To be friend of US ‘fatal’: Expert
US keeping to Netanyahu’s Clean Break plan
A packed house in the European Parliament on February 19, 2025, heard American Professor Jeffrey Sachs outline the cold realities of US power, and Europe’s subordination to it. At an event titled “The Geopolitics of Peace,” hosted by former UN Assistant Secretary General and current BSW MEP Michael von der Schulenburg, Professor Sachs warned the audience, “To be an enemy of the United States is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal,” and urged Europe to have a “real” and independent foreign policy — “A foreign policy that is realistic, that understands Russia’s situation, that understands Europe’s situation, and that understands what America is and what it stands for.” What follows is a short version of his comments edited for clarity.
By Jeffrey D. Sachs
Renowned economist
US foreign policy
When the Soviet Union ended in 1991, the view that we [the US] run the show became even more exaggerated. Cheney, Wolfowitz, and many other names that you will have come to know literally believed this is now a US world, and we will do as we want. We will clean up the former Soviet Union. We will take out any remaining Soviet-era allies. Countries like Iraq, Syria, and so forth will go. And we’ve been experiencing this foreign policy for now essentially 33 years. Europe has paid a heavy price for this because Europe has not had any foreign policy during this period that I can figure out. No voice, no unity, no clarity, no European interests, only American loyalty.
There were moments where there were disagreements and, I think, very wonderful disagreements. The last time of significance was 2003 in the lead-up to the Iraq war when France and Germany said we don’t support the United States going around the UN Security Council for this war. That war was directly concocted by Netanyahu and his colleagues in the US Pentagon. I’m not saying that it was a link or mutuality. I’m saying it was a war carried out for Israel. It was a war that Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith coordinated with Netanyahu. And that was the last time that Europe had a voice. I spoke with European leaders then, and they were very clear, and it was quite wonderful to hear their opposition to an unacceptable war. Europe lost its voice entirely after that, but especially in 2008. What happened after 1991, and to bring us to 2008, is that the United States decided that unipolarity meant that NATO would enlarge somewhere from Brussels to Vladivostok, step by step.
NATO expansion
There would be no end to the eastward enlargement of NATO. This would be the US unipolar world. If you play the game of Risk as a child like I did, this is the US idea: to have the piece on every part of the board. Any place without a US military base is an enemy, basically. Neutrality is a dirty word in the US political lexicon.
Neutrality is perhaps the dirtiest word according to the US mindset. If you’re an enemy, we know you’re an enemy. If you are neutral, you are a subversive because you’re really against us, but just not telling us. You’re only pretending to be neutral. So, this was indeed the mindset, and the decision was taken formally in 1994 when President Clinton signed off on NATO enlargement to the east.
However, an understanding was reached that NATO will not move one inch eastward. And it was explicit, and it is in countless documents. Just look up the National Security Archive of George Washington University, and you can get dozens of documents. It’s a website called “What Gorbachev Heard About NATO.” Take a look, please, because everything you’re told by the US about this promise is a lie, but the archives are perfectly clear.
So, the decision was taken by Clinton in 1994 to expand NATO all the way to Ukraine. This is a long-term US project. This is not due to one administration or another. This is a US government project that started more than 30 years ago. In 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote The Grand Chessboard, describing the NATO enlargement eastward.
So, this project began in earnest in 1994, and we have had a continuity of government policy for 30 years until maybe yesterday, perhaps. A thirty-year project. Ukraine and Georgia were the keys to the project. Why? Because America learned everything it knows from the British.
We are the wannabe British Empire. And what the British Empire understood in 1853, with Lord Palmerston [together with Napoleon III], is that you surround Russia in the Black Sea, and you deny Russia access to the Eastern Mediterranean. What you’re watching is an American project to do the same in the 21st century. The US idea was that there would be Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia all in NATO; That would deprive Russia of any international status by blocking the Black Sea and essentially by neutralizing Russia as little more than a local power. Brzezinski is clear about this geography.
And so, NATO enlargement, as you know, started in 1999 with Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic. Russia was extremely unhappy about it, but these were countries still far from Russia’s border. Russia protested, but, of course, to no avail. Then George Bush Jr. came into office. When 9/11 occurred, President Putin pledged all support to the US. And then the US decided around September 20, 2001, that it would launch seven wars in five years!
You can listen to General Wesley Clark on video speak about that. He was NATO’s Supreme Commander in 1999. He went to the Pentagon around September 20, 2001. He was handed a piece of paper explaining the prospect of seven US wars of choice. These were, in fact, Netanyahu’s wars.
The US government plan was partly to clean up [remove] old Soviet allies and partly to take out supporters of Hamas and Hezbollah. Netanyahu’s idea was and is that there will be one state, thank you, it will be Israel, Israel will control all the territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, and if anyone objects, we will overthrow them. Well, not Israel, exactly, but more specifically our friend, the United States. That’s been US policy until this morning. We don’t know whether it will change. Now, the only wrinkle is that maybe the US will “own Gaza” [according to President Trump] instead of Israel owning Gaza.
Netanyahu’s idea has been around at least for 25 years. It goes back to a document called “Clean Break” that Netanyahu and his American political team put together in 1996 to end the idea of the two-state solution. You can also find that document online.
So, these are long-term US projects. It’s wrong to ask, “Is it Clinton? Is it Bush? Is it Obama?” That’s the boring way to look at American politics, as a day-to-day or year-to-year game. Yet that’s not what American politics is.
After 1999, the next round of NATO enlargement came in 2004 with seven more countries: the three Baltic states, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, and Slovakia. At this point, Russia was pretty upset. This second wave of NATO enlargement was a complete violation of the post-war order agreed at the time of German reunification. Essentially, it was a fundamental trick, or defection, of the US from a cooperative arrangement with Russia.
As everybody recalls, because we just had the Munich Security Conference last week, President Putin went to the MSC in 2007 to say, “Stop, enough is enough.” Of course, the US did not listen. In 2008, the United States jammed down Europe’s throat its long-standing project to enlarge NATO to Ukraine and to Georgia. This is a long-term project.
As you know, Viktor Yanukovych was elected as president of Ukraine in 2010 on the platform of Ukraine’s neutrality. Russia had no territorial interests or designs in Ukraine at all. I know. I was there off and on during these years. What Russia was negotiating during 2010 was a 25-year lease to 2042 for Sevastopol naval base. That’s it. There were no Russian demands for Crimea or for the Donbas. Nothing like that at all. The idea that Putin is reconstructing the Russian empire is childish propaganda. Excuse me. Yet the United States decided that Yanukovych must be overthrown because he favored neutrality and opposed NATO enlargement. It’s called a regime change operation.
Maidan Revolution, its aftermath
Now, in 2014, the US worked actively to overthrow Yanukovych. Everybody knows the phone call intercepted by my Columbia University colleague, Victoria Nuland, and the US ambassador, Peter Pyatt. You don’t get better evidence. The Russians intercepted her call, and they put it on the Internet. Listen to it.
At the end of 2021, Putin put on the table a last effort to reach a modus operandi with the US, in two security agreement drafts, one with Europe and one with the United States. He put the Russia-US draft agreement on the table on December 15, 2021.
Following that, I had an hour-long call with [National Security Advisor] Jake Sullivan in the White House, begging, “Jake, avoid the war. You can avoid the war. All the US has to do is say, ‘NATO will not enlarge to Ukraine.’” And he said to me, “Oh, NATO’s not going to enlarge to Ukraine. Don’t worry about it.”
I said, “Jake, say it publicly.” “No. No. No. We can’t say it publicly.” I said, “Jake, you’re going to have a war over something that isn’t even going to happen?” He said, “Don’t worry, Jeff. There will be no war.” These are not very bright people. I’m telling you, if I can give you my honest view, they’re not very bright people. They talk to themselves. They don’t talk to anybody else. They play game theory. In non-cooperative game theory, you don’t talk to the other side. You just make your strategy. This is the essence of non-cooperative game theory. It’s not negotiation theory. It’s not peacemaking theory. It is a unilateral, non-cooperative theory if you know formal game theory.
So, we know what happened next: the Biden administration refused to negotiate over NATO enlargement. The stupidest idea of NATO is the so-called open-door policy, based on Article Ten of the NATO Treaty (1949). NATO reserves the right to go where it wants, as long as the host government agrees, without any neighbor — such as Russia — having any say whatsoever.
Well, I tell the Mexicans and the Canadians, “Don’t try it.” You know, Trump may want to take over Canada. So, the Canadian government could say to China, “Why don’t you build a military base in Ontario?” I wouldn’t advise it. The US would not say, “Well, it’s an open door. That’s Canada’s and China’s business, not ours.” The US would invade Canada.
Ukraine war, nuclear arms control
What was Putin’s intention in the war? I can tell you what his intention was. It was to force Zelensky to negotiate neutrality. You should understand this basic point, not the propaganda claiming that Russia’s aim was to conquer Ukraine with a few tens of thousands of troops.
The idea was to keep NATO out of Ukraine. And what is NATO, really? It is the US military, with its missiles, its CIA deployments, and all the rest. Russia’s goal was to keep the US away from its border. Why is Russia so interested in this? Consider if China or Russia decided to have a military base on the Rio Grande or in the Canadian border, not only would the United States freak out; we’d have war within about ten minutes. When the Soviet Union tried this in Cuba in 1962, the world nearly ended in nuclear Armageddon.
All of this is gravely amplified because the United States unilaterally abandoned the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 and ended the relative stability nuclear arms control framework by doing so. This is extremely important to understand. The nuclear arms control framework is based, in large part, on trying to deter a first [decapitation] strike. The ABM Treaty was a critical component of that stability. The US unilaterally walked out of the ABM Treaty in 2002. This blew a Russian gasket. So, everything I’ve been describing about NATO enlargement has occurred in the context of the US destruction of the nuclear framework. Starting in 2010, the US began to put in Aegis anti-ballistic missile systems in Poland and then later in Romania. Russia doesn’t like that.
One of the issues on the table in December 2021 and January 2022 was whether the United States claimed the right to put missile systems in Ukraine. According to former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, Blinken told Lavrov in January 2022 that the United States reserves the right to put missile systems in Ukraine.
That’s, my dear friends, is your putative ally. And now the US wants to put intermediate missile systems in Germany. Remember that the United States walked out of the INF treaty in 2019. There is no nuclear arms framework right now. Essentially, none.
When Zelensky said a few days after [the start of the war] that Ukraine was ready for neutrality, a peace agreement was in reach. I know the details of this because I talked to key negotiators and mediators in detail and have learned much from the public pronouncements of others. Shortly after the start of negotiations in March 2022, a document was exchanged between the parties that President Putin had approved, and that Lavrov had presented. This was being managed by the Turkish mediators. I flew to Ankara in the spring of 2022 to hear first-hand and in detail what happened in the mediation. The bottom line is this: Ukraine walked away, unilaterally, from a near agreement.
End of Ukraine war
Why did Ukraine walk away from the negotiations? Because the United States told them to and because the UK added icing to the cake by having BoJo [Boris Johnson] go to Kyiv in early April to Ukraine to make the same point. Keir Starmer turns out to be even worse, even more of a warmonger. It’s unimaginable, but it is true. Boris Johnson explained, and you can find it on the web, that what’s at stake here is nothing less than Western hegemony! Not Ukraine but Western hegemony. Michael von der Schulenberg and I met at the Vatican with a group of experts in Spring 2022, and we wrote a document explaining that nothing good can come out of continued war. Our group argued strenuously, but to no avail, that Ukraine should negotiate immediately because delays will mean massive deaths, risk of nuclear escalation, and possibly an outright loss of the war.
I wouldn’t want to change one word from what we wrote then. Nothing was wrong in that document. Since the US talked Ukraine out of the negotiations, perhaps one million Ukrainians have died or been severely wounded. And American senators who are as nasty and cynical as imaginable say this is a wonderful expenditure of US money because no Americans are dying. It’s the pure proxy war. One of our senators nearby New York State, Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal, said this out loud. Mitt Romney said this out loud. It’s the best money America can spend. No Americans are dying. It’s unreal.
Now, just to bring us up to yesterday, the US-Ukraine Project has failed. The core idea of the project all along was that Russia would fold its hand. The core idea all along was Russia can’t resist, just as Zbigniew Brzezinski argued in 1997. The Americans thought the US surely has the upper hand. The US will win because we’re going to bluff them. The Russians are not really going to fight. The Russians are really going to mobilize. We’ll deploy the economic “nuclear option” of cutting Russia out of SWIFT. That will destroy the economy. Our sanctions will bring Russia to its knees. The HIMARS will do them in. The ATACMS, the F-16s, will do them in. Honestly, I’ve listened to this kind of talk for more than 50 years. Our national security leaders have spoken nonsense for decades.
I begged the Ukrainians: stay neutral. Don’t listen to the Americans. I repeated to them the famous adage of Henry Kissinger, that to be an enemy of the United States is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal. Let me repeat that for Europe: To be an enemy of the United States is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.
Trump administration
Let me end with a few words about President Donald Trump. Trump does not want Biden’s losing hand. This is why Trump and President Putin are likely to agree to end the war. Even if Europe continues with its warmongering, it won’t matter. The war is ending. So, please, get it out of your system. Please tell your colleagues, “It’s over.” It’s over because Trump doesn’t want to hold on to a loser. The one that will be saved by the negotiations taking place right now is Ukraine. The second is Europe.
Your stock market has been rising in recent days because of the “horrible news” of negotiations and potential peace. I know this prospect of a negotiated peace has been met with sheer horror in these chambers, but this is the best news that you could get. I’ve tried to reach out to some of the European leaders. I’ve said, “Don’t go to Kyiv, go to Moscow. Negotiate with your counterparts. You’re the European Union. You’re 450 million people and a $20 trillion economy. Act like it.”
The European Union should be the main trading partner of Russia. Europe and Russia have complementary economies. The fit for mutually beneficial trade is very strong. By the way, if anyone would like to discuss how the US blew up Nord Stream, I’d be happy to talk about that too. The Trump administration is imperialist at heart. Trump obviously believes that the great powers dominate the world. The US will be ruthless and cynical, and yes, also vis-à-vis Europe. Don’t go begging to Washington. That won’t help. It would probably spur the ruthlessness. Instead, have a true European foreign policy.
So, I’m not saying that we’re in the new age of peace, but we are in a very different kind of politics right now, a return to great power politics. Europe needs its own foreign policy, and not just a foreign policy of Russophobia. Europe needs a foreign policy that is realistic, understands Russia’s situation, understands Europe’s situation, understands what America is and what it stands for, and that tries to avoid Europe being invaded by the United States. It’s certainly not impossible that Trump’s America will land troops in Greenland. I’m not joking, and I don’t think Trump is joking. Europe needs a foreign policy, a real one. Europe needs something different from, “Yes, we’ll bargain with Mr. Trump and meet him halfway.” Do you know what that will be like? Give me a call afterward.
Please have a European foreign policy. You’re going to be living with Russia for a long time, so please negotiate with Russia. There are real security issues on the table both for Europe and Russia, but the bombast and the Russophobia are not serving your security at all. It’s not serving Ukraine’s security at all. This American adventure that you signed on to and for which you are now the lead cheerleader has contributed to around 1 million Ukrainian casualties.
On Middle East, China
On the Middle East, incidentally, the US completely handed over foreign policy to Netanyahu 30 years ago. The Israel lobby dominates American politics. Please, have no doubt about it. I could explain for hours how it works. It’s very dangerous. I’m hoping that Trump will not destroy his administration and far worse, the Palestinian people, because of Netanyahu, whom I regard as a war criminal who has been properly indicted by the ICC.
The only way for Europe to have peace on its borders with the Middle East is the two-state solution. There is only one obstacle to it, and that is the veto of the United States in the UN Security Council, at the behest of the Israel Lobby. So, if you want the EU to have some influence, tell the United States to drop the veto. In this, the European Union would be together with around 160 other countries in the world. The only ones that oppose a Palestinian state are basically the United States, Israel, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Argentina, and Paraguay.
The Middle East is a place where the European Union could have a big geopolitical influence. Yet, Europe has gone silent about the JCPOA and Iran, and around half of Europe has gone silent over Israel’s war crimes and blockage of the two-state solution.
Netanyahu’s greatest dream in life is the war between the United States and Iran. And he’s not given up. It’s not impossible that a US-Iran War will also come. Yet Europe could stop it — if Europe has its own foreign policy. I’m hoping that Trump will end Netanyahu’s grip on American politics. Even if not, the EU can work with the rest of the world to bring peace to the Middle East.
Finally, let me just say with respect to China, China is not an enemy. China is merely a great success story. That’s why it is viewed by the United States as an enemy because China has a bigger economy than the United States (measured in international prices). The US resists reality. Europe should not do so. Let me repeat, China is no enemy and no threat. It is a natural partner with Europe in trade and in saving the global environment.
The full article appeared on ScheerPost.