The Duran Podcast - Wars in the West, development in the East - Jeffrey Sachs, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen

Episode Date: October 22, 2023

Wars in the West, development in the East - Jeffrey Sachs, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen

Welcome to today's program. My name is Glenn Dyson, professor of political science. With me is Alexander McCurice from the very popular and informative Duran. And the guest today, back very much by popular demand as well, is Jeffrey Sachs, a renowned economist, former economic advisor to Poland, to Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and, well, I assume everyone now know who Jeffrey Saxon. So welcome back, sirs. Good to see you. Great to be with you. Thank you.

So the topic we really wanted to cover today was, yeah, well, war in the West, or at least the proximity of the West and economic connectivity and development currently happening in the East, especially with this Belt and Road Initiative summit. As, you know, Financial Times wrote only a few days ago that a G7 diplomat argued that the West had lost the battle for the global south over its position on Israel and Palestine. Palestine. And all at the same time as this is happening, of course, we're seeing at the other side of the world the global south or the global majority, as now often referred to, meet in Beijing for this Belt and Road initiative. And the quite shocking is, yeah, the large absence by the West, which I think only Hungary appeared of all the Europeans with Viktor Orban. And it seems, yeah, the West is boycotting it to a large extent where most of the new economic connectivity. taking place and I'm fearful at least that it ends up in isolating itself but I thought we can start with the conflict going on in Israel and Palestine first because I think we're everyone well hopefully everyone was horrified by the Hamas brutal killing of Israeli civilians but of course

the context of the situation of Palestinian lives and the response of Tel Aviv was also been and continues to be quite horrifying as well so Professor Sachs, I was hoping that you could start off by perhaps giving your overview. How did this happen? And what do you see being the objective of the West now? Because at least the United States has now vetoed two calls for ceasefire. Where is this going? Can it be contained?

Sorry, it's a lot of questions. Well, yes, indeed. And it's a lot on the world's plate right now. And maybe the UN Security Council is the right place to start. because essentially there is a 14 to one vote right now in the UN Security Council. 14 states, including four of the five permanent states, want a ceasefire and want a political resolution of this decades and decades long Israel-Palestine conflict. But the United States is using its veto. This says a lot.

This says that the United States essentially is isolated on this matter. And it is because we're at the long end of a failed policy. And the failed policy is the same failure in Ukraine. It's the same failure which, actually, as you said, as united the world and on the other side of the globe in Beijing. It is the U.S. approach that military dominance should be used for political dominance and that this will be sufficient to run the show. And that was true in the U.S. and Israel avoiding for decades. any real political solution to a always extraordinarily hot and difficult conflict between Israel and Palestine.

It's never been resolved. It's basically a century-old conflict now, since just after World War I when a Jewish homeland was established under the so-called Balfour Declaration. And from that date till now, there have been two ethnic groups in the same place, and there's never been a political settlement of that most basic issue. And the U.S. position for decades has been, we're the most powerful country in the world, we can do what we want. And allies of the United States have said, we can say what we want and do what we want because the U.S.

has our back. It doesn't work. It never solved anything, but it really is unraveling now before our eyes. And similarly, in Ukraine, we have really a crisis that is essentially the same story, which is the United States after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, We can now dominate the political space of the post-Soviet world, maybe not Russia directly, but certainly surrounding Russia. And we'll do that politically. We'll do that militarily with NATO enlargement.

And we don't have to talk with Russia or anybody else on that. And this is unraveling also. So we have a basic foreign policy approach of the United States, which is that military power can determine political outcomes. This is always a dubious proposition, but with the declining relative power of the United States, with the rise of China, with the rise of many more countries as regional powers, this whole proposition that the U.S. leads is completely anachronistic, and it's failing everywhere. But it's fascinating that President Biden

has just given a dreadful talk to the American people where he uses every cliche of the 1990s, in fact, quotes Madeline Albright of the indispensable nation, as if we haven't had the past 30 years and the unraveling of this whole process. So what we're seeing is sad,

but it shows a U.S. leadership that is absolutely without an understanding of the rapidly changing world and has no tools to address it. And, you know, lead, I don't, lead is probably much too strong a word, actually, but somehow formally presided over by an octogenarian who's especially out of touch. And this doesn't work. It's extremely dangerous. The American people do not understand what's going on. The media do not help at all.

They only muddy everything. Our internal politics in the United States is a complete mess. The fight over the Speaker of the House in the House of Representatives demonstrates. So it's a mess. There's a lot of killing. violence taking place. Tensions are high, understanding is low, diplomacy is dreadful. But the one glimmer in this is that there are 14 votes out of 15 and the UN Security

Council that are pointed in the right direction, which is that we need a political settlement in the Israel-Palestine conflict. And that shows to me something more fundamental, which is that it's. not impossible to find a political approach more generally to the world for this kind of post-neocon era that we're soon to be entering if we don't blow ourselves up in the meantime. I completely agree. I completely agree with every point just made. Can I say that for me there's been two things that have stood out most of all about this crisis? We've had many periods before when there's been great violence in the Middle East, and it's been awful, and this is another one,

and this one has been particularly awful. But up to now, everybody has looked at the Americans to come up with the solutions. They've been the people who've been coming to the Middle East, they've been brokering or trying to broker, or going through the motions of brokering agreements and ceasefires and those sort of things. And I think the general consensus, everywhere, on every side now, is that the Americans have failed, that they have not managed to move this process forward. And we've had the President of the United States going to the Middle East. And instead of making the situation calmer, which is what he should have been trying to do, instead of taking steps as far as I can see to de-escalate, from what I can tell,

his visit has, if anything, made things worse. he has not been able to speak to the leaders of the Arab states. We've now reached that stage where the Arab states no longer want to speak to the president of the United States, which is something unprecedented in my lifetime. Just before we did this program, there was reports that President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority has now refused a call from President Biden. So the Arabs have had enough of the Americans. The first time, as I said, that the President of the United States goes to the Middle East, nobody is prepared to speak to him.

He offers no solutions. He doesn't talk about ceasefires. He makes a speech which exactly as Professor Sachs says on the Middle East seems to me more like an exercise in ticking boxes, rather than coming up with any kind of constructive ideas and which is full of cliches. He goes off on a tangent discussing Ukraine. Hardly apropos at this time, I mean, it seems to be, and offering no solutions, no real ways forward,

just ticking boxes and exactly, as Professor Sacks said, retreating into cliches. Of course, linking Ukraine and Gaza was, a not very subtle way to try to push this $60 billion of Ukraine funding through a Congress, which is more and more resistant because the American public is more and more resistant. So it was pretty crude, and it was pretty jerry-rigged, as you say, in the speech. but also harking back to this idea, bizarre, uninspiring, cliched, America holds the world together, which somehow the rest of the world doesn't quite see, you know, they're missing the point.

So this is, it was pretty pathetic. We'll see what happens today when this 100 billion total package hits the ground. But that was the linkage made, just a device to somehow bundle, very unpopular spending on Ukraine with what could well be more acceptable, though not very wise, spending on Israel right now. So that's what that was about, obviously. But I'm a bit, well, again, we discussed earlier before the program that this. is a very polarized conflict. You know, we have to choose one side of the other. You know, either you have to support Hamas, apparently, or you have to support ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

But I was wondering, even if we're our point of departure, just to look at how the world has changed, if our point of departure is, you know, we want to take a pro-Israeli position, only looking at Israel, would it not then be also in the interest of Israel at this point to start to look for a political settlement? Because, well, as Professor Sachs pointed out,

for many years, Israel didn't have to make any compromise, didn't have to accept any political settlement, especially over Palestinian state, because it had the unconditional support of the United States as the hegemon. But I would say what we've seen now, not just recently, but a wider, longer trend is the relative decline of the United States, losing its influence in the region, the entrance of new actors, we see that Israel itself is becoming more more divided internally. We see allies of Israel becoming more appalled, taking a greater distance after its use of force. His neighbors are growing stronger. And also the new rising great powers, be China or Russia, none of them going against Israel, but certainly they want a more balanced approach to the region. So my argument is from purely pro-Israeli perspective, if it will be

weaker tomorrow, wouldn't it not be in their interest to make a deal today in terms of a political settlement as opposed to going into the deepest conflict at a time when its position is weakening? If I might start on that, first on the polarization, partly it is a deep human impulse of us versus them mentality and dynamics, but partly it is, of course, a propagandistic game. And Orwell explained it very, very well in 1984, his book, not the date of that book, but in the 1940s, that you obliterate the past so that you can propagandize the present and the future. and anyone that is aware of the past, whether it is the past regarding Ukraine, the war and its

antecedents and causes and provocations, or the hundred years of strife in Israel, Palestine, well, then you know that this polarization is phony. It's an attempt to make you take stark sides in what is a very, deep complex issue which needs a proper resolution politically, not by a simple military control by one side or the other. So the first point of this polarization is we would not be so polarized if there was a proper accounting of history and background. and some memory of that, which we're told repeatedly by the dominant narratives of power.

Don't have memory. Listen to us. This is out of the blue. This is pure evil. This is whatever it is rather than trying to understand what this is about. But on the question of Israel's well-being, it's not just now. I would say it goes back decades and decades that many powerful parts of leadership of the Israeli political system has resisted a political settlement because the belief was variously,

we don't have to settle. It's too dangerous to settle. The land is all ours anyway, different variants, different beliefs. but the political system has always weighed against a real political settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, leading to the much discussed and never realized two-state solution. And that goes back many, many decades. And Israel's been divided over this for a long time. And back after the six-day war in June 1967, this debate raged what to do with this captured territory.

And the prevailing answer was, one way or another, the Israel needs to control this for the long term, whether through annexation or through settlements or through subterfuge or through creating a Palestinian-hust. enclave that doesn't have a real statehood, whatever it is, the effective decision was taken a long time ago, don't have a two-state solution, always blame the other side for the lack of that solution. But that was the decision taken to start settlements of Israelis in the occupied territories. Those settlements now number in the hundreds with hundreds of thousands of Israelis in the West Bank, hundreds of thousands, a couple hundred thousand plus in East Jerusalem. This was a plan, and the plan was military power and dominance will be sufficient, especially with the U.S. backing.

It never made sense. and it's unraveling now tragically, disastrously, awfully, but the U.S. is absolutely unaware of the unraveling, or I'd say the president of the United States is clearly unaware of the unraveling, but the unraveling is occurring at alarming speed. And as we see the mass destruction of Gaza taking place, right now, the unraveling will only intensify in the coming days because what's happening now is absolutely shocking. I'm going to make a few observations. I mean, I've been reading

extensively the Israeli media and I have been surprised and impressed actually by how much more sophisticated the discussion in Israel about this whole situation is. There's much more perceptions within Israel of the fact... I go through a lot of the Western media as well as the Israeli media. And if you read the Hartets, for example, almost on a daily basis, you'll find articles which are quite critical of the policy. Now, I wouldn't frame it as being anti-Israel, because the main argument is, you know, by forcing people in Gaza to live in this manner,

to essentially set them up in what now, you know, some resemble, well, open-air prison or concentration, whatever you want to call it. There also is criticism, even from, I think it was a former head of Mossad, who referred to it as an apartheid state, given that you have two different sets of rules and laws for, you know, Jewish versus the Palestinian citizens. So it's quite surprising that they allow for this, or they have this some pluralism or some debate at least within Israel in terms of defining, you know, their interest is what is the pro-Israeli policy? And it feels like they at least have the discussion of what should be defined as such. But one gets the impression that in the West we locked ourselves down, which we often do in foreign policy, by the way, is if you support Israel, then you support the, you know, the, you know, being pro-Israel against the Palestinians. To some extent, we see this across many conflicts we're seen Ukraine as well.

If you're pro-Ukraine, that means, you know, you have to support the toppling of their government. You have to support the anti-terrorist operation against their own people. You have to support, you know, sabotage of peace agreements. You know, a lot of policies which actually aren't very pro-Ukrainian at all. And I just feel like we see the same now with Israel. What is the background of this? So why do you see, is there something to the foreign spectator that makes things more polarized or in defining things more as us versus them? Well, of course, Israel has been deeply divided on this issue for decades.

There has been a peace movement in Israel for decades. And a peace movement in this context means the push for a political. settlement that typically calls for a Palestinian state alongside Israel. So that division has been there for half a century and indeed more. And before the Hamas attack, Israel was absolutely out on the streets in the bitterest political conflict between the supporters and opponents of the Netanyahu government over not exactly this issue, but the part of the public that despises Netanyahu as a politician who believes that he is corrupt, power-seeking, unprincipled, and that brought hundreds of thousands of Israel.

Israelis out on the streets. So this is one of the points that weakened Israel in the lead-up to these events. The guard was down because Israel itself was at each other's throats, actually, over internal political conflict. So in one sense, the divisions are long-stander. in another sense, they have never led to a solution, in part, because the U.S. has always encouraged Israel to say, you don't have to compromise, we have your back, pretty much the same that occurred in Ukraine vis-a-vis Russia. the United States said to the Ukrainian government, you don't have to compromise, you don't have to negotiate. We have your back. Of course, the United States doesn't have anybody's back right now. Ukraine is in the process of being destroyed with the U.S. at its back because the U.S. position

does not make sense. And the Ukrainian in a decision to pursue NATO membership rather than neutrality makes no sense for Ukraine's own interest and security. But it's been this call by the United States. You don't have to compromise that leads to this very strange political dynamic. Now, what happens in the United States? Well, our politics are very far removed from ground. realities in either the Middle East or in Ukraine. So the understanding of the dynamics are very low.

The quality of political discourse in the United States is absolutely dreadful. The historical knowledge is basically non-existent. And the mindset of the U.S. leaders for many decades is essentially, built on arrogance, which is the most powerful country in the world, can turn that military power into political outcomes as desired. Well, you would think after Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and the Middle East. The United States may have gotten the idea, not such a great idea. Maybe diplomacy would be helpful rather than assertions of the U.S. as the indispensable nation and all these other cliches.

But seemingly, at least in the political class, in the United States, there is such a collapse of understanding and knowledge that cliches seem to be the last hold of the U.S. political class in Washington right now. There's just no proper understanding of what's happening. And maybe not insignificant part of this is the selling of arms became the business of the United States. we see it. It's this literal role of the military contractors and their lobbyists also hijacking a lot of U.S. foreign policy. So that's actually part of the story as well. Lockheed and Northrop Grumman and Boeing and General Dynamics and Raytheon getting hundreds of billions of dollars of military contracts over the years and exercising extraordinarily lobbying weight over U.S. politics.

One of the remarkable things we've seen in this fight over the next Republican speaker of the House in the U.S. House of Representatives is that the chairman of the House of Armed Services, Committee, who's basically the recipient of the largesse of the military industrial complex, is negotiating that the incoming speaker will support proper funding for Ukraine and, and presumably Israel, meaning that you see the handiwork of the military industrial complex and the arms contractors and their lobbyists at work in the interstices of the day-to-day political machinations in Washington. And that plays a big role, especially in an election year.

And we're entering the one year until 2024 right now. So all eyes are on campaign contributions. So this is another part of the bizarre story right now. say on the U.S. side, it's incredible ignorance, long distance from ground realities, a complete unawareness of how the rest of the world has changed and moved on because, you know, my job is to be working with governments around the world. And I know that Washington has no understanding of the perspectives of the rest of the world at all. So it's that complete absence of in-depth knowledge, understanding of the local realities, longstanding hubris and overbelief in

the ability of military power to define political outcomes and the weight of the military industrial complex. It all adds up to quite a mess in poor, I'd say even disastrous decision-making in Washington. Well, speaking of, well, failing to appreciate the changing realities in the world. Obviously, as things are stagnating in the West, we see now in the East, there is a huge economic changes in the international economic infrastructure. We were spoken before, the three of us about BRICS, this grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. Obviously, an important institution to decentralize the international economic system. Of course, now with six more states being, you know, Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia.

And UAE. UAE. We have a, you know, this takes on a huge format. And, you know, this accommodates everything from, you know, diversifying or decentralizing technologies, industries, transportation corridors, banks, currencies, currencies, across the board. But at the moment, we also have had this meeting now, as I mentioned in the beginning, with the Belt and Road Initiative, which is, quite fascinating. This is, well, effectively, well, the whole world, except the West represented. And all this initiatives, it seemed like, you know, a huge potential to make, to reduce the dependence only in one central power. However, my question was about a comment you made at a conference we were recently about that,

which was you argue that one should be careful that this doesn't end up dividing the world into blocks, which I found was very interesting because certainly we don't want to repeat of this. Whenever countries express to loyalty to exclusive blocks, it amplifies this zero-sum logic of us versus them. So how do you see this? Do you see all the initiatives? What do these economic initiatives in the East mean? Do you see us reverting to block politics? So you see this being more inclusive and pacifying international rival race.

Of course, the direction right now is towards divided blocks, but that is, I'd say, a U.S. approach, a completely wrongheaded one, again, based on a total miscalculation and misunderstanding of ground realities, He's essentially based on the idea that the U.S. still predominates, that the U.S. still leads, as Biden said again. But he's living in a different world. It was delusional then, in my view, but it's completely anachronistic now. And I think it's extremely important to understand some basic facts, just a couple of things very, very quickly. at the beginning of the 1800s, at the beginning of the 19th century, Asia accounted for around 60% of world output. The North Atlantic region, meaning today's Europe, UK and United

States and Canada, maybe 25% of world output or so. During the 19th century, because of industrialization, that flipped. the West became the dominant power of the world. That was a deep historical reversal. And the West dominated military and industrial power from essentially around 1800 with the rise of industrialization, reaching its apogy of power, I would say, certainly in the first half of the 20th century, but then two of the most destructive wars in history, essentially the first one, a European civil war, the second one, a European civil war and an Asia-Pacific war provoked by industrial Japan, meant that 1950 was a turning point in history, in world economic history.

It was the maximum advantage, even after the two world wars, of the West over Asia. But at that moment, with India's independence and the founding of the People's Republic of China and what would soon be the end of the French Empire in, Asia and the end of European empires in Asia more generally, you see what we call economic convergence. And that means that Asia for decade after decade after decade, developed economically and technologically faster than the North Atlantic region, narrowing the gap, catching up, because there was headroom.

They were so far behind. It was an impoverished region. and over the course from 1950 till today, Asians catching up with the West so that the West no longer predominates. The mindset of the West continues. Nostalgia is extraordinarily powerful. Britain, with all respect, still thinks it's an empire, still thinks it runs the world. You know, the press and the British politicians struck the world stage. It's been a long, long time since that made any sense. And the United States is roughly in the same position, but lagging behind a bit right now.

And what happened is China became a larger economy than the United States already many years ago. If both economies are measured at a common set of. prices, what we call purchasing power adjusted prices. And the BRICS, as you mentioned, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, those five already were larger than the G7 countries in recent years. Roughly, according to the IMF's estimates, again, at common international prices or purchasing power parity, the BRICS five were 32 percent of world output compared to. to 30% of world output of the G7, which is the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan. And so already this change had taken place. Now you add the six new members of

the BRICS, and it's 37% of world output according to the IMF data compared to 30% of the G7. We're in a different age right now. And China is exceedingly sophisticated in its diplomacy and on the right track because the Belt and Road Initiative, which is in its 10th anniversary and its third big summit, now engages 150 countries around the world developing 21st century connected infrastructure. And when you read the commentaries and the analysis out of China in the context of this third bricks form, it's absolutely on target and highly sophisticated. They call it multidimensional connectivity because it's energy, its transport, and it's digital. China is at the cutting edge of all three of those technologies.

it is putting hundreds of billions of dollars of finance because China's a high saving society to the development of this infrastructure. The U.S. badmows the Belt and Road Initiative. Oh, it's a debt trap. It's something stupid. And, of course, it's so crude and absurd. what is said about this, because the whole rest of the world outside of this North Atlantic region and the few strong, dependent allies of the United States in Asia, know perfectly well,

this is a good, meaningful thing. And so this was a big success of China because not a propaganda and or a narrative, but because China's Belt and Road initiative makes full sense. And that's the basic point. And it's building modern infrastructure. And that's good. Connectivity is good. And so, you know, the West is in this anachronistic mode that is absolutely spinning out of control. And China's hosting countries for.

around the world aiming for sustainable development. It's quite a contrast this past week. Can I just also say the contrast is that the Chinese brick states, they seem to be looking forward. They're coming up with constructive solutions and going back to the Middle East. They're actually making proposals about how to move forward to resolve the situation in the Middle East. They're calling for a C. We see Russia, Brazil, the UAE working in the Security Council to try to get a ceasefire. And now they're talking about an international conference to try to sort out the problems in the Middle East, to sort out this crisis we have in the Middle East, to put it on a track to a sustainable solution.

And no one in the West seems to be doing the same thing. we're looking as it seems to be we're looking backwards all the time they're they're looking much more practically in a forward way forward looking way i i think that that is absolutely right and and it's also if if we should grab it some glimmers of optimism there is absolutely nothing fundamental that should block the U.S. and Europe from saying, you know what, we've had a wrong approach. We don't dominate the world. We don't run the world as if this is late 19th century Western imperialism. We need a cooperative approach. If we did that, that would not weaken European insecurity or the United States security, it would not lead to, you know, an invasion by the United

States. It would not lead to a collapse of the U.S. economy. All to the contrary, it would lead to a sigh of relief around the world. Oh, my God. You know, your fever has broken. This hallucinatory moment you've been in, you know, during your high fever is over. You're, you've, you've, woken up, welcome back to the family of nations. I don't mean to sound absurd, but there's nothing fundamental that leads us to this kind of block mentality. And it was an approach that the U.S. took based on extraordinarily out-of-date hubris that didn't make sense, even when it wasn't so extraordinarily out of date. But the U.S. could actually change its foreign policy

without doing an iota of damage to U.S. interests at all. And it could happen. Europe, I have hoped, and I continue to hope, can wake up to some of this, because if Europe actually says, you know, this isn't working so well for us, We're in a deep recession. China's our marketplace.

China's our, we share Eurasia with China. So we should partner our global gateway and China's Belt and Road. We can meet in Samarkandas, I like to say, you know, one going from east to west, the other from west to east. That's the whole idea of the Silk Road. So it was connecting Europe and China back in the day of the Roman Empire and the Han Empire. So this is 2,000 years of constructive relations if we choose to have it. And it was a little, I didn't see the full readout, but I did see the EU high representative, Yosef Burrell, going to China say, take us seriously, take us seriously.

We're a geopolitical power. Okay, fair enough. If you stop acting so absurdly as de facto a vassal of the United States, maybe Europe would be taken a lot more seriously and should be taken a lot more seriously. This has been Europe's terrible misstep of saying, okay, we follow the U.S. in lockstep. But maybe these events will open up European eyes. that would be enough actually to force a reassessment by the United States because the whole U.S. bargain is delusional right now. We lead the world when 80% of the world says, no, you don't. Don't do it.

But if Europe peels off and says, you know, we're not so keen on how this is unfolding, that would absolutely force a reassessment by the United States before we go closer and closer to global war. And we're heading in that direction if the United States doesn't change course and come out with a different foreign policy that is based on the idea of cooperation under the UN charter and under true international law, not under the rules as the U.S. wants them to be. I just would quickly add, and speaking from Britain, and you're absolutely right, by the way, about what you said about Britain. this fixation on trying to be a great power, especially in the case of Britain, when you are not. One effect it has is that it distracts us in Britain from addressing our very pressing and growing internal problems.

If you live in Britain, you will know exactly what I mean. We have been living off legacy of empire, and that is frittering away, thank goodness. and the result is that we are becoming less adapted to the changes of the modern world than we should be. And can I also say, coming back again to the Middle East, I am absolutely, perhaps this is controversial. I think this is an entirely solvable problem. I think this is a point I really do want to make, because many people tell me that it is insoluble. I don't buy it. I think it can be resolved.

I think if you speak to people on both sides, Palestinians and Israelis, there is a weariness and a desire to find peace. And I think that you can build on that. And obviously there's people with maximalist objectives on each side. But I don't think they're anywhere close to being even a significantly large minority. That's my own personal view. I agree with that completely. And even the issue of the militants can be solved by a broader diplomatic solution because that would end even the capacity of these absolute extremist elements to be able to subsist in this environment.

So a solution obviously can be found. It could be still the long talked about, but much evaded two-state solution, or even could be a democratic one-state solution. Both are possible. But and what is absolutely true is that it would be possible to reach an understanding with the Arab nations, the Arab League, and the neighbors in the region. With Iran, I will also add absolutely possible. I speak to a lot of Iranian diplomats over the years.

And of course, there could be agreements reached. So there's nothing out of grasp. What is out of grasp to this date is the result of an incredible arrogance and hubris and a lack of honesty about the core of this crisis. Same in Ukraine. When you know the underpinnings of the crisis, when you know the evolution of how we got to this dreadful place, a solution could be found. tomorrow, actually. And it goes back to the same hubris of the United States saying, we don't have to talk to Russia about anything, about our missile placements, about our NATO enlargement, about coups that we back in next door countries. We don't have to talk about anything. And that hubris

brings us to war. But by overcoming the hubris, we could actually get to peace. I just final comment, I think what Professor Sachs referred to as this block mentality. I think a lot of this is a, again, a manifestation of the hegemonic strategy because obviously, you know, you have two kind of security institutions. You have the one we pursue security with other members, and then you have the alliances or blocks where you seek security against non-members. And in this instance, you see often there's this need always to divide. between the protected or dependent ally and the weak and adversary, which is why if we look at why there's no peace, one could look at what happened when the Chinese negotiated this settlement

or peace between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Washington was very much opposed to it. And we saw the same, was it, three years ago, when the Chinese and Indians were having a clash in the Himalayas. If you saw the American media, then New York Times, they were all very excited and very openly stating, listen, this is a great opportunity with India in the conflict with China. They will have to align with us.

They will be dependent on us. And we have a powerful ally to weaken the Chinese. So it just seems like there's always this block mentality in order to achieve hegemony. So that's, I guess, why to some extent, I'm a bit more optimistic about BRICS because it doesn't seem like an alliance system. I know that they're trying to counter hegemony. But if you see the new members they took in, I mean, in Egypt and Ethiopia, they're in conflict over, you know, the water. They bring in Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Obviously, they are, you know, the main Cold War in the Middle East. And there seems to be, yeah, and this doesn't seem like an alliance that Iran and Saudi Arabia will turn against America together. It is not going to happen. It seems more being security with other members as opposed to, you know, allying against state sea. So it seems to be, I'm not sure if this is because. the objective hegemony is absent, but I'm not sure if you two have any thoughts on it before we

wrap it up. Well, Glenn, we could refer back 2,000 years to Dividee et Impera, divide and conquer. This has been strategies of empires throughout the ages that you divide the other side. You create those divisions. You divide and you conquer. This has been a U.S. foreign policy approach. It fails. It's failing miserably right now because the U.S. has lost any semblance of the power, whether it's military dominance, technological dominance or financial dominance, to be able to carry that out as dreadful as it was even when the U.S. was relatively more powerful than it is today.

But that has been the strategy. The alternative strategy is true multipolarity and true multilateralism under a common set of international laws, which at our core today are the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations. we could have a world that is peaceful, united, and pursuing sustainable development if we choose to do so. And we need to put aside the hegemonic aspirations and the divide et impera strategy of U.S. foreign policy, and then we can make some progress. I have little to add to that. I'll just say this. my impression is that most of the world, not the global south, the global majority,

I think that was Professor Sachs' term, and I think it's the one we should increasingly use. They understand what this is, you know, setting countries against each other, China against Russia. We see articles in foreign affairs that talk about, you know, the Russians, they need to find strategic autonomy, me from the Chinese, so they need to turn to us. That kind of thinking. The Indians and the Chinese are opposed to each other. So let's find ways of exacerbating this and get India on our side. I think most of the world is exhausted by this.

I think they're fed up with it. And I think that basically what we're seeing and what we're seeing now with this current crisis is they're saying enough of this, we have to move on. The world has changed. It's also changed profoundly in economic and technological terms. We have to get on. It is in our interests, too. It is in the interests of our people to get on. We have to get on because we cannot afford war. And war is too dangerous to be indulged with, indulged it in the way that perhaps, you know, 200 years it could be. And these attempts by you, in the West to continue these obsolete and anachronistic block policies and manipulative policies.

We've had enough. And if you don't join us, well, we'll just go ahead and do it without you. And that's, I think, that's I think where we're going. Beautifully put. Yeah, no, I agree. I think just to Europe, we're in a very new position. We've always been the subject. I think we're becoming the object now of geopolitics, because now we are being put in the division of, you know, we're being asked to cut ourselves off from the Russians, from the Chinese.

We're also absent there and becoming very, very uncomfortably dependent on the United States. So, you know, we're usually at the other end of this. But anyways, we went a bit over time. But anyway, just want to thank both of you for your time, Professor Sachs, Alexander. Excellent. So so much more I would like to talk about the prospect of a BRICS currency or alternatives, but we have to do this some other time, I guess. Let's do that too.

Thanks again for your time. We need to have more programs, and that's a good thing. Great. I agree.