Jeffrey Sachs: Pope whisperer The economist has undergone a conversion

Earlier this year, when Pope Francis suggested that Ukraine should have “the courage of the white flag” and negotiate with the Kremlin, the outrage that followed was swift and derisive. “Our flag is a yellow and blue one,” shot back Ukraine’s foreign minister. “Ukrainians cannot surrender because surrender means death,” thundered the nation’s Greek Catholic Church which, on theological matters, is aligned with the Vatican. A regional expert commented that the only party that needed courage was His Holiness — “to negotiate with Lucifer the surrender of the Catholic Church”.

Amid the indignation, however, few were willing to ask what — or who — compelled Pope Francis to weigh in on the matter. If they had, they would have stumbled across the work of an influential figure who, it’s no exaggeration to say, is at the heart of the Vatican’s foreign policy.

Jeffrey Sachs, a world-renowned economist at Columbia University, has been an informal advisor to the Vatican for about a decade. Best known as the author of several books on poverty and climate change, his anti-American views, which entail blaming the US for Russia’s invasion, have seen him largely ostracised in academic and policy circles. Today, you’re more likely to catch him being interviewed by Tucker Carlson than a prestigious journal.

“The Pope is correct that negotiations require moral courage,” Sachs wrote to me in an email last April. “Zelensky showed that in March 2022, but was dissuaded by the US,” he added, reiterating the disputed account that the US and the UK forced Ukraine to turn down an almost done deal with Russia that would have ended the war. “Now, in my personal view, the US should show moral courage in recognising its mistake of pushing Nato enlargement.”

Although Francis has balanced his pacifist statements by occasionally praising “brave” Ukrainians, and has tactically backtracked following waves of criticism, the parallels between the Pope and Sachs on foreign policy are striking. Since the 2022 invasion, the Pontiff has said that “Nato barking at Russia’s gate” ended up “facilitating” Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, has celebrated the legacy of the “great, enlightened Russian empire”, and has managed to alienate even Ukrainian Catholics. It is perhaps no surprise that, in Kyiv, the Vatican is largely considered pro-Russian.

On the war in the Middle East, meanwhile, Sachs has lamented that “the US is complicit in the genocide in Gaza”, while the Holy See described Israel’s response to October 7 as “inhuman” less than a week after Hamas carried out its attack. Sachs’s friendliness toward Xi Jinping’s China — he assured that, unlike in Gaza, no genocide is under way in Xinjiang — also dovetails with the current position of the Holy See, which signed (and then renewed) a much-discussed agreement with the regime.

And as Vatican officials and scholars advising the Holy See have told me, these converging views are no coincidence. They point out that Sachs was credited as one of the main authors of Francis’s 2015 encyclical Laudato si on the environment, and advised the Holy See on topics such as sustainable development, the climate crisis and economic inequality — striving to provide a scientific framework to the Pope’s moral authority. For years, he has been lecturing and consulting with top Vatican officials, reportedly visiting Rome as often as twice a month. The 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti on fraternity and social friendship took up the themes of solidarity and the multipolar world that Sachs has devoted himself to in recent years. In 2021, he was named a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, a prestigious academic body assisting the Church in developing its social doctrine. Pretty impressive for a non-Catholic raised in a Jewish family.

“The Pope relies on many advisers on political and economic issues, but certainly Sachs’s influence on the Pope’s inner circle has grown significantly during the last two years,” one Vatican aide told me. According to another official, Sachs’s ability to affect the debate also depends on his formidable fundraising power. Every year, he organises and chairs three major seminars in Rome on topics that Francis holds dear, and he works with donors and partners in order to cover the costs. In March, for instance, he set up a workshop named the Summit of the Future, aiming to link “fraternal economy” and “sustainable development” in a crossover that resembles a mixture of a Gospel and a UN brochure. The event was co-chaired with the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, a UN nonprofit created and still run by Sachs.

One of his long-term collaborators is Andrea Illy, CEO of illycaffè, the Italian coffee company known for championing social responsibility. Together they chair the Regenerative Society Foundation, an organisation comprising NGOs, academics, the private sector and “spiritual leaders”, which promotes a whole revolutionary socio-economic model. Illy has assisted Sachs in bringing questions of sustainable development to the forefront of papal matters, having been a speaker at one of Sachs’s workshops in the Vatican.

Among the main promoters of Sachs’s involvement in the Vatican is Stefano Zamagni, a professor of economics at the University of Bologna who led the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences from 2019 to 2023. “Sachs has no special access to the Pope,” Zamagni told me, “but his immense knowledge and authority is recognised by everyone. Because of that, the documents he prepares carry a lot of weight, and the Pope, whose background is not very solid, certainly reads them carefully.”

Zamagni concedes that Sachs is sometimes too extreme, but that’s just a “matter of style, not substance”. Yet Sachs is sure to convey his anti-US views on every available platform, including the TV show of Vladimir Solovyov, Putin’s chief propagandist. Elsewhere, the most aggressive tabloid of the Chinese Communist Party routinely interviews him on major geopolitical issues in order to “counter Western media’s malicious distortions”.

In his quest to become a Western spokesperson for the Global South, he blames the CIA for global turbulence and purports that Covid came out of a US lab. Sachs even floated the idea that the ISIS-K terrorists behind the Crocus City Hall attack in Moscow in March 2024 were acting on behalf of the US, as Washington routinely “engages in Jihadi-linked terror, and has done so for decades”.

“He used to be a mainstream economist and made many mistakes,” Zamagni said, referring to the early Nineties, when Sachs and others administered in Poland so-called “shock therapy” — dramatic economic policies employed to suddenly unleash market forces in state-controlled economies — and advised Russia to follow suit. “People don’t say that, but in Russia one million people died as a result of taking away health care coverage granted under the Soviet Union,” Zamagni said. In the end, the lost sheep rejoined the flock.

Sachs was named a professor at Harvard at the age of 28, received 42 honorary doctorates, filmed a documentary with Angelina Jolie, advocated for massive foreign aid to developing countries, applied scientific development principles to rural villages in Africa, fought to end poverty, partnered with George Soros, and worked with Bono in Africa at the height of the musician’s humanitarian career. Like many others before him, Sachs wanted to save the world. He also thought he knew how to do it. Soros believed Sachs had “a certain messianic quality about him”. He would eventually find in Pope Francis a leader who was the epitome of the principles he pursued all his life.

“My sense is that there was a turning point in his life,” Zamagni said. “I believe he went through a crisis and came out enlightened,” he added, praising the conversion-like journey that turned Sachs from torchbearer of neoliberal orthodoxy to leading advocate of the Global South. Others, though, see his apparent shifts as coherent elements of a technocratic framework.

“Sachs’s support for an unregulated free market in the early Nineties may seem to run counter to his current admiration for Xi’s China and other illiberal regimes, but it’s actually consistent with a mindset that puts efficiency before political debate,” says Nadia Urbinati, a professor of political theory at Columbia and colleague of Sachs. “Sachs and others want to reform democracy in order to make it more efficient. The idea, which is increasingly popular, is that democracy’s decision-making process is slow, troublesome and irrational, and therefore needs to be corrected with tools taken from autocracies and hybrid regimes,” Urbinati explained.

These days, Sachs seems desperate to be credited as a prophet of the Global South’s rise against the corrupt — and rapidly collapsing — world order shaped by the West. The very order Sachs worked so hard to build, before realising it was the work of the devil. Perhaps he has found in the Pope the moral inspiration required to re-launch himself into a new endeavour to fix the world’s shortcomings. In the end, the shock therapist, the humanitarian idealist, the conspiracy theorist, the renowned scholar, the messianic thinker and the enabler of autocrats are all facets of the man who thought he knew how to save the world.

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Mattia Ferraresi is the managing editor of the Italian daily Domani and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard ’19. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Foreign Policy, and other media outlets.

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