JEFFREY SACHS:
"The United States has sent armaments to Taiwan, which is part of China by US agreement and diplomacy.
The United States has stationed troops on Kinmen Island, part of Taiwan, which is part of China as per US diplomacy.
Blinken went to China a few days ago, and every single day since then, the US has put on sanctions, threats, warnings, and calls with our so-called 'military allies' in East Asia.
We are on a warpath.
What are we possibly thinking?
They do not know how to keep diplomacy from one day to the next.
There's an editorial in one of the leading Chinese government outlets saying, 'We don't understand why your Secretary of State came'—I think it was probably about 10 days ago, if I have the count right—and then this editorial outlined that 'every single day since then, it has been nothing but unrelenting hostility from the United States towards China.'
Of course, everyone's cheering in Congress over this as well. This is again bipartisan.
What are we thinking?
Do we want to destroy the world?
Do we not honestly want to have discussions?
Do no other countries have interests? Only the United States gets to decide who does what to whom and when, and only the United States can put on sanctions?
Only the United States can decide who the ICC does or doesn't indict?
This is a kind of madness right now that is leading us closer to doom than we can recall in our modern times.
[What kind of sense did it make for Janet Yellen, the Secretary of the Treasury, to chastise China for over-manufacturing? This is crazy.]
I communicated with her because she's a friend and my teacher, and I said publicly that this whole concept—if the United States wanted to say:
'You know, we're 20 years behind you, China, while we were having wars in Iraq and Libya and Syria and Ukraine, and trying to overthrow governments, doing all the things we're doing and running up a massive debt, you, China, were building the biggest industrial capacity in the world. You were lowering the cost of electric vehicles, building a global battery supply chain, developing 5G, and implementing it at low cost faster than anyone else. You developed the lowest-cost photovoltaics, wind turbines, and the world's lowest-cost fourth-generation modular nuclear power plants—that's peaceful nuclear energy, just to be clear—with everybody. In other words, China, you've really done something amazing. You've built the whole infrastructure for a clean, green, efficient manufacturing system that produces products the world wants. You produce the Teslas and the iPhones and so forth while we were in useless wars and driving up our debt to more than 100% of our national income.'
Now, if Secretary Yellen had said, 'You know, we really messed up and we need a little bit of a breather to build back our industry,' okay, there would have been some honesty to that.
But to go and attack China with unrelenting language of badmouthing and terrible antagonism, to say all those things you've been doing—that's terrible.
'You have to make amends; we demand it.' This approach actually doesn't work.
It's extremely dangerous. It has left the United States in isolation diplomatically and economically, in the world.
Other countries are building financial defenses.
Part of the problem is these 12 senators are still part of this delusional world that the US can run everything.
That is where the arrogance comes in—it's a kind of mix of neurosis, anxiety, and overbearing arrogance, but it's completely destructive for American daily life.
By the way, where does that inflation come from?
From disrupting every supply chain in the world."
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