Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs - A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism

[Music] so good afternoon everybody good afternoon everybody you're all very welcome to the institute of international european affairs for this very special book launch today I was with there professor Sachs this morning Minister sapone organized a very very interesting workshop on the SDGs through the lens of a child through the eyes of a child and it was very very successful it's very interactive the keynote speeches 5-volt Jeffrey Sachs and by Minister is a poem and and of course it covered many many other issues around climate and Iran foreign policy u.s. foreign policy and I daresay the community here today who've showed up in such numbers will have a tremendous appetite to hear and more may I just point out to all of you to please put your phones to silent but you're encouraged to tweet the hashtag IAEA and as is traditional the initial addresses on the record and the Q&A sessions on the Chatham House rule now we will have time for Q&A with plenty of time for Q&A at the end so let me formally introduce Jeffrey Sachs he is a professor of economics at Columbia University thought leader in sustainable development senior UN adviser best-selling author and syndicated columnist professor sacks serves as the director of the Center for sustainable development at Columbia University he's a university professor at Columbia University the universe's highest academic rank he is also special advisor to the UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres on the sustainable development goals I also want to thank besser Paulo Patrick walls from UCD for all the work that he has done and to help us to bring this event about this afternoon and all the work that he's done with the sustain without net work on behalf of Ireland contributing to the wonderful collaboration it's such a critical part of the achievement of the sustainable development goals over the next decade or so so with that please give a warm welcome - thank you that is a very warm welcome and I'm really delighted to be here and with many friends and many new friends and looking forward to discussing foreign policy and America and some of our strangeness right now but to understand a bit about the peculiar difficult challenging international diplomatic environment and foreign policy environment that we face I've written this book because I think the United States is not on a safe course and that has been true for quite a long time Trump makes this problem much more immediate and much more confused and much graver but the fact of the matter is American foreign policy has been out of kilter for quite a while and I think that it has been off course because of a an overwhelming concept in the American mind especially it's it's a broadly shared view but it is also an elite view of the power structure in the United States and that is American exceptionalism so I call this book and subtitle beyond American exceptionalism American exceptionalism is the view that the United States is truly the exceptional country in the world that stands out by dint of its mission its origins its values as having a unique role in the world and in general in a world that needs a lot of cooperation and is a diverse world maybe believing that one's country is special is ok believing that it is exceptional and therefore with certain prerogatives that no other part of the world has is very dangerous in my view and we're at a especially significant point of danger because the underlying assumptions of exceptionalism which are built on the idea of exceptional capacity to lead exceptional power exceptional values and exceptional preeminence in the world don't apply and they become more and more contradictory as the rise of China the rise of other parts of the world make the claims of exceptionalism stranger and more anachronistic than was true twenty or thirty years ago even then it was a concept of great hubris and got the United States into a lot of trouble and did not really do a lot of favor for the world unfortunately but it becomes more and more disjointed from the realities of the world that's not how its viewed in Washington not just by Trump but by the security establishment and by I'd say the maintained assumptions of the United States which is that the u.s. must lead the US is exceptional it's the only country that can lead and while Trump wants to lead in a particular way with the basically bashing the other side first before you say good morning and with a lot of unilateralism and with the great scorn of multilateral ideas he still wants to lead he thinks that America is exceptional it's not right to think that Trump is is an isolationist president or is wanting to abandon us leadership quite the contrary much of what the US is doing at his and his team's prerogatives right now for example the trade war with China is the intention and desire to stay the preeminent uniquely powerful and dominant country in the world so that is not an isolationist view it just is a particular vision of exceptionalism so the book traces these ideas back to American roots which even in the founding of the European settlements in the New World had an exceptional estelle iment to them because as the especially the English colonies were settled the concept of the first settlers was this is the new Israel and were founding a new promised land and that already was a sense of exceptionalism not of exceptional power in the world but exceptionalism from the point of view of moral purpose and I can tell you as a somebody who grew up as a child through public schools and as an American citizen and resident all my life you're imbued with that view basically from the very beginning that there was something unique and special and that America had a unique role and at times it did you know written constitution in creating a Republican form of government early on these are great accomplishments but from the very beginning this exceptionalism was a founding myth of course as well as having elements of reality the grim reality of America was that from almost the beginning of the settlements in the early 17th century the settlers and then eventually the United States itself was at war almost non-stop and in this we take after the founding power Britain which was at war almost non-stop for centuries including with this country but the United States was born in war and grew up in war and that really is part of the exceptionalism it's not part of the self gratifying story of our myths but it's part of a more grim reality so American exceptionalism was born in the unusual circumstances of colonizing not a new world but a world filled with populations across the American continent with Native Americans who had first to be pushed aside systematically over a period of three centuries and so there was a lot of genocide and there was slavery and so from the very beginning not quite the very beginning but by the end of the 17th century there were two fronts of war underway or two fronts of violence one was the violence of a growing slave population in the Caribbean and then in the southern part of the North American continent and the wars against the Native American populations and even during this period though there was a an extraordinary hubris of this new country when the United States won its independence from England with the support of France because just a few decades later the United States told Europe don't meddle in all of the Americas that's our backyard to meddle and which was rather a hubristic idea the Monroe Doctrine but early on even before the US could project much power it was already with a vision of a larger gaze in the world the 19th century in the United States was the century of first following England's industrialization and then surpassing England in economic might and but domestically the United States had the business of the civil war to settle the question of slavery and then it had the Indian Wars throughout the 19th century to settle the question of the Native American populations and those were quite brutal Wars of course the Civil War was the most brutal that the Americans United States ever fought on it's ended the wars against the Native American populations were a continuing series of genocides and the president that Trump most admires Andrew Jackson was a genocide 'el homicidal president probably with the the most perverse personality of any we've ever had until Trump arrived and probably from all I can gather arrival of Trump and antisocial personality disorder but a really nasty man who pushed the native populations to the west of the Mississippi River well by the end of the 19th century the those wars were over and America looked around the leadership looked around and our role model Britain had made a worldwide Empire and France and had its empire and he even Spain kept some of its empire a little bit Portugal kept a little bit of its empire Italy wasn't want to be imperial power so it would try trying again to invade Ethiopia and the United States decided it wanted its empire also and so it needed a good war in 1898 and when a battleship Explorer exploded in Havana Harbor in 1898 decided that that was a good time to invade Havana and have a war with Spain and gain its first overseas colonies Cuba Puerto Rico and the Philippines two of which we've given up one is bankrupt and still reeling from a massive hurricane last year and still in America's colonial hands and I think it's right to say that this building of the overseas Empire starting in 1898 became the business of the 20th century of u.s. foreign policy for the first thirty years it was repeated invasions of Central America and the Caribbean because we sent in the Marines every couple of years to collect debts from countries or to run countries or to grab a piece of Colombia to make it Panama to build a canal that would be under US ownership and through the 1930s America got its its experience in overseas projection of power and then the World War two of course was the decisive most horrific war in human history and the one that finally in effect ended the British Empire and passed the baton to the US Empire at the end of World War two and modern American foreign policy picks up at that point and there really were two visions of American foreign policy still built on an even more Exceptionalist sell vision at this point because now the US was the most powerful country in the world the technologically most advanced country by far the only major power in the world that had fought World War two with only one day of battle on its own soil the attack on Pearl Harbor but other than that a country that was not only intact but was had a war that led to the most remarkable industrialization and technological advancement imaginable and at the end of World War two also with the development of the atomic bomb the United States completely reigned supreme in the world as I would say then applicable phrase an exceptional country it was the only country of power at that time that had all of these attributes of economic might massive technological advancement unique military capacity and an economic reach that was already worldwide and influence and with Britain in crisis the debt at the end of World War two the United States saw its global leadership come to fruition with two interrelated viewpoints one was Roosevelt's vision Roosevelt I regard as America's greatest president by far I would say in its in the way but he had the vision of the United Nations and the idea of a collective security to build a world of peace based on a charter based on principles international law and an international institution that would keep the peace being the UN Security Council the second vision was not a collective security but a us-led security and especially since the Cold War began to unfold immediately at the end of World War two and that's a very complex and it's much contested history but I would say it's it was a cold war that was not an inevitable battle of a ruthlessly expansionist Soviet Union but was a detour of history that was extraordinarily dangerous costly and didn't have to happen actually is my own understanding of the Cold War but that side of the story gave a different meaning of exceptionalism which was that America was the unique protector of the world the free world and it was the only one that could defend against a in expansionist ruthless totalitarian power and the UN would not really suffice for that the US would have to stand on its own feat it would have to lead and it was only going to be through the hard-headed tough militarized leadership of the United States that the world would get through a twilight struggle between communism and capitalism that's how I grew up believing that story I think it's basically wrong but that is certainly the story that I imbibed from grade school onward and there was therefore attention which is inevitable on the one side an international order rule of law Universal Declaration of Rights treaties the GATT for trade the World Health Organization and other new organs of the United Nations Security Council then there was the Cold War and then there was the final real bleak side I would say of exceptionalism which is we're so damn powerful we also should take actions that are just in our interest period and in 1947 the u.s. took a fateful step for our politics in the National Security Act which created the CIA and the CIA was chartered at the first moment as having a dual role in intelligence agency and a secret army and that was very worrisome and Acheson and Truman knew that this was probably fairly dangerous for democratic institutions to combine those two functions but in effect the u.s. created a secret army of spooks and and people who could blow up things or put bullets in people's heads or create unrest or instigate general strikes not a large army but a a private army that could do dastardly things with the deniability of the President of the United States and one famous example of that two of the most famous examples of what goes wrong with that was in 1953 when Britain and the u.s. decided to overthrow the government of Iran which had the temerity to believe that the oil that just happened to be under Iranian land actually belonged to the Iranians we don't know still how they got that idea but it actually belonged to the British first and later to the Americans but the Iranians through some confusion believe that it was theirs and so it was very important to dismiss the government and put in the Shah of Iran who understood better who owned the oil and then the next year a really odd character in Guatemala got the idea that land might be redistributed for landless peasants now this is another completely insane idea obviously especially if the land was somewhere near the land where pineapples were being grown by United Fruit and it happened that United fruits lawyer was a Cromwell ins Sullivan and Cromwell a major US law firm whose senior partner John Foster Dulles happened to be the Secretary of State so when Jacopo Arvin's got the idea that there would be a mild land redistribution united fruit call the Secretary of State who happened to have a brother Allen Dulles who was the CIA director and John Foster called Allen and Arbenz was gone soon afterwards so that was not the Cold War that was not the UN that was private business dealings that also are part of exceptionalism and American foreign policy in the post-war period varied across these different conceptions with a lot of profound mistakes and a lot of projection of military power that became of course and an end in itself I would say and almost an unstoppable mechanism the u.s. put military bases around the world unlike any other country in history other than the than Britain which was the role model but the u.s. far surpassed its predecessor in this and the current counted military bases around the world though some are very small is typically held to be about 800 military bases overseas in 70 countries so the map is just a map of US military extension and the general rule is wherever you put a base never leave that's another principle if you do play the board game risk it's a lot like that board game which is you want a piece on every square of the board and if you don't have a piece on that square of the board it means somebody else does and they can start to move closer to your spot on the board and so it's really a zero-sum struggle that has no end until you cover the entire board and that I think is one of the motivating factors in the mindset of of the United States well in the u.s. visioned when the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1980s this was taken to be entirely the fruits of the Cold War and especially at that point Ronald Reagan's leadership rather than what George Kennan had told American policymakers 40 years earlier which was that the Soviet system was so flawed it would eventually collapse on its own thank you and Kenan said we don't have to have a twilight struggle for the survival of the world the Soviet Union is not after global takeover it is after its security zone in Eastern Europe and and Western Asia because it's been invaded so many times and we should be finding a solution that meets also the security perceptions of Russia in particular but that as to communism communism was a profoundly flawed design and it would take care of itself in essence it would not be defeated it would defeat itself I was became economic advisor to a number of governments in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s so I witnessed firsthand the transformation that was then underway and it was a wonderful political freeing of countries from Soviet imperial rule and I was all for it but I was also very much struck and very much admiring of me hail Gorbachev as he deftly unwound his country's empire and had the notion which he deeply held that we should find a way to peaceful open relations and that there should be a common peaceful home between Amsterdam or Rotterdam and Vladivostok as he described it on the Eurasian landmass and that we could do away with the Cold War which was a terrible idea and do away with Soviet control in Eastern Europe and I can tell you you know this but I watched it also firsthand he Gorbachev was the architect of the democratic transition in Eastern Europe to an important extent he told his comrades you have to leave now he told solidarity it's time for you to join the government this would be a good thing he helped to bring that about peacefully I mention all of this because at the end of the Cold War the US exceptionalism was at its most heightened extent and the idea was that there was now a world with one superpower alone and that it was the greatest military and economic Colossus in the history of the world and that the u.s. was proven now to be the exceptional country that would guide the world it was a triumphalist view it's not that the US was completely irresponsible in how it proceeded but it did proceed with incredible hubris after 1989 we won they lost we get to pick up the pieces and again with different strains of belief the shared vision whether was Madeline Albright calling the United States the indispensable country or the neo-cons in Washington who took a more militarized vision of this the idea was worried and we run the show and Francis Fukuyama put it as the end of history in essence though he didn't mean us hegemonic control but in effect it was the u.s. model writ large and one superpower in the world the u.s. took the opportunity to do two major things one start moving NATO towards the east and rather than saying NATO was the instrument to defend against a Soviet invasion of Western Europe NATO was reinvented to be a us-led military alliance that would now incorporate the countries that had left the Soviet left the Soviet Union this was really this decision was made easily and it was a bad and wrong and provocative decision because it kept a cold war but just kept moving the borders until the Cold War was with Russia as the last step of this and the second thing we know from accounts of Wesley Clark who was the NATO commander under Clinton that the bravado and the triumphalism at the end of the Cold War led the American policy planners of the neoconservative persuasion to believe that their nask task was to throw out the regimes that were the Soviet or Russian allied regimes in the Middle East it was now time to clean up the remaining mess of the Cold War because as Wolfowitz explained to Wesley Clark in 1991 what we learned from the first Gulf War was we could act and Russia would do nothing so we have a free playing field now and now it's time to clean up the Middle East cleaning up the middle getting rid of Saddam Hussein it meant getting rid of Bashar al-assad it eventually meant getting rid of Muammar Qaddafi who was viewed as a not may be useful for financing Sarkozy's presidential election at some point but afterwards more dispensable than not and so on and one interpretation which I believe is that the u.s. engaged in Middle East Wars from that point onward to fulfill the neoconservative vision of the sole superpower cleaning up the tableau and I take a view which is a very very much a minority view but I let the majority be wrong all the time so I'm not shy about letting you know the conventional view be wrong I take the view that the Syrian war for example was a u.s. war of choice to overthrow Assad in the context of the Arab Spring in 2011 but just went terribly wrong it was always a bad idea but it went terribly wrong in the sense that Assad just had the bad taste to stay in power and to call on his friends the Russians and the Iranians to defend his hold on power and it turned out that u.s. logistics and Saudi funding and jihadists were not enough to throw Assad from power especially after the Russians intervened of course the view that we here in the United States is something completely different which was that there was a Democratic uprising in Syria which was violently repressed and that Obama was too timid and and conflicted to move so the u.s. did nothing and then the Soviets came the Russians came in and militarize the conflict even more and made a massive and in other words taking the agency outside of the US I just have a piece of evidence that contradicts that view and that is that President Obama signed an order for the CIA to cooperate with Saudi Arabia to overthrow the Syrian government and that is how u.s. foreign policy operates and it failed like almost everything the CIA does by the way other than intelligence collection which it does pretty well but when it comes to this operational destabilization efforts it almost always leads to a debacle because you cannot run the world through this kind of machination z' and expect things to work out properly so my take is that were still stuck in this view what does mr. Trump mean for this two things one at the individual level he is mentally unstable and a dangerous person and do not underestimate that fact this is not a normal healthy human being this is a absolutely impaired individual the likes of which we've never had as president of the United States he's also a nasty man and a racist and many other things but more than that he is narcissistic sadistic impulsive he's really a disordered mind and I don't know if Ian Hughes is here no oh there so your book on disordered Minds is a brilliant book and I thought before I just steal the phrase I should to make sure you're here because a and has written wonderful book about what happens when people like Trump become president and it's extremely dangerous and we are in a big danger but at a political level what Trump represents is a kind of extreme version of exceptionalism Trump does not understand cooperation and never has in his life so this is part of the mental instability he believes in the deal the deal is screw the other side as much as you can take as much money you as you can for your family put it away if you end up defaulting to your creditors all the more power to you life is a real estate deal in New York with shady personalities and hot money that's life so that's the one one side of this but what it means in foreign policy terms is not a retreat from American exceptionalism but a retreat from the idea that the rule of law cooperation principles institutions organizations the UN the UN Security Council or any of the other structures that the United States built up in the Roosevelt Ian version of US leadership should have any role to play so it's a complete disdain for structure it's a complete disdain for rules it's a complete disdain for process for negotiation itself other than the negotiation of the deal and this is a big problem what it means in terms of the vision of the world is that the notion that America should be the preeminent power everywhere is amplified in this view not diminished the notion in our security doctrine and in our defense doctrine that America should be able to fight two major theater Wars and prevail remains the case that America should have dominant military power in every region of the world prevails and the new twist is that China is together with Russia described as strategic competitors out to undermine values in the world that are central to America's well-being and security so now these are not counterpart countries or countries that we must trade and deal with but countries that are subversive of fundamental American objectives I think what China is subversive of is something quite different and that is American economic preeminence because China is a big country in a very a very hardworking and successful country still much poorer than Ireland and the United States but with a scale of reach and a technological capacity and a rate of improvement that means that China becomes economically of a weight that is comparable in international trade to the United States and technologically at a level that makes Northeast Asia China Korea Japan together the counterparts of Europe and the United States in technological capacity and this also translates into military power as well in other words China is an affront to US predominance the United States B remains a very powerful very rich country but not the sole exceptional country that can determine all of the rules so in that vein that's why we have a trade war with China in my view we have a trade war because the effrontery of China is to accelerate its technological development and the goal of the trade war is not to redress a trade imbalance or to get China to obey and abide by certain wh WTO rules but rather to stop China's technological ascent and that's why the United States is asking all of its Allied countries like this one in Britain and Australia and others don't by wowee and don't buy and don't sell technologically advanced countries were in a cold war with China and we need to use our old playbook to stop the trade in dual use technologies we need to make sure that China's growth slows considerably we need to close our markets to China's continued expansion and that is the trumpian idea and at the same time for other pesky powers regional powers like Iran it will work with our local allies like the Saudis and Israel and so forth and undermine those regimes destabilize then overthrow them if we can and possibly something worse than that so that's the current version of American exceptionalism now let me just end by saying it's all a little bit crazy in a world when we have other things to do like stopping human induced climate change stopping environmental disasters which are running away with us address underlying problems in the world economy that are also conducive to unwanted mass migration and other forms of destabilization in other words what we should have is a positive foreign policy agenda of solving global problems and in the UN context that has been well defined actually as the sustainable development goals and the Paris climate agreement that's the constructive positive agenda you will never hear Donald Trump use the phrase sustainable development goals and the only I even took a tactical decision don't use the phrase in Washington cuz he might hear about them and then tried to stop them as something nefarious and the only context you'll hear about the Paris climate agreement is why we should believe it so the US has no constructive foreign policy agenda other than the maintenance of its power dominance that is the foreign policy it's an impossible foreign policy to achieve it is one that could lead to disaster because if you define your foreign policy as dominance you are inviting war and that becomes the logical conclusion of this kind of approach to the world but that's literally I'm not even speaking figuratively that's literally how the US strategic doctrines are now defined as the call for dominance and by the way I'll just emphasize in this vein of exceptionalism it's not just Trump although he is our unstable dangerous carrier of this right now I have a colleague who's an esteemed US diplomat or he was a colleague of mine ambassador Robert Blackwell who was taught at the Kennedy School with me and Harvard and then became ambassador to India for example and he wrote an essay three years ago that well China now is a threat to the United States we must contain China because otherwise u.s. preeminence and ability to imbue the world with us values will be gravely threatened so this is a mainstream view among a certain part of the American establishment it it's not just an outlandish view it's a deeply embedded idea we need something now completely different and just a final word about what I think that completely different approach is the scale of our problems comes at different levels depending on which problems and which aspects of problems we're talking about but climate change is a global problem that can only be solved globally for example a lot of other environmental crises certainly the oceans certainly a lot of the deforestation which is secondary to global trade and agricultural products are also global scale problems that need a global approach other problems like how Ireland and Europe will move to renewable energy our regional scale they can't be solved by an individual country alone they require a regional scale approach because you have to bring solar from Greece into Germany or you have to do something that crosses national boundaries so the EU becomes the natural level of problem solving for a lot of infrastructure for example other problems are truly national scales still other problems are local scale so the doctrine of subsidiarity is the right vision of this but my view is that a huge preponderance of major problems has a regional scale a set of commitments so the European Union is vital for Europe's prosperity brexit and all of that is a horrendous throwback to weird ideas that make absolutely no sense the African Union is essential for Africa's development and in general if you take that view which I would argue is economically and biologically and from an ecosystem point of view necessary view then regional cooperation becomes essential but a DVD a tempura divide & Conquer methodology of the British Empire or the American Empire is very invidious to that so the idea that we side with the Saudis against the Iranians is a complete throwback to stupid ideas rather than to the problem solving of a desertified region that needs to make an energy transformation and an ecological transformation with urgency and therefore saudi-iranian cooperation is preeminent not creating the divisions so my view and I'll stop here is we have global problems to solve that will require strong regional cooperation in regions where there are cold war or other legacy divisions Northeast Asia with China Japan Korea southern Asia with Pakistan and India the Middle East with Turkey the Arab region and the Iranians overcoming those historical legacies is the core work of sustainable development diplomacy and to make sustainable development work to stop human-made climate change for example on the time horizon we have we need the EU to be working with NAFTA the AU Northeast Asia Sark which doesn't exist in this context but that's the southern Asian a Cooperation Organization which should work in other words regional cooperation to knit together quickly a transformation to low-carbon energy this can't be done 193 individual signatories and it certainly can't be done with the one nudnik a president of the United States saying we're not part of this and so we need to actually have a diplomatic structure with strong regional institutions and global cooperation through the United Nations well there are a lot of specific pieces to that and I'll just end with two one is Europe has to work in other words Europe has to resist now the deliberate probably Trump Putin Alliance to undermine a strong European Union we don't really know what that is maybe mr. Muller will tell us more about that but at least Europe is being besieged from both sides from Putin's mashaa nations on one side and from Trump's machination z-- on the other side we don't know whether that's one thing or two things I think it's arguably one thing maybe mr. bannon is really the courier for this I don't know but in any event Europe needs to resist this and my view is that for Europe to resist this it needs to strengthen the Union and it needs to raise the budget of the Union it needs to have more resources to be able to invest and spend more at a union level you know the EU budget it's only one percent of European Union GDP you cannot run a political union on such a small budget and that's the fundamental challenge that Europe is facing right now even though it's framed in many different ways so that I think is one piece the other piece is to strengthen the United Nations and this is a long story and were with one political party in the United States the Republican Party that probably wanted mind of the u.s. left the UN we have a just it's been vulgar UN bashing by our outgoing ambassador nikki Haley who wags her finger and says we spend money and you don't vote with the United States we're never we're taking names she says this is called diplomacy America style and it doesn't exactly win the hearts and minds nor does it win the votes and it doesn't work for the world so invigorating the United Nations is the second great task I believe because we cannot address critical global scale problems except with the strong and effective United Nations thank you very much [Music]

Channel: IIEA

Views: 59,837

Rating: 4.775115 out of 5

Keywords: America, United States of America, American Foreign Policy, American Exceptionalism, US, Global Cooperation, International Law, Book Launch, International Relations, Ireland, IIEA

Id: VBjJF1U-3kw

Length: 54min 27sec (3267 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 15 2018