Jeffrey Sachs is a world-renowned economics professor and global leader in sustainable development, so, when he speaks, people who know him not only take note of what he has to say, but take him seriously.
It was quite disturbing, then, for Sachs to learn that key world leaders, including the White House, wouldn’t listen to him when he said it was ill-advised to open NATO to just anyone or to get too involved in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
"I've just never seen anything so reckless and I have no confidence in the U.S government, no confidence in what we're doing to head this off, because they're dead set on, uh, doing whatever it takes,” he says. “That's what they say all the time, ‘whatever it takes to win this for Ukraine, since I don't think Russia is going to lose this war short of nuclear war, to my mind we're on a recipe of continued escalation.”
This isn't pessimism, he says. It’s simply acknowledging the truth for what it is. We’re coming “closer and closer to the precipice,” to nuclear war, and if we don’t stop and listen, we may just end up destroying the world.
SOURCE: Finance Mail October 2022