Canada Elects the Anti-Trump

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Welcome back to Pod Safe the World.

I'm Tommy Vitor.

I'm Ben Rhodes.

Speaking of elbows up, are we going to get a Celtics Knicks playoff series?

We are going to get a Celtics Knicks playoff series.

It's going to be very

chippy at the end.

We're going to be throwing buzz.

World headquarters, Wikimedia.

We're both getting ahead of ourselves.

We have game fives tonight, right?

Yeah, yeah.

But I think we got this.

Orlando Magic.

And I especially think you've got this.

Orlando Magic's not the best team.

But good for you guys.

I'm happy for New York, kind of.

Yeah, because you're pretty certain that you're going to win in five or six games against us, which I would probably bet on.

I love everything about living on the West Coast, especially NFL game times and starts.

But unfortunately, a lot of these basketball games are like right in the middle of the hardest sort of bedtime periods with small kids.

Today, game five,

it's like 5:30, aren't we?

It's 4:30.

The next game is at 4:30.

I think you're at 5:30, which is like right in the middle of pickups.

Yep.

So

it's going to be a lot of Hulu on my phone and pockets.

Yeah, when I'm like, hey, Anna, can you just do a two-year-old and an 11-month-old at the same time by yourself so I can watch Jason Tatum?

Yeah.

he's in the over very well.

Anyway, we got a great show for you guys today.

Elbows up is, of course, a shout out to our Canadian friends who just had a big election Monday that is being perceived as a global fuck you to Donald Trump.

Fingers up, middle fingers up.

Then we're going to turn to the latest in the war in Ukraine, including Trump's meeting with Vlodymir Zelensky in the Vatican and Putin's latest cynical ceasefire proposal.

Somehow, Ben, the news cycle around the disaster that is Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is still going.

It's shocking to me that we're all talking about this, but we'll get you guys up to speed on that.

And we'll explain why tensions between India and Pakistan are as tense as they've been in decades, the latest grim news from Gaza, and an infuriating report out of Israel about the Biden administration's handling of the war.

Gonna have to do some deep breathing before we get to that part.

Yeah.

And then you did our interview today.

What do we got?

Yes, people should.

I know we always say this, but

extra.

Please stick around for this one with Alexandra Mudvichuk, who's a human human rights lawyer, the head of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine, and the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize winner.

So she's got that.

Some good credentials right there.

Yes.

But, you know, she gives a very raw perspective.

I mean, we talk a lot about the politics of this and what politicians are saying, but this is someone who literally documents war crimes on a regular basis, someone who's been a justice advocate.

And so we talk about what's the perspective of being in Ukraine right now, where there have been increasing bombardments in Kyiv where Alexandra is,

to have this kind of absurd conversation about the politics of things when you're still living through a war.

And so it's a perspective that we need to bring to bear.

How are Ukrainians thinking about what justice means for what's happened to them?

What's the capacity for justice in the broken international system that we're living through right now?

Kind of what sustains her and keeps her going, what her vision for the future of Ukraine, what it should be.

So it's very, very powerful perspective that we don't hear enough from in terms of Ukrainians on the front lines.

So check it out.

Did you ask her to say thank you and was she wearing a suit?

Yeah, but you know, to be honest, like listen to this interview.

I mean, I said this, Jackie,

listen to this interview, and then imagine J.D.

Vance

saying,

you know, did you thank us while you're listening to it?

And

you'll know what I'm getting at when you hear the interview.

Yeah, Ben was describing to me some of the details and all I could think of was that Oval Office meeting and how embarrassing our leaders are, and how embarrassing a lot of our press corps is, too.

And by the way, you know, what was kind of heartbreaking is she did say thank you,

you know, without me even asking her for what Americans have done for Ukraine, which she did not need to do.

Someone told JD.

Yeah.

All right, Ben.

So let's start with our buddies in Canada, and everyone should check out that interview.

President Trump has had a big 100 days, and he can now add to the list, losing a Canadian election to his list of accomplishments.

So golf clap to him.

Former central banker Mark Carney won the Liberal Party its fourth consecutive term in office.

This outcome was almost impossible to imagine back in December or January when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau started getting into serious political trouble and then resigned.

At the time, the Conservative Party was ahead by as many as 25 points in some polls.

But then Donald Trump decided to open his big, stupid mouth.

He was threatening to destroy the Canadian economy with tariffs, put in place a lot of those since.

And he's been threatening to make Canada the 51st state.

And suddenly within Canada, a debate erupted over who can best stand up to Trump, and that became the defining issue of this election.

And the results are in.

And Canadian voters have decided that not only was Conservative Party leader Pierre Polyev not the right guy to defend Canada from Trump, Polyev even lost his own seat in parliament.

So tough night for them.

It's also not clear whether he's going to remain the leader of the party itself.

So head spinning stuff here, Ben.

This is a clip from Prime Minister Mark Carney's victory speech Monday night.

As I've been warning for months, America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country.

Never.

But

these are not idle threats.

President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us.

That will never, ever happen.

When I sit down with President Trump, it will be to discuss the future economic and security relationship between two sovereign nations.

And it will be with our

full knowledge that we have many, many other options than the United States to build prosperity for all Canadians.

I love the dude kind of like...

calmly yelling shame.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Very Canadian.

So just a couple thoughts, Ben.

First of all, I mean, it is impossible to overstate how massive this comeback was for the Liberal Party and what an own goal it was for Trump.

Trump could have had an ideologically compatible leader in Canada that he could work with.

Instead, he has a guy who was literally elected with a mandate to fight him.

So that's his new political reality.

And not a weak one, like Justin Trudeau, like a freshly installed Mark Carney.

Also, you and I were laughing about how, you know, you don't see a lot of pundits or pollsters talking about how the angry electorate and the kind of like populist, curious countries all over the world, that people are looking for some like globalist central banker with degrees from Harvard and Oxford.

But that is what Canadians just voted for.

Like they wanted competence and stability and they didn't care that Mark Carney is Steve Bannon's worst nightmare.

Yes, this is a huge

upset result in the context of where this race stood a couple of months ago.

And I mean, to unpack a couple pieces of this,

the first obvious point, as you made, is that Trump has essentially accelerated a backlash to Trumpism globally in ways that we need to continue to watch.

Canada is the obvious first place where his threats, his disrespect, his disregard for the U.S.-Canada relationship and for Canadian sovereignty clearly led to this massive pendulum swing to Mark Carney.

But it's not the last place.

We've talked about the fact that Australia has an election coming up where the center-left Labor Prime Minister Albanese had been losing in polls and is now at least even, if not in the lead.

By the way, very smart of Canadians and hopefully Australians, because if you want to learn something from us, don't take this risk.

You know, you may not get your country back if it goes down this road.

And that leads to a second point, which is that Polyev really did try to kind of tread in this Trump-light space where they were increasingly bombastic, xenophobic.

You had him trying to kind of capture the energy we saw in that kind of weird weird trucker, anti-shutdown protest in Ottawa.

You saw an increasingly right-wing media ecosystem growing up in Canada.

And so I think voters are not dumb.

They saw, wait a second, this might feel good to some of us because we're tired of globalism or we're tired of the elites or we think Justin Trudeau is in there for too long.

But it's really dangerous to go down this road, both because it could weaken us to Trump, but also because it could turn us into kind of a weaker weaker version of Trump.

And so if Trump actually doing the things that he said he wanted to do in the second term, the way he did in the first, it could be the breaking point for the momentum for this kind of politics and democracies.

We have to watch that.

We'll see.

Yeah.

And you're right.

I mean, Mark Carney, I mean.

Mark Carney did his best to tie Pierre Polyeff to Trump in every way.

I think they were calling him Trump Light.

They were kind of like making videos of them morphing into each other.

So it really did become the defining issue.

Yeah, yeah.

And now the second thing, you know, David Axelod, our former guru on the Obama campaign, used to say that Americans look for the opposite person of the previous person.

And so the first time he said this was in 2008 when Obama was very much an opposite of Bush, you know.

But actually, if you stretch it forward, you know, Trump is kind of an opposite of Obama.

Biden's kind of an opposite of Trump.

It's like a pretty

pretty coherent way of looking at things.

And look, Carney is not only someone who stands up to Trump, he's the opposite of Trump.

You know, a man with deep experience in international finance at the Bank of Canada and at the Bank of England, a man with experience managing crises instead of creating crises, dealing with the financial crisis in 08 in Canada, dealing with Brexit in 2015.

And what we've seen is he's already kind of brushed back Trump.

You know, one of the more interesting reports I saw, Tommy, is that in the one phone call they had in which Trump came out and actually didn't disparage Carney in the same way they did Trudeau.

There's a rumor that Carney threatened to dump all of America's bonds, you know, and he knows what he's doing.

He's a former Senator.

He knows leverage.

He knows where he's got leverage points.

And we've already seen Canada

sign LNG deals with China.

Like this is a man who isn't just talking the talk, like he actually knows how to kind of run circles around Trump, even with Canada being a much smaller and more vulnerable economy, even as Canada may have to absorb an enormous hit from tariffs and things that Trump's doing.

This is a guy that knows how to work the system that America created that Trump doesn't understand.

Yeah, this is becoming Trump's Achilles healer.

You're also seeing this with the Chinese.

They know the weaknesses and pressure points.

Carney also

took some steps to distance himself, not just in words, but in policy from Trudeau.

He got rid of their carbon tax.

He basically cut the rate down to zero.

Carney also pledged to get rid of Trudeau's cap gains increases.

And I think Trudeau just being off the stage was absolutely critical for Carney because he could project himself as a firm break from the previous iteration of the Liberal Party, even if it's a fourth consecutive Liberal Party term.

Carney's fave-unfaved numbers actually improved during the election, which is very surprising for someone who was kind of incumbent.

But I mean, you just don't often see that.

Usually you just get worn down.

Pierre Polyev ended at 40 fave, 45 unfave.

Ben, I saw this in one story that at an April rally, a woman yelled, lead us, Big Daddy, at Mark Carney.

So that surprised me.

I mean, he does kind of exude a certain paternal Big Daddy-like father.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But look,

in terms of what to expect, I mean, in normal times, you know, Mark Carney is your kind of, you know, hyper-qualified globalist, right?

He's a man that, despite what he did with the carbon tax, has been focused on climate change and climate finance for a long time.

He's someone who's tried to navigate ways to minimize the negative impacts of globalization while not junking the whole system.

But I think what's interesting that we'll also have to watch beyond just the backlash to Trumpism is,

did he

actually stumble into a formula here that is different and kind of interesting where

he's combining like a certain form of competence

and nationalism.

I mean, because there's a lot of nationalism in what he says

and a kind of the authenticity of a technocrat.

You know, like he comes across as a very authentic guy.

I actually watched a lot of these videos with him.

And, but he's not authentically pretending to be someone else.

He's not like going on, you know, Theo Vaughan and trying to talk about pop culture.

He's authentic by talking about like banking and, you know, hockey, which he clearly likes.

And, and, and so, I don't know, maybe this is, this is a different formula than we've seen.

You know, he is who he is.

It's appealing to people.

Um, and it doesn't fit naturally into any, it's hard to think of, like, what campaign would you compare him to that we've seen in recent years?

Like, it doesn't, it's, it's different than Kier Starmer, who's just kind of like, we're going to make things normal again.

Like, there's a, there's a fight to Carney, and obviously Trump gives him the foil, but that, that, I'm, look, I'm not trying to raise expectations too high.

He's not like some uber charismatic guy.

And what you're getting at is he was like the right political kind of

thing for the moment.

It's not just that Trump was starting to fucking annex them.

It was that we're threatening to destroy their economy and create a financial crisis via tariff.

And this guy's like, hey, hand up.

I was a central banker

in London and Canada.

I'm a Huckleberry.

I'm your guy.

Friend of the pod and new Democratic Party leader, Jugmit Singh, also lost his seat in a brutal night for the NDP, his party.

Jugmit Singh came on a couple of years ago.

Think of them as like kind of the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party.

But they went from winning 25 seats in 2021 to a projected seven seats Monday night, which I think like lowers them below a certain threshold to be officially represented in parliament.

And I think what ultimately what happened is the race just became this binary question over who can best stand up to Trump.

And smaller parties like the NDP got squeezed out.

I also, I saw some of the coverage that former Congressman Pete Hoekstra is just arrived yesterday to be U.S.

ambassador to Canada, which is just very funny because that went from like kind of a cushy, you know, donor gig

to a real, you know, kind of a, you're going to be fighting

every day in Ottawa.

Elbows up, Peter.

You're in hostile territory.

Peter should get those elbows up.

Yeah.

Well, we wish them the best.

We should just say we love our Canadian listeners, and we're very glad that you have a sane, smart, tough prime minister.

Again, not perfect, but better than the alternatives.

Yeah, better than the alternative.

Last thing I saw, Ben, that I thought would interest you in particular: the New York Times had an interesting piece a few weeks back about how Meta had blocked actual news on the Facebook and Instagram feeds in Canada because they did this back in 2023 because those assholes assholes don't want to pay publishers for news.

It would have cost them an estimated $44 million a year out of their

$64 billion per year in revenue.

So there's been this huge proliferation of right-wing accounts that post kind of either agit prop or fake news all day long.

And I read about that.

It made me very nervous for what the impact might be on the election.

Obviously, it ended okay, but it will likely be an issue going forward.

And it'll get worse.

I mean, the thing is, you know, usually you're kind of at your high water political mark after you get elected.

Those accounts, that right-wing machine, in part because they sense, yeah, that this was a blow to the momentum of Trumpism.

I think you're unfortunately going to see an uptick in kind of right-wing garbage in Canada and in other places as well, certainly Australia.

And look, it'll be interesting to see what the Conservatives do in Canada because do they,

out of fear that they're going to be out of step with, if their prime minister is standing up to Trump, do they want to be seen as attacking their prime minister, right?

Or do they follow the lead of the Republican Party in this country and they don't care and they just become

nihilists and they're trashing him and they're lying about things?

And maybe they're not siding with Trump, but they're just trying to tear Carney down.

That's an interesting political choice for the Conservatives because there's political danger in attacking your prime minister when your country's under attack, but they kind of have some of that right-wing DNA that leads you in those directions.

Yeah, big, big choice for the Conservative Party about how to forge a path forward.

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All right, bed, so a lot has happened since we last covered the war in Ukraine, but it's still not clear if any progress was actually made.

Yeah.

You know, like a lot of events.

A lot of Marco Rubio threats.

We'll get to those.

Pick up his toys and go in the other toy room.

It is very sad.

So Trump and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky met in the Vatican this past weekend, where they were attending the Pope's funeral because of J.D.

Vance, as we mentioned last week.

Here's a clip of Trump talking about that conversation with Zelensky, their first conversation since that disastrous Oval Office meeting back in February, and then also Trump comments on the peace talks generally.

We had a good meeting.

It was a nice meeting.

It was a beautiful meeting.

I'll tell you, it's the nicest, the nicest office I've ever seen.

You crush President Putin.

You know, in about two weeks.

We're going to see what happens.

I want to see what happens with respect to Russia.

Because Russia had been surprised and disappointed, very disappointed that they did the bombing of those places after discussions.

Will President Zaleski talk to you about Crimea?

Well, he did

very briefly, but...

Crimea was given away by Barack Hussein, Obama, and by Biden.

That's 11 or 12 years ago.

That's a long time ago.

I don't know how you can bring up Crimea.

Go back to Obama.

Ask him why they gave it up.

They gave it up without a shot being fired, by the way.

What do you want Vladimir Putin to do?

Well, I want him to stop shooting, sit down, and sign a deal.

Very sober, forward-looking policy there from Trump.

So at the very end there, he's referring to Russia's airstrikes on Kyiv last week that killed 12 people and wounded over 90.

That Russian attack came just after the U.S.

had proposed the deal that would recognize Crimea as Russian territory, freeze the war on current lines, and de facto recognize Russian control over major portions of the four provinces in eastern Ukraine, about 20% of their territory, give a commitment that Ukraine will never join NATO, and lift sanctions on Russia.

So basically, Putin's entire wish list was offered up, and he is still firing shots.

Even though Trump's real estate buddy, turned emissary Steve Witkoff, has been doing the actual meetings with Putin.

I think we're up to four at this point.

I think usually one-on-one, usually with no actual professional staff.

Secretary of Sunday shows, Marco Rubio, went on Meet the Press this weekend to announce that this is a critical week for the talks.

Here's a clip of Rubio.

This week is going to be a really important week in which we have to make a determination about whether this is an endeavor that we want to continue to be involved in or if it's time to sort of focus on some other issues that are equally, if not more important in some cases.

But we want to see it happen.

There are reasons to be optimistic, but there are reasons to be realistic, of course, as well.

We're close, but we're not close enough.

Inspiring.

Putin's latest demand is a three-day ceasefire from May 8th to the 11th so that this pesky little war he started doesn't interrupt Russia's World War II Victory Day celebrations.

So, Ben, this is obviously a terrible deal for Ukraine, what Trump has proposed.

German defense minister Boris Pistorius described it as one that, quote, Ukraine on its own could have gotten a year ago.

It is akin to a capitulation.

I cannot discern any added value.

There was some recent reporting by Christopher Miller, friend of the pod, about how Ukrainians are very worried that Trump is going to walk away from these talks.

But I guess I remain confused at how that would be much worse for Zelensky if the Europeans actually stepped up to support him.

But I don't know.

What did you make of just this latest round of back and forth?

Secretary of Shame, Marco Rubio,

first of all, these incessant threats, because he said the same thing like two or three weeks ago.

Like, I mean, we're making fun of him, but it really is that bad for your credibility, you know, seriously, to just like keep threatening to walk away from a table that you keep sitting at, you know,

because then people your boss sits at.

Yeah, Steve Wickoff.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I mean, fair point.

Maybe he doesn't know, but I mean this seriously, like you can't, this is what this performative nonsense, you know, speaks to the bigger problem with their policy, which is that they the reality doesn't exist like it exists for them on Fox News.

Like, in reality, you can't just make the war in Ukraine stop so that you can look good on television, right?

Which is what Trump seems to be interested in.

Putin, if you're giving him everything he wants at the negotiating table, of course he's going to keep like pushing farther and waiting to see if you'll give him more.

You know, that's not a mystery to anyone.

When Trump says he's surprised that Russia is still bombing Ukraine, why is he surprised?

Anybody who knows anything about Putin, you know?

So that's the first point.

The second point, I found it interesting, Tommy, that Trump felt the need.

to have this visible meeting with Zelensky.

They released those photos.

The White House did.

They wanted people to see him him sitting with Zelensky in serious conversation.

And then he came out and said, you know, the nicest things he possibly could.

He still doesn't really compliment Zelensky to the Ukrainians, but he kind of indicated it was a good meeting.

To me, it showed that both Trump and Zelensky needed the appearance of that meeting for their own politics.

Now, Zelensky, it's obvious why.

Like, you know, they're worried not just about the American negotiating position.

They're worried that America will walk away from the table and that America will pull military and intelligence support.

And so Zelensky needs to be seen to at least be trying to maintain that American relationship.

I think it showed real vulnerability for Trump that he felt the need to have that meeting and say those things.

Because I don't think he's just doing that because he decided to wake up one day and be pissed at Putin.

He's known who Putin was all along.

I think he's getting shit.

from look the polls is an 80-20 issue in this country i think republicans in congress this is the first issue where they've been willing to really criticize him

i'm seeing a lot of them actually start to come come out and criticize the policy.

He's going to need their votes and other stuff.

Other world leaders, Europeans, are not, like the Germans, they're not budging.

They're saying, this is bullshit.

This is a shitty deal.

And that's part of what's frustrating Secretary of Shame Rubio is because he goes to meeting with the Europeans and they tell him that.

And so even Trump, you know, to me, it's a sign, don't let up.

Stand up to this guy.

Keep standing up to the bully.

And the bully will have to move in your direction.

You know, now, in terms of the chances for ending the war, we're no closer today than we were a a week ago because

the Russians are in transigen, Putin's intransigent, and unless Trump is actually willing to go beyond just like truthing about it to like applying some additional pressure or taking some Ukrainian.

I mean, the Crimea point is perfect.

I mean, first of all, obviously, we didn't give,

you know, Barack Obama didn't own Crimea and give it to somebody.

But frankly, we never recognized the annexation of Crimea.

Not Obama, not Trump in his first term, not Biden.

And so

Trump recognizing the annexation of Crimea, which is what's being discussed, is a huge shift in U.S.

policy that he doesn't need to give.

You know what?

If you're frustrated with what Putin's doing, rescind that effort at the negotiating table.

Say, you know what, Putin, like, you know, you had your chance, you fucked it up, and now we're taking this back off the table.

Like, you have to do things that incentivize Russia to change behavior.

Trump views this through such a petty personal lens.

He did this long interview with Time magazine.

They asked him, is there anything that Putin could do that would cause you to say, you know what, I'm on Zelensky's side now?

And his response was, not necessarily on Zelensky's side, but on Ukraine's side, yes.

Yeah, but not necessarily on Zelensky's side.

I've had a hard time with Zelensky.

It's like, get over it, you whiny bitch.

The man is defending his country.

Also, in that same interview, he was asked, You said you'd end the war in Ukraine on day one.

Trump goes, Well, I said that figuratively.

I said that as an exaggeration.

Obviously, people know when I said that.

It was said in jest, because, of course, we all joke about a conflict that you yourself said could lead to World War III or was World War III.

But to your point about how pathetic Trump looks, I mean, Trump's initial response to the horrific airstrikes on Kyiv was to truth social Vladimir,

stop exclamation point.

Shocked that one didn't work.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, that's the thing.

It's a man that there's something dangerous.

And if you study like these autocrats too, about someone whose feedback loop is constantly sycophantic and positive, because the feedback loop from the world is not like that.

And you can truth that and people in the Republican Party say yes, sir, yes, sir, you know, but Vladimir Putin's not going to do that.

And I'd like to just bring some more into it and listen to the interview with Alexandra.

There are other things that the U.S.

could be bringing in this negotiation that, you know, international justice.

Like, are there going to be efforts to hold Russia accountable for the rest of these people's lives, for what they've done to Ukrainians?

What about the 20,000 children?

What about the stolen kids?

Like, that's the part that is.

What are we doing to insist on those children being returned, right?

There are different...

Sometimes when a negotiation is tilted in one side's favor, part of what you have to do is enlarge the universe of things being discussed.

Trump is only discussing the things that Putin wants to talk about.

You know, annexation of that 20% of Ukraine's territory, Ukraine's membership in NATO, you know, these are Putin's list.

There's a Ukrainian list that has things like the 20,000 children, that has things like war crimes, that has things like what happens to sanctions, what happens to the frozen reserves.

There's like hundreds of billions of dollars in frozen Russian reserves that they want back that the Europeans might want to use to support Ukraine.

America could say, you know what, we're going to work with the Europeans to get this money to the Ukrainians if you don't deal.

So

there are

no leverage.

He's making vague threats of slapping the same sanctions back on Putin.

Putin is not worried about them.

Don't listen to J.D.

Vance saying that somehow we have no levers to pull here other than like somehow going to war ourselves.

There are other things we could do.

Yeah.

A couple other quick things, Ben.

So North Korea publicly acknowledged for the first time that they had sent troops to Russia to fight against Ukraine.

Kim Jong-un announced that they would build a monument to their heroism.

So I'm sure that the families of the estimated 4,000 North Korean troops who have been killed or wounded feel great about that.

Western intelligence officials believe that North Korea sent about 14,000 troops total to fight in the Kursk region of Russia.

That was that part of Russia that the Ukrainians invaded and briefly occupied.

It does sound like the combined Russian-North Korean forces have driven Ukrainian troops out of Russian territory.

So they've lost that as a bargaining chip.

But, you know, 4,000 casualties out of 14,000 guys is a pretty high rate.

And that's

some pretty intense combat, apparently.

Also, there was this report of a high-ranking Russian general who was killed in an explosion outside of Moscow last week, right when Witkoff was about to land, actually, in Russia for his meeting with Putin.

I guess he walked by a car that had been rigged with an IED.

Russia called it a terrorist attack that was conducted by the Ukrainians.

The Ukrainians refused to comment on these things as sort of a general policy, but it would match up with past actions by their special services.

So the war very much still going.

Yeah, no, and I was just like the 4,000 number, to put that in context, that's more than the number of Americans that died in Afghanistan.

Well, that was, I think that was killed and wounded.

Oh, killed and wounded.

Okay.

Well, but either way, I mean, it suggests that the Russians are treating the North Koreans like cannonbotter, which is how they often treat their own troops, you know.

And, you know, we'll see whether,

you know, over time, this is a military alliance that sustains itself or whether this was kind of a one-off in Kursk.

But, I mean, this is this kind of globalization of the war in Ukraine is something we have to continue to watch because we've seen these Chinese

reports of Chinese

personnel of some sort being in Ukraine.

Yeah, what do you make of those?

I don't think we ever talked about that on the show.

I mean, there are some reports or some suggestions in some of the reporting that maybe they were more like Intel officers.

Yeah, so

there were a handful of Chinese, including some that were captured by the Ukrainians.

So we know this happened.

The Chinese kind of denied the Chinese government that they were somehow involved.

I don't believe that you have Chinese people ending up on the front lines in Ukraine without the Chinese Communist Party that has kind of total control over things,

at least being aware of it.

I don't know.

I mean, one speculation that I've heard that's interesting is that they are like intel officers, that they're learning things, that they're learning, they want to learn from what's happening in this conflict.

They want to learn about the ways that things are, the way it's being fought.

They want to learn about different weapon systems.

And that's certainly possible too.

And we've seen this, I mean, not to, you know, not to use a

historical analogy, it's a little troubling, but like Spanish Civil War vibes, right?

Where like different parties start to creep in to see what it's like, modern warfare, anticipating some future war, you know.

Now, let's hope that doesn't happen.

But the war in Ukraine, the longer it goes on, we've seen different actors, you know, we look, there have been Americans there, too.

Including this really weird story about the son of a deputy director at the CIA killed in eastern Ukraine in 2024, fighting under contract for the Russian military.

Very strange story.

I don't know what to make of it.

It's an incredible story.

People should check it out.

Essentially, this kid went on a journey of sorts.

Michael Alexander lost totally by his own choice when he fought and died for the Russians.

I've never seen anything like that.

I mean, very senior CIA official.

So I don't know.

Deputy Director for Digital Innovation at the CIA.

That's a very important job, I would wager.

Yeah, yeah.

And one that the Russians would be interested in.

So I don't, you know,

but yeah, tragic, obviously, for the

tragic

baffling.

But raises a bunch of questions.

Yeah, a lot of questions.

Okay, Ben.

So like we said at the top, somehow this story about Pete Hegseth, our leader at the Department of Defense, is still going.

Dear leader.

Yeah, dear leader.

Last week, we dug into all these details about top eighth to Hegseth who were accused of leaking and fired.

This week, we're talking about it again because half of these dudes keep doing interviews.

So the first one was Joe Casper, who was Hegseth's chief of staff.

He did an interview with Ryan Grimm at Dropsight News.

Interesting choice.

Interesting choice.

That's not a criticism of the story.

That's someone who's done an interview with Ryan Grimm.

No, Ryan and Dropsight, they are hardly fans of the Trump administration.

Like it's hard to think of people less ideologically aligned with Pete Hegseth than Ryan.

So just bizarre.

In this interview, Casper talks about a possible investigation into whether he was doing drugs.

He floats this crazy theory about the leaks and that it was all a setup.

Like it's very paranoid, very weird.

And then Colin Carroll, who was chief of staff to the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Steve Heinberg, did an interview with Megan Kelly on her podcast.

Let's listen to a clip of that.

Like if you look at a pie chart of the Secretary's day, at this point, 50% of it's probably leak investigation press.

Like it's that.

Like that can't be.

That is a bad thing for America.

It's a bad thing for the president's objectives.

And then in order to kind of combat an image,

it's, hey, we're going to go do workout with the troops.

While that is important and it's a thing to do and get out there because it helps with recruiting, it just helps like with morale.

You know, if you're taking a half day trip to the Naval Academy at the same time the budget is due and we really need some support here, like, come on, you got to weigh priorities.

My observation from the first 90 days, and this is going to sound weird, is that

we had less of a problem from like the deep state bureaucrats in the department than we did from.

maybe some people on our own team.

They're polygraphing people actively right now in the department.

There's just like a culture of fear.

It's people that are like political people, you know, that are on the team.

And no one's going to want to come into that environment.

So if you've created that environment, you're basically, it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy now where people are just going to leave because no one wants to deal with that.

And then your team gets smaller and smaller and smaller.

You can't run a three million person organization by kind of like having a cabal of five people and making decisions.

It's like.

shotgunning memos out.

That's not how that's not how change actually happens.

And so I don't think that we ever, we struggled as an administration to really put a functioning team together.

Damning stuff.

First of all, no shit.

It wasn't the career professional people leaking.

It was the political people.

We all watched Trump 1.0, bud.

Like, we know it's your friends who are doing all the leaking.

Also, Ben, if it's true that the Secretary of Defense is spending half of his day on leak investigations, that is scary.

That's a huge problem.

That's a horrible use of his time.

And it's worth noting that, in addition to the Signalgate stories that we've covered about Hexeth sharing all this classified information in a commercially available app to people without a clearance.

This German site, Durspiegall, did an investigation into how easy it was to find personal contact info for Hexeth, his email, a password for one of his email accounts on like hacked, leaked forums.

And it was him.

It was Tulsi Gabbard.

It was a bunch of other top administration officials.

So like this problem of their information security is far more serious than just texting Jeffrey Goldberg by accident.

Yeah.

First of all, shout out to our team for that super cut.

It just captures things so beautifully.

The essence of it.

And it is like a guy wakes up in the middle of the night and he's like, you know, I woke up in the middle of the night and I opened the window and it was dark outside.

You know, like

these are so obvious.

These things are so obvious.

But the thing that is striking to me, Tommy, is I've wondered something ever since this particular nutty

nihilistic brand of the Republican Party really started to mushroom in the Obama years.

I would always wonder, like, do these people actually believe these things?

Or are they pretending to believe these things?

Right.

And part of what you hear in that interview is that like someone who believes these things genuine surprise being like I showed up the Pentagon and it wasn't full of a bunch of deep state you know operatives out to get us and and and then similarly shocked to be like this fundamentally unserious person who was put in charge of the Pentagon wasn't prepared to do anything other than manage his own image and go work out with the push-ups you know like well of course no shit but that's who he is like that's like like what about Pete Heckseth that has ever suggested to you that he wanted to dig into the details of the Pentagon budget or think about like how to, you know, deal with strategy in a disintegrating world order.

This is a man who, as long as he's at the Pentagon, is going to spend half of his day staring in the fucking mirror because that's all he's really interested in doing in the first place.

He did put in a makeup studio, it sounds like.

Yeah, he usually likes to be drunk.

And here's the thing:

there's such a trivialization of American politics.

And frankly, I think there's a sense out in the normie world that some of the resistance

people are kind of cried wolf people.

But actually, these things are, some of these things are very real.

No,

the fact that Pete Hegset does shit on his private phone and his phone number could be fined by Dir Spiegel is like a sign that the Chinese and the Russians and other people are in his phone and are seeing all this crap.

It's not hard.

This is not something that people are only saying on MSNBC or resistance Twitter.

Like, this is something that is happening, again, in the real world.

And the entire Trump presidency is going to be this kind of dynamic of people who are living in an alternative reality being forced to exist in actual reality.

Yeah, I mean, being in opposition is easy.

Governing is very hard.

Colin Carroll in this interview also says that what Hex has shared in that signal chat was classified.

He makes the point that Pete could have just been like, I have declassification authority, therefore it's okay to share it.

But it's a bit of an end run around how the process is supposed to work, but he's not wrong.

Although, Trump was asked about all this.

Here's his quote.

How about this for a vote of confidence?

I think he's going to get it together.

I had a talk with him, a positive talk, but I had a talk with him.

Also, Ben, like one of the leaks that apparently flipped Pete out was this time story about this plan to brief Elon Musk on these top secret U.S.

war plans with China.

So there's been a lot more reporting on what was in the memo that was going to get shared with Elon, but luckily wasn't.

According to the Wall Street Journal, The briefing was supposed to include information on 29 China-related special access programs.

So the most sensitive stuff the Pentagon does, like we're probably talking about unknown, at least to the general population, like sensitive technologies and weapons that are specifically designed for war with China, which is one, insane, and also like more evidence that Trump and Hexeth's denials that this briefing was ever going to happen were a lie.

We also learned, by the way, that Elon sat in on Trump's interview with an Air Force secretary nominee.

Pretty weird for a defense contractor.

Yeah, I mean, here's like what's weird to me about this.

First of all, you know, for

most of eight years, I was deputy national security advisor level, got the presidential daily briefing, was in the morning briefing with Obama the whole second term.

I was never read into those types of things.

Not because I was like.

You weren't going to be like a 180-day

employee.

The point is because I didn't need to know.

No, no, I'm making a joke that he doesn't.

No, I know, I know, no, I know.

I know you're making that joke.

But I'm saying is like,

I had no need to know about some super secret technology that we might use in a war with China to carry out my duties, right?

Like, why on earth?

I mean, yeah, no, this is to your point, like, why on earth this contractor needed to know these things is really fucking suspicious and scary.

Because all I can think of is,

one,

you know, I don't know, gives him a leg up and his contracting business with the Pentagon.

That's the most likely scenario.

Anything, anything he can learn that can help his SpaceX business or whatever.

Satellite procurement thing, yeah.

Two, I don't know, maybe he wants to tell somebody about it.

Like, that's even scarier.

I wonder if if he requested it or if this was Pete's.

Like, where did this idea come from?

Well, it also shows how much they're in this kind of psychic grip of Elon, that Pete Hex is sitting there thinking about, like, you know, do I, you know, like, like, what is this person?

Like, this is not a person that should exist in the U.S.

government structure, you know, and

the Air Force general, same thing.

Like, this person presumably might have some say over acquisitions.

I mean,

acquisitions for systems that include Elon's.

Like, the scale of corruption here is just mind-boggling.

That Air Force Secretary at some point will likely have to decide: okay, do we go with Boeing or SpaceX for this contract?

Exactly.

And that's what I'm sitting in on your fucking job interview.

Yeah.

Crazy.

And that's what I think this is about.

And I should say, by the way, like, this is by no means the biggest fucking hole waft to dig out of.

But, you know, the next president is going to inherit a Pentagon that is probably going to be wired on Grok and SpaceX and all this crap.

And by the Chinese.

And we're going to have to be going through the HAL computer in 2001, just unplugging the shit.

Also,

did you see that an aircraft carrier in the Red Sea accidentally dumped a $67 million F-A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet into the ocean?

I guess

they were towing it from the hangar bay.

It sounds like the boat was turning to reposition itself to deal with Houthi missiles.

Well, I was going to say, there were some questions about whether or not the reason it was turning like that might have been because of the way the Houthis were.

firing stuff at them, which shows that the longer you're at war with the Houthis, like you start to lose planes, like you start to have accidents.

I mean, the idea that you can have a cost-free forever war, which is what they seem to think, cuts against all the experience of the forever wars.

Yeah,

one person was injured.

No one was killed, thank God.

But it's not good to dump a $67 million plane into the ocean.

Also, that same ship, the USS Harry Truman, collided with a merchant ship back in February.

The commander at the time was relieved.

But to your point, I mean, these things are not very dangerous.

You're out there.

They're very dangerous.

Okay, we're going to take a quick break.

But before we do, we want to tell you about Shadow Kingdom, Ben.

Listeners to join the over 1 million listeners around the world who are listening to Shadow Kingdom, God's Banker.

It's our newest true crime podcast.

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He interviews spies, prosecutors, the last person to see Calvi, the banker, alive, all to answer one question, who killed God's Banker?

Maybe they'll figure that out at the Conclave.

It's coming up soon.

I mean, what if God's Banker can get into that?

Yeah, get some extra, even more intrigue at the Conclave.

Get a good seat.

Also, Ben, you just stopped by to talk with Stacey Abrams on her show, Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams.

Yes, people should check this out.

I loved talking to Stacey Abrams for Assembly Required out this Thursday.

We basically talked about, you know, the nuts and bolts of what it means for the United States to be essentially absenting its position at the center of the world order.

What are the implications for everyday Americans?

What are the implications for the American economy?

What are the implications for American security?

So it's a real step-back conversation.

Very much supplements what we talk about, but it kind of let's step back and look at the big picture.

Stacey is very good at making us think about what does this mean for all of us?

What should we do about it?

So people should definitely check that out.

Cool.

We'll do.

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All right, Ben.

So last Tuesday, there was a horrific terrorist attack in the India-controlled part of Kashmir that has drastically ratcheted up tensions between India and Pakistan that we wanted to talk about.

That attack, by the way, happened right as J.D.

Vance was visiting India, giving foreign leaders yet another reason to want him to just kind of stay away for a little while.

You don't want that guy around.

No, you don't want that guy.

He's bad news.

So the gunman killed 26 people.

All but one of them was an Indian tourist.

They reportedly, I saw a report, I don't know if this has been confirmed, that they were separating out the terrorists, were separating non-Muslims and then executing them.

This happened in a mountain valley area that's a tourist destination because it's very beautiful.

Initially, there were reports that an obscure group called the Kashmir Resistance Front was responsible for the attacks.

India says they have ties to a Pakistani terrorist organization.

The Resistance Front is now denying responsibility, saying its social media was hacked.

So, this is all very weird.

Regardless, the Indian government is pointing the finger at Pakistan and pledging brutal retaliation.

Prime Minister Modi said, quote, India will identify, track, and punish every terrorist and their backers.

We will pursue them to the ends of the the earth.

So that's pretty intense.

Pakistan is denied responsibility.

So, Ben, we can dig more into the history in a bit, but listeners should know that.

Potential war between nuclear-armed India and nuclear-armed Pakistan has been at the top of the World War Watch list for a very long time.

And now there's this escalating kind of diplomatic back and forth.

So after this attack, India revoked visas for Pakistani nationals.

They reduced diplomatic staff in Pakistan.

They suspended a very important water-sharing agreement between the two countries that has been in place since 1960.

And in response, Pakistan kicked India out of its airspace.

They suspended trade with India.

Pakistan's defense minister told Reuters this week that he expects a military incursion from India at some point.

So, you know, very scary stuff.

What's your level of anxiety about the escalation ladder happening here?

I mean, it's high because you feel like there's going to be an Indian response, and you also feel like the international environment around this conflict is not not one of mediation and de-escalation.

This is kind of the normalization of escalation, whether it's in Ukraine, whether it's in the Middle East.

Like, I worry about how that mentality enters into this conflict.

In the past, what you've had is kind of calibrated responses, like India takes some shot into Pakistan.

Right.

Pakistan does something back that is, you know, they shoot at something and intentionally miss it kind of thing, you know, and then everybody calms down.

That may happen.

But the risk here is if, you know, if things are escalating and neither side blinks and it keeps escalating, yes, these are two nuclear-armed nations that have fought multiple wars over this territory.

There's an absence of a UN system or a United States or any other kind of mediator that could come in to try to calm things down.

And so I think we have to be quite concerned about it because we already have flashpoints in Ukraine, in Iran, in the Middle East right now, and then Taiwan's looming there.

And now this enters into that picture too.

It's not the best

time for this to to be happening.

No, it's a pretty scary time.

Yeah, I mean, just to get to some of the histories, this dates back to the modern sort of dispute over this territory dates back to the partition of the Indian subcontinent by the British in 1947.

Not a thousand years ago.

Well, let's listen to President Trump's history lesson because I think that's all we really need is just to hear him.

Well, I'm very close to India and I'm very close to Pakistan, as you know.

They've had that fight for a thousand years in Kashmir.

Kashmir has been going on for a thousand years, probably longer than that.

Again, so that's not true.

Partition was in 1947.

Since 1972, the Pakistani and Indian-controlled parts of Kashmir have been separated by what's called the line of control.

The India administration portion has been dealing with a separatist insurgency for decades.

To make things even more complicated, China also claims and controls a portion of Kashmir.

For most of this period, the Indian-administered Kashmir had a special autonomous status, but Modi Modi revoked that status in 2019, bringing the region directly under his control.

Since then, the Indian government has cracked down on free speech, on journalism.

They've arrested thousands of people, while at the same time, encouraging people to go to the region for vacations, for tourism.

So, Trump was just like 950 years off there, I think, in his sort of knowledge of the world.

And he also repeated it, too, so it wasn't like a slip.

Like, he thought he'd made a really smart point.

Nailed him.

I really nailed it.

Yeah, I mean, look, this you've seen Modi kind of steadily change the status.

The status quo in Kashmir had been disputed territory

and kind of frozen conflict.

And

there's supposed to be like an international basis for there to be self-determination there.

But, but Modi short-circuited that by essentially trying to absorb Kashmir.

It's, you know, a tragic inevitability that,

you know, it's some like other places we've talked about around the world, including when we're about to talk about it, but if you repress people

and

you,

I mean, all reports are, and there's not a lot of reporting out of Kashmir, too, by the way, because they don't let a lot of independent journalism happen there, is it's a pretty can be a pretty brutal environment.

You get occasional acts of violent resistance.

And there's this cycle of that happening and India responding by attacking Pakistan.

And look, I think the Pakistani government has tolerated, and in some cases, supported groups that have agendas in Kashmir.

I find it hard to believe that the Pakistani government directed this attack, you know?

So I'm not sure it's constructive for India.

That has been the one moving, you know, and look, I...

I understand how Indians feel and the anger they feel.

They want a response.

I'm just not sure that attacking kind of the country of Pakistan is the most constructive way of doing that.

You're the stronger party.

India is indisputably the stronger party, the bigger, stronger country with the bigger economy and the bigger military.

And actually, I think showing some restraint might actually be in India's interest in the medium and long term here, even if a lot of the short-term kind of vengeance is leading them to military action.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

I mean, there's, I think, almost certainly a desire, at least in the region, for some sort of vengeance, especially given that it's just like, you know, 26 purely civilian targets who are executed.

Modi, Prime Minister Modi, is kind of like Netanyahu, and then he portrays himself as like Mr.

Security.

So clearly, the tough talk that I read out earlier is

part of him trying to

respond to a black eye over this incident happening on his watch.

And actually the other thing you worry about is sometimes Modi directs internally at

the Muslim minority population within India.

And so you hope you don't see that either.

Yeah, well, actually, let's turn to Netanyahu.

So we had a couple of Gaza updates we wanted to do.

So the first one is just, according to everybody on the ground,

things are

really bad in Gaza, maybe as bad as they have ever been right now.

The ceasefire, you know, ended on the 18th and March 18th when the Israelis started bombing again.

Gaza has now been under a total Israeli blockade for about two months.

The World Food Program said they are out of food stocks.

Gaza's few remaining medical facilities are nearly out of supplies.

And at the same time, IDF airstrikes are back to being like daily occurrence.

The casualties are way up.

In some cases, like dozens of people per day.

There's reports that 1,600 people have been killed by Israeli airstrikes since the ceasefire ended.

The strikes are often on tents or other temporary structures for displaced people.

So there's tons of collateral damage.

The Israeli forces there have issued dozens of conflicting evacuation orders, so people are just getting pushed all over the country.

According to Reuters, Hamas has offered to release all remaining Israeli hostages in exchange for an end to the war, reconstruction of Gaza, and the release of Palestinian prisoners being held by Israel.

But Hamas, the counteroffer from the Israelis is reportedly a demand that they fully disarm as part of any deal, which has ended up being a non-starter for them.

So, Ben, I feel like like things have been so insane in the Trump era that we have not covered Gaza as frequently as we did during the first year and a half of the war.

But it did seem important to highlight just how bad conditions are on the ground and the fact that the parties just seemed like they're nowhere close to any kind of ceasefire deal.

Yeah, but let's look.

Look, I just think that this is because Israel doesn't want to end the war.

And Netanyahu does not want to end the war, to be specific.

Because if they were willing to end the war, they would get the hostages out.

And the idea that they somehow need to continue to fight a war against Hamas in Gaza, I'm sorry.

There's no security need to do it.

There's no security need to do it.

It's a literal impossibility that October 7th or anything remotely approaching that, or anything really,

in terms of a ground attack on Israelis could happen if the war ended tomorrow, given the damage that's been done to Hamas, given how militarized that border is between Gaza and Israel.

So there's no military necessity to carry out this war.

Netanyahu is carrying out for his political purposes, and there are people in his coalition, including maybe Netanyahu himself, who want to carry out to just continue to punish and destroy the Palestinian people, if not ethnically cleanse them from Gaza, which is what a lot of people say.

That's the Trump plan.

That's what

Donald Trump says.

It's something the ministers in the Israeli government say.

The humanitarian situation can't be, we're not oversitting it.

Nothing has gotten in since mid-March.

Zero.

We're talking no food, no medicine.

in a place where there already was no infrastructure left.

They destroyed all the hospitals, they destroyed all the schools, destroyed basically all the buildings.

And so you're just talking about a place in which an already traumatized, bombarded people, including a lot of injured people, like badly injured people, are being bombed in tents with no food and medicine.

That's what's happening.

I was scrolling through Twitter yesterday, and I saw a video.

of kind of the after results of an airstrike.

And there was a little girl sitting on the ground.

And all of a sudden, her head just started gushing blood like I've never seen seen anyone bleed in my life.

And I realized I was watching the last moments of this little girl's life.

And this is happening every single time.

And what makes that okay?

What makes that worth doing?

Like, what, like, don't tell me that that's what hostages are being brought home by that?

You know, um, so there's just this is an immoral abomination that will be a stain on this country and on Israel for the rest of our lives.

A moral stain, a strategic disaster.

Yeah.

Everything about it is wrong and cruel and it's indefensible.

And just now that we're all furious about this again, it's worth highlighting this report on Channel 13 News in Israel about the Biden administration's handling of the war in Gaza, the policy generally.

So Channel 13 talked to a bunch of top former Biden people.

It's like nine administration officials.

They talked to a bunch of the Netanyahu government.

It's all in Hebrew, but a couple of sites dropped site news again, and then the Times of Israel did write-ups of the main reporting.

And it is both infuriating, not surprising, and confirms a lot of the assumptions we had from the very beginning about kind of what was happening behind the scenes.

So one of the most damning quotes came from the Israeli ambassador to the U.S.

at the time who said that, quote, God did the state of Israel a favor, that Biden was the president during this period, because it could have been much worse.

We fought in Gaza for over a year, and the administration never came to us and said, ceasefire now.

It never did.

And that's not to be taken for granted.

So he's obviously trying to give Joe Biden credit there.

And in so doing, offering the most damning thing observation you could about the administration.

A couple more things that jumped out on me, Ben.

The administration reportedly debated having Biden give a speech that presented the Israeli people two paths in the hopes of forcing an election.

One path was get a hostage deal, get a ceasefire, get a normalization agreement with the Saudis.

The other path was what we're seeing now, endless war, diplomatic isolation.

But ultimately, Biden just chickened out and didn't want to push BB politically and instead did that speech where he laid out the framework for a ceasefire deal that I guess Netanyahu had told him he agreed to, but later walked away from.

There was some stuff in the story about how Biden's team was particularly angry with Netanyahu when he released that video accusing them of implementing a broad freeze on weapon shipments, when in reality, Biden had only held a single shipment of 2,000-pound bombs, and that freeze was about to be resolved.

So I guess the Netanyahu

response, you know, destroyed the deal they were about to cut to ship the bombs.

And so, reading that, I was like, I get the frustration of these Biden staffers here because they're mad that Netanyahu lied about them, but it's also very telling that the biggest point of frustration was Biden not getting credit for

enough arms.

They're mad about that and not about the 2,000-pound bombs being dropped on the kids.

We'll come back to that.

Yeah, so I just, you know, it's a lot about the Saudi normalization deal.

There's people admitting what was obvious all along that Netanyahu was blocking a ceasefire for a political purpose.

So, again, like I said at the top, like this was obvious at the time.

We talked about it at the time.

Rereading it was absolutely enraging.

It was a reminder all over again of what a total fucking disgrace the Biden administration's policy on Gaza was.

The just unrequited, obsessive loyalty to Netanyahu blinded him to the

carnage and like total immorality of the policy and the U.S.

complicity in that policy.

And it's just, it's outrageous.

Yeah, what's really enraging about this,

well, there are different layers of it, but first of all, and you summed it up well, to try to add to that,

look, it was obvious at the time that they were not really pressing them for this ceasefire.

This just kind of confirms what we knew, and that's what a lot of us are angry about, that they were not implying any leverage.

They weren't doing anything to try to really push a ceasefire.

So this is the second thing, is they were saying at the time, we're working like relentlessly.

They were not.

They were not working relentlessly for a ceasefire.

They were talking about it publicly so that they had something to say.

And then privately they're just shoveling weapons at Netanyahu and mainly complaining that Netanyahu wasn't giving them enough credit for shoveling the weapons to him, you know?

I mean, it's very revealing that they were upset by Netanyahu making that video because

that's about the politics of it.

They were so inside the politics of it that they weren't looking at the conduct of what was being done in Gaza in the same way.

The other things I'd like to say about this, the first thing is that I think that they might believe that they were doing more than they were.

And I'm not saying this to absolve them,

anything but

I think they don't, the Israeli ambassador's words are so damning because he's making clear it was a choice for the United States to unreservedly back what Israel did for that whole year.

That was a choice.

It wasn't something that happened because of gravity.

It wasn't something that happened because politics inevitably means you support Israel unconditionally.

Joe Biden made a choice to provide unconditional military support to this Israeli government and this military operation.

And

just mouthing words of concern about the scale of loss of life doesn't matter.

You made that choice.

Another thing, this Saudi normalization thing kept coming up.

Like, I don't understand why they missed this opportunity.

Because you fundamentally, and what is amazing to me is some some of these people are people that kind of put themselves forward as like experts on Israel.

They're fundamentally misunderstanding this Israeli government.

Given the choice between having like commercial flights between Riyadh and Jerusalem and ethnically cleansing Gaza, of course they're going to choose to ethnically cleanse Gaza.

Why do we understand this Israeli government better than you do?

Or even just like even more pathetic and selfish, the choice between direct flights to Riyadh or Netanyahu, who's staying in power.

Exactly.

Yeah, there you go.

Yeah, that's right.

Because with Netyah, it's staying in power.

With like Ben Gavir and Smotrich, it's the West Bank and Gaza.

West Bank and Gaza are much more important than a Saudi normalization deal.

And so we're still like talking about Israel as if it's our version of what our version of Israel or Democratic Party foreign policy version of Israel is like, well, of course they'll want normalization with Saudi Arabia more than they'll want to like you know, kill the two-state solution and try to take back West West Bank and Gaza.

Like that, that's misreading this government.

The last thing I want to say, Tommy, is like, and we can have a conversation about this, like,

try to hold some space here because

if you've listened to this podcast for six, seven years,

I'll speak for myself.

I don't want to speak for you, but I think you've probably gone through a similar process, but I've had to deprogram a bit.

Totally.

I was much more defensive.

in 2017 about

drone strikes or

things that we did that we were part of some things that were wrong.

We were part of, actually, because some things that are just baked into U.S.

national security are wrong, right?

And it's been nice to have this forum and to interact, obviously, with so many people around the world

and force us to not do that, you know, to be more honest about.

And we're still, I'm not suggesting we're all the way there yet.

My advice to these people, some of whom we know well, some of whom are our friends, is don't do that.

Like, don't rationalize.

Don't explain the best spin.

You know, don't try to pick the one time that Biden said something that makes it look like you pressured Israel.

Like, in fact, don't talk about it at all right now.

I actually wondered why nine people talked to Channel 13 in Israel.

Sit with this.

Think about it.

Like,

like, absorb it.

Uh, listen to people in Gaza.

Um, like, consume those images.

Um, and I'm not,

I don't want this to come across preachy.

I really don't.

I say this as someone who did that thing of, like, defending everything we we did and tying myself in knots.

It's not healthy.

So this is not me.

I swear to God, this is not, I'm not trying to come at this from some highfalutin place.

I'm saying actually as someone who's that that's the wrong path.

You know, there's another path of,

because actually it'd be good for American foreign policy and Democratic Party national foreign policy for people to

truly evolve and

be like, you know what, that's wrong.

And give courage to the next generation generation of foreign policy staffers who are scared that they are going to get destroyed by APAC or these groups that are attacking, you know, YouTubers like Miss Rachel if she, you know, speaks about the humanity of the Palestinian people.

Like break that cycle.

I'm totally with you on the broader point that it took me forever to do a better job of thinking for myself, gaining perspective, reading more, learning more.

Like you just grow as a human being, you understand more.

But also just on this narrow policy, I guess what I'd ask people is: I don't care how hard Joe Biden worked a problem.

Nobody cares.

What I care is about the outcome.

You know what I mean?

And look at what's happening on the ground.

Like, it is a fucking disaster.

More people are dead.

1,600 people are dead since the ceasefire ended that you guys couldn't get over the finish line, that Trump somehow got over the finish line.

And I know these are not easy problems.

They're brutally hard.

Every option after October 7th was a bad option.

But blind loyalty to B.B.

Bibi Netanyahu, a right-wing autocrat, was a massive mistake.

And like we just have to acknowledge that because of the damage it did to the people in Gaza, but also the damage it did to the Democratic Party.

Yeah.

And

it's indefensible.

And the thing is, sometimes, again, you're programmed to think about, because you actually don't come to work thinking you want to do that.

You come to work thinking you want to ceasefire.

You come to work thinking, you know, we just need to get through this and maybe the next phone call with Bibi, like it'll work out.

But part of what you have to wrestle with is look to your point just the fact that you were in a lot of meetings and you stayed up late and that a lot of phone calls were made and trips were made the world experiences the outputs it's kind of like what we're saying with trump and reality and

the reality is that the system that was built um is part of the problem.

The system that was built to just shovel those weapons to the Israeli government, that's part of the problem.

And you're never going to change that system if you're just defending how you manage the system at the time.

And by the way, hands up, right?

Like Barack Obama signed a 10-year MOU.

That was $3 billion of warranties really good.

And we did that in part because we were defensive about the Iran deal.

Wrong.

We shouldn't have done that.

We knew who BB was.

We should not have signed a 10-year memory.

I'm sure I defended it at the time.

That was wrong.

Like,

that system that that was a part of was the wrong system.

And

you'll never really change the system if you're kind of constantly defending your management of it, you know?

Yeah.

And just one last point on this.

i mean of the nine people like officials quoted in that story and i don't i honestly don't even know who them all who all of them are because i didn't watch the video i just read the reports i mean i think probably a couple were actually in high-level meetings with joe biden all the time like i'm not this is not a staff problem there were clearly some staffers who i think were in a bad place and providing very very bad advice to joe biden but this begins and ends with him like this was clearly a problem 100 he owned to the great detriment of the policy outcome, but also to himself politically.

Because, again, I've been reading the Shake Tapper book.

I can't get into all the details of it, but it's clear, like, at some point, Biden just started spending all of his time doing Ukraine and Gaza stuff and

didn't get either of those problems solved and

forgot everything else he needed to do for a reelection.

It's just a fucking thing.

And it's 100% right that we have to, this begins and ends with Joe Biden.

It was his policy choice.

And you're right.

Like, the vast majority of the staff, like totally different people could have been there and the result would have been exactly the same.

The reason I think it's important though for staff to wrestle with these things when they're out of government is that's the only way that things change when you come back.

Oh, absolutely.

No, I totally agree.

Or you want the next Democratic presidential candidates to have staff or advisors who've learned some things, you know, and digested these things.

So

that's the evolution I would encourage.

If the next person who works on foreign policy for a Democrat says hug BB, you need to be walked out of the building.

Pete Hegsaff them out of the building that minute.

Yeah, Yeah, and we know who gives that advice, and you don't need to listen to those people.

Don't listen to those people.

Okay, we are going to take a quick break.

When we come back, you're going to hear Ben's interview with Alexandra Medvachuk.

So stick around for that.

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All right, I'm very pleased to be joined by Alexandra Mudvichuk, who is a human rights lawyer and activist, the head of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine, and a 2022 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

Alexandra, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you for the invitation.

So I want to start with the current situation in Ukraine, where we've seen an increase in Russian strikes recently, including an attack on Kyiv last week, which killed over a dozen people and injured around 100 people.

Alexandra, I know you're based in Kyiv.

What has been the situation there?

How could you describe these strikes and the impact that they've had?

Putin openly demonstrate that he doesn't want peace.

And it's obvious.

Putin started this large-scale war not because he wants to occupy just one part more of Ukrainian land.

Putin started this large-scale war because he want to occupy and destroy the whole country.

And go further, his logic is historical.

He dreams about his legacy.

He wants to forcibly restore Russian Empire.

And with this airstrike in Sumoy, in Kriviriya, in Odessa and in Kiev recently, with all these dozens of killed civilians and children and destroyed residential buildings, Putin openly demonstrate his disregard to President Donald Trump.

Yeah, I want to ask you a bit more about your work, but just on the negotiations that are taking place.

What is it like to live through the reality where there is this conversation happening internationally outside of Ukraine, largely between the American administration and the Russians, and at times with the Ukrainian government, at the same time that there's a war ongoing inside of Ukraine?

I mean, what is it like to live in a reality where these issues are being discussed in international capitals, and yet your reality is still the same.

It's a reality of war.

Recent weeks we heard a lot about natural minerals, about Russia's territorial claims, about geopolitical interest,

but we didn't hear about people.

And I think that is not okay,

because this war has a very vivid human dimension.

And we still want to get an answer to very important questions.

What will be with more than 20,000 Ukrainian children illegally deported to Russia, separated with their families, and supposed to be adopted by Russian families who will bring them up as Russians.

What will be with thousands and thousands illegally detained civilians, men and women, subjected to horrible torture and sexual abuse daily?

I personally interviewed hundreds of them, and they told me how they were beaten, raped, smashed into wooden boxes, their fingers were cut, their nails were torn away, their nails were drilled, there were electrically shocked through their genitalia.

One woman told me how your eye was duck out with a spoon.

Knowing this, it's very understandable that at least part of these people have a very less chance to be alive until the end of this political process.

And finally, what will be with millions of Ukrainians who live under Russian occupation?

They live in a grey zone.

They have no tools how to defend their rights, their freedom, their property, their lives, their children, their beloved ones.

And Russian occupation is not just changing one state flag to another.

Russian occupation means enforced disappearances, torture, rapes, denial of your identity, forcible adoption of your own children, filtration camps and mass graves.

So I feel bad.

I think we have to return human dimension into political process.

Only in that way we can find a path to sustainable peace.

All of that documentation that you've done through your work and your organization connects to something that you've been outspoken about, which is the need for there to be accountability for these crimes of aggression,

these crimes against humanity.

How do you approach that knowing that

in terms of if you're the Ukrainian government,

you know that Putin is not going to obviously want to agree to any process of accountability.

How do you think about, you know, there's so much discussion of territory and security guarantees, and these are very important things.

But how do you think about this question of accountability?

How do you think the world should approach accountability in the context of these negotiations and any future end to the war?

All this hell, which you now faced in Ukraine, It's a result of total impunity, which Russia enjoyed for decades, because Russian troops committed horrible crimes in Chechnya, in Moldova, in Georgia, in Mali, in Libya, in Syria, in other countries of the world, and they have never been punished.

They believe they can do whatever they want.

And for 11 years, we have been documented how Russian troops physically exterminate active local people on the ground.

Mayors, journalists, children writers, musicians, teachers, environmentalists, priests.

How they banned Ukrainian language and culture, how they destroyed and robbed Ukrainian cultural heritage, how they abducted Ukrainian children and sent them to Russia to bring them up as Russians.

So for me, it's obvious that justice is precondition to peace,

because we have to chain this long-lasting tradition of impunity.

We must break this circle of impunity, not just for Ukrainians, but but in order to prevent a next Russian attack to the next nation.

And I'm doing this work with responsibility and with a hope.

Because hope, it's not a confidence that everything will be fine, but hope, it's a deep understanding that all other efforts have a huge meaning.

And how do you

you know, as as an activist, as someone in civil society, as someone who's been documenting all of this injustice, you also have a situation where your government is in this very difficult position where it's fighting a relentless aggressor in Putin, and it now has an American government that seems more intent on putting pressure on the Ukrainian government than on the Russian government.

How would you like to see your government operate in these negotiations?

What is the mood in terms of how civil society is relating to the Ukrainian government right now?

It's not easy situation

and probably

it's not just Ukrainian problem that in 21st century a state decided that when you have a strong military potential, a nuclear weapon, you can break international order, you can dictate your rules to entire international community, and you can even forcibly change internationally recognized borders.

I think it's not just a problem for Ukraine.

Because

look at my work.

I'm a human rights lawyer.

And

for years, I am applying the law to defend people and human dignity.

For the current moment, I have no tools how to stop Russian atrocities.

It shows the vulnerability.

of the whole international architecture.

Yeah, I was going to ask you, I mean, where do you think those tools could come from, right?

Because Because there's the power of what you're doing, which is kind of bearing witness, documentation, organization on the ground.

But it seems like the tools of international justice

lack capacity, right?

So Putin can be charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court, but he can evade responsibility for that.

There are allies who provide weapons and other kinds of support to Ukraine, but it's not quite enough to overcome Russia.

I mean,

I'm not asking you to kind of solve the puzzle of international

justice here,

but what have you learned through this experience of the work you've done, the experience of being in Ukraine these years, about the need for greater solidarity or prioritization of these issues internationally?

Several things to comment.

First, you are totally right.

The international order, which is based on UN charter and international law, is collapsing before our eyes.

And there are reasons for this.

This international architecture was established past century.

It provides for several countries irrational privileges.

And now it's just stalling, it's reproducing ritualistic movements.

The work of Security Council is paralyzed.

And now it's easy to predict that such fires like wars can emerge more and more often in different parts of the globe because this international wiring is faulty and sparks are everywhere.

But still, even in such circumstances, there are room for decisive legal actions to establish law and justice.

We can create a special tribunal on aggression

to hold Putin, Lukashenko, and dom political leadership and high military command of Russian state accountable.

And more than 40 countries are discussing the modalities of the special tribunal to fill this gap of accountability when there is no international court which can prosecute Putin for the crime of aggression.

But everything which we are documenting is a result of his leadership decision to start such war.

So it's just one example.

And not to end to the negative note,

let me tell you the main lesson learned which I have from these years of war.

People have power.

We get used to thinking through the categories of states and interstates organizations.

But ordinary people have a much greater power than they can even imagine.

Ordinary people can change history.

And Ukrainians are one of example, because three years ago nobody believed that we can provide resistance for more than three or four days to such enormous opposing power as Russia is.

Even our international partners were confident that we have no potential to resist.

I was in Kiev.

When all international organizations evacuated their personnel, they left us alone.

But ordinary people remained.

Ordinary people started to do extraordinary things.

And suddenly it became obvious that ordinary people fighting for their freedom and human dignity are stronger than even the second army in the world.

Yeah, I mean, I want to ask you about Ukraine in the longer journey, because this all began, well,

it's hard to trace an exact beginning, but it's also the case that ordinary people stood up

on the Medan

over a decade ago and began this journey of trying to throw off corruption, throw off Russian influence, assert Ukrainian sovereignty and identity.

And here we are over 10 years later, and Ukrainians are still fighting for those things.

Do you think Ukraine has changed over the last 10 years?

I mean, how do you feel like the identity of the Ukrainian people has changed based on ordinary people trying to reclaim their power in the face of

Putin, who kind of is the most

core representation of authoritarian power in the world.

How has Ukraine's struggle against that changed the country and the people?

Eleven years ago, millions of people in Ukraine stood up their voice against Russian corrupt authoritarian government, and they peacefully demonstrated just for a chance.

to build a country where the rights of everybody are protected, government is accountable, judiciary is independent, and police do not beat students who are peacefully demonstrated.

And we are paying the highest price just for this chance.

I know what I'm talking about because I was coordinator of civil initiative Yavromaidan SOS during the Revolution of Dignity.

We brought up several thousands of people.

We worked 24 hours per day to provide legal assistance to prosecuted protesters.

Every day, hundreds, hundreds of people who were beaten, arrested, tortured, accused in fabricated criminal cases passed through care.

And when the authoritarian regime collapsed and we got our chance to start this democratic transition in order to stop us on this way, Putin invaded.

Putin occupied Crimea, part of Luhansk and Donetsk regions, and three years ago extended this war to the large-scale invasion because Putin is not afraid of NATO.

Putin is afraid of the idea of freedom which came closer to Russian borders.

So we have the possibility to reform our country just for 11 years.

We pay the highest price for this possibility and we have to do it during the war.

Can you imagine the burden?

It's very difficult to make a democratic transition even during peaceful time.

The countries

from European Union, United States, they paid decades, sometimes centuries to build sustainable democratic institutions.

We have just 11 years and we have to do it during the war.

But believe me, the country is rapidly changed

because

it's about responsibility.

We want to

do our job.

We want to have a country which we dream about.

We want to...

Our children have never been situation like us.

having to pay the blood for freedom and for human dignity.

And when you look to the future,

what kind of Ukraine would you like to see emerge from this war?

I mean, there's the immediate questions about how much territory Ukraine can maintain, but there are also questions of security guarantees.

There are questions of when Ukraine can join the European Union.

But just in terms of what kind of Ukraine you would like to see after the war,

what do you envision?

What do you believe in in terms of the future for Ukraine?

If I can say of a language of dream, I want to see my country in a way that

such organization like us, like Center for Civil Liberties, in our current functions

are not needed.

So this will be Ukraine which we want.

That

the rule of law is dominated, people are are protected, their rights are protected, so we can just grow our children in peace and have a freedom to live without fear of violence, have a freedom to have a long-term perspective.

And it's simple things, but it's not given for granted,

especially taken into account that we have also to develop the long-lasting strategy towards Russia.

Because Russia is empire.

And empire has a center, but has no borders.

Empire always tries to expand.

It's like Putin told that borders of Russia will never end.

And I saw it even in my human rights work when I interviewed people who survived Russian captivity.

They told me that Russians see their future like this.

First, we'll occupy Ukraine and then together with you, we will go to conquer another countries.

And if those are the stakes, what would you say to Americans who are being told by Trump that it's time to move on from this, that this is not important to the United States, that

we just needed to get out of this war, that it costs too much money?

You know, we have an audience that includes not just Americans, but American policymakers.

What would you say to them about why this matters to the rest of the world, including to the United States?

I'm not politicians.

Probably I will not find the proper words words to say.

I just only want to express my sincere gratitude to people in the United States.

Thank you that you are with us in this dramatic time of our history.

I saw social survey in the United States.

Majority of people in the United States supported our struggle for freedom.

And for me, as for human, it's obvious, because we are fighting for something that has no limitation in national borders.

It's freedom.

And human solidarity is also one of such things, which have no limitation in national borders.

And we all know from the world history that only the spread of freedom makes our world safer.

And one last question I just wanted to ask you.

I mean, you've been doing this work for so long,

it's obviously very difficult work,

and you're doing it in the context of war.

I mean, what keeps you motivated?

What keeps you doing the work of documenting crimes, of working for civil liberties.

What sustains you and how might people show solidarity to what you're doing?

Let me tell you with a story.

This is a story of Artem.

He lost his father and mother in a deliberate Russian strike on his residential buildings.

Artem dreamed to be a football player and after rehabilitation

he play and he continued his training and he told that he dreamed that father and mother are sitting in a stadium and look at him, how he is going to his dream.

I document such kind of stories.

We have in our database 84,000 episodes of war crimes.

It's enormous amount.

It's not just violations of Geneva and Hague Conventions.

We document human pain.

And it's a huge responsibility.

When you spoke with people who went through hell like this child Artem,

you have a clear impression that these people need to restore not just their broken life, broken future vision, broken families, but their broken belief that justice is possible even though delayed in time.

And I also know that our future is not just unclear, but also not pre-written.

It means that we still have a chance to fight for the future, which we want for us and for our children.

Alexandra, thank you so much for the work you're doing.

Thanks for sharing your perspective with us here today.

People should follow your work and the work of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine.

And we really wish you all the best.

Thanks for talking to us.

Thank you very much.

Thanks again, Alexandra, for doing the show.

And thank you, Ben.

Thank you for for the Knicks.

Thanks, Absen.

Well, actually, I'm really looking forward to this, even though the Knicks will probably lose.

Because Boston, New York, man.

Love it.

Nothing better.

Old school.

Yeah.

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