Jeffrey Sachs

European leaders privately knew Iran was in IAEA-verified compliance with the JCPOA and knew the US broke the agreement, yet said nothing, not during the original withdrawal, not during the bombing, not during the "economic D-Day" sanctions push; he recounts being barred from testifying at an emergency UN Security Council session on the day of the strike, where European ambassadors backed it. The war on Iran is a reckless, unjustified regime-change operation that is already failing and will fail, with the Houthis holding the Red Sea chokepoints, giving the lie to claims that a tightening naval blockade is turning the tide. Now calls the war Trump launched against Iran on February 28 reckless and unprovoked, and says it has spread to the Red Sea, with Ansar Allah holding the Red Sea coast and Iran effectively controlling the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off roughly 30 percent of Middle East energy supply.

The war traces directly to the broken 1990 pledge that NATO would not move "one inch eastward" after German reunification, and to the 1997 Brzezinski "grand chessboard" plan naming Ukraine as a "geopolitical pivot" for weakening and dividing Russia; it was manufactured, not "unprovoked." Ukraine was led into disaster by NATO expansion and the 2014 US-backed overthrow of Yanukovych, and it is now losing decisively, collapsing demographically and economically, with no path to victory and Russia holding escalatory dominance. Now says the war could end immediately if Trump conceded that NATO will not enlarge and that Ukraine will be neutral.

Netanyahu is a war criminal, and Sachs calls him the most disastrous leader in the world in the last 30 years, pursuing a "greater Israel" project of ethnic cleansing and regional war. His reckless push for regime change in Iran, backed by Trump, is producing global economic damage for no strategic gain. Sachs expects the next Israeli government to be hardline whether or not Netanyahu leads it, and argues the US must end its backing for this policy and support Palestinian statehood instead. Now points to the report that the UAE and Egypt warned Netanyahu of an October 7-style attack days beforehand, calls him an indicted war criminal, and says only a US withdrawal of backing would end the Gaza war.

China is matching or surpassing the US in key areas, including open-source AI, citing Chinese open-weight models undercutting even paid US offerings and arguing the "Magnificent Seven" narrative propping up the US stock market ignores this. He warns against extending the same hegemonic, confrontational logic behind AUKUS and the Quad into East Asia, arguing the US does not have the standing to "run the show" and that countries should pursue diplomacy instead. Now contrasts a US cabinet with essentially no scientific or technical training against a Chinese cabinet roughly half of whose members hold science and technology doctorates, and reads that as leaving the US badly positioned in the AI race. Now frames China’s four decades of roughly 10 percent annual growth, an economy up about 40 times since the late 1970s, as a natural recovery of Asia’s historic population and economic share rather than a threat, and says China is now leading BRICS into what he calls a "post-hegemonic world."

US unipolar dominance is structurally unsustainable given the US is about 4% of world population and 14.5% of GDP, and Washington has shifted from postwar self-interested beneficence to open grifting and extraction. The war on terror was never really about terrorism; it was a permanent, bipartisan primacy project of preventive war and regime change that outlasts any single president because it is run by a permanent state and military-industrial-digital complex regardless of who holds office. Hubris and overreach have bled the US for 25 years with no course correction in sight. Now argues the 1750-2000 era of Western dominance is a closed historical anomaly, that the post-1991 "end of history" self-image was hubris, and that the world has moved on: "That time is passed. We are now truly in a multipolar world."

Calls Bessent unqualified and dismisses his claim that Iran, Venezuela and Russia will be forced back into dollar-denominated oil sales as "absurd," given alternative payment systems, such as the Chinese cross-border interbank system, already exist. Sees the US economy as bifurcated: a booming AI/tech sector masking a hollowed-out manufacturing and infrastructure base, with debt near $40T (over 100% of GDP) and a stock market near 240% of GDP he calls "a mega financial bubble" headed for a "massive financial revaluation" within a few years. Reads the "economic D-Day" threats as self-refuting, since needing to threaten countries into using the dollar already signals the dollar has lost its grip. He now also points to the Iran war as deliberately wrecking the world economy, with oil, diesel, fertilizer and food prices spiking as markets brace for much higher prices. Now says oil and diesel prices are soaring because of the Iran war and its Red Sea spillover, driving broader inflation, a Fed rate rise and higher mortgage rates and bond yields, all of it a self-inflicted cost of permanent war. Now says China is roughly 30 percent larger than the US in properly measured (PPP) output, and that BRICS, at 41 percent of world output, has overtaken the G7, arguing India will become the world's second-largest economy by mid-century with China first and the US third.