Jeffrey Sachs on Trump's Iran policy and the long decline of Western hegemony
Glenn Diesen interviews economist and professor Jeffrey Sachs about the limits of US power, the Iran war, and the historical arc of Western dominance.
Summary
Glenn Diesen interviews Jeffrey Sachs on April 24th, 2026, discussing the long-term decline of Western hegemony and what the Iran war reveals about the limits of US power. Sachs argues that the so-called "unipolar moment" after 1991 was always an illusion, obscuring a decades-long process of Asian economic catch-up that had been underway since the end of World War II. He contends that China is now at least a peer of the United States economically and technologically, and in manufacturing and heavy industry has surpassed it. Sachs also argues that the American foreign policy establishment operates according to an offensive realist mindset — one that cannot accept other major powers as stable and legitimate — and that this makes genuine diplomatic accommodation structurally difficult. He traces this imperial mentality directly to the British Empire, arguing that American strategic culture absorbed it wholesale.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Opening: The Iran War and the Limits of US Power
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. Today is Friday, April 24th, 2026, and we are joined by Professor Jeffrey Sachs. Thank you for coming on. I've been wanting to speak with you about what appears to be the decline — at least of the hegemonic era after the Cold War. Because after the Cold War, the image of the US as being all-powerful was very important in shaping the international system. States linked their security to the United States, which tended to monopolize security, while adversaries tried to keep a very low profile so as not to provoke the US. But as we know, hegemons become overstretched and exhaust themselves, and it seems this is what Trump wanted to reverse. But with the Iran war, it seems that instead it exposed even more so the limits of US power. How do you assess the longer-term relevance of the Iran war?
Jeffrey Sachs: We're certainly seeing the limits of US power — no doubt. I think what we're seeing is a long-term trend, actually a long-term trend of the decline of Western hegemony — or the end of Western hegemony — which one can date already back to the end of World War II, when most of Europe lost its colonies around the world. The United States, in a way, replaced the European empires to become an American empire. It competed with the Soviet Union as the two major imperial powers, but the US was, within that competition, in some way always dominant economically and technologically. It was a very frightening time because these were two nuclear superpowers that were at each other's throats, often at least in proxy wars.
When the Soviet Union dissolved or disintegrated in 1991, it looked to US leadership and to much of the world as though the US was the sole superpower and was completely dominant. But I would say the long-term trend that had led to the decline overall of Western power after World War II was continuing. What happened at the end of World War II — with the end of the European imperial age — was that the rest of the world, and especially Asia, was given new space for catching up technologically, catching up in terms of education levels, literacy, urbanization, and industrialization. So all the way back from the end of World War II onward, there was a narrowing of the gap between the industrialized West — which broadly speaking was Europe and the United States — and the countries of Asia, and at least some partial economic development success stories in other parts of the world as well.
The Long Arc of Western Dominance and Asian Rise
The way I view it is that for around 150 years — roughly speaking from the beginning of the 19th century to the end of World War II — the Western world, and especially Europe, dominated the world. That really was a Western hegemony, basically with Britain in the lead, but a number of powerful European countries with imperial possessions around the world. After World War II, the gap between the West and the rest narrowed. Within the West, the US was clearly the dominant power, but underneath the surface was the year-by-year economic progress of much of Asia. And that means that on a long-term trend — not on a year-to-year trend, but on a long-term trend — the dominance of the Western world was bound to diminish.
But I would say two things hid that. The dominance of the US and Soviet Union made it look like it was really a two-empire affair battling with each other. And it was easy to take one's eyes off the rise of Korea, the rise of Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong — the so-called Asian tigers — or even the rise of China economically, which began in the late 1970s. So it looked like it was two powers battling each other when more fundamental change was underway. And I keep coming back to Asia as central to this, because Asia is home to 60% of the world population and has always been the center of gravity of world population and of the world economy for two millennia or more. What was happening was that Asia was slowly coming back from a century and a half of European imperial rule. But that was beneath the surface. It was gradual. It was year-to-year. And it looked like the United States and the Soviet Union were duking it out.
So when the Soviet Union ended in December 1991, there was one superpower remaining. The end of history was declared. The United States looked like the sole superpower. It was the unipolar moment. The US was the indispensable country. Every superlative one could imagine was applied. The neoconservatives in the United States believed their own headlines. And the portrayal that the fundamental change in the world was US dominance became the meme. But from an economic point of view, the fundamental story was the year-by-year, step-by-step narrowing of the gap between the West — again meaning Europe and the US — and Asia. The rise of Asia was the real story in terms of relative power.
Now, one could add a few points: that even in the heyday of US power, the US could not defeat Vietnam. The US could not overcome the anti-colonial wars and anti-colonial sentiments. The US could not keep European empires intact or replace them with American empires in much of Asia — though US influence in post-war Japan and Korea was nearly total. But all of this means that from my point of view, the unipolar moment after 1991 was an illusion to an important extent. If you were looking at this as an economist, as I was during that period, I was rather routinely saying that Asia is rising and that this is creating a different kind of world. If you were in geopolitics, power projection, and military affairs, it didn't necessarily look like that.
What's interesting — and I think it would be fun to actually go back and look at what the strategists were saying about China back in 1991 and 1992 when the unipolar moment was projected — my memory, which may be wrong, is that they weren't saying much about China. China was not viewed as a likely important actor. It was a poor country that assembled goods for US markets. It would be good if it rose in power perhaps, because it would continue to check Russian influence. But I don't think China was viewed as a strategic issue by the United States until after the start of the 21st century, and really until around 2010 when Obama started talking famously about the Asia pivot, or the China pivot.
So all of this is to say, Glenn, that the broadest trend of all in the world scene, in my view, is that from 1800 to 1950 roughly speaking, the Western world — led by the European empires and within Europe by Britain — dominated the world. They industrialized. They had the vast preponderance of military power. They had the vast preponderance of technology and the overwhelming leadership in science. Whether that balance was in Europe or the United States had already begun to shift by the beginning of the 20th century, but it decisively shifted at the end of World War II. But taking the West as a whole, that dominance of the West peaked around 1950.
The political headlines — European empires over, India independent, People's Republic of China declared, and so forth — started a deep economic process that we loosely call catching up. It's not an adequate phrase, but at least for the first 50 years of the period from 1950 to 2000, it's not a bad phrase to think that what was happening in Asia was catching up in the sense of literacy for the first time, mass public education for the first time, basic infrastructure being built that had not really been built during the European imperial heyday. "Catching up" is no longer the right phrase, because China is clearly in the lead technologically in a lot of areas now. The United States is by far not the hegemon or the sole superpower in the world on most criteria. Economically and technologically, China is at least the peer of the United States — but in manufacturing almost across the board, and in heavy industry almost across the board, China is way ahead of the United States right now.
So in this sense, the idea that American hegemony is coming to an end — I would say that has been true gradually for decades. The post-1991 euphoria in the United States about the unipolar world — and it really was euphoria; I was around to see it in the think tanks, to see it in the universities, to see it in Washington, to listen to it in the rhetoric of every president — this was always, in my view, economically ignorant.
I was also part of a debate back in the 1990s: was the rise of Asia real, or something that was going to collapse? There were articles about the myth of the Asian miracle and so forth. My view all along was that we're seeing a long-term, real catching-up process, and again after 2010, a going-ahead process in many ways. I never bought into the unipolar story as being real. And having witnessed the Vietnam War debacle, I always felt that America exaggerated its power.
The Ukraine War and the Limits of American Expansion
I would say that the Ukraine war is another demonstration of the clear limits of American unipolarity. Basically, the Ukraine war was the end of NATO enlargement and the end of the US putting its pieces on the board wherever it wanted. We can remember that in the unipolar moment, Zbigniew Brzezinski basically had the idea that the United States would come to dominate Eurasia — nothing less — and that Ukraine would be the pivot for doing that. And President Putin basically stood up and said, "No, not on my watch. It's not going to happen." The Ukraine war is essentially a war about the limits of American expansion.
The US thought that it would just blow off Russia financially and economically through sanctions, or militarily, or through subversion inside with some kind of color revolution or something else. And all of that proved to be a complete illusion as well. So — long answer to the question — yes, we're seeing the limits of Western power. We're seeing the limits of US power. But my answer is that Western power, which is a relative concept after all, has been waning because of the rise of Asia already for 75 years, since the middle of the 20th century. The unipolar moment was never real. It was always a bit delusional to think that the US was riding supreme.
Now, having said all of that, the US clearly still has a lot of power and a lot of influence and a lot of destructive capacity. So this isn't the collapse of US power, but it is definitely the limits of US power.
Glenn Diesen: It's interesting — by comparison, in the 19th century, much of the power politics was seen through the prism of Britain versus the Russian Empire. And as this rivalry was going on, you saw new powers emerging at the periphery: the US, Germany, Japan. To some extent this is what the 20th century was as well — the United States versus the Soviet Union — and now in this rivalry you see Asia really emerging at the periphery. And yet there's still the assumption that the normal state of things — Western hegemony — will somehow return. I'm curious about that.
Technology Diffuses and Monopolies Don't Last
Jeffrey Sachs: This is a basic point, and it's a basic lesson of all of history: advantages of any one place are temporary. They could be temporary over the course of centuries, or they could be fleeting over the course of decades, depending on what you're really looking at. But technology — which is usually the key to giving some kind of advantage, whether military technology or productive technology — in the case of the 19th century, I put the steam engine as absolutely central to that unique advantage of Europe over the rest of the world. It wasn't the only advantage, but it was very key.
Eventually, good ideas, technology, and knowhow diffuse. Keeping a monopoly of power is almost never possible. You can try to hold trade secrets. You can try to limit the exports of high technology. But reverse engineering, copying success stories, understanding the underlying science and technology — this is a worldwide gift. Leaders find competitors because the basis of that leadership was typically some kind of real substantive technological advantage, very often a military advantage that had come — but then one that was quickly copied elsewhere.
Of course, the whole nuclear age was like that. When the atomic bomb was developed at Los Alamos and then dropped as a demonstration by Truman — a demonstration to Stalin, by killing massive numbers in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — the US planners thought that the US would have the atomic monopoly probably for about 30 years. It lasted four years. Because the Soviets spied, because they had great scientists, because of a lot of things. But monopolies don't last.
The idea that the United States has choke points is a constant meme. It's almost ludicrous, but you go back to the beginning of 2022 — the US talked about cutting off Russian banks from SWIFT as the nuclear option. It was going to bring down the Russian economy. We had the choke points. We had the definitive hold on power. It basically meant almost nothing in the end.
So this is a constant refrain of history: if one country takes the lead — which Britain did in industrialization in the late 19th century and especially after the Napoleonic Wars — other countries innovate, catch up, steal good ideas, narrow the gap, and often leapfrog. That was true of Germany and the United States vis-à-vis Britain from around 1870 onward.
But it was kept within the Western family, broadly speaking, for a long time. It led to many racist ideas — that this is a white people's hegemony, a European cultural hegemony, a Christian hegemony. Even the most enlightened, subtle, impressive thinkers like John Stuart Mill were basically imperialists. John Stuart Mill worked for the East India Company. He wrote tracts for it, and he wrote that it's Britain's mission to bring civilization to backward India, and that it's okay if there's a tutelage period — this is what empire is for. So a lot of ideology developed, and it goes away very, very slowly.
You look at British and French behavior — while they don't have empires anymore, they absolutely have imperial mentalities, and often even more naive and militaristic than the United States, which actually has an empire. British Russophobia and Britain's drumbeats of war against Russia in Ukraine are even louder than in the United States, and cruder and more simple-minded. But they come from a longer period of empire — the idea that British dominance is natural and inevitable, that Russia was the enemy of British dominance, and they still continue that battle even though they're an island, not an empire. It would be humorous if it weren't so dangerous.
Glenn Diesen: Well, in the 19th century, John Stuart Mill advocated for a liberal empire. Today, we have NATO advocating for liberal hegemony. So there's some consistency in history.
Jeffrey Sachs: We learned everything we know from the British Empire. Everything America thinks it knows came from the British Empire. And actually the links are very direct — language, culture, direct education. It's all there to be seen. If Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar, and Rhodes was the great imperialist of Africa at the beginning of the 20th century, Clinton absorbed that at Oxford. So when he became President of the United States in the 1990s, he was filled with American grandiosity that he had somehow learned from the British experience.
Offensive Realism and the Structural Barrier to Peace
Glenn Diesen: In realist theory, it's often assumed that states are security maximizers — that if we're unbalanced, we'll continue to expand, through NATO expansion, the Middle East, and so on — until we're balanced. Once balanced, we seek a new status quo in order to maximize our own security. You would think that as NATO expansion came to a grinding halt in Ukraine, as NATO has been balanced by Russia, or what we see now with the Middle East, or with China, there would be a diplomatic effort to shift to a new status quo. Do you see that?
Jeffrey Sachs: I don't see it, essentially. Instead, if I look at Iran, I think this is part of the reason why there can't be a peace — because Trump only wants a hegemonic peace.
Glenn Diesen: We saw that the US was quite desperate for a ceasefire. They agreed to Iran's format, then walked it all back once the guns went silent. And now the US appears to be marching toward all-out war against Iran. Is this based on their reluctance to find a peace that's not based on dominance? What do you think Trump's place is in all of this?
Jeffrey Sachs: This is a great question, and I think it comes to the variant schools of thought within realism. There is the school of thought of our good friend John Mearsheimer — offensive realism — which says that you can't really find an equilibrium among the great powers. They're always looking for an advantage. They're always annoying each other. And in John's theory, you end up with what his great book is titled: The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.
John says there really can't be a balance of power that's satisfactory. In what is sometimes in US schools called defensive realism rather than offensive realism, the idea is that security is at the center but you can find a kind of modus vivendi of the great powers — stay out of each other's way, and treaties can matter and stabilize things. That is the predominant view.
I would say Kissinger was somewhere in between the two. Strangely, Kissinger studied the Concert of Europe — this was his great model, the 19th-century relative stability of the major powers of Europe through a concert of systematic negotiation and basic norms of behavior. But Kissinger also succumbed to the offensive realism that when the other side is down, you take advantage of it. So he was in favor of NATO enlargement in the 1990s, even though he knew it would provoke Russian unhappiness.
I think one of the things that makes John Mearsheimer's work so important is that — while I don't agree with it myself as the necessary description of international politics — I think it's a very good description of the mindset of American strategists. American strategists don't take enough as a basis for stopping. There is a problem in the United States — which is, if any other major powers are standing, we are threatened — that is the idea. And so the United States, and by that I mean Washington, and by Washington I mean mainly the security establishment, has a very hard time with the idea that Russia is a stable great power. It has an extremely hard time with the idea that China is a stable great power. It's going to have a hard time with India being a great power. Because in the American mindset — and I think John Mearsheimer does portray this right — the idea is that it's too dangerous just to leave these other powers. You can't really trust them. And you should do what you can to undermine them.
So John does generally view China as a threat that we should be doing what we can to contain. I disagree with that viewpoint actually rather deeply, because I don't view China as a threat to the United States at all. I would like to work on cooperative accommodation in a number of ways — stay out of each other's red lines, stop the United States from arming Taiwan, and many other things that I think would make the world a lot safer. But the American mindset is: it's a dangerous world out there, and we have to push wherever we can.
We have caricatures of that. Our most caricaturish senator — a warmonger for every occasion; if you want a new war, you trot him out — is Lindsey Graham. He's always saying we need more war. Don't stop. Escalate. Whatever it is — whether it's Ukraine, whether it's Taiwan, whether it's Iran. And there is a course like that. One theory is they get campaign contributions from military contractors and so they're mouthpieces for them. They're warmongers in other ways. But there's also an idea that America should be the unipolar power and that it should fight its way to that if necessary — that it should put a stick in the spokes of any other major power, tie that power up in knots, and create trouble for it.
And that, to my mind, is an accurate description of American foreign policy and statecraft, but also a disastrous approach that is unnecessary, destabilizing, and ultimately dangerous for the United States itself, not to speak of all of the rest of the world.
Imperial Ideology and Its Persistence
Glenn Diesen: When there are extreme power disparities — or over the past centuries of Western dominance — it often makes sense for that dominance to generate or be accompanied by ideologies of superiority. So when you address the rise of the rest, as you say, or the rise of China, the reaction one often gets is perhaps encapsulated in work like Robert Kagan. He wrote the book The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World, in which essentially the answer is that the garden — which would be us, the civilized us — would have to go out and trim back the jungle again and civilize it.
Jeffrey Sachs: That is a very deep ideology. It goes back centuries. It's also very interesting from the point of view of the history of thought. Philosophers — inadvertently or advertently — are often really just the scribes of power. And so when countries become powerful, the philosophy arises to underpin that power. We had centuries of European ascendance and then 150 to 200 years of unchallenged European dominance over the rest of the world. Basically, while Europe lost some battles, it won most of the wars in Africa and in Asia. A whole ideology developed — many variants of it. Pseudoscientific racism, and of course the religious impulse — God's on our side — and many other similar philosophical ideas, the civilizing mission: we have the key to civilization.
Even the most enlightened, subtle, impressive thinkers like John Stuart Mill were basically imperialists. John Stuart Mill worked for the East India Company. He wrote tracts for it, and he wrote that it's Britain's mission to bring civilization to backward India, and that it's okay if there's a tutelage period — this is what empire is for. So a lot of ideology developed, and it goes away very, very slowly.
You look at British and French behavior — while they don't have empires anymore, they absolutely have imperial mentalities, and often even more naive and militaristic than the United States, which actually has an empire. British Russophobia and Britain's drumbeats of war against Russia in Ukraine are even louder than in the United States, and cruder and more simple-minded. But they come from a longer period of empire — the idea that British dominance is natural and inevitable, that Russia was the enemy of British dominance, and they still continue that battle even though they're an island, not an empire. It would be humorous if it weren't so dangerous.
Glenn Diesen: Well, in the 19th century, John Stuart Mill advocated for a liberal empire. Today, we have NATO advocating for liberal hegemony. So there's some consistency in history.
Jeffrey Sachs: We learned everything we know from the British Empire. Everything America thinks it knows came from the British Empire. And actually the links are very direct — language, culture, direct education. It's all there to be seen. If Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar, and Rhodes was the great imperialist of Africa at the beginning of the 20th century, Clinton absorbed that at Oxford. So when he became President of the United States in the 1990s, he was filled with American grandiosity that he had somehow learned from the British experience.
Glenn Diesen: Well, you have a big day there in New York, so I want to thank you for taking the time.
Jeffrey Sachs: Anytime. Great to be with you. Talk to you soon.