Jeffrey Sachs warns Germany is sleepwalking toward war with Russia
Jeffrey Sachs is interviewed by Glenn Diesen about his second open letter to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, urging diplomacy with Russia.
Summary
Jeffrey Sachs, professor and economist, joins Glenn Diesen to discuss his second open letter to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, arguing that Europe — and Germany in particular — is escalating toward a catastrophic war with Russia while refusing all diplomatic engagement. Sachs traces the roots of the conflict to broken promises made during German reunification in 1990, the reckless NATO enlargement commitment at the 2008 Bucharest summit, the US-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014 — including Germany's failure to uphold the February 21, 2014 agreement its own foreign minister had negotiated with President Yanukovych — and the subsequent sabotage of the Minsk 2 agreement in which Germany was a named guarantor. He recounts a direct conversation with then-National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan in late 2021, in which Sullivan acknowledged NATO would not enlarge to Ukraine but refused to say so publicly — a position Sachs argues made war inevitable. Sachs describes the current moment as acutely dangerous, citing the Ukrainian missile strike on a girls' school in Starobilsk, Russian warnings of imminent strikes on Kyiv, and escalatory rhetoric from Baltic states, while European leaders remain entirely unresponsive to diplomatic overtures and increasingly disconnected from their own publics.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and the reason for a second open letter
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back to the program. Today 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 four years of having minimal contact with Russia. And now you've written 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?
Jeffrey Sachs: To put it simply, things are worse now than they were six months ago. 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're facing right now.
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 is part of Europe, that we're going to have to live together with Russia after this war, that we need to speak with Russia. And he, President Macron, and some other leaders in Europe started to opine in January about the need for some kind of new diplomacy. Europe, in a rather clumsy way, started publicly looking for who might serve as a diplomatic envoy from Europe.
By the way, it's rather sad and strange that the person designated for that job — Kaja Kallas — is deemed by both sides to be inadequate, because she is an open Russophobe. Every day, anti-Russian hate speech comes out of her mouth, making it not really possible for her to fulfill her job, which is to be Europe's chief diplomat.
After January, and despite this rather bizarre public process of opining about who could serve as an emissary — should it be former Chancellor Merkel? Should it be former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi? Should it be former Chancellor Schröder? — nothing has come of it. What has occurred in the last few weeks, and really in the last couple of weeks to a startling degree, is an escalation of rhetoric and the Ukrainian attack on the girls' school in Starobilsk, with many deaths of young students. Europe has not only not apologized for that or explained why a missile went in the wrong direction — it is actually in denial or silence about this horrible event.
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 Kyiv — it's going to attack control centers and areas of operations control in the capital. Minister Lavrov advised Western diplomats to take care, be safe, and clear out. That attack has not come yet despite the warnings, but I think we can expect that it will.
So these are alarming days, and the response in Europe has been escalatory in rhetoric and unapologetic for disasters that have clearly occurred. There are many mysterious events — drones in Baltic airspace, 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, is all shocking. None of this is the kind of behavior 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's truly shocking.
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: "Why aren't we there?" As if a union of 450 million people can't get its act together to find someone to speak with the counterpart in Russia.
So, Glenn, I wrote the letter because the situation is completely alarming now — not because I have any special hopes that what I say will be heeded, but because the situation demands it.
Germany's specific historical responsibility since 1990
And just to underscore the point of the letter: the point I'm making is not only that diplomacy is correct, but that Germany has a particular responsibility. And before people jump to conclusions, I'm talking about responsibility from 1990 onward. I'm talking about specifics of the events that are taking place in Ukraine.
I happen to know firsthand, and in many other ways, that Germany cheated on German reunification in a fundamental way. The terms of German reunification in 1990 — which required the approval of the Soviet Union and the other occupying powers of Germany after World War II — were that Germany and the West more generally would not take advantage of German reunification by moving military forces eastward into central and eastern Europe, much less to Ukraine and the South Caucasus. Georgia was another aim of this absolutely irresponsible alliance called NATO. And they cheated.
So Germany has a responsibility given that solemn commitments were made to Germany's advantage — promises 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 reunification by moving its military and the NATO alliance eastward. Germany and the United States cheated. And this, to my mind, is the underlying reason why tensions rose for more than 30 years.
I mentioned six episodes in this letter where Germany did not follow through honestly in a geopolitical context that was completely harrowing. So it's not just general historical responsibility. It's not only that Germany is the biggest and most powerful country in Europe. It is that Germany gained advantages vis-à-vis Russia starting in 1990 with unification premised on the neutrality of the countries to the east and not extending NATO. And then time and again Germany violated not only that promise but many other specific commitments that it undertook.
So as Chancellor of Germany, Merz has a responsibility to know this and to act upon it before Europe is embroiled in another war. All this chest-thumping about how saintly Europe is and how evil Russia is — this one-sided narrative that is unending, "We're pure, they're evil, everything they do is unprovoked" — this is what is going to get us to complete and total disaster.
Europe should start, first of all, by apologizing or expressing condolences for the attack on Starobilsk and by trying to understand what happened. That's the first step. When you kill young girls — whether it's the United States doing it brutally because of this crazy AI targeting of sites in Iran that killed more than 160 schoolgirls, or what's happened reportedly in Luhansk in the Starobilsk girls' school — we need civility, honesty, humanity, decency, and discussion. Not further warmongering and hate speech.
The 2008 Bucharest summit and the path to war
Glenn Diesen: I tend not just to blame NATO but also to see that they have a key role in resolving this. Where we're sitting now, I accept that Russia faces an existential threat — or at least sees it this way — with NATO's incursion into Ukraine. But I also recognize that as a result of the Russian invasion, the Ukrainians also face an existential threat. So I understand the motivation of both sides to fight to what I suppose is the bitter end and be willing to absorb such horrible costs. But the ones who can solve this are the NATO countries, because we are the ones who triggered the security competition.
If you go back to 2014, when we toppled the government in Ukraine, only a minority of Ukrainians wanted to be 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. And it's so interesting and ironic given what former Chancellor Merkel has just said again in the last few days — how much we knew about the provocations that NATO was making. This goes back to 2014 when the US really gave a big nudge to a coup in Ukraine, turning it from a neutral country to a very dramatically pro-NATO expansionist country. But before that coup, six years before, came the decisive event that even triggered what happened in 2014 — and that was the commitment that NATO made that it would enlarge to Ukraine and to Georgia, made at the Bucharest NATO summit in 2008.
Jeffrey Sachs: At that summit, George W. Bush was pushing — especially because of his neoconservative gang around him, led by his vice president Cheney — that NATO would enlarge. And the Europeans then knew how dangerous and reckless this was. In fact, I've been told by one of Europe's leaders today — whom I won't name so as not to embarrass — that the European leadership was promised just before the Bucharest summit that the United States would pull no such stunt of trying to demand an enlargement of NATO to Ukraine. But when they got to the Bucharest summit, the US was out in full force.
Chancellor Merkel has written about this in detail in her memoirs. 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's how the Russians would see it. And she resisted this commitment on the first day of the summit. But then the Americans wore her down. On the second day, while the NATO summit did not commit to a specific timeline — a so-called MAP, which would lay out precisely the timeline — it committed in no uncertain terms to enlargement to Ukraine. And she wrote in her memoirs that she knew such a commitment was reckless.
The reason I say this is ironic is that just in recent days she said she hopes 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, why can't we come up with a formula to end this? That formula has to be based, by the way, on what was, is, and remains the core issue of this war: Ukraine's neutrality. The West absolutely must understand this, or we will have a war in Europe.
Jake Sullivan and the 2021 conversation that preceded the invasion
I mean, the warmongering and irrationality and danger and recklessness and shallowness and immaturity of the people who lead us is something to behold. In December 2021 — I think it's December 17th if I remember correctly — when President Putin, in a final attempt to press the Biden administration to recognize the commitment of no NATO enlargement that had been made 30 years earlier, and to stop the war that was already seven years underway in Ukraine, put a draft security arrangement between Russia and the United States on the table — well, there were things in it that I don't think NATO would ever 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 have said, "Yes, NATO's not going to enlarge any further into Ukraine, much less into the South Caucasus region" — which, by the way, is still in play. Even as we speak, the CIA is playing games in Armenia and the South Caucasus. But let me not digress.
I called the White House and I spoke to the National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan, and I had the most surrealistic conversation imaginable. We spoke for an hour. We spoke in detail, and I said, "Jake, take the deal. Say NATO's not going to enlarge. It's a terrible idea. It's not in America's interest. It's not in Ukraine's interest. Take the deal."
And he said to me, "Jeff, NATO's not going to enlarge to Ukraine."
I said, "Jake — what? NATO's not going to enlarge?"
I said, "Fine, say it."
"No, no, we can't say it. It's our open door policy."
I said, "Jake, you're going to have a war over something that isn't going to happen."
He said, "Jeff, there's not going to be a war. We're going to handle this diplomatically. Don't worry, there's not going to be a war."
What can one make of this, almost five years later? The incompetence is shocking. The brazenness is shocking. The naivety is shocking. It's so distressing to have conversations like that. Not one word of it made sense. Yet I think that actually was American policy: NATO's not going to enlarge, but we're not going to say it, and we're not going to have a war. Every premise of it made no sense and was quickly disproved.
And here we are with an ongoing war — since 2014, let's be clear, but this escalation since February 2022, so more than four years. And now we hear Chancellor Merkel, whom I always liked, saying she hopes it won't 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's never really been at peace as it should be. It's had stretches that were much better. But what kind of mentality — rather than saying, "Oh my god, this could go on for another ten weeks, that's horrible, we have to do something" — says, "I hope it won't go on for another ten years"? Whatever the exact meaning of the quote, it was a rather plaintive view: we're just stuck by these forces of opposition and it's just a long hard slog. Well, try sitting down diplomatically.
The Maidan coup, Minsk 2, and Germany's role as guarantor
Understand all of the lies that were told. On February 21st, 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, "No, we don't accept a violent coup. Ukraine is a constitutional democracy, and President Yanukovych remains president." Of course, they didn't say that. The US was rubbing its hands together: we got them. Now we're going to go for NATO enlargement. Immediately the post-coup regime said, "Well, maybe Russia shouldn't stay in Sevastopol, Crimea. Maybe it's time to unwind that lease for their naval base." You saw the plot straight out. What did Germany do in that context? Nothing except go along. So that was another cheat.
And then a year later, in February 2015, when the war had already started and people were dying in the Donbas, Chancellor Merkel and President Hollande personally negotiated an arrangement to end the war called the Minsk 2 agreement. It happened to be based on an idea of autonomy for the ethnic Russian population of eastern Ukraine. I happen to know, interestingly, that Chancellor Merkel viewed that as quite a good alternative, because she knew about the German enclave in South Tyrol in northern Italy — another case of an autonomous region in Europe at peace, given autonomy because it's an ethnically distinct 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. So Chancellor Merkel said this is how to end the crisis in the Donbas — give autonomy.
Well, 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. I happen to know the United States didn't like it. Ukraine should be a unitary state. We don't want this autonomy. Don't weaken Ukraine. In other words, don't follow through on exactly what you've just signed and what has just been unanimously ratified by the UN Security Council — because the Minsk 2 agreement is not only an agreement inside Ukraine, it was an agreement endorsed by the UN Security Council, and then blown off years later.
Chancellor Merkel said, "Well, yes, we didn't really expect it to work. It was going to give time for Ukraine to build up its strength." I actually don't believe that was her motivation back in February 2015. I think that's a strange kind of ex-post rationalization of events. But whatever it is, there was duplicity in the end.
What Chancellor Merz must understand
All of this, Glenn, is to say: I don't know whether Chancellor Merz knows any of this. I don't know whether he does his homework. I don't know whether he's 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. That means knowing these events, understanding that there's no purity on the European side, that there's 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 and connect with his counterpart, President Putin.
Glenn Diesen: The lack of diplomacy has been shocking. The fact that the Germans were guarantors to the unity government in 2014 and then walked it back, the fact that the Minsk peace agreement was sabotaged for seven years, the 2019 election when the Ukrainians were actually allowed to vote for a no-war platform and to make peace with the Donbas and Russia — and essentially our government-funded NGOs made sure that Zelensky reversed this, of course also with the backing of our financed and trained right-wing forces. Then ignoring all the possibilities of finding an out in 2021, then sabotaging the Istanbul peace negotiations, and then boycotting diplomacy for four years. It is something unique — this is very deliberate, this unwillingness to find a solution.
I'm just curious what European leaders actually think, because I know for a fact that something has changed now in Moscow. This incremental escalation over the past four years has now crossed a line. The Europeans are speaking openly about war with Russia, the goal of destroying its energy infrastructure, striking military installations deep inside Russia, backing this up by mass-producing weapons, openly stating the intent, developing the capabilities, using their territory for attacks. I spoke with Mearsheimer, a common friend of ours, and he was making the point: this is not a proxy war anymore. We are now at war. We attacked Russia, and the Russians know this. So they're going to change their posture to a huge extent. Attacking Kyiv in a very brutal way is one way, but I don't think we have the luxury anymore of just putting the Ukrainians in front of us and letting them die for us, because I think the Russians are going to increasingly deter the Europeans more directly as well.
If you look at the path we've gone on over four years, it's hard to ignore that we're heading toward a war, and we're still not doing diplomacy — twelve years of this nonsense, sabotaging every diplomatic path, and we're still going to do it even now, potentially fighting the world's largest nuclear power. It's beyond insane.
Why European leaders have gone silent
Jeffrey Sachs: It is. And one wonders how this can happen in a world of open communication — our discussion, or the ability, thank goodness, that I can still publish an open letter in an important German outlet, the Berliner Zeitung. But what I can tell you is that our governments are in a bunker already. They don't talk to the public. They don't engage in any discussion of what we're discussing right now. They won't answer.
Of course, Chancellor Merz is not going to answer me — that goes without saying. But in general, they have simply hunkered down and operate without responsibility. It's hard to imagine, because we have all of the trappings of democracy, all the trappings of accountability. But I know, because I experience it daily — and you do as well — there simply is no response. If I call a senior official in the European Commission, I don't get an answer. I don't get a call back. They know who I am. I've been dealing with the European Commission for 40 years in one way or another. I've 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 propagandize in one direction and call the rest of us whatever names they want, or use sanctions or whatever they do — which they do occasionally against certain people.
What we don't have, even within our own countries right now, is open discussion. And this is just an explanation of how we go day by day with falsehoods hanging in the air, unresolved, because they don't try to resolve them. There are no independent inquiries, no commissions, no responses to parliament, no answers. It's a very, very dangerous situation, because the normal processes of truth-telling and analysis — and what diplomats are especially important for: understanding how the other side thinks and explaining that straightforwardly, and if there is something wrong with how the other side thinks, discussing it together with the other side to try at least to clarify — none of these processes happen right now.
I was invited by the host country at the time, which was Indonesia, to speak to the G20 foreign ministers. This was after the invasion. They would not speak with Foreign Minister Lavrov. So here are foreign ministers — it's their job, that's why they're there — and 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.
I don't really understand what the motivations are. People have various explanations. We can say the publics are disgusted by this. Broadly speaking, Merz's popularity is essentially in complete collapse. Macron's popularity is essentially in complete collapse. Starmer's popularity is essentially in complete collapse. It's not as if these people are expressing the will of their republics — absolutely the opposite.
And so then it raises all sorts of questions. Some people say, "Well, Merz — he's BlackRock." I don't know if that's the explanation or not. He's the German military industry. Who knows? It seems doubtful to me. These explanations are so simplistic. But frankly, I don't 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's sake — 450 million people in the European Union — find someone and get started.
Glenn Diesen: No, it's incredible. Again, we have diplomats who don't believe in diplomacy, leaders who ignore their basic national interest and seemingly have some contempt for their own public, and journalists who think it's their job to defend narratives. I think at the end of this, we also risk a legitimacy crisis when, as you said, they're not actually doing their jobs. Anyways, I hope we will have an opportunity to discuss some positive development in the future. Thank you very much — I really enjoyed your open letter, and I will leave a link to it in the description. I would encourage everyone to read it. Thanks again.
Jeffrey Sachs: Glenn, thank you so much. See you soon.