The following is a transcribed extract from an interview with Professor Jeffrey Sachs (which you can hear in full at the link below):

“I think people really need to understand something … maybe the single most important fact of our reality today … and that is that the United States has destroyed the nuclear arms control framework. It has done so willfully. It has done so repeatedly. We had a framework for nuclear arms control, until in 2002 the United States unilaterally abandoned the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. This already created a profound destabilization. It is one of the reasons why the war in Ukraine broke out in 2014, because Russia viewed the United States as an increasing and potentially mortal threat because the US was no longer willing to abide by the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. 

“And it [the US] began to place anti-ballistic missile systems … the Aegis missile systems in Poland and Romania. And in December 2021 … January 2022 to be precise … it refused to rule out placing missile systems in Ukraine. Now in 2018 Donald Trump announced that the United States would leave the Intermediate Nuclear Force Treaty, a second bulwark of basic nuclear arms control. And in 2019 the Trump Administration followed through, so we broke an agreement to not have intermediate range nuclear missiles. Now the United States has said it will place intermediate nuclear missile systems … presumably according to what our experts are saying … in Germany. 

“What are these people thinking? What is Jake Sullivan thinking? What is Blinken thinking? Is Biden thinking at all? What is Lloyd Austin thinking? What are these people thinking? Are they really aiming to get us all killed? Is NATO trying to provoke Putin? It’s not NATO. This is the United States. 

“Germany rolls over as if nothing happened. I spoke to a leading German politician a couple of days ago, one of the most important. He said Schultz is a catastrophe. That was exactly the word that he used, “catastrophe.” I said “Why?” He said, “Well they have something on him possibly.” He didn’t know, but we suborn these politicians. We control them. We occupy their countries with military bases. We have the CIA and the BND involved. We don’t know what’s happening exactly. But what are they doing with nuclear escalation now with the collapse of a nuclear arms control framework that the United States has provoked? 

“There is no accounting for this. It is absolutely reckless beyond any measure. It’s the single most important development in the world in the last 20 years … that we abandoned … and I mean the US led the abandonment of the nuclear arms control framework. Now it’s in tatters, and we are in a hot war with Russia. We are in a cold war with China. We have an expanding war in the Middle East. We have an incompetent president, and I don’t know whether that’s physical or just a professional incompetence. 

“It’s a terrible situation.”

Full interview here: https://youtu.be/DGFJt8Ho6O4?si=NSBTcBauKwL17lAJ