Last weekend, Sen. Carlo Calenda of the Italian Republic cut off American academic Jeffrey Sachs mid-sentence. “You’re lying,” Calenda said flatly. Sachs looked extremely offended. The clip went viral because Calenda refused to treat Sachs’s sophisticated falsehoods as credible arguments.
Sachs is a professor at Columbia University. In the early 1990s, he advised Russia during its transition from the Soviet economy. He argued that the West should provide major financial support to stabilize the country. When the transition went badly and oligarchs captured the economy, he blamed the United States for not delivering enough aid. He seemed to forget that Russia’s collapse came from decisions made in Moscow, not elsewhere. This point, like many other Russian actions subsequently, escaped him. Instead, he now casts Moscow as a victim of Western policies.
