Dear CCI Friends,
Several of us at CCI want the following article by Jeffrey Sachs, an expert in U.S. political economics, to be read today by as many Americans as possible.
Sachs’ keen perspective on the current debacle in U.S./Russia relations comes from his decades of experience between the two countries starting with mistakes made in the 1990s.
We live in very uncertain times and fortunately voices like Sachs’ remind us how we got where we are, and what to do differently in the immediate future.
Please forward to your colleagues and friends.
Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives
Ukraine Is the Latest Neocon Disaster
If Europe has any insight, it will separate itself from these U.S. foreign policy debacles, writes Jeffrey D. Sachs.
July 1, 2022
By Jeffrey D. Sachs
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 U.S. 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 U.S. and the European Union towards yet another geopolitical debacle. If Europe has any insight, it will separate itself from these U.S. foreign policy debacles.
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 U.S. must predominate in military power in every region of the world and must confront rising regional powers that could someday challenge U.S. global or regional dominance, most important Russia and China. For this purpose, U.S. military force should be pre-positioned in hundreds of military bases around the world and the U.S. should be prepared to lead wars of choice as necessary. The United Nations is to be used by the U.S. only when useful for U.S. purposes.