As if the European Union did not already have one epically vain and dangerously influential American to deal with, who should pop up to harangue the European parliament in Brussels last week (for well over an hour, uninterrupted) but Professor Jeffrey Sachs?
These days, among other things, the president of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, Sachs came to global attention as the adviser to Boris Yeltsin in the early 1990s, when, with a group of fellow Harvard economists, he sold to the Russian leader a policy known as “shock therapy”. This involved instant mass privatisation of industries and the simultaneous removal of all price controls. It was, to put it mildly, not a success: the resulting chaos led, in a way, to the era of Vladimir Putin.
Sachs subsequently argued it was Yeltsin’s fault that the policy handed over the ruling heights of the Russian economy to corrupt oligarchs. But, as the former World Bank economist David Ellerman observed, it was the rapidity of the privatisation programme that made such an outcome inevitable in the sort of society Russia was: “Only the mixture of American triumphalism and academic arrogance could have produced such a lethal dose of gall.”
Sachs’s academic arrogance has not diminished over the years but, conversely, he has become the world’s most obsessive critic of American triumphalism. And this was his message to the assembled European politicians. He regaled them with his view that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was purely the consequence of Nato over-enlargement, and that the aim of the US had been for Nato to enlarge “from Brussels to Vladivostok”. Obviously no mention of Putin’s seismic 2021 essay On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, which devoted a solitary paragraph to Nato but spent more than 7,000 words explaining, before his attempted annexation, why Ukraine should have no right to independence.
And Sachs presented these European delegates, many of them from the former satrapies of the Soviet Union, with the proposition that Nato membership had been imposed on them by the US. When he was told by one bewildered MEP, “Countries including Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic wanted to join Nato”, Sachs responded: “Nato is not a choice of Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic.” Nor, presumably, of Finland or Sweden in the past two years — they too must just be slavish lackeys of US imperialism.
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