Jeffrey Sachs

And in Tehran, I was invited to a kind of cocktail party or an evening get-together, very nice, on a top floor of an apartment building.

You couldn't see anything out the window because it was just completely darkened in the afternoon by this sandstorm, basically.

So,

The point was, it struck me then, these are arid regions.

Yes.

They are drying under the forces of long-term changes that are underway.

Having been in the Gulf and then in Iran, it's of course exactly the same ecosystem.

It's the same environment.

It's the most natural thing that they should be working together to solve these problems.

And you say, this is...

Where do these lines of division come from?

Just because someone drew a political line, it doesn't change the fact that there's the sandstorm on one side, the same sandstorm on the other side, and they should be working together.

And so it just struck me.

I'm just reminded of the fact that...

I had this intense visceral feeling then how artificial these political boundaries are because this is a region.

And it's a region that shares some very intense human problems like how to get enough water to stay alive day to day.

And they should be working together to solve that problem.

So I don't think in this case that you need the United States to geoengineer anything.

I think it's happening by itself.

has spent $5 to $10 trillion on this Israel venture.