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jeffrey sachs
This Illegal US-Israeli Attack on Iran Is Also an Assault on the United Nations
Let us be clear about what the United States and Israel are pursuing. The US objective is not the security of the American people. The objective is global hegemony. The attempt is to destroy the UN and the international rule of law—an attempt that will fail.
Mar 02, 2026
On February 16, 2026, one of us (Jeffrey Sachs) sent a letter to the UN Security Council warning that the United States was on the verge of tearing up the United Nations Charter. That warning has now come to pass. The United States and Israel have launched an unprovoked war against Iran in flagrant violation of Article 2(4) of the Charter, without authorization from the Security Council, and without any legitimate claim of self-defense under Article 51. They are trying to kill the UN Charter and the international rule of law, but they will fail.
At the Security Council on February 28, 2026, the US and its allies directed their condemnation not at the American and Israeli aggression, but at Iran. One US ally after the next condemned Iran for its retaliatory attacks yet absurdly failed to condemn the illegal and unprovoked US-Israeli attack on Iran. This performance by these countries was disgraceful and turned reality completely upside down.
The joint US-Israeli attacks were described by Trump as necessary because Iran “rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can't take it anymore.” This is of course a flat lie. As the letter of February 16 recounted, Iran agreed a decade ago to a nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that was adopted by the UN Security Council in Resolution 2231. It was Trump who ripped up the agreement in 2018. In June 2025, Israel bombed Iran in the midst of US-Iran negotiations. This time too, the Israel-US war plans were set weeks ago when Netanyahu met with Trump, and the negotiations underway between the US and Iran were a charade. This seems to be the new modus operandi of the US: start negotiations and then aim to murder the counterparts.
It is easy to understand why the US allies behave in the embarrassing and self-abasing way they did at the UN Security Council. In addition to the United States, eight of the other fourteen Council members host US military bases or grant the US military access to local bases: Bahrain, Colombia, Denmark, France, Greece, Latvia, Panama, and the United Kingdom. These countries are not fully sovereign. They are partially governed by the US. The US military bases house CIA operations, and the host countries constantly look over their shoulder to try to avoid US subversion in their own countries.
As Henry Kissinger famously said, “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be its friend is fatal.” We can add that to host US military bases and CIA operations is to turn your country into a vassal state.
As an absurd but telling example, the Danish ambassador parroted every US talking point, pointing her finger at Iran for its aggression as if Iran had not been attacked by the US and Israel. She completely forgot that such humiliating vassalage to the US will not play well for Denmark if the US occupies Greenland.
The truthful voices at the Security Council came from the countries not occupied by the United States. Russia explained correctly that the so-called West (that is, the countries occupied by the US) is engaged in victim-blaming when it points its finger at Iran. China reminded the Council that the crisis began with the US and Israeli attacks on Iran, not with Iran’s retaliation. Somalia’s ambassador, speaking on behalf of several African member states, truthfully portrayed the source of this recent escalation. The UN Representative of the League of Arab States spoke brilliantly about the root cause of Israel’s mad aggression: the denial of rights to Palestinian people, and Israel’s use of mass murder and regional war to prevent the emergence of a State of Palestine.
When Iran retaliates against US military bases in the Gulf, it is exercising its inherent right of self-defense under Article 51 of the Charter. We must remember that the US and Israel are openly and repeatedly assassinating Iran’s leaders, with the aim of overthrowing its government. When states murder a foreign head of state and attempt to destroy the government, the target of those threats is entitled under international law to defend itself.
The US-Israeli bombing murdered not only Iran’s Supreme Leader and several top government officials, but also more than 140 young girls in their school in Minab. These young children are the victims of a horrific war crime. The countries today that gave a pass to the United States and Israel for these killings—notably Denmark, France, Latvia, the United Kingdom, and of course the US —are also complicit in this war crime.
This UN Security Council emergency meeting will likely be remembered as the day the United Nations ceased to function from its headquarters on American soil. An international organization dedicated to the peaceful settlement of disputes cannot credibly operate from a country that wages illegal wars, threatens member states with annihilation, and treats UN Security Council resolutions as disposable instruments of convenience. For the UN to survive, and we need it to survive, it will need several homes around the world—in Brazil, China, India, South Africa, and others—honoring the true multipolarity of our world.
Let us be clear about what the United States and Israel are pursuing. The US objective is not the security of the American people. The objective is global hegemony. The attempt is to destroy the UN and the international rule of law—an attempt that will fail. Israel’s objective is to establish a Greater Israel, destroy the Palestinian people, and assert its hegemony over hundreds of millions of Arabs across the Middle East (from the Nile to the Euphrates, as US Ambassador Mike Huckabee recently asserted).
The United States’ delusional efforts at global hegemony are proceeding region by region. The US has recently claimed, in a wholly twisted supposed revival of the Monroe Doctrine, that it controls the Western Hemisphere and can dictate how Latin American countries conduct their economic and political affairs. The US kidnapped the sitting Venezuelan president to prove the point, and it now threatens to overthrow the Cuban government as well.
Today’s war against Iran aims to prove that the US similarly owns the Middle East. The war is part of a 30-year campaign, initiated by the Clean Break doctrine, to overthrow all governments that oppose US and Israeli hegemony in the region. Those joint Israel-US wars have included the genocide in Gaza, the occupation of the West Bank and the decades of wars and regime-change operations in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.
One part of the US global plan is to commandeer the world’s oil exports and to weaken China and Russia in the process. The US seizure of Venezuela was designed to ensure American control of that country’s oil exports, especially to control the flow of oil to China. US sanctions on Russia aim to prevent Russian oil from reaching India and China. Now the US aims to stop the flow of Iran’s oil to China. More broadly, the US aims to control the entire Gulf region plus Iran to maintain its imperial dominance.
The international order that Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt helped to build after the catastrophe of WWII was founded on a simple and profound idea – that law and respect, not force, should govern relations among states. That idea is now being destroyed by the very nation that did most to promote it in founding the UN. The irony is bitter beyond measure.
The truth is that the devastation of the war will not directly affect the so-called West: their children will not suffer traumas or death, and their countries will not be set ablaze. The victims of this attack are the people of the Middle East. They are the expendable ones who suffer from Western arrogance, abuse of power, and addiction to war.
We close with two observations. First, the United States will not achieve global hegemony or kill the UN. The world is too large, too diverse, and too determined to resist domination by any single power, much less one with 4 percent of the world’s population. The world outside of the US and the countries it occupies want the UN to live and thrive. The US attempt will surely fail, but it may cause immense suffering before it does.
Second, if Israel continues its addiction to war and occupation, it too will not survive. That addiction represents a mix of theocracy and post-traumatic stress. Part of Israel believes that it is the biblical kingdom of the 5th century BC. The other part lives in the traumatic memory of the Holocaust, and so is determined to kill any perceived adversary rather than learn to live together with it in peace. The Israeli Ambassador’s twisted defense of Israel’s brazen attack on Iran, as usual, cited the Bible and Auschwitz as the two justifications. These are Israel’s two perennial references, but not the real world of today.
A state that depends on permanent war, permanent occupation and slaughter of the Palestinians, and the indefinite subjugation of millions of people has no viable future, and the policies that the United States is now pursuing on Israel’s behalf will accelerate rather than prevent that outcome.
The two-state solution, which the Council has endorsed repeatedly, offers Israel a path to peace. Tragically Israel rejects that. The result, eventually, will be the end of Israel itself in its current form, especially as the US population is rapidly turning against Israel’s violent theocracy and towards the cause of Palestine. Perhaps there will be one democratic state for both Arabs and Jews living in peace, together, with an end of apartheid rule.
These are harsh truths, but emergencies demand honesty. The UN is being murdered by Israel and the United States. The Security Council must rouse itself from their military occupation by the US, and remember that they are the stewards of the UN Charter’s promise to maintain international peace and security.
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The Case Against American Intervention in Venezuela
There is no strategic, legal, or moral justification for surrounding Venezuela with the most lethal naval assets on Earth.
Dec 13, 2025
As the USS Gerald R. Ford—the largest aircraft carrier afloat—casts its shadow along the Venezuelan coast, the United States must confront an uncomfortable question: What national interest is being protected by threatening a country that poses no military, territorial, or existential danger to the American republic?
The answer, made clear by an array of respected American scholars, former officials, and ex-military insiders, has nothing to do with security. Instead, it arises from a familiar mixture of ideology, geopolitical control, and the old reflex of imperial overreach. This is not defense. This is theater—one part provocation, one part political opportunism, and no part necessity.
Among the clearest voices cutting through the rhetoric is professor John Mearsheimer, perhaps the most prominent American realist in international relations. He does not mince words: Venezuela is not a threat to the United States. Its military lacks both the capacity and the intention to project power beyond its borders. Suggesting otherwise is “laughable,” he notes, because the true irritant is ideological. Venezuela’s Bolivarian model—imperfect and embattled as it is—represents a deviation from Washington’s preferred political order, a deviation the US has repeatedly sought to crush in Latin America for decades. For Mearsheimer, even if one entertained the fantasy of using force to change the regime, the idea collapses immediately under logistical absurdity and moral bankruptcy. Invading a nation of 28 million people, and then attempting to occupy and “stabilize” it, would be catastrophic in cost, chaotic in outcome, and impossible to justify.
The national security pretext collapses further under the testimony of Sheriff David Hathaway, a former Drug Enforcement Administration supervisory agent with firsthand experience in Latin America. He dismisses the drug-trafficking narrative not just as false, but as deliberately false. Cocaine originates in Colombia and Peru, not Venezuela, and the US fentanyl crisis has nothing to do with Caracas. There is no vast Maduro-led drug conspiracy, Hathaway explains, only a political fiction designed to mimic past excuses for intervention. He is blunt in stating that Washington has repeatedly used narcotics accusations as camouflage for intrusion, sabotage, and coercion. This is not about drugs. It is about dominance.
To continue down the present path is to invite disaster: another needless conflict, another wave of human suffering, another blot on American history.
Even those once inside the system acknowledge this. Jordan Goodro, a former Green Beret involved in the ill-fated 2019 coup attempt against President Nicolas Maduro, offers a rare insider glimpse into the dysfunction and deception behind such operations. The effort to remove Venezuela’s government was pushed aggressively by the Trump administration and then sabotaged internally by divisions within the American intelligence establishment. Yet despite that spectacular failure, the narrative is being recycled again—complete with the same exaggerations and the same hollow slogans about protecting freedom. Goodro’s own admission is unambiguous: Venezuela poses no military threat to the United States. Repeating failed strategies does not make them more credible; it merely exposes the compulsions driving them.
If the military and narcotics arguments fail, the economic one becomes impossible to ignore. Professor Jeffrey Sachs, one of the world’s most respected economists, calls out the interventionist posture for what it is: a resource-driven gambit. The aim is not humanitarian aid, nor national security, nor democracy—it is control over one of the world’s largest oil reserves. Sachs warns that the moral veneer placed over this pursuit is dangerously thin. To blockade, bomb, or invade a sovereign country under such distortions is not simply misguided; it is, in his words, “the epitome of gangsterism.” The cost would be human suffering on a mass scale—suffering already amplified by years of sanctions—and the benefits would accrue not to the Venezuelan people, but to those seeking to reshape the hemisphere for profit.
While these foreign provocations unfold, an equally disturbing drama plays out at home. A number of Democratic lawmakers—many with backgrounds in the military or intelligence services—issued a sober warning to US service members: Illegal orders must not be obeyed. They reminded the armed forces that loyalty lies first with the Constitution. Instead of engaging that foundational principle, President Donald Trump responded by accusing them of sedition and musing that such dissent might warrant the death penalty. No president who respects the rule of law speaks this way. Such rhetoric is not an expression of strength; it is a hint of despotism.
The irony is that the Americans telling the truth about Venezuela are not radicals or fringe theorists. They are sober-minded public servants and scholars—people like Sachs, Mearsheimer, Hathaway, and Goodro—whose assessments reflect America at its best: skeptical of power, loyal to constitutional principles, and unwilling to manufacture enemies where none exist. Their voices stand in stark contrast to those who believe that power confers moral exemption. Trump’s saber-rattling does not embody American values—it betrays them.
There is no strategic, legal, or moral justification for surrounding Venezuela with the most lethal naval assets on Earth. The Gerald R. Ford is not defending American shores; it is intimidating a smaller nation whose only “crime” is political independence. The United States must withdraw its fleet. It must halt its reckless rhetoric. And President Trump—whether sitting in the Oval Office or aspiring to return to it—must apologize to the lawmakers defending constitutional duty and make unambiguously clear that illegal orders will not be tolerated.
To continue down the present path is to invite disaster: another needless conflict, another wave of human suffering, another blot on American history. The case against intervention is not complicated. It is not partisan. It is not abstract. It is moral—and it is overwhelming.
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As Israeli Genocide Intensifies, Majority of Americans Support Palestinian Statehood
"Israel has lost the support of the world, including the American people," said policy analyst Jeffrey Sachs.
Aug 20, 2025
As the US backs Israel's plans to occupy Gaza and expand illegal settlements in the West Bank, a solid majority of Americans say the world should recognize a Palestinian state.
According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll published on Wednesday, 58% of Americans believe that every country in the United Nations should recognize a Palestinian state, compared with just 33% who said they should not and 9% who said they were unsure.
In recent weeks, as Israel's blockade of humanitarian aid has inflicted mass starvation across the enclave, many American allies—including Canada, the UK, and France—have broken with the US by indicating their intent to recognize the State of Palestine. In total, 147 of the UN's 193 member states—over 75%—now recognize Palestine as a sovereign nation.
Last week, the foreign ministers of 26 states signed onto a statement that the crisis in Gaza has reached "unimaginable levels" and called on Israel to allow unrestricted humanitarian aid into the strip. As of Tuesday, the Gaza Health Ministry reported that 266 people, including 122 children, had been starved to death as a result of the blockade.
In Gaza City, where Israel has begun a devastating campaign of bombing, shelling, and shooting civilians and demolishing their homes, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) reported Friday that malnutrition has reached 21.5%, "meaning nearly one in five young children is now malnourished."
Amnesty International says the rise in malnutrition is the result of a "deliberate campaign of starvation" by Israel aimed at "systematically destroying the health, well-being, and social fabric of Palestinian life." Israeli human rights groups, including B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, have described their nation's military actions as "genocide."
While the administration of US President Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and many Democrats continue to back Israel's actions to the hilt, they are increasingly out of step with the views of the American public.
In a July 29 Gallup poll, just 32% said they approved of Israel's military actions in Gaza, while 60% disapproved. The decline in support among Democrats is especially striking: Where 36% said they supported Israel's actions in October 2023, that number has plummeted to just 8%.
But unlike elsewhere in the world, this has not resulted in a sea change among politicians. Just 13 House Democrats signed onto a letter earlier this month calling on the Trump administration to recognize Palestinian statehood.
Israel has meanwhile moved forward with actions explicitly aimed at making a Palestinian state impossible.
On Wednesday, Israel gave the final approval for a massive new illegal settlement in the West Bank known as E1, which slices the Palestinian territory in two and cuts off Palestinian communities between Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley.
Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich has championed the proposal, saying it "buries the idea of a Palestinian state."
Trump and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee have reportedly given approval to the plan, as part of a reversal in the decades-old US policy opposing Israel's settlements in the West Bank, which violate international law.
International business professor Avraham Shama argued in The Hill on Wednesday that Israel's "increasingly brutal" actions will only continue to galvanize the world toward the plight of the Palestinians.
"Soon, the Palestinian people will be recognized as a sovereign nation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank by most countries. They now have the political and moral momentum toward achieving this goal," Shama said. "The case for Palestinian independence has been getting clearer and more urgent with every Israeli bombing of mostly innocent Gazans, and with every death from starvation caused by Israel's withholding of food."
Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, told Common Dreams that through its continued support for Israel, the US government is increasingly isolating itself.
"Israel has lost the support of the world, including the American people," Sachs said. "Israel's genocide has made it a pariah state, propped up by the White House over the objections of the American people."
"The only way to peace, and to rescue Israel from its murderous ways," he said, "is to implement the two-state solution immediately, as almost all of the world demands. It's now up to Trump to end US complicity in the genocide and to recognize Palestine."
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From Genocide Joe to Omnicide Joe
Whether heralded or reviled, Biden’s supposed restraint during the Ukraine war has steadily faded, with more and more dangerous escalation in its place.
Nov 25, 2024
President Biden has never wavered from approving huge arms shipments to Israel during more than 13 months of mass murder and deliberate starvation of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Biden’s crucial role earned him the name “Genocide Joe.”
That nickname might seem shrill, but it’s valid. Although Biden will not be brought to justice for serving as a key accomplice to the horrific crimes against humanity that continue in Gaza, the label sticks—and candid historians will condemn him as a direct enabler of genocide.
Biden could also qualify for another nickname, which according to Google was never published before this article: “Omnicide Joe.”
In contrast to the Genocide Joe sobriquet, which events have already proven apt, Omnicide Joe is a bit anticipatory. That’s inevitable, because if the cascading effects of his foreign policy end up as key factors in nuclear annihilation, historians will not be around to assess his culpability for omnicide—defined as “the destruction of all life or all human life.”
That definition scarcely overstates what scientists tell us would result from an exchange of nuclear weapons. Researchers have discovered that “nuclear winter” would quickly set in across the globe, blotting out sunlight and wiping out agriculture, with a human survival rate of perhaps 1 or 2 percent.
While Russia’s invasion and horrible war in Ukraine should be condemned, Biden has compounded Putin’s crimes by giving much higher priority to Washington’s cold-war mania than to negotiation for peace—or to mitigation of escalating risks of nuclear war.
With everything—literally everything—at stake, you might think that averting thermonuclear war between the world’s two nuclear superpowers, Russia and the United States, would be high on a president’s to-do list. But that hardly has been the case with Joe Biden since he first pulled up a chair at the Oval Office desk.
In fact, Biden has done a lot during the first years of this decade to inflame the realistic fears of nuclear war. His immediate predecessor Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of two vital treaties -- Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces and Open Skies -- and Biden did nothing to reinstate them. Likewise, Trump killed the Iran nuclear deal negotiated during the Obama administration, and Biden let it stay dead.
Instead of fulfilling his 2020 campaign promise to adopt a U.S. policy of no-first-use of nuclear weapons, two years ago Biden signed off on the Nuclear Posture Review policy document that explicitly declares the opposite. Last year, under the euphemism of “modernization,” the U.S. government spent $51 billion -- more than every other nuclear-armed country combined -- updating and sustaining its nuclear arsenal, gaining profligate momentum in a process that’s set to continue for decades to come.
Before and after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022, Biden showed a distinct lack of interest in actual diplomacy to prevent the war or to end it. Three days before the invasion, writing in the Financial Times, Jeffrey Sachs pointed out: “Biden has said repeatedly that the U.S. is open to diplomacy with Russia, but on the issue that Moscow has most emphasized—NATO enlargement—there has been no American diplomacy at all. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has repeatedly demanded that the U.S. forswear NATO’s enlargement into Ukraine, while Biden has repeatedly asserted that membership of the alliance is Ukraine’s choice.”
While Russia’s invasion and horrible war in Ukraine should be condemned, Biden has compounded Putin’s crimes by giving much higher priority to Washington’s cold-war mania than to negotiation for peace—or to mitigation of escalating risks of nuclear war.
From the outset, Biden scarcely acknowledged that the survival of humanity was put at higher risk by the Ukraine war. In his first State of the Union speech, a week after the invasion, Biden devoted much of his oratory to the Ukraine conflict without saying a word about the heightened danger that it might trigger the use of nuclear weapons.
During the next three months, the White House posted more than 60 presidential statements, documents and communiques about the war in Ukraine. They all shared with his State of the Union address a stunning characteristic -- the complete absence of any mention of nuclear weapons or nuclear war dangers—even though many experts gauged those dangers as being the worst they’d been since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
With everything—literally everything—at stake, you might think that averting thermonuclear war between the world’s two nuclear superpowers, Russia and the United States, would be high on a president’s to-do list.
With occasional muted references to not wanting a U.S. military clash with nuclear-armed Russia, during the last 33 months the Biden administration has said it did not want to cross its own red lines—and then has repeatedly proceeded to do so.
A week ago superhawk John Bolton, a former national security advisor to President Trump, summarized the process on CNN while bemoaning that Biden’s reckless escalation hasn’t been even more reckless: “It’s been one long public debate after another, going back to ‘Shall we supply ATACMS [ballistic missiles] to the Ukrainians at all?’ First it’s no, then there’s a debate, then there’s yes. ‘Should we supply the Ukrainians Abrams tanks?’ First it’s no, then there’s a long debate, then it’s yes. ‘Should we supply the Ukrainians with F-16s?’ First it’s no, then there’s a long debate, and it’s yes. Now, ‘Can we allow the Ukrainians to use ATACMS inside Russia?’ After a long debate, now it’s yes.”
Whether heralded or reviled, Biden’s supposed restraint during the Ukraine war has steadily faded, with more and more dangerous escalation in its place.
Biden’s recent green light for Ukraine to launch longer-range missiles into Russia is another jump toward nuclear warfare. As a Quincy Institute analyst wrote, “the stakes, and escalatory risks, have steadily crept up.” In an ominous direction, “this needlessly escalatory step has put Russia and NATO one step closer to a direct confrontation—the window to avert catastrophic miscalculation is now that much narrower.”
Like Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken as well as the Democratic and Republican phalanx of Ukraine war cheerleaders on Capitol Hill, Bolton doesn’t mention that recent polling shows strong support among Ukrainian people for negotiations to put a stop to the war. “An average of 52 percent of Ukrainians would like to see their country negotiate an end to the war as soon as possible,” Gallup reported last week, compared to only 38 percent who say “their country should keep fighting until victory.”
Biden and other war boosters have continued to scorn, as capitulation and accommodation to aggression, what so much of the Ukrainian population now says it wants—a negotiated settlement. Instead, top administration officials and laptop-warrior pundits in the press corps are eager to tout their own mettle by insisting that Ukrainians and Russians must keep killing and dying.
Elites in Washington continue to posture as courageous defenders of freedom with military escalation in Ukraine, where hundreds of thousands have already died. Meanwhile, dangers of nuclear war increase.
Last week, Putin “lowered the threshold for a nuclear strike in response to a broader range of conventional attacks,” Reuters reported, “and Moscow said Ukraine had struck deep inside Russia with U.S.-made ATACMS missiles…. Russia had been warning the West for months that if Washington allowed Ukraine to fire U.S., British and French missiles deep into Russia, Moscow would consider those NATO members to be directly involved in the war in Ukraine.”
For President Biden, the verdict of Genocide Joe is already in. But if, despite pleas for sanity, he turns out to fully deserve the name Omnicide Joe, none of us will be around to read about it.
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How to End Global Financial Apartheid
The poorer countries are demanding an end to a world dominated by the rich—as well they should.
May 09, 2023
The key to economic development and ending poverty is investment. Nations achieve prosperity by investing in four priorities. Most important is investing in people, through quality education and health care. The next is infrastructure, such as electricity, safe water, digital networks, and public transport. The third is natural capital, protecting nature. The fourth is business investment. The key is finance: mobilizing the funds to invest at the scale and speed required.
In principle, the world should operate as an interconnected system. The rich countries, with high levels of education, healthcare, infrastructure, and business capital, should supply ample finance to the poor countries, which must urgently build up their human, infrastructure, natural, and business capital. Money should flow from rich to poor countries. As the emerging market countries became richer, profits and interest would flow back to rich countries as returns on their investments.
That’s a win-win proposition. Both rich and poor countries benefit. Poor countries become richer; rich countries earn higher returns than they would if they invested only in their own economies.
Strangely, international finance doesn’t work that way. Rich countries invest mainly in rich economies. Poorer countries get only a trickle of funds, not enough to lift out of poverty. The poorest half of the world (low-income and lower-middle-income countries) currently produces around $10 trillion a year, while the richest half of the world (high-income and upper-middle-income countries) produces around $90 trillion. Financing from the richer half to the poorer half should be perhaps $2-3 trillion year. In fact, it’s a small fraction of that.
The problem is that investing in poorer countries seems too risky. This is true if we look at the short run. Suppose that the government of a low-income country wants to borrow to fund public education. The economic returns to education are very high, but need 20-30 years to realize, as today’s children progress through 12-16 years of schooling and only then enter the labor market. Yet loans are often for only 5 years, and are denominated in US dollars rather than the national currency.
Suppose the country borrows $2 billion today, due in five years. That’s okay if in 5 years, the government can refinance the $2 billion with yet another five-year loan. With five refinance loans, each for five years, debt repayments are delayed for 30 years, by which time the economy will have grown sufficiently to repay the debt without another loan.
Yet, at some point along the way, the country will likely find it difficult to refinance the debt. Perhaps a pandemic, or Wall Street banking crisis, or election uncertainty will scare investors. When the country tries to refinance the $2 billion, it finds itself shut out from the financial market. Without enough dollars at hand, and no new loan, it defaults, and lands in the IMF emergency room.
Like most emergency rooms, what ensues is not pleasant to behold. The government slashes public spending, incurs social unrest, and faces prolonged negotiations with foreign creditors. In short, the country is plunged into a deep financial, economic, and social crisis.
Knowing this in advance, credit-rating agencies like Moody’s and S&P Global give the countries a low credit score, below “investment grade.” As a result, poorer countries are unable to borrow long term. Governments need to invest for the long term, but short-term loans push governments to short-term thinking and investing.
Poor countries also pay very high interest rates. While the US government pays less than 4 percent per year on 30-year borrowing, the government of a poor country often pays more than 10 percent on 5-year loans.
The IMF, for its part, advises the governments of poorer countries not to borrow very much. In effect, the IMF tells the government: better to forgo education (or electricity, or safe water, or paved roads) to avoid a future debt crisis. That’s tragic advice! It results in a poverty trap, rather than an escape from poverty.
The situation has become intolerable. The poorer half of the world is being told by the richer half: decarbonize your energy system; guarantee universal healthcare, education, and access to digital services; protect your rainforests; ensure safe water and sanitation; and more. And yet they are somehow to do all of this with a trickle of 5-year loans at 10 percent interest!
The problem isn’t with the global goals. These are within reach, but only if the investment flows are high enough. The problem is the lack of global solidarity. Poorer nations need 30-year loans at 4 percent, not 5-year loans at more than 10 percent, and they need much more financing.
Put more simply, the poorer countries are demanding an end to global financial apartheid.
There are two key ways to accomplish this. The first way is to expand roughly fivefold the financing by the World Bank and the regional development banks (such as the African Development Bank). Those banks can borrow at 30 years and around 4 percent, and on-lend to poorer countries on those favorable terms. Yet their operations are too small. For the banks to scale-up, the G20 countries (including the US, China, and EU) need to put a lot more capital into those multilateral banks.
The second way is to fix the credit-rating system, the IMF’s debt advice, and the financial management systems of the borrowing countries. The system needs to be reoriented towards long-term sustainable development. If poorer countries are enabled to borrow for 30 years, rather than 5 years, they won’t face financial crises in the meantime. With the right kind of long-term borrowing strategy, backed up by more accurate credit ratings and better IMF advice, the poorer countries will access much higher flows on much more favorable terms.
The major countries will have four meetings on global finance this year: in Paris in June, Delhi in September, the UN in September, and Dubai in November. If the big countries work together, they can solve this. That’s their real job, rather than fighting endless, destructive, and disastrous wars.
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Ukraine Is the Latest Neocon Disaster
The main message of the neocons is that the US must predominate in military power in every region of the world, and must confront rising regional powers that could someday challenge US global or regional dominance, most important Russia and China.
Jun 28, 2022
The war in Ukraine is the culmination of a 30-year project of the American neoconservative movement. The Biden Administration is packed with the same neocons who championed the US wars of choice in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and who did so much to provoke Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The neocon track record is one of unmitigated disaster, yet Biden has staffed his team with neocons. As a result, Biden is steering Ukraine, the US, and the European Union towards yet another geopolitical debacle. If Europe has any insight, it will separate itself from these US foreign policy debacles.
The neocon outlook is based on an overriding false premise: that the US military, financial, technological, and economic superiority enables it to dictate terms in all regions of the world.
The neocon movement emerged in the 1970s around a group of public intellectuals, several of whom were influenced by University of Chicago political scientist Leo Strauss and Yale University classicist Donald Kagan. Neocon leaders included Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan (son of Donald), Frederick Kagan (son of Donald), Victoria Nuland (wife of Robert), Elliott Cohen, Elliott Abrams, and Kimberley Allen Kagan (wife of Frederick).
The main message of the neocons is that the US must predominate in military power in every region of the world, and must confront rising regional powers that could someday challenge US global or regional dominance, most important Russia and China. For this purpose, US military force should be pre-positioned in hundreds of military bases around the world and the US should be prepared to lead wars of choice as necessary. The United Nations is to be used by the US only when useful for US purposes.
This approach was spelled out first by Paul Wolfowitz in his draft Defense Policy Guidance (DPG) written for the Department of Defense in 2002. The draft called for extending the US-led security network to the Central and Eastern Europe despite the explicit promise by German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher in 1990 that German unification would not be followed by NATO's eastward enlargement. Wolfowitz also made the case for American wars of choice, defending America's right to act independently, even alone, in response to crises of concern to the US. According to General Wesley Clark, Wolfowitz already made clear to Clark in May 1991 that the US would lead regime-change operations in Iraq, Syria, and other former Soviet allies.
The neocons championed NATO enlargement to Ukraine even before that became official US policy under George W. Bush, Jr. in 2008. They viewed Ukraine's NATO membership as key to US regional and global dominance. Robert Kagan spelled out the neocon case for NATO enlargement in April 2006:
[T]he Russians and Chinese see nothing natural in [the "color revolutions" of the former Soviet Union], only Western-backed coups designed to advance Western influence in strategically vital parts of the world. Are they so wrong? Might not the successful liberalization of Ukraine, urged and supported by the Western democracies, be but the prelude to the incorporation of that nation into NATO and the European Union--in short, the expansion of Western liberalhegemony?
Kagan acknowledged the dire implication of NATO enlargement. He quotes one expert as saying, "the Kremlin is getting ready for the 'battle for Ukraine' in all seriousness." The neocons sought this battle. After the fall of the Soviet Union, both the US and Russia should have sought a neutral Ukraine, as a prudent buffer and safety valve. Instead, the neocons wanted US "hegemony" while the Russians took up the battle partly in defense and partly out of their own imperial pretentions as well. Shades of the Crimean War (1853-6), when Britain and France sought to weaken Russia in the Black Sea following Russian pressures on the Ottoman empire.
Kagan penned the article as a private citizen while his wife Victoria Nuland was the US Ambassador to NATO under George W. Bush, Jr. Nuland has been the neocon operative par excellence. In addition to serving as Bush's Ambassador to NATO, Nuland was Barack Obama's Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs during 2013-17, where she participated in the overthrow of Ukraine's pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, and now serves as Biden's Undersecretary of State guiding US policy vis-a-vis the war in Ukraine.
In the "battle for Ukraine," the neocons were ready to provoke a military confrontation with Russia by expanding NATO over Russia's vehement objections because they fervently believe that Russia will be defeated by US financial sanctions and NATO weaponry.
The neocon outlook is based on an overriding false premise: that the US military, financial, technological, and economic superiority enables it to dictate terms in all regions of the world. It is a position of both remarkable hubris and remarkable disdain of evidence. Since the 1950s, the US has been stymied or defeated in nearly every regional conflict in which it has participated. Yet in the "battle for Ukraine," the neocons were ready to provoke a military confrontation with Russia by expanding NATO over Russia's vehement objections because they fervently believe that Russia will be defeated by US financial sanctions and NATO weaponry.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a neocon think-tank led by Kimberley Allen Kagan (and backed by a who's who of defense contractors such as General Dynamics and Raytheon), continues to promise a Ukrainian victory. Regarding Russia's advances, the ISW offered a typical comment: "[R]egardless of which side holds the city [of Sievierodonetsk], the Russian offensive at the operational and strategic levels will probably have culminated, giving Ukraine the chance to restart its operational-level counteroffensives to push Russian forces back."
The facts on the ground, however, suggest otherwise. The West's economic sanctions have had little adverse impact on Russia, while their "boomerang" effect on the rest of the world has been large. Moreover, the US capacity to resupply Ukraine with ammunition and weaponry is seriously hamstrung by America's limited production capacity and broken supply chains. Russia's industrial capacity of course dwarfs that of Ukraine's. Russia's GDP was roughly 10X that of Ukraine before war, and Ukraine has now lost much of its industrial capacity in the war.
The most likely outcome of the current fighting is that Russia will conquer a large swath of Ukraine, perhaps leaving Ukraine landlocked or nearly so. Frustration will rise in Europe and the US with the military losses and the stagflationary consequences of war and sanctions. The knock-on effects could be devastating, if a right-wing demagogue in the US rises to power (or in the case of Trump, returns to power) promising to restore America's faded military glory through dangerous escalation.
Instead of risking this disaster, the real solution is to end the neocon fantasies of the past 30 years and for Ukraine and Russia to return to the negotiating table, with NATO committing to end its commitment to the eastward enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia in return for a viable peace that respects and protects Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity.
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Experts Say Long War of Attrition in Ukraine Is a Dangerous Path
"By expanding support to Ukraine across the board and shelving any diplomatic effort to stop the fighting, the United States and its allies have greatly increased the danger of an even larger conflict."
May 11, 2022
While the United States lavishes Ukraine with tens of billions of dollars in military aid as part of a stated goal of not only defending an ally against Russian invasion but also of weakening Russia itself, peace-minded voices this week warned against the existential dangers of pursuing such policy.
"The longer the war, the worse the damage to Ukraine and the greater the risk of escalation."
In a Wednesday New York Times opinion essay, journalist Tom Stevenson, who reported from Ukraine during the first weeks of the war, wrote that "at first, the Western support for Ukraine was mainly designed to defend against the invasion. It is now set on a far grander ambition: to weaken Russia itself."
"Presented as a commonsense response to Russian aggression, the shift, in fact, amounts to a significant escalation," he continued. "By expanding support to Ukraine across the board and shelving any diplomatic effort to stop the fighting, the United States and its allies have greatly increased the danger of an even larger conflict. They are taking a risk far out of step with any realistic strategic gain."
The dangers of such policy are more than just military in nature. Writing for Project Syndicate, progressive economist Jeffrey D. Sachs said that "the adverse economic fallout from the war and sanctions regime will also reach dire proportions in dozens of developing countries that depend on food and energy imports."
"Diplomatic efforts ought to be the centerpiece of a new Ukraine strategy."
"Economic dislocations in these countries will lead to urgent calls worldwide to end the war and sanctions regime," he predicted, while noting that the International Monetary Fund "now forecasts a 35% contraction of Ukraine's economy in 2022, reflecting the brutal destruction of housing, factories, rail stock, energy storage, and transmission capacity, and other vital infrastructure."
Nevertheless, said Sachs, "the risk of nuclear war" remains "the most dangerous of all."
"If Russia's conventional forces were actually to be pushed toward defeat, as the U.S. is now seeking, Russia might well counter with tactical nuclear weapons," he warned. "A U.S. or Russian aircraft could be shot down by the other side as they scramble over the Black Sea, which in turn could lead to direct military conflict. Media reports that the U.S. has covert forces on the ground, and the U.S. intelligence community's disclosure that it helped Ukraine kill Russian generals and sink Russia's Black Sea flagship, underscore the danger."
Sachs continued:
The reality of the nuclear threat means that both sides should never forgo the possibility of negotiations. That is the central lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which took place 60 years ago this coming October. President John F. Kennedy saved the world then by negotiating an end to the crisis--agreeing that the U.S. would never again invade Cuba and that the U.S. would remove its missiles from Turkey in exchange for the withdrawal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba.
That was not giving in to Soviet nuclear blackmail. That was Kennedy wisely avoiding Armageddon.
Stevenson concurs, arguing that "diplomatic efforts ought to be the centerpiece of a new Ukraine strategy."
"Instead," he lamented, "the war's boundaries are being expanded and the war itself recast as a struggle between democracy and autocracy. This is not just declamatory extravagance. It is reckless. The risks hardly need to be stated."
"The longer the war, the worse the damage to Ukraine and the greater the risk of escalation," Stevenson cautioned, adding that "indefinite protraction of the war... is too dangerous with nuclear-armed participants."
The experts' warnings came as the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved $40 billion in additional aid, much of it military in nature, for Ukraine. The vote was 368-57. All the dissenting votes were Republicans.
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Social Democracy Lands Finland Atop World Happiness Ranking
"World leaders should take heed," said economist Jeffrey Sachs. "Politics should be directed as the great sages long ago insisted: to the well-being of the people, not the power of the rulers."
Mar 18, 2022
Finland is the happiest country in the world, followed by Denmark and Iceland, with other Scandinavian social democracies Sweden and Norway not far behind.
"Social support, generosity to one another, and honesty in government are crucial for well-being."
That's according to the latest World Happiness Report 2022, released Friday for the 10th year in a row by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN).
Rankings are based on opinion surveys that people from nearly 150 nations around the globe completed from 2019 to 2021. Analysts say that data from the Gallup World Poll and other sources reveals "key determinants of well-being," which countries can use "to craft policies aimed at achieving happier societies."
As SDSN president and report co-editor Jeffrey Sachs explained in a statement: "A decade ago, governments around the world expressed the desire to put happiness at the heart of the global development agenda, and they adopted a U.N. General Assembly resolution for that purpose. The World Happiness Report grew out of that worldwide determination to find the path to greater global well-being."
"Now, at a time of pandemic and war, we need such an effort more than ever," said Sachs, who also directs the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University's Earth Institute. "And the lesson of the World Happiness Report over the years is that social support, generosity to one another, and honesty in government are crucial for well-being."
According to the report, the global public health emergency, now in its third year, has "demonstrated the crucial importance of trust for human well-being. Deaths from Covid-19 during 2020 and 2021 have been markedly lower in those countries with higher trust in public institutions and where inequality is lower."
For the fifth consecutive year, Finland--where union density remains relatively high and the welfare state comparatively robust--was identified as the happiest country in the world. Denmark, where workers' rights and the provision of public goods are also high priorities, maintained its position in second place, while Iceland, which in recent years has experimented with a four-day work week, moved up from fourth place to third.
Coming in fourth was Switzerland, followed by the Netherlands and Luxembourg. Sweden, Norway, Israel, and New Zealand rounded out the top ten.
According to Oxfam, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has killed or contributed to the deaths of more than 19.6 million people worldwide, with most fatalities occurring in low- and lower-middle-income countries.
"This presents a stark reminder of the material and immaterial damage that war does to its many victims and the fundamental importance of peace and stability for human well-being."
Despite this grim global situation, report co-editor John Helliwell of the University of British Columbia said that two years' worth of evidence allowed SDSN to assess how "benevolence and trust... have contributed to well-being during the pandemic."
"We found during 2021 remarkable worldwide growth in all three acts of kindness monitored in the Gallup World Poll," said Helliwell. "Helping strangers, volunteering, and donations in 2021 were strongly up in every part of the world, reaching levels almost 25% above their pre-pandemic prevalence."
"This surge of benevolence, which was especially great for the helping of strangers, provides powerful evidence that people respond to help others in need, creating in the process more happiness for the beneficiaries, good examples for others to follow, and better lives for themselves," he added.
Of the 146 countries surveyed, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Lesotho, Botswana, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Lebanon, and Afghanistan ranked the lowest for happiness.
"At the very bottom of the ranking we find societies that suffer from conflict and extreme poverty," said Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, director of Oxford University's Well-Being Research Center and a co-editor of the report. "Notably we find that people in Afghanistan evaluate the quality of their own lives as merely 2.4 out of 10. This presents a stark reminder of the material and immaterial damage that war does to its many victims and the fundamental importance of peace and stability for human well-being."
Not long after the 16th-ranked United States withdrew from Afghanistan last August following a 20-year military assault that killed hundreds of thousands and cost trillions of dollars, U.S. President Joe Biden last month seized $7 billion worth of assets held by the war-torn and poverty-stricken nation's central bank--putting millions of Afghans on the verge of starvation.
"World leaders should take heed," said Sachs. "Politics should be directed as the great sages long ago insisted: to the well-being of the people, not the power of the rulers."
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One Group Who Knew All Along How Dangerous Trump Was: Mental Health Experts
From the perspective of his psychopathology, Trump's coup attempt last week was wholly predictable.
Jan 16, 2021
Of course, the media environment was set up for the likes of Trump. America is filled with racism, sexism, and hatred, and with mass media outlets like Rupert Murdoch's Fox News that have no responsibility to the truth. The Fairness Doctrine, which used to protect us, was repealed decades ago by the Federal Communications Commission under Ronald Reagan, and in place of fairness jumped right-wing extremism. Social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and Parler, also played a major role.
Yet Trump posed a special challenge. Into the brew of hatred and racism came a mentally disordered individual with a knack for self-promotion. Trump was not merely conniving, and that's the point. He suffers from severe impairments, including characteristics of sociopathy, pathological narcissism, and sadism. A mentally disordered leader in a country filled with inequalities and a mass media environment promoting extremism led to a terrifying situation.
"Trump was not merely conniving, and that's the point. He suffers from severe impairments, including characteristics of sociopathy, pathological narcissism, and sadism. A mentally disordered leader in a country filled with inequalities and a mass media environment promoting extremism led to a terrifying situation."
Mental health professionals started to warn Americans about Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, but they were shut down by none other than a professional organization of their own, the American Psychiatric Association. The APA was unique among mental health associations to adopt the so-called Goldwater Rule, which resulted from Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, when some psychiatrists questioned Goldwater's mental health fitness for office. After that, the APA decreed that it was unethical for mental health professionals to diagnose public figures without a personal examination and without consent.
With the arrival of the Trump administration, however, the APA expanded the Goldwater rule dramatically. Originally, the rule applied to diagnoses. Now, according to the APA, any offer of professional comment regarding the mental health of a public figure was deemed to be unethical. When some mental health professionals started to warn specifically about Trump, the APA pushed back hard, invoking the Goldwater Rule. There were reports that the APA may have acted to protect its federal funding. Whatever was the actual motivation, the APA revisions under the Trump administration troubled many mental health professionals.
Several psychiatrists convened at Yale School of Medicine in early 2017 and published the proceedings in a book, "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President," which raised the topic of Trump's mental unfitness in public discussion.
The mental health experts correctly predicted that the dangers of Trump's presidency were greater than the public and the politicians suspected, that the dangers would grow over time, and that they would possibly become uncontainable. Of course, these experts did not predict the coronavirus pandemic, but they recognized right away that the US death toll from COVID-19 -- now at nearly 390,000 -- would depend more on the president's mental state than on characteristics of the virus. Well before the 2020 election, they warned that Trump would refuse to concede, declare the results a fraud, and refuse to leave office. They warned that the post-election transition would be the most dangerous days of this presidency. Though they were correct in these predications, many political leaders continued to treat Trump as a normal, albeit highly manipulative and unprincipled politician, not as dangerously disordered.
Trump's coup attempt last week was predictable from the perspective of Trump's psychopathology. Convicting him in the upcoming Senate impeachment trial is also important to keep Trump from running for office again. Yet we must draw further lessons.
We must find formal ways to incorporate psychological insights into political discourse. This would involve, among other measures, correcting the Goldwater Rule, adjusting the 25th Amendment to ensure that it can be applied to dangerous psychological disorders, and taking steps to reduce the powers of the presidency so that the nation is not vulnerable to the whims of one mentally unbalanced individual.
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Beware Biblical Literalists Like Pompeo Seeking War With China
On America's unholy crusade against Beijing
Aug 05, 2020
Many white Christian evangelicals in the United States have long believed that America has a God-given mission to save the world. Under the influence of this crusading mentality, US foreign policy has often swerved from diplomacy to war. It is in danger of doing so again.
Last month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo launched yet another evangelical crusade, this time against China. His speech was extremist, simplistic, and dangerous - and may well put the US on a path to conflict with China.
According to Pompeo, Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Communist Party of China (CPC) harbor a "decades-long desire for global hegemony." This is ironic. Only one country - the US - has a defense strategy calling for it to be the "preeminent military power in the world," with "favorable regional balances of power in the Indo-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and the Western Hemisphere." China's defense white paper, by contrast, states that "China will never follow the beaten track of big powers in seeking hegemony," and that, "As economic globalization, the information society, and cultural diversification develop in an increasingly multi-polar world, peace, development, and win-win cooperation remain the irreversible trends of the times."
One is reminded of Jesus's own admonition: "Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye" (Matthew 7:5). US military spending totaled $732 billion in 2019, nearly three times the $261 billion China spent.
The US, moreover, has around 800 overseas military bases, while China has just one (a small naval base in Djibouti). The US has many military bases close to China, which has none anywhere near the US. The US has 5,800 nuclear warheads; China has roughly 320. The US has 11 aircraft carriers; China has one. The US has launched many overseas wars in the past 40 years; China has launched none (though it has been criticized for border skirmishes, most recently with India, that stop short of war).
The US has repeatedly rejected or withdrawn from United Nations treaties and UN organizations in recent years, including UNESCO, the Paris climate agreement, and, most recently, the World Health Organization, while China supports UN processes and agencies. US President Donald Trump recently threatened the staff of the International Criminal Court with sanctions. Pompeo rails against China's clampdown on its mainly Muslim Uighur population, but Trump's former national security adviser, John Bolton, claims that Trump privately gave China's actions a pass, or even encouraged them.
The world took relatively little notice of Pompeo's speech, which offered no evidence to back up his claims of China's hegemonic ambition. China's rejection of US hegemony does not mean that China itself seeks hegemony. Indeed, outside of the US, there is little belief that China aims for global dominance. China's explicitly stated national goals are to be a "moderately prosperous society" by 2021 (the centenary of the CPC), and a "fully developed country" by 2049 (the centennial of the People's Republic).
Moreover, at an estimated $10,098 in 2019, China's GDP per capita was less than one-sixth that of the US ($65,112) - hardly the basis for global supremacy. China still has a lot of catching up to do to achieve even its basic economic development goals.
Assuming that Trump loses in November's presidential election, Pompeo's speech will likely receive no further notice. The Democrats will surely criticize China, but without Pompeo's brazen exaggerations. Yet, if Trump wins, Pompeo's speech could be a harbinger of chaos. Pompeo's evangelism is real, and white evangelicals are the political base of today's Republican Party.
Pompeo's zealous excesses have deep roots in American history. As I recounted in my recent book A New Foreign Policy, English protestant settlers believed that they were founding a New Israel in the new promised land, with God's providential blessings. In 1845, John O'Sullivan coined the phrase "Manifest Destiny" to justify and celebrate America's violent annexation of North America. "All this will be our future history," he wrote in 1839, "to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man - the immutable truth and beneficence of God. For this blessed mission to the nations of the world, which are shut out from the life-giving light of truth, has America been chosen..."
On the basis of such exalted views of its own beneficence, the US engaged in mass enslavement until the Civil War and mass apartheid thereafter; slaughtered Native Americans throughout the nineteenth century and subjugated them thereafter; and, with the closure of the Western frontier, extended Manifest Destiny overseas. Later, with the onset of the Cold War, anti-communist fervor led the US to fight disastrous wars in Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) in the 1960s and 1970s, and brutal wars in Central America in the 1980s.
After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the evangelical ardor was directed against "radical Islam" or "Islamic fascism," with four US wars of choice - in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya - all of which remain debacles to this day. Suddenly, the supposed existential threat of radical Islam has been forgotten, and the new crusade targets the CPC.
Pompeo himself is a biblical literalist who believes that the end time, the apocalyptic battle between good and evil, is imminent. Pompeo described his beliefs in a 2015 speech while a Congressman from Kansas: America is a Judeo-Christian nation, the greatest in history, whose task is to fight God's battles until the Rapture, when Christ's born-again followers, like Pompeo, will be swept to heaven at the Last Judgment.
White evangelicals represent only around 17% of the US adult population, but comprise around 26% of voters. They vote overwhelmingly Republican (an estimated 81% in 2016), making them the party's single most important voting bloc. That gives them powerful influence on Republican policy, and in particular on foreign policy when Republicans control the White House and Senate (with its treaty-ratifying powers). Fully 99% of Republican congressmen are Christian, of whom around 70% are Protestant, including a significant though unknown proportion of evangelicals.
Of course, the Democrats also harbor some politicians who proclaim American exceptionalism and launch crusading wars (for example, President Barack Obama's interventions in Syria and Libya). On the whole, however, the Democratic Party is less wedded to claims of US hegemony than is the Republican Party's evangelical base.
Pompeo's inflammatory anti-China rhetoric could become even more apocalyptic in the coming weeks, if only to fire up the Republican base ahead of the election. If Trump is defeated, as seems likely, the risk of a US confrontation with China will recede. But if he remains in power, whether by a true electoral victory, vote fraud, or even a coup (anything is possible), Pompeo's crusade would probably proceed, and could well bring the world to the brink of a war that he expects and perhaps even seeks.
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