Politics & Power Quote by Jeffrey Sachs

There is a tell in Sachs's phrasing: "in a sense". It’s the diplomatic throat-clearing that signals a hard truth is coming. By riffing on Woodrow Wilson's "make the world safe for democracy", Sachs frames intellectual property not as neutral legal plumbing but as an ideological export project. The line turns a wonky policy agenda into a geopolitical doctrine, and that move is the point: it exposes how trade rules can function like foreign policy by other means.

The intent is to puncture the self-congratulatory story advanced by U.S. negotiators and corporate lobbies in the late 20th century, especially around the WTO's TRIPS agreement, when patent and copyright standards were globalized through trade pressure. "Made safe for American ideas" sounds benevolent until you notice the asymmetry. "American ideas" here are not just inventions; they're a system of ownership and enforcement tailored to an economy that already sits on deep R&D pipelines, venture capital, and global distribution. Once other countries adopt that framework, the competitive terrain tilts toward incumbents.

Subtext: this wasn't simply about rewarding innovators; it was about locking in advantage and converting innovation into rents. The phrase "our very innovative economy" carries a mild irony, because the innovation becomes the moral alibi for rules that can restrict access to medicines, raise costs for late-industrializing countries, and criminalize the improvisational copying that historically helped today's rich nations develop.

Sachs is also implicating a broader American habit: translating national interest into universal principle, then calling the enforcement of that principle "progress."