- 2 days ago
In this powerful lecture, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs argues that Donald Trump is not an accident in U.S. politics—but a symptom of America’s deeper geopolitical and demographic transformation.
Sachs says Trump represents a reactionary moment in U.S. history, driven by the loss of global dominance, shifting demographics, and the rise of Asian economic power. Calling Trump “the weirdest president the U.S. has ever had,” Sachs frames him as the outcome of a system in crisis, not the cause.
He explains why:
• The U.S.–China rivalry is not a two-sided war, but a U.S. temper tantrum over China’s success
• America is struggling with the end of Western dominance after 200 years
• Trump emerged as the backlash to Obama and a reaction to demographic change
• Global power is shifting toward Asia and Africa—and the U.S. is resisting the transition
• The real fragmentation isn’t global—it's the U.S. and Europe losing their place in the world
Sachs argues that Trump embodies America’s fear of decline, but also signals a deeper rebalancing of global power that cannot be reversed.
Do you agree with Sachs’ assessment of Trump’s role in U.S. decline?
Let us know in the comments.
Sachs says Trump represents a reactionary moment in U.S. history, driven by the loss of global dominance, shifting demographics, and the rise of Asian economic power. Calling Trump “the weirdest president the U.S. has ever had,” Sachs frames him as the outcome of a system in crisis, not the cause.
He explains why:
• The U.S.–China rivalry is not a two-sided war, but a U.S. temper tantrum over China’s success
• America is struggling with the end of Western dominance after 200 years
• Trump emerged as the backlash to Obama and a reaction to demographic change
• Global power is shifting toward Asia and Africa—and the U.S. is resisting the transition
• The real fragmentation isn’t global—it's the U.S. and Europe losing their place in the world
Sachs argues that Trump embodies America’s fear of decline, but also signals a deeper rebalancing of global power that cannot be reversed.
Do you agree with Sachs’ assessment of Trump’s role in U.S. decline?
Let us know in the comments.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00a major hinge moment in the world. I think everybody knows this. Everybody feels it
00:07worldwide. We can thank Donald Trump for clarifying how weird the world is.
00:14We gave you the weirdest possible president of the United States, just to underscore with an
00:20exclamation point, this is a different world from the world of the past. It is a world in which
00:29the United States is fading not only from rationality, but from its dominance of the last
00:3775 years. It's a world in which China, of course, has become a larger economy than the United States,
00:45a more dynamic economy, a more technologically sophisticated economy, actually, even though
00:52on conventional data, the GDP per capita of China is still only around one-third of the U.S. level.
01:04The fact is China is actually more advanced than the United States in many areas of infrastructure,
01:11of research, and of the 21st century technologies. And so this is the new economics that we are facing.
01:23I brought up my computer because I wanted to read you something to explain the kind of weirdness of
01:30U.S. policy to help you understand a little bit of what is going on in this U.S.-China war that traps
01:41all the rest of the world somehow in between the two giant economies. And if you'll permit me,
01:49I just wanted to read you one thing that was written 10 years ago that helps to explain where we are.
01:59Oops.
01:59So, and I spoke this morning just before coming here on a Zoom to Beijing, which was a U.S.-China
02:15roundtable to discuss why is there so much tension. And everyone was saying that, well, the two sides
02:24are in a war with each other and trade war and so forth, and we need to tamp down the tensions.
02:31And I said, it's not exactly like that. What is happening is the U.S. is having a temper tantrum,
02:39basically. It's not a war between the U.S. and China. It is the U.S. absolutely
02:47having a tantrum because China's become so successful. This is quite different from two
02:55sides fighting each other. This is one side acting like a four-year-old, and we've now elected a
03:06president who fits the role perfectly. But let me read to you, thank you, let me read to you
03:15a very interesting article if you want kind of illumination of the American mindset. It was an
03:23article written 10 years ago for the Council on Foreign Relations, which is the establishment
03:30institution in New York about U.S.-China relations. And I recommend people to read it. It's by Blackwell
03:41and Tellis, Robert Blackwell and Ashley Tellis. And it's called Revising, let me give you the exact
03:51name, Revising U.S. Grand Strategy Towards China. Published in March, I think it's March 2015.
04:05And I'll just read you a few excerpts, and then it will help you understand the geopolitics. It helps
04:13me understand the geopolitics entirely. So this is 2015. Blackwell, who was my colleague at Harvard,
04:21after he was at Harvard, went to become one of America's leading diplomats. He was ambassador to
04:28India and a very senior official in the United States. So what he says is rather authoritative
04:36here. It's not an academic speculation. It's an announcement about U.S. policy. And he says,
04:44since its founding, the United States has consistently pursued a grand strategy focused on acquiring and
04:52maintaining preeminent power over various rivals, first on the North American continent, then in the
04:59Western Hemisphere, and finally globally. Because, and then now I'm skipping, because the American effort to
05:07integrate China into the liberal international order has now generated new threats to U.S. primacy in Asia,
05:15and could eventually result in a consequential challenge to American power globally. Washington
05:23needs a new grand strategy toward China that centers on balancing the rise of Chinese power rather than
05:30continuing to assist its ascendancy. In other words, China's become big. We're number one. We better
05:39stop that. Very simply put. Going on, the meteoric growth of the Chinese economy, even as China's per
05:49capita income remains behind that of the United States in the near future, has already provided
05:55Beijing with the resources necessary to challenge the security of both its Asian neighbors and
06:02Washington's influence in Asia with dangerous consequences. Of all nations and in most
06:09conceivable scenarios, China is and will remain the most significant competitor to the United States for
06:16decades to come. China's rise thus far has already bred geopolitical, military, economic, and ideological
06:24challenges to U.S. power, U.S. allies, and even the U.S. dominated international order. Its continued,
06:34even if uneven success in the future, would further undermine U.S. national interests.
06:41Okay, this is, you could call it grim realism, which is, China is succeeding. That's bad.
06:52That's the American attitude. Not that China's doing anything pernicious or evil. It's just successful.
07:02Good. And if you're number one and the guy behind you is gaining on you or overtaking you and your mindset
07:13isn't how you're doing, but how you're doing relative to someone else, that is seen as dangerous. That's the
07:23American mindset. And what I like about this obnoxious article, because I just want to make clear, I find it
07:32completely obnoxious, but very accurate, I would say, is that America's goal is dominance, stated clearly.
07:44So if another country is rising or powerful or a pure competitor, that's per se bad. Now, as an
07:55economist, this is completely against everything I was trained and I've thought about for my entire
08:05career, which is that economic well-being is not a zero-sum struggle. So if one part of the world is better off, that
08:16doesn't diminish the rest of the world. In fact, the most formative document of economic ideas of the modern world,
08:28which will celebrate its 200th, 250th anniversary next year, is Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.
08:38It's actually a very good book, by the way. It's got a couple of flaws, which we could mention in
08:45discussion. But it's a book of pure genius and humanism also. But his basic idea is, the world helps each
08:56other. Different parts of the world trade with each other. This is mutually beneficial, not the American
09:02mindset. Mutually beneficial. And so a larger world market is good for everybody.
09:10And Smith had two very humane insights. One, he told the British, because he was writing, of course,
09:22in Scotland in 1776, don't fight with the Americans. Trade with them. Let them be independent. We don't need
09:32colonies. We just need free trade, because that's what makes us better off. So that was one very humane,
09:41idea, which, of course, King George III did not listen to. So there was a revolutionary war that lasted for
09:50many, many years. Incidentally, the war was actually won not by George Washington. It was won by the
09:58French, who saw an opportunity to undermine their rival, Britain. Again, a very European idea
10:07that we can hurt Britain by helping the United States. France did such a good job that they spent so much
10:14money, they went so deeply into debt that they had a revolution the next decade when their finance minister
10:20tried to raise taxes to pay off the debts that had been incurred in fighting the British in North America. But that's
10:27another story. But the point is that Smith said, let them go. We just need to trade with them. We don't
10:35need to dominate them. And the other thing that Adam Smith said quite wonderfully and very relevant for
10:40us is that he said it's my favorite paragraphs in economics, by the way, which you can find in the middle of the
10:49Wealth of Nations. He says that the two most significant events in the history of mankind are the voyages of
10:57Columbus, or he says the discovery of the sea routes to the Americas and to Asia from Europe. So the voyages of
11:06Christopher Columbus in 1492 and of Vasco da Gama in 1498. And he says in a very humane way, again, these events
11:17united the whole world. And in fact, unite the world for the first time of 10,000 years, because 10,000 years ago, the world was
11:26united over a land bridge between Asia and the Americas, which went underwater when the ice age ended, and the sea level
11:34rose. So Beringia became the Bering Straits rather than a land bridge. And so the world was divided between the old world and
11:42the new world. And then came these voyages. And Smith says this should have benefited everybody. Because each part of the world
11:50could help to meet the needs of other parts of the world, so we should have mutual benefit. And then he says, but it
11:58happened that European military superiority was so vast, that these meetings of the different parts of the world
12:07rendered devastation on the East and West Indies, the natives of the East and West Indies, he writes in 1776. And then he says, but some
12:20day, there will be a rebalancing of power in the world. And that will come about through trade. Because trade will
12:30spread ideas and allow the regions that are now under the domination of European rule to rise in power and
12:39reestablish an international justice based on an equality of force. So he wrote that 249 years ago. We're in that
12:49world now. We're actually literally international trade because that was the mechanism of China's rise
12:56is leading to the rebalancing of power. Okay, if you put these pieces together, basically what Blackwell and
13:06TELUS wrote in 2015 is the tail end of the Adam Smith story. It's a rebellion. It's a reaction
13:18of the last readout of Western imperialism against the rise of the rest of the world. And that's the
13:27period that we're in right now. We're in a reactionary period. And Trump is the ultimate reactionary
13:36president. In a literal sense, make America great again. What does that mean? It means let's return to
13:46the world of 1950 when America was the most powerful and white part of the world. So it's a racial reaction
13:57and it is a global power reaction. It's doomed to fail. We just don't want it to destroy anything else
14:08in the meantime. It can't succeed because Adam Smith is fundamentally correct in his 1776 insight that the
14:20world will rebalance over time. And the world has rebalanced. And also in the United States, to understand
14:29Donald Trump, understand that American demography has changed decisively. We were about 88% white and
14:41almost entirely European in 1950. Now the United States is, by the U.S. census definition,
14:52white means white non-Hispanic. So all of this place knows more about race than any place on the whole
15:01planet and classifications and all the weirdness and so on. But in the U.S., white means that you're not
15:09Hispanic or people of color of various sorts from African-American, Asian-American, and so on.
15:17And that white non-Hispanic category, which was about 88% of the population, is now 55% of the population.
15:28And it will be less than 50% by the 2040s. So Trump is the last reactionary response to that.
15:40He is literally created by Obama's presidency because he is the reaction to Obama. And Mamdani is the
15:53reaction to Trump. And by the way, Mamdani and Obama are the future of the country, just in a pure
16:02demographic sense. And so Trump is not the end of the story, but he is the weirdest part of the story we
16:10ever had. That's absolutely for sure. So where we are geopolitically is that the world is rebalancing.
16:20But especially what has happened is Asia's rise. And Asia has many different parts to it. And it's very
16:30interesting to attend to the different parts of Asia. And I won't do a long excursus about this, except to
16:40say that it's such a fascinating story because, of course, Asia is about 60% of the world population. So
16:48it's a lot of human history. But when European imperialism dominated Africa and Asia in the 19th
16:57century, one country in Asia escaped colonial rule in either a direct or indirect way. It nearly fell under
17:12colonial rule, but escaped it. And that was Japan. And it's a fascinating story. But Japan reacted to
17:21the arrival of American imperialism, actually, with the U.S. Navy showing up in Tokyo Bay in the 1850s by
17:31having a decisive, I call it a capitalist revolution in 1868 called the Meiji Restoration. And they said,
17:40we got to get our act together. Otherwise, we're going to fall under the sway of these Western
17:46barbarians. And they did get their act together in the most remarkable way. And one of the things they
17:53did, which is one of my favorite stories of economic history, is they sent, they didn't have the internet
17:58then. Connectivity was weak. So they established a commission in 1868 to tour the world to find out
18:08what were the best practices of the most powerful countries called the Iwakura Commission. And it went off to
18:15the world and came back with 18 volumes of observations about Europe and the United States and what to do. And they
18:22made radical reforms in the early 1870s. And that propelled the first industrialization of Asia. And they got so good
18:33at it that by 1895, they became an imperial power. So it was something in the mindset. It's actually also
18:45an incredible story. In 1894, Japan invaded China. And a Chinese diplomat said to his Japanese counterpart,
18:55why are you invading us? We're being attacked by the barbarians from the West, and you're attacking us.
19:04And the Japanese diplomat responded, oh, sorry, we have joined their club.
19:12That's a literal quotation from a wonderful book by Ezra Vogel about China and Japan facing history.
19:19And the Japanese became Western imperialists, wannabes, and invaded China repeatedly up until 1945 and
19:30colonized Taiwan and Korea and so forth. Anyway, back to our current events. This Asia dynamism started with
19:40Japan. Japan then became the imperial power of East Asia. It launched World War II in Asia.
19:49Asia, of course. They were absolutely brutal, by the way, stunningly brutal, with 10 to 20 million Chinese
20:00dying during World War II, a story very few people know. And I certainly did not know in detail until
20:10reading a wonderful book this year by a Harvard professor named Rana Mitter called The Forgotten
20:17of the World War II about what happened to China during World War II and how completely devastating that
20:24world was. But in any event, after World War II, Japan almost immediately recovered within a 15-year period
20:33because the United States rebuilt Japan with a lot of Japanese effort, of course, but rebuilt Japan to be a
20:41billwork against communism in East Asia. So the U.S. gave an extra hand. So that started the Asian
20:50recovery after World War II. Then came all the countries that followed Japan's example, how to grow
20:59rapidly. Because Japan invented a rapid growth strategy, first in the 1870s, and then they did it again after
21:08World War II. And it's a mix of state and market. It is state-guided market growth.
21:17And if it sounds familiar in China, it's because China learned it from Japan. Actually, China learned it
21:24truly from Singapore, which had learned it from Japan. So first came Japanese growth. Then came the
21:34so-called Asian tigers, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Then Deng Xiaoping came to power in China in
21:471978, had a long conversation with Lee Kuan Yew when he visited Singapore and implemented the Singapore model,
21:56I would say, which was the Japanese model, and implemented it so well that 1.4 billion people
22:04became a high-income, technologically dynamic rival of the United States within a 40-year period.
22:16And the next step of this is India, which is about 20 years behind China chronologically in the
22:27development. India looked over at China and said, what the hell is going on? We have to reform. And
22:34India began its reforms in the 1990s, opening up to the world, ending what they called the License Raj,
22:43which was a completely bureaucratic, mixed-up system. It opened up to large entrepreneurship,
22:51and starting in the early 2000s began rapid economic growth as well. And then two other regions that I
22:58would mention in Asia. One is Central Asia, which reached its pinnacle of economic influence in the
23:08year 1400, when the Silk Road was the dominant transit between Europe and Asia. But after Vasco da Gama,
23:18the great cities of Central Asia, Samarkand, Bukhara, and others fell into museum status, in a way,
23:26because their role in east-west trade was ended by the Suez Canal, by the Cape of Good Hope first,
23:35and then the Suez Canal in the late 19th century. But now Central Asia is saying, we're back again,
23:43because overland transport is actually quite efficient and much faster than the sea routes,
23:51and China's really good at fast rail. And so Central Asia is also experiencing
23:59a proto-boom, I would say, as the east-west connector.
24:05So this is still to be formed and to be solidified, but the so-called five stands of Central Asia,
24:15Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, are in the middle between Europe and
24:26Asia, and are regaining their historic ancient role as a land bridge between east and west,
24:35and that's propelling a lot of growth. And then the last major region of Asia to mention, of course,
24:42is the Middle East and especially the oil-rich Gulf. And this is a very rich region facing the quite
24:56complex challenge of global energy transformation when the livelihood has been hydrocarbons.
25:06But it's a rich part of the world, obviously, the entire Gulf region. So Asia is in a very dynamic
25:17state. It will remain so no matter what the United States does. And in this sense, it's not true
25:28to say that globalization has ended or the world is fragmented. There was
25:34the old saying of the British Empire that there's fog in the channel. The continent is isolated. That
25:50the center of the world was London. And if there was any division, it meant that the rest was isolated.
25:59I'd say that's basically the right description today, that the United States is becoming more and more
26:06protectionist and isolated and having a tantrum with China especially, but basically a tantrum that
26:18the age of U.S. dominance, which lasted about a half a century from 1950 to 2000, is diminishing
26:27and disappearing, in fact. And the idea that this means the end of globalization is completely wrong,
26:36because Asia by itself is 60 percent of the world population. Africa right now is 18 percent of the
26:45world population. And Africa and Asia are not fragmenting and isolating. Africa is in the process of
26:54creating the African continental free trade area and strengthening its relations with Asia in trade.
27:01And so what is fragmenting is the U.S. European role, which was dominant for two centuries between 1800 and 2000,
27:14and is no longer dominant in the world. So we're going to have a discussion and I'm going to close by saying
27:21the change of geopolitics is real. It comes from a fundamentally good point, which is that Adam
27:32Smith's prediction that there would be a rebalancing of the world is coming to be. The fragmentation is
27:40mainly the U.S. and Europe really having an existential crisis. You could call it a neurotic breakdown
27:51from the fact that several hundred years of dominance is coming to an end. And this is very hard
27:59to grapple with because the mindsets are very deep. And they're deep in Europe and the U.S. and anyway,
28:10everything the U.S. knows about bad behavior learned from the British, who were our tutors all along and
28:18taught everything about imperial behavior to the United States. We're just kids on the block compared to
28:25Britain in this regard. But this part of this age is coming to an end. The question, of course, on all of
28:34our minds is what about Africa's position in all of this? Africa has not had the kind of dynamic, sustained,
28:44high growth that Asia has experienced. And
28:49And we can discuss some of the reasons for that. But the real question is, will Africa follow
29:01this path of rapid growth over the next 40 years? My answer is yes. My assignment to you is to make it
29:13happen because there is a unique role of leading universities to make it happen. This is a knowledge
29:23led world. No question. And the knowledge is in the universities first and foremost. And so the
29:34universities are actually the key instruments of economic development. We don't have the taxing power.
29:43We don't have the ability to implement. But the knowledge has to start here. The training of young
29:51people has to start here. The vision of what to do has to start here. The knowledge technically of how to
30:00implement has to start in the universities. My view is that the next 40 years should be a period of 8 to 10 percent
30:10per year growth of Africa. Roughly twice the current rate.
30:19And that this is feasible. And that China is the proof of concept. And the best role model as well
30:29for how to get this done. And by role model, I don't mean exactly the political formation. China's political
30:37system doesn't date from 1949. It dates from 221 BC. So China's statecraft is centralized administrative
30:49statecraft ushered in by Qin Shiwangi in 221 BC and implemented and refined by the Han dynasty from 204 BC to
31:02220 AD. So don't try to replicate that exactly. That is on the basis of a lot of practice for 2000 years.
31:12Each place needs its own political culture. But what China has done is show how to plan, how to think forward,
31:20how to implement long term infrastructure strategies, how to dramatically raise the human capital in the population
31:28over two generations to make the cutting edge, high tech country right now, leading in most areas, in fact.
31:40And if you look, by the way, at the most innovative clusters in the world, Silicon Valley is number three on the UN
31:51WIPO list. Number one is Southern China, the so-called Greater Bay Area of Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Guangzhou.
32:00Number two is the Tokyo-Yokohama corridor. Number three is Silicon Valley. Number four is Beijing.
32:09Number five is Seoul. So this is an Asian phenomenon, very successful. But China figured out how to do that.
32:18Africa needs to do this in the next 40 years. And Africa is going to be 25 percent of the world
32:25population by 2050. And it's going to be 35 percent of the world population by 2100. So please get this
32:34right. You're going to be at the very center of the world. And you all know it, but I need to say it all
32:42the time. And let me just end here. It is, of course, always pointed out Africa has the youngest
32:50population. It's got a burgeoning young labor force. This is called the demographic dividend.
32:58It's not true, stated that way. What will make this a demographic dividend is if that is a highly
33:07educated young population. Otherwise, believe me, it will be a huge burden for young people and for
33:16society and for the world. What is needed here is above all is investment in education and not next year,
33:2710 years, 10 years, 20 years. But now that every child is in school, online, with a device so that
33:38they can participate in the digital learning and digital economy and that they're going to complete
33:47at least upper secondary education. But I hope that many of them come to Gibbs also
33:54so that they can learn entrepreneurship at the cutting edge. And please work all over Africa
34:02for this, because this is a continental scale that's needed. You're the third of the mega populations,
34:11China, India, Africa, all are 1.5 billion people. You'll be much bigger than China and India soon,
34:18soon enough. But 1.5 billion people, that's a big market to work for. That is all the gains of
34:28scale within the African continental free trade area. And I hope that a very strong university network
34:36in Africa, of course linked to partners with the rest of the world, but especially within Africa, can
34:44propel this unprecedented scaling up of quality education, knowledge, and technology across the
34:53continent. Thank you very much.
Be the first to comment