Jeffrey Sachs argues that the third world war has begun as a result of American “madness” and the machinations of “crazy, rogue” Israel, on Glenn Diesen’s “Greater Eurasia” podcast.

JEFFREY SACHS: When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, the insanity of a country with 4% of the world’s population deciding it would run the world went into overdrive. It went into overdrive, and it’s been in overdrive since 1991. The United States has viewed itself-and by United States, I mean the CIA, the military-industrial-digital complex, the ones that make the war decisions that have brought us nonstop into war, that allocate the trillions of dollars and so on-they believe they run the world. When China rose in power over several decades, and that was noticed by the United States sometime around 2010, this freaked out these would-be hegemonists. Now there’s an enemy. Russia was dismissed as a has-been, useless anyway, so not really something to worry about. So we don’t have to listen to anything Russia says. But the attention turned to China, and we have to defeat China the same way. That’s been the U.S. foreign policy for the last 15 years. Just quickly, a couple flies in the ointment. First, all of this is delusional. That’s the starting point. The idea that the United States runs the world, rules the world, dominates the world, and can have its way is madness. It’s been madness for decades. But it’s been a repeated madness that leads to millions of deaths all over the world, whether in Vietnam or across the wars of the Middle East. Second, the misjudgment about Russia is the reason for the Ukraine war. The United States never expected Russia to resist NATO enlargement, never expected it to be able to stand up to the United States for even one moment. This is both a denigration of Russia and a profoundly delusional exaggeration of American power. Both go hand in hand. But the war in Ukraine is fundamentally the result of an American delusion spelled out helpfully by Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1997, because he spelled out in The Grand Chessboard exactly what the delusion is. He concluded that Russia could not resist the eastward enlargement of NATO and Europe. Then the other fly in the ointment is Israel. Israel is a crazy rogue state with half its political leadership in the mindset of the fifth century B.C., reading some text from King Josiah. Israel has just plunged the world into probably the Third World War, but certainly into a phenomenal economic crisis. The timing, the instigation, is Israel’s. The fact that the United States goes along with it is because it’s completely coherent with the U.S. hegemonic project. But this is Israel. Complete madness. And because of the hold of the Israel lobby in the United States, that madness isn’t even examined. Excuse me. We have an ambassador in Israel-the United States ambassador named Mike Huckabee-who is, let’s just say, a minor Protestant evangelical theologian, if I could put it that way. That’s a very polite way to put it. He said two weeks ago: yes, Israel owns the land from the Nile to the Euphrates. When Tucker Carlson asked him, Excuse me-they own the land? Could they take it? he said, Sure. Yeah, sure they could take it. This is again what’s sometimes called by psychologists or psychiatrists folie a deux-craziness of Israel matched by craziness of the United States. Israel wants to be the hegemon from the Nile to the Euphrates-or beyond. The United States wants to be the hegemon of the world. That’s a long-standing project. And here we are in the early shooting of World War III-unless somehow somebody stands up and stops the madness. The ones most likely to do it in the end are China and Russia, because they are mature, aware, and not really so happy about this U.S. hegemonic project. If India would recognize its own interests clearly, it would also play a very major role in this. But India has signed on to the U.S. project to some extent, and it raises a big question: what are the Indian leaders thinking? They had the British Empire for a couple of centuries. It should have been enough. They should have good instincts to know: don’t follow the U.S. empire in this kind of madness. … Incidentally, I’ve been thinking about this especially from the Anglo-American mindset, because Britain and the United States have done the most to wreck things for a couple of centuries in this way. The mindset goes back to the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, who said that in the state of nature, life is solitary, poor, “nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes said that to get out of the war of all against all you need a Leviathan, he called it-you need a superior power. That was his theory of national government: that people would give up their sovereignty, their freedom to kill each other, to a sovereign who would then keep order and everyone would be better off because they wouldn’t be killing each other. And then you turn that logic to the global order. The way that logic gets turned into global order by the CIA or MI6 or these intelligence agencies in the West is to say: we don’t have a supreme ruling Leviathan, so it is a war of all against all, and we have to be brutally realistic. It’s us or them. Sometimes you have to strike first, like Israel and the United States striking Iran. That’s the mindset. But another part of the mindset is the United States saying: we’ll be the Leviathan, thank you. Britain was the Leviathan in the nineteenth century. The only way to be safe is if we are the Leviathan. In other words, there can only be one that runs the world, and we’ll be the one that runs the world. Now, there is another way in life, which is that you get along with each other. You make some common rules. You share the sandbox. We teach our five-year-olds to do this. It’s not impossible that you don’t need one ruler of the world to have peace. This is what the American hegemonists-or supremacists-cannot understand. But I think partly they’re trapped at an emotional level, maybe before age five. I don’t know. They don’t really see that there’s another way: that in a multipolar world, we actually could get along. We could make some rules of the road. We could have some cooperation.