Jeffrey Sachs on United States

“The U.S. has had, by now, two startling wake-up calls: back to back years of falling life expectancy and declining measured subjective well-being . . . A public policy response built around well-being rather than corporate profits would place the rising addiction rates under intensive and urgent scrutiny, and would design policies to respond to these rising challenges.”

“Piers Morgan: You're always very keen to take a view, even if they're unproven, that is anti-American. You're never quite so keen to take a view that is anti-dictator. ... Jeffrey Sachs: It's not whether they're dictators or not, it's what the United States' role is. I don't believe that any country can arrogate this task of bringing down other countries' governments. The CIA has been involved in probably 90 or 100 covert regime change operations since it was founded in 1947. My whole life has been the United States at war. It's sickening. It's tiring. These wars are disasters. It's just not our business to say, "That one's despicable. That one has to go."”

“In 1845, John O’Sullivan coined the phrase “Manifest Destiny” to justify and celebrate America’s violent annexation of North America...On the basis of such exalted views of its own beneficence, the US engaged in mass enslavement until the Civil War and mass apartheid thereafter; slaughtered Native Americans throughout the nineteenth century and subjugated them thereafter; and, with the closure of the Western frontier, extended Manifest Destiny overseas. Later, with the onset of the Cold War, anti-communist fervor led the US to fight disastrous wars in Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) in the 1960s and 1970s, and brutal wars in Central America in the 1980s.After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the evangelical ardor was directed against “radical Islam” or “Islamic fascism,” with four US wars of choice – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya – all of which remain debacles to this day. Suddenly, the supposed existential threat of radical Islam has been forgotten, and the new crusade targets the CPC.”