Interview: U.S. seeking hegemony by dividing world "dangerous" -- world-renowned academic

"We need peace and diplomacy, not provocation. I hope that the U.S. government reconsiders its dangerous and misguided foreign policy," said Jeffrey Sachs.

LONDON, Aug. 5 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. seeking to keep its position as the world's hegemonic power by trying to divide the world is "a strategy that is very dangerous and misguided," world-renowned academic Jeffrey Sachs has said.

The world already faces a series of major and destabilizing crises, one of which is the Ukraine crisis. It is the U.S. arrogance that blocked negotiations in 2021 between the United States and Russia that could have avoided the crisis, Sachs, a professor from America's Columbia University, said in a video interview with Xinhua on Tuesday.

"We need peace and diplomacy, not provocation. I hope that the U.S. government reconsiders its dangerous and misguided foreign policy," added Sachs, who wrote about the need for a change of U.S. foreign policy in a book entitled A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism.   

"I want the U.S. to have a foreign policy based on the UN Charter. I want all of global economic diplomacy to be based on the ideas of sustainable development and the Paris Climate Agreement, that is finding the ways to decent lives for people in all parts of the world," he said.

From 2001-2018, Sachs served as special advisor to the UN secretary general, for Kofi Annan, Ban Ki-moon and Antonio Guterres.

He was twice named among Time magazine's 100 most influential world leaders and was described by The New York Times as "probably the most important economist in the world."

In recent years, the United States has been escalating its containment of China through what Sachs sees as unilateral and provocative actions that are dangerously raising tensions between the United States and China.

"The goal of the United States is to weaken China and to mobilize an alliance against China. This is a huge mistake and very dangerous," he said.

Sachs said the pragmatic approach he favors would not be a position of politicians in one country telling another country how to operate domestically, or to say that there is one political system. Instead, a common set of objectives and standards and obligations under the UN Charter, should be supported.

"We need a world of peace, in which war is not used as state policy, and a world in which all countries abide by the UN Charter," he said, stressing, "We need cooperation first and foremost."

"We have a lot of things to do on this planet to make our global governance work better, to make the planet safer, to address major ills like pandemics or human-induced climate change. And that can't be done by one side dictating the answers to another," Sachs added.

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