Trump is an arms-salesman but foreign policy cannot be about selling arms

It is always delightful to listen to Prof Jeffrey Sachs. He has been outspoken in recent interviews in which he has blamed the US ‘Deep State’ of engineering 100 regime changes in the world and of reneging on the promise the US made in 1990 that NATO would not move ‘one inch eastward’ after the German reunification that brought to an end the cold war.

In the last few days he has gone on record to say that for the last 30 years Washington DC had been actively trying to ‘dismember’ Russia and has advised Europe to break free from the US.

The Columbia University professor is disarming when he says that he is not anti-American. He of course is an American citizen, works in the US and has family there. When he criticises the US and its foreign policy, he asserted, he is merely trying to stop his country from wrecking other countries, in a recent conversation with an unlikely and independent Member of the European Parliament, Fidias Panayiotou from Cyprus.

Breaking down his thoughts on the hot topics confronting the world right now may help some of us understand the bewildering developments marginally better. The conversation can be accessed through the link here:

His views, however, can be briefly summarised here:

US Foreign Policy: American ‘stupidity and arrogance’, Prof Sachs says, is responsible for much of the strife that one sees in the world today. The US ‘Deep State’, he reminds us, has been responsible for 100 regime changes around the world. They are well documented and the evidence are all available in the public domain, he adds. Starting from the US bombing of Belgrade in the last century to regime changes in Syria, Libya, Iraq and Ukraine have all been the handiwork of the US ‘Deep State’. The US has repeatedly defied resolutions backed by the UN Security Council. The US is the country least aligned with the UN and has simply ignored the UN. It has facilitated the genocide in Gaza and unilaterally called of a nuclear treaty with Iran. The US attitude is, “No one tells us what to do or say”. That may have worked in a unipolar war but is unlikely to work in a multipolar world. 

NATO:  The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), a military alliance between the US and western European countries, was formed in 1949 specifically to contain the expansion of the Soviet Union. Once the Soviet Union was dissolved in December, 1991, NATO lost its raison-d’etre. It should have been wound up. But the US, under President Clinton, in 1994 decided to expand NATO and move east to hem Russia in.

Despite promising Russia that NATO would not expand to the east, NATO bases were set up in Balkan states like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and moved closer to Russia around the Black Sea. For the Americans, it was a game, for Russia it was a matter of national security and a question of life and death. Russian President Putin issued a stern warning in 2008 at Munich in a hard hitting speech and asked the US to ‘stop’. But NATO continued to expand with the US shrugging and telling Moscow that the countries wanted membership of NATO.

What if China decided to build military bases in Mexico or Canada is those countries desired, asked Prof Sachs rhetorically.

Ukraine: Prof Sachs appears to support President Purin’s claims that it was the US which had engineered the coup against Ukrainian president Yanukovich in 2014 and installed a puppet government. Yanukovich, according to these versions, was wary of allowing NATO to build bases and instigate Russia. In 2022 also, claims Prof Sachs, Ukraine and Russia had reached an agreement that Ukraine would remain neutral and not join NATO but the US and the UK scuttled it, encouraging Zelenskyy to issue a decree that there would be no negotiations with Russia. Ukraine, he says, is fighting a proxy war on behalf of NATO and the US and the day the United States wants the war to stop, it would stop, no matter what the European countries may think.

Is China a threat to the US?  China, Prof Sachs points out, has not said or done anything to harm the US. However, there is deep-rooted prejudice in Washington DC against China. China is getting too big and is too successful, which is an affront to the Americans. While Trump has conceded that we live in a multipolar world with three great powers, the long-held belief that the US is the sole super power is hard to discard. The American contempt for allies and vassals alike is well-known, he says, and Trump is less of a diplomat and more of an arms salesman. Prof Sachs believes that President Trump is seeking to normalise relations with Russia so that he can deal with China on his terms. Taiwan, he fears, could become another Ukraine, instigated by the US.

Isolation of Europe: President Trump and Vice President JD Vance have both signalled that NATO has outlived its utility for the US and that European countries would have to bear the cost of helping Ukraine and defending Europe from external threats. Europe unfortunately, says the Prof, has for too long been riding on the coat tails of the US. Europe has a 2000-year history while the US is just 200-230 years old; and yet Europe does not have an independent foreign or defence policy. What Europe needs is a ‘grown up foreign policy’, not a childish foreign policy or foreign policy based on slogans.