Jeffrey Sachs

Of course. But this is incredible. How would we feel if Russia were attacking the United States? And trying to kill the president, which we are trying to kill Putin right now. Would we say that's just fine? Don't worry if Americans are getting a little upset about that. But that's literally what Biden has approved. And then we see hot spots around.

You have to be, you know, really into this to be following them. the country of Georgia in the South Caucasus region. There's a little typical regime change maneuver that's been underway in recent weeks. It will not succeed, but the aim was to destabilize that region. The hand of the U.S. is absolutely clear in that. We see in Romania another bizarre episode where a

Presidential election was in its second round, and the lead candidate was saying we should end the war with Ukraine. And the Supreme Court of Romania annulled the election, claiming Russian interference. And so that candidate that was calling for peace could not win election. We're seeing those kinds of events all over. What are we seeing in South Korea?

In South Korea, of course, we saw something that we don't understand that's also mind-boggling, which was an attempted coup by the president of Korea, President Jung, who called out the military to surround and arrest the parliament. And ultimately, the coup failed and the president was thrown out of office. But why he made that coup is not absolutely clear. And the U.S. reaction was...

bizarre the u.s said we're watching with concern that was all uh it didn't say anything about restore the constitutional order or were against the coup or anything else and there was a a a glimmer of possible reason i don't want to overstate any certainty on this because this is of course also not uh

analyzed properly or made public so we don't have the information but the week before the military action the coup attempt There was a visit by the Ukrainian defense minister for armaments from South Korea, something that the United States has been pushing very hard for. The United States has been trying to get South Korea to ship arms to Ukraine because the U.S. inventories are depleted.

and South Korea under its law cannot do so because it cannot ship arms to belligerents that are engaged in war, and the parliament opposed it. The parliament president does not have a majority in the parliament, or the former president, and the opposition opposed the armaments. So there's some...

possible relationship with this, that when Yoon declared martial law, he said that the opposition was siding with the North Koreans. That was his statement. And some read that as a way to clear the way for South Korea to enter the Ukraine war with massive arms shipments. I don't know whether that's the case, but it wouldn't surprise me if that's the case. Maybe we'll find out.

It happens that the acting president was my first PhD student at Harvard. So I go back with him 44 years, which is nice. Amazing.

I think that it was, first of all, a military choice because Russia is in the midst of a very tough war along a 1,200-kilometer front in Ukraine, and it did not want to divert any major military effort. that direction. Second, the proximate reason why Assad fell was that the main military backing of Assad was Hezbollah forces and the Iranian guard. And they had both been

Especially Hezbollah had been very badly mauled by Israel in the last month and a half and had pulled its reinforcements from Syria to reinforce Lebanese positions. And so Assad was left without the backing of Hezbollah forces, several thousand, which was the bulwark of his military. I think a third... is that Russia doesn't think it's leaving Syria, that this isn't the end of the story.

And immediately, the supposed new force in Syria, the HTS, said that it wants Russia to stay and to keep its bases in Syria. Russia has a naval base and a small one and an airfield. And Russia has re-established deployed its forces from within Syria to both of those bases, but is probably not leaving.

So I think from probably a strategic calculus, Russia just regards this as a temporary step on a path to continued conflict and that this was not the time to get into another major front. Yes. And that would be my assessment.

Well, I would first be clear. Under the Constitution, Biden is president until January 20th. I think it's right to say that Biden should not put America into further insecurity. He's done enough damage. And so I think it's right for every political figure to say to Biden, you're at the end of your term and the world is very dangerous. You do not have a mandate to increase the danger.

You should never have authorized violence. The use of attack and other U.S. missiles in deep strikes into Russia stop further provocations now. So I hope that politicians of both parties and I think President Trump can also make this clear. It's not to take over the government until January 20th. But Biden. Absolutely, in my view, is without the legitimacy to further endanger us.

And they should prevent any actions from abroad that threaten American security, of course. But I don't see those happening. I think the biggest risk right now is continued U.S. provocations of the kind that we've been discussing in Ukraine, in the Middle East, in the periphery of Russia, in the Far East. Stop any further provocations.

The idea of somehow tying Trump's hands is completely illegitimate constitutionally and politically, and it's a disastrous approach. We're not playing a game of two people or a game of two administrations. We're trying to survive. at a time of perhaps maximum global peril right now. So just to say, most experts that look at this think we're closer to nuclear war than we have ever been.

And I refer often to the doomsday clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which is the graphic to demonstrate how close or how far we are from nuclear war. And that doomsday clock puts the clock at 90 seconds to midnight, which is the closest to nuclear Armageddon that it has ever been since the clock was first rolled out in 1947.

So I think it behooves those people who are making the decisions in the Biden administration to stop imperiling Americans at this point and to understand that their job right now is to keep things stable, to give power over to President Trump on January 20th, 2025.

This would change so much.