The Tucker Carlson Show - Jeffrey Sachs: The Untold History of the Cold War, CIA Coups Around the World, and COVID’s Origin

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

Professor Jeffrey Sachs is the President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He is the author of The End of Poverty and The Ages of Globalization. (00:00) "Unprovoked war" (21:04) Why did the U.S. push for Ukraine to Join NATO?  (1:03:53) What is a Neocon?  (01:32:50) Regime Change Never Works  (01:43:16) Who Blew up the Nord Stream Pipeline? (02:08:07) COVID Origins Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Tucker Carlson show it's become pretty clear that the mainstream media are dying they can't die quickly enough and there's a reason they're dying because they lie they lied so much it killed them we're not doing that tuckercarlson.com we promise to bring you the most honest content the most honest interviews we can without fear or favor here's the latest do you drink coffee all the time non-stop me too non-stop nine or ten cups a day yeah it's good i like coffee and i drink it straight until minutes before bed i do too oh do you yeah and we will never drink as much as Voltaire drank yeah yeah oh is that right like 40 cups yeah oh is that right oh yeah and it worked okay so the the one thing that we know we heard about the movement of Russian troops into Eastern

Ukraine in February of 2022 was it was unprovoked. Here's a selection of what we know about that. The Russian military has begun a brutal assault on the people of Ukraine without provocation, without justification, without necessity. This is a premeditated attack. Russia's unprovoked and cruel invasion has galvanized countries from around the world. Russia's unprovoked and unjustified attack on Ukraine. Russia conducted an unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine. This unprovoked Russian war of aggression has got to be met with strength. Vladimir Putin decided, unprovoked, to start this war.

So, was it unprovoked? Well, we did hear that a lot of times. I actually asked a research assistant of mine to count how many times we heard that in the New York Times in that first year from February 2022 to February 2023. In their opinion columns, it was 26 times unprovoked. Of course, things aren't unprovoked. It's almost a brand name, the unprovoked invasion. It's the lazy person's dodge for actually trying to think through what's going on.

And it's very dangerous because it's wrong. It gets the whole story completely wrong. And it misunderstands the trap that we set for ourselves as the United States to push Ukraine deeper and deeper and deeper into this hopeless mess that they're in right now. So in what sense was it provoked? What started this? Basically, it started very simply, which is that the United States government, let's not call it the U.S. people, they had nothing to do with this, but the U.S. government said, we're going to put Ukraine on our side,

and we're going to go right up to that 2,100-kilometer border with Russia, and we're going to put our troops and NATO and maybe missiles, whatever we want, because we are the sole superpower of the world, and we do what we want. And it goes back, actually, a long way. It goes back 170 years. The Brits had this idea first, surround Russia in the Black Sea region, and Russia's not a great power anymore. And that was Lord Palmerston's idea in the Crimean War, 1853 to 1856. And the Brits taught us what we know about empire. And they basically taught us the idea, you know, Russia, it needs an outlet.

It needs an outlet to the Middle East. It needs an outlet to the Middle East. It needs an outlet to the Mediterranean. You surround Russia in the Black Sea. You have rendered Russia a second or third rate country. And Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of our lead geostrategists of the current era, wrote in 1997, let's do this. Let's make sure that we basically surround Russia in the Black Sea region. They got this idea that we'll expand NATO so that every country in the Black Sea around Russia is a NATO country. Right now, well, back then, Turkey was a NATO country.

But we said, okay, we'll get Romania and Bulgaria. And we'll get Ukraine and we'll get Georgia. Now, Georgia, you know, not our Georgia, Atlanta, Georgia, Georgia of the Black Sea. We used to call it Soviet Georgia. Yes, Soviet Georgia, if you want to call it that. Home of Stalin. It's not NATO North Atlantic. It's way out there on the eastern edge of the Black Sea region.

People can look at a map. But we said, yeah, we'll make Georgia part of NATO too. And the reason was very clear, and Zbigniew was very explicit about it, that this is our way to basically dominate Eurasia. If we can dominate the Black Sea region, then Russia's nothing. If we make Russia nothing, then we can basically control Eurasia, meaning all the way from Europe to Central Asia, and through our influence in East Asia, do the same thing. And that's American unipolarity. We run the world. We are the hegemon. We are the sole superpower. We are unchallenged. So that's the idea.

But why would you want that? Why would the Brits want that? Why does the U.S. State Department want that? What about Russia, which is not actually much of an expansionist power, is so threatening? It's not about Russia. It's about the U.S. It's about Britain before that. I think it's a little bit like that old game of Risk. I don't know if you played that as a kid, but the idea was have your peace on every place in the world. That was the game. And you read the American strategists, whether it's Zbigniew

Brzezinski, although he was a very moderate, or the neocons who have run US foreign policy for the last 30 years. The neocons are very explicit. The U.S. must be the unchallenged superpower in every place in the world, in every region. We must dominate. It's quite a load for us American people. What they say is we are going to be the constabulary duty holder. What a fancy word for saying we'll be the world's policeman. They say it explicitly. They say, that's lots of wars. We have to be ready for all these wars. To my mind, it's a little crazy, but their idea was after the end of the Soviet Union,

well, now we run the world. And to come back to Russia, the idea was, well, Russia's weak. It's down. It's we're the sole superpower. They're on their back or on their knees, whatever it is. And now we can move NATO where we want, and we can surround them. And the Russians said, please don't do that. Don't bring your troops, your weapons, your missiles right up to our border. It's not a good idea.

And the U.S., I was around in those years, involved in Russia and in Central Europe. The U.S. was, we don't hear you. We don't hear you. We do what we want. They kept pushing inside the U.S. government in the 1990s when this debate was going, should NATO expand? Some people said, yeah, but we told Gorbachev and we told Yeltsin we weren't going to expand at all. No, come on. The Soviet Union's done. We can do what we want. We're the sole superpower. Clinton bought into that. That was Madeleine Albright's line. NATO enlargement started. And our most sophisticated diplomats,

we used to have diplomats at the time. We don't have them anymore, but we used to have diplomats like George Kennan, said, this is the greatest mistake we could possibly make. We had a defense secretary, Bill Perry, who was Clinton's defense secretary, who agonized, God, I should resign over this. This is terrible. What's going on? But he was outmaneuvered diplomatically by Richard Holbrooke and by Madeleine Albright. And Clinton never thought through anything systematically, in my opinion.

And so they decided, OK, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, first round. wrote a strategy for Eurasia where he laid out exactly the timeline for this U.S. expansion of power. And he said, late 1990s, we'll take in Central Europe, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic. By the early 2000s, we'll take in the Baltic states. Now, that's get close to Russia. By 2005 to 2010, we'll invite Ukraine to become part of NATO. So this wasn't some flippant thing. This was a long-term plan, and it was based on a long-term geo-strategy. Now, the Russians are saying, are you kidding? We wanted peace. We ended the Cold War too. You didn't just defeat us. We said no more.

We disbanded the Warsaw Pact. We wanted peace. We wanted cooperation. You call it victory. We just wanted to cooperate. I know that for a fact because I was there in those years. What Gorbachev wanted, what Yeltsin wanted. They didn't want war with the United States, nor were they saying we're defeated.

They were saying we just want to cooperate. We want to stop the Cold War. We want to become part of a world economy. We want to be a normal economy. We want to be normal society connected with you, connected with Europe, connected with Asia. And the U.S. said, we get it. We get it. We won.

You do everything we say, and we determine how the pieces are going to go. So in the early 2000s, Putin comes in. First business for Putin was good cooperation with Europe. You go back to the early 2000s. Again, I know the people. I watch closely. I was a participant in some

of it. Putin was completely pro-Europe. Yes. And pro-US, by the way. I know. And we don't want to talk about this. We don't want to admit it because we don't want anything other than unprovoked. So everything is phony, what we say.

Everything is a lie. But just to say, the U.S. kept doing unilateral things that were really outrageous. In 1999, we bombed Belgrade for 78 days. Bad move. Absolutely. We bombed a capital of Europe for 78 days. What was, looking back, what was the point of that? The point of that was to break Serbia into, create a new state, Kosovo, where we have the largest NATO military base in Southeast Europe. We put Bondsteel base there because we wanted a base in Southeastern Europe. We put Bondesteel Base there because we wanted a base in

Southeastern Europe. And again, you look at the neocons, it's nice of them. They actually describe all of this in various documents. You have to make the links, but in a document called Rebuilding America's Defenses in the year

2000, they say the Balkans is a new strategic area for the U.S., so we have to move large troops to the Balkans because their idea is literally the game of risk. Not just you need good relations or peace. We need our pieces on the board. We need military bases with the advanced positioning of our military everywhere in the world. So they wanted a big base in Southeastern Europe. They didn't like Serbia.

Serbia was close to Russia. Anyway, we're the sole superpower. We do what we want. So they divided the country, which they now claim you never do. You never change borders. We broke apart Serbia, established by our declaration a new country, Kosovo. We put a huge NATO base there, and that was the goal. So that was 1999.

So it wasn't to save the oppressed Muslim population? Excuse me? It wasn't to save the oppressed Muslim population? It was very much to save the military-industrial complex to have a nice location in southeastern Europe. It killed all those people, wrecked the city. You know, it was a little bit sad, but we do lots of sad things and lots of destructive things,

lots of wars. We're the country of perpetual war. We don't look back. We're not even supposed to talk about this because this was unprovoked, remember? So in 2002, the U.S. unilaterally pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Unilaterally. Well, that was one of the stabilizers of the relationship with Russia,

and it was one of the stabilizers of the global nuclear situation, which is absolutely dangerous. And the U.S. unilaterally started putting Aegis missiles into first Poland, then Romania. And the Russians are saying, wait a minute, what do we know you're putting in this? You're a few minutes from Moscow. This is completely destabilizing. Do you think you might want to talk to us? So then comes 2004, seven more countries in NATO, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Now,

starting filling in the Black Sea, Romania and Bulgaria, suddenly they're now North Atlantic countries, but it's all part of this design, All spelled out, all quite explicit were surrounding Russia. In 2007, President Putin gave a very clear speech at the Munich Security Conference. Very powerful, very correct, very frustrated, where he said, gentlemen, you told us in 1990 NATO would never enlarge. That was the promise made to President Gorbachev, and it was the promise made to President Yeltsin. And you cheated, and you repeatedly cheated, and you don't even admit that you said this, but it's all plainly documented, by the way, and as you know, in a thousand archival sites, so it's easy to verify all of this. James Baker III, our Secretary of State, said that NATO would not move one inch eastward.

And it wasn't a flippant statement. It was a statement repeated and repeated and repeated. Hans Dietrich Genscher, the foreign minister of Germany, same story. The Germans wanted reunification. Gorbachev said, we'll support that, but we don't want that to come at our expense. No, no, it won't come at your expense. NATO won't move one inch eastward, Mr. President. Repeated so many times in many documents, many statements by the NATO Secretary General, by the U.S. Secretary of State, by the German Chancellor, now, of course, all denied by our foreign policy blob because we're not supposed to remember anything. Remember, this was all unprovoked.

So back to 2007, Putin gives this speech and he says, stop. Don't even think about Ukraine. This is our 2,100 kilometer border. This is absolutely part of the integrated economy of this region. Don't even think about it. Now, I know from insiders, from all the diplomatic work that I do, that Europe was saying to the U.S. European leaders, don't think about Ukraine, please. This is not a good idea. Just stop. We know from our current CIA director, Bill Burns, that he wrote a very eloquent, impassioned, articulate, clear, secret, as usual, memo, which we only got to see because WikiLeaks showed to the American people what maybe we would like to know once in a while,

but we're never told. Like what our government's doing. What they're doing and how they're putting us at nuclear risk and other things. Okay, this one did get out, and it's called Nyet Means Nyet. No means no. And what Bill Burns very perceptively, articulately conveys to Condoleezza Rice and back to the White House in 2008 is Ukraine is really a red line. Don't do it. It's not just Putin. It's not just Putin's government. It's the entire political class of Russia. And just to help all of us as we think about it, it is exactly as if Mexico said, we think it would be great to have Chinese military bases on the Rio Grande. We can't see why the U.S. would have any problem with that. Of course, we would go completely insane.

And we should. And we should, of course. The whole idea is so absurdly dangerous and reckless that you can't even imagine grown-ups doing this. So what happens is, for what I'm told by European leaders and by long, detailed discussion,

Bush Jr. says to them, no, no, no, it's okay, don't worry, I hear you about Ukraine. And then he goes off for the Christmas holidays and comes back, whether it's Cheney, whether it's Bush, whatever it is, says, yeah, NATO is going to enlarge to Ukraine. And the Europeans are shocked, pissed. What are you doing? You may have come to the obvious conclusion that the real debate is not between Republican and Democrat or socialist and capitalist right left. The real battle is between people who are lying on purpose and people who are trying to tell you the truth. It's between good and evil. It's between honesty and falsehood. And we hope we are on the former side. That's why we created this network, the Tucker Carlson Network. And we

invite you to subscribe to it. You go to tuckercarlson.com slash podcast. Our entire archive is there. A lot of behind the scenes footage of what actually happens in this barn when only an iPhone is running. tuckercarlson.com slash podcast. You will not regret it. So Bush did not make that decision. Bush did not make the decision? did not make the decision right i mean it sounds if i'm hearing what i'm saying yeah no bush did make this okay but no what i'm saying is he had told the europeans i hear you i'm not going to do it but it sounds like he was influenced by the people around him oh no that could be yeah i don't know whether it was cia or whether someone explained to him or whether uh someone said george mr president uh this is a long-standing project you know it's not something for a european country to object to i don't know what happened there but what i do know is that he came back and told the european leaders no we're doing it. They said, no, no, no, no, we're not doing it.

And then they had the NATO summit in Bucharest, and this was 2008. And the Europeans, Chancellor Merkel, French president, all of them, George, don't do this. Don't do this. This is extraordinarily dangerous. This is really provocative. We don't really need or want NATO right up to the Russian border. Bush pushed, pushed, pushed. This is a U.S. alliance fundamentally. roadmap right now, but Ukraine will become a member of NATO. Because in those days, the U.S. and Russia met in a NATO partnership, even then, Putin was there the next day in Bucharest saying, don't do this. This is completely reckless. Essentially, this is our fundamental red line. Do not do this. The U.S. can't hear any of this. This is our biggest problem of all, because the neocons who have run the show for 30 years believe the U.S. can do whatever it wants.

This is the most fundamental point to understand about U.S. foreign policy. They're wrong. They keep screwing up. They keep getting us into trillion-dollar-plus wars. They keep killing a lot of people. But their basic belief is the U.S. is the only superpower. It's the unipolar power, and we can do what we want. So they could not hear Putin.

Even that moment, they couldn't hear the rest of the Europeans. And by the way, they said Georgia would become part of NATO. Again, the only way to understand that is in this longstanding Palmerston-Brezinski theory. This isn't just haphazard. Oh, why don't we take Georgia? This is a plan. Okay. The Russians understand every single step of this. So another thing goes awry. What goes awry? The Ukrainians don't want NATO enlargement. The Ukrainians don't want it. They're against it. The public opinion said, no, this is very dangerous. Neutrality, it's safer. We're in between East and West. We don't want this. So they elect Viktor Yanukovych, a president that says, we'll just be neutral. And that's absolutely the US's, oh, what the hell is this? Ukraine? They don't have any choice either. So Yanukovych becomes the enemy

of the neocons, obviously. So they start working. Of course, the way that the U.S. does, we got to get rid of this guy. Maybe we'll elect his opponent afterwards. Maybe we'll catch him in a crisis and so forth. And indeed, at the end of 2013, the U.S. absolutely stokes a crisis that becomes an insurrection and then becomes a coup. And I know, again, from firsthand experience, the U.S. was profoundly implicated in that. But you can see our senators standing up in the crowd, like if Chinese officials came to January 6th and said, yes, yes, go. You know, how would we like it if Chinese leaders came and said, yeah, we were with you 100%. American senators standing up in Kiev saying to the demonstrators, we're with you 100%.

Victoria Nuland famously passing around the cookies, but it was much, much more than the cookies, I can tell you. And so the U.S. conspired with a Ukrainian right to overthrow Yanukovych, and there was a violent overthrow in the third week of February of 2014. That's when this war started. This war didn't even start in 2022. It started in 2014. That was the outbreak of the war, was a violent coup that overthrew a Ukrainian president

that wanted neutrality. When he was violently overthrown and his security people told him, you're going to get killed. And so he flew to Kharkiv and then flew onward to Russia that day. The U.S. immediately, in a nanosecond, recognized the new government. This is a coup. This is how the CIA does its regime change operations. So this is when the war starts. Putin's understanding, completely correct in this moment, was I'm not letting NATO take my naval fleet and my naval base in Crimea. Are you kidding?

The Russian naval base in the Black Sea, which was the object of the Crimean War and in its way is the object of this war in Sevastopol, has been there since 1783. And now Putin's saying, oh, NATO's going to walk in? Hell no. And so they organize this referendum of the, this is a Russian region, and there's an overwhelming support. We'll stay with Russia, thank you, not with this new post-coup government. An outbreak breaks out in the eastern provinces, which are the ethnic Russian provinces in the Donbass, in Lugansk and Donetsk. And there's a lot of violence. So the war starts in 2014.

So saying something's unprovoked in 2022 is a little bizarre for anyone that actually reads a normal newspaper to begin with. But in any event, the war starts then. And within a year, the Russians are saying very wisely, we actually don't want this war. We don't want to own Ukraine. We don't want problems on our border. We would like peace based on respect for the ethnic Russians in the East and political autonomy because you, the coup government,

tried to close down all Russian language, culture, and rights of these people after having made a violent coup. So we don't accept that. So what came out of that was two agreements called the Minsk I and the Minsk II agreement. The Minsk II agreement was backed by the UN Security Council and it said that we'll make peace based on autonomy of the Donbass region. Now, very interesting, the Russians were not saying that's ours, we want that, all the things that are claimed every day that Putin just wants to recreate. He thinks he's Peter the Great.

He wants to recreate the Russian empire. He wants to grab territory. Nothing like that. The opposite. We don't want the territory. We actually just want autonomy based on an agreement reached with the Ukrainian government. So what was the U.S. attitude towards that? U.S. government attitude. U.S. government attitude was to say to the Ukrainians, don't worry about it. Come on, don't worry about it. You keep your central state. We don't want to see Ukraine weakened at all. We just want a NATO in a unified Ukraine. Don't go for decentralization. We tell them to blow off the very treaty that they've signed. Then we accuse Russia of not having diplomacy, by the way, which is par for the course. Oh, you can't trust them. We blow off every single agreement. We blow off not moving one inch eastward. We blow off the

anti-ballistic missile treaty. We have so many NATO-led wars of choice in between. I didn't even mention in Syria, CIA attempt to overthrow Assad in Libya and so forth. And we blow off the Minsk agreements. And actually, Angela Merkel explained in a rather shockingly frank interview that she gave last year when asked why Germany didn't help to enforce the Minsk agreement because Germany and France were the guarantors of the Minsk agreement under something called the Normandy process. She said, well, we just thought this was to give some time to the Ukrainians to build up their strength. In other words, they were guarantors of something in a phony way. And the U.S. was absolutely lying about this. And I know senior Ukrainians who were in government and who were around the government who said to me, Jeff, we're not going to do that. Anyway, that was at gunpoint.

We don't have to agree with that. So all that diplomacy was blown off. The war continued. The U.S. pumped in arms, built up armaments, was building up what would be the biggest army of Europe, actually, a huge army that Russia was watching. What are you doing? You know, you're not honoring Minsk.

You're building up this huge Ukrainian army. Paid for by NATO. Paid for by the United States, basically, yes. And in 2021, Putin met with Biden, and then after the meeting, he put on the table a draft Russia-U.S. security agreement. He put it on the table on December 15, 2021. It's worth reading, very plausible document. I don't agree with some of it. It's a negotiable document, something you would negotiate.

I thought the core of it was stop the NATO enlargement. And I called the White House myself at that point and said, don't have a war over this. Who did you talk to? I talked to Jake Sullivan and I said, don't have a war over this. We don't talk to? I talked to Jake Sullivan, and I said, don't have a war over this. We don't need NATO enlargement for U.S. security. In fact, it's counter to U.S. security. The U.S. should not be right up against the Russian border.

That's how we trip ourselves into World War III. No, Jeff, don't worry. No war. There's not going to be a war. Don't worry. We've got a diplomatic approach. I said, Jake, this't worry. No war. There's not going to be a war. Don't worry. We've got a diplomatic approach. He said, Jake, this is a basis for diplomacy. Negotiate.

Well, the formal response of the United States is that issues about NATO are non-negotiable. They're only between NATO countries and NATO candidates. No third party has any stake or interest or say in this. Russia, it's completely irrelevant. Again, to use the analogy, you know, if Mexico and China want to put Chinese military bases on the Rio Grande, the United States has no right to interfere. And no interest in it. And no interest in it, and no bilateral. And this was the formal U.S. response in January 2022. So unprovoked, not exactly.

So can I ask- 30 years of provocation where we could not take peace for an answer one moment all we could take is we'll do whatever we want wherever we want and no one has any say in this at all so guys go back 12 12 i guess 22 years putin told me and i checked i think it's true that he in clinton's final days asked clinton if russia could join nato which seems almost by definition like a victory nato exists as a bulwark against russia russia wants to join the alliance then you've won right why would why would the us government have turned that offer down. And do you think that is real? Russia and actually Europe wanted, used to want before Europe was completely a kind of vassal province of the United States government, wanted what they call collective security,

which was we want security arrangements in which one country's security doesn't ruin the security of another country. And there were two paths to that. There were basically three paths, let's say. One path was what they call the OSCE, the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe. Really a good idea. It's Western Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and former Soviet Union. And the idea was, let's bring us all together under one kind of charter, and we'll work out a collective security arrangement. I liked it. I mean, this is what Gorbachev was saying.

We don't want war with you. We don't want conflict with you. We want collective security. Second arrangement that actually makes a lot of sense, but people say, is this guy out of his mind? But it actually makes a lot of sense. Gorbachev disbanded the Warsaw Pact. We should have disbanded NATO. NATO was there to defend against a Soviet invasion. There's not going to be any Soviet invasion. In fact, after December 1991, there's not even a Soviet Union. We don't need NATO.

Why is there NATO? NATO was established to defend against the Soviet Union. So why did it continue after Gorbachev and Yeltsin? The neocons, thankfully, thank you, read the document. It's all explicit. This is our way of keeping our hegemony in Europe. In other words, this is our way of keeping our say in Europe, not protecting Europe, not even protecting us.

This is hegemony. We need our pieces on the board. NATO's our pieces on the board. Why would Germany allow foreign troops garrisoned on its soil for 80 years? I don't understand. Why would a European country allow that? Would you want foreign troops in your town? Tucker, when you had your wonderful interview with Putin,

he answered everything except once you asked him, what are the Germans seeing in this? And Putin said, I don't get it. And I thought, oh my God, thank you. I don't get it either. Is it just broken by war guilt? Is it masochism? I mean, honestly, it's not masochism.

It's not war guilt. There are basic mechanisms that I don't understand truly after being around more than 40 years in this and knowing all the leaders, and I know Schultz, and I know others. I don't understand it, but when the U.S. has a military base in your country, it really pulls a lot of the political strings in your country. It really influences the political parties.

Of course. It really pays. I know it's, I'm naive. You know, in other words, the Germans are not, they're not free actors in this. That's the point. If men with guns showed up in your apartment in New York and just camped out there, you probably wouldn't really be the head of your household anymore, would you? It's probably true.

But your question of why would the Germans want this, it's the same question of after the US blew up the Nord Stream pipeline, why wouldn't the Germans have said before or after, why did you do that? This is our economy you just blew up. But they don't. And so they're so subservient to the U.S. interests. It's a little hard to understand because it makes no sense for Europe. But like you said, there are armed people in your house.

Maybe that's the bottom line. I've spoken to European leaders who have said to me, I can't quote it because it's so shocking, and I won't quote it because it was said confidentially, but basically they don't take us seriously in Washington. And I said, yes. I didn't say it was the bubble over my head speaking to a European leader, but maybe if you to a European leader,

but maybe if you pushed a little bit, you would be taken more seriously, not in this way of just defeat. But it was said to me in such a sad way, I just felt, oh, God, don't tell me that you're a leader in Europe. But we're occupying their country with soldiers and guns. How could we take them seriously? They're a bitch. I mean, honestly. No, I don't know.

It's really sad and it's doing a lot of damage to, it's doing huge damage to Europe. It's destroying Ukraine, by the way. That's the first point. It's destroying Ukraine. It's doing a lot of damage to Europe. It's wasting a hell of a lot of lives and money in the United States, which

the neocons don't count. And almost nobody stands up and talks about it. And your first question about being unprovoked, we even have a story about it. It's the story's complete bull. It's complete nonsense. It's for people who don't want or don't remember, don't want to remember anything before February 24th, 2022. But there's a whole long history to this that's absolutely kind of absurd and tragic. I mean, it's absurd. It's utterly tragic. 500,000 Ukrainians dead for nothing.

Do you think that's the number? I think that's probably the number, yeah. That's the best number that I know. I mean, we talked about this last night at dinner, but one of the most shocking things, just as someone who lived in Washington, to me is if you ask any of the senators, as I have, who voted to keep this

war going with U.S. tax dollars, how many of your beloved Ukrainians have been killed? They have no idea and they have no interest in knowing. And they don't care at all. And sometimes they say they don't care. Mitt Romney said, you know, it's greatest bargain, no American lives. Dick Blumenthal said the same thing basically this is a great bargain no american lives but isn't that evil i mean at some point it's certainly hypocritical they're telling us we're doing this for ukraine for our friends in ukraine the standard

bearers of democracy but also don't you have an obligation to kind of care about the people you kill i think so you think so. I think Americans think so. I don't think that the security apparatus thinks so. Because the security state, you know, you got to be tough to play that game of risk. You got to know there are going to be some collateral losses. Millions of people have died in American wars of choice. But if you're a big boy, you can't let that deter you. So I think it's pretty deeply ingrained that a few hundred thousand lives here and there, come on, we're talking

about who runs the world after all. It's really, really dark. I think it's extraordinarily reckless. Just to circle back, but also look, if the pretext for all of this is some sort of moral authority, we're for democracy, therefore authoritarianism. This has nothing to do with morality. This has nothing to do with morality. It has nothing to do with Western values. It has nothing to do with American values. It doesn't even have to do with American interests from what I can see, although it says that they say that American interests are at stake.

Well, we've spent maybe $7 trillion on these reckless perpetual wars since 2001. Is that really? We've added to the debt. The debt's gone from about 30% of national income to more than 100% of national income. We've had these disastrous wars. Is this America's interest? No.

I mean, maybe we could have actually rebuilt a bridge or a road along the way or destroyed our country even at a mile of fast rail in our country or something but no we had to spend trillions and trillions on wars so to my mind it's all completely perverse but what i find amazing is that once in a while, you have to look, but once in a while, you'll actually find the truth expressed in such a vulgar way. No, they don't count the Ukrainian lives. They literally say no American lives.

We're not even so sure about that, by the way. No, Americans have died. Yeah, it's not a large number, but it's some, but they don't tell us the truth about that either. It's one of the saddest things about this country. The country's getting sicker. Despite all of our wealth and technology, Americans aren't doing well overall. Obesity, heart disease, autoimmune conditions, all kinds of horrible chronic illnesses, weird cancers are all on the rise.

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It was ridiculous, but it was also a metaphor for the way our leaders run this country. They're constantly telling you everything is fine. Everything is fine. Don't worry. Everything's under control. Nothing to see here. Move along and obey. No one believes that. Crime is not going away. Supply chains remain fragile. It does feel like some kind of global conflict could break out at any time. So the question is, if things went south tomorrow, would you be ready? Well, if you're not certain that you'd be ready, you need AmmoSquared. AmmoSquared is the only service that lets you build an ammunition stockpile automatically. You literally set it on autopilot. You pick the calibers you want, how much you want to save every

month, then they'll ship it to you or they'll store it for you and ship it when you say so. You get 24-7 access to manage the whole thing. So don't let the people in charge, don't let CNN lull you into a fake sense of safety. Take control of your life, protect your family, be prepared. Go to AmmoSquared.com to learn more. So just to circle back to the provocation, I watched as a complete non-expert, the administration send the vice president to the Munich Security Conference in February of 2022 when it was clear that things were getting really hot, and watched Kamala Harris say to Zelensky, on camera, we want you to join NATO, when everybody, even me, a talk show host, knew that that was the red line for Putin. So the only conclusion I could reach was they want him to move across the border into ukraine they want a war what is your take tucker just to say until

this moment every senior official in the u.s or the the secretary general of nato jens stoltenberg says ukraine will join nato and one thing everyone that's listening should understand. Ukraine will never join NATO short of a nuclear war. So because Russia will never allow it, period. So every time we say it, all we mean is the war continues and more Ukrainians are destroyed. And we're willing to risk nuclear conflict. And some people definitely are because they're idiots. Really? Because my resentment gets very high when we reach that level.

But we hear talk about nuclear war these days. We hear, we're not going to be blackmailed by this nuclear threat and so forth. Well, goddammit, you better be worried. We're talking about a counterpart that has 6,000 nuclear warheads. We have 6,000 nuclear warheads. We have a lot of crazy people in our government. I know it. I'm adult enough to know over 44 years of professional life that there are a lot of intemperate people in our country. We have a lot of allies that say, oh, we can do this. We have a president of Latvia tweeting or X-ing or whatever the verb is these days,

Russia delenda est. In other words, Russia must be destroyed. Playing off of the old Cato the Elder, Cartago, Delenda S. Carthage must be destroyed. Honestly, a president of a Baltic state tweeting that Russia must be destroyed, this is prudent, this is safe, this is going to keep your family and my family safe,

are we out of our minds? And all through this, Biden hasn't called Putin one time. And I speak to very senior Russian officials. You speak to the most senior Russian official. They say, we want to negotiate. Of course, we'll talk. Zelenskyy, quote unquote, made it illegal. And the United States says, well, we won't do anything that the Ukrainians don't want. This is insane, by the way, as if this is really between Ukraine and Russia. This is about the United States and Russia. This, everybody should understand. This isn't even about Ukraine and Russia. This is about the U.S. being in Ukraine and Russia. So the ones that need to talk are Biden and Putin, period. And I keep saying, if I may say it again just now, I keep saying to Biden, if you want to use my Zoom account, please use it. I'll lend you my phone. You make the call.

Start negotiations. I don't like my phone. You make the call. Start negotiations. I don't like my family being at risk of nuclear war. Why won't they? Because they believed up until now, I think get their way through bluff or superiority of force or superiority of finance. They gambled because they were gambling with someone else's lives, someone else's country, and someone else's money, our money, the taxpayer money. But they were gambling, not with their own stakes, but they were gambling. They're not very clever. They gambled wrong all along. Putin said, no, for us, this is existential. For you, it's a game, apparently the game of risk. You need your piece on that board as if American NATO forces in Ukraine is somehow existential for the United States as

opposed to a neutral Ukraine. And they thought that they would get their way. And I spoke with senior officials all along who just thought Russia won't object or can't object or will be pushed aside or will fall to its knees with U.S. financial sanctions or will succumb to the U.S. HIMARS and ATTACOMs. Just one absolutely naive idea after another. But you might ask me, how can they have such naive ideas? That was my question, yes. And I'm sorry to put words in your mouth, but I would say, well, I'm old enough to remember Vietnam. I'm old enough to remember trying to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. I'm old enough to

remember Libya. I'm old enough to remember Afghanistan. We screw up nonstop. This is not clever, what we're doing. But the people, what's so interesting, so you've been an academic your whole life. I think you're one of the youngest tenured professors at Harvard, but you've also been, I think uniquely, a diplomat on and off, mostly on for decades. So you know the people who are making U.S. foreign policy personally well. And the quality of the person engaged in that seems to have declined just dramatically. I think that's true, by the way.

I think it's true in general of American politics. Maybe it's an illusion, but when I was a kid in college, I did my summer internships in my senator's office, Senator Phil Hart. He was a man of great integrity, of great intelligence. He was a Democrat, but he had lots of Republican friends and colleagues. there. And they were serious people, Fulbright and Frank Church, really wonderful, impressive people, Chuck Percy, Lugar, really impressive people who wanted the U.S. to do right, to do good. And I admired them, and it was on both sides of Republican and Democrat. And you feel it's not like that right now. It's really not like that right now.

And I don't see it. I don't see wise people on either side. I hate to say that. I don't think it's a partisan divide. They all seem crazy and dumb to me. You know, we chatted Rand Paul's, the only one for me that makes sense on foreign policy right now. He says, stop this.

There's so many damn wars. It's putting us at incredible risk. But you don't hear the Democrats. They line up 100% for more military spending, continue the war. We have people that completely shock me that are saying these stupid things about no U.S. lives, as if Ukrainian lives don't matter. Nobody wants to talk about negotiation. No one says anything honest.

No one even wants the truth out of the White House or the executive branch, which is another role of Congress, which is don't take us for a ride. We're an independent, separate, equal part of government. And it used to be that Congress kind of resented when the executive branch lied to it. Yes. You don't see that resentment. They crave their lives. You don't see that resentment.

You see partisanship. If it's a a republican president then the democrats go after him if it's a democratic president republicans but nobody from one's own party even tells their president stop bullshitting us yes and that's very serious well and and these are not small. So the two of the biggest lies are that Ukraine can win, whatever that means, never defined, push Russia back to its January 2022 border, and two, that Ukraine will join NATO. And neither one of those things is true. They're not only not true. If you are able to watch you or someone outside the mainstream, it becomes obvious that these aren't true. But if you follow Admiral Kirby

and the White House every day, lying with a smirk on his face, which I can't stand because he can't even control his smirk because he tells us, I'm lying, you know, as he's talking, it's unreal. But if you, or if you read the New York Times, which is sad and pathetic, you won't know.

But if you actually listen to any independent outlets, which I do because I'm traveling in the world most of the time, actually, not in the U.S., you know that these things are obvious. Someone asked me a couple days ago, Ukraine's getting blasted on the battlefield now. Some days are 1,500 dead, typical 1,000 dead. Russia has air superiority, artillery superiority, missile superiority, everything. And the Ukrainians are getting blasted. And now the U.S. press is reporting, oh, the Ukrainians are falling back and the tone has suddenly changed. So someone asked me a couple of days ago, why did this sudden change on the battlefield occur? And I said, excuse me? He said, yeah, why did this sudden change? I said, there's no sudden change on the battlefield occur and i said excuse me he said yeah why did this sudden change he said there's no sudden change this whole trend has been obvious for more than two years we're in

a war of attrition and the bigger party is blasting hell out of this much bigger party much bigger exactly but you wouldn't know it by any of our narrative, official, congressional, or our kind of mainstream media, because they don't tell the truth until, I'd say until, but even after it's staring you in the face. Then maybe they'll say something that's a little bit true. That just feels like North Korea to me, or what you imagine North Korea is, this news vacuum where everybody is under these huge misimpressions. Nobody has any reference point in the truth at all. People don't even know they're being lied to.

You travel constantly. Is this the most sort of cut off country from an information perspective in the world? You know, when I'll give an example, when the U.S. put on sanctions on Russia in March 2022, just after the beginning of this latest phase of the war that started in 2014. I know senior U.S. financial officials and they, oh, we've got them. This is going to crush them. I said, I don't think so. I was in Latin America last week. They're not going to do this. I was in India the week before that. It's not going to go like that. So what happened was the only ones that applied the sanctions are Europe, the United States, and a few allies in East Asia, Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore. The rest of the world said, we're not part of that. We don't sign up to this. We don't like this. We

don't agree with the NATO enlargement. We don't like this narrative. And the sanctions proved to be pretty useless compared to what this grandiosity of the U.S. strategists thought. So it comes to this question, what does the rest of the world think? The rest of the world doesn't think much of the United States, what it's doing. It seems to them it's a bizarre country. Why are you pushing NATO enlargement? Why are you bringing us into your war? We don't really want this. Interestingly, most of the rest of the world is not against the United States, by the way. They said, just don't make us choose all these things. This isn't our battle. And we don't even like what you're doing. Just make peace, calm things down. And we

don't want bad relations. So it's not as if the world's antagonistic, but Washington does not get this at all. I probably speak to more world, I don't know, speak to a lot of world leaders in developing countries all the time. It's my job as a development economist. So I'm talking to world leaders, foreign ministers, heads of state, and so on. And I know their understanding and position very clearly. Clearly, I don't know whether the White House or Blinken or anyone else in the administration understands even these basic points. But it was obvious to me. Do you know Blinken? Obvious to me.

A little bit. Not well. From the outside, it seems like Blinken is a driving force. I doubt it. Who do you think is? I doubt it. force, the Pentagon's obviously a driving force, the armed services committees. It's not one individual, but it's a project that is long dated and it doesn't turn. And we don't have a president that's very flexible of mind. We don't have a president that is on top of any of this, it seems to me. Not a nimble president.

Not nimble, not effective, not nimble not effective not necessarily in charge not necessarily making decisions i don't really know but what i do know is that it's not improv it's a rudder that's stuck i would say in other words they can't do something different and each what what is improv is that the last thing they tried didn't work so now they need to quickly improvise something else as the rudder is stuck so we continue on the same destructive path and it's not working so oh my god we've got to do something else that's the improv part but what is not changing is goals direction right strategy or this most basic point which for me is a kind of uh it sounds so simple minded but i actually from a lifetime of experience really believe it. We don't talk to the other side. We also seem to be huffing our own gas a bit,

believing our own lies. We believe that we need to lie because maybe if your rudder's stuck and you're the skipper, you have to say, full speed ahead. In other words, if you can't move the rudder you have to give some self-justification for why we continue towards disaster for example since you are an economist um the the economic effects of kicking russia to swift etc etc right of these

very serious sanctions imposed against russia two and a half years ago. Big picture, it seems like that's a country with an economy based on natural resources and manufacturing. Ours is largely an economy based on finance, lending money and interest and real estate. Right. Which is more durable? Which is more real? I mean, that's my perspective. What's your sense of it?

Well, I think the basic point on the sanctions is if you have oil, if you don't sell it to Europe, you can sell it to Asia. Well, yeah. And it wasn't so hard, and they figured that out. Even I know that, though. They figured out how to get those tankers in. They figured out how to get insurance cover, and they figured out how to do it. And they're making a lot of money, and the sanctions didn't have any effect. And what they also didn't understand, and I think it's also important for people to understand, in all of this neocon strategizing,

they had this glimmer of insight, and actually Zbigniew Brzezinski was very good on it. He said, by all means, the one thing never, never to do is to drive russia and china together well exactly and he said very explicitly and he says in 1997 uh in his book the grand chessboard i think it's called he says but this is so unlikely you know this would be so crazy to do and this is exactly what these dunderheads have done whether it's a family member friend or furry companion joining your summer road trip enjoy the peace of mind that comes with volvo's legendary safety during volvo discover days enjoy limited time savings as you make plans to cruise through Muskoka or down Toronto's bustling streets.

From now until June 30th, lease a 2025 Volvo XC60 from 1.74% and save up to $4,000. Conditions apply. Visit your GTA Volvo retailer or go to volvocars.ca for full details. Who are the neocons? How would you describe them? What is a neocon? A neocon is a group of true believers that really rose to force in the last years of Bush Sr. It was Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, but it became absolutely bipartisan. Victoria Nuland is kind of the ultimate. Her husband,

Robert Kagan, is kind of the public intellectual of the neocons. I mean, he is. I know Bob well. He's an idiot. He's your public intellectual. He's the guy that writes the tomes. But he's a child. I think that this has been just about the most disastrous foreign policy imaginable. How can you go from peace in 1991 when you have a chance for creating a peaceful, cooperative world that could actually be prosperous and do good things together to this mess that we're in, it took a strategy so stupid, so reckless, so blind. And that's what the neocons gave us.

They gave us a strategy which said, we now run the world. And explicitly, we will be the world's policemen. We will fight the wars that we need to fight whenever and wherever we need to fight them. We will make sure that there's never a rival. Well, you do that long enough, you end up in lots of absolutely destructive, stupid wars. And the rest of the world doesn't just sit back and say, oh, thank you, US. We're so grateful you're the leader. They say, come on. You're 4.1% of the world population. There's another 95.9% of the world population that actually would just

like peace and some cooperation and not you to be telling us what to do. So this strategy was explicit, clear, adopted in the last years of basically in 1991-92 after the Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991. Clinton was, he's just not serious, consequent, or experienced enough. He wasn't a rigid neocon, but Madeleine Albright was a true believer, and Clinton drifted in that direction. And that's also partly something to understand, which is when you have the biggest military machine in the world, when you are so powerful, the war machine is always revving. There's always some case for war. The neocons basically said, yeah, we're the policemen,

we're the constabulary. This is our duty. And said, you have to be in each of these conflicts because US reputation also depends on this. So they invited regional wars everywhere and all the time and believed, of course, we could clean out governments we didn't want, regime change by war, by covert operations, and so on. And it became not a little movement. It became the dominant drive. So Clinton kind of drifted. His administration was divided between Madeleine Albright and Holbrooke on one side and William Perry on the other side.

But he went with Albright. By the end of Clinton's term was NATO enlargement, bombing of Belgrade, and we were kind of off to the races. Then came Bush Jr., 9-11, global war on terror, but basically 9-11 as the opportunity to implement the project for the new American century, which is the document that defines the neocon agenda. And it's such an interesting document because very clear. It was very carefully studied. And it's also important to understand the U.S. is a big ship, so it doesn't turn quick. So you prepare a path or it's this stuck rudder, as I said.

And you can read in Rebuilding America's Defenses, which was a kind of campaign document for the incoming Bush Jr. administration, what we should do, and it defines this neocon agenda. So Bush Jr. introduced all of these things, the unilateral withdrawal from ABM, the war in Iraq, the expansion of NATO to seven more countries, the commitment to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia. Then comes Obama. You don't think of him as a neocon especially, but who becomes the point person for Eastern Europe and Ukraine, Victoria Nuland. So interesting. Victoria Nuland was the deputy national security advisor of Cheney. I remember very well. Yes. So she was Cheney's advisor. Then she was George W.'s ambassador to NATO during the commitment to enlargement. And if Obama weren't a neocon, you would say, well, that's not someone I'm going to hire.

But all of a sudden, she lands as Hillary's assistant. Now, Hillary's absolutely neocon to the core. And there's Victoria Nuland, and she goes from being Hillary's assistant to becoming assistant secretary of state for European affairs and becomes the point person in the overthrow of Yanukovych at the end of 2013 and early 2014. And Obama is also very inexperienced, obviously no experience at all in foreign policy, but he wasn't by nature a neocon, but the system keeps you moving unless you're a president that knows how to keep a foot on the brakes. And we haven't had many presidents like that. Eisenhower was one who knew how to put his foot on the brakes because he really understood this system. John Kennedy learned it, but only after the Bay of Pigs and probably was killed by our government for trying to keep his foot on the brakes. And there have not been many other occasions when presidents kept their foot on the brakes.

So in 2011, Obama does the absolute neocon play of saying, almost out of the blue, by the way, why don't we overthrow Bashar al-Assad, Syria's president. Well, that's a little damn weird, but suddenly you start hearing Assad must go. I was on Morning Joe when that statement by Hillary was made and Joe Scarborough looked at me and said, Jeff, what do you think? And I said, said well how are they going to do that that sounds like another pretty stupid idea and it turned out that was 2011 we've had 13 years of war in syria hundreds of thousands dead destroyed the country of course destroyed the country and and who's president bashar al-assad And interestingly, I can tell you, oh, God, yeah, I can tell you. In 2012, the U.S., you know, there were protests. There were things that were going on in Syria.

But the president said, okay, we'll send in the CIA to overthrow the government in Syria. And if anyone is wondering, we do this dozens of times. So don't have any illusion that this is unusual. It is the job, the terms of reference of the CIA to overthrow governments in other countries. I don't approve.

I think it leads to war, destruction. It hasn't passed Putin's notice that that's the job of the CIA, so it's another reason he doesn't exactly want the U.S. on his border and so forth. Okay, so we start arming the jihadists, crazy things in Syria. Yeah, I can say it. I'm just thinking because... And the U.S. says Assad must go. So the U.N. starts a diplomatic process to try to find peace, which is the job of the U.N. It's not to implement U.S. regime change. It's to try to find peace. So the U.N. succeeds in getting all of the parties to agree to a peace agreement, except one, the U.S. So the idea that you couldn't

find peace, you couldn't find all these different factions in Syria. There was an agreement reached, but there was one obstacle to the agreement. And the obstacle was the U.S. said on the first day of this agreement, Assad must go. And the response was, why don't you have it a process? There'll be in two years an election or three years. Don't overthrow the government the first day. We have all this in place. And Obama, well, I don't know if it's Obama, probably Hillary, but whatever, said no. So that's why there was no agreement.

But what was the motive? Why would you want to overthrow Bashar al-Assad? Very strange. But what was the motive? Like, why would you want to overthrow Bashar al-Assad? Why not? One argument was that the neocons had a list, and this is actually what Wesley Clark, who was NATO's Supreme Commander in the end of the 1990s, of the governments aligned with the Soviet Union or with Russia. Now, Russia has a naval base on the Mediterranean. And so Assad is therefore an enemy. Or not an enemy. He doesn't rise to the level of being an enemy. He's someone whose peace you can take off the board and put in your own peace.

That's all. So the idea is incredible arrogance. They don't think, honest to God, I don't know. Whoever gave that order knew nothing about Syria. That I can guarantee you. But the downstream effects of that were horrifying. Well, unbelievable. What created ISIS. Yeah, unbelievable. Well, it created ISIS. Yeah, but we probably created ISIS pretty directly

because we funded jihadists all along the way. That's our story since 1979, actually. Yes. So this goes back a long time. They don't, they're not clever. They're not honest. They're not transparent. They are arrogant to the hilt and they don't talk to anybody else, including to us, the American people, including to Congress, including to counterparts in other countries. gets you into trouble when you're so flippant and flagrant.

Because remember what was happening in Syria, they did exactly the same thing in Libya. And you look at Libya, they decided to take out Gaddafi. Why? No one really knows. He was cooperating with us at that point? No one knows because some people say Sarkozy, that Gaddafi had contributed to Sarkozy's campaign, that it was a personal vendetta. There are a hundred theories. The fact that there are a hundred theories shows that the whole thing was bullshit, to use a technical diplomatic term. You cannot even know right now why.

What you know is that they misused a UN Security Council resolution to protect the people of Benghazi to launch a months-long NATO aerial bombardment of Libya until they brought down the government, unleashed war in Africa for the next 13 years until today, which is still roiling all of the

countries of the region. They do these things because they can, because it doesn't count. Maybe another theory, which is maybe true. What difference? It's money. It's a business. We're running a business. We're trying weapons. We're doing this. Maybe it's all a success from somebody's point of view that you have all these wars going with this big military machine. I don't know. That is a theory which is not completely dismissible because what you can't do, Tucker, is look and say, my God, we had a geopolitical reason to do this. This was really part of American security. We really needed to overthrow Assad.

We really needed to take out Gaddafi because if we didn't do that, something else would happen. You cannot even concoct a crazy narrative ex post that explains that. So these are not deeply explicable facts. But the pattern is recognizable immediately. Here you have a country with unchallenged, for a moment, unchallenged power, starting wars for not any obvious reason all over the world.

When was the last time an empire did that? You know, the British. That was the last time. I think we learned everything from the world. When was the last time an empire did that? You know, the British. That was the last time. I think we learned everything from the British. They were in nonstop wars, skirmishes. You know, when you're an empire, and if anyone still plays Risk, I don't know. I played it 60 years ago, I have to admit,

so I'm not sure if people still play the game. But Risk, you're trying to get your peace on every part of the board. When you have your peace someplace on the board, if the neighboring spots are not yours, you better have wars with them or they're going to take you out. And so every place becomes an object for war because it becomes next door to wherever you have your bases, your concern, and so on. So we have military bases in, I would say, 80 countries probably, something like that. Of course, the count is not public, so people put together their own lists. We have about 750 military bases around the world.

Each of those places has a neighborhood. Each of those places has the next door, which, oh, well, we don't have a base there. We better have a base there. And so that's the logic, which is if you're at the outer end of this, well, you better continue because otherwise your outer limit is—what we don't learn, actually, it's another analogy which I found to be useful. The Romans, by around 110 AD, with Hadrian said, and Trajan, okay, we've reached a good limit yeah and they stopped trying to expand yep they built they built a wall they kind of left it there exactly and they said uh they had a there was a war that i find analogous to ukraine uh they had a war in Germania, so-called, east of the Rhine, in what is now Germany, in 9 AD, which was a war of expansion by Augustus to tame the German tribes. And they lost that war.

It's the War of the Teutonburg Forest, and they lost that war in 9 AD. They basically decided after that, not entirely. They didn't say, well, this is the end of the Roman Empire. They said, okay, we'll just leave Germania. Yeah, there are limits to our power. There are limits and that's fine. Why don't we behave like that? We're not threatened by Russia. We are not threatened by Russia.

And Ukraine being neutral is not a threat to U.S. security. It builds U.S. security, period. That's what I said to Jake Sullivan. It's not even a concession, Jake. It's a benefit for us. Leave some space between you and them. That's what we want, some space so we don't have an accidental tripwire. That's the real logic of this world. Give a little space. Yes. We don't have to be everywhere.

We're not playing risk. We're trying to run our lives. We're trying to keep our children safe. We're not trying to. We're trying to run our lives. We're trying to keep our children safe. We're not trying to own every part of the world. So speaking of increasing our risk, I think the unstated but very clear objective of all of this is to kill Putin and replace him and break up Russia. That's my read on it. If you read even this project for a new American century, rebuilding America's defenses, it says maybe Russia will be decentralized into a European Russia, Central Asian Russia, Siberian Russia, they call it, and a Far East Russia. This is essentially what you're saying.

They talk, there's even some commissions in Washington decolonizing Russia. Their hope, the CIA's hope, if they would ever tell us the truth about anything, was, but they don't get any of this right, but their thought probably in this deep long-term vision was after the Soviet Union fell, so too will Russia disintegrate. It will disintegrate along its ethnic lines. It will disintegrate along its geographic lines. Why is that a U.S. project?

It's a U.S. project only because, from my point of view, the U.S. resents that there is a country of 11 time zones. And it's so big that it is on its face a denial of U.S. global hegemony. In other words, how obnoxious of them to be there. But the problem is. They don't see it that way. But just if you're looking at this purely through the lens of like what's good for us, like U.S. interests, which I do think is their job, actually. Yes.

But chaos across 11 time zones and innumerable ethnic groups and religious divisions with 6,000 nuclear warheads. That's really a threat to the world. I couldn't agree more. Is it not? Am I missing something? No, you're not missing anything. And the fact of the matter is, I was an advisor to Gorbachev in 1990, 1991.

I got to watch close up. I was an advisor to President Yeltsin in 1991-1992. I actually, it's literally true, as weird as this sounds, I, well, maybe not to you, you're about the one person for whom it's not weird, I sat in the Kremlin sitting across from Yeltsin the day the Soviet Union ended. Not even quite that day, literally. It was even more remarkable and bizarre than that. I was leading a little economics delegation to talk about the collapse of the economy that was underway. And Yeltsin came from the back of the room in one of these giant Kremlin rooms. Yes. And walked across the long room and sat down right in front of me and said, gentlemen, I want to tell you the Soviet Union is over.

That's incredible. Like that. And then he pointed to the back door. He said, do you know who is in that room over there? It's the leaders of the Soviet military. And they have just agreed to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. And that was the first words I heard out of his mouth sitting directly across from me. So what a moment. Yeah, that was of course the most unbelievable moment I've had. And you're

sitting in the Kremlin and you hear that suddenly. And then he went on to say, he spoke very beautifully for a few minutes. What does Russia want? And he must have used the word normal 10 times in that short speech. We want to be a normal country. We're done with the communism. We want to be normal. We want to be friendly. We want to be part of Europe.

We want to be part of the world economy. We want to be normal we want to be friendly we want to be part of europe we want to be part of the world economy we want to be normal mr sax can you help us be normal and i said mr president um the world will be so grateful for this opportunity for peace that i am absolutely sure that the United States and the rest of the world is going to come to your assistance. And I said this most remarkably wrong fact because I believed it. I knew that that was America's interest. I believed we would follow our interest. And I had had a very unusual experience, a wonderful experience two years earlier when I served as Poland's main

outside economic advisor, helping them to develop the plan for becoming a market economy and part of Europe. And in those days, I helped Poland raise many billions of dollars of emergency support to stabilize a very shaky, unstable economy. And in those days, in 1989, everything I recommended was adopted by the United States government almost immediately. I thought, hell, I'm pretty good. I once went in one morning to Senator Dole and I said, Poland needs a billion dollars to stabilize its currency. And he said, Mr. Sachs, come back in an hour. And I came back in an hour and there was Brent Scowcroft, our national security advisor.

Senator Drill said, you know who this is, Mr. Sachs. I said, General, it's an honor to meet you. And Scowcroft said, what's your idea? And I handed him my one page, about a billion dollars. And he looked, and and he said will this work Mr Sachs and I said I think this is the right way to stabilize the currency he said well we'll get back to you and at 5 p.m as Dole asked me I called Dole and he said, tell your friends they have their billion dollars within eight hours, basically. Amazing.

Okay. So I said to Yeltsin, this will be great. You're going to get all the support. We're going to go mobilize a financial package for you. We're going to help you stabilize the ruble. We're going to get a stabilization fund for the ruble. We're going to help you stabilize the ruble. We're going to get a stabilization fund for the ruble. We're going to get this and that. And of course, every single thing I recommended that had worked in Poland, they rejected in Washington.

And I, just for the life of me, what the hell is going on here? Stabilization fund. It worked. The zwolty was stable. The Polish currency stabilized. No, Mr. Sachs, I'm afraid we don't support that. And one after another, knocked down. So I did not understand the geopolitics that I was in at all.

I didn't get it. I said, are you kidding? They want normal. They want peace. This is our greatest moment. This is the greatest moment of the second half of the 20th century. The scourge of nuclear war has been lifted. The Cold War is over. Do something. No. So that's it. What do you make of Putin? He's very smart.

He has led Russia very effectively. And because he emerged from the KGB, he understands the U.S., the way the U.S. operates because we became a security state. We became a state where the CIA has absolutely extraordinary influence and Putin gets that. And so he really understands how we operate. He doesn't like it, but he understands it. And his background, especially because his background comes from the KGB, his counterpart was the CIA. He does not have illusions about the United States. And I wish we were proving him wrong, but we're not. How influential is the CIA in the operations of the U.S. government? Definitely in many, many places, it is the instrument of regime change. Yes. The U.S. is the only country in the world that relies on regime change as I would say

the lead diplomatic, let me put it a different way, not diplomatic, as the lead foreign policy instrument. In other words, most countries, virtually any small country, any middle power country, when it doesn't like another country, it either has to deal with it or it comes begging to the United States to take out that country. And we are the country that makes a living by overthrowing other governments. And that's not a good vocation for us. It almost always ends in disaster, in bloodshed, in continued instability. But that's the job of the CIA. But that's the job of the CIA.

That became, it's half the job of the CIA. CIA is also an intelligence agency. It collects information and makes analysis and it gives intelligence findings. And I have no problem with that role at all, although I don't want them to spy on us. But I think that making intelligence findings for the U.S. government is necessary. But being a private army or a hidden force that overthrows governments, that stokes unrest, that puts people in power, that runs covert operations, I'm against it. So if a big part of the CIA's job is taking down leaders of foreign countries, how long before it does that here in the United States? I mean, it doesn't seem unlikely that,

like, why wouldn't they do that here in the United States? I mean, it doesn't seem unlikely that, like, why wouldn't they do that here? Yeah, probably 61 years ago was their first run at this with President Kennedy from, I think it's best guess, not sure, but best guess that this was at least maybe rogue CIA or maybe official CIA or maybe compartmentalized CIA operation. It was clearly someone's operation, not Lee Harvey Oswald's. That's pretty obvious.

All we know and all of the evidence points in that direction. It used to be said, why is the United States the only country in the world that's never had a coup? And the answer was, well, we're the only country that doesn't have a U.S. embassy. Well, of course we've had a coup. I mean, murdering the president is a coup. But we probably had a coup in broad daylight on November 22, 1963. And we never quite got over it. And we never looked into it.

On the contrary, we covered it up from the beginning and drip by drip evidence comes including the most recent evidence that that magic bullet which was one of the justifications of the absurd account of a lone gunman. It was also debunked by the, I think now 88-year-old Secret Service agent who said, I actually put that bullet from the back of Kennedy's seat in the limousine on the stretcher at Parkland Hospital. So there's so many things wrong with the official, and it's preposterous. Almost nobody believes it or should believe it. But it's also interesting for all that we're discussing. Most likely it was a government coup in broad daylight

with a tremendous amount of evidence that it was a conspiracy at a high level. And yet it passed for the last 61 years without any official practical note of that fact. Do you think that was the last time the CIA tried to influence domestic politics in this country? Well, I'm sure the CIA influences domestic politics all the time in this country because we know about extensive surveillance operations. But it's interesting. Next year will be the 50th anniversary of the Church Committee hearings.

And Frank Church was a very unusual figure from Idaho, a pretty staunch Republican state, and he was a young, gifted patriot whose things we're talking about, something's not right. People are getting assassinated in other countries. Our government, it doesn't look clean. And one thing after another in a series of events led him to chair the only time a Senate investigative committee actually looked deeply into CIA operations. That was 1975. Fascinating. What made it possible was just a confluence of events. Nixon had resigned. Ford was an unelected president who came from Congress who didn't want to take on Congress, so he didn't resist Church's investigation, even though his chief of staff, Dick Cheney, was telling him, go after this guy. We got to crush this investigation.

But Ford said, no, no, no, we can't in any way, Supreme Court. And I don't want to get into another huge fight. Hoover had died. J. Edgar Hoover had died in 1972, I believe. So the FBI couldn't resist the same way. Bill Colby had become CIA director and he didn't want to inherit all the shit from the past CIA. So there came this one moment when all these pieces enabled actually someone to look into what this organization was doing. And the first thing they discovered was no one had ever looked into any of it before. Nothing. Second, they discovered this is an army of the president of the United States. Yes.

This is a private army. And they debated, is it a rogue army? Does it do it on its own? Or is it an army of the president? But it's an army. And it's an army completely outside of our, our oversight and control. Then the third thing they found is they're assassinating lots of people.

They're assassinating Americans, by the way, through these unbelievably crazed LSD experiments. But they, you know, basically, uh, they weren't the ones to put the bullet through the head of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, but they tried and they supported the overthrow of Lumumba. And of course, they were trying to kill Castro and many other things. So they found unbelievable things. Now, that was 1975. Since then, we're 49 years. There's never been another church committee of its kind.

It's unbelievable how many things have happened since then. The list, believe me, is very, very long. I've seen some of it so directly. I can't, it's just shocking to me, but just an insight into how our country works, which you know very well. But to me, I find it so weird. I was asked to help Aristide in Haiti. Yes. Haiti's, oh, so poor, so unstable, so desperate. And Aristide asked me for economic help. That's what I do.

That's my expertise. So I flew down to Port-au-Prince, and I had a very good meeting with him. And at the end of the meeting, he said, Mr. Sachs, they're going to take me out. They're going to take me out. And I said, what do you mean? He said, they're going to overthrow me. Okay, sorry to be so naive as I am. I said, no, we're going to make this work. You know,

this is a, we're going to make this work. No, no, no. They're going to take me out. I said, no, no, I'm going back to Washington. We're going to help with the Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank and IMF. And, oh, I'm so naive. So of course, then they decide to take him out. And the way they do it is destabilize the country. So the first thing is close down the IMF, close down the World Bank, close down the Inter-American Development Bank. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. The next thing is you send in some mercenaries who are going to create trouble, come over the border from Dominican Republic. The last thing was rather remarkable, which was the U.S. ambassador showed up at his door literally one day and said, Mr. President, you have to flee.

We have a plane waiting for you. Otherwise, your life is in danger. And they led him to a plane with an unmarked tail. And 23 hours later, he was in Central African Republic. So this is what's called a coup in broad daylight. Central African Republic. Absolutely. I thought he went to Joburg.

I don't know why. No, no, no. He went afterwards, but the first, the landing was Central African Republic, if I remember correctly. So I, what do I do? What can I do? Well, I called up the New York Times reporter on the beat, So I, what do I do? What can I do? Well, I called up the New York Times reporter on the beat.

And I said, there's been a coup on broad daylight. I don't, you know, you got to cover this. The reporter told me, my editor's not interested. A coup in our hemisphere. All the news that's fit to print. So I have wanted, it's amazing. So I wanted to ask you about that. I mean, you said there have been no, correctly,

there have been no real oversight hearings into the intel agencies in 50 years. Yes. But, you know, the congressional committees are only one part of the oversight the Constitution prescribes. And the other part, of course, is the media, right? Supposed to provide oversight uh oversight of government and i one of the moment i really wanted to speak to you was the day that i saw the clip of you on bloomberg news i think you were one of my favorite

moments and we just described and it was within hours of this massive natural gas pipeline, Nord Stream, disintegrating. Can you describe what happened? Yeah. So, you know, the U.S. blew up Nord Stream, as it promised to on probably dozens of occasions. But the most recent of those occasions was President Biden said, I think it's February 7, 2022. I may have the date a little bit off, but he said in a statement to the press, if the Russians invade Ukraine, Nord Stream is finished. And the reporter who asked him the question, I think from Germany,

but an international, said, well, Mr. President, how can you say that? How could you do that? And he looks and he says very gravely, believe me, we have our ways. Okay. So this is, and then you can go back and find a thousand clips of Victoria, New England and Cruz and everyone saying, this must stop. This must stop.

We'll never let it happen. It will be destroyed. It will be ended. Okay. So then it's blown up. Okay. And you, and, and then the American, you know, well, before we get to that, I was on Bloomberg soon afterwards. I don't remember whether it was the next day or the day after. And I said, you know, I think the U.S. did this. Mr. Sachs, how can you say that? And I said, well, first the president said it was going to be over. And then there's actually, you know, some readings of planes in the vicinity and so forth. And there was the tweet by the former and now current foreign minister of Poland, thank you, USA, with a picture of the water bubbling over the blown-up pipeline, Radek Sikorski's tweet. And Applebaum's husband, I should say.

Yes, there was a bit of evidence that, well, yes, the United States had done this. Thank you very much. They said they would, and they did it. I was yanked off the air within 30 seconds. I could watch, I could imagine, because he was listening to something in the earplug, which I could only imagine, get that son of a bitch off the air. And they just, this interview's over, you know, and he stopped. And then another anchor berated me for a few minutes after that.

And, okay, that was the last time I had a word on mainstream media, I have to tell you. Seriously? Yeah, yeah. But you've been famous, because I live in this country, I know. You've been famous for decades. Yeah, I was on everything, MSNBC. Like a lot. Yeah, a lot, constantly.

But it's so interesting that your sin was saying something true that the media really should be on. I mean, this is the largest act of industrial sabotage in my lifetime. It's the largest carbon emission ever. You know, look, it's a big deal. It's an act of war.

It helps to understand what this Ukraine war is all about. It helps us to understand that this is a war between the United States and Russia fought on many means. It's important to understand it. significance because it's part of a long-standing uh u.s idea of not letting germany and russia ever get too close together economically so there's a lot to that story and but the media should be covering that look if you can kill a president in broad daylight uh and get away with it for 61 years if you can can walk a president of a neighboring country out to an unmarked plane and not have it covered if you can have a quote unprovoked war that you provoked over a 30-year period you can do lots of things and this is just one of the things that you could do, and I discovered that some of our press, like the New York Times, which opined after the blow up that,

it looks like Russia did that to their own infrastructure. Their reporters, their top reporters know better. They tell me, yeah, Jeff, of course, of course. But they don't cover it because we're living in an environment where the people in power think it's a game. And they think that it's not their job to tell us. They're playing risk with our lives. They're playing risk with Ukrainian lives. They don't have to tell us. They're playing risk with our lives. They're playing risk with Ukrainian

lives. They don't have to tell us the truth. We don't have to have any serious discussion. We don't have to call anyone for a real hearing or even much less a congressional investigation. We're not living in that kind of world. We're living in a world where it's almost daily that the government says what it wants. Kirby at the White House says it with that damn smirk of his. And pretty much everyone knows it's lies but why have it it's just interesting because you're from a very specific class you know yeah well-known academic economist diplomat frequent tv guest and you know there are a bunch of other people in that world yeah but you were pretty much the only person to say no that's a lie and I'm not going along with it. Why you? Why didn't you do what all of your peers did?

I do it because it came as part of my life course working mostly internationally, talking with the leaders abroad. I care about my credibility a lot, which is, you know, I'm not always right, but I try to always be right. And I have a lot of discussions every day with foreign ministers or with senior diplomats or with heads of state. And for me, I don't hold an office. I don't do anything other than try to have reasonable ideas and speak as truthfully as possible. So it's kind of a career approach, which is I'm trying to be accurate. Right. But there should be a lot of people like you in your world.

Yeah. I know for me, I'm not interested and I would not take a job in the U.S. government, for example. I couldn't anyway, you know, with all the things I've said, I can imagine the congressional hearings. It would be, did you say that about the U.S. government? Did you say that about the U.S. government? But in any event, I'm not looking for a job. I'm not looking for a USAID grant. I'm not looking for a U. government grant. So in that sense, also, I'm not, um, I'm not part, I'm not exactly, I hope

trapped in, in that way, I'm just trying to be accurate and what I'm really, really trying is to help the United States government understand they're operating on dangerous, dangerous trajectories and with a lot of delusions. And it's very risky for everybody. And I also have a big measure of resentment. I don't like the risks that we're being put under, Tucker. Yes, I agree with that completely. I don't like it.

You've got children. This is not a game. I've got that completely. I don't like it. You've got children. This is not a game. I've got grandchildren, and I really care about this, and I don't like the games, and I want people to tell the truth. And if we told the truth, we could actually stop the wars today. I don't mean – that sounds crazy. It's not crazy. If we told the truth about Ukraine, if Biden called Putin and said that NATO enlargement we've been trying for 30 years, it's off. We get it. You're right. It's not going to your border. Ukraine should be neutral. That war would stop today. There'd be lots of pieces to figure out where exactly will the borders be? How will it go?

I don't say that there won't be issues, but the fighting would stop today. If the government of Israel either were told or said, there will be a state of Palestine and we will live peacefully side by side, the fighting would stop today. These are basic facts, basic matters of truth, that if we actually spoke them, if we actually treated each other like grown-ups, we would resolve what seem to be these insurmountable crises. They're not at all insurmountable.

They just require a measure of truth. How have you been treated by your peers for saying things like, I hear what you just said, and I think it's indisputable. It's also very honorable. You seem to be acting out of the best motives, traditional American motives, I would say. Yeah.

So I admire you for saying that. How have your peers responded to you? They think I'm a little crazy, I think. What would be crazy about what you just said? Well, you know, when I said that this war has a reason, that it's not that Putin's evil, that we provoke this, and that it could stop, I got most of my remaining interlocutors saying, Jeff, what is the matter with you? You're Putin apologist? How dare you? When I say this about Israel, I lose another group.

Because there are things you're supposed to say here. Because this idea of U.S. hegemony, this idea of U.S. dominance, it's pretty deep in American academia also. I mean, it's not a shock to tell you, but all of these special organizations, the think tanks or university special departments or research units, they're funded by the U.S. government. They're funded by the security state. They're funded by large donors that are all part of this story. So it's not absolutely simple to get out of that. I think Mark Twain, I think he was the one that said it.

It may have been Mencken, but I think it's attributed to Twain that said it's impossible to convince a man of something when his job depends on believing the other. And I think that's true of a lot of people, which is, I can't really say that. I don't know if it's true, but anyway, why are you sticking your head out so much? I got to ask you about, first of all, thank you. I think that's the crispest and I think most honest description

I've ever heard of the lead up to what's happening in Ukraine right now. So thank you for that. So given the credibility that you just gained by that explanation, where do you think COVID came from? COVID? The question is which lab and in which way. It almost surely did not come out of nature. It almost surely came out of a deliberate research project that had a core idea, which was to take a natural virus and make it more infectious.

And we have one major blueprint of that, which is a research proposal called Diffuse, which was submitted to the Department of Defense to the unit called DARPA in 2018. And it is a kind of cookbook for how to make the virus that causes COVID-19. And the virus is called SARS-CoV-2. And what's distinctive about SARS-CoV-2 is that it has something called a proteolytic cleavage site, and specifically something called a furin cleavage site. And it's just some pieces of the genome that make this thing damn infectious. And what's interesting about it is that for this class of bat viruses, which are called beta coronaviruses, which is what SARS comes from and what COVID-19 comes from,

for that class of viruses, and there are several hundred known, none of them in nature ever had that particular piece of the genome. None? None, other than SARS-CoV-2. And that piece of the genome, the furin cleavage site, was an object of research attention from 2005 because it was understood that if a virus were to have that, it would make the entry of the virus into human cells easier and would make the virus therefore infectious for humans. SARS-1, which is the first outbreak of a virus like this in 2003 in Hong Kong, was most likely a natural

virus that came from a farm animal. and it was not so infectious. It killed some thousands of people. But with SARS-CoV-2, you got very, very sick for weeks before you were infectious to someone else. And that meant that it was not so hard to stop by isolating people who had the symptoms. With SARS-CoV-2, you are infectious even without any symptoms. Sometimes you're completely asymptomatic. So what's the difference of SARS-1 and SARS-CoV-2? The furin cleavage site.

And in 2005 already, so almost 20 years ago, that experiment was done that said, oh, take SARS-1, add in a furin cleavage site, this thing becomes really infectious. And there are a series of experiments, 2005, 2009, 2011, that are called gain-of-function experiments where you deliberately manipulate the virus to make it more infectious. By 2015, we had a full-blown research program funded by NIH, by Tony Fauci's unit, on beta coronaviruses, already with the lead scientists focusing on this furin cleavage site it's starting to get ah so they're starting to do more and more targeted experiments may i ask why why would you want to take a virus like that and make it more infectious they're the overarching answer is called biodefense. And the real question, which I don't know the answer to, is that biowarfare or is that true defense? NIH, starting in 2001, became the Defense

Department's research unit. So remember the anthrax attack that came after 9-11? Yes. After that- I'm sorry to ask you, Paul. Do we know, or are you satisfied you know what that was? That probably came out of AMRID. It was probably a US, some US scientists either- For sure. Provoking or doing some crazy things or disgruntled or boosting up the DOD budget. I don't know. I don't know the answer to that.

I know that after that, DOD put its budget through Tony Fauci's unit, which suddenly became the largest unit of NIH. And Fauci became the head of what is politely called biodefense. But one only suspects that it is, we're not supposed to do biowarfare. It used to be called germ warfare, right? Right. And I don't know. And they say, well, it's for vaccines against biowarfare.

It's to defend against it. It's to defend against natural outbreaks. But what it is, is a tremendously dangerous research program that involves a lot of manipulation of very dangerous pathogens. And by 2015, the ability of scientists to manipulate these viruses was reaching astounding proportions. And we've got a real genius who was part of this group named Ralph Baric at University of North Carolina, who is a genius. And what he could do was if you gave him 30,000 letters of the DNA code, A, G, C, C, G, A, and so forth. And I mean, give him the letters,

he'll turn that into a live virus. I think that's pretty damn remarkable. In other words, you give him the designer virus, he'll give you the live virus. And he created what's called a reverse genetic system to make these viruses and to put in pieces into the viruses with a technique which he also called no-see-em, meaning you suture in a part, but you do it in a way that you can't identify that it was put in in the lab,

so it's without the fingerprints, as it were. And it's clear that this area of research picked up a tremendous amount of steam because a lot of American scientists were shouting, this is so damn dangerous, stop it. And Fauci was saying, no, this is important. This is really crucial. We're going to continue to do this. There was a brief moratorium at the end of the Obama period, and then the moratorium was lifted during the Trump administration. And even during the moratorium period, we know that the research continued on many grants. look closely at this, that they were getting closer and closer to this insertion of the furin cleavage site into SARS-like viruses. Now, in 2018 came this proposal. As always, this was a highly classified proposal. We only learned about it after the fact by a whistleblower. We never even would have

learned about it, even in all of the commotion of the pandemic, but for a whistleblower, a brave whistleblower in the Department of Defense who said the public needs to see this. And when you look at the diffuse proposal, really you say, holy shit, because on page 10, it says we have collected more than 180 previously unreported beta coronaviruses. we're going to test them for whether they have a proteolytic cleavage site, which is a furin cleavage site. And if they don't, we're going to insert a furin cleavage site into them. It's the goddamn cookbook for how to make this virus. So here comes the, the defense department turned it down, supposedly. I mean, probably did. And then comes the question, well, so what happened?

Well, the people that wrote that little cookbook said, not us. We didn't do anything like that. No, it got turned down. Nothing to look at here. And there are all, I know because people have told me, oh, Jeff, it's not just that it got turned down. They had done the work even before they submitted the grant proposal. That's not uncommon in science, which is you do a lot of the work beforehand. So I've heard that on good authority. I can't verify it personally. And there are so many strands now that say, yeah, something really screwy was going on. For example, there's a very weird paper, weird to me, by Barak and the head of what's called Rocky Mountain Laboratory, which is a NIH laboratory under Fauci's authority that reports this completely bizarre finding. And the finding sounds very technical, but it says the Wuhan Institute of Virology Type 1 virus does not infect Egyptian fruit bats.

Okay, that's the title. So you say, so what the hell is that? and 2018, they were doing experiments using viruses from Wuhan in the Rocky Mountain Labs with their collection of bats. Okay. So one theory, and the bats in Rocky Mountain Labs is called an Egyptian fruit bat. It's not the kind of bat that carries this virus in China, which is in Yunnan, which is a different kind of bat. But they tried it in Rocky Mountain Lab. I scratched my head and said, what the hell? We have Rocky Mountain Lab doing experiments with Wuhan viruses in Montana, in NIH labs with Ralph Baric, who was one of the principal investigators of the Insert the Furin

Cleavage site into the virus. I'd like to know more about that. Thank you. Isn't that curious? Then there are other scientists that have pieces of this puzzle. So the answer is we don't know exactly. One theory is that it was concocted in the U.S. and sent over to Wuhan, to this Wuhan Institute of Virology, for testing in their bat collection, which is the Chinese bats rather than the Egyptian fruit bats. That's plausible. That's one person's theory. other theories that even a related research group, German and Dutch, may have played a role because they have in Wuhan research. But when the virus broke out in that period at the end of 2019, early 2020, there's commotion among the scientists. What the hell is this? Where'd this come from? Oh my God, did we do this? How'd this escape? Or whatever. Nobody knows, of course. So they start

having secret calls. And one of the most important of these calls was on February 1st, 2020, that was then memorialized by one of the participants in a long memo, all of which became public through a Freedom of Information Act subsequently, because our government has lied to us about every single moment of this from the start, hasn't told us anything about any of this. It's all whistleblowers or Freedom of Information Act. That's the only way we know any of what I'm describing to you right now. No one has told the truth at all. So on the February 1st call, the scientists say, oh, God, this looks like a lab stuff.

One of them says, I can't figure out how this could have ever come out of nature. And they're all looking at the furin cleavage site because they know, this group of scientists knows that's the object of research. That's the goal. It's never been seen before in a virus like this. It's the signature right there. I did this. And four days later, that group authors the first draft of a paper called The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2 that says it's a natural virus. The same people wrote it?

The same people who privately said it's out of a lab, most likely. So it's just, that is provably a cover-up then? That's a cover-up. This paper is a fraud. It has not been retracted until today. It's a fraud. Where did it run? It ran in Nature Medicine in March 2020.

Which I think is considered one of the most credible medical journals, right? When I read it, when it came out, it was, I think, the most cited paper in biology or in medicine by far in 2020. Everyone wanted to know where this virus came from. I read it, and I went around knowingly telling everyone, oh, it's natural. You have to read Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2. Because it never occurred to you they would lie in Nature Medicine. Because this is the top of the heap of the scientific journals

and the scientific establishment. The top. Nature. You know, there are two great science magazines in the world that have a history that is so deep. One is science, that's the US one, and the second is nature, which is the British one. And nature is the one that originally published Darwin. And it's so illustrious. And I was so it's, you know, it's so illustrious. And I was so smug, you know,

oh, you didn't read Nature, SARS-CoV-2, Proximal Origins, because you believe that stuff when it's written there. It's a fraud, that paper. And it stands to this day. To this day, they have not retracted it. There is, last week, a call by several scientists to the editor, a very clever one, calling for its retraction because, this is interesting, all in the weeds, but it's like everything we're talking about, the nonstop line. The paper was to an important extent honchoed by somebody named Jeremy Farrar, who at the time was the director of British Welcome Trust, which is a huge foundation that supports biomedical research.

And Farrar was working with Fauci to make it look like nature. And so he was part of this group, but he's not a named author. And at the bottom of the article, there's more details than you want to know, but at the bottom of the article this more details than you want to know but at the bottom of the article thanks welcome trust well under the rules of science and under the rules of a journal if there's an a contributor who financed the thing but is not mentioned as a contributor to the article, that is per se a violation of conflict of interest standards. And that wasn't revealed. So just last week, a group of very illustrious virologists called for the retraction of this. I've called for the retraction of it because it's an outright fraud because we have Slack messages and other email messages

and other e-messaging that says, I don't really believe this. In other words, it's clearly a fraudulent paper, but they're not moving to this moment. So there's a lot of debate about a pandemic treaty who is of course pushing it lots of countries are as well as you well know how can you prepare for a new pandemic without establishing the origin of the most recent pandemic and and more than that we're going to have another pandemic if it came out of a lab.

They're still doing this work. It's not as if they said, oh, oh my God, we really blew it. Now we stopped gain-of-function research. There's gain-of-function research going on all over the place. And interestingly, Tucker, last year, almost like Monty Python, but it's so serious, Boston University put out a paper based on gain-of-function for manipulating SARS-CoV-2. And NIH says, you didn't ask for approval before doing that experiment.

And Boston University says, we don't have to ask for approval. It's not on your grant. We just, we're doing it like we want. And it shows we got a shit show going on in this country right now. If a university thinks it can do whatever it wants, and if NIH has a different opinion and we have no rules and they're doing work on dangerous pathogens, yeah, we're going to have another pandemic. Even if this one didn't come from it, this line of work is really dangerous. And who's watching it?

Well, we don't know because it's dod because it's confidential because no one tells us anything and interestingly you know now the house uh investigation committee is trying to get at some of this the democrats completely surrounded fauci And so we don't want to have a look at this. And said, this is Republican grandstanding. It's nuts. What could be less partisan than where this virus came from? And we can't even get Democrats in the House. Now, I think a few of them are coming along. But for a time, it was completely partisan.

The Republicans could investigate in the House, but in the Senate where the Democrats are controlled, they were saying no. And Rand Paul asked me to come in and meet his counterpart, who was the chair of the committee, Peters, and I did. And now, by the way, they are moving in the Senate because you got these bright red lights flashing. Holy hell, let's find out what happened. humanity right there nuclear war bio warfare um possibly ai yeah uh but just right there i mean what what big picture what is this did you ever think you would after living in the most prosperous country in the world your entire life find yourself in a place where the country you live in is basically causing, um, you know, the potential extinction of, of humanity. You know, I think it's, it's really, uh, true and important to understand that since 1945, we've been living this way and, uh and we don't know it. We're barely aware of it.

But the ability to screw things up in this world is very high. The ability to have terrible accidents. Oops, where'd that virus come from? The ability to have a nuclear war even by accident, but much less when you're in the face of your opponent and talking about defeating them and so forth, a war between two nuclear superpowers that we have normalized. Yeah, oh, we're not at war. We're just feeding them all the weapons and the British who are the worst at this.

Yeah, they can use the weapons wherever they want. No constraint, no control. We've been living this way, but we don't know it because, like everything else, the narrative doesn't permit it. One day, Biden said in, I think it was the fall of 2022, you know, this is pretty dangerous. We could be on a path to nuclear Armageddon. He didn't say that in a speech to the American people because he doesn't give speeches to the American people.

He doesn't talk to the American people. He doesn't have press conferences. He said it at some fundraiser, as usual, and then someone reported it. What was the reaction of the press the next day? Almost to a paper, the reaction was, how dare he say these things? How dare he scare the people? How dare he say a word like Armageddon? There was, I think, an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, if I remember correctly, this unforgivable, this kind of slip of the president of the United States.

So Biden, for a moment, blurted out the truth, no doubt by accident, no doubt because he was in some fundraiser, probably trying to impress some donor. But the reaction wasn't, oh, my God, what does this mean? How do we consider this? Let's go back and think about unprovoked, unprovoked, unprovoked, and maybe we could decide how to step a little bit back from the cliff. And no, absolutely the opposite, completely the opposite. And I've seen, I mean, not only you could have a pandemic that kills an estimated 20 million people and not really care to find out where it came from. You can be on the brink of nuclear war.

We can have Ukraine shelling the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Do you know our newspapers won't say that it's Ukraine shelling the power plant? And Ukraine is shelling the nuclear power plant i can reveal uh as if it's a as if it's a surprise because the russians are inside the power plant and the ukrainians are trying to take back the power plant and so these shells come to the nuclear power plant and then our lovely fucking crazy our lovely newspapers say each side accuses the other of shelling the nuclear power plant. And I happen to know for the reasons that I know some of these things that the, of course, it's Ukraine shelling a plant that the Russians are inside of, not Russians shelling the plant. But you can't get officialdom to say this.

You can't get the newspapers to say this. That's pretty serious to be shelling a nuclear power plant. I mean, are you out of your, I put that on the list that we've been adding to. Are you out of your mind? Don't do that. But they're doing it. In the country in the world that's actually had a profound nuclear accident already you might mention that maybe they would know something

about it that there would be some reticence about so that leads to my last sincere question which you may or may not answer but um you know you're telling the truth about things that are big things they're big things like the biggest things and in a world where They're big things, like the biggest things. And in a world where you're just absolutely, as you've noted repeatedly and correctly, you're just not allowed to do that. And you're telling the truth about people who don't care about the deaths of millions who have caused the deaths of millions. So are you worried because you do have credibility, you're not a crank, and your job and your career give you prima facie credibility, it's a big thing for you to say these things.

Are you worried about the risks to you? Really? I'm worried about the risks to me of a nuclear war. For sure. I really am. I spend a lot of time with diplomats. I really like diplomats, by the way. It's even when countries hate each other or war, good diplomats smile and talk to each other.

And one could say, you know, oh, how cynical. But it's actually quite nice. I believe the human touch is what can keep us alive, actually. I don't think it's a naive idea. It's actually a quite deep idea. Russia has one of the greatest diplomats I've ever seen. I think Lavrov is absolutely remarkable. Remarkable. And I've known him for 30 years. Have you really? Yeah. It's funny, in a fair world, in a meritocratic world, he'd be very famous,

even if you disagree with everything he said, because he's so obviously smart. He's astoundingly smart. Yes. And astoundingly capable. And he's astoundingly someone that we should be speaking with. Oh, I agree. To find an answer to this. So the thing that makes it, if I were shouting in the wilderness and just felt it's insane, no one's listening. I'd have a very different reaction from the one that I actually carry day by day. Almost everyone I talk to around the world is worried, shares the things we're talking about, understands the risks, makes you feel completely normal, not abnormal in any of

this, says, please keep doing this. Can you find a way to talk here or there? I've spoken twice in the UN Security Council or testified twice in the UN Security because our lives depend on it. And we stopped all diplomacy in the United States, all of it, except what we call speaking with our friends and allies. But diplomacy is not speaking with your friends and allies. Diplomacy is speaking with your counterparts, even your adversaries. That's what diplomacy is, and we got to get it back. Do you think the average American, I said that was my last question, but I do have one more.

Do you think the average American, even sort of inform people, has any sense at all of how close we are to annihilation? I think people are worried, and people are not happy campers and people do not agree with the foreign policy of this administration. But people are also very confused because we don't hear anything clear, except when you interview President Putin and we get to hear what he says. And think of, I mean, that was a monumental occasion, Tucker, and an extraordinarily important one. But how rare it is, and that's what made it also so extraordinary

because you're not supposed to do that. We're not supposed to listen to that. So I think Americans are, they know that something's wrong. They don't know exactly. How could they know what exactly is wrong? The level of trust in government is extraordinarily low. That low trust has been unfortunately amply deserved because our government lies and lies and lies, and it doesn't even try to tell the truth anymore. It tries to make a narrative.

So I think people sense something seriously wrong, but God, I hope our lives are in the hands of a few people, and they better learn some prudence because they have not had it for a long time. And they don't even understand what it is to talk to a counterpart. And my absolute core bottom line is until Biden speaks directly with Putin and starts talking, our lives are deeply at risk. And it's unimaginable to me that we are in open war as we are, and we're not even trying to find the path to peace right now. And we have crazy statements that the president of Finland said the path to peace is through the battlefield. These people don't understand anything.

And I was just going to mention two quick things in closing. One, I spent a lot of my life studying the Cuban Missile Crisis and its aftermath. And I wrote a book about Kennedy's peace initiative in 1963, which was remarkable because he actually, in the height of the Cold War, reached the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with Khrushchev. And they both knew we had to pull back from the brink because they both had had advisors that would have led us to nuclear annihilation. And they were just completely, completely shocked as the two people who had saved the world, but just barely how close we had come. But one of the things that most people don't know about the Cuban Missile Crisis is that even when Kennedy and Khrushchev had reached an agreement, we almost had nuclear war after that

event because of the disabled Soviet submarine. Do you know this event? Because it's one of the most remarkable, little known facts of modern history. And it's worth understanding. After Kennedy and Khrushchev reached the agreement to end the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy removing the nuclear weapons from Turkey and Soviet Union removing the nuclear weapons from Cuba and the U.S. promising never again to try to invade Cuba, there was a disabled Soviet sub at the bottom of the Caribbean that had been sent over during the crisis. And it blew a gasket, as it were, and temperatures inside 120 degrees, and the sailors fainting, and the ship deeply disabled. And this was 1962, so the communications did not exist.

The ship was out of communication. They had no idea what was going on. So they decided to surface. And as they surfaced, American Navy pilots were dropping charges on the sub. And it's not absolutely sure, but one story is that the Navy pilot, one Navy pilot for fun, was dropping live grenades on the sub as it was surfacing rather than depth charges.

And the pilot thought that they were under attack and that there was a war above the surface. Now, this was the lead sub of a squadron of seven in the Caribbean, and it was the one sub in that squadron that had nuclear-tipped torpedoes. And under U.S. doctrine, any attack by a nuclear weapon was to be met by the full force of the US nuclear arsenal with an attack on across the Soviet Union, China, and all of the Eastern European countries, estimate 700 million dead. And that was to happen with any nuclear attack. And Curtis LeMay was the head of the US Air Force at the time and he couldn't wait.

I think it's fair to say. Yes, it's fair to say. So what happened was this skipper, the commander of the vessel, ordered the nuclear torpedo into the torpedo bay pretty sure I have the name right, was a party official that had a higher rank than the ship's captain and said, I don't think that's a good idea. I think we should surface. And he countermanded the order at the last moment. And the ship surfaced. And they found out there was no war and no crisis. And that was the end of it. And we came within a moment of a full nuclear annihilation. Now, that's a true story. If people want to read about it in detail,

the most remarkable book about this is a book by the late historian Martin Sherwin called Gambling with Armageddon, which is an absolutely phenomenal work. And Martin Sherwin, some people may recall, is the historian who's the co-author of Oppenheimer, which became the screenplay. He's a wonderful historian who died a few years ago. And he tells this story in unbelievable, riveting detail. Now, I take this not only as a literal event, but as a metaphor for our reality, which is something can always go wrong.

Stay away from the cliff. Stay away from the cliff. This is how close we are. Talk to President Putin. Negotiate with China. Make a two-state solution to stop the war in the Middle East. Stop carrying on like you run the world because you don't.

Thank you for this. And I hope that you are heard everywhere. Well, thank you. Thanks for all your great leadership in this, Tucker, because you're playing a huge, huge role. Just bumbling along, but that's the greatest account I've ever heard. So thank you. Thanks for listening

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