May 31, 2026<\/a>. This transcript of his conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and is shared here with permission.<\/p>\nThe following transcript has been edited for clarity.<\/p>\n
Glenn Diesen: We are joined again by Professor Jeffrey Sachs to discuss an open letter to the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. You wrote a letter six months ago urging the Chancellor to restart diplomacy after merely four years of having minimal contact with Russia. And now you wrote yet another open letter to the German Chancellor, which has been republished in the German media. I wanted first to ask why you wrote a second letter. What do you feel has changed in the proxy war in Ukraine?<\/p>\n
Jeffrey Sachs: To put it simply, things are worse now than they were six months ago. So that was the reason for the letter. The first time I wrote the open letter, which was December 2025, the situation was rather grim. There was warmongering and escalation. And I wrote that Germany had a special responsibility in this context as the most powerful country of Europe, the most populous country of Europe, the country that has lots of historical responsibilities regarding the issues that we\u2019re facing right now.<\/p>\n
And in January 2026, just a couple of weeks after that letter was published, I saw glimmers of hope. Chancellor Merz made a couple of speeches where he somewhat surprisingly said in an open way that Russia\u2019s part of Europe, that we\u2019re going to have to live together with Russia after this war, that we need to speak with Russia. And he and President Macron and some other leaders in Europe started to opine in January about the need for some kind of new diplomatic deployment.<\/p>\n
And Europe, in a rather clumsy way, started publicly to look for who might serve as a diplomatic envoy. Kaja Kallas is an open Russophobe and every day hate speech comes out of her mouth, anti-Russian speech, making it not really possible for her to fulfill her job, which is to be Europe\u2019s chief diplomat. After January and despite this rather bizarre public process of \u201cWho could serve as our emissary? Should it be former Chancellor Merkel? Should it be former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi? Should it be former Chancellor Schr\u00f6der?\u201d\u2014nothing has come of it.<\/p>\n
But what has occurred is the Ukrainian attack on the girls\u2019 school in Starobilsk with many deaths of young students, and Europe not only not apologizing for that or explaining why a missile went in the wrong direction, but actually in denial or silence about this horrible event. And in response, Russia has said through Foreign Minister Lavrov in a call to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Russia is going to attack the capital, Kyiv\u2014it\u2019s going to attack control centers and areas of operations control in the capital. And Minister Lavrov advised the Western diplomats to take care and be safe and clear out. That attack has not come yet, despite the warnings, but I think we can expect that it will.<\/p>\n
So these are alarming days, and the response in Europe has been escalatory in rhetoric and non-apologetic for disasters that have clearly occurred. There are many mysterious events of drones in Baltic airspace and a drone hitting in Romania near the border with Ukraine that are contested, unexplained, but also raising tensions and a sense of escalation. The rhetoric out of the Baltic states about perhaps attacking Kaliningrad or being ready to be a base for drone operations into northwest Russia are all shocking. None of this is the kind of behavior that we need in a nuclear age. All of it is incredibly irresponsible, incredibly neglectful of your and my life and those of all the rest of us on the planet. It\u2019s truly shocking.<\/p>\n
I put the principal responsibility on Europe. It has not shown the slightest interest, the slightest capacity to engage in any kind of diplomacy except to whine when the US and Russia speak. \u201cWhy aren\u2019t we there?\u201d As if a union of 450 million people can\u2019t get its act together to find someone to speak with the counterpart in Russia.<\/p>\n
So, I wrote the letter because the situation is alarming now, not because I have any special hopes that what I say will be heeded, but because the situation is completely alarming. And just to underscore the point of the letter, the point I\u2019m making in the letter is not only that diplomacy is correct, but that Germany has a particular responsibility. And before people jump to conclusions, I\u2019m talking about responsibility from 1990 onward. I want to be clear\u2014I\u2019m talking about specifics of the events that are taking place in Ukraine.<\/p>\n
And I happen to know firsthand: Germany has cheated on German reunification in a fundamental way, because the terms of German reunification were that NATO would not expand eastward into Central and Eastern Europe, much less to Ukraine and the South Caucasus\u2014Georgia, another aim of this absolutely irresponsible alliance called NATO. And they cheated.<\/p>\n
So Germany has a responsibility, given that solemn commitments were made to Germany\u2019s advantage\u2014promises made in February 1990 that, in the context of German reunification to end World War II (believe it or not, because there had been no treaty after 1945 until the Two Plus Four agreement in 1990), Germany would not take advantage of German reunification by moving its military and the NATO alliance eastward. And Germany and the United States cheated.<\/p>\n
And this, to my mind, is the underlying reason why tensions rose for more than 30 years. And we saw them happening. And we saw repeated duplicity, because I mentioned six episodes in this letter where Germany did not follow through honestly in a geopolitical context that was completely harrowing.<\/p>\n
So it\u2019s not just general historical responsibility. It\u2019s not only that Germany is a big and powerful country, the biggest and most powerful in Europe. It is that Germany gained advantages vis-\u00e0-vis Russia starting in 1990 with unification premised on the neutrality of the countries to the east\u2014not extending NATO. And then time and again, Germany violated not only that promise, but many other specific commitments that it undertook.<\/p>\n
So as Chancellor of Germany, Merz has a responsibility to know this and to act upon it before Europe is embroiled in another war. And all this chest-thumping of Europe about how saintly Europe is and how evil Russia is, and this one-sided narrative that is unending\u2014\u201cwe\u2019re pure, they\u2019re evil, everything they do is unprovoked\u201d\u2014this is what is going to get us to complete and total disaster.<\/p>\n
And Europe should start, first of all, by apologizing or expressing condolences for the attack on Starobilsk and for trying to understand what happened. That\u2019s the first. When you kill young girls, whether it\u2019s the United States doing it brutally because of this crazy AI targeting of sites in Iran that killed more than 160 schoolgirls, or what\u2019s happened reportedly in Lugansk in the Starobilsk girls\u2019 school\u2014we need civility, honesty, humanity, decency, discussion, not further warmongering and hate speech.<\/p>\n
Glenn Diesen: I tend to not just blame NATO but also see that they have a key role in resolving this, because where we\u2019re sitting now is\u2014I accept that Russia faces an existential threat, or at least sees it this way, with NATO\u2019s expansion. But the ones that can solve this are the NATO countries, because we are the ones who triggered the security competition. If we go back to 2014 when we toppled the government in Ukraine, only a minority of Ukrainians wanted to be a part of NATO. And more importantly, we knew it would trigger a war. This is well documented among Europeans and Americans, and we decided to do it nonetheless. So this is my concern\u2014that we continue to push ahead here. And it\u2019s so interesting and ironic given what former Chancellor Merkel has just said in the last few days again, how much we knew about the provocations that NATO was making.<\/p>\n
Jeffrey Sachs: This goes back to 2014 when the US really gave a big nudge in support of a coup that turned Ukraine from a neutral country to a very dramatically pro-NATO expansionist country. But before that coup, six years before, came the decisive moment at the Bucharest NATO summit in April 2008. George W. Bush was pushing\u2014and especially this was because of his neoconservative gang around him, led by his Vice President Cheney\u2014that NATO would enlarge. And the Europeans then knew that this was reckless. The Europeans were actually taken aback just before the Bucharest Summit that the United States would pull such a stunt of trying to demand an enlargement of NATO to Ukraine.<\/p>\n
But when they got to the Bucharest Summit, the US was out in full force. George Bush said, \u201cWe will commit.\u201d And Chancellor Merkel has written about this in detail. She says that she knew that committing to a timeline for NATO enlargement to Ukraine was tantamount to a declaration of war on Russia, that that\u2019s how the Russians would see it. And she resisted this commitment the first day of the summit. But then the Americans wore her down. And on the second day, while the NATO summit did not commit to a specific timeline\u2014a so-called MAP, which would lay out precisely the timeline\u2014it committed in no uncertain terms to the enlargement of NATO. And she wrote in her memoirs that she knew that such a commitment was reckless.<\/p>\n
The reason I say that this is ironic is that just in recent days, she said that she hopes that the war in Ukraine stops sometime within the next ten years. What? Are we so incapable as human beings that we accept a timeline of ten more years of war? Why not ten days or ten hours, understanding all of the mistakes that have been made, and come up with a formula to end this\u2014one that has to be based, by the way, on what was, is, and remains the core issue of this war, which is Ukraine\u2019s neutrality. The West should understand this, absolutely must, or we\u2019ll have a war in Europe.<\/p>\n
By the way, I think we\u2019ve talked about it, but I\u2019d like to discuss it in this context because the warmongering and irrationality and danger and recklessness and shallowness and immaturity of the people who lead us is something to behold.<\/p>\n
In December 2021, when President Putin, in a final attempt to press the new Biden administration to recognize the commitment of no NATO enlargement that had been made 30 years earlier\u2014and to stop this war that was already seven years underway in Ukraine\u2014put a draft security arrangement between Russia and the United States on the table (I think it\u2019s December 17, if I remember correctly, 2021). There were things that I don\u2019t think NATO would ever have accepted, or the US would have accepted, about rolling back some of the existing placements. But what absolutely struck me as core and correct was that the United States at that point should say, \u201cYes, NATO\u2019s not going to enlarge any farther into Ukraine,\u201d much less into the South Caucasus region\u2014which, by the way, is still in play by the CIA and the United States even as we speak right now. They\u2019re playing games in Armenia, they\u2019re playing games in the South Caucasus. But let me not digress.<\/p>\n
I called the White House and I spoke to the National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. And I had the most surrealistic conversation imaginable. We spoke for an hour. We spoke in detail. And I said, \u201cJake, take the deal. Say NATO\u2019s not going to enlarge. It\u2019s a terrible idea. It\u2019s not in America\u2019s interest. It\u2019s not in Ukraine\u2019s interest. Take the deal.\u201d And he said to me, \u201cJeff, NATO\u2019s not going to enlarge to Ukraine.\u201d I said, \u201cJake, what?\u201d \u201cNATO\u2019s not going to enlarge.\u201d I said, \u201cFine, say it.\u201d \u201cNo, no, we can\u2019t say it. It\u2019s our open door policy.\u201d I said, \u201cJake, you\u2019re going to have a war over something that isn\u2019t going to happen?\u201d He said, \u201cJeff, Jeff, there\u2019s not going to be a war. We\u2019re going to handle this diplomatically. Don\u2019t worry, there\u2019s not going to be a war.\u201d<\/p>\n
What can one make of this almost five years later? First, the incompetence is shocking. The brazenness is shocking. The na\u00efvet\u00e9 is shocking. It\u2019s so distressing to have conversations like that. Not one word of it made sense, yet I think that actually was American policy: NATO\u2019s not going to enlarge, but we\u2019re not going to say it, but we\u2019re not going to have a war. Every premise of it made no sense and was quickly disproved.<\/p>\n
And here we are with an ongoing war\u2014the war has been since 2014, let\u2019s be clear\u2014but this escalation is since February 2022, so more than four years. And now we hear Chancellor Merkel, who I always liked, I have to say, saying that she hopes it won\u2019t be ten more years. What is it? Is something so wrong in the European mentality that war is so normalized? Europe has been at war essentially since maybe 300 AD, since the Germanic tribes made their incursions into the Roman Empire, and since 476 when Western Europe splintered with the end of the Roman Empire. It\u2019s never been really at peace as it should be. It\u2019s had stretches that were much better.<\/p>\n
But what kind of mentality? Rather than saying, \u201cOh my God, this could go on for another ten weeks\u2014that\u2019s horrible, we have to do something,\u201d it\u2019s \u201cI hope that it won\u2019t go on for another ten years.\u201d It was a rather plaintive, complacent view that we\u2019re just stuck by these forces of opposition and it\u2019s just a long, hard slog. Try sitting down diplomatically. Understand all of the lies that we\u2019ve been told.<\/p>\n
And just to say some of the others that I mentioned that are of relevance: in the context of the coup in Maidan, on February 21, 2014, the German Foreign Minister and his French and Polish counterparts negotiated with President Yanukovych that there would be no coup, that President Yanukovych would remain in power under the constitutional order, and that there would be elections late in 2014. The next day, a violent coup came. You might think that the United States and Germany and Poland and France would say, \u201cNo, we don\u2019t accept a violent coup. Ukraine is a constitutional democracy and President Yanukovych remains president.\u201d Of course, they didn\u2019t say that. The US was rubbing its hands together\u2014\u201cWe got them. Now we\u2019re going to go for NATO enlargement.\u201d Immediately the post-coup regime said, \u201cMaybe Russia shouldn\u2019t stay in Sevastopol and Crimea. Maybe it\u2019s time to unwind that lease for their naval base.\u201d You saw the plot straight out. What did Germany do in that context? Nothing except go along. So that was another cheat.<\/p>\n
And then a year later, in February 2015, when the war had already started, when people were dying in the Donbas, Chancellor Merkel and President Hollande personally negotiated an arrangement to end the war called the Minsk II Agreement. And it happened to be based on an idea of autonomy for the ethnic Russian population of eastern Ukraine. And I happen to know also, interestingly, that Chancellor Merkel viewed that as quite a good alternative because she knew about the German enclave in South Tyrol in northern Italy, which is another case of an autonomous region in Europe\u2014at peace, but given autonomy because it\u2019s an ethnically autonomous part of Italy. Italy had taken some territory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I, a German-speaking part near Bolzano. And they now have autonomy and everything works out well.<\/p>\n
So Chancellor Merkel said this is how to end the crisis in the Donbas: give autonomy. Germany negotiated it. Germany presented itself as the guarantor, together with France, in the so-called Normandy process. And Germany reneged on its guarantor role. The United States didn\u2019t like it\u2014\u201cUkraine should be a unitary state, we don\u2019t want this autonomy, don\u2019t weaken Ukraine.\u201d In other words, don\u2019t follow through on exactly what you\u2019ve just signed and what has just been unanimously ratified by the UN Security Council. Because the Minsk II agreement is not only an agreement inside Ukraine, but it was an agreement endorsed by the UN Security Council and then blown off.<\/p>\n
Years later, Chancellor Merkel said, \u201cYes, we didn\u2019t really expect it to work. It was going to give time for Ukraine to build up its strength.\u201d I actually don\u2019t believe that was her motivation back in February 2015. I think that it\u2019s a strange kind of ex post rationalization of events. But whatever it is, there was duplicity in the end.<\/p>\n
All of this, Glenn, is to say: I don\u2019t know whether Chancellor Merz knows any of this. I don\u2019t know whether he does his homework. I don\u2019t know whether he\u2019s aware of history. But he is the Chancellor of Germany and he has a responsibility to all of us, actually, to behave like a responsible Chancellor of Germany. And that means knowing these events, understanding that there\u2019s no purity of the European side, that there\u2019s plenty to talk about for true mutual security in Europe, and that as Chancellor, he has a responsibility not to be a warmonger. He has a responsibility to pick up the phone or dial his Zoom and connect with his counterpart, President Putin.<\/p>\n
Glenn Diesen: The lack of diplomacy has been shocking to me, though. The fact that the Germans were guarantors to this unity government in 2014, which they then walked back. The Minsk peace agreement, which they then walked back. Sabotaging the Istanbul peace negotiations, and then of course boycotting diplomacy for four years. It is something unique\u2014this is very deliberate, the lack of willingness to find a solution.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m just curious\u2014you say you recently spoke to European leaders and you often engage with them. What do they actually think? Because I know for a fact that something has changed now in Moscow, that this incremental escalation over the past four years has now crossed the line. The Europeans speaking openly about war with Russia, the goal of destroying its energy, striking military installations deep inside Russia, backing this up by mass-producing the weapons, openly saying the intent, developing the capabilities, using their territory for attacks.<\/p>\n
Attacking Kyiv in a very brutal way is one path, but I don\u2019t think we have the luxury anymore of just putting the Ukrainians in front of us and letting them die for us, because I think Russia is going to also increasingly deter the Europeans more directly as well. If you see the path we\u2019ve been on for years, it\u2019s hard to ignore that we\u2019re heading towards a war and that we\u2019re still not doing diplomacy. Twelve years of this nonsense, sabotaging every diplomatic path, and we\u2019re still going to do it even now that we might fight the world\u2019s largest nuclear power. It\u2019s beyond insane.<\/p>\n
Jeffrey Sachs: It is. And one wonders how this can happen in a world of open communication\u2014our discussion, or the fact that I can still publish an open letter in an important German outlet, the Berliner Zeitung.<\/p>\n
But what I can tell you, what we know, is our governments are in a bunker already. They don\u2019t talk. They simply have hunkered down and operate without responsibility. It\u2019s hard to imagine because we have all of the trappings of democracy, the trappings of accountability. But I know, because I experience it daily\u2014you do as well\u2014there simply is no response. If I call a senior official in the European Commission, I don\u2019t get an answer. I don\u2019t get a callback. They know who I am. I\u2019ve been dealing with the European Commission for 40 years in one way or another. I\u2019ve been dealing at a personal level with many of these people. They simply will not speak anymore. Leaders that I know will not speak. They are hunkered down. They cannot defend their position. They cannot rationalize it. All they can do is repeat the narrative.<\/p>\n
And that is not an answer\u2014it\u2019s just an explanation of how we go day by day with falsehoods hanging in the air unresolved, because they don\u2019t try to resolve them. There\u2019s no independent look, or commissions, or responses, or answers to parliament. There\u2019s no inquiries into anything. It\u2019s a very, very dangerous situation because the normal processes of truth-telling or analysis\u2014or what diplomats are especially important for, understanding how the other side thinks and explaining that straightforwardly\u2014have broken down.<\/p>\n
I was invited by the host country at the time, which was Indonesia, to speak to the G20 foreign ministers. And this was after the invasion. They would not speak with Foreign Minister Lavrov. So here are foreign ministers\u2014it\u2019s their job, that\u2019s why they\u2019re there\u2014and they would not even speak to the Russian foreign minister. This is the idea: you do not engage in actual communication, much less diplomacy and negotiation.<\/p>\n
And I don\u2019t really understand what the motivations are. People have various explanations. We can say the publics are disgusted by this, broadly speaking. Merz\u2019s popularity is essentially in complete collapse. Macron\u2019s popularity is essentially in complete collapse. Starmer\u2019s popularity is essentially in complete collapse. It\u2019s not as if these people are expressing the will of their republics\u2014absolutely the opposite.<\/p>\n
So then it raises all sorts of questions. Some people say Merz is Blackrock, or he\u2019s the German military industry. Who knows? Seems doubtful to me. I don\u2019t find such explanations so simplistic convincing, but frankly I don\u2019t have a better one, because the behavior is so bizarre at this point, so counterproductive and so dangerous. And we have to keep the core message to the Europeans: you said you were going to talk. You said you were going to find an intermediary. For heaven\u2019s sake, 450 million people in the European Union\u2014find someone and get started.<\/p>\n
Glenn Diesen: It\u2019s incredible. Again, we have diplomats who don\u2019t believe in diplomacy, leaders who ignore their basic national interests and seemingly have some contempt for their own public, and journalists who think it\u2019s their job to defend narratives. I think at the end of this, we also risk a legitimacy crisis when, as you said, they\u2019re not actually doing their jobs.<\/p>\n
Sources:<\/p>\n
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