India should count China as friend, not US, says Sachs at Nobel laureates’ college
Times of India | 23 December 2025
Kolkata: India should cooperate with China and not trust the US, said economist Jeffrey David Sachs on Monday at Presidency University, formerly Presidency College, the alma mater of two Nobel laureates, Amartya Sen and Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee.
"My repeated advice to my Indian friends in Delhi is do not trust the US. Stand on your own. Have your own interests but also peacefully cooperate with China. China is not an enemy. Mr McMahon is an enemy of stability because he did what the British always do. He stirred up trouble and arbitrarily created a line," said Sachs at a colloquium at A K Basak Hall, organised by Presidency University and Presidency Alumni Association. He was referring to the McMahon Line, the disputed boundary between the Northeast (Arunachal Pradesh) and Tibet (China), established by the 1914 Simla Convention between Britain and Tibet, named after British negotiator Sir Henry McMahon. China has rejected it as the de facto boundary.
Sachs, a professor at Columbia University and a global leader in sustainable development, feels Indian foreign policy should focus on South Asian stability and effective diplomatic cooperation with China. He also called for diplomatic solutions to border disputes, especially with China, to explore cooperative opportunities and "figuring out that line in the Himalayas".
Acknowledging sustainable development saw some progress, Sachs pointed out the pace was slow and it was becoming more vulnerable to current turbulent and dangerous global politics. he said, "Politics is more fraught than before, a considerable threat towards sustainable development. Diplomacy and engagement are missing due to deeper political forces and intents at play to provoke the unstable international system."
Criticising US interventionism, especially in Ukraine, the Middle East and Taiwan, Sachs called for diplomacy to be the solution to curtailing such realist foreign policies and inducing multilateral engagement. "I spent decades on this idea that we should turn our goals into practical politics, which then will help move the world in the direction we want," Sachs said, urging students to develop and harness tools and technology to move towards a favourable future.
"Students should build a vision of what's possible ahead of political lobbies and propaganda," he said. The economist also pointed out six challenges faced by India to accomplish sustainable development goals: improving educational facilities, public health nutrition, energy transformation pertaining to global warming, land use transformation, urban sustainability and learning to live in the digital age.
Sachs, who was a major critic of Trump's domestic and foreign policy, critiqued the steep decline in the US state of affairs, especially with the Trump administration being a tipping point, endangering multilateral engagement and sustainable development. He critiqued how Trump called climate science a "hoax" at the UN, making it partly performative to complement the corrupt US oil lobby. "It's partly a measure of ignorance, shamelessness and recklessness that puts all the pieces together of how dangerous this time is," Sachs said.