Jeffrey Sachs on US imperial strategy targeting Russia, Iran, and China
Jeffrey Sachs is interviewed by Glenn Diesen about the long-term strategic logic behind US foreign policy toward Russia, Iran, and China.
Summary
Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins Glenn Diesen to argue that a continuous, bipartisan US imperial strategy stretching back 35 years, rooted in the pursuit of global primacy as articulated by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard. Sachs argues that Trump's supposed peace diplomacy over Ukraine was a facade, conducted simultaneously with CIA-directed escalation of drone and missile strikes deep inside Russia, with Palantir identified as a central actor choosing Ukrainian targeting. Sachs also discusses the Wolfowitz Doctrine of 1992 as an early articulation of the primacy strategy, and his own personal involvement in proposing economic assistance to Russia after 1991 — proposals he says were rejected because Washington wanted primacy, not Russian recovery. He contends that the US has systematically pushed Russia, China, and Iran together — the very outcome Brzezinski warned would be fatal to the primacy strategy — and that the entire enterprise is now failing. He also argues that Iran is a technologically sophisticated state that has spent decades preparing defenses against US military power, contrary to American assumptions of easy dominance. He places his remaining hope in public opinion in the US and Europe, which he says is overwhelmingly opposed to continued war, as the only realistic check on what he calls an unaccountable, debt-financed, and largely secret war machine.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Opening: The escalation in Ukraine and the Middle East
Glenn Diesen: We have the great privilege of being joined today by Professor Jeffrey Sachs. Thank you for coming back on the program. We're observing what I would say is a deeply troubling development. In Europe, there's a massive escalation and increase in the brutality of the NATO-Russia proxy war in Ukraine. In the Middle East, we're also seeing a massive escalation, but also a widening of the war as it pulls in more states. We could already have entered our third world war, and you would think that diplomats would be working overtime to put an end to this — but they seem to be throwing more fuel at the flames. Forget about negotiations; we don't even have diplomacy. So again, it seems predictable, the kind of disaster we're heading towards. How are you reading this situation?
Jeffrey Sachs: I'm reading it as indeed a disaster. Everybody loves war. Nobody's interested in peace. One of the things that I've learned — and that we've learned from some of the writing and disclosures of the last few weeks — is that even during what was purportedly a period of diplomacy in 2025, Trump's first year of the second term, beneath the surface the CIA, Palantir, and Trump were actively promoting a massive scaling up of drone warfare and the targeting of sensitive infrastructure deep inside Russia. Trump, in other words, for all of the talk about ending the war with a phone call, or even the summit in Anchorage last year, behind the scenes never really deviated from the war strategy.
For a while it looked like there was a serious divergence between the US and Europe on this question, but I think that divergence was greatly exaggerated if we look beneath the surface. Maybe that was apparent all along — for me it wasn't so apparent, because I met negotiators from both sides and I thought there was some negotiation being attempted by the United States. But we now know categorically that at the very time these negotiations were supposedly taking place, Trump was giving the green light, and the CIA was calling for greater freedom in providing intelligence for targeting, and a greater scaling up of missile strikes and drone strikes inside Russia.
Palantir and the AI-enabled war machine
Jeffrey Sachs: What's also quite clear is an enterprise that is very particular for our time: Palantir. It is at the core of the US war machine. If you watch the very visible CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp, he's a blatant and very strange warmonger who thinks he's defending all of Western civilization, and that it's simply necessary to kill lots of people using AI and the Maven system — the Pentagon's AI-enabled system run by Palantir. Palantir is all over Ukraine. Palantir is the big buddy of the defense minister Fedorov, who was just seemingly fired by Zelensky, though everything happening in Ukraine remains opaque and uncertain. But Palantir has been all over this drone war, and Karp himself proclaimed that Palantir is choosing most of the targets that Ukraine is striking.
So this is really a US war in which the Ukrainians die, Ukrainian territory gets burned up, but it's really been a US-orchestrated war all along — and Trump didn't really change any of it.
The 35-year arc of US strategy
Jeffrey Sachs: We're in a kind of madhouse that has been going on, by my estimate, for 35 years — ever since 1991. The CIA has been out to defeat Russia, to divide Russia, to bring Russia to its knees. It's all been spelled out if you look in the right places. My favorite palimpsest for this is Brzezinski's 1997 highly didactic tome The Grand Chessboard, subtitled American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives — a strategy for primacy. The whole point of Brzezinski's text, and the whole point of American foreign policy, has been to defeat Russia, and nothing has changed on that. It remains true.
Several things can be said about this. One is that the way war is conducted now, from an American point of view and basically from a European point of view, is essentially costless — for the politicians, at least. Unlike most of human history, our leaders don't lead their armies into battle. They're very safe and far away. So for them, war is a video game. Trump talks about bombing as a slap to the other person. It's all great fun. It's not paid for by taxation; it's paid for by debt. So you can run up the debt until you wreck the economy — which is what the US and Europe are doing — but you don't have to justify it to anyone.
So in the short term, for these politicians, war is favored by their intelligence agencies. The CIA, I do believe, is really at the core of most of American foreign policy, because it's convenient, it's secret, it's deniable, and you don't have to explain anything to the public. We didn't really know that Trump was giving green lights to targeting deep inside Russia at the same moment that he was talking about diplomacy to end the war and how important peace was. Secrecy is a big part of the game. They call it a game, by the way — it's not a game. It's a disaster that can lead to a World War I-style destruction of civilization, or to nuclear war and the end of civilization. But for them, it's not a risk. It's unaccountable. It's mostly done in secret. It's done on debt. And so from the US point of view, this can go on a long time.
Silicon Valley as a war lobby
Jeffrey Sachs: Then you have the particular lobbies that want this to continue. Lobby number one is the military-industrial complex itself. And probably the biggest lobbyist for war right now is Silicon Valley — Palantir, SpaceX, and others — because they're testing their weapon systems in real time, in real battlefield conditions, with rapid advances and turnover of generations of technology, all in weeks or months. What could be better? Alex Karp tells us how wonderful the advances are: killing Palestinians in Gaza, targeting infrastructure in Iran, hitting deep inside Russia. This is all the Pentagon Maven system, and think how much it has been improved, quote-unquote, in recent months.
All of this is to say, Glenn, there's no real check on this. In Ukraine itself, recent Gallup polls and other polls show an overwhelming proportion of Ukrainians want the war to stop, even with concessions. But no one asks them. No one asks Americans. No one asks Europeans. If you look at the approval ratings of these politicians, or what the public says about war and peace, the public says these politicians are awful — they don't represent us. Merz, Macron — well, Starmer is gone, but his last act was to go to Kyiv again, because for him the war was the biggest thing of his prime ministership. No doubt. Because MI6 told him so.
So the public doesn't like this. The public wants the war to stop. The public doesn't like these politicians. But it doesn't matter. It's so easy for the CIA and others to continue all this great fun — and how exciting that we're developing a new generation of AI-enabled weaponry, and the Ukraine war is enabling us to do it.
That is my take on this: very little constraint, and a very deep program that goes back 35 years, spelled out explicitly in the 1990s. And I would add one more point. Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard explains that the aim is American primacy. The threats are the big powers — Russia and China. The solution is to weaken or defeat them, or replace their regimes one way or another. The way to do that in part is through what Brzezinski called geopolitical pivot states. A geopolitical pivot is a place that doesn't matter to Americans except that it's useful leverage against the big powers. Ukraine is number one on Brzezinski's list. He spelled out in 1997: we will take Ukraine, and thereby Russia will no longer be a major power.
Iran as the second geopolitical pivot
Jeffrey Sachs: What was number two on Brzezinski's list in 1997? Iran. He explained that Iran is the pivot for the Gulf region, for Middle East energy resources, and for the Caspian Sea region. Control Iran, and you control all of that. So all of this is deeply seated. Little of it has to do with Trump, actually. He does express the venality and the corruption of all of it perfectly — he channels the greed, the corruption, the violence — but it's not really him, because this is how it was with Biden, and how it was with Trump's first term when he helped Ukraine build its million-person army, and how it was with Obama and the many wars Obama prosecuted and the coup in Ukraine in 2014, and how it was with Bush, and how it was with Bill Clinton, who started this whole process when the Soviet Union ended.
Clinton was the president beginning in 1993 who set the path: our goal is now primacy. Actually the idea was even there at the end of the Bush senior presidency, in the 1992 Pentagon strategy written by Wolfowitz — but it was Clinton who set us on the way. So to my mind, Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama, Trump one, Biden, Trump two — it's been pretty much all the same. Perpetual war, always a good reason to continue, never give up. Why give up? No real constraints. Someday we'll win. And in the meantime, you don't have to count the dead. It's somebody else's dead.
Glenn Diesen: It's kind of incredible that only a few weeks after the collapse of the Soviet Union, you had the Wolfowitz Doctrine essentially outlining the policies of today — perpetuating global primacy by knocking out Eurasian rivals. I thought that was interesting, the Wolfowitz Doctrine, simply because it also identified countries like Japan and Germany as possible threats to US hegemony. This is again weeks after the Soviet Union was gone.
The missed opportunity for peace after 1991
Jeffrey Sachs: What's so interesting is that I was quite deeply involved in those days on the economic issues of what was a state of collapse, a financial crisis, a systems change and transformation — and everything signaled in the brightest possible blinking lights: we can have peace now. We can achieve generations of peace, because the Russians want peace. They want normality. Everyone wants peace. Time to build. I put forward specific proposals: help the Russian economy, help them stabilize financially, and so forth. All of which were rejected by the US government, because the US government didn't want peace. It wanted primacy. It didn't want Russia to get back on its feet — quite the opposite.
And Brzezinski said it. Maybe Russia will break apart into three different weak states — a European Russia, a Siberian Russia, and a Far East Russia — in a loose confederation. What a great vision. But it was all in the service of American primacy.
And we just had Rasmussen — this fool who purports to somehow represent the security of the West but is a complete disaster — who said, "Yes, what is NATO? NATO is in the service of American power projection." Well, that's literally true. He at least said it right. It's not about security. It's about power projection. And the American idea has not changed to this moment: America works for primacy. And primacy says it's not good enough to be safe, not good enough to have security, not good enough to have prosperity — you have to dominate. And the rest of the world doesn't want to be dominated this way. Russia doesn't want to be dominated by the United States. China certainly doesn't want to be dominated by the United States. Iran doesn't want to be dominated by the United States.
Brzezinski's fundamental miscalculation
Jeffrey Sachs: What Brzezinski got completely wrong — totally wrong — and he's a very clever and very influential person, and his book was not only putting forward his own views but explaining the Washington point of view, a textbook for his students explaining how Washington thinks about these problems — his point, which is the single biggest mistake of all, was that America will succeed in primacy because it is basically unchallenged economically and technologically, and no one can come close to it. That is simply false, and it was falsified over the next 30 years, especially but not only by the rise of China.
What the United States got completely wrong about Iran, and continues to get wrong, is that it thought Iran was some medieval failed state that would crumble when American military technology hit it. Iran is quite the opposite. It is a highly technologically sophisticated state that has worked for decades to prepare a defense against American war. The results are there for all to see — but it doesn't stop the American war machine.
There's another point that's probably quite obvious to everybody: if you're running this primacy strategy, part of your game is maintaining the primacy bubble. You have to have everyone believe, to the extent possible, that you are the unchallenged power. Even the Athenian generals explained this to the Melians in the famous dialogue — they couldn't let Melos be neutral because that would show weakness to others within the Athenian camp. Well, the Americans cannot admit defeat. They can't. Defeat is only admitted in very strange circumstances. The Vietnam War ended after Nixon resigned — that's what enabled it to finally end, because the next president, Ford, said, "Okay, we're basically closing shop." It wasn't his war.
Trump had that opportunity to end this debacle in Ukraine. That's why some of us thought he would actually try to do so. But he's too weak, too inconsequential, too ignorant, and basically too beholden to the Palantirs of the world to do any such thing. And so already at the same moment that he was talking about negotiations, he was following the CIA playbook.
My point is slightly different, which is that America cannot admit any kind of setback or defeat. So it has to constantly proclaim, "We're winning, we're winning, we're winning." Not that I could care less, but if it were actually shown that Iran held the US to a draw after a lot of blood and destruction — yes, that would weaken America's further pretensions of primacy in other places. I say bravo. The whole idea is crazy. But from the advocates of primacy, it's a disaster. So as long as they can have budget deficits, as long as they can do their operations with deniability and no accountability to Congress or to public opinion, they're going to continue to do it. And that's basically where we are.
And when the Democrats win part of Congress in November, it may not change anything, because this isn't really a partisan issue at all. This is a Washington mindset and debacle that's gone on with both parties for the last six presidents.
The three front lines and the risk of European escalation
Glenn Diesen: With Brzezinski, because geopolitics is about territory, he made it very clear that Eurasia is where most of the territory, population, and resources are located. So you would have three front lines: the western parts of Eurasia, which would be Russia; the east, which would be China; and the south, which would be Iran. Those are the three main countries the US happens to be in conflict with. But towards this end, the frontline states have a very specific purpose — some can be disposable. If you're fighting Iranians, you would traditionally be using Iraqis or Kurds. Similarly, if you're going to fight Russia, you use Ukrainians. In East Asia, the US also has its proxies.
But as Ukraine is essentially bleeding out, it begs the question whether the Europeans will be thrown into the fight, because Brzezinski said global primacy rested on three pillars: maintain security dependence among the vassals — that would be the Europeans and all the frontline states — keep tributaries protected, and keep the barbarians from coming together, meaning America's adversaries. The whole point here is that America seems to have gone all-in, because if it fails to defeat these countries, it has essentially pushed the Russians, Iranians, and Chinese closer together. So it seems like an all-or-nothing moment, which is always dangerous because countries will be willing to take huge risks. How do you see this playing out? And do you think the United States will be willing to throw the Europeans into this as well? Because a lot of the fake diplomacy of Trump appears to have simply been outsourcing the war to the Europeans — if you see how much more hawkish the Europeans have become since Trump took over, it would be a reasonable hypothesis.
The fatal error: pushing Russia, China, and Iran together
Jeffrey Sachs: Brzezinski again spelled everything out very clearly, exactly as you said — Russia, Iran, and China as the three potential blockages to American primacy in Eurasia, and then all of these geopolitical pivots around each of them so that they can be somehow brought down with regime change, crippled, or defeated in war. I mentioned one of the big mistakes Brzezinski made — a fundamental flaw of the whole analysis. He said Russia will never be able to resist this because American technological dominance is so secure and unchallenged. So ultimately Brzezinski thought American power — not soft power, not propaganda power, not information wars or narrative power, but the fundamentals of industrial production and technology — would in the end dominate. And we know that is not true.
But the second point he made was that the big risk is that China, Russia, and Iran will get together — and then he says in 1997, no American strategy would be so stupid as to push Russia, China, and Iran together. And of course that's exactly what America has done.
I think it's deeper than just a tactical response of the three of them facing American hubris. I actually think the fit in Eurasia is a very good fit — that China and Russia have a natural economic complementarity. By the way, just like Europe and Russia have a natural economic complementarity. Europe is resource-poor and highly densely populated. Russia is low population density and resource-rich, and that means a great complementarity to put the two together. Europe could have thrived on that basis. Europe has cut itself off exactly from that. So the same complementarity applies with Russia and China, and that relationship is not going away. It's not just a tactical relationship. It is a deep, mutually beneficial economic relationship. And the same is true with Iran and China. The alliance of the three therefore makes very big sense.
And then even more than that, if you look at Eurasia east of that line — basically from the longitudes of the Middle East all the way to the Pacific, with the bit of complexity about India and its place in global geopolitics — all the rest will coalesce into an economic unity of Eurasia that makes a lot of sense. And Europe will find itself out on the far western periphery, cut off from its natural trading partners Russia and China, because it's cut itself off — and finding that the United States isn't much of a friend. That's what Europe doesn't understand: it has put itself so squarely into a corner. It's geographically in a kind of corner, but it put itself geopolitically into a corner by its naivety and a kind of corrupt vassalage to the United States. And if the Europeans would read Brzezinski, they would see that they were already regarded as vassals back 30 years ago, and they have become even more so today.
The hope: public opinion as the last check
Jeffrey Sachs: Where is it all heading? The biggest hope is that the publics of the US and Europe are sick of this. It's not their gain. It's not to their advantage. Our societies are hurting. They're divided. There are so many problems. Our infrastructure doesn't work in the United States — it's failing. Even in Europe, where it was always kept to a higher standard, people are telling me it's unimaginable what is happening right now to even basic services, as fools like Merz proclaim that the goal is to prepare for war.
So I think the public is disgusted, and I don't give up — maybe it sounds naive, but I don't give up on democracy being able somehow to choose a different course. This is our biggest hope. Europeans in daily life do not want a war. The politicians are talking big, talking nonsense, filled with bravado and delusions. But if the shots started to be fired, I think maybe just maybe there would be some quick sobering up. But even before that, the publics know this is completely wrongheaded.
And maybe to conclude on my part, Glenn — all of this was premised on American primacy and on getting the European vassal states to buy into that and to pursue it against the big adversaries, so that the US could dominate Eurasia. Everybody can see this is impossible. So if people would open their eyes, it's a failed venture that's leading us closer and closer to war.
When the bubble bursts on this delusion, it's going to change a lot. It's actually going to burst a financial bubble that the US rides on as well, because a lot of the US stock market boom of the last 20 years is a primacy bubble in some sense. So there's going to be a reckoning, and it's not going to be entirely pleasant — but it could save us, if a realism arises from all of this. But right now, don't count on that realism coming from Washington or Brussels or Berlin. If it comes at all before mass destruction, it will come from the general public.
Glenn Diesen: Well, on that slightly optimistic note, we can leave it. Thank you very much for your time.
Jeffrey Sachs: Great to be with you. Thanks a lot.