Trump's Military and Intelligence Purge

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Speaker 1 Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor.

Speaker 2 I'm Ben Rhodes.

Speaker 1 Taylor Swift got engaged. I feel like we should lead for that for SEO, if nothing else.
Yes, some AI.

Speaker 3 That

Speaker 1 long away to date. How are they feeling about Travis?

Speaker 2 I mean, I think they'll basically follow Taylor's lead in anything, right? Taylor says he's okay. I guess he's okay.

Speaker 2 As a Jets fan, I'm not sure about that, but it is what it is.

Speaker 1 I'm happy for him.

Speaker 1 I like Travis Kelsey. It's funny to watch his evolution over time if you've been paying attention for a while.
He had a different vibe. He had a different vibe.
He had a different vibe.

Speaker 1 He's very wholesome now. Yeah, I'm happy for him.
And look, good for them. They're also

Speaker 1 a podcast competitor to us.

Speaker 2 Well, they crushed us. How much crossover do you think there is between us and the Kelsey podcast?

Speaker 1 Like one dude by accident.

Speaker 1 Because you were talking about the Jets.

Speaker 1 Also, Ben, I just, I wanted to point out, I think you and I were both chatting about this this morning.

Speaker 1 Trump fired a member of the Fed's board of governors based on basically like totally unproven allegation of mortgage fraud.

Speaker 1 And I kind of thought that like screwing around with the Fed or threats to fire Jerome Powell might finally make the stock market freak out. But I just checked and the S ⁇ P is up on the day.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's unnerving.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of

Speaker 2 rational exuberance over there. I mean, there's the same people over there that thought that

Speaker 2 packaging a bunch of shitty mortgages was a good way of running the entire global economy.

Speaker 2 So I don't know that I put all my confidence in the rationality of the markets to understand why having no independent central bank is maybe a bad idea, but we'll see.

Speaker 1 Like ultimately, they're sort of pricing and risk

Speaker 1 and future returns. And I feel like creeping authoritarianism might make you worry.

Speaker 2 They're also projecting their version of rationality onto Trump, which is always dangerous, I think.

Speaker 1 Yeah, very true. Well, we got a great show for you today.

Speaker 1 We are going to cover the FBI raid on John Bolton's home, the impact of Trump's firing of the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the general purge of top military and intelligence leadership that's been ongoing for, what, six, eight months now.

Speaker 1 We're going to talk about why the Israeli military fired two tank shells at a hospital in Gaza, killing five journalists and 20 people total.

Speaker 1 We'll talk about the response from Barry Weiss and the editors at the Free Press to our segment last week calling out their editorial, calling out their bullshit, the latest on the ceasefire talks in Gaza, such as they exist, and an odd connection between political spending by APAC here in the U.S.

Speaker 1 and a pro-crypto group. Very interesting story in semaphore news.
Then we'll talk about Trump's meeting with South Korea's new president and why. I don't know about you, Ben.

Speaker 1 It made me feel deeply embarrassed. Did you watch a lot of this availability?

Speaker 2 I did. I always

Speaker 2 watch these clips of Trump, and sometimes I forget that there's a foreign leader there because it could be anybody. It could be like some random CEO.
It could be Kid Rock.

Speaker 2 And every now and then he's going on and on about windmills or something. And there's just like some very important foreign leader just sitting there having to listen to it.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And we played a clip of it yesterday on Padsai of America.

Speaker 1 And you can hear the translation happening and something about hearing those words translated into Korean and like knowing that the South Korean leader is just like wincing hearing this crap.

Speaker 2 And it's probably playing like live on South Korean television too. So that's just getting a window into our insanity.

Speaker 1 Did you see that they had a cabinet meeting that I think went on for three hours today?

Speaker 2 I did. Every now and then I went online and saw some new clip circulating of people praising Trump.

Speaker 2 So that's not.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's like Steve Wickoff.

Speaker 2 I have a theory about this, by the way. Just a quick theory.

Speaker 2 I'm going to try it on the World of Is here, which is that, you know, did you see Trump say, like, oh, I'm president of Europe or, you know,

Speaker 2 people want a dictator? And

Speaker 2 I think all these people suck up to him, right?

Speaker 1 Some of them.

Speaker 2 European leaders.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 CEOs, like, you know, people who want things from him flatter him, right?

Speaker 2 The problem is he believes all of it.

Speaker 1 Totally. Right.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 just think about the psychology of being told constantly how absolutely brilliant you are and completely believing it.

Speaker 2 I think we're trapped in a feedback loop where the flattery is actually, you know, accelerating the craziness because why wouldn't, you know, the head of NATO called him daddy, you know, said that was great.

Speaker 2 You know, so there's a danger to us all from this flattery.

Speaker 1 I'm just

Speaker 1 I think we should start nominating a fluffer of the week.

Speaker 2 Steve Witkoff, I got it.

Speaker 1 I think of it this week. We're also going to talk about Europe's desperate effort to get Iran back into nuclear talks, why Australia just expelled all the Iranian diplomats from the country.

Speaker 1 Crazy story, yeah. Super interesting story.
And then you'll hear my conversation with Franklin Nassiter from the Crisis Group. So he's a Senegal-based terrorism analyst focused on the Sahel region.

Speaker 1 Over the last few years, Ben, or many years now, like we have talked about all these coups in the Sahel region, the growing threat of these sort of like ISIS-linked or al-Qaeda-linked extremist groups.

Speaker 1 So it was just interesting to talk to an expert about the impact. So I think you'll like this a lot.

Speaker 1 And then at the end of it, Frank was like, he mentioned that he had actually worked in American politics. He worked on John Aussoff's campaign

Speaker 1 in 2020. Hey.
And I was like, so, wait, how did that all happen? Go to Sahel.

Speaker 1 I was like, you was like, American politics was so bad that you decided, like, I got to go back to this ISIS tracking? He's like, actually, yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, this is better. This is better.
It's a better environment for my mental health.

Speaker 1 So, uh yeah anyway go cool guy interesting conversation uh check that out and then other uh friends of the pod subscribers will get to hear some questions uh we'll answer some questions from the crooked media discord if you want to join go to crooked.com slash friends to be part of it so anyway fun group you also get ad-free listening lots of other perks yeah check it out all right ben so on the show we focus on foreign policy obviously but we also like to keep an eye on the kind of creeping authoritarian movement that is mega for a lot of personal reasons for professional reasons.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of data points this week. We've got armed troops in the streets in D.C.
We got pending troop deployments to Chicago and other liberal cities.

Speaker 1 But we're going to focus on last week's FBI raid on the home of former Trump National Security Advisor and longtime neocon, John Bolton.

Speaker 1 Bolton has been a fierce Trump critic since leaving the administration.

Speaker 1 Initially, It seemed like the raid on Bolton's home was just a continuation of the prior investigation Trump launched into the publication of Bolton's memoir in 2020.

Speaker 1 Trump claimed Bolton's book had classified information in it.

Speaker 1 Bolton said he got the book cleared, and that this was just an obvious attempt to prevent the publication of material that might be embarrassing to Trump.

Speaker 1 The investigation kind of seemed like it went away when Trump lost the election, but this raid clearly revived it or something broader.

Speaker 1 Then, though, the New York Times added a weird wrinkle over the weekend when they reported that the raid on Bolton's home was based in part on intelligence collected overseas by the CIA, which CIA Director John Ratcliffe then passed on to FBI Director Cash Battell.

Speaker 1 That raises some large legal and ethical questions since the CIA is barred from collecting intelligence on American citizens.

Speaker 1 However, there are processes that allow the CIA to pass along information it gathers to law enforcement for prosecution.

Speaker 1 According to the Times, the search was approved, though, by two separate judges,

Speaker 1 and it's seeking to determine whether Bolton illegally shared or illegally possessed classified information.

Speaker 1 So, Ben, like with every investigation about classified shit, like it's so murky and hard to understand or like read through the lines of these reports.

Speaker 1 To me, it seems like an obvious case of Trump retaliating against a critic. But do you have theories about this weird report about like the CIA's role in maybe precipitating this raid?

Speaker 2 Look, first of all, it wasn't a great week for authoritarianism watch. I mean, we've got

Speaker 2 troops in the streets. We've got the independence of the central bank being compromised.
We've got ICE being turned into kind of a mega militia that serves Trump's interests. You know, we could go on.

Speaker 2 I just noted as someone wrote a book about the authoritarian playbook a few years ago. This is, we're well beyond it.

Speaker 2 You know, Trump has kind of smashed through the kind of soft authoritarianism and is kind of skipping ahead to the scarier stuff. So let's just keep that.

Speaker 2 And that's relevant to the Bolton thing because I think we have to start from the premise that I don't think that there's any way. just one man's opinion, keeping on the right side of the lawyer,

Speaker 2 that this is an organic investigation. And

Speaker 2 in other words, that Bolton is being targeted because of some natural development of a case.

Speaker 2 And the reason I'd give for that is that while the federal agents were storming his house, Cash Patel was tweeting, you know, nobody's above the law, like we're on the case.

Speaker 2 And he doesn't do that for normal investigations of, you know, whatever level of crime this is. So

Speaker 2 this does feel like it's in the wheelhouse of retribution and the weaponization of the justice system against his enemies. That's the first thing.
The only other thing I'd add to this,

Speaker 2 you know, you guys have talked about this on Potsave America.

Speaker 2 I definitely agree with the fact that Trump likes to start with somebody like a John Bolton that nobody really, you know, has no constituency beyond kind of never Trump Republicans and, you know, hat tip Tim Miller, like the

Speaker 1 Bullwork podcast.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I don't know. Immediate family.
But nonetheless, it's worrying and it's also, it's not just a message to everybody, including people like us, right?

Speaker 2 It's particularly a message to people that work for Trump. Because remember, what Bolton did, his original sin was working for Trump and then leaving and trashing him.

Speaker 2 And I think Trump is going to be going the extra mile

Speaker 2 to make sure that there's no more, you know, anonymous, remember that from Trump One, no more John Bolton, no more witnesses at the first impeachment, you know, Fiona Hills.

Speaker 2 He's not hiring those people to begin with, but also I think this is meant to send a message that like if you turn against him from the inside,

Speaker 2 the justice is coming quick, you know, I think.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and this is a thing you see from a lot of authoritarians. Yes.
Right. Like if you are

Speaker 1 a Russian military leader and you become a source for the U.S. and you move to London, you're getting that's who falls off a balcony.

Speaker 1 That's who they go after first, right? So I like, that's my gut on what a lot of this. But I I guess I didn't realize that a judge from the U.S.
District Court for D.C.

Speaker 1 had written at the time that he was, quote, persuaded that defendant Bolton likely jeopardized national security by disclosing classified information in violation of his non-disclosure agreement obligations, and that Bolton, quote, has gambled with the national security of the United States.

Speaker 1 Now, you find the right judge who's enough of a stickler, they will, I think,

Speaker 1 overreact

Speaker 1 to

Speaker 1 the occlusion of conversations about things that are technically classified, but are widely reported on and known. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, look, there are a couple. So, to answer your question on the CI piece of this, it better be something kind of

Speaker 2 tangible because

Speaker 2 there are actually all kinds of regulations about what type of information. This came up with the NSA, too, right? I mean, the NSA, technically,

Speaker 2 remember when the Snowden disclosures happened, when we were in government, I was in all these meetings about what happens to all this bulk collection.

Speaker 2 That's the mass surveillance collection, where essentially, in order to be able to spy on certain emails, the NSA is kind of vacuuming up all this stuff.

Speaker 2 And one of the points that was made is that if you mined everything in the NSA or CIA's collection, you'd catch some crimes.

Speaker 2 And there was actually like, and I'm not claiming to be the expert on this, but there's like a hierarchy of things.

Speaker 2 Like, so for instance, child sex trafficking, for instance, is the kind of thing where the wall can break down, right?

Speaker 2 But you're not necessarily supposed to just kind of check, you know, put in John Bolton into a search and then, like, every single thing that was collected, look for some criminal activity.

Speaker 1 He had bought weed in like 86.

Speaker 2 So we don't know. I mean, John Bolton has done some weird things in the past, like the kinds of things that Rudy Julian has also done.

Speaker 2 Like he was a paid spokesperson for the MEK, that group that was trying to overthrow the Iranian government. You know,

Speaker 1 a lot of people are flagging that he did some work for Qatar. He did

Speaker 2 as half the Trump administration.

Speaker 1 Exactly, as did Pambondi, as did Cash Patel, as did all these goobers. Who knows? It sucks that we're all speculating on this.

Speaker 1 Again, I think this is clear-cut retaliation, but it's like, I don't want to carry water for a guy who I just, I don't know the facts.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm not carrying water either way.

Speaker 2 To your point, there's an interesting

Speaker 2 question here, which is, look,

Speaker 2 let's take a hypothetical, right? Like, not even apply it to us. You know, someone who served in the Obama administration could go to some conference, you know,

Speaker 2 in some country after they're in government, and someone could ask them about drone strikes, which are technically all classified. And so if you

Speaker 2 read a newspaper on it, yeah, if you say anything, you know, about drone strikes, somebody might say, oh, wait a second, you know, and this is the selective use of,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 essentially, do you say, well,

Speaker 2 this is why it's dangerous to say, like, I want to get John Doe, you know, and therefore I'm going to like check all the information we have about John Doe.

Speaker 2 And if I find even a hint of him like, you know, emailing some European about like something about Ukraine in 20, you know, Bolton was in government in, what, 2018.

Speaker 2 If John Bolton was like, yeah, we wanted to give them the, you know, anti-tank weapons in 2018, like, could you say that was somehow a classified conversation? Maybe. And so

Speaker 2 what I would look for when the information comes out is, does it feel like they worked backwards from the objective of prosecuting John Bolton?

Speaker 2 Or does it seem like there's, whoa, there's some investigation that led to John Bolton?

Speaker 2 This feels right now like they're kind of working down a list of people and they tried to find something on the gut.

Speaker 1 Yes, I totally agree.

Speaker 1 And so the other sort of related thing that happened last week, which again would have been a massive scandal in the before times for Trump, was when Secretary of Defense Pete Hexeth fired Lieutenant General Jeffrey Cruz, who's the head of the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Speaker 1 The DIA focuses on military intelligence. It's the component of the intelligence community that's within the military.

Speaker 1 Ben and I used to love flipping through this DIA product called the Defense Intelligence Daily, or the DID, because it was all.

Speaker 2 Nobody called it the DID except you and me. Okay,

Speaker 1 it was all cool pictures of like, you know, foreign missiles and military formations and shit, whatever. It was interesting.

Speaker 1 Pistol Pete also fired two senior officials of the Navy, including the head of Naval Special Warfare, the guys who oversee the Navy SEALs. It's a big deal.

Speaker 1 The DIA head was fired very soon after Trump flipped out about a leaked preliminary DIA assessment that the U.S.

Speaker 1 military strikes on Iran's nuclear sites only set back their nuclear program for a few months. Remember, Trump had claimed that they were totally obliterated.

Speaker 1 That, by the way, is obviously not true. We will talk in a minute about the diplomacy between the Europeans and Iran over the nuclear program that shows that the problem is not solved.
But anyway,

Speaker 1 Ben, it does seem like another instance here,

Speaker 1 this firing of the DIA chief of Trump retaliating against officials who are not critics, just people who state facts that contradict him.

Speaker 1 But also, like, I just, as I was thinking about this, when you zoom out and you think about the totality of national security officials who have been purged in eight months, it is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, fired for being black, literally.

Speaker 1 Head of naval operations, fired for being a woman, Commandant of the Coast Guard, the head of the NSA, the National Security Agency, fired because Laura Loomer. figured out his name.

Speaker 1 The top leaders of the Air Force were fired or resigning.

Speaker 1 Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard fired the leaders of the National Intelligence Council for releasing an assessment about, I think, a trend de Aragua that was politically inconvenient for Trump.

Speaker 1 Like the totality of this is scandalous, yes, but also is going to have a massive impact on the makeup of the military and the intelligence community.

Speaker 2 No, we've never seen anything like this, you know, not even just post-Watergate reforms.

Speaker 2 On the Iran point and then on the other firings, the Iran point is so important, and not just because like we focus a lot on Iran in this podcast, roll back the tape to what we know happened on Iran based on reporting, which is that Tulsi Gabbard herself said that Iran was not weaponizing their nuclear program.

Speaker 2 She was literally rebuked by Trump publicly and changed her line and said, you know, I was wrong about that or whatever.

Speaker 1 After she testified before Congress.

Speaker 2 After she testified before Congress. So the message goes to her, like on this issue of Iran, the the facts, quote-unquote facts, are whatever Trump wants them to be.

Speaker 2 Then he bombs them. The whole question of whether it is the right policy to bomb the Iranian nuclear program depends on two things.

Speaker 2 Did you succeed in totally destroying their program, obliterating, as Trump said, and going forward, will we be able to see, you know, if the Iranians start to try to build a covert nuclear program?

Speaker 2 Now they've fired someone.

Speaker 2 This person didn't even write the report. This person didn't leak the report.

Speaker 2 This person just ran the agency that produced the battle assessment or the initial one that said something that Trump didn't say and that Pete Hexet didn't say, which is that, which, by the way, which any analyst of Iran's nuclear program that I

Speaker 2 trust over the years has said, which is that because these facilities are complex, they're underground, you can't obliterate them in one night of airstrikes.

Speaker 2 It just looks literally, you'd have to, I don't know, hit the jackpot far beyond anybody could have been able to do it.

Speaker 1 Also, we know that Trump was presented with a much more expansive set of military strikes that would have lasted weeks.

Speaker 1 and he said no and he opted for this smaller version which again tells you that there was an option on the table that they thought may have been able to totally obliterate Iran's sugar program that's right and and and so

Speaker 2 the reason this is so dangerous is that the message is now out whether you are a line level analyst writing the report or the head of an agency, your job is to give Trump the facts that he wants.

Speaker 2 Right. And so because of that, we will just never be able to trust,

Speaker 2 like whether it's Iran or any other issue, that the information that they're giving us, that they're using as the basis for their policies, is true information.

Speaker 2 And just to take the Iran issue, like, how on earth can we trust the battle assessment or the question of future weaponization? Trump might have an interest.

Speaker 2 By the way, this isn't even me trying to guess where it's going to go, because he might have an interest in acting like he solved the problem and the Iranians pop up with a nuclear weapon, or he may have an interest in going back in the war and he's saying they just don't know.

Speaker 2 And so flying blind like this and having the world's most powerful military make decisions about who to go to war with and who to bomb based on just the information Trump wants to get is incredibly, incredibly dangerous.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it is bad. You see, Tulsi apparently is promising to cut the DNI budget by 50%.

Speaker 1 I assume that means like not just the intelligence community budget, but like the actual DNI's office, which probably not hard to do once you decide that like all you're going to do is confirm Trump's priors.

Speaker 1 Yeah. But there's also, even before that, probably some room for some savings.

Speaker 2 Well, and the other thing that I think should scare people here is as they kind of move down this purge, right?

Speaker 2 These roles like that people overseeing the Navy SEALs, these are incredibly powerful roles that operate very much in the shadows. Yes.

Speaker 2 You know, and so we don't know what the Navy SEALs are doing or what U.S. Special Forces are doing.

Speaker 1 Most elite members of the military. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Everything we know about Trump and Hegseth would suggest that they want to turn those kinds of capabilities into kind of instruments of Donald Trump's will and interests.

Speaker 2 And so it should really concern people that, not that like, you know, in a kind of MSNBC, like every national security professional sacrosanct way, but this is a purge.

Speaker 2 Like we, we now have enough evidence that they,

Speaker 2 and you know the kind of people that they're putting in there are MAGA people.

Speaker 2 And so between like a militarized ICE and a US military that is being turned into kind of a MAGA extension of Trump,

Speaker 2 especially elite capabilities like special forces, like what is this gonna look like in two years? You know, and what might Donald Trump want to do with those capabilities?

Speaker 2 Whether that's strange things in Greenland or the Panama Canal, or whether it's the United States.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 as a good DIA analyst will tell you, the trend line is not good. Yes.
Speaking of which, Ben, let's turn to Gaza.

Speaker 1 On Monday, the world witnessed, basically live, this horrific massacre in Gaza after Israeli forces repeatedly shelled the Nasser hospital in southern Gaza, killing 20 people.

Speaker 1 So this happened at about 10 a.m. Gaza time.
An IDF tank fired at the hospital, sort of in an area near its operating room. That strike killed at least one person.

Speaker 1 Then, a bunch of first responders and some journalists rushed to the scene to help the injured and to cover the story.

Speaker 1 And then, about 10 minutes later, the IDF fired again, and five journalists were among that second group killed. They had worked for outlets like Reuters, the AP, Al Jazeera.

Speaker 1 They were Stringers from many others. This is what is known as a double-tap strike.

Speaker 1 It's when a second airstrike or an IED or whatever you know, munition targets the same location after a long enough delay between the first and second strike where you have responders showing up.

Speaker 1 A double-tap strike on hospital is the kind of thing you would expect from ISIS or maybe Bashar al-Assad or Putin,

Speaker 1 sort of the worst despots.

Speaker 1 Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu took to Twitter to say, quote, Israel deeply regrets the tragic mishap that occurred today at the Nasser hospital in Gaza.

Speaker 1 Israel values the work of journalists, medical staff, staff, and all civilians. The military authorities are conducting a thorough investigation.

Speaker 1 Our wars with Hamas terrorists, our just goals are defeating Hamas and bringing our hostages home. End quote.
We're going to explain in a bit why that statement is top-to-bottom bullshit.

Speaker 1 So on Tuesday, Ben, the IDF released its first kind of explanation of what happened.

Speaker 1 They said their forces were targeting an observation camera that had been put on the roof of the hospital by Hamas to track Israeli troop movements.

Speaker 1 CNN reported that Israeli troops had the authorization to fire some sort of smaller drone munition at the camera, not a tank shell.

Speaker 1 The IDF, of course, has not released any evidence to prove the existence of the camera. But again, just Ben,

Speaker 1 even if this story is true, like to me, this just encapsulates all the problems with the Israeli military's rules of engagement.

Speaker 1 Because as we've discussed 18 months ago now, like it's a war crime to attack a hospital or fire in a hospital.

Speaker 1 If you deem there is some sufficient military necessity or value to do so anyway, the bar has to be really, really high. And an observation camera doesn't cut it.

Speaker 1 It doesn't require a military strike, like let alone two tank rounds, especially when the IDF has a constant pervasive surveillance pointed at these targets at all times.

Speaker 1 Like they knew these responders were there.

Speaker 1 So I don't know, it's like we just, we also know, like back to Netanyahu's statement, hundreds of journalists have been killed in Gaza, hundreds of first responders have been killed, hundreds of medical workers.

Speaker 1 This, to me, looks like a 100% intentional strike. Like, it seems like a double-tap that did what it was designed to do.

Speaker 1 The problem for Netanyahu and the reason he released the statement is because it was filmed live and the world saw so clearly what happened.

Speaker 1 And so, we will probably never know all the truth since the IDF, they promised to use investigations and that accountability almost never leads to anything.

Speaker 1 But, like, I just, I don't know that we need that.

Speaker 2 This was a war crime. And, and, and that is a fact.
I mean,

Speaker 2 a double-tap strike that kills journalists and first responders is a war crime. You might not like that.

Speaker 2 You may say, well, Hamas is doing this or that, but you're arguing with a fact, you know, as is so often the case in Gaza now.

Speaker 2 Like, there's not a world in which that's, you know, even if you think that the Hamas camera

Speaker 2 is a target, you're still saying that it's okay to commit a war crime to take out this camera, right? So

Speaker 2 that's the first thing.

Speaker 1 Why not send like a couple, like a battalion of troops, not battalion, a bunch of troops to the roof to get the camera and take it down?

Speaker 1 Yeah, you could do any,

Speaker 2 yes. I mean a tank shell?

Speaker 2 Yes. I mean, there's other ways.
This is why they're war crimes, you know, so that you have more proportional use of force if you have like a target like that.

Speaker 2 The other thing I'd say is that this kind of weirdly reminded me, you're right, because this was on camera, it caused some uproar and Netanyahu said something on Twitter at least.

Speaker 2 But it kind of followed that pattern of earlier in the war. It kind of reminded me, Tommy, where there was that hospital bombed, Al-Shifa Hospital, I think.

Speaker 2 And then the next day we heard that the Pentagon, the Hamas Pentagon was under

Speaker 1 fake digital rendering of what it looked like.

Speaker 2 All of the defenders of the Israeli government get all up in arms about, you know, how

Speaker 2 just this was.

Speaker 2 And it's enough to just make the story go away. It's enough to create like a he said, she said around it.

Speaker 2 So instead of the story being like, hey, everybody just saw war crime, the story becomes like, hey, this horrible thing happened, but Israel says there was a Hamas camera.

Speaker 2 And then people argue about that. And then, you know, people move on, right? And so to me, that is clearly what is happening here.
There's no sincere

Speaker 2 interest in some form of accountability on behalf of the IDF here, right?

Speaker 2 It's just like, how can we get through this news cycle by spinning that there's like a Hamas camera or one of these journalists, you know, they'll call Hamas or they'll call people like me Hamas, you know, who are criticizing them, right?

Speaker 2 It's just it's all bullshit. And the world sees this for the bullshit it is.
There's a shrinking number of people, though, who are completely invested in believing the bullshit.

Speaker 2 If you still believe that this is a military operation, get back the hostages, I really don't know what to say to you.

Speaker 2 The Israeli government tells you all the time it's not.

Speaker 2 They want to, quote, take over Gaza. They want to ethnically cleanse Gaza.

Speaker 2 Nothing they're doing is designed to rescue rescue hostages.

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Speaker 1 So let's talk about some of those, you know, kind of final defenders of the Israeli military campaign, Ben.

Speaker 1 So last week, we talked about an investigation from the Free Press, that's Barry Weiss's publication, about images of starving kids in Gaza.

Speaker 1 The Free Press team found instances where coverage of these images of these starving kids didn't note that some of the kids or that the kids had preexisting conditions, which in some cases were like cerebral palsy.

Speaker 1 Now, every famine expert will tell you the sick, the elderly, people with preexisting conditions, those are the people who die first in the famine, always.

Speaker 1 But the clear intent of the story was to suggest that the omission of the pre-existing condition is evidence that reports of the famine were overblown and/or that the media coverage was dishonest or biased, right?

Speaker 1 Like everyone, that was obviously the takeaway they wanted from it. So, two updates

Speaker 1 that we did that segment.

Speaker 1 First, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, which is the horrible acronym, but it's a global system created by the UN and a bunch of NGOs to classify food insecurity globally.

Speaker 1 They have confirmed that Gaza City and its surrounding areas are experiencing a famine. So, that's about 500,000 people.
What that means in practice is starvation, death, acute malnutrition.

Speaker 1 So no lack of clarity there. No context missing there.

Speaker 1 And then second, Ben, the free press folks responded to our criticism, criticism from many others, with a not-at-all defensive editorial with the headline, Journalists Against Journalism, which they released on the day that Israel fired two tank rounds at a bunch of reporters, killing them, which is a...

Speaker 1 tough look, but neither here nor there. Now, it's a long editorial.
I won't get into all of it. You get mentioned by name.
I'll leave that part to you.

Speaker 1 But one just sort of factual thing I wanted to take issue with is they write, you'll, this is a quote, you'll notice one important aspect about the uproar. No one is disputing the facts in our piece.

Speaker 1 Instead, they take issue with the facts we have exposed. They take issue with the curiosity that points in the wrong political direction.
End quote. Now, that is not at all true.

Speaker 1 The first critique we had about their piece is we talked about a specific case they cited, which is a 14-year-old boy whose quote-unquote precondition was they had a chunk of his skull blown off by an Israeli airstrike.

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 1 I guess you can call that a precondition. I'm not a doctor, but whether it's starvation or the IDF military campaign itself, that boy is dying because of the Israeli government's policies and actions.

Speaker 1 All the kids are. Everyone in that story is.
Like, I don't care if you have cerebral palsy and you can't get enough food, or if you're perfectly healthy and you can't get enough food.

Speaker 1 You're dying because you are starving. And so, like, I am fine with the free press or anyone providing as much context as possible about what's happening in Gaza.

Speaker 1 If there's like sins of omission in their mind, by all means, report it. But we're not stupid.

Speaker 1 Like the broader intent of that story was to suggest that the media is biased, that reports of famine are overblown, and like it is very clear who it benefits, which is why we saw BB Net and Yahoo literally tweet out their response to the response, the free press's response to the response earlier today.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think that you make the most important point, which is that

Speaker 2 it's actually a sign of famine that people with pre-existing conditions are beginning to die of malnourishment because, as famine experts will tell you and have said again and again, and the Free Press ignores this, when famine hits, the first people to really be devastated are people with vulnerabilities.

Speaker 2 And by the way, as you point out, some of those vulnerabilities are created by Israel, like traumatic brain injuries from airstrikes.

Speaker 2 So it's not some gotcha to point out that people with pre-existing, kids with preexisting conditions are starving, okay?

Speaker 2 It's actually confirmatory of the fact that this is the first wave of famine that has now been confirmed by the IPC, right?

Speaker 2 And there's no engagement with the international expertise that is being brought to bear to make these determinations. The second thing is this idea that this is just all about doing extra journalism.

Speaker 2 is such complete utter bullshit.

Speaker 2 Is the free press going to

Speaker 2 scour the internet for pictures of starving kids in Darfur and check whether the starving kids in Sudan have pre-existing conditions?

Speaker 2 Are they just assigned themselves the pre-existing conditions in famine beat for children? I mean, is that, does anybody truly believe that they are motivated principally by

Speaker 2 like an ombudsman for journalists on this?

Speaker 2 Because if they were, they might give a shit about the hundreds of journalists that have been killed in Gaza.

Speaker 2 If your real interest was in the integrity of journalism, maybe the safety of journalists, including the five that got killed, I mean, this is what drives me the most insane about this: is that

Speaker 2 we would be led to believe that somehow the victims in all this are the free press.

Speaker 2 The victims are the kinds of people that just got killed in a double-tax strike, and it was a war crime in Gaza. That leads me to the last point:

Speaker 2 yeah, in their snarky shots at everybody that has called them out, they reiterated, you know,

Speaker 2 my Hamas, you know, quote unquote nickname, right?

Speaker 2 First of all, if you've listened to this podcast, I have never said anything nice about Hamas.

Speaker 2 I'm not a fucking fan of Hamas, okay?

Speaker 2 And you're taking like a jokey story I actually put in my book about Ram Emmanuel calling me Hamas one time because he's Ram Emmanuel and he was fucking kidding around.

Speaker 2 But here's the point. Here's why this matters.

Speaker 2 Because actually, to them,

Speaker 2 you read the editorial, they said we have a political interest.

Speaker 2 What do they think the political interest is?

Speaker 2 They would, in their minds, I'm sure they think their political interest is some compulsion that is against the Israeli government.

Speaker 2 That's why they can kind of denigrate me by calling me Hamas or dehumanize me by calling me Hamas.

Speaker 2 It's unfathomable to them. that your interests might just be that you don't want kids to starve to death.

Speaker 2 Like that to me is actually what is so depraved about this and it leads back to what I was saying last week that probably triggered them when I described this as sociopathic, but they cannot accept that there are people out there, like let's just take Miss Rachel, for example, right?

Speaker 2 There are people out there who just, their political interest in this is not about the borders of a Palestinian state or about the origins of Zionism.

Speaker 2 That people might just have an interest that these kids not starve to death.

Speaker 2 And that if you have an interest in spotlighting this horrific thing that is happening to these children because you want to stop, that that makes you indistinguishable from Hamas.

Speaker 2 That is just, I reject that. That's not true.

Speaker 2 And there's a whole industry of people that are just designed to make any concern for the humanity of Palestinians indistinguishable from being supportive of a terrorism, right?

Speaker 2 And enough people are getting sick of this. I wish more Democrats who are elected would get sick of this.

Speaker 2 That's why we're coming back to this, because this is kind of illustrative of a much bigger problem where sympathy with children starving to death is somehow seen as like a

Speaker 2 beyond the pale, you know?

Speaker 1 Yeah, like, look, yeah, to your point on like first principles, I don't want kids to starve to death.

Speaker 1 I don't want my tax dollars to be used to purchase tank shells that get fired at hospitals that massacre journalists.

Speaker 1 I don't want instances of anti-Semitic violence to increase because this war in Gaza is dragging on and on and on.

Speaker 1 I don't want extremist groups to attack Americans in the future because we are fully funding this war. Right.
These are all things I think is going to happen.

Speaker 1 And the free press, again, one of the greatest things they could do to try to live up to this name that they have given themselves would be to advocate for the government of Israel, who is a fan of their own

Speaker 1 to let in journalists. Let in fine.
Without an IDF minder.

Speaker 2 If you don't trust these Palestinian journalists, then

Speaker 2 why don't you advocate to let in real journalists and not in some kind of Potemkin embed? Dude,

Speaker 1 beyond just the Potemkin embed, you're starting to see like Prager U kind of producers and shit. Like I saw this guy doing like a two-bit kind of root ball impression by a bunch of anyway.

Speaker 1 It's the weirdest shit I've ever seen.

Speaker 1 But because we actually do care about reporting and context, we wanted to play for you an excerpt of a conversation Crooked Media's own Matt Berg had with a woman named Annalise Stevenson when she's an American critical nurse currently working at Nasser Hospital in Gaza talking about what she's seen.

Speaker 4 There's a lot of skepticism, I think, in the general population about the way that media covers things. You know, there's always this concern that media is sensationalizing in order to get more views.

Speaker 4 I just want to reassure people that this is not a case of media sensationalization.

Speaker 4 If anything, the details and the horrific things that are being done here are not being covered in enough depth or as widely as they should be.

Speaker 4 The scope of what's happening here, even being here and seeing it with my own eyes, is unbelievable.

Speaker 4 So people should understand that what they're seeing seeing on the news, if they're horrified by it, that's only a small fraction of what's happening. There are multitudes more

Speaker 4 like horrors and injustices and atrocities that are occurring every day in Gaza, every day, every minute, every second.

Speaker 1 The reality of what she's talking about there, that scale, is why the Israeli government won't let journalists in.

Speaker 2 And why would somebody working for the free press with an internet connection in the United States know better what's happening in Gaza than that person?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, that's what that's just what it is. Or these journalists.

Speaker 1 Anyway, all right, Ben. So, also, last week, by the way, if you want to hear more from Matt Berg, subscribe to the What A Day newsletter.

Speaker 1 You can go to crooker.com, sign up there, or you can sign up on Substack, but he's doing great work. All right, Ben.

Speaker 1 So, last week, we also talked about reports that Hamas had accepted a ceasefire framework based on what Trump's golf buddy turned diplomatic envoy Steve Witkoff had proposed earlier this summer.

Speaker 1 It's a framework that Netanyahu had agreed to, I think, back as recently as June or July. It has sort of been 10 days since Hamas agreed to this deal, and Israel has just decided to not respond.

Speaker 1 That's been their response or is ghosting everyone.

Speaker 1 This proposal is a phased release of hostages, a temporary pause in fighting, and that kind of type of deal was the only thing Netanyahu was willing to accept for like 22 months until a few weeks ago.

Speaker 1 He just did this 180, and now he's completely changed his approach, and he's demanding a comprehensive, war-ending deal that would would release all the hostages at once, but also force Hamas to basically unconditionally surrender.

Speaker 1 So, this kind of goalpost moving from Netanyahu to avoid getting to yes has been a hallmark of his negotiation with Hamas and with the international community.

Speaker 1 Former State Department spokesman for Joe Biden, Matt Miller, outlined kind of the Biden team's experience and frustration with Netanyahu over this kind of bullshit during an interview he did with Israel's Channel 13 News, which is part of like a broader documentary about the war war and the peace negotiation or the ceasefire negotiations.

Speaker 1 Let's listen.

Speaker 5 There were times that we very much wanted to go public and make clear that we thought the prime minister was being completely intransigent and making it tougher to get a deal.

Speaker 5 But we discussed it amongst ourselves and we made the decision that it wouldn't accomplish anything. And if we had seen it in a number of cases, Sinoir

Speaker 5 pull back from negotiations when he thought there was division between the United States and Israel.

Speaker 5 And so we wanted to speak very toughly to the government of Israel behind closed doors, but ultimately not do anything that we thought would make it harder to get to a deal.

Speaker 5 We never endorsed a proposal that went to Hamas that Israel had not signed off on. No.
They were always looking for ways to

Speaker 5 add conditions or

Speaker 5 make the terms more difficult. The Secretary was laying out all of our concerns to the Prime Minister and to the rest of the War Cabinet.

Speaker 5 And he said, without a plan for the day after the conflict, you're going to be bogged down here fighting this war for years and decades to come.

Speaker 5 And the Prime Minister said, you're right. We are going to be fighting this war for decades to come.

Speaker 5 That's the way it's been.

Speaker 5 That's the way it's going to be.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so it's worth watching the full piece from Channel 13.

Speaker 1 I appreciate Matt kind of laying all that out there because there's other Biden administration officials in the interviewed for this piece who are just sort of toe-of-the-party line, which is like Hamas was the only impediment.

Speaker 1 They blocked every deal, et cetera.

Speaker 1 Obviously, you know, Matt outlines analysis and decisions there that we said at the time we didn't agree with, like this idea that you should only criticize or disagree with Netanyahu privately and not publicly.

Speaker 1 But like, I just sort of appreciated him laying it all out like that.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I look, I'm glad he's at least talking it through.

Speaker 2 I mean, we covered all the shortcomings in that logic at the time.

Speaker 2 I would just say that

Speaker 2 the idea that

Speaker 2 there's this kind of paralysis that you sense in the Biden administration,

Speaker 2 there's a lot that we could talk about, but the one thing I'll just say is that they would always say, like, well, if we criticize them, it might not work.

Speaker 2 Well, not criticizing them demonstrably never works.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 2 So, like, it's trial and error here, guys, right?

Speaker 2 The only other thing I'd say to just introduce a new component to this so people understand Netanyahu is what became clear to me when I was in government, and I think I can say clear to our boss, Barack Obama.

Speaker 2 Netanyahu always wanted to be in talks with the Palestinians, right? I think people don't remember this. Like, Netanyahu would always be like, yeah, let's have a peace process, you know?

Speaker 2 And actually, it was usually Abu Mazin who was like, I can't enter this peace process unless I can show my people something.

Speaker 1 Like a settlement freeze.

Speaker 2 Yeah, like a settlement freeze, right? And the reason is, because as long as he was in a negotiation, he could appear reasonable internationally.

Speaker 2 But he never had any interest in reaching a deal.

Speaker 2 The purpose was to have a negotiation, have endless talks and changing conditions and shifting goalposts until after the John Kerry process collapsed in 2014, Obama's like, I'm not chasing a deal with someone who has no interest in one.

Speaker 2 I say that to make the point that this is not new from Netanyahu.

Speaker 2 Like, he has a very long-standing strategy where I'm in ceasefire talks, and there's drama, and there are meetings in Qatar, and there are meetings in third countries, and Barack Ravid's going to tweet out like sirens about

Speaker 2 background quotes about how we're close or, oh, no.

Speaker 2 And like, that is all part of the same show. And it's not restricted to post-October 7th.
This is how Netanyahu has acted since the 90s. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And it's a churn.

Speaker 1 And I think you sort of made the point at the time that, unfortunately, a lot of the focus on just getting a limited ceasefire deal took the place of like pressure on the Israelis to end the war permanently.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You know, and he's very.

Speaker 2 And the Biden people walked right into this trap. You know, like everything was about like a ceasefire that the Israeli government had no interest in reaching.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 One final thing in this bucket of issues we wanted to flag, Ben, was you guys have heard Ben and I express our frustration with AIPAC many, many times on the show.

Speaker 1 APAC is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Speaker 1 Semaphore had a fascinating report about how the crypto lobby, which contributed to campaigns through a bunch of super PACs, one is called Fair Shake.

Speaker 1 They appear to be aligned with APAC in its 2024 campaign spending.

Speaker 1 So Semaphore notes that in 61 out of 65 races, the crypto lobby and APAC overlapped in contributions, a move that clearly wasn't a coincidence.

Speaker 1 According to a source who said that Fair Shake, quote, they take a lot of their cues from AIPAC. So Fair Shake, the crypto PAC, they deny this.

Speaker 1 And it's just worth noting, like, the crypto lobby is preparing to spend up to 140 million or maybe even more in the midterms. So Ben, I just thought this was really interesting

Speaker 1 because there's this growing backlash to APAC and the Democratic Party that is partly because of the unyielding support they demand for Netanyahu and US weapons shipments to the Israelis to be used in Gaza, but also because APAC keeps jumping into Democratic primaries and going after progressive Democrats by using these other DMFI and other PACs to run attack ads on Democrats on unrelated issues.

Speaker 1 And there's that kind of tactic, but hearing about this kind of tag team work between this sort of shady,

Speaker 1 very

Speaker 1 well-resourced crypto world and APAC reminded me of some anxieties I've heard from progressives who are worried that like APAC might change strategies this cycle and try to hide some of its spending either through partnerships like this or by dispersing its money to other PACs.

Speaker 1 So it's just something to watch.

Speaker 2 Yeah, because I think there's a couple of things to say about this. One is that we've already seen APAC or kind of, you know, groups like the Democratic Majority for Israel.

Speaker 2 When they run ads against their targets, they often don't make them at all about Israel, right?

Speaker 2 So you wouldn't wouldn't know that this is like about, you know, because right now I think the last poll I saw said something like 8% of Democrats support what Nanyal is doing, right?

Speaker 2 So people won't want to make those ads in Democratic primaries.

Speaker 2 So the first thing is they hide the money by essentially making it look like, you know, ex-candidate is bad for some other reason has nothing to do with the reason they're spending the money, which is dishonest, but that's politics.

Speaker 2 But the other part of the problem here is that there's a constellation of groups, of interest groups, that have figured out that Trump can be good for their interests, right?

Speaker 2 The crypto industry because they want deregulation and no enforcement, APAC because they want a blank check for Israel, and on down the line.

Speaker 2 And the point is that all of those groups, you know, not just APAC, but all of those groups, are part of the reason why we are currently living in an authoritarian police state that is emerging, right?

Speaker 2 And if you're a Democrat, you should not accept money from, you know, some shady crypto firm firm that is like kneecapping your colleagues. But the same thing should apply to AIPAC.

Speaker 2 Like, there should not be a carve-out where it's like, well, you know, we're against the pro-Trump authoritarians on all these other things, but we kind of need this support over here. Right.

Speaker 2 So the point is that let's see this for what it is because it's not subtle.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, like, these crypto packs, look, the crypto industry was just like ripe for the picking for Trump. We all should have seen this coming, right? Because they're like,

Speaker 1 you have like all this constellation of billionaires, this massive market cap for Bitcoin and others, and a very urgent need for favorable regulation, right?

Speaker 1 Or lack thereof. Or lack of regulation, right? And so, if you can buy access to a politician, like of course, Trump's your guy, obviously.

Speaker 1 But also, these crypto packs went after some really great Democrats, like Katie Porter here in California, Sherrod Brown, right? He got like 40 million dumped on his head by this crypto pack.

Speaker 1 And look, I don't know what the connection is between these crypto packs, Fair Shake and AIPAC. I hope there's a lot of, I hope reporters will dig into it.

Speaker 1 And I hope other Democrats who are like, you know, get support from FairShake or other crypto packs will press them on that.

Speaker 2 But here's the connection, because to me, it's simple. The connection is they want a Republican Congress and they want Trump in office.
And this is why it's so dumb for Democrats to be like, well,

Speaker 2 APAC will leave me alone. They'll leave you alone, but they'll make sure

Speaker 2 they'll try to make sure you will, until they won't, and they also want you in the minority, right? Because they don't trust Democrats as much as Republicans. So

Speaker 2 it's just staring you in the face if you're a Democratic leader. And too many of them, as evidenced by this DNC vote today where they kind of took the

Speaker 2 Democratic majority for Israel line, like too many Democrats still think this is like 1998 or something.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there has been some movement on this. I saw Congressman Adam Smith today said he called on Trump to stop the sale of some offensive weapon system to Israel as leverage to push for a ceasefire.

Speaker 1 He previously had not done that, but he said that like the situation in the Middle East has changed because Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah, they have all been weakened. right? So you're seeing progress.

Speaker 1 You saw a lot more Democrats voting for resolutions put forward by Bernie Sanders to cut off weapons shipments.

Speaker 1 It is a sea change from 2019 or 2020 when you and I were kind of trying to work people on this.

Speaker 1 But it's still way behind where the base is. But yeah, I think Democrats have to be clear.
We should not be taking money from APEC.

Speaker 1 The time to like the we should give Israel no more leash to continue this.

Speaker 2 Offensive weapons, I mean, the fact that we're even still, like, what are these weapons for? Like, what?

Speaker 1 Hamas is decimated.

Speaker 2 Hamas is not, like, that's the other thing. It's not like there's masses of Hamas troops, you know, like,

Speaker 2 explain to me what's left to be targeted here.

Speaker 1 There's no security

Speaker 1 basis for this war anymore. Just they need to cut a deal and get these hostages home.
And Democrats need to try a different strategy and just cut off weapons shipments, like, if we can.

Speaker 1 Anyway, we're going to take a quick break, but before we do, we've got some great news for you guys.

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Speaker 1 Let's change gears, Ben. So on Monday, South Korean President Lee Jong-young was in Washington for the first time as president.
That meeting, he met with Trump Trump in the Oval Office.

Speaker 1 That meeting included like the standard ass kissing, promises to invest in the U.S.,

Speaker 1 along with a press conference, which per Trump's new kind of,

Speaker 1 I don't know, approach, they do it before the meeting actually happens, which drives me crazy because they don't talk about what they agree to.

Speaker 1 And then in this instant, I don't know if you watched it, Ben, like it was so logistically stupid because

Speaker 1 there was no infrastructure in the Oval Office for simultaneous transactions.

Speaker 1 So everything took forever. So anyway, for context, right, like South Korea, one of our closest allies in Asia, the U.S.
has 28,500 troops stationed in South Korea. The U.S.

Speaker 1 has had a free trade agreement with South Korea in place since 2012, which the Trump administration has just decided to ignore or pretend it doesn't exist because we're slapping tariffs on them.

Speaker 1 So, that's a very important, substantial relationship.

Speaker 1 This meeting also comes on the heels of this period of enormous political instability in South Korea, including former President Yoon-suk-yule's declaration of martial law in December of 2024, and then the subsequent impeachment proceedings of him and others.

Speaker 1 But so, like, despite all this tumult and the importance of the relationship, like, Trump doesn't care about anything or anyone but himself, and just decided to, like, roll grenade after grenade into the conversation.

Speaker 1 Before the meeting even started, he posts on Truth Social, quote, this is all caps. What is going on in South Korea seems like a purge or revolution.
We can't have that and do business there.

Speaker 1 I'm seeing the new president today at the White House. Thank you for attention to this matter.
Three exclamation points. And like, there's no context there, what he's talking about.

Speaker 1 He later sort of explained that he was referencing reports of like raids on churches, the search of an American military base.

Speaker 1 And we later learned for context, the church raid was part of an investigation into this kind of like January 6th-style storming of a courthouse in support of President Yoon Suk Yule.

Speaker 1 The military base search took place on the Korean part of a base jointly operated by the U.S. and South Korea.
But, you know, Trump didn't care about any of that.

Speaker 1 And then, Ben, here's a supercut we made of the like the pool spray itself for the press conference that takes place at the pool spray.

Speaker 1 The first voice you're going to hear is the Korean translator answering a question about the investigation into his predecessor because of this martial law declaration. Here's a clip.

Speaker 7 There is a fact-finding investigation by a special prosecutor that was appointed by the National Assembly.

Speaker 8 And this special prosecutor named Derange Jackson, by any case.

Speaker 8 They took him from our country.

Speaker 8 Deranged Jack Smith. He's a deranged, sick individual.
I would say that Washington, D.C. right now is much safer than Seoul.

Speaker 8 You know why? Because we have a friendly neighbor. We have more friendly neighbors.
You have a different kind of problem. We all have different problems.

Speaker 8 Would you go back to the DMZ to meet with the North Korean leadership? I loved it.

Speaker 8 Remember when I walked across the line and everyone went crazy? Especially Secret Service? I would say they would all went crazy.

Speaker 8 And I looked into those windows. You know know, the windows, the glass,

Speaker 8 that you could only see if you looked direct, because there was all sorts of stuff. But I looked in and I saw more rifles pointing at me than you could.

Speaker 8 There were a lot of rifles in that building. If you remember, you were doing the Olympics and there was a great time of hostility with North Korea, and you weren't selling tickets

Speaker 8 because nobody wanted to be blown up in the stadium during the opening ceremonies. The whole issue of

Speaker 8 the women, comfort women, very specifically, We talked, and that was a very

Speaker 8 big problem for Korea, not for Japan. Japan wanted to go,

Speaker 8 they want to get on,

Speaker 8 but Korea was very stuck on that.

Speaker 1 Okay, so the person chortling in the background at the top is J.D. Vance, by the way.
So, Ben,

Speaker 1 the South Koreans, they come to this meeting, they're hoping to win Trump over by promising this massive investment into shipbuilding.

Speaker 1 But I think that clip we displayed is so instructive because you hear Trump just vomiting out nonsense and cracking jokes about the most sensitive issues possible for South Korea.

Speaker 1 Like he makes South Korea's martial law declaration and concern about a possible military coup about himself and Jack Smith. He makes a joke about North Korea bombing the Olympics in Seoul.

Speaker 1 He talks about the legacy of Korean women being forced into sexual slavery by Japan and doesn't seem to understand why that was more of an issue for the Korean side than the Japanese side.

Speaker 1 It's just like he's just riffing in the most offensive way humanly possible.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I, you know, I apologize to the people of South Korea. It's so embarrassing.
It's so embarrassing.

Speaker 2 And look, we should say President Li, the new president of South Korea, has done a pretty good job, by all accounts, at kind of stabilizing the situation there, trying to reach out a little bit to the opposition, move past that incredibly divisive period they went through.

Speaker 2 So the point is, though, that it's not only just like a normal meeting with the president of South Korea.

Speaker 2 They've just been through some shit. It's dicey.
It's dicey. Like, this guy's new.

Speaker 2 Like, you know, he wants to get the kind of fortification of the most important ally that has allowed them to survive since the Korean War against this hostile neighbor.

Speaker 2 And instead, you've got Trump, you know, joking about things that are pretty core to their national identity.

Speaker 2 You know, I mean, the comfort women are both about the horror of what happened to those women. It's also about the like

Speaker 2 centuries of colonization at the hands of different powers, including Japan.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 his just lack of regard for that at all is just on such display.

Speaker 2 And if you think that that's not going to permeate the body politic in South Korea, if you think that, you know, we can have a president just treat people like garbage like that and insult the country, and that, you know, Sure, maybe they kiss his ass now and lie about some big shipbuilding investment to avoid tariffs.

Speaker 2 But again, two years, three years, four years from now, they will be trading more with China. They'll be looking to get

Speaker 2 less reliant on the United States. Maybe they'll need their own nuclear weapons so they don't have to deal with having to kiss up to Mr.
Trump.

Speaker 2 They're worried about what he wants to do with Kim Jong-un. I mean, so it's just.

Speaker 2 Everything has collapsed. Because in the first Trump term, this would have been, to your point, like big story.

Speaker 2 We're treating South Korea like garbage. Now it's literally like

Speaker 1 one of three press avails of the day.

Speaker 2 Register here, but guess where it registers? It registers in South Korea.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And also, like, Trump does these little sprays that turn into press avails, and he ends up talking the entire time and taking a bunch of unrelated issues as this poor, you know, head of state sits the potted plant.

Speaker 1 We want to play a little bit more, including some questions he got about the war in Ukraine and efforts to broker peace.

Speaker 8 We're going to get that war straightened out. We're going to get it done.
I don't know that they'll meet. Maybe they will.
Maybe they won't. They'd like me to be at the meeting.

Speaker 8 I said, you guys ought to work it out. But he wasn't happy about coming to the United States either.
That was a big concession, and I appreciate the fact that he did.

Speaker 8 I stopped seven wars, wars that were raging, one for 31 years, the Congo, and as you know, Rwanda.

Speaker 8 I thought this would be, in many ways, the easiest way. I have a very good relationship with Putin.
I thought it would be the easiest one to stop, and it's really not. It's very complex.

Speaker 8 I would like to see them meet first. They'd like me to be there.
I may be there. I may not.
I'll see.

Speaker 1 So just real quick here, Ben, just a little, we want to just keep this guy accountable. Like, there's been no progress on any of these next phases of what was supposed to be this peace process, right?

Speaker 1 There's supposed to be a bilateral between Zelensky and Putin. That's not happening.

Speaker 1 The Russians are now sort of making it sound like they maybe will send some like two-bit, you know, third-tier delegation to meet with.

Speaker 1 Or I think they invited Zelensky to come to Russia, which hell of an invitation there. He also keeps saying that like Putin coming to the U.S.

Speaker 1 was a concession for Putin or hard for him, which is just the opposite of what's true.

Speaker 1 And then, again, like this,

Speaker 1 the number of wars he's claiming to have ended keeps going up and up and up. Yeah, it's at seven, I think if someone said

Speaker 1 I don't even know what they are anymore. But like,

Speaker 1 again, he keeps saying he's ended the war between the DRC and Rwanda. But Human Rights Watch says that the M23 rebels killed at least 140 people in eastern Congo just last month.

Speaker 1 They're summarily executing women and children. So again, like, I don't, how are we, this is, the war's not over.
What are we talking about?

Speaker 2 The Russia-Ukraine thing is kind of crazy when you think about it, given how high-profile these summits were that yielded precisely absolutely fucking nothing, right?

Speaker 2 And the only thing we've seen in the Russia-Ukraine war is an uptick in Russian attacks on Ukrainians over the last weeks and months.

Speaker 2 And again, in any normal world, that would be like absolutely devastatingly humiliating to a president of the United States to exact that kind of effort, to disrupt everybody's schedules, you know, to fly all these Europeans over for no fucking reason whatsoever, with no strategy, no plan for follow-up.

Speaker 2 So that's one thing. And then, yeah, this kind of manipulation into all global events, into like the

Speaker 2 homework submission, like the college application for the Nobel Peace Prize, is actually getting kind of dangerous.

Speaker 2 Because now we're all supposed to pretend like things were settled in the DRC when people are still being killed and

Speaker 2 the militia is still there. Like, sure, maybe these leaders felt like they had to say something to get Trump off their back on tariffs, but they didn't really agree to anything, right?

Speaker 2 India and Pakistan. If you think that the India-Pakistan conflict was resolved, it's actually dangerous to think that.

Speaker 2 It's dangerous for Trump to kind of declare that somehow India and Pakistan are not in conflict over Kashmir anymore.

Speaker 2 They're entirely still in a like a Cold War that becomes hot periodically over that conflict, right? So this is

Speaker 2 the requirement.

Speaker 2 I mean, to connect the thread even to the intelligence firings, like the requirement that everybody has to be stupid, you know, and has to just live in this bizarro world where he's solving all these problems and whatever he says is true, and he's a genius, and he should get the Nobel Peace Prize.

Speaker 2 We've never experienced anything like this in our lives.

Speaker 1 Where's operating in his reality? And the other one we talked about earlier was Trump's reality.

Speaker 2 What about Gaza? Member, you solved that one.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we solved that one. And then, you know, we obliterated Iran's nuclear infrastructure and brokered peace between Israel and Iran.

Speaker 1 But again, so the UK, the French, and the Germans have been hosting these latch-ditch talks with Iranian officials in Geneva.

Speaker 1 They're in the final weeks. It's October 18th is the expiration date for the JCPOA.
The JCPOA is the Obama-era Iran nuclear agreement that was brokered in 2015.

Speaker 1 So the Europeans want Iran to restart talks about their nuclear program.

Speaker 1 They want to get some accounting for where the 400 missing kilos of highly enriched uranium are now went, where'd that go after the bombing, basically.

Speaker 1 And then then um they want it'd be good to know it would be good to know and then they want to allow international nuclear inspectors back into Iran

Speaker 1 or else these harsh international sanctions will get slapped back on the Iranians the Iranians though they don't seem to want to make nice or have these talks on Sunday in his first public appearance since the Iran's war with Israel Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ruled out direct talks with the U.S.

Speaker 1 saying the U.S. wants Iran, quote, to be obedient, but that Iran will, quote, stand with all its power against those those who have such erroneous expectations.

Speaker 1 He also called the situation unsolvable.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, Ben, on Tuesday, Australia expelled a bunch of Iranian diplomats, including its ambassador, after linking Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to two anti-Semitic arson attacks in Australia.

Speaker 1 There was a Melbourne synagogue that was firebombed in December, and there was a fire at a kosher food business in Sydney in October. Luckily, no one was hurt.

Speaker 1 Australia also suspended operations at its Iranian embassy and withdrew its staff, essentially cutting all ties with Iran.

Speaker 1 Foreign Minister Penny Wong said this was the first time since World War II that Australia has expelled another country's ambassador.

Speaker 1 So Ben, sort of two unrelated things kind of jammed together there. But one, like, do you have any hope that Europe can restart these nuclear talks?

Speaker 1 And why do you think the Europeans are so concerned about the sanctions snapping back on the Iranians?

Speaker 1 And then second, I mean, it's just, it's hard to understand why Iran would, I believe that Iran sponsored these anti-Semitic attacks in Australia. It's hard to understand the reason why.

Speaker 1 It seems like equal parts evil and idiotic, you know, for them and self-defeating, but I don't know. Maybe that's just how the IRGC rolls.

Speaker 2 Look, on the first point,

Speaker 2 this gets to the failure of bombing Iran.

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 2 the whole point was to get a verifiable deal. Trump said his whole policy was to try to get a deal, remember? And now

Speaker 2 we're not accountable to that anymore. He can say that it's obliterated and everybody can move on.

Speaker 2 And what would worry you is, and look, I think the Europeans are worried because they live in reality.

Speaker 2 And they're like, shit, what the Iranians are going to do is going to take their program underground. And we don't want them, they sincerely don't want them to get a nuclear weapon.

Speaker 2 Like, Trump doesn't even care. He cares about like the optics of, you know, Obama had a deal and I'm going to do this deal.
Like, it seems like he actually doesn't genuinely even.

Speaker 2 give a shit about solving these problems. He just cares about the appearance of them.
The Europeans actually care. They don't want a country like Iran nearby having a nuclear weapon.

Speaker 2 And what they think is going to happen is probably the Iranians take their program underground.

Speaker 2 The Iranians, you know, are going to learn from the last spade of bombing, so they'll figure out a way to protect their regime a little bit more the next time.

Speaker 2 They'll crack down on dissent, which they're already doing, and we'll end up with a more radicalized, potentially nuclear-armed Iran in two or three years because of what Trump and Israel did.

Speaker 2 It's not an irrational thing to think. That's what most people would have predicted would happen.

Speaker 2 And they're trying to use this time period of these snapback of sanctions to get something done diplomatically. I should add, though, like, and we should come back to this,

Speaker 2 sanctions just don't fucking work anymore. Like,

Speaker 2 where is the evidence? You know, Venezuela, Russia,

Speaker 2 some sanctions can make all the difference. You know, you need another side of the equation.
You need an incentive to offer as well as a sanction. On the Australia thing, it's obviously grotesque.

Speaker 2 It's also the same thing that people predicted. It doesn't make it any less horrific or grotesque.

Speaker 2 But when people like us said, you start bombing Iran, you might see asymmetric attacks, you know, against random targets in third countries. Well, that's what this feels like.

Speaker 2 Now, the other thing I'd say is that with the Iranian system,

Speaker 2 this could either be like literally a directive, which would be fucking terrifying if the directive would not have from the Supreme Leader to start like just workshopping attacks on Jewish targets or Israeli targets or Western targets even in third countries.

Speaker 2 Or it could be like

Speaker 2 some guy in Australia who's particularly radical and who's like, I'm taking matters in my own hands. And that's always like a hard thing to determine with the Iranian system.

Speaker 2 But again, I should say that just these are horrific things, they're also the things that people warned about.

Speaker 2 Covert nuclear program, walking away from talks, potential asymmetric terrorist attacks in third countries. Like this is what people were worried about.

Speaker 1 Yeah, not good.

Speaker 1 We're running long today.

Speaker 1 So next week, maybe we should talk about the fact that, well, since we're talking about Europe, it's not good that the polling out of Germany has the AFD leading the CDU for the first time.

Speaker 1 The polling out of France is the National Rally Party leading. Reform UK is leading in the polls in the UK.

Speaker 1 And then far-right parties are winning elections in Poland, Romania, Portugal, and the Netherlands.

Speaker 1 That's a thing we probably don't have time to dig into, but it's making me worried once we're talking about Europeans kind of leading the charge on talks with Iran, you know. Where are we going to go?

Speaker 2 It's being worried about based on all the content in the last couple of, like, I don't know where to go.

Speaker 1 I don't know. I don't know.
Mars.

Speaker 2 It's shrinking. Like, if you know, if you get people out there, you know, just let us know.
Where should you go?

Speaker 1 That's a friendly country. Australia.
You have to leave.

Speaker 2 I'm I'm I'll stay to the end here. Don't worry.
I I'll put my body in the line. But uh, I don't know.

Speaker 1 The rump state of California.

Speaker 1 Gavin Newsome.

Speaker 2 Gavin Newsome has like an island, like Catalina Island. Catalina Island becomes the Taiwan of the United States, you know?

Speaker 1 Too real, man. Okay, finally, Ben, you probably remember a few months back when our producer, Michael, forced us to watch and then talk about Eurovision.
Yes. Very difficult.

Speaker 1 So, Russia has been blocked from participating in Eurovision since their idiot president tried to march tanks into Kiev back in 2022. So, Vladimir Putin did what any sad, left-out little boy does.

Speaker 1 He created his own kind of lamer version. Putin did so by reviving this Soviet-era song contest called Intervision, which was, I guess, a thing between like 1965 and 1980.

Speaker 1 This contest is going to be held in Moscow in September. I want to read for you a list of participants and see what you think about the grouping here.
here.

Speaker 1 So we got Azerbaijan, Belarus, China, Colombia, Cuba, Egypt, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, South Africa, Tajikistan, the UAE, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, and the United States of America.

Speaker 1 Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Speaker 2 I didn't expect the twist.

Speaker 1 So we are going to be represented by someone named B. Howard, who is apparently rumored to be Michael Jackson's son.
If you look at a picture of this dude,

Speaker 1 he looks like a Jackson.

Speaker 2 He's not acknowledged as such, but people, there's

Speaker 1 a theory. Something like that.
A lot to unpack there.

Speaker 1 So Russia is going to be represented by a singer named Shaman, whose hit I Am Russian featured lyrics like, you can't break me because I'm Russian. Until the end, I go.
I'm Russian.

Speaker 1 My blood comes from my father. I'm Russian.
I've been fortunate. I'm Russian in spite of the entire world.

Speaker 1 So that's, that's the crew we're rolling with at Intervision.

Speaker 2 What are the odds that Mike Flynn is at Intervision?

Speaker 1 Should we go cover it? Yeah. Or maybe just, yeah, it's good.

Speaker 1 Maybe it'll just be like a joint Blackwater Wagner group sponsored.

Speaker 2 Yeah, like an Eric Prince tent. You know, like at the Aspen Security Forum.
Remember, there was like a Booz Allen hospitality tent? Maybe there's like a

Speaker 2 Blackwater, whatever he calls it now, hospitality tent.

Speaker 2 Stephen Seagal and some of his biker dudes.

Speaker 2 It's so weird. Gerard Despardieux.
There's a pretty interesting collection of Western celebrities that turn up in.

Speaker 1 Didn't Gerard Despardieu, of by father the hero fame,

Speaker 1 didn't he leave France because of the tax rate?

Speaker 2 Yeah, tax purposes, yeah. Like there's a tax reason.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so he got out of that.

Speaker 2 It wasn't purely a lifestyle choice.

Speaker 1 What was Stephen Segal's reason?

Speaker 2 I think he genuinely was just on board with the project. Just down with Putin,

Speaker 2 he's just down with Putin doing judo, and there's some weird Russian extremist biker gang that he hangs with. Really? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Cool.

Speaker 2 I mean, to be fair, like

Speaker 2 it's been a little while since he had a hit here. I mean,

Speaker 2 what was it? Hard to kill? I I remember.

Speaker 1 That's a pretty good one. I don't remember what else he did.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Well, uplifting show. And with that, we're going to take a quick break, and then you'll hear my conversation with Franklin Nossiter from the Crisis Group about terrorism in the Sahel.

Speaker 1 So stick around for that.

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Speaker 1 I'd like to welcome to the show Franklin Nossiter. He is a Sahel analyst at the International Crisis Group based in Senegal.

Speaker 1 We've been wanting to dig into this subject for a long time, so we're really grateful to you for making the time.

Speaker 3 Thank you, Tommy. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 So, just to set the scene for listeners, so when we talk about the Sahel, we're talking about two things.

Speaker 1 It's a geographic region, basically a belt across the entire continent of Africa from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, just south of the Sahara Desert.

Speaker 1 We're also usually going to be referring to some core countries in that belt, specifically Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali.

Speaker 1 Those three countries have all had military coups within the last several years and are now run by military juntas. And the people living there have to deal with this very acute threat from terrorism.

Speaker 1 And they've had a bunch of foreign powers jostling for influence. More on those players in a second.

Speaker 1 But Franklin, why do you think, just starting at the top, the Sahel is such a geopolitical flashpoint?

Speaker 1 And is there any other context you kind of want to lay out at the top to set the stage for this conversation?

Speaker 3 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3 So what you said is absolutely right, first of all, about the difference between the geographic Sahel and kind of the conflict zone that we're referring to, which we often call the central Sahel, just because of where it is.

Speaker 3 You know, the geographic Sahel, like you said, goes from Senegal to Sudan.

Speaker 3 The current conflict, you know, has its roots in the independence in the 60s and even before, but really it got kicked off in 2012 because in 2011 you have the fall of Gaddafi, which leads to this kind of explosion of weapons and combat veterans across the region from Libya.

Speaker 3 Some of these guys have family ties to long-standing independence movements in northern Mali, which are led by certain parts of the Taareg community.

Speaker 3 And the Tuareg are a nomadic group in northern Mali in the deserts,

Speaker 3 mainly herders and sometimes smugglers. And they've been kind of launching periodic independence wars for some decades now.

Speaker 3 So after in 2012, this new independence war is kind of supercharged by these weapons.

Speaker 3 And not only weapons, but now you have not just independentists, but jihadists coming, often coming from Algeria at that time.

Speaker 3 And these guys, you know, quickly overrun kind of northern and central Mali and are advancing.

Speaker 3 And then the French come in in 2013 and kind of kick them out.

Speaker 3 And then that leads to like a long decade of counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency operations across Mali, and then Burkina Faso and Niger as violence expands there too.

Speaker 3 And things just get worse and worse and worse until finally we have those coups in the early 2020s, as you said.

Speaker 1 They kick out the French.

Speaker 3 They kick out a UN peacekeeping mission that was also there.

Speaker 3 And now that leads us to today.

Speaker 1 That's a great summary. I mean, and there's a bunch of players in the region or sometimes want to be players, and it can get complicated quickly.

Speaker 1 But beyond the military juntas of the three countries we mentioned, I mean, you currently have the Russians trying to do some things. You got the Chinese who have invested heavily across Africa.

Speaker 1 The United States, of course, there's Turkey ramping up efforts in the Sahel. And then there's these jihadist insurgents you mentioned.
There's both sort of ISIS and an al-Qaeda affiliate called JNIM.

Speaker 1 And then, you know, you also have kind of the ghost of the French forces or the U.S. presence in Niger.
Can you talk about just sort of what the U.S.

Speaker 1 and the French were doing in the Sahel, specifically in terms of the counterterrorism mission and what that departure meant for

Speaker 1 the growth or the ability to operate for these terrorist groups? Sure.

Speaker 3 So, like I said, in 2013, you have the French Operation Sarval, which comes in.

Speaker 3 The jihadists, I mean, at that point, the jihadists and the separatists had kind of had set up a, I mean, they had had declared a new state called Azawad that covered all of northern Mali and parts of central Mali.

Speaker 3 And the French, I mean, destroyed them in the towns and cities where they were concentrated, struck them, and kicked them out back into. Mali is a vast country.

Speaker 3 All three countries are quite large, especially Mali and Niger, with huge kind of rural areas that are very difficult to monitor, even for a wealthy government, which none of these three are.

Speaker 3 And so the French successfully chased these jihadists into the rural areas in 2013. And then

Speaker 3 this might be familiar to American listeners, you know, they stuck around after the initial success.

Speaker 3 And that's when things started to go wrong and what's called Operation Barkan, which had kind of unclear objectives of wiping out the jihadists, more or less.

Speaker 3 Now, people will disagree on what the objectives were. They weren't clear exactly.
The U.S. role in this was really just a support role.
We don't want to overstate it. I mean, U.S.

Speaker 3 troops were involved, have been involved in training militaries across the region since the early 2000s.

Speaker 3 And then the US provided pretty essential logistical support to the French mission, which at its peak in Mali was like 5,000 troops. So the US had two bases in Niger.

Speaker 3 Prior to 2012, also, the US played a huge role in arming the Malian military, but we don't need to go into that. That's a whole other can of worms.

Speaker 3 But the US, then after Mali became a disaster in 2012, the U.S. switched to pivoted to Niger as its best friend.

Speaker 3 And the US had a base in the capital, Niamey. And then later in the the 2010s, the US built like a massive drone base in northern Mali.

Speaker 3 And from there, they did kind of intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance, which they would give the information mainly to the French, but also, I think, to the Salian governments.

Speaker 3 And then some training of Nigerian troops and things of that nature.

Speaker 3 As you kind of referenced, after Niger, which was the last of those three countries to have its coup, had a coup in 2023, they, you know, not too, too long afterwards, kicked out the U.S.

Speaker 1 troops.

Speaker 1 You know, when you sort of talk to folks who are involved in those counter-terrorism missions, how important was the, it sounds like just intelligence gleaning from that U.S.

Speaker 1 drone base to sort of like the overall effort to combat these terrorist groups?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think from the U.S. end, they're going to say it was essential, which is normal for them to say.
I mean, they're not going to say that they were useless. From the Sahel end,

Speaker 3 they have

Speaker 3 consistently complained. And even before the coups, you saw some complaints about

Speaker 3 certain aspects of the U.S. military presence, about the U.S.
not sharing information, things of that nature.

Speaker 3 I mean, we're not, you know, we don't work for any of these governments, we're not in that room. So it's pretty difficult to know the actual impact.

Speaker 3 And to kind of answer your question about how this has impacted the jihadist groups, I think it's something you have to be pretty careful about.

Speaker 3 Because when they kicked out, when the new governments kicked out the French and then to a lesser extent, the US and also the UN, obviously that led to a lot of hurt feelings, you might say.

Speaker 3 And so there's been this kind of narrative where, you know, things were going all right, I guess. And then these guys went crazy and they kicked out the French.

Speaker 3 They kicked out the Americans and the UN. And now

Speaker 3 it's going to pieces. And that's not the case.

Speaker 3 What we're seeing today is certainly a downward trend, but it's a downward trend that existed already prior to the coups and the kicking out of the French.

Speaker 3 In fact, the coups really came as a response to this downward trend. And now they haven't succeeded in reversing it by any means.

Speaker 3 But, you know, it's a complex situation that way.

Speaker 1 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah, no, totally.

Speaker 1 I mean, look, and the reason I ask is because you always hear people talking about getting pushed out of Niger and then having to abandon this just-built drone base.

Speaker 1 But also, like, stepping back, big picture, if you kind of look at the threat from extremist groups or jihadi groups from 9-11 to now, it seems to have only gotten worse, sort of an inexorable path to worse, no matter how much we spend on it.

Speaker 1 So, I wonder how much of that is just like kind of sky is falling, alarmist rhetoric versus, you know, really losing an effective tool, whether it's, you know, armed drones or just surveillance or, you know, a presence generally.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And then I think you have to also ask, I mean,

Speaker 3 the threat and violence has gotten worse, but actually not for America and for Americans, actually. I mean,

Speaker 3 these jihadists and the Sahel have shown no interest, you know, really in targeting the U.S.

Speaker 3 and you know, we don't we don't really see why they would. I mean, for years, their goal was to kick out the French forces

Speaker 3 and the Crusaders, they called it. And I mean, you know, viewed a certain way, they kind of succeeded at that.

Speaker 3 And so striking the U.S., you know, it's just not, it just makes no sense. It's very hard to imagine.

Speaker 3 You know, I think in the popular imagination, jihadists are kind of like bloodthirsty demons almost, you know, totally, something totally outside of what we can imagine.

Speaker 3 And I'm not trying to do an apology for them.

Speaker 1 They're, you know, no, no, no, it's important.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but they are strategic actors. They think strategically.

Speaker 1 Right. And there's groups like al-Qaeda, which are, these transnational groups, which were focused on Israel or the U.S.
or targets that are obvious to people. But then you're right.

Speaker 1 There are these localized forces or extremist groups that have regional goals. And I think it's important to disaggregate those two.

Speaker 3 And Sahelian jihadist groups are overwhelmingly focused on local and regional goals.

Speaker 3 I mean, the era of transnational jihadists striking the West is,

Speaker 3 that doesn't seem to be the era that we're in. And I think you can see that reflected in the West with with

Speaker 3 a big decline, I think, in the interest in counterterrorism around the world and the global war on terror.

Speaker 3 And I mean, I think that's something that the Sahel governments are a little resentful about in some ways.

Speaker 3 Although, obviously, right now, it's hard to imagine close military cooperation between them and the West.

Speaker 3 They kind of say, like, what gives? I mean, we thought you guys, you know, we thought you guys were going to help us with this.

Speaker 3 I mean, the rhetoric has become quite overheated. There's a lot of resentment towards France and the region.
And France has done its fair share of earning that resentment. Part of that is due to

Speaker 3 the historical memory, not just of colonization, but then of what we call France-Afrique, where France was

Speaker 3 very involved in its newly independent colonies. I mean, really, kind of it's the neo-colonialism par excellence.

Speaker 3 And then you have the military presence in the 2010s that was just very visible, even if it came at Malian request, was very visible. And I think, you know, really helped inflame those tensions again.

Speaker 3 If you hear today, you know, you'll see people talk about neocolonialism oh and the french supported the jihadists uh and this and that when the initial breakup happened between france and mali uh the malians were actually reproaching the french for abandoning them and for not helping enough uh and the malian prime minister at the time who you know went on to become a big sovereignty guy and this and that uh said you know he famously said uh the uh abandon uh abandon in the middle of flight

Speaker 1 yeah yeah that's really good um yeah so just one group i mean we haven't talked much about is j and i am can you talk about sort of how they operate, what their goal is?

Speaker 3 Sure. JNIM is JNIM, it's in English, is the group of support for Islam and Muslims.
It's a coalition actually created in 2017 and led by this guy, Yad Aghaghali, who's a longtime

Speaker 3 Torag independence leader, kind of local legend. He served as an ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

Speaker 3 He led an independence war in the 90s, and then he kind of converted himself to jihad in the late 2000s, mid to late 2000s, maybe.

Speaker 3 And so he's kind of the overall leader of JNIM, which is, you know, far and away the most dominant jihadist coalition group, whatever, in the region.

Speaker 3 But then JNIM is actually composed of a variety of heterogeneous groups with different goals. And

Speaker 3 that's where it starts to get kind of interesting because we don't know. I mean, it's quite difficult to, you can't, you know, just call him up and say, hey, what are you trying to do?

Speaker 3 I mean, Yad Ad Ghali and the guy,

Speaker 3 his close confidants have for decades been pretty clear on what they want, which is an independent Touareg Emirate state, whatever, in northern Mali.

Speaker 3 But when you look at the gross expansion of violence out of northern Mali, which is very sparsely populated, I mean, it's the literal Sahara Desert,

Speaker 3 into central Mali, into northern and eastern Burkina Faso, and into Western Asia, far more populated, the groups that are driving that are

Speaker 3 primarily not Toureg

Speaker 3 and have

Speaker 3 likely very different goals, which are difficult to know.

Speaker 3 And we can speak more about how the jihadists were able to expand that influence, if that's a good subject.

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, I'm curious about that. I mean, I'm curious how they expanded their influence, but also, I mean, how much of a threat are these groups to expanding into further south or to the

Speaker 1 west or the coast?

Speaker 3 Yeah, yep, exactly. So, first, how did they grow their influence? Essentially, they were able to profit off local grievances really effectively.
And primarily local grievances between

Speaker 3 more or less marginalized herding groups and sedentary communities and the governments with essentially over access to resources and things of that nature.

Speaker 3 the herding, nomadic herding communities kind of having less political weight, feeling more marginalized, leading to resentment.

Speaker 3 And then, you know, these governments have all been intensely corrupt for years.

Speaker 3 And the jihadists were really able to profit off that very effectively to recruit

Speaker 1 and recruit governments.

Speaker 3 Exactly.

Speaker 3 This resentment, which is not invalid resentment. In French, people often say jihad de la voche, which is a jihad of the cow,

Speaker 3 which is, you know, it sounds better in French, you know, but

Speaker 3 it's not an inaccurate reflection, you know, for a lot of these groups, you know, and the way it's often framed here in the region is, you know, if you're a young man, one of these villages, you know, a tiny rural village, far flung from the capital, the big city, with very few opportunities or none, if you come from a marginalized ethnic group, especially very few opportunities, corruption, and these guys come up to you and they say, here's, you know, 50,000, about 80 bucks, a motorcycle and a gun, you know, come fight for God.

Speaker 3 It's actually not a bad deal from that perspective. And so that's really how they've been able to grow.
And so now we have, as you alluded to, you know, this real risk of expansion further south.

Speaker 1 For a while, it felt like the French were getting pushed out, the U.S.

Speaker 1 was getting pushed out, and the Russians were moving in often via the Wagner Group, this creepy Russian mercenary group, once led by a guy named Progozhin, who found himself at the wrong end of a grenade in his private plane that we all assume was placed by Vladimir Putin after Progozhin turned his forces and started marching on Moscow, which never a good idea, notes itself.

Speaker 1 Is the Wagner Group still there? And if so, what is their goal? What was their goal? What is Russia's strategic interest in the Sahel?

Speaker 3 So first of all, what is, I think, we got to define the Russian presence in the Sahel

Speaker 3 as quickly as possible. So first you have the Wagner Group, you know, the paramilitary, independent paramilitary group led by Venji Prigozhin, who, you know, as you said, did not wind up super well.

Speaker 3 After Prigozhin's death, and even prior to Prigozhin's death, the Russian state really tried to regain control of Wagner's army because Wagner has been doing its own thing, especially in its African operations in Mali and Central African Republic.

Speaker 3 They really kind of went off script. I mean, you know, in Central African Republic, they sell beer.
In Mali, for a while, there were rumors they were selling sardines.

Speaker 3 They started their own economic activities. I mean, they kind of acquired a life of their own.

Speaker 3 And the Russian state did not like this, especially after Prigozhin's kind of abortive rebellion.

Speaker 3 And so after Prigorjin mysteriously dies, you know, you have the Russians really, the Kremlin really tries to take control over these operations.

Speaker 3 And so when you had all the news recently about, oh, Wagner is leaving Mali and Africa Corps is coming in, you know, again, you have to be very careful because there's a lot of hurt feelings in the region after the governments chose to replace France with Russia.

Speaker 3 And so, you know, there's this narrative of, oh, the Russians got beat and now they're leaving. That's not what happened.

Speaker 3 I mean, Africa Corps, I think, is like 80% the same personnel as some of the estimates that I've seen. So it's a rebrand.
It's the Russian

Speaker 3 Defense Ministry asserting control. And then the Russian presence in this hull is actually more limited, I think, than people realize.

Speaker 3 They are present in Mali between probably between 1,000 and 2,000 troops doing combat operations. But that's the only country that they're doing combat operations.
In Burkina, they're huge.

Speaker 1 It's a big country, too.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's a huge country, and it's at the center and the origin point. But actually, violence is worse in Burkina Faso today,

Speaker 3 just as an aside. But they've been sited in Burkina essentially doing personal security, but not...
on a consistent basis. We don't know if they're there right now, for example.
And in Niger,

Speaker 3 they've been doing training. So what were Russia's reasons for doing this? I think that,

Speaker 3 first and foremost,

Speaker 3 it was an opportunistic thing. I mean,

Speaker 3 the French were leaving Mali, and then the Malians kicked them out, and the Malians wanted and needed an international partner to help them destroy the jihadists.

Speaker 3 Wagner had built up a certain reputation through its operations, especially in Central African Republic, and they signed a business deal.

Speaker 3 I mean, Wagner, the Malians wanted a partner who, a military partner with experience, who would do whatever they wanted without concerns about human rights or the proper use of equipment or what have you.

Speaker 3 And then also, you've got to point out that the French, when they were there in their kind of post-colonial manner, really kind of ran the show.

Speaker 3 I mean, it's a bit of an overgeneralization, but these governments were very much at the back seat of kind of their own conflict. That's not the case anymore.
And you can say what you will about...

Speaker 3 their failure to restore security, which is valid, but they have put themselves at the center of the action.

Speaker 3 And they decided they needed that the Russian offer was the best equipped to fit their needs. Now, Russia, of course, has

Speaker 3 aims.

Speaker 3 And I think a big one was embarrassing France, which at the time and even today has been a champion of kind of common EU defense policy, standing up to Russia, supporting Ukraine, things of that nature.

Speaker 3 And so this, you know, the Sahel, France's former colonies, France's failed military mission, I mean, it's a golden opportunity at very low cost, because actually no cost, because the Malians are paying for the services because it's the business deal.

Speaker 3 And so I think that's a major thing. And then you'll hear some people talk about, you know, Russian attempts to southern flank of Europe and

Speaker 3 foment chaos and drive migration. I don't really buy that.
And I think if you look at migration numbers, it doesn't really support that kind of consensus.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that feels a little

Speaker 1 bit hard to actually pull off in practice.

Speaker 1 So, you know, big picture, you just

Speaker 1 sort of outlined this enormous amount of change over the last, what, sort of, decade or so, or two decades.

Speaker 1 How now is the Trump administration approaching the problem of these extremist groups in the Sahel, if they are at all?

Speaker 1 And how does it differ from what you saw from the Biden administration, at least so far?

Speaker 3 Absolutely. Yep.
That's kind of, I think, the hot topic of the past month in the region-ish is the new Trump engagement with the Sahel.

Speaker 3 So I think that needs to be nuanced, first of all. I mean, from what we've seen publicly, there's no concrete cooperation going on, nothing new in that sense.

Speaker 3 There have been meetings that weren't taking place before, notably, a senior U.S. counterterrorism official in Mali's capital, Obamacare, things like that.
It's not nothing.

Speaker 3 It means something, but it's not exactly a new approach, not yet. But there are two things that are pretty different about the Trump approach to Africa as a whole

Speaker 3 and to the world as a whole, really, that kind of change the game in the Sahel. So the first is kind of the stance on global norms around democracy, human rights, and things of that nature.

Speaker 3 I mean, the Biden administration took a pretty traditional U.S. stance on that, at least in the Sahel, where, you know, we don't like coups,

Speaker 3 we don't like military governments, we don't like violence against civilians. And so this ran into issues with the regimes in the Sahel because

Speaker 3 they kind of did all three of those things, and they really didn't like it when Westerners came and told them what to do, even if that was, you know,

Speaker 3 don't kill kill civilians.

Speaker 3 And so the Trump administration seems far less focused on these, especially on the elections democracy thing, which was really a major irritant.

Speaker 3 Biden administration pressuring these countries and not just the Biden administration, regional pressure, France, what have you, pressure for elections that the Trump administration is not going to be doing that.

Speaker 3 And then the other thing is this kind of commercial push really aligns, and then the whole sovereignty narrative. I mean, it's a huge thing in this, how all these governments,

Speaker 3 they haven't held elections, whatever, but they are, from what we we can see they've they've maintained a certain popularity um which is is interesting you know and and really speaks to the failure of democracy in the region uh these guys even after the the security failures still seem rather popular um and that's because they they really speak this language of sovereignty that trump also speaks uh the the trade not aid is something you will hear at the heritage foundation it is something you will hear in bamako and it is something you will hear in waterdugu now does it actually mean anything yet we'll see i think the last the last thing i'd like to bring up with that is that there's a lot of buzz right now because of the U.S.

Speaker 3 role in the DRC. Everyone always says the U.S.
doesn't care about Africa. Trump doesn't care about Africa.
And I think that is 100% true.

Speaker 3 I mean, and it's not just the Trump administration.

Speaker 3 No U.S. administration has seriously engaged with Africa.

Speaker 3 And so they have this thing in the DRC, which we don't obviously have time to get into right now and the problems with that and why I think it's whatever.

Speaker 3 But that situation is not replicable in the Sahel for two key reasons. The first is that the U.S.

Speaker 3 has no pre-existing commitments in terms of the critical strategic resources, you know, another hot buzzword, the Trump administration, they love critical minerals. There's lithium in Mali.
The U.S.

Speaker 3 has never been involved in this, and the Chinese actually already are. It's a big difference with the Congo and the U.S.
companies have been involved in the past.

Speaker 3 The other key difference is that there is no Rwanda in this situation, where Rwanda is the kind of credible interlocutor, you know, it's the state backer for the M23.

Speaker 1 You can negotiate.

Speaker 3 Exactly. You know, you can have, you know, the president of Rwanda can come to the White House, you know, eventually, maybe.

Speaker 3 There's nothing like that for the jihadists. There's no political, there's not even a political office like the Taliban had.
I mean, there's really right now, there is no sanitized interlocutor.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, I think you're right. Look, Trump keeps telling everyone who will listen that he created peace between the DRC and Rwanda, but he always leaves out that the M23 was not a party to this deal.

Speaker 1 And I think Human Rights Watch and the UN have said that there were massacres in July. Like hundreds of people have been documented, women, children, just summarily executed by M23 rebels.

Speaker 1 So if that's a peace agreement, I can't imagine a lot of people are going to be signing up for another one of those, even without rare earth elements or whatever will get Trump horny for a deal.

Speaker 1 Final question for you.

Speaker 1 So, and this is a complicated one, but if you or like, you know, other sort of smart policy people could wave a magic wand and kind of dictate a better approach in the aggregate for Western countries or anyone else to this problem of this sort of growing threat of extremism in the Sahel.

Speaker 1 What are some things you do?

Speaker 3 This is not a conflict that you're going to win with a purely military approach. There were attempts at dialogue in previous governments, and now

Speaker 3 that's mostly dead from what we can see, at least publicly. These regimes have very strongly committed to an all-military approach.
We will kill all the jihadists and then we'll talk.

Speaker 3 At Crisis Group, we don't think this is his path forward. We think that these regimes, military action is a vital part of this.

Speaker 3 You've got to be able to control the balance of power, the balance of force in the field, 100%.

Speaker 3 We don't want to be naive here.

Speaker 3 But you also have to have the carrot and the stick. You have to have the dialogue there.

Speaker 3 These governments need to be putting themselves and their populations in a position where people can sit down and talk about what do we want our societies to look like moving forward.

Speaker 3 Because that's just so far that doesn't seem to happen.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Well, listen, frankly, I really appreciate you taking the time to help us understand this.

Speaker 1 A lot of factors, huge region, super complicated, but like something, it's just something we've talked around a lot, you know, as these coups have happened, as the front got pushed out, as the U.S.

Speaker 1 got pushed out. And it was just really great to kind of close the loop and be like, okay, what has the impact been? And not great, it sounds like, but also maybe some, hopefully some

Speaker 1 opportunity for dialogue or a different approach that isn't entirely just about bombing stuff.

Speaker 3 You got gotta have some hope.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I have some hope. Well, listen, thank you again.
I really appreciate it.

Speaker 3 Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you.

Speaker 1 Thanks again to Franklin Nossiter for joining the show. We'll talk to you guys next week.

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