Jeffrey D. Sachs is a renowned economist, bestselling author, innovative educator, and global leader in sustainable development. He is mild mannered but speaks eloquently and emphatically about the economic and political issues affecting our world. In this video, he talks about lessons learned from consulting with governments around the world and about how global problems, such as the war in Ukraine, will only be solved via efforts to understand the other side, never by force. Rob Johnson, the President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), is the interviewer. Two of Jeffrey’s many books are heavily quoted: To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace. Random House (2013), and, A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism. Columbia University Press (2018).
Cuban Missile Crisis: Most Americans are aware of the crisis which happened 60 years ago. The U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a tense, 13-day political and military standoff in October 1962 over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles on Cuba. In a TV address on October 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy explained his decision to enact a naval blockade around Cuba and made it clear the U.S. was prepared to use military force if necessary. The world was at the brink of a nuclear war. Fortunately, disaster was averted when the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba.
Many Americans perceived that this as a total victory for the US because of our military might. But unbeknownst to many, in exchange for the Soviet Union’s promise to remove the Cuban missiles, the US has counter-offered to remove US nuclear missiles from Turkey, a stone throw away from Russia. Thus, the Cuban Crisis was averted with diplomacy rather than the sheer strength of US military power. In this video, Rob Johnson and Jeffrey Sachs also described how close a Soviet submarine came to launching a nuclear warhead during the crisis.
The American Century and American Exceptionalism: In this and other videos, Jeffrey Sachs speaks eloquently about the deleterious effects of these concepts. In essence, the US has been pushing our concept of liberal democracy as the universal truth. Our version of “World Order” is a political system that all countries must adhere to. We have often used military power as the means and more often than not, regime changes are our end goals. Diplomacy and our very substantial soft power are almost always neglected.
The Military Industrial Complex (MIC): For many decades, the US military budget has taken the largest share of our national budget. By some estimates, we have been out spending the next 9-11 countries combined on defense, Russia and China included. This would be fine if it is not at the expense of our health care, infrastructure, education, environment, and all the other supporting systems that make our country great. Jeffrey said that one of the roles of the US President is to apply the brakes to the overreach of the Military Industrial Complex. Yet, almost all our Presidents have failed to do this. The exceptions are President Truman, Eisenhower and President Kennedy. President Truman fired General MacArthur when the latter wanted to escalate the Korean war by using nuclear weapons to attack North Korea and China. President Eisenhower warned the nation with regard to the corrupting influence of the “military-industrial complex”. President Kennedy was successful in using diplomacy to deescalate the Cuban Crisis.
Lessens Learned: Donald Trump failed miserably by putting “American First” and disrespecting our European allies in trying to contain China. Biden is forming an alliance with NATO to contain Putin and Russia which ultimately has precipitated the Ukraine war. The US-NATO alliance represents a small portion of our world’s population. The global south majority (which represents most of our world’s population) are reluctant to support the US-NATO led initiatives and peace is the result of diplomacy, never of war!