When I ponder on liberalism at its best (not that I spend a heap of time doing any such thing) I can think of no finer example than Jeffrey Sachs. Like his friend John Mearsheimer – featured in my last post but one, also in the context of Venezuela – Sachs has pushed back hard on the demonstrably mendacious but, with dismaying credulity, widely accepted narrative that Russia launched an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
See my March 2025 post, A Ukraine timeline, for a more complete evidence-based refutation of the “Putin’s unprovoked war” lie
But Sachs applies the same logic to the same known facts to draw conclusions very different to Mearsheimer’s about a China no less demonised by the West’s systemically corrupt corporate media, and politicians whose first loyalty is not to their citizens but to Washington.
On this I’m with Professor Sachs.
I have my reservations, mind. One is that both men overstate Israel’s malign influence over the US, while understating the alignment of interests – see US Neocons & Israel’s far Right – not between the two countries but between an expansionist settler state and America’s elite. Their blindness to class, in practice if not in principle, leaves both ill placed to fully grasp that since a nation state is not an indivisible entity, the fact that US foreign policy has long been inimical to the interests of ordinary Americans is not proof that Tel Aviv/Jerusalem dictates to Washington
Another reservation is also rooted in the limits to a perspective which fails to factor in class (a term I use to denote not just inequality but radically opposed interests). In the video below, its focus a Venezuelan people threatened on the most risible to date of the pretexts given by every US administration from Bill Clinton on, Sachs sets out his “Sphere of Security” thesis, which he contrasts with Mearsheimer’s “Offensive Realism”, and more specifically its corollary thesis of “Spheres of Influence”.
With spheres of security substituted for spheres of influence, Professor Sachs insists, both China and Russia can be seen as on the receiving end of the dangerous thrashing out of an empire in savage decline: a conclusion with which I, though not Professor Mearsheimer, would concur.
It’s the premise I don’t buy. Yes, Sachs gets closer to the truth than does Mearsheimer on China, while both are appalled by the strongarming of Caracas; not just for its own sake – this being as good a place as any to stress that Mearsheimer is not immoral; rather, that Offensive Realism is Hobbesian amoral – but for having brought us even closer to a superpower confrontation they rightly see as driven by decades of Washington idiocy (their term) or criminality (mine).
FWIW I don’t see the two as mutually exclusive. Hubris – in this case born of power unchecked, if not for eternity then for a New American Century – begets its own kind of stupidity.
The White House aide [thought to be Karl Rove] said guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community’“, which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality [but] that’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do”.
US journalist Ron Suskind, 2004
But in his sales pitch on “spheres of security” offering more hope than Mearsheimer’s “spheres of influence”, Jeffrey fails – surprisingly (or not!) given that his core discipline, unlike John’s, is economics – to see that unipolarity is existential for a US ruling class with no way back; no way of regaining either industrial or agricultural pre-eminence, however loudly Trump and Bessent trumpet their intent – and here too it takes a better brain than mine to disentangle self-serving zeal from flat out mendacity – to “bring American jobs home” …
… without even the most rudimentary of plans for doing so; just the spasmodic dance of tariffs imposed, walked back, reimposed. Far less with frank admission of why it is that American jobs went south in the first place, and the powerful interests thus served.
My caveats out of the way, let me now commend this appraisal of just what is afoot as regards Trump’s vulgar – Professor Sachs uses the word repeatedly, but without embracing the liberal delusion that this is all on the tangerine narcissist – threats to a country sitting on the planet’s largest known oil reserves.
(Which by the way exceed Saudi Arabia’s, 1 and that’s before we even get to Venezuela’s claims against littoral neighbour, Guyana. Here’s a tough question – whose claim do you suppose gets Washington endorsement? – followed by another – why would an otherwise populist Guyanese president rule out oil nationalisation? )
And as he notes, again rightly, while oil is a big part of this, it’s not the only factor. Think Russia, think Monroe Doctrine, think the US elite’s visceral aversion to the slightest whiff of socialism and, while we’re on the subject, think that child of Cuban expats now elevated to US Secretary of State, one Marco Rubio.
* * *
- Venezuela’s oil nationalisation precedes Chavez by over 20 years, but its crude – heavy, hard to extract and process – kept the country on the wrong end of terms imposed by US refineries. See this Al Jazeera explainer. Needless to say, China’s ability to help in this regard is not welcomed in a Washington whose oil lobby leaves AIPAC in the dust.