign policy based on secrecy.

and when you're experienced in this over the course of many, many years, you know that you're not hearing even the basics, but at least there should be skepticism to realize this, but maybe even that point is not realized or it's not worth it, makes the viewers uncomfortable. It is pretty worrisome to me, though, that these days on crucial issues, really issues that are, you know, potentially shaping the future of the planet. We don't hear two sentences of truth in a row often. Yeah, boy, that sure is right, and especially with the current situation here. And I think this is probably anybody's experience, if they've ever actually dealt with the media, if anybody's ever been in the newspaper, they know that, well, wait a minute, that's not what I said, or not exactly, or the reporter didn't understand what I was trying to tell him, or at best, right, just about anything. So obviously, you have a background where you know a lot about Russia. So this controversy breaks out in Eastern Europe, and you go, well, everybody, I got all this context for you. But they don't have that context. So obviously, it's not that you're looking at it from Vladimir Putin's point of view, but from the point of view of an American who actually

understands the background a little bit. So can you explain? I mean, they say, and they seem to mean it, sir, that Vladimir Putin has this right-wing ideology that says he has to recreate the Russian Empire. He's a revanchist, and we have to stand up to him or else he'll be in Berlin in a couple of years. Yeah, this is just the weirdest narrative and a very unfortunate one. Putin did not want this war. He actually made diplomatic demands, I would say, but he made diplomatic demands at the end of 2021 that in my view, and I set it to the White House, actually, were the basis for serious

negotiation. They weren't flippant. They weren't crazy. They were real. And the center of this, and I've watched this now for more than 30 years, pretty close up, is the question of NATO on Russia's border. And that's an issue, by the way, you could trace it for two centuries. Russia does not like what it perceives as a potential enemy or an actual enemy on its border. And when you've been invading, by Hitler and by Napoleon and by Palmerston and Napoleon the third and lots of forces over history. You just want some space. And this current story did not start in February 24th, 2022. It started back in 1990. I happened to have been there, which is pretty weird, but I was an economic advisor to Michael Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union. I was an economic advisor to Boris Yeltsin,

the first president of independent Russia. I was an economic advisor to Leonid Kuchma, the first president of Ukraine. I was an economic advisor to President Yuschenko, who followed Kuchma as president of Ukraine. I've seen this with my own eyes. In 1990, Gorbachev unilaterally, and I want to underscore unilaterally, disbanded the Soviet military alliance, which was called the Warsaw Pact. The U.S. couldn't believe it. Germany couldn't believe it. They said, oh my God, thank you. We will not take advantage of this. And a famous expression was uttered repeatedly to Gorbachev. NATO will not move one inch eastward. to take advantage of your unilateral disarming of the Warsaw Pact. And that turned out to be a big lie.

As soon as the Soviet Union ended in December 1991, the neocons in the Bush senior administration, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld. And this is a lot of Washington, by the way, started saying, okay, now NATO starts to expand. Bill Clinton came in, sided with kind of the deep state argument. Now NATO expands. All of the promises that were made, yeah, forget it. We're now the sole superpower in the world. We can do what we want.

And interestingly, Clinton's own secretary of defense, a wonderful person. William Perry said, come on, this is going to upset what we're building, which is trust with Russia, which is crucial because Russia remains a major nuclear power and we want to actually build a peaceful generation. So Perry came close to resigning over Clinton's decision to expand NATO, decided in the end he wouldn't resign. The American people never really heard anything about this debate. And the first expansion came to Central Europe, to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. But then George W. Bush Jr. came in, and the neocons, you know, led by Cheney, went into overdrive on a, on a hundred different fronts. The U.S. unilaterally walked out of

the anti-ballistic missile treaty to the absolute deep anxiety and chagrelibe. of Russia because they viewed this as directed towards Russia. The U.S. unilaterally launched the Iraq war on false pretenses. NATO expanded to seven more countries. 2004 with the three Baltic states, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, and Bulgaria, right up against the Black Sea. Putin said in 2007, stop. Stop, you're getting awfully close, and I'm telling you, you're crossing our red lines. George W in 2008 at the Bucharest summit says, no, no, now we go on to Ukraine and to Georgia. And the Europeans themselves were horrified, but Europe has no foreign policy.

Bush pushed through the final communique in Bucharest at the NATO summit, the expansion of NATO to Ukraine and to Georgia. European leaders told me at the time, what the hell is your president doing? This is unbelievably destabilizing. So then Ukraine got a president who gave a little bit of protection. Yanukovych said, we want to be neutral. We want to stay out of a proxy war between these two giants. We will be neutral. Then comes the neocons, and, well, they contributed his overthrow, a violent coup in February 2014. And we heard on tape our then assistant secretary of state, our current undersecretary of State, Victoria Newland, one of the leaders of the neoconservatives, talking about who the new government would be. you know, the U.S. was picking who it would be. I saw some of this pretty close up, actually. It was

really unpleasant, irresponsible. And that's when the war started in February 2014 with the overthrow of a pro-Russian president that was trying to maintain neutrality. Russia took back Crimea. By the way, exactly as Putin said to Bush would have. when he discussed Russia's red line in 2008. So this was all, if you were watching, knew what was going on, watching behind the scenes. This was this tragedy playing out step by step. The US flooded the zone with NATO weaponry between 2014 and 2021.

Things weren't just standing still. There was a war going on. It was a lower intensity war. intensity war, but NATO was, and the U.S. basically, is flooding Ukraine with billions of dollars of armaments. Okay, then comes the elections, 2020. Biden comes in, and Putin says, basically, to Biden, look, this is our last chance. You're building up really a large NATO army on our border. You're talking about NATO enlargement. Still, the U.S. signed several, three major documents in 2021, that NATO will move to Ukraine. And at the end of 2021, Putin said, look, you got to stop.

This is our red line. No NATO enlargement. I happened to call the White House then and spoke to senior officials, let's say, said, take it. Don't have a war. I was told, yeah, NATO's not going to enlarge. Oh, NATO's not going to enlarge. Then say it so we can avoid a war. Of course, I didn't believe what they were saying because they just want to kind of slip it through. But they refused absolutely to negotiate with Putin. And so after basically seven years of war, Putin took this major escalation in February 24, 2022. and all our newspaper said, an unprovoked action that started this day because he thinks he's Peter the Great. Crazy. Completely phony. No journalism, no background, no history, no context, no understanding,

but also no attempt in the slightest to give Americans a background to this, to explain what this is about, where this came from. Wars don't come out of the blue like this. In fact, this was a war that was going on already for eight years. But where is the media? It's just unbelievable. The intention is to spin a story that everything started a year ago and don't try to think of anything from a moment before that because otherwise then you're a Putin apologist if you think of anything. a moment before that. That's where we are. My favorite is when they pretend to be honest, like you, and go, no, this story really begins sooner when Russia took Crimea in 2014. Oh, exactly. Yeah, right. Exactly. And they just did that. Was it the Times or somebody started the date, you know, weeks after the U.S. participation in the overthrow of the government,

but not worth mentioning, not not even worth the, what could that have to do with anything? Exactly right. That's amazing. All right. So, you brought up so much stuff that I want to go back over there. But let's start with the reasonable demands right before the war, because they certainly were not treated as reasonable demands. And I think especially when Putin invoked the NATO Russia Council founding act of 1997 and Bill Clinton's promise in that deal to not put Western military equipment at, least into the new NATO countries that we were expanding into. They treated that like it was completely insane. They treated it like it was some promise from 1897. And 1997, what is he even

talking about? Obviously, anything from then is completely null and boy. But so I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about that promise and the deal that was made then and then go back to what you were saying. If you could elaborate please about how, you know, Well, what you said, that Putin's demands were reasonable. They were the basis for reasonable negotiation. They should have sat down and talked about it. Yeah. But instead, they were treated like it was all completely nuts.

And this guy, there's no way we're letting you close the door on our open door. And hell no. And treated it like, look, we'll give him assurances that, come out, we're not going to expand NATO soon. And we're not going to put missiles in her. Why would we put missiles in Harkeith? But that should be good enough for him, right? You've got it exactly right. There were two kinds of issues at the end of 2021 that Putin put on the table.

One was about Ukraine itself, and the other was more generally about the U.S. and NATO vis-a-vis Russia and especially missile security and nuclear security. it came to Ukraine, there were three basic points. One was no NATO enlargement, which I think is the fundamental point. Second was Crimea. Crimea is a very interesting story, by the way, because Russia was content, I would say, maybe it's not exactly the right word, but Russia accepted that Crimea would be part of Ukraine. When Ukraine, Ukraine, was responsibly recognizing Russia's stakes in Crimea, Yanukovych was negotiating with Putin a long-term lease, because after all, Russia's naval fleet has been in Savastopol since 1783.

And, you know, you don't have to know too much history to know that the first Crimean War, 1853 to 1856 was explicitly, I mean explicitly by the UK and France to push the Russian fleet out of the Black Sea, basically to eliminate Russia's naval force in Sabastopol. And it was in fact canceled for 20 years. That's Russia's historical memory. And rightly so. So the first thing was there had been a modus vivendi on Crimea. But after the Yanukovych overthrow, and Crimea being overwhelmingly Russian and there was the plebiscite and whatever Russia claimed Crimea, Russia, Putin said at the end of 2021, Crimea is Russian. Okay, one could negotiate that in de facto terms, but that was a starting point. by the way, many people in the U.S. government today and senior politicians privately will tell

you, yeah, yeah, we understand that about Crimea, because that is core Russian national security. I mean core. So that was number one. Number two, I'm sorry, that was number two, NATO number one, Crimea number two, and the third was the Donbass. And at that point, Russia had not annexed the Donbos, region, Donetsk and Lugansk. Russia had said, implement the treaties that Ukraine has agreed to, but failed to implement the Minsk two agreement. This is pretty basic. Implement what you've agreed. And France and Germany were guarantors in what's called the Normandy process of the Minsk agreements. We heard, you know, an incredibly weird interview by former Chancellor Angela Merkel, that, oh, I didn't really mean it with the Minsk two agreements. We didn't

think they were going to be implemented. We were just giving Ukraine time to build up its military force and so forth. Unbelievable. I don't even believe that was Merkel's view when the agreements were signed. But the statement now was so cynical. And Russia was saying, honor what you, agreed. Is that outrageous? Is that crazy? Is that song, you know, Peter the Great villainy? No, it was pretty basic. So I said to the White House, look, are you kidding? We're going to have a war over NATO enlargement that you claim isn't going to take place. And Crimea, which you know the real story about. And the midst two agreements, we're going to have a big war and see Ukraine destroyed. over these three factors, but the US refused to negotiate.

But fundamentally, it refused to negotiate over all of them, in fact, but it absolutely refused to negotiate over NATO. Then there are the real security issues of where are you putting your missiles and what are you putting up against our borders? And those are serious issues. We almost had nuclear war in 1962.

when the Soviet Union in a dingbat move of Nikita Khrushchev put offensive nuclear weapons in Cuba. And the world almost ended at that moment because the U.S. said, no, we will not have those on our border. So if the U.S. thought just a little bit, if Biden thought just a little bit, what Putin was saying was not crazy. It was the grounds for serious negotiation. But of course, it was completely brushed aside, and we have what we have. Now, what is very important to know, and also our wonderful mainstream media have not spent five minutes on this crucial point. After the Russians invaded on February 24th, about two weeks later, Zelensky said, you know,

neutrality wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. Donbass and Crimea, we should talk about that. And what happened actually, what really happened, which I don't think I ever read a word about in the New York Times, I apologize. They may have written something on page A17, but what really happened was that when Zelensky said this, the Russian said, you know, that is grounds for. for us negotiating a quick end to this. And actually, there were exchanges of papers.

And in fact, the Russians based on Zelensky's statements, exchanged papers, the Ukrainians came back. The Turkish foreign ministry was the mediator. Actually, Naftali Bennett, the former prime minister of Israel, played a role. And by the end of March, they were close to an agreement based on Ukrainian neutrality. Now, I've heard this story from a lot of insiders in some length. One day, the Ukrainians showed up and said, we're not negotiating anymore. That's the truth. You'd think a New York Times reporter might have just a glimmer of curiosity about that, but of course, no, because this whole

episode was just brushed aside. But what we have good reason to believe is the United States told the Ukrainians, no, do not negotiate on that basis. Do not negotiate on the basis of neutrality. And Naftali Bennett gave a strange but very interesting. interesting, long interview online. I wonder if it's still online. I listened to it at length. And he said, you know, he got, became friendly with Putin. He became friendly with Zelensky. He said, I can help mediate between this. So he was alongside the Turkish mediators. And he said we were close to an agreement. And then he said the U.S. stopped it. And he said, I disagree with what they did. But, you know, maybe they were right. That's what he said. Then a couple of days later,

of course, he walked back the statement. No, no, I've been misinterpreted and so forth. He committed what is technically, of course, known as a gaff, which means he accidentally told the truth and had to walk it back. But basically, my point is the basis for negotiation was there at the end of 2021. And the U.S. did not want peace on either occasion. I don't say the U.S., I should say the Biden team, did not want peace on either occasion. And we now have another year of mass bloodshed, further escalation, a complete mess. Hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, the audiobook of my book, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism is

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Okay, so let me drill down on this point here about the start of the war. clearly they were not willing to negotiate on a reasonable basis to prevent it. They were willing to say to Putin, you better not do it, and we'll punish you with sanctions and things if you do, but they weren't willing to negotiate on a reasonable basis. My question is, and I think you're alluding to this, this is your belief, but I wonder if you could tell me, you know this from speaking with Democrats in power and so forth, that they deliberately provoke this war. They wanted this war to happen in order to launch what they all told the consensus is Stravrides and Hillary Clinton and so many others in the New York Times and

foreign affairs and all over. They said, we want to replicate the Afghan war of the 1980s. They thought Kiev would fall almost immediately and that we would be backing an insurgency based out of the West or based out of Poland and that we would do the Rambo 3 and lead them to bankruptcy, just like Osama bin Laden just finished doing us. And so I wonder if you think that when they were saying, you know, you better not, that they were actually deliberately provoking the attack. I have a statement where Putin himself said, geez, I think they're trying to provoke me into doing something stupid here, but then I might not have a choice. You know, it may be truly, I don't know, I tend to doubt it, but I may be, you know,

an innocent in this. My view is they thought they could kind of bluff their way. or push their way or lean their way to what they wanted without Putin daring to do it. But maybe I'm maybe, you know, your version is absolutely correct, which it really could be. But my feeling all along is that the U.S. neocons basically think they can get away with things. I don't think they love long wars. I don't know, you know, they don't tell me their innermost thoughts, but I think they believe that they can get away with things. I think they believed that they could overthrow or, you know, help to overthrow Yanukovych and basically make a new fate of complete. But then Putin reacted, and it didn't turn out that way.

I think that they thought that the threat of what they thought would be, you know, the crushing sanctions. that would just bring the Russian economy to its knees, an extremely naive idea, by the way. And I told them that also. And there I have some professional expertise. You're not going to bring Russia to its knees through these sanctions. But in any event, I think they thought, you know, maybe he won't dare. Then we continue to arm.

We continue to make the Ukraine army interoperable. we continue to strengthen the regime, we continue to build these fortification lines, and one day we announce they're a member of NATO. I think that they thought you can get this on the cheap. I think, by the way, Putin thought, all right, now this is pretty bad. I think I can push them to the negotiating table very quickly. I don't think Putin counted on a long war either. And indeed, after a couple of weeks, Zelensky said, yeah, you know, there is actually grounds for negotiating. So I thought, I think Putin probably thought, I can push them back the other way. And then the U.S. at that point said, okay, now we have the makings of something probably pretty good.

As Lloyd Austin said, you know, famously at the time, now our goal is to weaken Russia. So that view, I don't know if it was there in December, but it was pretty explicitly stated by the end of March that now, okay, now we'll have a long war. I think there was an element of bluff here also because I think they didn't believe that Putin would be able to politically mobilize Russia for a longer war. I don't think they counted logistics at all. their ideas about the world economy and what they called the, you know, financial nuclear option of cutting rush out of swift. It was so wrong. It was just absolutely. I wrote at the time I wrote an op-ed, come on, guys, this is not how things are going to unfold. But my view in this, in this escalating battle is that each side has thought this will push the other to back down.

And what you have is two very strong wills. One says, no one tells NATO where to go, when to go, how to go, we are the United States of America. And the other side says, NATO will not be on our border. And, you know, I think the neocons have led us into one debacle after another, and that this is yet another one, of course, has led Ukraine into a far worse debacle. But it's this clash of wills, not wanting long war, but each one thinking, I can, in this game of chicken, I can push the other to back down. And so far we're on a path of escalation. And frankly, it's an extraordinarily dangerous path of escalation. And that's the other game of the media.

You're not allowed to say anything is dangerous. Oh, we can't have nuclear blackmail. We can't have this and we can't have that. Well, you know what? We should worry because there are a lot of irresponsible people in our government and in Russia and in other places. And you've got to worry all the time that escalation can get out of hand. Yeah.

All right. So I'm really torn here, but I'm going to go back to history now. The not one inch promise. I'm writing a book about this now. It's called Provote. And it's 633 pages because I can't quit writing about it. But so obviously the controversy there is that Baker clearly told Gorbachev not one inch. And that was the basis upon which Gorbachev said, okay, fine, let's make a deal then. And he agreed to pull his truth. out of Germany. But the deal they signed doesn't say that. And it doesn't say, and of course they ended up saying, well, that kind of doesn't make sense. We got to be able to expand NATO's presence inside Germany. But then the discrepancy is over whether the Russians understood that we promise not to expand any further east than that was the basis of they're negotiating everything else that they

did. And so, you know, the technicalitarians will say, as, you know, Peter Baker in the New York Times, well, it doesn't say that in a treaty. They used to deny that it was promised at all, but then George Washington University National Security Archive put up all the documents for everybody to read. It's like, okay, well, it's in writing, but it's not in an actual deal. So you're professing firsthand knowledge of this. I was wondering if you could help to, you know, explain the nuance here. and whether the Russians really had a deal or whether they didn't. Look, I think the deal was there.

I think Gorbachev should have gotten it in writing. It would have helped a lot. But there's no question that the meaning of not one inch eastward wasn't within the GDR, wasn't within East Germany, because there were many, many statements, not just about Germany, but about moving eastward towards the Soviet Union into central and eastern Europe, and basically not taking advantage of the unilateral gesture or the unilateral action of Gorbachev, who was a man of peace, very rare. And, you know, in this prisoner's dilemma game, where peace on both sides is a lot better than war on both sides.

The argument is, well, if you're soft, the other side takes advantage of you. And the Soviet side was, quote, soft. You know, and if you're a profound and deep cynic, you say, okay, yeah, great. What a sucker this guy was. If you're actually out for peace and for the world, you say, God, did we really have to wreck this once-in-a-century opportunity to be. build a safer world because that's exactly what we did. We've lawyered up, we played with words, we hid the discussions, we phonyed it up, and here's where we are. So, you know, many scholars and historians point out lots of

international agreements are verbal commitments. Those are clear. We thank George Washington University for those archives because they're really good and very, very helpful. They make very clear the meaning of these terms, but Gorbachev should have gotten it in writing. Yeah, they would have just tore that up too, the way they tore up the ABM treaty and whatever else is in their way. But now, okay, so you told Tulsi Gabbard on her show that you had gone to Ukraine just after the coup in 2014, and the NGOs were showing you around and bragging about how they had helped overthrow the government there. So I was more if you could elaborate on that anecdote.

Yeah, you know, I was asked by the new government, come and talk to us about our financial crisis and financial situation. That's what I do as a professor. So if a government calls, I generally try to go. So I went to beat the new prime minister Yatsunuch. And the Maidan was still filled with the protesters. and there were Americans all around, and I had a couple of hours before my meeting, and they showed me around. They explained, yeah, we were all out there.

We made this great demonstrations. You know, we helped them, we supported them, we financed this, we financed that, all completely consistent with what we know. We don't know all the story, but we know that Victoria Newland was basically camping out in, in Kiev, those weeks helping to steer what became a violent insurrection against the government. And, God, I hated what I saw because I just, I wouldn't like on January 6th to find out that, yeah, the enthusiasm and the money had come from, you know, lots of foreign powers that said, go, you know, go storm the capital. We'd feel great about that, wouldn't we? You know, but that's exactly what we did.

So I think you probably won't want to name first and last names of individual people, but can you name some organizations that we're talking about here? I probably don't want to right now, but it's, they know some of them have bragged about it. It's pretty unpleasant. I actually believe as a general matter, by the way, that the National Endowment for Democracy should be shut down as an institution dangerous to the well-being of the American people. So that's not what I experienced in that instant, but it's a more general observation. We should not be meddling in the internal politics, the mechanics of party politics, of elections,

the way we do relentlessly in a lot of places, it's bad news for us, very dangerous. We hate it when anyone comes miles close to what we do right up to the right up to the vote and we should stop doing it. We made institutions that are designed to meddle deeply and in a completely non-transparent way in politics of other countries, and we should stop that. You know, let me ask you this. I mean, I'm sorry because it's kind of a straw man thing, but I see it all the time. It's kind of a talking point of the other side, which is you're just denying the will of the people of the Maidan or the people of the Rose Revolution or whatever. people wish that their country could change and we came and helped them a little bit and now you're denying their agency by giving all the credit to the CIA because you live in conspiracy world or

something like that look you know their business is their business my business is what our government is doing and that's what i'm talking about right now we should not have been there our politicians should not have been there we should not have been funding uh this uh what's turned into this open uprising, period. So, you know, it's not denying any agency of anyone else. It's denying what our role of irresponsibility is we should take care and stay away from this kind of meddling. And, you know, if you've seen the world, as I've seen some of these very unfortunate things. I don't like American-led insurrections or even American participation in insurrections. I don't like the covert operations like we talked about in Syria, which was a

presidential order actually to the CIA to overthrow Assad. No, I don't like that. That's a terrible idea. And basically, we know historians have produced long lists of dozens and dozens of regime change operations. My belief about foreign policy is foreign policy is you deal with another government, with diplomacy, with negotiation, with the many things, but you don't make foreign policy based on overthrowing other governments. And if we followed that, basic idea that foreign policy is about diplomacy, it's not about regime change, we would have spared millions of lives and trillions of wasted dollars in the U.S. because we got hooked on regime change a long time ago, already going back to the 1950s, and it's been a disaster

for the United States, a disaster, not to mention a disaster for the other countries. Okay, so let's go back to 08. You said you talked with leaders from the European Union about the Bucharest Declaration at the time. You mentioned that. I was just wondering if you could give us any more specific anecdotes there about French, German positions that they held, who it was, what exactly they said to you at the time? Well, it wasn't the French or the Germans. So I can say that. I won't say more than that, except to say that European leaders were really unhappy with Bush, because Bush had basically told them, as I understand it, we're not going to do that, went off to Christmas holidays apparently came back and said, okay, now we're enlarging to Ukraine and to Georgia. And they were really unhappy. A lot of that unhappiness was shown publicly because Sarkozy and Merkel said, no, we're not going to put a path to membership, but Bush forced the final declaration to say that NATO will enlarge to Ukraine and to Georgia, not maybe, not

someday, but just will enlarge to Ukraine and to Georgia. And by the way, just anecdotally, soon after that, the Georgian leader, Shokashvili, came to New York on a quick tour of the U.S., and I went to hear him at the Council on Foreign Relations. I couldn't believe what I was hearing because the guy was saying, yeah, we're going to join NATO, we're in the center of Europe, and the Americans in the room, yeah, yeah, we're with you 100%. And I walked out of there shaking. This is crazy. This guy is going to get his head handed to him. And it wasn't just a few weeks later that Russia and Georgia were at war and he got his head handed to him. And you know, these countries also need some prudence. They need to

know if you're Georgia campaigning for NATO membership as a country. and the caucuses, not smart, not prudent. The Ukrainians should have understood that to invite this proxy war on their soil is first and foremost the massive disaster for their country. But we also shouldn't entice them into this. And we're, you know, pretty convincing. You put your arm around them. We got your back. We're with you. We love you until we don't. And how many times if we walked away from, and we'll walk away from this also most likely in a horrible way, but I don't want us to walk away. I want us to settle this through negotiation just to be clear. But, you know, these countries also need prudence. They need to understand. Don't get yourself trapped in a proxy

war. All right. And then one last thing. On that Bucharest declaration and the Germans and the French and everybody else complaining about it, did they have any other reason to oppose this besides it'll unnecessarily provoke Vladimir Putin's Russia? I think that that was the basic idea that, you know, why go up right to the front line and destabilize the situation? they just sensed. And of course, many, many American thinkers, most famously George Kennan in 1997, and I mentioned Bill Perry, and there were many others, and Kissinger and others, knew, don't destabilize a fragile situation, especially if you have a modicum of knowledge of Russian history. And so I think it was basically prudential on their side. All right. Well, thank you very much for the great interview. I hope we can catch up

sometime relatively soon. I want to ask you a little bit about the 19- All right, very good. Let's do that. I can't wait to read your book. Good. Okay. Well, I hope I can, once it's done, I can edit it back down to 600 readable pages. I have a lot of work left to do still, but I'm sure you'll like. Great to talk to you. Take care. Okay. Thank you very much. Appreciate you. all right you guys that is geoffrey sacks he is professor at columbia university the scott horton show anti-war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 fm in l a psradyo dot com antiwar dot com scothorton dot org and libertarian institute dot org