Jeffrey Sachs Is No Stranger to Controversy

The Hill called him a “Kremlin Mouthpiece.” He’s one of the few reasonable leaders left.

Photo courtesy of Georgetown University Berkley Center

He was called a “Kremlin mouthpiece” in The Hill. During the Joe Biden administration, a State Department-linked NGO listed him as one of the figures “repeating Russian propaganda.” He was condemned by over 300 peers in economics departments across the country for his position on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. And he’s a professor at Columbia.

Jeffrey Sachs is no stranger to controversy. He has appeared on Tucker Carlson four times in the past year. Though he wrote to me that President Donald Trump is “erratic,” he also criticizes the “progressive” left for their foreign policy positions. You will find his op-eds in left-leaning publications like Common Dreams and John Menadue’s Pearls and Irritations, and also in Chinese state media CGTN and Qatari state media Al Jazeera.

Sachs is an economist who was formerly the director of the University’s Earth Institute, and is now the director of Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development and president of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He is the co-founder of the Millennium Promise Alliance, an organization whose goal is to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, and serves on the group’s board of directors. As an economist, Sachs has advised the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and various foreign governments, perhaps most notably known for prescribing shock therapy in post-Communist Poland and Russia with mixed reviews.

In recent years, Sachs has emerged not only as a leading economist but also as a peace advocate. While anti-interventionism broadly aligns with the emerging principles of the New Right, he is certainly no conservative.

In fact, it was only a few short years ago during the Bush administration that the Democrats had the strongest anti-war figures in their caucus, including then-Senator Barack Obama and Senator Bernie Sanders. However, in today’s realignment, we can instead look to more isolationist figures like Vice President JD Vance, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby (for the record, I don’t know what Sachs himself makes of any of these individuals).

Does aligning with Trump on Ukraine make one a conservative? Does writing for CGTN make one a dictator-lover and a hater of America? I’m certainly weary of this simplistic worldview of elementary school teachers forcing kids to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. That is why I reached out to Sachs directly for comment.

Trump the Peacemaker?

Sachs believes that Trump is “a one-man show.” He wrote in a statement to Sundial in late April, “I support his efforts to end the war in Ukraine, and I am relieved that the [U.S. Government] is talking with Iran. Maybe an agreement will be reached; it is certainly feasible and vital. Yet the Trump Administration’s support for Israel’s ongoing mayhem in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria is awful, as are Trump’s policies on trade, climate, and sustainable development.”

Vance himself identified this inconsistency in Trump’s European versus Middle Eastern foreign policy in a leaked Signal chat, as did Tucker Carlson twice on X.

However, the president is now sending very different signals. His relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has become strained, marking a low point in U.S.-Israel relations. Trump lifted sanctions on Syria and met the country’s new leader during his tour of the Gulf States, and is negotiating a new Iran nuclear deal. There has also been some speculation that Trump could recognize a Palestinian state, which, though far-fetched, is nonetheless a sign of a significant shift in U.S. foreign policy in the region and “an end of an era,” some pundits say, in America’s longstanding support of Israeli objectives.

Because of this radical shift, Sachs now appears to have a slightly different perspective on Trump and the Middle East from when he wrote to me in April. “President Trump has the opportunity to extricate the United States from the profound mess that Netanyahu has caused,” Sachs said on Andrew Napolitano’s show. “President Trump likes peace, he likes business, he likes development, and all of that is possible if President Trump says, ‘I’m not following the madness of Israel’s extremism.’” Of course, the vibes could certainly still shift in a few weeks.

And none of this changes the reality of Trump’s war on Columbia in the name of safeguarding Jewish students, which Sachs is acutely aware of. During an interview with Fidias Panayiotou, a YouTuber-turned-renegade member of the European Parliament, Sachs did not hold back on calling out Trump for arresting “one of my students,” Mahmoud Khalil, merely “because he happens to believe that the Palestinian cause is just.” He also noted that as a Jewish professor, he feels safe on Columbia’s campus.

In my estimation, Sachs appears to be taking a measured and principled approach. By no means is he hopping on the MAGA train to crazytown, and he is eagerly criticizing Trump when he believes it is necessary. But he also supports in good faith the possibility for negotiations and peace in both Eastern Europe and the Middle East. He is certainly hopeful that Trump could deliver on both of these goals, at least more than his war-hawking predecessors.

Even so, Sachs also believes that government by executive action through “one-man rule” has resulted in “repeated changes of view and policy.”

“We need to return to government according to the rule of law, not according to the declaration of phony ‘emergencies’ on which the executive decrees are based,” Sachs wrote. For a feigned “Kremlin mouthpiece,” Sachs sounds oddly in favor of American democracy.

The Demise of the Anti-War Left

Sachs laments the direction that the left has taken. He wrote to me, “During the Biden years, the so-called ‘left’ in Washington and the mainstream media were almost all pro-NATO enlargement, and in favor of continuing the war in Ukraine. I did not find such positions to be wise, prudent, or desirable. The Biden Administration was also complicit in Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. So, we can ask, where was a truly progressive and anti-war left?”

In September 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported that an estimated one million-plus individuals had been killed or injured in the Russo-Ukrainian War. On May 7, 2025, there were over 52,000 reported casualties in Gaza, according to Hamas’ Ministry of Health. Sachs appears to be asking: at what cost do we pursue the goals of the American Empire? Are lofty neoconservative “realist” objectives for the global reign of Big Macs and “democracy” worth the death of innocent men, women, and children? How and why did the left become so supportive of this neoconservatism?

Recall that war hawk and former Republican vice president Dick Cheney, whom both myself and Jacobin believe should be in jail, endorsed Kamala Harris over Trump in September 2024. Similarly, Bill Kristol, co-founder of the neoconservative Project for a New American Century that sought “a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad,” tweeted in August 2024 about the Democratic National Convention: “Leon Panetta quoting Ronald Reagan! My kind of Democratic convention.”

On the other hand, Trump in Saudi Arabia said, “The gleaming marbles of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation builders, neocons, or liberal nonprofits…in the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.”

Unfortunately, too many purported “leftists” are unlikely to side with the devil incarnate on a foreign policy they would have otherwise supported only a few years ago. Even the supposedly anti-establishment Daily Show took issue with Trump’s message.

With the era of the anti-war left certainly fleeting and realigning in many ways on the right, and the neoconservatives re-realining on the left, Sachs finds himself on a deserted island. He is only truly accompanied by a few critical thinkers, including University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer.

In a May 5 panel discussion I attended on “Nuclear Weapons and Global Order,” Sachs called Mearsheimer “a friend and occasional sparring partner” for their differing stances on geopolitical realism (Sachs anti, Mearsheimer pro). Mearshimer, for his part, has also received his fair share of criticism over his similar stance on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. Columbia professor Ivana Hughes, also on the panel, mentioned that though a realist, “even Mearsheimer is not welcome in Washington” because unlike many of his peers, he calls out the excesses of U.S. foreign policy. Sachs agreed.

Censoring Unwelcome Ideas

At the Athens Democracy Forum in October 2022, Sachs noted that “We should not judge simplistically another social system, even another political system, by simplistic categories.” A few days before attending the forum, he was kicked off Bloomberg TV for suggesting that the U.S., not Russia, blew up the Nord Stream pipeline. At the 2024 edition of the Athens Democracy Forum, in October, Sachs lamented that he couldn’t even get 700 words in the pages of The New York Times.

It may be less so that Sachs embraces niche commentators and publications, and more so that the mainstream media has relentlessly attacked and silenced him.

His geopolitical views are also not fully welcome at the University, as his work at Columbia is focused on climate and sustainable development, not foreign policy. “Most of the official events at Columbia on Ukraine seem to have had a lopsided representation of the pro-NATO-expansion and Russophobic narrative,” Sachs wrote. “This is most unfortunate, because this view is naïve, neglectful of history, and contributing to ongoing war.”

Indeed, a brief scroll through the University’s Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies website will reveal the advancement of precisely this narrative: Russia, a ruthless regime, simply attacked Ukraine. The strong counterargument—that the U.S. has aggressively pushed NATO expansion past its agreed-upon boundaries and thus provoked the Russians into military action—is seldom discussed.

After the Russian invasion in February 2022, then-University President Lee Bolinger, in a University announcement, was quick to liken the Russians to the World War II “era when totalitarianism and its evils were a principal subject of analysis and rejection,” that is, the Nazis. Predictably, there’s been little talk providing nuance to this worldview. Take, for instance, the neo-Nazi Azvov Brigade that has been instrumental in helping Ukraine fight the Russians. It had a U.S. weapons ban lifted in June 2024, although the U.S. had apparently been training them even before that date.

To be clear: I am not advocating for a blindly pro-Russian perspective or claiming that the Ukranians are necessarily under a total Nazi occupation, eager to be liberated, as the Kremlin does. Somewhat to Bolinger’s credit, the Ukranians too have likened Russian President Vladimir Putin to a Nazi, and the Wagner Group, a mercenary militia initially instrumental in the onset of the war, purportedly has neo-Nazi ties—starting with its very namesake, the composer Richard Wagner who was a favorite of Adolf Hitler.

So, it would be quite ridiculous to love Vladimir Putin. Despite Ukraine’s incredible anger toward Sachs and the fact that the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed in January 2023 accusing him of being among “Putin’s American Cheerleaders,” I don’t think this accurately characterizes Sachs.

Then, we must ask: why only put one side of the story regarding a complex geopolitical issue in an official University communication, as Columbia and numerous other American institutions eagerly have regarding Russia-Ukraine? The year is not 1962, and Russia is not the Soviet Union, but America is still America. If we still cherish free speech, we not only hope for but need open, heterodox, and non-ideologically captured discourse. The University should be a forum for lively and respectful debate about these issues, not the Pravda for American foreign policy.

Expanding NATO, Pronouncing Kiev as “Kyiv”

In a way, I do agree with Sundial’s own Nicholas Greyson Ward: As he wrote in December 2024, Columbia did forget about the Russo-Ukrainian War. Ward, however, misplaces the blame. If so many students are eager to call out American-backed imperialism in the Middle East, they should be just as eager to call out American imperialism in Eastern Europe.

We don’t need more banners blindly proclaiming Slava Ukraini, more students pronouncing Kiev as “Kyiv,” and peers I’ve never met flooding my DMs with strongly-worded attacks after I reposted a Compact article titled “Why Zelensky Must Go.”

Rather, we need a deep understanding of how we reached this bloodshed in the first place. Of course, the Kremlin is to blame for the loss of human life because Putin ultimately invaded a sovereign country and violated international law. Russia is certainly no saint. But neither is Washington for expanding its sphere of influence into the Eastern European steppe, where it forged a client state 300 miles from Moscow, totally turning a blind eye to the reality of the now-multipolar world order. It is worth noting that since the 2008 Bucharest Summit, it has been the explicit goal of NATO to expand east onto Russia’s border in Ukraine and Georgia.

Sachs is deeply aware of this. “I warned that the US approach would make Ukraine into the ‘Afghanistan of Europe.’ And so, it has,” he wrote. “The US approach of expanding NATO to Ukraine was set in place already in the 1990s, as another arrogant and reckless fantasy of the neocons.”

“It has failed disastrously, and predictably,” he added.

That said, Sachs is still hopeful that a more sensible, peace-driven American foreign policy can help foster an understanding between Russia and Ukraine.

“The path to peace today is the same as it was in April 2022 when a Russia-Ukraine peace agreement under the Istanbul Process was nearly reached: Ukrainian neutrality, some territorial adjustments (which more adverse for Ukraine after three more years of war), and security arrangements for all parties adopted by the UN Security Council,” he wrote.

But the Biden administration vetoed this approach in April 2022, Sachs wrote. “Please remember that the war could have been averted altogether as late as January 2022 if the US had agreed with Russia that NATO would not spread to Ukraine,” he added. “And if the US had not actively supported a coup in February 2014 that overthrew a neutralist president of Ukraine, there would have been no war, and Ukraine would not have had to cede any territory whatsoever, since Russia was making no territorial claims on Ukraine at that point.”

Looming Danger Ahead

At the May 5 panel, Sachs said, amongst discussion of the risk of nuclear armageddon in Russia-Ukraine, India-Pakistan, the Middle East, and East Asia: “If you know senior government officials in the U.S., you cannot sleep at night. We are not well governed. The stupidity is immense.”

According to him, the Biden administration was “the worst foreign policy administration, blundering fools,” and the conservative American Enterprise Institute is a “so-called think tank.” Sachs appeared to be referring to an article published by AEI and Bloomberg about how we’re losing the cold war with China. He noted that this was “ridiculous” because China is not a geopolitical enemy, and the Cold War with the Soviet Union and communism was supposed to end a long time ago.

Indeed, Trump may be showing some rational progress on Ukraine, and lately, even on the Middle East. But both parties and their long-time institutions, even during this moment of GOP realignment, still risk ending the world as we know it. The whole situation is absurd because, as Sachs is correct to stipulate, the U.S. could be one of the safest countries in the world with no imminent military threat were it not for nuclear weapons and our warmongering adventurism. Which is why, like Sachs, I find it hard to sleep at night, as should you.

Juxtaposed against the Anne Appelbaums, Fareed Zakarias, and Douglas Murrays of the world (and there are many), we should embrace a scholar like Sachs at Columbia who eagerly challenges the orthodoxies of American foreign policy. Even if you do not agree with everything Sachs says, we need unorthodox voices that provide alternative, oft-underheard, and, in my opinion, truly valid viewpoints. So what if he does it on Al Jazeera and Tucker Carlson? Get off your high horse and take a listen.

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Mr. Mohammadi is a freshman at Columbia College majoring in American Studies. He is a staff writer for Sundial.

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The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sundial editorial board as a whole or any other members of the staff.

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