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Episode: John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs | All-In Summit 2024

Author: All-In Podcast, LLC
Duration: 00:54:27

Episode Shownotes

(0:00) Announcement from Friedberg! (0:21) Sacks intros John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs (1:32) What is the Deep State Party, and what are their goals? (13:56) Should America leverage its power against dictators? (22:07) The China threat: avoiding the escalatory path to nuclear war (36:08) India's growing role; are China's wounds

self-inflicted? (47:07) Conflict in the Middle East and the path to peace Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_05
Hey, everybody, Friedberg here. What you're about to hear is a panel discussion from our all in summit recorded in LA on September 10th. We're going to publish some of the best conversations once a week over the next month.

00:00:11 Speaker_05
If you want to see all the talks, subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash at all in and follow us on x at the all in pod.

00:00:22 Speaker_06
One of the most influential and controversial thinkers in the world.

00:00:26 Speaker_01
He is known as one of the world's leading experts on economic development. One of the most famous political scientists in history. We're talking about moral and political principles here. I would suggest that all four wars could be ended quickly.

00:00:48 Speaker_00
Great power politics is now back on the table.

00:00:51 Speaker_01
If we are anything as a world community, we have to implement what we've said.

00:01:06 Speaker_02
I'm excited for this panel. We're gonna talk about foreign policy.

00:01:09 Speaker_02
We have, I think, two of the most interesting, eminent, renowned thinkers about foreign policy, Professor John Mearsheimer from University of Chicago and Professor Jeffrey Sachs from Columbia. So great to have you guys here today.

00:01:26 Speaker_02
It's a big world and there's a lot of things happening, so let's just jump into it. The big news over the past week was that Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris for president.

00:01:38 Speaker_02
I think for people who see the world in partisan political terms, this might've been surprising, but I don't think that you guys were that surprised by that. Do you see an underlying logic to this? Jeff, why don't I start with you?

00:01:51 Speaker_01
I think it's obvious there's basically one deep state party And that is the party of Cheney, Harris, Biden, Victoria Nuland, my colleague at Columbia University now.

00:02:06 Speaker_01
And Nuland is kind of the face of all of this because she has been in every administration for the last 30 years. She was in the Clinton administration wrecking our policies towards Russia in the 1990s.

00:02:20 Speaker_01
She was in the Bush administration junior with Cheney. wrecking our policies towards NATO enlargement. She was in then the Obama administration as Hillary's spokesperson first, and then making a coup in Ukraine in February 2014.

00:02:41 Speaker_01
Not a great move, started a war. Then she was Biden's Undersecretary of State. Now, that's both parties. It's a colossal mess, and she's been Cheney's advisor, she's been Biden's advisor, and makes perfect sense. This is the reality.

00:03:07 Speaker_01
We're trying to find out if there's another party, that's the big question.

00:03:11 Speaker_02
John, what's your thought on that? Do you see any difference between Republicans and Democrats?

00:03:16 Speaker_00
No, I like to refer to the Republicans and the Democrats as Tweedledee and Tweedledum. There's hardly any difference.

00:03:28 Speaker_00
I actually think the one exception is that former President Trump, when he became president in 2017, was bent on beating back the deep state and becoming a different kind of leader on the foreign policy front. But he basically failed.

00:03:44 Speaker_00
And he has vowed that if he gets elected this time, it will be different, and he will beat back the deep state. He will pursue a foreign policy that's fundamentally different than Republicans and Democrats have pursued up to now.

00:03:59 Speaker_00
And the big question on the table is whether or not you think Trump can beat the Deep State and these two established parties. And I'd bet against Trump.

00:04:08 Speaker_03
John, and Jeff, but let's start with John. Can you actually define for us, for me, I don't understand when people say Deep State what it is. I almost viewed the term comically. We have one of our friends in our group chat who we call Deep State, who's

00:04:23 Speaker_03
Deep state. He's really in the deep state. But we say it as a joke. But for maybe the uninitiated, what does it actually mean? What are their incentives? Who are they? Jeff, maybe you want to start, or John, you want to start?

00:04:37 Speaker_00
Yeah, I'll say a few words about it. When we talk about the deep state, we're talking really about the administrative state.

00:04:43 Speaker_00
It's very important to understand that starting in the late 19th, early 20th century, given developments in the American economy, it was imperative that we develop, and this was true of all Western countries, a very powerful central state that could run the country.

00:05:02 Speaker_00
and over time that state has grown in power. And since World War II, the United States, as you all know, has been involved in every nook and cranny of the world, fighting wars here, there, and everywhere.

00:05:15 Speaker_00
And to do that, you need a very powerful administrative state. that can help manage that foreign policy.

00:05:22 Speaker_00
But in the process, what happens is you get all of these high-level bureaucrats, middle-level and low-level bureaucrats, who become established in positions in the Pentagon, the State Department, the intelligence community.

00:05:35 Speaker_00
you name it and they end up having a vested interest in pursuing a particular foreign policy and the particular foreign policy that they like to pursue is the one that the Democrats and the Republicans are pushing and that's why we talk about Tweedledee and Tweedledum with regard to the two parties you could throw in the Deep State as being on the same page as those other two institutions.

00:06:02 Speaker_01
There's a very interesting interview of Putin in Figaro in 2017, and he says, I've dealt with three presidents now.

00:06:13 Speaker_01
They come into office with some ideas even, but then the men in the dark suits and the blue ties, and then he says, I wear red ties, but they wear blue ties. They come in and explain the way the world really is, and there go the ideas.

00:06:29 Speaker_01
And I think that's Putin's experience, that's our experience, that's my experience, which is that there's a deeply entrained foreign policy.

00:06:38 Speaker_01
It has been in place in my interpretation for many decades, but arguably a variant of it has been in place since 1992. I got to watch some of it early on because I was an advisor to Gorbachev and I was an advisor to Yeltsin.

00:06:53 Speaker_01
And so I saw early makings of this, though I didn't fully understand it except in retrospect

00:07:00 Speaker_01
But that policy has been mostly in place pretty consistently for 30 years, and it didn't really matter whether it was Bush Sr., whether it was Clinton, whether it was Bush Jr., whether it was Obama, whether it was Trump.

00:07:13 Speaker_01
After all, who did Trump hire? He hired John Bolton. Well, pretty deep state. That was the end of, they told, you know, he explained, this is the way it is. And by the way, Bolton explained also in his memoirs

00:07:27 Speaker_01
When Trump didn't agree, we figured out ways to trick him, basically.

00:07:31 Speaker_03
And what are their incentives? Is it war? Is it self-enrichment? Is it power? Is it all three?

00:07:36 Speaker_05
Is it some combination? Is there a philosophical entrenchment? Or is it just this inertial issue, that once a policy begins, it's hard to change, and the system's just working with 10,000 people working towards it?

00:07:52 Speaker_01
If I were lucky to sit next to the world's greatest political philosopher, which I am, he'd give you a good answer, which is the right answer, which is if you want to interpret American foreign policy, it is to maximize power.

00:08:09 Speaker_01
And John gives an explanation of that. We have some differences, but I think it's a very good description of American foreign policy, which is that it's trying to maximize global power, essentially, to be global hegemon.

00:08:28 Speaker_01
I think it could get us all killed. This is because it's a little bit delusional in my mind. Not his interpretation of their idea, but the fact that they hold that idea is a little weird to me. But in any event, that's the idea.

00:08:44 Speaker_01
And every time a decision comes inside that I've seen I'm an economist, so I don't see the security decisions the same way, but every decision that I've seen always leans in the same direction for the last 30 years, which is power

00:09:01 Speaker_01
as the central objective. So Clinton faced an internal cabinet, really, debate, should NATO be enlarged. Is this a post-Cold War phenomenon? Well, I'll let John take that.

00:09:17 Speaker_00
Two very quick points. First of all, I do believe that the people who are in favor of this foreign policy do believe in it. It's not cynical. They really believe that we're doing the right thing.

00:09:31 Speaker_05
I've met them, yeah.

00:09:33 Speaker_00
The second point I would make to you, and this sort of adds on to what Jeff said, Jeff said power has a lot to do with this. And as a good realist, I of course believe that.

00:09:42 Speaker_00
But it's also very important to understand that the United States is a fundamentally liberal country. And we believe that we have a right, we have a responsibility, and we have the power to run around the world and remake the world in America's image.

00:09:57 Speaker_00
Most people in the foreign policy establishment, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, they believe that. And that is what has motivated our foreign policy in large part since the Cold War ended.

00:10:09 Speaker_00
Because remember, when the Cold War ends, we have no rival great power left. So what are we going to do with all this power that we have? What we decide to do is go out and remake the world in our own image.

00:10:23 Speaker_05
So that's a values point of view though, right?

00:10:25 Speaker_05
That there are values that they hold dear, that many do hold dear, that liberalism, democracy does ultimately, I believe I've heard this, reduce conflict worldwide, that there's an importance that we've never seen two democratic nations since World War II go to war.

00:10:43 Speaker_05
and that there's a reason why we want to see liberalism kind of breed throughout the world, and it's our responsibility for global peace to make that a mandate.

00:10:54 Speaker_01
Let me step in for one moment.

00:10:55 Speaker_05
And by the way, I'm, what do you call it, where you pull the spirits of the voice of others, but I'm just trying to... Channeling. Channeling, that's the word.

00:11:05 Speaker_00
I want to be very clear. Forever thankful that I was born in a liberal democracy and I love liberalism But the question here is do you think that we can run around the world?

00:11:18 Speaker_00
Imposing liberal democracy on other countries and in some cases shoving it down their throat Doing it at the end of a rifle barrel and my argument is that's almost impossible to do it almost always backfires think Iraq Afghanistan so forth and so on

00:11:33 Speaker_00
and secondly you begin to erode liberalism in the United States because you build a deep state.

00:11:41 Speaker_00
And you want to understand that a lot of the complaints here about cracking down on freedom of speech and so forth and so on are related to the fact that we have this ambitious foreign policy. Those two things go together in very important ways.

00:11:54 Speaker_01
What an irony. Let me disagree just a bit because we agree actually on the behavior and I've learned I'd say most of that from you, that it's power-seeking. Truly, John, in my work 40 years overseas, I don't think the U.S.

00:12:14 Speaker_01
government gives a damn about these other places. I don't think they really care if it's a liberal democracy, if it's a dictatorship. They want the right of ways. They want the military bases. They want the state to be in support of the United States.

00:12:28 Speaker_01
They want NATO enlargement. I know you've written, and there are some who believe in state building. God, if they do, they are so incompetent, it's unbelievable. But I'll give you an example, if I could. Just one example.

00:12:50 Speaker_01
I'm a friend with one of the only PhD Afghani economists, senior person in the US,

00:13:00 Speaker_01
academia over the last 30 years, you would think that the State Department, if they were interested in state building, would ask him one day, one moment, something about Afghanistan. Never happened. One question. Never happened. Not even one question.

00:13:16 Speaker_01
Never happened. He asked me, can you get me a meeting with the State Department? They were completely uninterested. This is about power. You're too idealistic, John. They don't care about the other places.

00:13:33 Speaker_01
They may feel we should be whatever we want, free and so forth. But freedom, I've seen with my own eyes the coups, the overthrows, the presidents, Democratic presidents led away. They don't care at all. This is Washington. Be a realist. Come on.

00:13:54 Speaker_04
Professor Mearsheimer, When we talk about power, there are other people in the world who are trying to accumulate power. We live in a multipolar world right now. And they have, in some cases, very nefarious or bad intent. And they do not have democracy.

00:14:10 Speaker_04
So it's one thing to tell people in Afghanistan, you need to evolve to be a perfect democracy like the one we have here. I think we all agree that's unrealistic and insane and not practical.

00:14:24 Speaker_04
But what about the free countries of the world uniting together to stop dictators from invading other free countries? Is that noble? Is that a good use of power and a good framework for America to evolve to?

00:14:37 Speaker_00
No, I don't think so. I think that what the United States should do is worry about its own national interest. In some cases that's going to involve aligning ourselves with a dictator.

00:14:51 Speaker_00
If we're fighting World War II all over again, it's December 8, 1941, you surely would be in favor of aligning with Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union against Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. Sometimes you have to make those kind of compromises.

00:15:09 Speaker_00
As I said before, I love liberal democracy. I have no problem aligning with liberal democracy. But when you begin to think in the terms that you're thinking, you end up with an impulse to do social engineering around the world.

00:15:22 Speaker_00
And that gets you in all sorts of problems.

00:15:24 Speaker_04
What I'm proposing is when dictatorships invade other countries, then we take action.

00:15:30 Speaker_00
It depends.

00:15:30 Speaker_04
Maybe defend them. It depends. Yeah, of course.

00:15:33 Speaker_00
I mean, when Russia invades Ukraine, Basically, what you're saying is you want to go to war on behalf of Ukraine against Russia. Are you in favor of that?

00:15:45 Speaker_04
No, I would say diplomacy would obviously be what we'd want to exhaust. But if they do roll into other free countries, I think there's an argument for the free countries of the world to get together and say to dictators, we're not going to allow this.

00:15:58 Speaker_01
Could I come in here? Could I clarify a few things? Look, first of all, almost all the time that we intervene, it's because we view this as a power situation for the US.

00:16:21 Speaker_01
So whether it's Ukraine or Syria or Libya or other places, even if we define it as defending something, believe me, it's not about defending something. It's about a perception of US power and U.S. interest, and it's in objectives of U.S.

00:16:41 Speaker_01
global hegemony. And if we analyze the Ukraine conflict just even a little bit below the surface, this is not a conflict about Putin invading Ukraine.

00:16:53 Speaker_01
This is something a lot different that has to do with American power projection into the former Soviet Union, so it's completely different. Second,

00:17:03 Speaker_01
If we decide we're the police, which we do, you can't imagine how cynical bullshit we use to justify our actions. We used the cynical bullshit that we're defending the people of Benghazi to bomb the hell out of Libya to kill Muammar Gaddafi.

00:17:28 Speaker_01
Why did we do that? Well, I'm kind of an expert on that region and I can tell you maybe because Sarkozy didn't like Gaddafi. There's no much deeper reason except Hillary liked every bombing she could get her hands on.

00:17:43 Speaker_01
And Obama was kinda convinced, my Secretary of State says go with it, so why don't we go with the NATO expedition. It had nothing to do with Libya.

00:17:51 Speaker_01
It unleashed 15 years of chaos, cheated the UN Security Council, because like everything else we've done it was on false pretenses. We did the same with trying to overthrow Syria.

00:18:04 Speaker_01
We did the same with conspiring to overthrow Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine in February 2014. So the problem with this argument is we're not nice guys. We're not trying to save the world.

00:18:18 Speaker_01
We're not trying to make democracies We had a committee by the way of all the luminaries you could mention But they're the neocon crazies, but they're luminaries the committee for the people of Chechnya Are you kidding?

00:18:34 Speaker_01
Do you think they even knew where Chechnya is or cared about Chechnya? But it was an opportunity to get at Russia, to weaken Russia, to support a jihadist movement inside Russia. This is a game.

00:18:47 Speaker_01
But it's a game that John has described better than anyone in the world. It's a game of power. It's not that we're defending real things.

00:18:55 Speaker_01
If you want to defend real things, go to the UN Security Council and convince others, because the other countries are not crazy.

00:19:03 Speaker_01
And they don't want mayhem in the world, but we play games, so they say, that's a game, Iraq, which was obviously a game before we went in. Obviously, Colin Powell could not move his lips without lying that day. Obviously. And so they said, no.

00:19:20 Speaker_01
But if we're real about our interests, then you go to the UN Security Council, and then it's not just on us. It's actually then a collective security issue.

00:19:29 Speaker_04
Professor Mearsheimer, if we were to take Jeffrey's position here that we are exerting power for the sake of our reputation and in fact to weaken dictatorships, if I'm summarizing correctly here, is that not a good strategy to weaken dictators around the world who might like to invade other countries?

00:19:49 Speaker_04
Is there a framing in which you could see that being for a world where democracy and people living freely has gone down in our lifetimes? Is that not noble? Is there not a justification somebody can make for it?

00:20:04 Speaker_04
I'm not saying I have that, but I'm just trying to steal me on the other side of this. Is weakening dictators and despots a good strategy? It depends. Well, let's talk about the two that we have, you know, Xi Jinping.

00:20:17 Speaker_04
I think you wanted to get to eventually. And then Ukraine and Putin. Are these people worth trying to, you know, contain or even weaken?

00:20:26 Speaker_00
Well, in terms of China, I'm fully in favor of containing China.

00:20:31 Speaker_04
OK, so containment check.

00:20:32 Speaker_00
It's containment. I'm not interested in regime change I'm not interested in trying to turn China into a democracy not gonna happen.

00:20:40 Speaker_00
You know not gonna happen We tried it actually and I thought it was foolish to even pursue a policy of engagement toward China with regard to Russia I don't think Russia is a serious threat to the United States And indeed, I think the United States should have good relations with Putin It's a remarkably foolish policy to push him into the arms of the Chinese

00:21:02 Speaker_00
There are three great powers in the system, the United States, China, and Russia. China is a peer competitor to the United States. It's the most serious threat to the United States.

00:21:12 Speaker_00
Russia is the weakest of those three great powers and it's not a serious threat to us. If you are playing balance of power politics and you're interested, as the United States, in containing China, you want Russia on your side of the ledger.

00:21:26 Speaker_00
But what we have done, in effect, is we have pushed Russia into the arms of the Chinese. This is a remarkably foolish policy. And furthermore, by getting bogged down in Ukraine and now bogged down in the Middle East,

00:21:40 Speaker_00
It's become very difficult for us to pivot to Asia to deal with China, which is the principal threat that we face.

00:21:54 Speaker_01
David, could I just say, two-thirds right, perfect.

00:22:00 Speaker_04
So you gave him a B? Or B plus? A minus.

00:22:04 Speaker_01
I always give him an A minus. Oh, that's that great inflation? I just wanted to add a footnote, which is that China's also not a threat.

00:22:12 Speaker_00
It's just not a threat. We're gonna get to it.

00:22:14 Speaker_01
China's a market. It's got great food, great culture, wonderful people, a civilization ten times older than ours. It's not a threat.

00:22:25 Speaker_05
Well, as an economist, can you talk about the impact of a cold or hot conflict with China from an economic perspective given the trade relationship?

00:22:34 Speaker_01
Yeah, it would wreck California for one thing. it would destroy the economy that you guys are making completely. This economy has been the biggest beneficiary of China's rise probably in the whole world. So it's crazy.

00:22:47 Speaker_01
Maybe if you're worried, if you're really worried about whether a worker in Ohio has a particular job on a particular assembly line, then you can be anti-China. If you're worried about the tech industry, about California,

00:23:02 Speaker_01
about peace and the future, you should be pro-China, that's all.

00:23:05 Speaker_05
So why has it become so universal to assume that we are already in a state of conflict with China on not just party lines, but like almost any spectrum you could kind of like consider?

00:23:18 Speaker_01
I think John should take that one. Because John said it exactly right and he predicted it better than anyone in the whole world in 2001. He said, when China becomes large, we're going to have conflict. Because that's John's theory.

00:23:32 Speaker_01
And it's right, as a description of American foreign policy, that we are for power. They are big. Therefore, they're an enemy. They're an enemy of our aspiration to global hegemony.

00:23:43 Speaker_05
Two cities trapped.

00:23:44 Speaker_02
Let's let John jump in here.

00:23:47 Speaker_00
Is it OK if I talk about this?

00:23:49 Speaker_02
Yeah, yeah. I think that, what's interesting, I mean, you and Jeff, I think, arrive at similar conclusions about Ukraine, but different ones on China, right?

00:24:01 Speaker_02
Because Jeff is an economist and I think sees the world in fundamentally positive some ways based on the potential for trade, economics, basically. Whereas you see the world as more of a zero-sum game based on the balance of power.

00:24:15 Speaker_02
Why don't you just explain that difference?

00:24:18 Speaker_00
It is very important to emphasize, as David was saying, that Jeff and I agree on all sorts of issues, including Ukraine and Israel-Palestine, but we disagree fundamentally, as he just made clear, on China.

00:24:29 Speaker_00
And let me explain to you why I think that's the case, and then Jeff can tell you why he thinks I'm wrong. It has to do with security, whether you privilege security or survival, or whether you privilege prosperity.

00:24:44 Speaker_00
Economists, and I would imagine most of you in the audience, really care greatly about maximizing prosperity. For someone like me, who's a realist, what I care about is maximizing the state's prospects of survival.

00:24:56 Speaker_00
And when you live in an anarchic system, and in IR speak that means there's no higher authority, there's no night watchman that can come down and rescue if you get into trouble. And this is the international system, there's no higher authority.

00:25:09 Speaker_00
In that anarchic world, the best way to survive is to be really powerful. As we used to say when I was a kid on New York City playgrounds, you want to be the biggest and baddest dude on the block.

00:25:20 Speaker_00
And that's simply because it's the best way to survive. If you're really powerful, nobody fools around with you. The United States is a regional hegemon. It's the only regional hegemon on the planet. We dominate the Western Hemisphere.

00:25:35 Speaker_00
And what China has begun to do as it's got increasingly powerful economically is translate that economic might into military might, and it is trying to dominate Asia. It wants to push us out beyond the first island chain.

00:25:53 Speaker_00
It wants to push us out beyond the second island chain. It wants to be like we are in the Western Hemisphere. And I don't blame the Chinese one bit.

00:26:01 Speaker_00
If I was the national security advisor in Beijing, that's what I'd be telling Xi Jinping we should be trying to do. But of course from an American point of view this is unacceptable and we do not tolerate peer competitors.

00:26:15 Speaker_00
We do not want another regional hegemon on the planet. In the 20th century there were four countries that threatened to become regional hegemons like us. Imperial Germany, Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union.

00:26:32 Speaker_00
The United States played a key role in putting all four of those countries on the scrapheap of history. We want to remain the only regional hegemon in the world. We are a ruthless great power. Never want to lose sight of that fact.

00:26:48 Speaker_00
And the end result of this is you get an intense security competition between China and The United States, and it revolves around the concept of security, not prosperity.

00:27:02 Speaker_00
Just very quickly, so what you see beginning to happen is that it's in all domains where the competition takes place, especially high tech. We do not want them defeating this. defeating us in the high-tech war.

00:27:18 Speaker_00
We are competing with them economically, we are competing with them militarily. And this is because the best way to survive is for us, the United States of America, to be the only regional hegemon on the planet.

00:27:34 Speaker_02
So Jeff, let me set it up for Jeff here. So Jeff, you and John I think agree that the game on the board is power seeking. I think what John is saying is there are smart ways and dumb ways to pursue power.

00:27:50 Speaker_02
Containing China is a smart way, what we're doing in Ukraine is a dumb way. Whereas it seems like you're saying that all power seeking behavior is bad. That's not the game we should be playing. We should somehow opt out of that.

00:28:02 Speaker_02
Is that kind of where you're going?

00:28:05 Speaker_01
It's not a bad way to say it, but I would put it in another way. I read a very good book, John's. And John described, I'm going to quote him, but he can quote himself afterwards. He said that the regional hegemons don't threaten each other, actually.

00:28:30 Speaker_01
Why? Because we have a big ocean in between.

00:28:36 Speaker_01
I deeply believe that China is not a threat to the United States, and I deeply believe the only threat to the United States, period, in the world, given the oceans, given our size, and given the military, is nuclear war.

00:28:55 Speaker_01
I deeply believe we're close to nuclear war because we have a mindset that leads us in that direction. We have a mindset that everything is a challenge for survival and that escalation is therefore always the right approach.

00:29:14 Speaker_01
My view is a little bit of prudence could save the whole planet. So why I don't like Ukraine is that I don't see any reason in the world that NATO has to be on Russia's border with Ukraine. I was

00:29:32 Speaker_01
as I said Gorbachev's advisor and Yeltsin's advisor and they wanted peace and they wanted cooperation but whatever they wanted they did not want the US military on their border. So if we continue to push as we did we would get to war.

00:29:50 Speaker_01
John explained that better than anybody. We're now at war and even this morning there is further escalation Blinken has said, well, if the Iranians give these missiles, then we will give missiles to hit deep into Russia. This is a recipe.

00:30:05 Speaker_01
And then we had Bill Burns, the CIA director, say last week an absurdity that he knows, but CIA directors never tell the truth. If they do, they lose their job. But he said, don't worry about nuclear war. Don't worry about saber rattling.

00:30:22 Speaker_01
My advice to you is worry a lot about nuclear war. And so be prudent. You don't have to put the US military on Russia's border. And my advice to Russia and to Mexico, when I'm going to Mexico tomorrow, I'll give them a piece of advice.

00:30:42 Speaker_01
Don't let China or Russia build a military base on the Rio Grande. Not a good idea for Mexico. not a good idea for Ukraine, not a good idea for Russia, not a good idea for China, not a good idea for the United States.

00:30:56 Speaker_01
We need to stay a little bit away from each other so that we don't have a nuclear war. By the way, I do recommend another good book, and that is Annie Jacobson's Nuclear War, a Scenario.

00:31:09 Speaker_01
It takes two hours to read, the world ends in two hours in the book, and it's a very persuasive a guide that one nuke can ruin your whole day, as they say.

00:31:24 Speaker_01
My strong advice on this, therefore, is recognize China, first of all, is not a threat to the United States' security. Big oceans, big nuclear deterrent, and so forth. Second, we don't have to be in China's face. What do I mean by that?

00:31:44 Speaker_01
We don't have to provoke World War III over Taiwan. That's a long, complicated issue, but this would be the stupidest thing for my grandchildren to die for, imaginable. And I resent it every day when we play that game.

00:31:59 Speaker_01
We have three agreements with China that say we're going to stay out of that, and we should. And then China would have no reason for war either.

00:32:10 Speaker_01
China, and then on the economic side, let me just reiterate, because I was asked yesterday, and there was some surprise, was it good to let China into the WTO? I said, of course. It enriched all of you, by the way. It enriched me.

00:32:27 Speaker_01
It enriched this country. It enriched the world, including enriching China. That's normal. Economics is not a zero-sum game. We all agree on that. I believe that security doesn't have to be a zero-sum game either.

00:32:42 Speaker_01
We can stay a little bit away from each other. And China does not spend its time bemoaning America being a Western Hemisphere hegemon. They don't. That's not their greatest interest, to bring down American power in the Western Hemisphere.

00:33:01 Speaker_00
Jeff, what about the energy?

00:33:02 Speaker_01
Hold on. Let's let John respond to this.

00:33:05 Speaker_00
Just very quickly, most of you have probably never asked yourself the question, why is the United States roaming all over the planet, interfering in every country's business?

00:33:16 Speaker_00
It's in part because it's so powerful, but it's also because it's a regional hegemon, which means we have no threats in the Western Hemisphere, so we are free to roam.

00:33:26 Speaker_00
The great danger, Jeff, if China becomes a regional hegemon and doesn't have to worry about security concerns.

00:33:33 Speaker_01
Then they behave like us.

00:33:34 Speaker_00
Then they behave like us. Can't we do better? But my point to you, Jeff, is let's prevent that from happening by preventing them from becoming a regional hegemon. We don't want them to have freedom to roam.

00:33:47 Speaker_00
You were talking about them putting military bases in Mexico. That's our great fear.

00:33:53 Speaker_01
It's not my great fear. They have no interest in doing so because they don't want to get blown up either.

00:33:59 Speaker_04
So- They do seem to have a big interest, Jeff, in Africa, India, Russia, and they are- I'm sorry, say it again. China has a major interest- Doesn't have military bases there.

00:34:10 Speaker_04
Well, they're building nuclear power plants and trade, and they're building debt loads with those countries.

00:34:14 Speaker_01
Well, that's a big difference. I'm all in favor of that. Let's go compete that way. I'm all in favor of that.

00:34:18 Speaker_00
But Jeff, that's because they're not a regional hegemon yet.

00:34:22 Speaker_01
Yeah, if you try to prevent them from being a regional hegemon, we're going to end up in World War III, because as you say yourself, that this can absolutely spill over into war. I don't want it to spill over into war on the theory

00:34:37 Speaker_01
that maybe someday they behave differently. That's not a good theory for me, that part.

00:34:42 Speaker_02
So John, can we contain China, prevent them from becoming a regional hegemon, without directly defending Taiwan? I mean, isn't that where the rubber meets the road?

00:34:53 Speaker_00
No, it's not just Taiwan. I mean, one could argue there's sort of three flashpoints in East Asia that you folks should keep your eye on. One is obviously Taiwan, two is the South China Sea, and three is the East China Sea.

00:35:06 Speaker_00
And I think, David, that the place where a conflict is most likely today is not over Taiwan. I could explain why I think Taiwan is not a serious problem at the moment or for the foreseeable future. The South China Sea is a very dangerous place.

00:35:20 Speaker_00
We could end up in a war for sure, even if we did not defend Taiwan. So Taiwan, you don't want to overemphasize. I agree with Jeff that we definitely don't want a war, and we certainly don't want a nuclear war.

00:35:37 Speaker_00
And he is absolutely correct that there's a risk of a nuclear war if a war breaks out of any sort between China and the United States. Many of us in the audience remember the Cold War, and this was an ever-present danger in the Cold War.

00:35:51 Speaker_00
But my argument is that this is inevitable, because in a world where you don't have a higher authority, and you care about your survival, you have a deep-seated interest, as any state in the system, to be as powerful as possible.

00:36:06 Speaker_00
And that means dominating your region of the world.

00:36:09 Speaker_04
There was one player on this chessboard that hasn't come up yet, and maybe we could skate to where the puck is going.

00:36:16 Speaker_04
When you talk about the South China Sea, okay, sure, South Korea, Japan, Australia, all of those major players there, they're just a couple of hundred million people. But then China is in population decline.

00:36:26 Speaker_04
Xi apparently is self-destructing in terms of trade.

00:36:29 Speaker_04
Seems like containment's working pretty well there because of the all the self-inflicted wounds But the fastest growing country the fastest growing economy the quickest to develop is India and they seem to have a very pragmatic approach Hey, they'll buy cheap oil from Putin and they are their own sovereign country with their own point of view Would we not be really well advised over the next 10 to 20 years to make that our priority and India's role in this?

00:36:53 Speaker_04
How do you look at them?

00:36:55 Speaker_00
Well, we definitely view India as an ally. It's part of the Quad, which is this Rube Goldberg type alliance structure that we put together in East Asia that includes Australia, Japan, the United States, and India.

00:37:11 Speaker_00
India is smartly maintaining its good relations with Russia. The Indians understand, like Jeff and I do, that the Russians are no great threat. But from India's point of view, the real threat is China.

00:37:25 Speaker_00
And there are two places where India cares about China. One is on the India-China border up in the Himalayas, where they've actually had conflicts. And there's a real danger of war breaking out.

00:37:37 Speaker_00
The second place, which is maybe even more dangerous, not at the moment, but will be over time, is the Indian Ocean, because the Chinese are imitating the United States.

00:37:48 Speaker_00
They not only want to be a regional hegemon, they want to develop power projection capability. So the Chinese are building a blue water navy that can come out of East Asia, through the Straits of Malacca, through the Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf.

00:38:05 Speaker_00
And once you start talking about going through the Indian Ocean, the Indians get spooked. And that's when the Americans and the Indians come together.

00:38:14 Speaker_01
Okay, let's think of this from an engineering point of view if we could. Why are the Chinese developing the Navy? Because for 40 years I've read essays on all of the choke points in

00:38:32 Speaker_01
the South China Sea, the East China Sea, the Indian Ocean against China. That's our policy choke points. Look at the Malacca Straits. Look what we can do here. First island chain. This is American strategy.

00:38:47 Speaker_01
Can we keep the Chinese submarines out of the Pacific Ocean? First China, first island chain, and so forth. So, of course, they react. They're rich, they're going to build a navy so that they can get their oil on which their economy runs.

00:39:01 Speaker_01
Can we be a little bit sensible with them and decide how we're not going to have choke points and then we don't have to have a nuclear war which is really going to ruin our day? That's the point. We can think a little bit.

00:39:15 Speaker_01
We can understand it from their perspective. We can understand it from our perspective. Deconfliction. By the way, I don't believe India is an ally. India is a superpower. India is going to have its own very distinctive interests, thank you.

00:39:35 Speaker_01
It's not going to be an ally of the United States. I happen to like India enormously and admire their policies, but the idea that India is going to ally with the United States against China, in somebody's dream.

00:39:50 Speaker_01
in Washington because it's another delusion in Washington because they should get a passport and go see the world and understand something.

00:40:02 Speaker_01
But Jeffrey, if they... These are my failed students in Washington right now, because they didn't listen to their professor.

00:40:10 Speaker_04
Jeffrey, we're making our iPhones in India now. Is that not... We're moving iPhone production. Cooper, maybe Cooper, you're into economics here and that impact. You've got Apple moving out of China.

00:40:24 Speaker_04
You've got Japan funding people leaving China to Vietnam and to India. Is that not the solution here? As we decouple from China, it seems like they come back to the table. We had Xi Jinping kick all the venture capitalists, all investment out of China.

00:40:38 Speaker_04
He got rid of all the education startups. And then, whatever, two or three years later, he's in San Francisco asking all of us to invest more money and saying, where'd you go?

00:40:45 Speaker_01
OK, first of all, invite me back 10 years and we'll see how smart all these decisions are. Xi Jinping? No, I'm talking about, yes, we've moved to India, that's our great ally, and then we're going to have other issues.

00:41:03 Speaker_01
I think you said that Xi Jinping's trade policy is self-imploding or something.

00:41:09 Speaker_04
It seems like there's a lot of self-inflicted wounds when you... No, it's not.

00:41:12 Speaker_01
Let me explain what the wounds are. Okay. The wounds are the United States' deliberate policy to stop you from selling things to China and to stop China buying things from you. That's not self-inflicted wounds. Oh, no, you're wrong here.

00:41:26 Speaker_01
This is a clear... You're wrong here. You got rid of... Wait a minute, wait, just to say, let me say, please, because this is very important for the economy of the people in this room. This is a decision that was taken around 2014 to contain China.

00:41:42 Speaker_01
And it's been systematically applied since then. And it's not a surprise that Biden kept all the things that Trump did and added more. And now Trump says, I'm going to do all the things that Biden has kept in place, and I'm going to do more.

00:41:59 Speaker_01
This is not a self-inflicted wound. The United States has closed the market to China, okay? Is that smart? No, it's not smart. Is it leading to, is it, by the way, recuperating American manufacturing jobs? Zero. It may shift them a bit.

00:42:19 Speaker_01
It may make things less efficient. It may make all of you lose a bit more money or not make as much money. But is it going to solve any single economic problem in the United States? No way.

00:42:35 Speaker_00
Let's let John in. Spicy. I just want to ask Jeff a question on this. My argument is that this is the way the world works.

00:42:47 Speaker_01
Yes, I know.

00:42:48 Speaker_00
And it is. And it is. But if I'm describing how the world really works, how do you beat me?

00:42:55 Speaker_01
The reason is you've described a world—you've described, I think, better than any person I ever read or know how American foreign policy works. I think it's likely to get us all blown up.

00:43:13 Speaker_01
You title, not because of John, but because he's made an accurate description of a profoundly misguided approach, which is power seeking, even if you're safe as a regional hegemon, you're never safe if another regional hegemon does what you do.

00:43:32 Speaker_01
No, you can't allow that to happen, so you have to meddle every single place in the world. Now, let me just finish because it's important. It is important to say, try this in the nuclear age, you don't get a second chance.

00:43:49 Speaker_01
So this, to me, is the most definitive fact of our lives, which is we are now in a war, direct war, direct war, not proxy war, direct war with Russia, which has 6,000 nuclear warheads.

00:44:06 Speaker_01
I can't think of anything more imbecilic than that, aside from the fact that I know step-by-step, because I saw it with my own eyes, how we got into that mess because we thought we had to meddle up to including putting NATO into Georgia in the caucuses of all places.

00:44:26 Speaker_01
and Ukraine. So we made that because we have to meddle because we couldn't let good enough stand. If we do the same with China, there will be a war, but it's not like reading about the Crimean War or World War I or World War II. That's my difference.

00:44:46 Speaker_01
This is a fine theory that explains a lot of things, but damn if you can make chat GPT or you can make Optimus or you can make all the rest, we can avoid nuclear war. So just do a little bit better than saying it's inevitable.

00:45:07 Speaker_02
We only have a minute left, so I want to give it to John. I just want to ask. He had a question.

00:45:11 Speaker_05
I know, but we only have a minute left. We've got to add five minutes.

00:45:14 Speaker_04
This is the best panel I've ever been on in my life. Can we just add ten minutes? We've got to add five or ten minutes. The best panel. Is this the best panel ever?

00:45:22 Speaker_02
I'm sorry, I'm calling an audible. We've got five minutes, so before we leave this topic, John, Your book is called The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.

00:45:32 Speaker_02
You clearly understand the tragic aspect of how great power rivalry, great power competition can lead to disaster. What Jeff is saying is we're now in the nuclear age and it's going to lead to nuclear war.

00:45:45 Speaker_02
So do we have to be on this path or is there a way off of it?

00:45:50 Speaker_00
Two points. In my heart, I'm with Jeff. In my head, I'm not with Jeff. I wish he were right, but I don't believe he's right. To answer your question head-on, I believe that there is no way out. We are in an iron cage.

00:46:06 Speaker_00
This is just the way international politics works, and it's because you're in an anarchic system where you can never be sure that a really powerful state in the system won't come after you and inflict a century of national humiliation on you.

00:46:20 Speaker_00
So you go to great lengths to avoid that by trying to gain power at the expense of another power, and that leads to all sorts of trouble. Can war be avoided?

00:46:32 Speaker_00
I like to distinguish between security competition, which I think is inevitable, and war, which is where security competition evolves into war.

00:46:40 Speaker_00
I think war can be avoided and we were thankfully successful in that regard during the Cold War and hopefully that will be the case in the US-China competition moving forward. Can I guarantee that? No. Does this disturb me greatly? Yes.

00:46:59 Speaker_00
But again, this is just the tragic aspect of the world we live in.

00:47:03 Speaker_05
Let me just ask one, because we're a little bit, I know we were going to try and talk about Middle East for a good chunk of this.

00:47:09 Speaker_05
So I just want to scenario propose or kind of give you guys a scenario, get your reaction, because it is kind of what feels to be the most imminent theater of conflict, the West Bank.

00:47:23 Speaker_05
The Israelis are buttressing the settlements, there's a lot of checkpoints, things are getting very tense, they're running raids, and it's becoming a very difficult place to live for Palestinians, and there's a real concern that the West Bank collapses.

00:47:35 Speaker_00
And Israelis.

00:47:36 Speaker_05
And Israelis. But there's a real risk that the West Bank collapses and turns into a real conflict zone. If that happens, the Jordanians are sitting right there, and they're not gonna let Palestinians get slaughtered.

00:47:48 Speaker_05
They're gonna have to do something, and they're such a strong ally of the United States. Does that trigger a theater of response where what is Saudi going to do? Are others going to be drawn to the region?

00:48:00 Speaker_05
Does the collapse of the West Bank or the conflict that seems to be brewing in the West Bank become this kind of tinderbox for everyone showing up and getting involved and create some sort of regional issue that we get drawn into in a bigger way?

00:48:17 Speaker_01
Can I start and have John have the last word? I work each day at the UN and discuss this issue with ambassadors from all over the world. There is, over the last 50 years, an agreement on what would make for peace.

00:48:36 Speaker_01
And the agreement is two states, maybe with a big wall between them, on the 4th of June 1967 borders with a state of Palestine being the 194th UN member state and its capital in East Jerusalem, and control over the Islamic holy sites.

00:48:57 Speaker_01
And that is international law. The International Court of Justice just reaffirmed that the Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal. The International Criminal Court

00:49:11 Speaker_01
is likely to find, or ICJ is likely to find, that Israel is in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention, which I very much believe it to be in violation.

00:49:22 Speaker_01
So my own solution to this is implement international law, two states, build the wall as high as you need to build, but you give Palestinian rights, you establish a state of Palestine, you stop the Israeli slaughter,

00:49:38 Speaker_01
of Palestinians, you stop the Israeli apartheid state, and you have two states living side by side. Israel is dead set against that. The entire Israeli political governance now is dead set against that.

00:49:56 Speaker_01
Hundreds of thousands of illegal settlers in the West Bank are dead set against that. Smotrich, Ben-Gavir, Gallant, Netanyahu are dead set against So my view is it has nothing to do with what Israel wants.

00:50:11 Speaker_01
It has to do with enforcement of international law. So I want to see this imposed, not because Israel agrees to it, but because it is imposed.

00:50:20 Speaker_01
And there is one country that stands in the way of imposing this, not Iran, not the Saudis, not Egypt, not Russia, not China, not any country in the European Union, one country and one country alone.

00:50:35 Speaker_01
And that is because of the United States of America and the Israel lobby. Somebody wrote a very good book about that, too, that I know. The best book ever written about it by John. And that's what stops the solution that could bring peace.

00:50:53 Speaker_01
And I believe we should bring peace because not only would that bring peace to the Palestinians and peace to the Israelis, but it would avoid, potentially, another flashpoint that could easily end up in World War III.

00:51:07 Speaker_00
Let me answer your question about escalation potential, the Jordanians coming in. Israel faces three big problems, aside from problems with centrifugal forces inside the society.

00:51:21 Speaker_00
One is the Palestinian problem, which is both in Gaza and in the West Bank, that's one. Two is Hezbollah, and three is Iran.

00:51:31 Speaker_00
I think there is virtually no chance of what you described happening, which is if the Israelis were to go on a rampage in the West Bank, similar to what they've done in Gaza, that the Jordanians would come in or the Egyptians or the Saudis.

00:51:45 Speaker_00
They simply don't have the military capability. This is a scenario where the Israelis completely dominate. So, in terms of escalation with regard to the Israel-Palestine problem, I don't think there's much potential.

00:52:00 Speaker_00
Hezbollah is a different issue, but mainly because it's linked with Iran. And Iran is the really dangerous flashpoint because, as you know, the Russians are now closely allied with the Iranians. The Chinese are moving in that direction as well.

00:52:17 Speaker_00
And if Israel gets involved in a war with Iran, we're going to come in, in all likelihood. Remember, when the Israelis attacked the Iranian embassy in Damascus on April 1st, on April 14th, The Iranians retaliated against it.

00:52:40 Speaker_05
The reciprocal response.

00:52:41 Speaker_00
Yeah. But we were involved. We were forewarned, weren't we? Yes, we were forewarned. But the point is that we were involved in the fighting. We were involved with the Israelis, with the French, the British, the Jordanians, and the Saudis.

00:52:55 Speaker_00
We were all involved in the fighting. So this gets at the escalation problem. Now, to counter the Iranian escalation scenario, the fact is Iran does not want a war with the United States, and the United States does not want a war with Iran.

00:53:11 Speaker_00
And it's the Israelis, especially Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been trying to sort of suck us into a war. Because he wants us, the United States, to really whack Iran, weaken it militarily, and especially to go after its nuclear capabilities.

00:53:29 Speaker_00
Because as you well know, they are close to the point where they can develop nuclear weapons. So the Israelis are the ones who want us to get involved in a big war with Iran. That's the escalation flashpoint.

00:53:42 Speaker_00
And the $64,000 question is whether you think the United States and Iran, kind of colluding, can work together to prevent the Israelis from getting us something.

00:53:53 Speaker_05
That question will be answered based on who leads the next administration.

00:53:59 Speaker_00
Well, if you believe that it matters who leads the next administration, that's true.

00:54:06 Speaker_04
Thank you. Let me just say, Jeffrey and John, now I know why Sachs will not stop talking about you two. This was the most amazing panel of the event so far. Give it up for Jeffrey Sachs and John Mearsheimer.