John Mearsheimer – meet Jeffrey Sachs!

I ended the previous post, on the Children who rule the West, with this promise:

Coming soon: the zero sum addiction of the West’s rulers, versus China’s we win-you win.

Before I move on to fulfilling it, I want to show a video featuring two important American public intellectuals scathing of their country’s forever wars. Both have featured multiple times on this site and, while I have my disagreements, both have my respect as honest and erudite pundits.

Jeffrey Sachs, economics professor at Columbia University and one of many prominent Jewish academics – others being Chomsky, Finkelstein and Pappe – to damn Israel, was also advisor to Boris Yeltsin, the first and conveniently forgotten president of the Russian Federation after the collapse of the Soviet Union. While this might be held against him – see Chapters 10-11 of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine for the why of that – he has been refreshingly candid about his political naivete when disaster capitalism came howling, a wolf in wolf’s clothing, at Russia’s door.

Professor Sachs has emerged as an eloquent and highly informed critic of US policy as regards two of the planet’s three most likely flashpoints for WW3; namely Ukraine and the Middle East.

Chicago University’s Professor Mearsheimer – nothing to do, I hasten to add, with the morally and theoretically bankrupt Chicago School of economics so effectively exposed by Ms Klein – is the man most associated with the Machiavellian school of ‘Political Realism’, aka Offensive Realism. This courteous man featured extensively in my March post, John Mearsheimer meets Piers Morgan, an event I’ll return to in a moment.

While Jeffrey Sachs is not a Political/Offensive Realist in the narrow sense used here, his vast non academic experience and, more importantly, reflection on the same have brought him close, as intellectual ally and – a truth on show in the debate below – personal friend to John Mearsheimer. Like John, he has been “an eloquent and highly informed critic of US policy as regards two of the planet’s three most likely flashpoints for WW3; namely Ukraine and the Middle East”.

But that same Realism-with-a-capital-R divides them on the third likely flashpoint. On which I’m with Jeffrey Sachs. As I put it in the previously cited March post, John Mearsheimer:

… at times voiced opinions I do not share – most importantly that the situation in China vis a vis  Taiwan ¹  in no way mirrors that in Russia vis a vis  Ukraine – [but] did so in a manner consistent with the political philosophy he has both advanced and in his way popularised.

Even if that philosophy – with its failure to consider class – does blind him to what Ukraine and Taiwan share; their usefulness as sacrificial pawns to a wounded, insecure and on both counts triply dangerous US empire …

My bias may be colouring my view of Jeffrey as clear winner on this point. He cogently shows that, in our thermonuclear age, the zero sum philosophy of Washington – even if mirrored in Beijing (and I’m with Jeffrey on there being scant evidence of that) – makes John’s Realism deeply unrealistic.

Judge for yourself. Either way this, as the host notes in conclusion, is the most compelling of debates. Even the asinine assumptions informing some of the questions put to the learned pair do useful service in allowing brainwashed absurdities frighteningly prevalent to see light of day and therein be politely demolished.

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1. I here use Taiwan as a convenient shorthand. As John Mearsheimer, and others like the very different Brian Berletic, have often noted, the entire region – less Taiwan than East and South China Sea – constitutes a WW3 flashpoint. Indeed, one of my earliest posts as steel city scribe concedes the point. See Perilous days.