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JEFFREY SACHS

Jeffrey Sachs is the director of the Earth Institute and was special advisor to former United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on the Millennium Development Goals, having held the same position under Kofi Annan. He is also director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, co-founder and chief strategist of Millennium Promise Alliance, and director of the Millennium Villages Project. He is the author of The End of Poverty, Common Wealth: Economics for a crowded planet, The Price of Civilization and To Move the World: JFK’s quest for peace.

What do you think is the solution to the Syrian crisis?

The US has pursued a regime-change strategy in the Middle East and other parts of the world during the entire Cold War and post-Cold War period and it’s reached an end because it’s now in a disastrous stage of sharply negative returns. Both the Syria and Libya debacles that followed the Afghanistan and Iraq disasters have left us in a situation of war, massive terrorist blowback, and a massive displacement of people.

We need an approach that is not based on US-led regime change. The United States should have never been in the business of toppling Assad, a decision that was made by President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton without public debate or Congressional backing. Whatever one thinks about Assad, it wasn’t an appropriate foreign policy of the United States to team up with Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other Gulf States to bring down this regime. The UN Security Council should always have a role in trying to frame international support for regional solutions. This would mean finding common ground with Russia and China, as well as with American allies like France and Britain. There needs to be a co-operative approach to encourage a different Middle East reality.

We also need active diplomatic solutions where Iran, Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt play a role to help broker a reasonable path forward for Syria and the region more generally. This means not letting this Shi’a-Sunni proxy war (i.e. the virulent anti-Iranian positions of the US and its allies) spin even further out of control.

The second aspect of global diplomacy is to remember that this region is experiencing an ecological and developmental crisis. There are many crucial steps to take in the Middle East concerning water, energy transformation, education and job creation. These are the truly important issues for the region. There is an urgent and positive sustainable-development agenda that is extremely significant in the Middle East and must be part of any realistic, core long-term approach. Moving from a US strategy of perpetual war to a regional strategy of peace, and moving from a strategy of US-led regime change to a strategy of regional sustainable development, is the only sound and sensible approach. If anyone thinks we are on a sound course right now, they don’t have their eyes open.

Do you think it would be problematic to arm the secular Syrian rebel groups?

I think arming any faction in the region now as a first-line approach makes no sense. We need to know what we are trying to do. What are the goals, what is realistic? There is no military solution to the Syrian and Middle East problems and there never was. And we have not properly discussed or agreed on a diplomatic solution globally.

Do you think these negotiations will have to involve all the external and internal sources involved in the Syrian conflict to prevent the arms flow into the country?

Syria is a classic proxy war: lots of different interests are being fought in Syria. This isn’t working to anyone’s advantage, least of all the Syrians, of course. The proxy war is a disastrous negative sum game being played out right now. The United States views Syria in Cold War terms vis-à-vis Russia; the Saudis view it as part of their war against Iran, as does Israel. There are enough political conflicts inside Syria to last for quite a while, unless directly tamped down in the interests of peace. The Turkish engagement in Syria has also been very complex because it’s been both based on the Turkish role in the Sunni world and Turkish-Arab relations, but it’s also deeply implicated in Turkish-Kurdish issues.

The Syrian war is a proxy war with arms pouring in from all sides because everybody is placing their bets and defending their positions. The way out of a proxy war is to have an approach that brings the interested parties together and out of the illusion that they can win on the battlefield. This proxy war has also led to terrorism and bloodshed that is out of the control of any of the countries involved to a large extent. I don’t think the ISIS phenomenon is in any of the countries’ agendas and interests in terms of creating it, but I do think there is a shared interest in stopping it because it has carried out a campaign of mass murder across a very large area. There are strong interests of Russia, the United States, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey that are reflected in war, but should be a basis for a peaceful resolution.

What needs to happen on both sides to develop better relations between the United States and Russia?

I think a Cold War and unipolar mentality is at the core of US foreign policy. So, at the end of the Cold War, rather than saying now we can build a world based on international law and multi-polarity, we know there were strong neoconservative views inside the United States that thought now we can build a world based on unipolar US leadership. That was a powerful and profoundly misguided vision that played on many deep strands of US exceptionalism. I think this vision has been a major fuel for US-fought wars since 1991. It’s also been one of the main reasons for stoking a new, albeit lesser, Cold War with Russia, which I think is also very dangerous. The idea that everything that has happened is because Putin is a tyrant is an absurdity; it’s for people who don’t follow the storyline. The storyline is that the US has also made a lot of provocations towards Russia in the post-Cold War era.

Do you think Russia and the United States can come to a strategic and morally acceptable agreement about how to deal with the situations in Syria and Ukraine, where both countries have pursued foreign policies distinctly different from one another?

Yes, I do. I think there are a lot of common interests, but there is no winner-take-all outcome possible. I don’t think the US idea that we were going to defeat Russia’s ally in the region was a proper starting point in Syria. I also don’t believe encouraging Ukraine to join NATO was a proper idea. I think the US just pushed too far. We should have been much more reticent, and we should have understood Russia’s economic, geopolitical and security viewpoints. If we had done so, we wouldn’t be in the current situation. But we have a hardline neoconservative vision of the world that is entrenched in US foreign policy, and it’s an incorrect and dangerous vision.

Is there another way for developing economies to prosper than the sweatshop-driven model, so workers can play a bigger role and have greater input in their societies?

I would say that the best overall framework we have is the sustainable-development framework that countries agreed on at the United Nations. One of the core pillars of the framework is that economic development should be combined with social inclusion and environmental sustainability. I think this kind of development approach is possible. It means each country aims for a mixed economy where private-sector production, trade and investment is combined with a very active state that is guaranteeing quality education, quality healthcare, access to infrastructure and protection of the national environment.

Countries must hold themselves accountable from the national to the local level, not just for GDP growth, but for economic fairness, social inclusion and environmental sustainability as well. This is closest to the social democratic approach of northern Europe and Costa Rica. This model is feasible because it respects the land tenure and community rights of campesinos, and it ensures that large companies can’t use bilateral investment treaties to grab land and destroy the environment. It has some very inclusive features to it, but it is still a market economy in a mixed system. It totally rejects the idea of privatizing core human services and human needs, like health and education, both of which I think need to be publicly guaranteed and publicly provided.

In this sustainable-development approach, basic needs should be met early on: access to healthcare, education, water, sanitation and basic infrastructure. I don’t know of any other way to ensure human needs and an advance in living standards. I think the development work will require a couple of generations ahead of us because a generation of young people needs to grow up with better education, better skills, better nutrition and better health situations. We need to have new entrepreneurs and companies to develop; and all of that takes time.

How important is it for governments not to let the hidden environmental costs of extraction and other polluting industries be left off the books or passed on to the public?

Environmental sustainability is not merely an option; it’s a matter of survival for vast numbers of people and places around the world. The current global production systems, especially those based on high-carbon energy, are creating devastating costs. Some of these costs are short-term in the form of massive pollution that could be put to an end in future years, but the longer-term and persistent climate costs will be even larger than that. It’s not possible to deny human-induced climate change without denying all of the science we know about how Earth’s systems function. We are beyond debate on this issue, and that’s why sustainable development needs to be a central organizing principle for our time, not an option to be debated. We are not there politically in the US because one party [the Republican Party] is so profoundly corrupted by big oil it won’t breathe the truth, and the other party is half-corrupted, so it won’t implement the truth with any vigor.

How vital is gender equality to creating a global sustainable economy?

Gender equality is vital for sustainable development; hence its inclusion as Sustainable Development Goal Five. The benefits of gender equality are first and foremost moral – with girls and women representing half the population, of course they should be entitled to the full social, economic, and political rights enjoyed by males. But the society-wide benefits of gender equality are also enormous and very practical: healthy, educated, empowered young women raise healthy, educated and skilled children who grow up to have better lives and higher wellbeing. By helping girls to achieve their full potential – through nutrition, healthcare and especially access to quality education – the intergenerational propagation of poverty can be defeated. ■