Season 2, Episode 10: Chris Coyne: In Search of Monsters to Destroy: The Folly of American Empire and the Paths to Peace

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and political and media analyst Norman Solomon as they discuss Solomon’s important new book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine. 

Listen in as Solomon and Sachs explore the intricate interplay between the mainstream media and powerful political forces that promote America’s disastrous “wars of choice” – including the US-led wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and currently the US-Russia proxy war in Ukraine and the US backing of Israel’s war in Gaza.   

Solomon’s book explores how American foreign policy has become one of perpetual war, and how the media systematically hide the tragic human and political consequences of these wars, thereby enabling the US Government to perpetuate these conflicts.

Footnotes:

• Ukraine War
• 2023 Israel-Hamas War
• Vietnam War
• MLK - madness of militarism
• Pseudo-democracy
• Propaganda
• Orwellian
• Political Geology of 1984
• Rules-based Order 
• NATO
• Military-industrial Complex
• Ethnic Cleansing
• NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia
• Genocide
• Rashida Tlaib
• South Africa’s Genocide Case Against Israel at the ICJ
• Common Dreams
• War in Yemen
• Pentagon Papers
• War Profiteering
• Information Warfare - Censorship
• Pentagon Woos Silicon Valley to Join Ranks of Arms Makers

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Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and economist David Daokui Li as they discuss Professor Li’s brilliant new book, China's World View: Demystifying China to Prevent Global Conflict. Listen in as Professor Li explains the deep nature of Chinese politics and economics – based on China’s long history, Confucian culture, and meritocratic political system. 

Together, they delve into a wide-ranging discussion of politics, education, philosophy, culture, and international relations.  Professor Li helps us to understand the similarities and differences in the Chinese and US approaches to politics and economics, and explains how US-Chinese relations can be peaceful, constructive, and beneficial for both countries and the world.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• History of the People’s Republic of China
• Cultural Revolution
• Mao Zedong
• Civil Service of the People's Republic of China
• Meritocracy
• Social Structure in China
• Ancestor Veneration
• Lincoln Portrait, “Fellow Citizens, We Cannot Escape History..”
• Checks and Balances in China
• Central Party School of the Chinese Communist Party
• Century of Humiliation 
• Confucianism
• Opium Wars
• Meiji Restoration 
• China-Russia Border
• Ancient Chinese History
• Ezra Vogel 
• Japan-China Relations

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Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and Jessica Rawson, one of the world’s most eminent scholars of China, as they discuss Rawson’s book, Life and Afterlife in Ancient China. Listen in to learn about the roots of Chinese civilization through the stories of twelve grand tombs, each helping to reveal a pivotal phase in China’s history. 

Together, they discuss the political, geographical, technological, and cultural evolution of China. Professor Rawson offers profound and fascinating insights regarding one of the world's great civilizations. With deep insights gleaned from her lifetime of scholarship, and building on the latest archaeological findings, Prof. Rawson sheds light on the deep foundations of China’s unique culture, including the role of ancestor worship, physical geography, and farming systems in shaping China’s civilization. 

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

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Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and political scientist Lindsey O’Rourke as they discuss O’Rourke’s remarkable book, Covert Regime Change.  US foreign policy is based heavily on trying to overthrow foreign governments, and O’Rourke’s account is a powerful and deeply scholarly account of America’s frequent resort to secretive regime-change operations. Her book focuses on the Cold War years (1947-1989), but Sachs and O’Rourke bring the issues up to the current day.   

O’Rourke’s highly insightful study offers a deep and rare look at the how’s and why’s of US foreign policy.  Together, Sachs and O’Rourke discuss why U.S. covert regime-change operations have rarely succeeded, but have often left a colossal mess in their wake.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• Regime Change
• American Involvement in Regime Change 
• Conspiracy Theories
• Foreign Electoral Intervention
• Kennan and Containment, 1947
• Political Assassinations 
• JFK and the Diem Coup
• List of Coups and Coup Attempts
• List of Revolutions and Rebellions
• John Mearsheimer
•  James Rodney Schlesinger
• Freedom on Information Act
• Obama Attempt to Overthrow Syria 

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Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and political scientist John Mearsheimer as they discuss Professor Mearsheimer’s latest book, How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy. Hailed as the most influential foreign policy realist of his generation, Mearsheimer and co-author Prof. Sebastian Rosato provide a groundbreaking examination of a central question in international relations: Do states act rationally?

Together, they discuss the book’s core idea: that states are generally rational in their foreign policymaking, in the sense that they use deliberative processes grounded in plausible theories of the world.  Through a fascinating analysis of historical case studies, Mearsheimer and Rosato argue that states think rationally most of the time, though not always with successful outcomes.

Yet. as Sachs and Mearsheimer discuss, sometimes states do indeed act irrationally - as when the US invaded Iraq in 2003.  In their discussion, Professors Sachs and Mearsheimer cover considerable ground, discussing the World Wars, the Cold War, and the War in Ukraine.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• Ukraine War 
• Vladimir Putin
• International Relations 
• Foreign Policy 
• Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire
• NATO
• Wikileaks
• Balance of Power Theory 
• Benjamin Netanyahu
• Realist Theory
• Open Door Policy 
• Bush Administration NATO Expansion 
• Hegemony
• Georgia NATO Relations
• Russian December 2021 Ultimatum
• Economic Sanctions

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Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and economist Francisco Rodriguez as they discuss Professor Rodriguez’s newest publication, The Human Consequences of Economic Sanctions. Prof. Rodriguez is an expert on the use of unilateral economic sanctions - when one country imposes economic costs on another, and shares insights on the US as the main user of such unilateral economic sanctions.

Professor Rodriguez offers us a comprehensive assessment of the effects of unilateral sanctions on the living standards in target countries. The effects of sanctions are dramatic: rising poverty, falling living standards, and premature deaths. These consequences go far beyond politics, and hit the civilian population very hard. Professor Sachs and Rodriguez offer a fascinating discussion that sheds light on economic warfare, and how it is deployed in the world today.

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• Economic Sanctions
• Crisis in Venezuela
• Venezuela Economy  
• The Rise and Fall of a Petrostate
• Hugo Chavez 
• History of the Venezuelan Oil Industry 
• US Economy 
• US Sanctions
• International Financial Statistics 
• US Maximum Pressure
• Nicolás Maduro
• Unilateral Sanctions 
• Secondary Sanctions
• Juan Guaidó
• Citgo
• Sanctions During the Venezuela Crisis
• How Latin America Has Been Shaped by the War in Ukraine
• Diaspora

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Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and two of the world's leading experts on the economics of wellbeing, Lord Richard Layard and Professor Jan-Emmanuel De Neve to discuss their newest book, Wellbeing: Science and Policy. Together, they examine how wellbeing can be measured and how it can be promoted today and for future generations.

What produces a happy life and a happy society? Layard’s and De Neve’s new book offers a systematic exploration that brings together a fascinating and vast body of research in the past 20 years. This thought provoking conversation explores the new science of wellbeing and how it can improve public policies and our lives. 

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• World Happiness Report
• Wellbeing
• Aristotle
• Nicomachean Ethics
• Happiness as GDP
• Martin Seligman
• Subjective Happiness Scale
• Affective Component of Happiness
• Eudaimonia
• Nobel Prize Winner Daniel Kahneman
• Stoicism 
• Positive Psychology
• Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)
• Set point - stable point of genetic disposition 
• Twin studies 
• Mental Health Diagnosis with happiness
• Diminishing marginal of impact on wellbeing

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Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and Professor Bruce Cumings, renowned historian and  expert in East-Asian history, to discuss Cuming’s book, The Korean War. Together, they discuss the factors that led to the Korean War, its brutal trajectory, and its powerful and fateful impacts US foreign policy. 

The Korean War, though little known or understood today, continues to cast a long shadow on geopolitics and US foreign policy up to this day.  Cumings offers a profound and essential look into a war that is widely misunderstood, forgotten, or willfully ignored, but that still deeply shapes our world.   

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• Korean War
• World War II
• American Military in WWII 
• US Second Amendment 
• NSC68
• 38th Parallel 
• Pro-Japanese Collaborators 
• Five Theories of Korean Unification
• Dean Acheson
• Marshall Plan Speech
• Korean War and Japan’s Recovery
• Cold War
• Declaration of Neutrality 
• George Kennan 
• Guerrilla Operations in North Korea 
• US in the Korean War
• American Armed Forces Statistics
• Nuclear Arms Race
• Yellow River Flood

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Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and bestselling science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, to discuss Robinson’s recent books The Ministry for the Future and New York 2140  for a thought provoking conversation on how climate change has and will potentially affect us all. 

 Together, they explore climate change as an existential threat and the plausible and tumultuous ways the climate crisis will shape our future. What happens as we push beyond planetary boundaries? Will sea levels rise to devastating levels, submerging lower Manhattan and other urban centers of the world? Will climate change lead to acts of terrorism, countries engaging in unilateral geoengineering, and even climate terrorism??  Will UN member states finally get their act together?

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org."

Footnotes:

• COP Meetings
• Paris Agreement 
• UN Member States
• Small Island States 
• 1.5 degree Celsius
• Unanimity Rules
• Decarbonize 
• Capitalism 
• Mass Extinction
• Keynesian
• Tax Structures

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Join Professors Jeffrey Sachs and Chris Coyne, economist and author of In Search of Monsters to Destroy: The Folly of American Empire and the Paths to Peace, for an eye-opening examination on whether interventionist methods should ever have a place in foreign policy. 

Together, they discuss American imperialism and militaristic culture around the world, proving that nonviolent approaches to domestic and international conflicts not only minimize violence, but also promote cultures of peace throughout the world. Coyne presents his compelling arguments as to why such interventions are a threat to liberal values and alternative methods can preserve freedom and promote security between nations. 

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

Footnotes:

• Afghanistan Papers 
• Pentagon Papers
• John Quincy Adams 
• Liberalism 
• Joe Biden
• Autocracies 
• January 6th resurrection 
• Manifest Destiny 
• Westward Expansion 
• Imperialism 
• Militarism in the US
• Banana Wars 
• Cronyism
• Adam Smith 
• United Fruit - Guatemala 
• Dulles Brothers 
• Game Theory
• US Surveillance State  
• Church Committee (CIA violating its charter)
• American military spending 
• Capturing Osama Bin Laden 
• US War on Drugs in Afghanistan 
• Taliban 
• Latin American war on drugs 
• Militarism of Drones

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