Jeffrey Sachs 3 april 2024

The Naked Truth Sometimes People Don't Want To Hear The Truth Because They Don't Want Their Illusions Destroyed MUST WATCH: The most important interview of our time Russia-Ukraine War The Best Explaned Jeffrey Sachs: Biden Has DESTROYED Ukraine, More Funding Would Be INSANE The longer it continues, the less there will be of Ukraine. Russia will capture more territory. Russia will capture Odessa, Kiev. It was about NATO enlargement, where the Russians said, no NATO on our borders. Americans who were following this, like our CIA director Bill Burns, who was then the US ambassador to Russia in 2008, said, this is crazy. No way. The entire russian political class is against this. But Biden and Obama and Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, Tony Blinken, they just barged ahead. They've wrecked everything. That's our american foreign policy. That's when this war started. This war didn't start in February 2022. It started in February 2014. It started with Nuland. It started with Blinken. It started with Sullivan. It started with Biden, who was a key person in that whole thing. Putin escalated. He didn't start the war. Well, first of all, this is purely money down the drain. So if they want to rip up another $61 billion, which is not chump change, they seem intent on doing it, but it will mean nothing except more destruction for Ukraine. The fact of the matter is, if you don't listen to the nonsense in our mainstream media but listen to your show and others, people would know that this war has destroyed Ukraine. And the longer it continues, the less there will be of Ukraine. It's very simple, actually. If this goes on longer, Russia will capture more territory. If it goes on long enough, Russia will capture Odessa, Kiev. If we continue the way we're doing, and this is a Biden project that goes back ten years now, will completely destroy Ukraine. So the idea that this is siding with Ukraine is absurd. Anyone who really follows events knows that we're not siding with Ukraine. We have paid for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to go to the front lines and die for more and more territory to be lost. Because the most basic point of this war, which is that we overthrew a government in Ukraine in 2014 that wanted neutrality so that we could push NATO enlargement, was reckless, stupid, and doomed to fail, and it failed. Now Biden is just trying to hide the failure to get past November, but the failure is seen on the battleground every day. If the Republicans play into this, its unbelievable shame on them. Theyre basically on the right side, although Biden bludgeons them every day. Youll be the one to lose Ukraine. Well, the truth of the matter is Biden has been a disaster for Ukraine for a decade. The disaster is there in the graves of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and lost territory. This is a war that never should have happened. It was about NATO enlargement, where the Russians said, no NATO on our borders. And Americans who were following this, like our CIA director Bill Burns, who was then the US ambassador to Russia in 2008, said, this is crazy. No way. The entire russian political class is against this. But Biden and Obama and Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, Tony Blinken, they just barged ahead. They've wrecked everything. And now they want another $61 billion to get them past November. It's a disgrace. It's completely a disgrace. To play devil's advocate. Let me give you the other side and then allow you to respond to that. What do you say to people that maybe acknowledge there were certainly missteps with the expansion of NATO and the provocation, but nevertheless, Russia chose to respond to that with an invasion. The situation in Ukraine is due to that invasion. And so what do you say to people who think, well, so we are now responding to that invasion by funding, not committing american troops, but funding a resistance in Ukraine that wants to continue fighting? Well, yeah, the war began ten years ago when Victoria Nuland not only passed out cookies on Maidan, but engaged in insurrection to violently overthrow a government in Ukraine. Pretty stupid. Pretty stupid to have a regime change operation on a country with the 2000 kilometer border with Russia. That's our american foreign policy. That's when this war started. This war didn't start in February 2022. It started in February 2014. It started with Nuland. It started with Blinken. It started with Sullivan. It started with Biden, who was a key person in that whole thing. And then the fighting went on for ten years. And then in December 2021, Putin said, look, stop the NATO enlargement. We can avoid an escalation. I talked to the White House at that point. Nah, we don't stop anything. They just thought they had all the cards. We're going to cut them out of this SWIFT banking system. We're going to bring the economy to the knees. Bunch of nonsense by ignorant people. And so Putin escalated. He didn't start the war. He escalated the war. And within, basically a week, Zelenskyy said, okay, okay, okay, we can be neutral. And the Turks mediated negotiations. And then, though the US government wants to hide all of these facts, which are sitting out there for those who know where to find them, the US intervened and told the Ukrainians, you keep fighting. And we have our senators who say, this is the best the money can buy, because it's Ukrainians dying, not Americans. They're weakening Russia. Well, they're not weakening Russia, but they are killing Ukrainians. So this is not responding to Putin's invasion. The war started ten years ago, and we kept refusing every off ramp till this day, Robbie, you know, you hear Putin say, and if you listen, every day, we're open to negotiations. And then these fools in the US government say, there's no one to negotiate. They don't want to negotiate. And then President Putin says, oh, we're open to negotiation. Oh, there's no one to negotiate, is what we hear from the US side. This is just narrative. It's destroyed Ukraine, and they just rip up money like there's no tomorrow. So another 61 billion. And now I hear from. From you that the latest plan is to take the illegally confiscated assets of Russia because there's no legal basis to do this and use that. That'll be really great for the international financial system. I'll tell you. Because these are people who don't think ahead one day. They just improvise day by day, and then they'll find out, oh, things don't work out so well for the US dollar, for the US as reserve currency for the US place in the world, because these people are acting like clowns, frankly, day by day, not thinking ahead, doubling down on lost gambles and everything to tell a story so that they can get to the elections in the way they see fit. Professor, I want to ask you about how the United States gets out of this now, because I'm reminded of conversations that surrounded the war in Afghanistan for years, which was that we shouldn't have gotten into it. This is a mistake. But now we've destabilized the country. We're in neck deep. We can't just stop funding and abandon this project. And that's a hamster wheel of sorts, right? So there are some people that I think are gonna listen to this and say, well, I agree with everything you're saying, but what do you do at this point? Is it just a sunk cost? Or is there some obligation to unwind this in a way that's responsible and doesn't leave Ukrainians high and dry? Ukrainians are high and dry no matter what we do. We've killed nearly half a million of them through this stupid project. And the ones that throw good money after bad are the ones themselves that are personally culpable for this. This is Biden's project. So this is the first starting point. You don't throw good lives after those already dead and good money after bad when you have an absolute failure and disaster on your hands. By the way, this is like every american effort. I'm old enough to remember Vietnam. The same words said about Vietnam. We do this over and over and over again in the US because our so called leaders have no sense and they don't think ahead. So, yes, we have to stop this. But the one thing that we don't do, and it's really a bit of a mystery to me, it's the worst I've seen in my whole lifetime. We don't negotiate. Does Biden call Putin, say, we need to talk? No, that would be weakness. That would be appeasement. They don't even have the idea that you negotiate anything. And, you know, if you try everything by a military approach and a failed one, and you do it in these proxy wars where it's the people themselves in these countries that are dying on the front lines, and you don't know anything about diplomacy? Well, you make a complete mess of the world. And so the answer is the first thing is the US and Russia should talk to each other because there's a cause of this war and that's NATO enlargement. And by the way, that's no secret and that's not propaganda. Even the secretary general of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, said that absolutely explicitly, as did the top negotiator for Zelensky, Davyd Arakhamia. This is a war about NATO enlargement. So why doesn't Biden call up Putin, say, you know what, we gotta stop the war. And that whole NATO enlargement that I was party to going back to the 1990s and to 2014 coup and all that was a bad idea. Figure out how to stop the war, recognize mutual security, and stop the bloodshed and massacres in Ukraine. If Biden were really acting like a president, thats what he would do. Its been about a year since a group of economists wrote an open letter about you, accusing you of denying the agency of Ukraine peddling Putin talking points, all of those kinds of things. It's a year later. How do you respond to them? Well, I don't respond. I tell them I told you so. I told them so from the beginning that this would be a complete disaster for Ukraine. People don't want to hear this. They don't understand. They don't know enough about american history. I told them Ukraine is going to be like Afghanistan and boy is it like Afghanistan right now. So they didn't want to hear. That's not right. That's not fair. Professor Sacks. I was telling them facts. I was giving them some good advice. They didn't want to hear that. They wanted to hear about victory, glory, how Ukraine's going to succeed, that great counteroffensive, all the rest, all the baloney. But I said from the beginning that this would be a disaster. I said this is just the latest neocon debacle. And I said explicitly it was going to leave Ukraine like Afghanistan and it was completely avoidable. So that's what I tell them. I'm sorry. Listen, pay attention. Learn something. That's what I say to them.