Jeffrey Sachs - The Real Roots of Hegemony

“I want to take it back to the 1840s, to the real roots of hegemony, which is Great Britain.

There was never a hegemon with such ambition and a curious view of the world.

But Britain wanted to run the world in the 19th century and taught America everything it knew.

Recently, I read a fascinating book by a historian named J.H. Gleason, published by Harvard University Press in 1950. It’s a fascinating book called ‘The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain.’ The question is, where did England’s hate of Russia come from? Because it’s actually a little surprising. Britain has HATED Russia since the 1840s and launched the Crimean War that was a war of choice in modern Parliament—a war of choice by Palmerston in the 1850s—because it hated Russia. So, this author tries to understand where this hate came from, because it was the same kind of iterative hate that we have now.

And by the way, we hated the Soviet Union because it was Communist, but we hated Russia afterwards when it wasn’t communist. It doesn’t matter. So, it’s a deeper phenomenon, and he tries to trace where this hatred came from. The fascinating point is, Russia and Britain were on the same side in the Napoleonic Wars from 1812 to 1815, from the Battle of Moscow in Russia to Napoleon’s defeat in Waterloo. They were on the same side, and in fact, for many years, the relations weren’t great, but they were kind of normal. So, this historian reads every snippet of the newspapers, what’s written, of the speeches, to try to understand where the hatred arose.

The key point is there was no reason for it. There was nothing that Russia did. Russia didn’t behave in some perfidious way. It wasn’t Russian evil; it wasn’t that the tsar was somehow off the rails. There wasn’t anything except a self-fulfilling lather built up over time because Russia was a big power and therefore an affront to British hegemony. This is the same reason why the US hates China: not for anything China actually does but because it’s big. It’s the same reason, until today, that the United States and Britain hate Russia—because it’s big.

So, the author concludes that the hate arose around 1840 because it wasn’t instantaneous, and there was no single triggering event. The British got it into their crazy heads that Russia was going to invade India through Central Asia and Afghanistan—one of the most bizarre, phony, wrongheaded ideas imaginable—but they took it quite literally. And they told themselves this: ‘We’re the imperialists. How dare Russia presume to invade India?’ when it had no intention of doing so.

So, my point is, it’s possible to have hate to the point of war and now to the point of nuclear annihilation for no fundamental reason.

Talk to each other.”

Excerpt from remarks by Professor Jeffrey Sachs, American economist and academic, in an interview with Alex Christoforou and Alexander Mercouris for The Duran YouTube channel, April 4, 2024.